The Last Laugh

After pinballing around the world for two decades, the only thing Svetlana has left is her story. But what will it take for the world to hear it?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
A warning before we start. This episode includes discussions of suicide.
In one of my conversations with Svetlana's daughter, there was
one detail she shared about her mother that really stuck
with me. Olga had spent her childhood living alongside, living
inside her mother's trauma, and after many moves and revelations

(00:24):
and heartbreaks, that trauma was something the two of them shared.
But Svetlana was resilient, and she wanted to teach her
daughter resilience. Two. My mother would make me recite the
story of Scheherazade to myself as a means of telling
myself that things could be so much worse. The story

(00:48):
of Scheherazade comes from the classic tale One thousand and
one Nights. As the story goes, a Persian sultan, driven
into a jealous rage by his unfaithful wife, would marry
a verse gin every night and behead her in the morning.
When the beautiful and clever Shahrazade weds the monarch, she
staves off death by telling him enchanting stories Aladdin Ali

(01:11):
Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sindbad the Sailor. But each
night she stops the story before getting to the end.
If the Sultan wanted to hear the rest. He'd have
to spare her life until the next night, and the next,
and the next, and after one thousand and one nights
of bedtime story blue Balls. The Sultan, who'd fallen head

(01:32):
over heels for Shahrazad, spares her life forever. Ah, love,
I could be kidnapped by a king and having to
be telling him stories to keep myself alive, you know,
the never ending story to keep myself alive, that kind
of thing like we should be so lucky. Of all
the sagas of survival that' stet Lana could have compelled

(01:55):
her daughter to recite, she chose Shahrazade, a woman trapped
by a tyrant, A woman whose power, whose very survival
was rooted in her ability to tell stories of Stalin's children.
His eldest son was killed in war at thirty six.
His younger son drank himself to death by forty, but

(02:17):
Svetlana lived to eighty five. She lived by telling her story.
Storytelling was her route to freedom, her ticket to America,
to financial independence, a means to gain control over and
make sense of her messy life. So how does that

(02:37):
Lana's story end? Did she ultimately find what she was
looking for. Did she ever really break free of her
family history, of the cycles that haunted her? Can any
of us? I'm Dan Katroser and this is the last

(02:59):
step episoda of sted Lana Steed Lana. You wake up
in the morning, you live your day, and then you
do it tomorrow and over and over again, and over

(03:22):
again and over again. Act one. I did it my way.
Sped Lana had spent the last few years trying to
reconnect with her family, with her roots, and find a
place that felt like home. Now she found herself back

(03:45):
to square one in Wisconsin, or more like square eight.
I don't know. I'm not one for numbers. Here's Rosemary,
you know it's It's a story that is unbelievably structured
because everything echoes every thing else. Spent Lana is back
in Wisconsin again. Olga is back at boarding school in

(04:07):
England again. Spent Lana's two Russian children are lost to
her again, and now she's alone in a hunting lodge
in the woods that she bought for cheap. Some newspapers
report that she's got fifteen hundred dollars to her name,
and when she reaches out to friends to ask for money,
a very normal communist thing to do when you need help.

(04:29):
Her American capitalist friends are embarrassed for her, and the
press has a field day. I'm looking at this one
clipping now where Spet's wearing eighties wire frame aviator glasses
with the headline Stalin's sad daughter has to beg Jesus
in the past, when speed Lana's been this confused, down

(04:51):
and out, overexposed, underappreciated, She's fallen back on her writing.
She's reclaimed her voice and she got rich doing it,
so she tries again. Steed Lana writes another book, a
memoir called A Book for Granddaughters about her time back
in Russia, and if you recall, stet Lana had also

(05:12):
written a book while living in England, a memoir called
The Faraway Music about her time it's Holly Esen. So
she's got these two books, two books that I love
so much. We built this podcast around the stories they contain,
and yet no one gives a shit about them because
they aren't about her father. The only interest in Svetlana

(05:35):
was that she was Stalin's daughter, so she wasn't talking
about Stalin. They weren't interested, So she decides she needs
help from someone with a bit more agency, and who
might have more agency why an agent, perhaps Steed. Lana
gets connected with Helen Brand, a famous literary agent to

(05:57):
such icons as Maya Angelou and fran Leibowitz. And in
the archive at Amorous College which houses feed Lana and
Helen's letters, I was stunned by the shall we say,
emotionally charged correspondence between these two women. I'm going to
force my mic shy producers to read these letters for me.

(06:19):
The relationship with Helen Brand begins cordially and sweetly. Here's Helen.
You write beautifully about nature, about faith, about people. I
love your descriptions. This is not a political book, but
a hunting memoir. You can feel speed. Lana's surprised, refreshed,

(06:39):
ready to engage deeply with a collaborator and a champion.
For a long time, I have not heard anyone praising
my work and good things owas make me pray. Helen's
going to make set the talk of the town again.
She has a game plan. She has connections. She's going
to use them. All have to find the best editor

(07:01):
and the best publisher. She goes on to list editors
she knows at Random House, Harper and Rogue, nah FSG
a double day. Spent Lana is thrilled. She sees the
whole world opening up to her again. She even makes
plans to buy a new house with what she is
sure will be a nice advance. This is all going
so well, so smoothly. The trajectory is up, up, up,

(07:26):
But what goes up, according to science, must inevitably come down.
Early on, editors start passing. Here's W. W. Norton and co.
The past, which propelled spent Lana into the limelight seems
so distant and really used up that it doesn't resonate now. Basically,

(07:51):
according to this guy, Spent Lana's old news. Then there's
the actual critique of her manuscripts. He regretfully calls them
one damned thing. After another Random House agrees set Lana
has to be massively edited. But it's not just her
story that's turning publishers away. It's well her I also

(08:14):
know too much about how difficult she can be, how paranoid. Okay,
that's not fun. But Helen, good old Helen is not
willing to give up on her client just yet. She's
going to wrap up their critiques into one big constructive
burrito and hope that's Svetlana will bite. Here's the thought.
Set Lana ought to condense all four of her memoirs

(08:36):
into one big, best selling autobiography. Yum is that Soviet
cilantro I taste. I think a book titled set Lana
a Life would sell and sell and sell. Now, before
we get to set Lana's response to this, I want
to say that I understand the suggestion, yet I also

(09:00):
totally understand the feeling of having written something you're really
proud of and the person who is supposed to be
your advocate tells you that's great, But why don't you
write it completely differently? This is the reason I'm bald.
Each follicle of hair I've lost is from someone not
clapping at my work. But I've never had the ovaries

(09:21):
to do what sveet Lana does next, and that is
to clap back. The whole notion about condensing my whole
body of working one sounds like eskuing a composer to
write one big symphony. Spetlana is downright insulted, and as

(09:46):
this conflict between agent and client is brewing, spet Lana
puts a down payment on a house with money from
an advance that was not advanced. PS. I am still
not quite out of a met so I have gotten
into thanks to your promises, that I quote can buy
a house. She sends Helen Brand and her agency a

(10:09):
legal bill for five hundred and ninety two dollars and
thirty six cents. Would your office reimburse me? I think
it should. Helen is astounded by this quote soap opera.
She believed in speed Lana's extraordinary story and was only
trying to help, but it blew up in her face.

(10:33):
When Spetlana first came to America in nineteen sixty seven,
she did so on a work visa with a one
point five million dollar book deal. If you recall, she
was getting so much mail from her readers, America loved her.
Listen to how young and hopeful she sounds. Have you
any idea how many letters you've received? Well? I think

(10:53):
I have received hundreds and hundreds of them. Have you
read most of them? Oh? Yes, of course, And I
keep most of them because they are really very nice
and very kind and warm letters. Now Svetlana is not
receiving letters from adoring readers. She's getting rejection after rejection,
and rejection just sucks, especially when it's your life story

(11:17):
that people are rejecting. That's personal, and for someone so
studied in politics, it's frustrating to me that spet Lana
could not have been less diplomatic in how she received
constructive feedback. She was alienating her allies. But maybe she
was just over it. Maybe after everyone twisting her intentions,

(11:38):
her words, her story, maybe after East and West had
yanked her around, Maybe after being robbed of her money
at Taliessin and emptied of her heart in Russia, maybe
she was just like, fuck all, y'all. The problem is
all those people who had fuck spet Lana over in
the past had seduced her because they want did something

(12:00):
from her. Helen Brand is just an agent who set
Lana's never met in person and who is merely trying
to help. Yet set Lana is so over people's input
on her life story that she sees a suggestion as
an attack, critique as a betrayal. The final letter from
helen Brand, which included her returning all of set Lana's manuscripts,

(12:24):
was dated November ninth, nineteen eighty nine, the fifty seventh
anniversary to the day of her mother's death, the exact
day the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. The world was
changing rapidly. Could set Lana keep up more? After the

(12:50):
Break Act too? The Last Laugh? June nineteen ninety one,
A dreary day in London. After all the rejection in America,
Svetlana has returned to Great Britain once again, and on

(13:11):
this overcast morning, Svetlana gets herself dressed and takes the
tube to London Bridge. When she gets off the train,
it's raining. She has her umbrella, but it keeps flying
up and turning inside out. When she reaches the bridge,

(13:32):
she finds it deserted, nobody cloud and the water was
muddy and brown and dreadful. She's laughing in this interview,
recorded a few years after the fact, but this is
a grim moment, the lowest low. She Shimmi's up onto

(13:57):
the rail, struggling in her pencil skirt. There was nothing
particularly wrong with my wife on that day, but on
this particular day I thought about it in the very
dark terms. What am I My book farm has published,
like Sienies Lucky escape from that yeah, and it was
very dark, Queny holds. At this time, Stetlana is living

(14:24):
in a charity hostel in what the Evening Standard dubs
the shabby end of town, a group home where the
bathroom is shared and residents cook their meals communally. She
just lost a couple of close friends, including fame novelist
Jersey Kazinski, who died the month before by suicide. Stetlana
is reminded of her own mother's suicide, and she thinks,

(14:47):
if Jersey has nothing to live for with his literary fame,
then what chance does she have. As she stands there
on the edge of the bridge, perhaps she feels ready
to join her friends her mother in what she maybe
imagines as a more peaceful place. But as she's struggling
in her pencil skirt, somebody gretnam that they at be

(15:10):
done and pulled me back. Steed Lana is saved by
a man she thinks must be an angel, and as
he pulls her back to safety, speed Lana struggling in
his grasp, he shouts, oh, these godless people as I
was fighting are off. I am nobody us and she

(15:32):
was holding me there. The police take her home and
make her promise not to do it again. As far
as suicide attempts go, speed Lana relays this one with
a surprising amount of irony and humor. And that's what
I love so much about her. It's so characteristically set

(15:52):
to be able to look back at her most vulnerable moment,
a moment when she was willing to actually end at all,
and well, laugh. Of course, now I think they last
next day, not maybe last next day. Maybe yah. Yeah.
That laughter. It was something she'd been taught by many
people in her life. It was her antidote to tragedy.

(16:16):
It's a saving grace, yes, but it was always that.
It was always on the version you could lay, you
could laugh, and you could, but the last thing would
be laugh. You could cry, you could laugh, but the
last thing would be laugh. You can hear it, can't you?

(16:36):
In her laughter, spet Lana was able to take a
step back from the pain. In nineteen ninety seven, speed Lana,
now seventy one, returns to Wisconsin for the last time
to live with her twenty six year old daughter, and
for the rest of her life she'll do something she's
never done. She'll stay put. Mother and daughter wouldn't live

(16:58):
together long, but Olga would always be her closest friend,
her confidant, her protector, and with help from those who
loved and cared for her, set Lana would get to
live out the rest of her days somewhat anonymously. I
think many people did not even realize who she was.
I mean, she was private. We called her Lana. That's
Bridget Roberts, who works at the community library in downtown

(17:21):
Spring Green. After we visited Taliessen, my producers and I
wandered around, hoping to get a glimpse of what spet
Lana's day to day might have looked like. When we
spoke to Bridget, who was just as friendly, chipper and
hushed as a Midwestern library administrator should be, we asked
her if she knew spet Lana. Yes, she came in
on this library many times. Oh, I definitely knew her,

(17:45):
and she would come in. She loved to sit over
in the reading area and just read books. I took
her home a few times because I said, Lana, you
can't walk all the way home, you know, with it.
But a very very sweet lady and really private. I
love that image of spent Lana Aluyeva or I guess
Lana Peters a short, quiet woman in our seventies, spending

(18:06):
her days in the library, reading and reading and reading
until closing time. She's sort of an older Russian Matilda,
someone seemingly ordinary who was in fact extraordinary. I think
she felt comfortable here and safe, and like I said,
many people just knew her is Lana. I don't know
if they really knew what the connection was, but I

(18:28):
think really everyone who knew that connection really respected her
because she did not like the limelight or any of
that kind of stuff sped. Lana had always claim she
didn't want the limelight, though I'm not convinced that that
was always true yet certainly by this time in her
life she worked very hard to stay anonymous, so much

(18:50):
so that even now when I meet people who knew her,
they feel like it is their duty to protect her.
Like when my producer Alison and I were interviewing Allen
historian Kieren Murphy and uncovered her connection to set. Towards
the end of our conversation, I'm just curious, since you
recounted that memory of Lana, what the context was of

(19:11):
you getting to know her. I lived above spet Lana
Kieren admitted she'd been purposefully hiding this detail. She had
a house with a second floor, and I lived up
in that apartment. During these years, people would sometimes enquire
about fet Lana's whereabouts. It was just in the air

(19:35):
because people had heard that she was back from Europe,
and so they would ask me if I knew her,
if I met her. Kieren would always say, I don't
know where she is right now to throw them off
the scent. My joke was always like, I did not know.
Was fet Lana in her living room? Was fet Lana

(19:58):
at the library? Was Fetlana getting her mail? I don't know.
Even though Karen lived in the same house as Lana,
she kept a polite distance. She knew that set Lana
was wary and weary of people oggling her. The first
time that I met her was very sweet, but in
my head, I'm going, oh my god, you're Stalin's daughter.

(20:21):
Oh my god, you're Stalin's daughter. Like that's screaming in
my head, you know, while I'm talking to this very
nice woman, but it's overwhelming. Just what did set Lana
say at one time? Like nobody can control who their
parents are. And she was like, I wish my mother
had married a carpenter. To her Spring Green neighbors. Launa

(20:51):
Peters was this sweet old lady who spent her days
quietly reading in the library. To her daughter, she was
still the hilarious, big, complex personality that she had always
been in our conversations. Her daughter told me that she
and speed Lana dressed up as the Golden Girls Dorothy
and Sophia Petrillo for Halloween. That sped Lana would curse

(21:11):
in Russian at her typewriter. She was a terrible typer,
yelling the Russian equivalent of motherfucker or more literally, mother
raper at the keys if they got stuck. That speed
Lana was always writing, always reading, always brewing some witchy
old world salth that was good for aches and pains.
But to the outside world, Speed Lana had become something

(21:33):
of a legend, a fun fact. Have you heard Stalin's
daughter lives in bumble Fuck, Wisconsin. Journalists, filmmakers, biographers all
tried to reach out to speed Lana, but at this
point in her life she felt so burned and harassed
that she put up a wall. Right. My first letter
heard said, Hey, an Nick, I want to write about
your life she'd be run it away because she didn't

(21:54):
want the attention. That's Nicholas Thompson. Nick is now the
CEO of the Atlanta. Back in two thousand and six,
he was writing a book about George Kennon and reached
out to spet Lana as a source. They soon became
penpal's traded phone calls, and when Nick eventually visits her
in Wisconsin, he meets an older Spetlana, a quieter one.

(22:16):
Her hair has gone white, she walks with a cane,
and she's living in a senior citizen's home, her father's
Russian English dictionary on the bookshelf. He recalls her having
the welcoming energy of someone who hadn't told her story
in a long time. Their conversations were long and numerous.

(22:37):
Spetlana gifted him poignant insights about Kennon, the subject of
his book, and didn't hold back from giving him personal
advice either. They became friends. I feel lucky that I
met her. I felt lucky that I got to talk
to her. I really like I enjoyed those years a letter,
not just as a writer or as a reporter Jack
sometimes gone in the way, but just as a person

(22:59):
so I was very grateful to have had her as
like an older friend. Nick would eventually pen a wonderful
piece in The New Yorker called My Friend Stalin's Daughter.
It was one of the first pieces I ever read
about her. She was an extraordinary mix of emotions and
intensities and passions in a way that I found utterly compelling.

(23:23):
Like Nick and so many others, I too have found
her wildness, her daring, her thoughtfulness, her impulsiveness, all of
her contradictions intoxicating. She's a cocktail I want to keep
drinking forever. I don't know if the inner turmoils that
Lana had experienced in her life was ever resolved, whether

(23:45):
she had quieted down because she finally found balance, or
that she had just gotten older. She still struggled with money.
She's still cycled between senior homes. She never forgave her
father and saw and repurposing his playbook, but still, by
her daughter's account, she found some sense of peace end

(24:07):
of laughter in her final years. By twenty eleven, speed
Lana is diagnosed with colon cancer. Sensing she's at the
end of her days, speed Lana pends a letter and
gives it to her lawyer, and in November, of course,
she passes away at the age of eighty five. This letter,

(24:32):
written by speed Lana to her daughter, her last great story,
is delivered in the aftermath of her death from beyond
the grave. It's a loving letter about how she's joining
her ancestors and how she's now watching from the other side.
She ends it with a scribbled note saying sorry for
the bad typing, alas it did not improve even from here.

(24:58):
Whatever you want to call all her spet Lana Aluyeva,
Luana Peters, you have to admit she got the last laugh. Actually,
her daughter got the last laugh when she threw a
party on the beach to scatter her mom's ashes into
the Pacific Ocean, hoping no one would notice and issue

(25:19):
her a fine. It was a fitting end laughter and tears,
a group of friends in the sand drinking wine, casting
stet Lana out to sea. More after the break, Act

(25:57):
three curtains Scheherazade was able to stay alive through her storytelling.
She'd cleverly chop her stories in half, finishing one and
starting the next in the same night, making her bloodthirsty
husband salivate. For the end of the tale, instead of
the end of her life. It's in this way that

(26:18):
Scheherazade created a kind of never ending story, And though
that was certainly not spet Lana's intention, I kind of
feel like she's done that for me. Each chapter of
her life oddly linking to the next one in a
way that makes you want to be a detective, understanding
the links, piecing them all together. Why did she defect

(26:39):
to the US, Why did she go to tally Esen,
Why did she marry wes Why did it have to
happen so fast? Why did she return to the USSR?
Why did she come back? She writes about all of
these big life moves in separate books, but she doesn't
connect the dots. I don't disagree with the editor who said,

(27:00):
it's quote one damn thing after another. So the why
keeps me searching. Looking back on her eighty five years
of life, it's easy to see her as a tragic figure.
A New York Times obituary calls her life a quote
bewildering road ending in decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.

(27:22):
That is so mean, you guys, And look, it's true.
Everything that she had gained by defecting in nineteen sixty seven.
It seems that she had lost by the end of
her life. Before Roger and Harold met up with spelt Lana,
they were warned by her friend how poor she was.
It's the end of the month, and her welfare check

(27:44):
will ever run out, and you know she probably will
not offer you any drinks or you think to eat.
So yes, by some standards, American capitalist standards twenty first century,
everyone wants to be famous, standards where there are winners
and losers in life. Sped Lana had lost it all.
That's how I was characterizing her to Nicholas Thompson when

(28:05):
I sat down with him, and I was blown away
when he corrected me. She seemed like a great American immigrant,
right like, Yeah, just came here and became something entirely new.
I think. I mean she broke out of one life,
created a new one, had a whole bunch of ups
and downs. But I don't think of her story as

(28:25):
a tragic one at all. It had tragic elements, but
was not a tragic story. She lived a very full life.
She lived a fascinating life. She lived an emotionally invigorating life.
She had a fulfilled life. There were lots of upslots
and downs, massive regrets, but I certainly don't think of

(28:45):
it as a tragedy. As a writer trying to understand her,
it's easy to get lost and sped Lana's life. He
sped Lana. Herself got lost in it too. But Thompson
is right. Sped Lana story may have tragic elements, but
it's not a tragedy. At one point, she even said
so herself. Sometimes, if you are interested to listen to

(29:09):
one of the most funny stories of our time, my
paradoxical life, I would be glad to tell you more.
It is your saga, an irony, is the tire and
the tragedy all in one. I'm glad I have survived
it all, and I'm still an optimist, but I do
laugh a lot at myself, and if I lose that

(29:31):
mess of tupacity, my end will come fast. A saga,
an irony, a satire, a tragedy. That was what drew
me to spetlana story in the first place, the tale
of a woman who did everything in her power to
shuffle off the shackles of one life, only to thrust

(29:52):
herself into the cage of another. And then to do
it over and over again, each time intersecting with the
most bizarre ca arcters of history. This is what made
me want to write her into a play, a play
that itself would be all of the things that she was,
all of the things that I am. When I started

(30:13):
the process of writing about set Lana, I knew that
that was where I wanted to take the story. What
I didn't expect was where the story would take me
on trips to Scottsdale. Welcome to the Terminal three, a
Phoenix International Airs on tours of Wisconsin. Your destination is

(30:35):
on the left, we see. Thank you so much this. Yeah,
I'd become friends with authors Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman. Oh, Roger,
you sound beautiful. I want you to read me the Bible.
I'd be happy to you know that, Sodom and Gomora

(30:56):
Parts and Sharon. The love for stet Lana with biographer
Rosemary Sullivan. Your affection for Steve Lana moves me. I
mean she really matters to you. Yeah, she does. I
get to meet people who knew stet Lana funny, smart, interesting.

(31:17):
She always had like a funny quip. You know, she
had great stories. It's just a total pleasure to talk
with her, and I'd get out of a trap that
I and stet Lana and so many writers always fall into.
I'd find a gang of artists who were not only
my champions, but my collaborators, my comrades, Adam Webber, Alison Joy,

(31:39):
and Catherine Isaac, the Stetlanits as I call us as.
Someone pick a tone and we're all gonna harmonize. Wait no, yeah, yeah,
not sound terrible. All right, Alison, you go again. Yeah,

(32:05):
I feel like this is Ultimately We've told this tale
with humor. It was honestly the most reverential way I
could tell it, and I hope, against hope that spet
Lana would get the joke, or maybe not. The woman

(32:26):
certainly had lots of opinions, but I wouldn't have her
any other way. It's because of our fearless storytellers, our
spet Lana's are Shahrazads, that we have these never ending
stories to tap into. It's been more than ten years
since she died, and spet Lana's life story and her

(32:46):
writing have changed me. I'm calmer now, just kidding, I'm
really not. I'm still the same messy person I always was.
I just know that you can leap fearlessly into the
next chapter of your life and rest assured that you'll
retain all of your glorious, fabulous flaws. That, among many

(33:08):
other things, is what her life means to me. I
hope spent Lana's life has meant something to you. It
would seem that she hopes so too. She closes her
last book, a Book for Granddaughters, with this parting thought,
The hope of this writer is that the memoirs of
my generation will be appreciated by those who never knew

(33:32):
our times. Our books will help them to understand not
only another era, but different people. And granddaughters of all
colors and creeds not only mine, will then find on
these old fashioned pages strange and unreal situations, but also
some familiar faces. So the next time you have an

(33:56):
impulse to throw your life up into the air, blow
it up, crash into a new chapter, think of spent
Lana and know that, sure you just might lose everything,
but you'll have one hell of a story. Let's drink
to that, but not vodka. Svetlana preferred a gin and tonic.

(34:18):
Vodka she said was for peasants. My name is Dan Katroser,
and this was spet Lana spent Lana. St Lana spent
Lana is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the documentary group.
I'm your host, Dan Katroser. The show is written and

(34:39):
produced by me and my friends Adam Webber, Alison Joy,
and Katherine Isaac. We also serve as executive producers at
the documentary group. Our executive producer and all around fairy
godmother is job A Silhouettes. Production oversight by Stacy Kleiger,
additional support from Tom Yellen and Gabrielle Tenenbaum. Our iHeart

(34:59):
team is supervising producer Casey Pegram and executive producer Maya Howard.
Editing assistants from producers Christina Loranger and Joey pat These
folks went above and beyond and were forever grateful. Original
music by Elan Izakov, Your Brilliant Buddy. Production counsel by
slas Ekhouse, Dasty Haynes Lockoe, Clearance counsel by Ballard Sparr

(35:22):
Jay You're Our Hero. Fact checking assistance by Meghan Trout.
Excerpts from spit Lana Alujeva's book, A Book for Granddaughters
are performed by Cassie Greer. Cassie, along with Alyssa, Josh Luanne, Sean,
Sherry Beth and Line Storm Playwrights, helped me develop my
play and we're some of my earliest partners in crime.

(35:42):
Thank you all. Big thanks to parents Neil and Diane
for taking me on the best trip to Amherst, and
my cousin Jenny and her fiance Jared for going on
multiple tours of tally Esen West with me and show
furring me around Arizona. I'm so glad I don't drive.
And thank you to the partners of our writing and
producing team who have added so much to this project emotionally,

(36:06):
spiritually and creatively Jeff Wooker, Jonathan Willen, and Lena Vaughan. Lena,
you are the one who said this story should be
a podcast. So grateful for all of your support. And
lastly to my husband Jordan Siegel. You've been there with
me every step of the way during this project. You
must be exhausted. Thank you.