240. Show PJs

"Beginner's Love," chapters 8-9. Well, folks, we finally made it to the big sleepover in this 1983 Norma Klein novel about first-time S-E-X. Berger plans a future with his lady Doogie Howser, Mom and Dad shred their friend group, and Joel and Leda score a home run. Molly and Jody talk about diary snooping, high school prudes, and ghost art. Molly presents a fascinating Special Report on The Joy of Sex. Thank you to Blume Head Geniene for her Age Gap Yap, and to Kleinstein for our latest look into the mysterious life of Norma. It's a (sometimes) Judy Blume book club. Join us every other week!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi, I'm Jody and I'm Mollie, and you're listening to
the Bloom Saloon.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's a Judy Bloom book Club.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
We're here to talk about a Norma Klein book today
called Beginner's Love. Yay, Beginner's Love, Beginner's Love. We're doing
chapters eight and nine.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
But before we get into that, let's talk about the
Judy minuti, where we take a minute or more or
less to talk about the most Judy Bloom thing that
happened to us this week. So, Jody, what's the most
Judy Bloom thing that happened to you this week?

Speaker 1 (00:46):
This is wild, Okay. I went to the SF MoMA
to see there's an exhibit there Rutha Sawah. She's a
really amazing Bay Area bay artist. Her body of work
is incredible, from like paintings to sculpture to prince and
just she did everything. But I went into this little

(01:10):
room off to the side of her exhibit and nobody
else was in there. It was totally empty. There were
just like a couple of small framed things on the
wall and I saw the real life baby feet whoa
Frank Fargo was not the first artist to do babyfeet
ruth Asawa is, and I feel like Frank Fargo is

(01:33):
a fraud. Oh, not only is he a transient, he
is a fraud.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
That's so funny.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Oh my god, I'll send you a photo. I took
a picture of myself next to baby feet just for
you because I was like, no one's gonna believe me.
They look exactly like I pictured the Frank Fargo baby feet. There's,
my god, one pair of feet in and one pair

(02:01):
of feet in blue, and they're walking towards each other.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
That's exactly what I would picture.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Right, But there's a there's a hitch though, so I
think I might have imagined it. Well, I mean, I
have the photo, but it did make me wonder. Nobody
else was in the room, so I didn't have anyone
to talk about it with. And I've looked it up
online and I'm finding nothing, yeah from ruth Osawa regarding

(02:27):
baby feet or feet prints. I even did a reverse
image search and nothing pops up.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
So, oh my gosh, I know, I just searched it
now as you were talking, and nothing came out. Oh
my god, that's so weird.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Is this a ghost art?

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Oh my god? Ghost art?

Speaker 1 (02:43):
No, so smart it's.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Like you just like stepped into the room of requirement
and it's like, here's this weird art that you want
to see, right totally, I am sending it to right.
Oh my gosh, gosh, Yeah, that's what that is. That's
what that is.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
That's crazy ghost art.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
There's not even like a like attribution like placard next
to it neither. No, that's really like, where is this art?

Speaker 1 (03:14):
It's like the art version of an orm.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Oh my gosh. Okay, So Bloomheads, your assignment is to
go to sf MoMA and see if you can also
find this or if it's a fever dream that Jodias.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yes, that's such a great idea.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
So that's my Judy Minudi, what's yours, Mollie.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
At the beginning of summer, my friends and I met.
We had a party at my house and we each
like crafted summer bucketless. We made like little bucket lists
out of construction paper and stickers and fun pens and stuff,
and then just yes no. Two days ago on Sun Saturday,

(03:55):
we had the closing ceremonies of the bucket less. So
we went to a bar and we like looked at
the things we crossed off of our bucket list, and
it was just like really wholesome and cute and like silly.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
It was so fun, so fun, what a great I mean,
nobody nobody crosses off their bucket list. I'm so like
you did it.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
We did, and it was an idea I got from
a teen on TikTok like two years ago, and so
I started doing this maybe to one or two years ago,
and we've just kept this tradition up. And it's so
fun to do it with your friends because then you
have other people to do stuff with. So it's like,
if you all put what you want to go see
an outdoor movie, we should go see one. Or if
you all want to go to the beach, let's make

(04:37):
a day and go to the beach. And that's exactly
what happened. And now one of my other friends is
talking about wanting to do a party where we do
fall bucket lists. So yeah, it just seems like very
cute and friendly and wholesome.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Oh whatever, teen on TikTok, you thank you. You saw that.
That is another great contribution from gen Z. What was
the other one we decided was their greatest contribution? Pimple
Patches yes, pimple patches of populus.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Thank you for your service.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
We've got a letter.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
This letter is from bloomhead Jeanine. Now you might remember
Janine from the Having a Missing Front Tooth club. So
here's Janine's letter. Hi, bloom Buds. I wanted to weigh
in on the age gap yap. First of all, why
didn't we think of that? But I have too many

(05:46):
feelings for instant messages. So here we are. Okay, here
we go. Let's trap in. My husband is seventeen years
my senior. We met in a college painting class. We
were both students, so it's not like he was a
professor creep. I truly thought he was my age, maybe
a little old. I mean he was in my class.
He had to be twenty five tops, right, folks, he
was thirty nine to my twenty two.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
Oops.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
He didn't mislead me about his age. To be fair,
I didn't ask right away, but when I found out
how old he was, I demanded to see some id.
He was very youthful looking, still is No one has
ever asked is that your dad? When we went on
our first date, he got carded and I did not
rude when he met my friends. Our favorite game was

(06:34):
Guess how old Charlie is. I don't know if that
was Charlie's favorite guy, but reality is, we really clicked.
We liked a lot of the same music, books, movies.
He also found me charming and beautiful, so that was
nice for me. Everybody finds you charming and beautiful. You're
charming and beautiful real. He also found oh oh, I

(06:57):
found him funny and sweet and qtaf We're still together
twenty three years strong. Sometimes it just works, other times
it's deeply creepy. Looking at you, Bill Belichick love and
don't mind the age gap? Janine? Oh, that's nice.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Is Janine reiterating the word age gap because of gap?
Tee h?

Speaker 2 (07:21):
That's If anybody knows about a gap, it's Janine. So
I think that's good insight, you know.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
I think it's really fascinating how you and I are
pretty open to it. Seems like Janine is as well. Yeah,
but Molly, you did a poll on Insta the other day,
and uh.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
The results were interesting. So I did a pull in
our Instagram stories pardon me in our Instagram posts, and
it said, what's your take on age gap relationships? Now?
Mind you there were only twelve responses, so forty two
percent said ten years older is too much, thirty three

(08:06):
percent said ten years older is okay, seventeen percent. Seventeen
percent said it's all gross, which the wording on that
is vague. Do you think any kind of age gap
at all is gross? Or do you think dating in
general is gross? And then eight percent said I'm into it,

(08:32):
which again I accidentally make the wording unclear, But I
think that means you're in the age gap. Really, But yeah,
I think it's such a case by case basis thing, right, Yeah,
And I was. Actually I did a show last night's
stand up show with my friend Guy Branham, and he

(08:53):
has a great one man show right now called Be Fruitful.
And one thing he talks about is how there certain
things that happen in gay male relationships that aren't talked
about widely in society. And he said one of them
is big age gap relationships. But a lot of that
has to do with younger people, especially younger people of

(09:14):
like the generations when he was dating a lot more,
they didn't have access to queer spaces with people their
own age because people their own age weren't you know,
out as much, so it's really not uncommon, he asserts,
in like the gay man dating community to be like
have huge age gap relationships, which is why, going back

(09:36):
to what I said a couple of episodes ago, Dan
Savage says about the Campsite rule is like, you go
ahead and date people younger or older than you, but
the goal is to leave everybody better than when you
found them. So I tend to think about both of
those things.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
That makes so much sense, and I agree Kate's by
case basis. I mean, but there's creepy people doing creepy
things no matter what age.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
So yeah, creepiness knows no age.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
Creepiness knows no age. Well, Denise, thanks so much for
sharing your story. We want to hear more age gap stories,
good or bad or neutral? Yes, totally all right, Mollie,
Are you ready for another Pata normal Pada Norma Investors?

Speaker 2 (10:25):
You can you can't. You can't pronounce this dumb segment
name that I made up. Weird.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
This is courtesy of friend of the pod Kleinstein, who
has been sending us some really exclusive and interesting intel
on the life and tragic death of Norma. This one
here is from writer Meryl Joan Gerber, and she's written

(10:54):
a lot. She's very accomplished. She was a friend of
Norma and like a pen pal of Norma. I love
that this was written after Norma's death. So this was
in twenty twenty three as part of Merril Joan Gerber's
compilation called Revelation at the Food Bank. So she's speaking

(11:16):
of her friendship with Norma. She doesn't name her by name,
but we all know who she's talking about. She starts
off with talking about her friend, a well known author
of teenage novels, A woman who, as they always say
of people who seem to have it all, had everything
to live for. She had a successful career, a devoted husband,

(11:37):
two beautiful children. Her record of publications and sales would
be the envy of any writer. She lived in a
fine apartment in New York City, and she wrote a
new book every year from October first to October thirty first.
That's so interesting.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Whoa.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Her rule for herself, which she told me about, was this,
and this is this is pretty dire. You must write
ten pages a day or you will be shot. So
seemed to work for Norma. WHOA.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
That is so interesting because of what we're going to
talk about in some of these chapters today. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
I admired her industry. She chose October in which to
write her novel because it was a bleak month. Her
children were in school, there was no sun in the sky.
She wrote all morning, every morning, and every afternoon went
to a movie by herself.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Oh that sounds honestly, so nice.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Love a routine. The books she wrote each October were
her young adult novels. Later in the year she would
also write for adults. Once a book was finished, there
was the excitement of selling it, usually for a good
deal of money. She was brave in treating subjects for
young people, unmarried sex, a divorced parents having a love affair,

(12:56):
a mixed race for romance, a boy who chooses to
raise the baby his pregnant girlfriend wanted to abort, and
later in her career, euthanasia, the killing of an alien
grandparent by the hero and his father out of mercy.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Who wow, damn.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
My friend's books were often removed from library shelves. She
fought against censorship and traveled to speak out about it.
We began writing to one another after our mutual agent
died and we were both seeking a new agent. She
gave me advice, a personal and professional. She held back
no secrets. She talked about money the way adults usually didn't,

(13:33):
telling me about the exact amount of her own earnings,
about her husband's, about the advances she knew had been
given to other writers. She spoke of secrets of hers,
her husbands, and her children's without guilt. She read their
diaries and letters.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
No norma, norma, yikes, I don't like that.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
I don't either. But it happened to me by my
own mother. And oh well that sucks.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
What was that? Like? When did that happen?

Speaker 1 (14:04):
She read some Well, this is my fault. So I
used to print out my emails for something. This was
like early days of emails, like the late nineties, and
I would print them out for my I don't know,
my archives or something, and I would.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Do the same thing. My friend and I would write
fan fiction via email sometimes, so I printed out those correspondences.
But yeah, okay, I'm so familiar with this, and I
would print out my friends would pronount aim conversations. But
I never thought to do that.

Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yeah, I mean, okay, I think it was a thing
back then. I don't think it was just me, so
that's good to hear.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
It wasn't.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
But I left one of my emails in the printer
and my mom was like, dude, do do what's this?
And you know, she just and I think from there
it was kind of like the floodgates opened and she
just o a bit more snooping. But yeah, how.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Did you know she read your journal? Did she say?

Speaker 1 (15:05):
She told me because I had. I was talking all
about smoking weed and she grounded me.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
Oh geez, the opposite happened to me. I found my
mom's journal and I read my mom's joel when I
was in I was maybe in like fourth or fifth grade.
I read my mom's journal. Oh, and it was a
page turner. It was great. I loved it. I loved

(15:34):
it so oh my I got scared and I told
my mom. I got in big trouble. And then she
was always like, now I'm going to read yours.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
And I was like, oh, that's like such a threat
that I would think about every day and I would
never keep a journal.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
I well, it didn't stop me, but I was just
I was combing through some journals today because I thought
I had some spicy stuff about my ideal virginity loss situation.
And I think I just thought that I didn't write
it down, but I saw a bunch of entries that
were like my mom said, she's gonna read dish. Oh no,
like yeah, I also found one entry that was like

(16:17):
today today is the first day of the Iraq war
and the first day at war with the girls in
my school.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
Oh that rivals a Judy bloom first sentence. I mean
that is good, Mollie. Yeah, it's high time for some diaries.
We haven't done that in a while. So I'm glad.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
I want to hear your emails too.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, I don't see. I'm sure it's still somewhere. I
don't throw anything away, But I.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Just wonder, like neither of us are parents, and so like,
I can sort of understand being worried about you, especially
if you like accidentally left that thing out.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, but it just seems like such.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
A violation to read your kid's journal. What what do
the I wonder what the parents who are listening, if
you have any insight into this.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
So I know friends of mine who are parents who
do read their kids texts. Oh, you know, I don't.
Part of me is like, maybe you should be keeping tabs.
I mean, not doing it secretly, but being like, hey,
hand over your phone.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
My mom would do that. In fact, my mom used
to like make me once a month like show her
everything on my Facebook. She would like sit behind me
and look at everything on my face. Yeah, which was
good because I was putting some sus stuff up there.
But yeah, and I guess maybe it's wholesome to be like, oh, yeah, sure,

(17:48):
kids are still keeping journals, like I actually don't know if.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
That's true, right, I do think a journal is different
because that's not like what you're putting out in the world. Yeah,
but I don't know, are they Yeah, very very thought
provoking questions here, parents, let us know. Okay anyway, sorry interrupt, No,
this is good. So yeah, Norma was doing that, but

(18:11):
it seemed like she thought it was okay because she's
telling her buddy all about it. So, oh well that
kind of makes me sad.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Then, like part of the reason she's so good at
writing these books is because she's like re ribbing them
from her kids. Yeah, private thoughts. Oh, I don't like that.
I don't like that.

Speaker 1 (18:29):
I didn't even think of that. But I wonder if.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Judy did that and just didn't say anything about it. Oh,
I don't know, and I'm uncomfortable. Every part of norma
investigation makes me more uncomfortable. Have to be honest, it's
such interesting insight, but it's just like, oh, man, I
don't know how to feel about this.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
It's because she's so raw. I think Judy has a
veneer of like perfection, you know, like perfectly imperfect. But
Norma is very imperfect, and maybe we're not used to that.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Oh. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Once when she came to visit me, I picked her
up from the airport. On the way to my house,
she began telling me the plot of a novel she
planned to begin in October. As she talked with obvious excitement,
we passed a burning house. Fire trucks were arriving. There's
sirens blasting, Smoke was pouring from the windows of the house,
and people were gathered across the street to watch. My
friend didn't even seem to notice the spectacle. Her mind

(19:31):
was somewhere else, her brain filled with the images of
her book to be, her fantasies stronger than the burning
reality at hand.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
Oh my god, imagine driving past this tragedy and Norma's
like and then he touches her boots. But then they
worry that she's maybe not a vision, but she totally is,
like the house is on fire.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
Nor During our visit talked for three days, stopping only
to eat and sleep briefly, but mainly she talked and
I listened. She was bursting with talk. Her head was
under enormous pressure from her visions and her ideas. Her daughters,
like mine, were adolescent girls. We spoke about their new sexuality,

(20:16):
how we dealt with it, what we feared from it. Oh, Mollie,
this is gonna make you so uncomfortable, and I will
probably cut this out, but I have to read this
part to you. You have to. Oh god, it's and
She told me she had taken her daughters to see
a pornographic movie, that they might as well be exposed

(20:37):
to such films in her presence as be shocked by
them later without her there to explain things. Yes, HI,
question like that?

Speaker 2 (20:45):
Okay, okay, I listen. Do I want to watch a
pornographic movie with my mom? No? But I think the
heart behind this is very nice and the thought behind
it is nice, So I mean I think maybe we
could have watched you know, an R rated movie first

(21:08):
Nice or Jesus. It was the seventies, like PG really
rated movies you could see bush. So it just feels
like maybe we didn't need to go that far. But
this doesn't bother me.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
Okay, okay, what do you think? Well, at first I
was shocked and horrified and oh no, that is like
a borderline child abuse. But then second thought was, maybe
it's not straight up porn as we know it now.
Maybe it was like she took her to see you know, again,
it was the seventies, so maybe they went to go

(21:42):
see there's.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Like an element of camped you know, we forget that,
like porn used.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
To be a little campier, yeah than it is now
camp here and strangely mainstream like now, god, I'm forgetting
the name. What's the oh Last Tango in Paris or something. Yeah,
So taking it with a grain of salt.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
It's definitely shocking and it's definitely not something I would
want to do with my mom. But I see the
I see the vision.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
Okay. I'm open to you know, I'm open to giving
her the benefit of the doubt here, so.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
I would love I wonder, are any of these primary
sources you have from her children at all.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
I believe, so I haven't gotten to those yet, but yeah, okay,
and one of her kids, Kleinstein says, would be very
receptive to talking to us.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
So way to bury the lead.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
That's cool, The author continues, I was the one shocked.
I was frightened that she wanted to control their mind
to that extent. She felt that it was her duty
to initiate them personally into aspects of life that were
not her business. When I visited her in New York,
she gave me a blanket for my bed made out
of ties from her dead father, who had been a psychoanalyst.

(23:11):
She told me she was his angel of perfection, that
she could do nothing wrong in her eyes. One wall
of her library was filled with the books of Virginia Wolf,
who was her heroine and inspiration. She told me that
any woman who came after Wolf and wrote a book
was already defeated. Virginia Wolf had done the best that
could ever be done.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
But also, I just read a Virginia Wolf book, and
I'm here to say no, no, I actually I think
we can do a little bit better.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
Yeah, I haven't read much Virginia Wolf.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
I think she's an incredibly important author for what she
did in her time, but it's tough to read. It's
just I read now, I think two Virginia Wolf books,
and both of them were like, Wow, these are some
beautiful sentences, these are some timeless thoughts. I would much

(24:04):
rather be reading Norma Kleiner chreep interesting. Okay, maybe that's
just me.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, I value that opinion. We wrote letters to one
another for fifteen years. Hers were single space four or
more pages long, and answered the minute she received mine
as I answered hers. What we had was a fever
long distance conversation, two women typing madly at opposite ends
of the country, consoling one another's literary disappointments, encouraging one

(24:32):
another's ideas and plans. Okay, I think I'll stop there.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Wow, that was a really neat missive. I really liked
hearing that.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
Yes, and this author, uh Merril Joan Gerber, I hadn't.
I'm not familiar with her, but I read about her
and she seems very interesting. And she's written a lot,
including her own like Tome of Ya novels. So whoa, Yeah,
that's so cool. I love that a friend of Norman
is a friend of ours.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
That's so true, so true. Well, thanks again Kleinstein for
bringing that to our attention. What a treasure trove.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
Cool Yoda over here.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Okay, this is a big one. Gang they were. She
was really like machine gunning out new characters this this
this section. Okay. So we have Joel, who's the narrator.
He's seventeen. We have Knocks, Joel's older brother. He's a

(25:55):
dentist in La and he's thirty two. We have Angela
Spivak Spivak. How would you pronounce Angela's last.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
Name, Spivac.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
Spivac? Okay, Angela Spivac who is Knox's fiance and she
is hot, but she's not as hot as the people
NOx usually dates, and she works at her funeral. We
have Franklin, who's Joel's dad. He's a food critic. We
have Nan, Joel's mom, who's a galerina. Now we've come

(26:33):
to the part of role call that I call Mom
and Dad's rogues gallery of friends, because we hear so
much about Mom and Dad's friends in these two chapters.
So we have Susie Daniels hot question mark, da Vita
hersh hot question mark, Obra hot question mark question mark

(27:02):
white question mark question mark question mark. The Drusels live
in Washington. No no on how hot the Drusls are,
but we do get commentary on Kitty Drusl, who's their
teenage daughter, who Joel says is not hot. So, for
those of you keeping score, not hot Kitty.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
Don't you agree with me that Kitty Drusals sounds amazing?

Speaker 2 (27:29):
She sounds like someone we would be friends. Go back
to talking about her. Oh, I'm not done with all
of their friends yet. We have We have Man and Nobbler.

Speaker 1 (27:46):
Oh god, it's mom's friend.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
Who is named after the deity in the craft question
mark question mark question.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
Mark, Yeah, yeah, okay, so Man is a demon?

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Cool?

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
Then we have Ksey Nobbler, whose dad's friend no relation
to Man on what the fuck? It's so funny. I
just picture Norma being like tee, you're writing that little
part and be like, well, off to the movies. She's
done writing for Lamb's book shut. And then we have

(28:30):
Louise Parker, whose mom's friend hotness tbd. We have Billy Parker,
who's Louise's son and who used to be Joel's friend,
but it is not anymore because Joel fucking sucks. Okay,
and that's all of mom and Dad's friends. So we
still haven't mentioned Danielle. Who's Lda's friends? Who is busty? Uh?

(28:54):
We have Leda is also seventeen years old, and who's cool?
And who's Joel's girlfriend. We have Ramone, who is a
weird older actor man that Leeda almost went all the
way with. We have Burger, Joel's best friend. And the
last person I put on this list was mysterious lady

(29:18):
doctor and the note I put on it was hallucination
question mark hot question mark, question mark question So that
is like all seventeen thousand characters that are mentioned in
these two chapters, which I bet is less than twenty pages.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
It's insanity. I think she really was having a manic episode.
And then like all the names are so wild, and
then there's like Louise Parker, like, wait a minute, this
doesn't fit.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
Honestly, I again I must call out these Hunger Games
ass names. This is crazy. I never read a book
other than The Hunger Games where the names were this
batshit on ad regular clip insane.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
Oh so fun? Okay, Well, thank you so much, Molly.
That was a lot of work. I can tell I'm sweating.
Chapter eight. So Knox is Joel's big dentist bro in
La and he's getting married to a lady undertaker or

(30:23):
I don't know if she's an undertaker or if she
just owns this like chain of funeral homes.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Oh, that's a good question.

Speaker 1 (30:31):
I don't know what the difference is, but it does
seem like she's the only person who works at this
chain of funeral homes because she's just like going around
town to old folks homes picking up corpses. It was
so morbid, like I don't think that's what the owner
of a chain of funeral homes is supposed to be doing.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Angela's speedback is out here like a single mom who
works two jobs he loves and never stuff She's got
like bodies falling out of her car.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, sow awi Ali, I'm just imagining her as Angelina
Pivarnik from Jersey Shore.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
I cannot believe you know Angelina's.

Speaker 1 (31:15):
Lasting Well, I had something. I had to google it,
but I knew it was something that sounded like spivack.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
So okay, that's gonna be my new my new head
canon for her. Yeah, that's her. Angelina. So except for
I was picturing the lady from ask More, a mortician
YouTube channel. That's who I was picturing because I love her.
Caitlin Doughty. Oh, she's real cute and she kind of

(31:44):
matches the description. So maybe a combination of both of these.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
People are kind of gal So yeah, So much of
this chapter is about mom and Dad and their friends
and speculating about Angelica and just being weird about everything.
They're very strange people. So first they want to know
if Angelica might be Catholic. They're like, what kind of

(32:11):
last name? You know? They're trying to figure out her
ethnicity and maybe if she and Knox have kids, she's
gonna try to make Knocks convert and their kids are
gonna have to be Catholic. They sound very judgy about this.
Then they start talking about her looks and how Dad
says that she's pretty but not too pretty where she's

(32:33):
likely to be a psycho. And let me read what
he says. Beautiful women, extraordinarily professionally beautiful women are trouble.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Frank, what a sexist thing to say. How about Susie Daniels.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Susie Daniels is not extraordinary though she's quite lovely, all
a bit.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
Well, what in the world world do you call extraordinary
in real life?

Speaker 1 (33:04):
You mean?

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Right? Hm?

Speaker 1 (33:08):
I call Davida Hirsh extraordinary.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
Vita Hirsh.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
She's just that's her manner.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
She just oozes all over every man she meets. Sure,
she has a gorgeous figure, but what's so special about
her face?

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Does she have a face? Frank?

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Really?

Speaker 1 (33:35):
Or what's her name? You know, the one who grew
up in Baghdad?

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Abra?

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah, Obra. Look at the wreckage she's rot on. The
men in her life. One went crazy, one jumped out
of a window. Herman is an alcoholic.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
She just has bad taste in men. And she's not
even that pretty.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
My point was just I think Angelica Spivak is perfect,
nice looking. But Knox won't have to lie awake at
night trembling for fear someone will snatch her away like
you do. Right, I'm a nervous wreck.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
Wow, that whole conversation interesting.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
I mean, they're talking about their future daughter in law,
so word.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
But also it's so fucked up that he's basically like,
these are the friends of ours that I think are
really attracted?

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (34:30):
Boy? Yikes?

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Nice. Joel's listening to all this, but not really. His
only takeaway is that Knox is just dumb to not
have married a movie star since since he's out in
Hollywood doing movie star's teeth and he's waited so long,
Like why would he just be with a normal girl
and a movie star would be rich and have a

(34:52):
pool and it just doesn't make any sense. Joel's thoughts
on women are very confusing to me and very flip
floppy from one page to another. So like, pivot from
this comment about, you know, glorifying movie stars and how
it would be so amazing to be with a movie
star to his comment about Kitty Drussel, who sounds amazing

(35:14):
but he like doesn't seem to like glamorous women who
are into Burt Reynolds.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
Yeah, do you want to read that part because I
think that's further along.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
I think we should bookmarket for when you get to it.
But I just want us to remember his flip floppy comments.

Speaker 2 (35:35):
And actually, let me go back a page because we
missed an age gap. Yep. Uh so, because this book
is like pounding you over the head with this. So
they're talking about mom and Dad's like Jewish identity, and
they say some weird shit that I'm not gonna repeat

(35:56):
because I don't want in my voice repeated on record.
But one of the things Dad does says is Dad
says going to Woody Allen movies and eating bagels is
all he feels like doing about being a Jew. And uh,
lest we forget, by the time that this book has
been written, Woody Allen is uh married to his stepdaughter.

(36:21):
So there's that.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
Wait, I thought that happened after this.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
Okay, I'm just skimming the Wikipedia page. If they're not
legally married, which yuck, yuck, yuck, they're definitely shit is
going on. Uh so, oh fuck Woody how fuck.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Hmm hmm.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
I can't wait till he dies.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
If you put that in your voice, you can transcribe
that away.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, please transcribe that. Tell everybody I think that way, Jesus.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
So in positive New Thanksgiving is coming up in Joel's parents.
Dun dun, dum. They are going to be out of town.
They're going to Washington. They're gonna look at some art
and stay with the Drew Cells, the dreu Cels. This
is the greatest thing Joel's ever heard. He and Lyda

(37:18):
have made this big plan that she's gonna tell her
parents she's staying at Danny's Classic. But really, she's gonna
come over to Joel's as soon as his parents leave,
or no, they're gonna they're gonna wait like an hour,
and then she's gonna come over. And then this blew
my mind. She's gonna stay two whole nights. I know

(37:39):
they're gonna be living together all weekend. This woo's.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
That would have been too much for me as a teenage, right.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
I mean, an overnight great, exciting fun, but then you
have to like spend the day the next day with
that person and like brush your teeth together. No, that's
not fun. But Joel's so excited he can't focus on
anything at school. He is excited. He's terrified that his

(38:08):
parents might change their minds, and he also is a
little bit in disbelief. He can't believe he might actually
get to do it soon. Part of me, I can't
believe it's really going to happen. You think to get
a girl to do anything sexy, you'd have to practice
some long speech or go out, go all out to
convince her, and then she just goes and does something

(38:30):
like that. Wait, it's very unclear. Does what says she'll
come over for the weekend.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Yeah, So I think what he's implying and what this
keeps implying, and I'm scared about where it's leading is
they keep implying that the only way to get a
girl into bed is by promising her you'll marry her,
promising her you love her, blah blah blah. But in

(39:00):
Joel's experience with Lida, like she kind of cuts to
the chase, Like, she doesn't do that necessarily. She has,
they have said they loved each other, but after kind
of after the fact. So I'm worried that he's starting
to get suspicious of Leda's virginity because she's like, so,

(39:23):
let's say sex positive.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
Right, she goes against everything he's been told by his
mentor and Sage Burger.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, like, God forbid, a woman is down to clown.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
But speaking of Burger, you have a bit of backtracking
to find out what happened with Burger at the Simon
and Garfuncle concert a few weeks earlier. Remember, he had
tripped over a beer bottle and gone missing, And turns
out he was rescued by this super hot and jogger nurse.

(39:58):
She was just jogging by.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Excuse me, she's a jogger doctor.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Oh, oh my god, I'm so sexist. She's a doctor. Sorry, sorry,
I can't operate on him.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
He's my small boy I found in the park.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
This is such a strange aside that we get. I'm like,
this is this This jogger doctor must come into play later,
But I thought we could read this.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
She was gorgeous. I think I dreamed the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
What happened?

Speaker 1 (40:36):
She was great. She told me to lie perfectly still
and she'd find a stretcher to get me to the hospital.
She said the main thing was not to put any
pressure on the foot, so I kind of lay there
in pain. And around five minutes later she came back
with these two guys who were carrying a stretcher. They
were just there in case stuff like this happened. They
took me to an ambulance and drove me to the hospital.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
What happened to the doctor?

Speaker 1 (41:00):
She came along in the ambulance. She was just in
her jogging clothes. She said she wanted to make sure
I was okay. What's so unbelievably dumb as I never
found out her name. My darn leg hurt so much
I could hardly concentrate on anything else. I think I
kind of passed out in the ambulance. How who was

(41:20):
she in her twenties? I guess black hair, blue eyes?
Wait in her a doctor in her twenties?

Speaker 2 (41:28):
God bless, does the math add up? I mean, doogie houses. Yeah,
it's another age gap. It's the age gap between her
and the other doctors.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
Uh huh uh uh black hair, blue eyes? Christ, why
the fuck didn't I get her name?

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Well, but if she's in her twenties, she's not gonna
have time for you.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
You can't tell Look at Marilyn Globberman.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Well, anyhow, you didn't get her name, so you might
as well forget it.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
Oh what I thought I might do? Oh it's start
jogging around the area. Maybe I'll run into her again, Yeah,
at ate at night. True, it may be a little
tricky convincing my parents is safe, but they're always after
me to get more exercise. I wouldn't really have to jog.
I just buy one of those jogging outfits people wear,
maybe jog for a few feet. Mostly, I'll just look

(42:21):
around and see if I can find her, I could
hang outside hospitals too. I wish I knew where she
worked at least?

Speaker 2 (42:28):
How do you know she was a doctor?

Speaker 1 (42:30):
I mean, that's the only good questions Alas had so far.
What do you mean how do I know she was
a doctor? How do I know? I twisted my ankle.
I was lying there, and she came over and said,
you seem to be in pain. I'm a doctor, Can
I help you? She looked like a doctor, you can tell,
kind of crisp and cool and efficient, like she could

(42:52):
cut you open, take out your intestines, and then go
out for lunch.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
What's so great that?

Speaker 1 (43:01):
Don't you ever just look at someone and have an
overwhelming desire to get them in the sack?

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Hy?

Speaker 1 (43:08):
She had beautiful hands. Maybe she was a surgeon. She
put her hands on my face and said, you don't
seem to have any fever. What a voice? She had,
this great musical voice. Imagine being married to someone like that.
Every time you're sick with anything, she'd know exactly what
was wrong with you. She'd look after you.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
Are you crazy? If she's a doctor, she'll be off
looking after other people.

Speaker 1 (43:31):
Nah, not her. If I was sick, she'd drop everything,
she'd sit by my bedside night and dead. Uh sure, listen,
I'm not joking around. I'm going to find her. If
I have to jog forever years from now, they'll be
find me jogging aimlessly over rocks, around trees.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Go ahead, who's stopping you? So?

Speaker 1 (43:52):
Okay, okay, at least, uh Burger's gonna get out and
get some fresh air. I guess good for him. Joel
tells him about the big plan with Leeda over Thanksgiving,
and Burger says, you know, what he's been saying is
that Lida must be madly in love with him, because

(44:15):
girls like her never just do it. They've got to
be in love. What did you do? What did you
say to convince her that you had a year to
live like? He's so manipulative he can't think of any
other reason why a lady would want to get it on.
Oh meanwhile, he is smoking a cigarette he found in

(44:35):
the hamster Cagel Griss. One thing I thought was funny.
Burger's talking about how sex makes you crazy, it makes
you totally certifiable, like with Marilyn Globerman. I swear if
she asked me to take a flying leap out the window.
I would have done it. It must fry your brains
or something, and Joel's like, I know what you mean.

(45:01):
And then the chapter ends with Burger thinking again about
maybe taking Danny out. I think he's been hemming and
haweing on this Danny thing for a while now, and
Joel's Joel's not into this because he's so close with
Lida now that he doesn't want Burger to fuck things

(45:21):
up with her best friends. And what did he say?
Hold on, he said.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Something, I know what it is. Okay, So he's like
he's asking Burger, like, hey, don't go out with her
unless you really like her, because she's really upset about
like people just liking her for her body. And they
go back and forth, and finally, finally, mister sensitive Joel says, Berg,
I mean it, will you not because Leda will be

(45:48):
really mad at me if you start something with her
and then she commits suicide or something. Yeah, that's your
priorities are in the right place.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
Yeah, And then we get a moment of levity. We
get Burger saying their day will be strictly platonic because
he's saving himself for the Lady Doctor.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
Chapter nine, they're talking about their Thanksgiving. They're introducing their
friends Manon, Lord of Darkness and Casey Nobbler. They keep
wanting to set up Casey and Manon, but it doesn't work,
and they think it's because Casey is not cool and

(46:52):
Dad is defensive of case Oh this is fucked up.
I hate this so much. Okay, let me see, let's
actually do popcorn reed. Mom claims that it's Casey's fault
that he and Manon aren't dating, and Mom says, he
just has this classic hang up about women who are

(47:14):
smarter than he is. It's so sad.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
I don't know that Manon is all that smart. She's
just driven.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
She is smart. She's driven too, but that doesn't make
her not smart anyway. Why shouldn't she be driven? How
else do women ever accomplish anything?

Speaker 1 (47:32):
You've accomplished a lot and you're not driven?

Speaker 2 (47:35):
Of course I'm driven.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
How can you say that it's quality? I feel like
Manon is always slightly like she's had eight cups of coffee.
She rattles.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
That doesn't let Casey off the hook. What hook hang
out with girls in their twenties at his age? It's
childish and after being in analysis all that time, So
this exchange is so weird. I don't I don't understand
what the difference, What kind of distinction Dad is trying

(48:09):
to make saying that mom isn't driven, Like, that's so
fucked up. I don't get it.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
He's not even saying okay. First he says, you're either
driven or you're smart. You can't be both. Maybe you
can be, but that's just seems like he's making a distinction.
But then he's not saying Mom is driven or smart.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
She's just accomplished a lot, So what mind you? In
the previous conversation, he was like, Lol, beautiful women are trouble,
that's why you got a date. Ugly ones Like wait a.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
Minute, so mom is ugly, dumb but accomplished. I mean, what,
what the hell? Yeah, these conversations don't make sense. They did,
they're not.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
I absolutely believe these are like transcriptions of real things
she heard, because I can picture people saying these. But
I can also picture freaking out people said anything like
this in front of me. Huh oh boy. And then
again we have an age gap yapp with Casey dates
younger women like okay, I can't and I don't even

(49:14):
understand quite at this point why we're hitting it home
so much, because again, are not Leita and Joel the
same age. I'm so confused about the premise here.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
Maybe it's to contrast, like their love is so pure
and everyone else's love is so tainted and age gappy.
I don't know. Okay, huh, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
Man, Well, anyway, Mom isn't feeling good and Joela is
scared that this means she's gonna be sick and cancel
the trip, so he's really worried. Another like very on
the nose like sort of plot inclusion is they don't
have turkey for Thanksgiving. They have a capon, and a

(49:58):
capeon is a mail chicken that's been castrated to improve
the quality of its flesh. So it's like really like fatty,
juicy chicken. But Joel makes like a big meal of like, well,
I would hate if somebody cast rated me. Like all right, Freud,
you got this one, I guess yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
But yet as a vegetarian, it sounds like he is
eating this capon for Thanksgiving dinner.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
I know, I know. It's so confusing. I kept waiting
for something definitive to happen, and I think he's eating chicken.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
I think he's eating chicken.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
You know, the vegetable chicken.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
Well, tuna is the chicken of the sea. Chicken is
the vegetable of the coop.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
You're so right, and you should say that they talk
about you know, hey, if you want to invite Leta
over for dessert, you totally can. And Joel's like, no,
it's freaked out because he I think he says he's
worried that his parents will put something weird in his head,

(51:08):
or like they won't like Lyda, or that they'll catch
Whise that she's gonna come over as soon as they leave.
But it does seem weird that he's like, after we
have sex, they can be Yeah. Yeah, anyway, Menon and
Casey come over for dinner. Mom and dad are gonna
leave him alone. Which this is another question. Did did

(51:30):
your parents leave you alone for like a weekend like
this ever?

Speaker 1 (51:36):
Yes, but not until I was like a senior, but
I got I mean Joel's a senior.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yes, okay, that's interesting that never happened. And how how
far apart are.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
You from your sister five and a half years?

Speaker 2 (51:53):
Oh okay, so that if you were like seventeen, where
she's like twelve.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Yeah, uh huh.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Wow, okay, and did that go? Okay? Did you get
in trouble? Did you do anything?

Speaker 1 (52:02):
I know, I didn't do anything bad. I was very
conscious of not getting caught, so like if like you know,
we love, we like to smoke, we we like to drink,
but like everything was cleaned up by the time and
got back, Like I wasn't interested in having big parties.
That's too stressful, like who wants to do that? But
I do remember, oh god, there was this guy uh

(52:27):
who yes, he you know, We've talked about this whole
thing where like I just wanted the boys to like me.
I didn't want to actually do anything with them, and
so it was like almost like he likes me too much,
like he's really trying to get with me, Like god,
now what. And then he found out that I was

(52:48):
home alone and he was like very sweetly just and
he was like he was a sweet guy. But I
was just like too nervous about like intimacy and remember
free out and then I was like, Okay, I have
to leave the house because I don't want to. He's
gonna stop by, so I have to like go out
with a friend or something and not be home. And

(53:09):
then I was like, but fuck, what am I gonna
do about Rosie? So I tried to like find a
friend's house for her to go. This is like Friday
night at like nine, I'm like calling Rosie's neighbor friend
around the corner. Can Rosie come over so I can
go to the pub to escape? Who wants to make
out with me? It was such a weird scene and
so not normal of a teenager, you know what I mean,

(53:32):
Like I feel like most people would be like come over. No, no, no,
no no.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
I completely relate, even being like one hundred percent horn dog.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
Then and now I felt like similarly of like I
didn't I almost didn't want something happen, especially didn't want
it to happen at my house.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:51):
Oh, and there's that, like, well, there's a couple of
pieces of art that corroborate this feeling. One is I
think all of like the first or second season of
Gilmour Girls is kind of like Rory hiding from Dean
in a way that I'd never seen on TV before,
And I'm like, yes, it is like that you really
want something to happen, but you're also scared because it's
never happened to you before. Yeah, and then there's a

(54:15):
line in the Taylor Swift song called so high School
and she talks about like there's a lyric that's like
I want to find you in a crowd just to
hide from you. It's like it is like that, but
he liked someone. It's like that. I used to lie
all the time about like why something couldn't happen because I.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Was just scared.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
I was so scared of like getting in trouble or
like being that close to someone or whatever I think
it was. I think that's kind of why, like big
stuff like that didn't happen until I was in college.
I needed to just get far away from everything right
to not feel like I was getting in trouble all
the time.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Yeah, I didn't care about getting in trouble, But I
think what I cared about was the gossip because I
knew that like, if something happened, the guy would go
tell his friends and everybody would know. And then like
what if, like we broke up and then everybody would know.
I just like did not. I wanted to be so
neutral on the gossip train. That I was willing to

(55:13):
forsake everything. But at the same time, I was boy
crazy and I flirted my ass off and I wanted
all the boys to like me. And I was just
known as a tease because anytime like they would make
a move, I would run away. Huh.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Yeah, it's like it's like a It's like the Joker says,
it's like it's like a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't
know what to do when I caught one.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
Huh. It's kind of like totally totally wow, wow, good
sidebars great.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Anyway, so they finally go and oh, here we go.
The last thing he does before his parents leave is
they're like, are you sure you don't want to come
with us, and he's like, oh, I would like to,
but I've got homework. And they're like, oh, that's too

(56:04):
bad because the Drusals their daughter's going to be home.
And here's how he describes our best friend Kitty Drusl.
Kitty is someone I wouldn't be interested in if I
were lying on a desert island and hadn't seen a
human face in a year. She's a total airhead. She
goes to this really snotty school where all they do
is put on makeup and try to meet boys who
have lots of money. You can't imagine how dumb she is.

(56:27):
She's the kind of girl who thinks Burt Reynolds is
really sexy. She paints her toenails gold. I won't even
go on about her because it makes me sick to
think about it. It's like, uh, she sounds like the
coolest girl in the world.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
She sounds so fun. What the fuck is wrong with you, Joel? I?

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Yeah, what does it say about a girl that she
thinks Burt Reynolds?

Speaker 1 (56:48):
I know what negative connotation there? Who are you supposed
to like?

Speaker 2 (56:53):
You know what? I wonder if this is another age
gap thing, because remember the person he has a crush on,
his Brookshields, who is like his age And so it's
okay when he has crushes on celebrities, but if girls
have crushes on older celebrities, oh suddenly it's bad and
threatening to him. Maybe or maybe it's just a.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
Dick Reynolds in nineteen eighty one.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
And see also when the playgirl thing was.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
He would have been forty five.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Yeah, buddy body, And is this in a post playgirl
spread world?

Speaker 1 (57:30):
Let's see where is that seventy.

Speaker 2 (57:33):
Two seventy two, so this is post so she's she's
seen the whole junk.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
He is so handsome.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
I did it.

Speaker 2 (57:43):
You know what too? Though. I think we will find
later in this chapter that Joel has an anti beard
and body hair bias.

Speaker 1 (57:52):
So notice keep going yeah, put that, we'll.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
Clock that away. Okay. So they have this crazy convoluted
plan that once the parents leave, they're gonna wait a
couple hours and then he's gonna call Leda to kind
of tell her that the coast is clear, and so
he goes to do that, and then he gets scared
because her mom answers and Lida is, I don't know,

(58:17):
busy having a life, so she can't answer the phone.
So Joel gets really scared, and he's like biding his
time for an hour. And here's what he does. He goes,
I was so worried about everything, so I walked around
every room in our house ten times at least. I
pretended it was something I'd been ordered to do or

(58:38):
I'd be shot. It wasn't very interesting, but I kind
of got in the hang of it. I'd pretend to
be whoever was giving the orders and say, nice work,
just over that ridge a few more times, Lieutenant, this
is what Norma does with her writing.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
Oh my god, such a good crazy catch. Whoa whoa?

Speaker 2 (58:57):
Well, I wouldn't have caught it if we hadn't have
read that primary source. That's so interesting. Well, I mean,
and it's also kind of an insight into Norma's psyche too,
of like this whole writing like you're running out of time,
and it seems like for Norma it's almost her like

(59:18):
out running her own psyche and her own demons.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
Whoa, whoa? Crazy? Yeah? Who is the proverbial shooter? Is
it father time?

Speaker 2 (59:32):
Is it her own like darkest feelings? Like when is it?
Oh man, that's so sad? Yeah, okay, okay, the lead
the lad don't delete, no, don't delete, move, don't really
move on okay anyway. Then he finally gets Leita on
the on the phone and she's coming over, so he's
still nervous, and honestly, I really related to this too.

(59:55):
I think moments like before a new lover comes over
for the first time is like the most nerve wracking
of anything. It's so like I've never cleaned my apartment more,
my heart has never raced more. I've never felt like
less comfortable. And I really think that she nailed it
with describing like I'm like so horny and so anxious

(01:00:16):
at the same time, it's like, yeah, I've spent years
feeling and so one of the things he does he
does to try and calm down is read is go
into his parents' bedroom and sneak their copy of The
Joy of Sex. Yes, and this is something he does

(01:00:37):
so much that he's memorized the spot in the bookshelf
that it goes so he can put it back in
the same place. Oh, do we do the special report? Now?
You want me? Wait to land in the chapter? I
forget what we say. That's wait, okay, okay, So I'm
gonna do a special report on the Joy of Sex.
So put a pen in that. But he's talking about
he's like looking at all the pictures and he says,

(01:00:59):
the in the picture is really ugly. I don't know
why they drew someone with a beard. He doesn't like it.
But a lot of the stuff I was reading is
commenting on the man imagery. So we'll come back to that. Okay.
I'm googling the parts that he's reading calls having sex
with supreme human experience, and it's kind of like it's

(01:01:21):
turning him on, but it's also making him scared because
there's a part where it says male sexual response is
far brisker and more automatic. It is triggered easily by
things like putting a quarter in a vending machine. So
he's like, very scared. He's so scared. He's so horny,
And at the exact right moment, like in a horror movie,

(01:01:43):
phone rings and it's his mom's friend asking if he
wants to come hang out, and he's.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
Like, no, I'm too horny.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
So actually, this is the part that I like so
deeply relate to. He goes, everything in the joy of
sex made me either insanely horny or maniacally worried. Yeah,
story in my life, baby doll.

Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
I'm looking at these illustrations now and they're making me
a little worried too.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Oh just wait till we get to the excerpts I've pulled.
Oh just wait. So Lida comes in and she makes
her like trademark like confident entrance. She looks really cute.
She's got jeans and a red jacket, and she goes here,
I am in all my glory cool. She's so cool.
I love her. She deserves so much better. They have

(01:02:37):
a wine cellar in their house, which good for them,
and Lida is worried that his dad is an alcoholic
because he has this wine cellar, and they start drinking
one of the cheaper bottles, which this made me scared too,
because like, you can't just take a bottle, I know.
Also sidebar, my brother did just get in trouble because

(01:02:57):
he was house sitting at my mom's house and he
drank an expensive follow line and part of me was like,
that's such a brother thing to do.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
Yeah, that's so funny. Did he know it was expensive
or just helped himself? Yeah, I hope it was good.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
Yeah, Hey, I'm sure it was. I'm sure it was.
Lyda brought a dress that she wants to wear. They're
lighting candlesticks. It's so cute. Lida comes out in this
dress and there's a description of it. It says Lyda
was wearing this stress, the kind you wear to a dance.
It was pink, the kind of soft material with a

(01:03:35):
neckline that came down so you could see the tops
of her breast. She had a pearl necklace on and
she was wearing some kind of terrific perfume.

Speaker 1 (01:03:43):
It's so sweet, so sweet.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
You know what I picture the stress to look like.
Have you ever seen the movie My Date with the
President's Daughter?

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
No, I have not.

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
Okay, it's a Disney Channel original movie.

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
Hold on, I'm looking it up.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Date with the President's Daughter. Pink dress.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
Yeah, oh, like a little like satiny, velvety slip dress.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
It's so cute that it's very cute with pearl necklace.
You look wonderful.

Speaker 1 (01:04:14):
Do you like pink? Danny thinks it's too conventional, you know,
but I think I look good in pink.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
You look good in everything.

Speaker 1 (01:04:23):
They kiss you, taste of wine, you too. It's funny.
I don't feel all that nervous anymore. Last night I
couldn't sleep till around three. I kept worrying about all
the things that could go wrong. I know, I think
it's good that we both never did it before, don't you.
I mean, it's like we're starting at the same place.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
What about that actor Ramone?

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
What about him? Well, you said you're almost no. We
see he had done it a ton of times, he'd
been married and everything. He was still married, which is
what got Daddy's so excited, even though he was separated
and hadn't even seen his wife for a whole year,
but he never got his divorce papers.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
So how close did you come to doing it?

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
Well, we went to his place one night and we
took our clothes off, but it didn't work. It didn't work.
He like, couldn't get it in. I don't know what
do you mean? See, I think he had all these
fears based on my being a virgin and Daddy's owning
the theater. He said I was too young, and he

(01:05:33):
wanted to do it with someone who could teach him.
Maybe I didn't want to that much. It was more
like he was handsome and such a good actor. It'll
be different with that, s Joel, because we love each other.
Don't worry.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
Oh, no, worried. But he is a little worried. And
they go out on this beautiful balcony. They have a
view of Central Park. And then Joel's big move is
he brings her into Knox's room, oh ugh, which he
says is like that. He says, a guest room, so
it's always really clean. But he said, also, maybe I

(01:06:12):
was thinking of all the girls Knocks had scored with
all the action that Bet had seen, as if it
were as opposed to mine, where I've jerked off a
million times, like, oh god, I hate boys. It's horrible.

Speaker 1 (01:06:25):
I get I'd rather have the sex Vibes room than
the like krusty sock room, but.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
Sure I would be so weirded out when the reveal happened,
and she is.

Speaker 1 (01:06:41):
And he also lies about the lasagna.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
Oh yeah, he claims to have made the lassgnya.

Speaker 1 (01:06:47):
It's lying by omission in so many ways.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
Joel, we see you, we see you. Okay, So this
is really sweet, but like they're starting to undress. He's
in doing her buttons. Oh god. She sees that the
sheets are like really beautiful and flowered, and she's like,
you put those down for me and he's.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
Like, oh no you didn't, No you didn't, No you didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
So they're naked, and he talks about her pubic hair,
but he says it's nice, which is cool.

Speaker 1 (01:07:24):
He seems surprised at her pubes were darker than her hair.
It's like, have you not seen your own pubes? Like
don't you know that? That's how it works?

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
I think if I think with boys, that's not always
the case because if well, I mean not to out myself,
but I feel like if if sometimes when boys have
dark head hair, it's like the same deal.

Speaker 1 (01:07:42):
But what about a blond boy, Well, he's never.

Speaker 2 (01:07:45):
Seen the pubes of the blood. I guess, sorry, not
everybody else, And I guess the guy enjoy of sex
has dark hair, So okay, whites, Joel's outing himself as
having no blonde friends.

Speaker 1 (01:08:05):
I guess, yeah. Oh, I'm just like, it's the early eighties.
Weren't boys just all changing in front of each other
in the dressing room?

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
But oh wow, well men weren't allowed to be blonde
in the eighties, right, So right, you never seen that before.
But I actually, I genuinely think that's a good thing
to put in this YA book, because it's like, oh,
a lot of people probably don't know that, so it's
good to it's good to explain.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
That, hey, reader, you are normal.

Speaker 2 (01:08:32):
This part, however, I think, is irresponsible to write this
way because they're describing for play and he says, I
even put my hand inside of her. Now when I
read that, I'm that to me if I'd never had

(01:08:54):
sex before and I had no idea what any of
this is I would think he is going full Jim
Hensch and Creature Shop and like putting a hand inside
of her. Yeah, that's not what she means to describe.
I know it's not what she means to describe.

Speaker 1 (01:09:10):
I know he's not fisting.

Speaker 2 (01:09:13):
He's not he's like fingering her. Sorry, Atiya, but if
you made this far, like sorry, yeah so, but I
think it's irresponsible of Norma to write it he puts
his hand in her, because if I'm a teen reading this,
I'd be so confused.

Speaker 1 (01:09:29):
Lead to a lot of visits to the er. Like
I read about it in Norma.

Speaker 2 (01:09:34):
Crime my brother. Uh so, he's like really excited and
really crazy, and I was surprised with all this lead up.
This is how it's described them having penetrative sex. It
goes okay, So I did a classic thing. I absolutely

(01:09:58):
couldn't help it. I entered her and it felt so
just the idea that we were really doing it, plus
the feeling just everything that I came. There's no way
on earth I could have held off. And when I finished,
I lay there on top of her, embarrass but it
just felt like maybe I feel like in Forever we
got more of a description of that, but maybe it
is like very descriptive of the actual experience, which is

(01:10:23):
like it's actually not romance novel. It's not meant to
be romance novel. It's meant to be like nope, this
is how this is how it is sometimes.

Speaker 1 (01:10:30):
Okay, So I do remember in Forever their first time
like it wasn't that great, and then it was the
second time where it was like yeah, and we're getting
like full like paragraph.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Okay, all right, I believe it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:45):
But I'm an optimist, so we'll see.

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
Okay, me too, I'm back on I'm back on the track.
So after that happens. Now this is interesting. Who knows
if this is true or not. But Leita claims that
she came already hmm prior to this, and I feel

(01:11:08):
like what I know about Joel, I highly doubt that
that's true.

Speaker 1 (01:11:11):
M hm.

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):
But whatever, women women can come, like I'm not disbelieving that.
I'm just saying, like, oh, that he would have been
as attentive.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
So quickly, and you know, maybe she's like, you know,
she knows what she's doing, but like we've talked about before,
she is a bit of a people pleaser, and so
I'm wondering if she is telling this story to make
him feel less bad about coming so soon.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
But but it does seem like They go on to
say Joel asks her if she likes it, and this
thing says they say, you shouldn't ask that. I wonder
who was giving him the guidance that, like, oh, you
never asked someone if they liked sex, like that the
whole deal.

Speaker 1 (01:11:59):
You know, No, it's burgerl.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Probably, but she says, and again this is another line
where I'm like, does she really feel this way or
is she people pleasing? It's like it was great. I
hope I won't be a nymphomania, which adorable. I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):
It's pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
And I don't mean, if you're listening, I'm not questioning
Leita just because she's a woman. I'm questioning it because
she's not the narrating character, so I don't know what's
in her mind. So if she was narrating and she
said it, I would trust her to be a reliable narrator,
the same way I'm trusting Joel to be the kind
of narrator he is. But I just don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
Yeah, I get it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
Uh, this shows that Joel has his dad's penchant for
saying the wrong thing to women. It's like she's like,
was it hard to get in? Ramone said I was
tight or something, and Joel goes, oh, not at all,
Like oh buddy, oh hon no, that's not what a

(01:12:58):
lady likes to hear. I know what he means, but
that's not what you should be telling me.

Speaker 1 (01:13:04):
Like you're like a wide open freeway.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
Nah man, I was like throwing a hot dog down
a hallway. Okay, let's read this part, so I'm gonna
read Joel at the end of eighty six. Lee, listen,
there's one thing. This isn't my room.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):
Whose is it?

Speaker 2 (01:13:24):
My brothers?

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
How come you wanted to do it in here?

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
I thought he'd bring me luck.

Speaker 1 (01:13:33):
I don't want you to be like your brother.

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
I'm not, don't worry.

Speaker 1 (01:13:38):
I hate it when guys are just interested in scoring
just to tell their friends or something. Will you promise
not to tell Burger?

Speaker 2 (01:13:45):
Aren't you going to tell Danny?

Speaker 1 (01:13:47):
That's different. I won't tell her to boast or anything,
just because she's like my best friend.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
Burger's my best friend.

Speaker 1 (01:13:54):
But it's different with boys, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
Not that differently, But I won't tell him if you
don't want me to.

Speaker 1 (01:14:01):
Should we wear her damas or a nightgown?

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
I don't have a nightgown.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
Well I don't feel especially cold.

Speaker 2 (01:14:07):
Do you not at all? Should we get into our pj's.

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):
Like the fact that she probably brought like her little
like I know kid, and oh.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
I so relate to this.

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
She's so ready to like move in and be wifey too,
you know, like well.

Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
You know, she agonized over which pj's to bring because
she didn't bring her like comfy PJ. She brought her
cute PJS. Oh, I love Leita.

Speaker 1 (01:14:38):
They might even be brand new pj's.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
Oh my god, breaking out your sex PJ. Yeah, I
feel like as a single woman and god knows, I
haven't had to rip these out in a while, but
I feel like I do have like show pgs. I'm like,
oh this, Oh, I wear this all the time show pj's.

Speaker 1 (01:14:58):
Oh that's fine, And you gotta have your show PJS.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
You gotta have your show PJS. Okay, well, now it's

(01:15:21):
time for my special report on the joy of sex. Now,
was this a book that was in your house?

Speaker 1 (01:15:29):
No? Hell no, me neither.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
And I almost asked my mom about it, but I'm like,
I don't want to know.

Speaker 1 (01:15:34):
Yeah, yeah, you made it this far.

Speaker 2 (01:15:37):
And also I was such a snooper, like I read
every single magazine that came into my house, every single
book that came into my house. I feel like if
we had it, I would have found it. So we didn't.
This is not a title I grew up with, but
let me tell everybody about it. So The Joy of
Sex was a book published in nineteen seventy two and

(01:15:59):
it was written by this British author named Alex Comfort,
which is a crazy name. Alex Comfort is a scientist, physician,
writer and poet and activist, and so he wrote The
Joy of Sex in nineteen seventy two and the title
is the Joy of Sex, but the subtitle is a
Gourmet Guide to love Making, And it was meant. The

(01:16:24):
structure of this book was kind of meant to be
almost a parody of the Joy of Cooking, in that
there's title, there's section titles that are like starters and
main courses, so like the starter section is all four
play and the main courses is all like penetrative stuff.

(01:16:46):
So it's a whole thing is like a play on
the Joy of cooking, which kind of grows but kind
of like, oh, is that why dad bought this book accidentally?
But it was a huge bestseller. It was like spent
eleven weeks on the bestseller list. It's sold millions and
gazillions of copies. It's especially known for its illustrations, and

(01:17:09):
its illustrations were done by Chris Foss and Charles Raymond,
and they had to intermix those kinds of drawings with
sort of drawings from ancient texts like the Kamasutra and
other like Japanese erotica. And that was sort of a
way to sidestep getting involved in an obscenity lawsuit, which

(01:17:33):
says you can't like distribute purient things for purient interest,
so like things like pornography, it has to have like
cultural or artistic bart. So by mixing these illustrations with
these older pieces of art, you can say like, oh,
we're not just doing this to make this a jerk
off book. It's actually important to the culture.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:17:55):
But something that's really interesting is Chris Foss, who's one
of the illustrators. The way he got these pictures is
he would take pictures of Charles Raymond boinking his wife,
not Chris Voss's wife, Charles Raymond's wife, so he would
just come over watch them boink, and then they would

(01:18:15):
both go and draw the pictures of it. That's crazy.
And Charles Raymond's wife, I'm glad you asked. Her name
is Edel trod wait first name, first name, Edel Trode
Charles and Edel Trod Raymond boinking, Chris Foss is watching

(01:18:36):
and drawing, and Alex Comfort wrote the whole thing. Wowie wowie, wowie,
wowie wowie. Oh and I know you thought, Alex Comfort,
I bet there's nothing salacious about him. You'd be wrong.
When when The Joy of Sex came out, Alex Comfort
was like, oh, yeah, this is stuff that is based

(01:18:58):
on my sex life of me and my wife of
thirty years. But very soon after the book came out,
they divorced, and what happens a few months later, Comfort
confesses to have been having an affair this whole time
with his wife's best friend, who he then married. It

(01:19:21):
gets gurely and don't worry, the sleasia stuff didn't stop
because after that they moved to a nudist colony in
the Bay Area.

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
Oh that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
Yeah, yeah, So about this book, it's meant to be
sort of a guide to like sex education, but also
to deepening your sexual relationship with your partner. And you know,
it is not a perfect book by any means, but
it is kind of marked for having these illustrations that
really show clearly how to do certain sex acts. It's,

(01:19:57):
you know, one of the texts that first talks about
sort of the glitterists and how important that is to
a female orgasm. Though he does kind of focus on
He's like, mostly people are having vaginal orgasms, which like
ha okay, and he his emphasis in this book is

(01:20:18):
kind of like, oh, yeah, everybody comes at the same time.
That's how it works, all right, okay, But it is
like people who talk about this book do tend to
talk about like these illustrations because, like Joel says, it
is a man with a beard and everybody's got full bushes.
Because it's the seventies. What did you think about the

(01:20:39):
illustrations when you saw them.

Speaker 1 (01:20:41):
I'm still looking at the there's I'm fascinated.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
It's so tough to put these on Instagram. I'm to
try to figure out how to do it without getting banned.

Speaker 1 (01:20:52):
So I'm having trouble though parsing because there's a lot
of like knockoffs and like spinoffs from like other like
dev and art and stuff. Like everyone's just trying to
like draw their own version. So I'm trying to find
the originals. But like they're so explicit, And I thought
I always knew about the joy of sex and like,
oh that like parents had it in their bedroom, but

(01:21:12):
I so, I guess I assumed it was much more
like clinical, like almost kind of like whew. But these
are very titillating.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
They are. And I don't think the man with the
beard is ugly, no, no, it just like looks like
a guy in the seventies, though I do love men
with beards.

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):
And this doesn't particular seventies haircut, big fan like helmet totally.

Speaker 2 (01:21:33):
These would shock the hell out of me. Though if
I was a child or.

Speaker 1 (01:21:36):
Teen, I would never be able to look my parents
in the eye. Like if I found this, I would
move out. I would not be able to handle living
in the same.

Speaker 2 (01:21:45):
Room, nor would I it. You know, it is not
perfect by any means. There's some really fat phobic shit,
he says at one point, fatness in our culture is unlovely.
We all know someone who's pretty fat daughter can only
get Middle Eastern boyfriends because of this? It's like, whoa fat?
Phobic and racist in the same sentence, What the hell?

(01:22:05):
Howie wowie? He does say like things that are shitty
in addition to all of like the good stuff about
like you should have sex and it should be nice.
He also is like pretty pro abortion, which is cool.
But I'm going to read you some some quotes that
I found around that are just crazy. Okay, buckle up, Okay.

(01:22:31):
The marketers of intimate deodorants and flavored vaginal douches show
evidence only of sexual experience. Nobody wants peach sauce on
say scampy?

Speaker 1 (01:22:43):
Oh wait, which, what's the scampy? Is that?

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
Lady? I think? Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:22:52):
Okay, got it?

Speaker 2 (01:22:56):
He says, hide and seek with the woman's pubic trying
is one of the oldest human games. I know what
he means now that I read this, but when I
first read this, But don't worry, he has other games
you could play.

Speaker 1 (01:23:11):
Hey, I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:23:12):
Hold on, so think about he I believe he's talking
about like you're a woman's puov when someone is doing
oral sex on you, like them dipping below your view line.
I think is what he's saying. Sorry, idea. Uh and

(01:23:33):
then but don't worry again. He has other games to play,
he says. Oh, brother, he says, long hair or braids
can be rolled into a vagina, or the penis can
be lassoed with a loop of hair, though some women
may object because it's a bore to wash. No, just

(01:23:58):
please don't please don't put braids in anyone's vagina. Please.
All these like weird ass seventies men were like, hey,
Bob bro come here, I've got something to show you.
His last uh, his last sex tip is Oh, this

(01:24:18):
is so funny. This is so true, and this is
like Joel needed to hear this. It says the only
really disturbing manifestation of love music is when a woman
laughs uncontrollably. Some dude, don't be uptight about this? So true.

Speaker 1 (01:24:34):
I you know, I do like that last one.

Speaker 2 (01:24:37):
Sometimes you have to laugh. You have to laugh.

Speaker 1 (01:24:40):
What are you gonna do after you fart?

Speaker 2 (01:24:42):
Come on? Or if you don't actually fart. Sometimes when
you're like chest touch into together, they make a fart.

Speaker 1 (01:24:49):
Oh yeah, that's my favorite.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
Oh so funny that and that is I think that
is something that literature should convey more often. Is like,
sex is so so funny, like it just like and
I think that's a sign of intimacy. Is like when
you can laugh about something like that and nobody gets scared.

Speaker 1 (01:25:08):
Totally.

Speaker 2 (01:25:09):
Yeah, don't worry. There have been many versions of the
Joy of Sex. It's been updated over the years. They
have The Joy of Sex, a Gourmet Guide, More Joy
of Sex, The Love Making Companion to the Joy of Sex,
The Joy of Sex, A Gourmet Guide to love Making,
which was revised in nineteen eighty six to include aids yikes,

(01:25:33):
and then all these other different versions of it updated
the last the most recent one was updated in two
thousand and eight. There was a Joy of Sex movie
a year after Beginner's Love was published.

Speaker 1 (01:25:45):
I just saw that. Interesting. Oh, there's a there's a
Joy of Gay Sex and the Joy of Lesbian Sex.
The typography on this one is crazy, and I thought
it was saying the Joy of le Sabian sex.

Speaker 2 (01:26:03):
Well, they definitely didn't. He wasn't in charge of that one.

Speaker 1 (01:26:09):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:26:09):
And then then nineteen ninety three there was a video
game adaptation of the book.

Speaker 1 (01:26:14):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:26:14):
It was possibly the first of only twenty three video
games to have received an adult only rating, so.

Speaker 1 (01:26:21):
Well, I played a lot of pleasure. I wonder if
it was similar.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
I wonder this is a pre Grand Theft Auto World,
so whoahs. But that's my special report on the Joy
of Sex and now I really want to get an
old copy same. So I'm going to be on the
lookout for every yard sale and thrift store because I
bet I keep seeing it on eBay for like thirty
bucks and that's too much. I bet I can find

(01:26:47):
it at a yardstale.

Speaker 1 (01:26:48):
Er thrift store. Yeah, I want a dogg eard really ill.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
The pages are stuck together.

Speaker 1 (01:26:55):
Yeah, buddy, that was so good. Thank you, Molly. It's
surprising how little I knew about the Joy of Sex
considering this podcast for nine years. Well, it's been such
a good episode. Is there anything else we need to say?

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
Nope, nothing else for me.

Speaker 1 (01:27:15):
Okay, Well we'll see you guys in two weeks. Y'all
remember to send us emails, messages, dms ims everything we
want to hear about your age gaps, you want to
hear about your discoveries of joy of sex in your
parent's bookshelves, and anything else you have to offer.

Speaker 2 (01:27:37):
Please please, please, please, thank you all right Bye ye