Episode 16: Transcript

"Writing is usually a terrible moment of joy." - with Wendi Aarons

Magda Pecsenye: Oh, my God, the weed whacker noise. I feel like Erma Bombeck. You know what I mean? Like, everything she did was about this conflict of being an essential human versus being a mom in the suburbs. Like, everything I do now, it's the conflict between being an essential human and being a stepmom in the suburbs.

Doug French: That is the lead in to talk about Wendi Aarons right there because she has been described as a modern-day Erma Bombeck. And a modern-day Phyllis Diller, which I don't get as much.

Magda: Yeah, I don't get that either. I definitely get the Erma Bombeck thing because she really has this knack for describing sort of the perils of the mom lifestyle in the suburbs. Like, wow. You know, I mean, I'm reading the stuff and I'm thinking, “I never went through that.” And then I was like, oh, wait, because I lived in cities my entire momming career, right? I lived in New York City, I lived in Detroit. Some of the stuff that she went through…

Doug: So you and I will also have a diametric difference between how we describe cities. Because I grew up in the suburbs of New York. My neighborhood in New Jersey looked every bit like your neighborhood in Toledo. But you associate Toledo with a city.

Magda: Yeah, most cities in the world have housing that includes yards.

Doug: Right.

Magda: And you don't see that if you're just in Manhattan.

Doug: I mean, you have to go farther out. I mean, we saw some yards in Inwood. There's plenty of them out in the outer boroughs.

Magda: Right.

Doug: I just never saw them as a kid. I really enjoyed reading her stuff just because she also has two sons. And I had this abiding desire to like write a two-handed something with her about the care and feeding of young boys just because raising boys now seems so very different than it did in the previous generation in terms of how masculinity is being completely redefined. And there's a whole division now between the alpha males who are like “wear a watch, treat your woman like a subservient mistress” type.

Magda: The “wear a watch” part of the whole toxic male culture thing to me is completely random, right? It's like, did Timex somehow get in there?

Doug: It's gotta be yeah, they're working overtime to try and associate their timepieces with dudes who have to build up their own masculinity with bling.

Magda: Yeah, it's very interesting to me to see, like, after all the fights that have existed about feminism for years and years and years, that now there's the same fight happening about raising boys and that fighting toxic masculinity has somehow flipped things around.

It's all very interesting and weird. And I'm not... 

Doug: Well, that's progress, right? I mean, if you're going to apply pressure, you're going to cause some seismic shift.

Magda: Well, yeah, but I do think that there are a lot of people, a lot of men and a lot of boys, who kind of don't know where the horizon is and it's the combination of that, plus all of our guns, is a big issue.

Doug: Well, we saw that firsthand I mean Robert would come home from school and just talk about all the other boys at his all-boys school and how many of them were like “look at the car I drive and look how fast I can drive it,” “look how many girls I've had sex with.” It was all very performative masculinity that they were being taught.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And thank God, Robert had so little use for it.

Magda: I know I worked hard to find him male role models that were not that, that were really, really varied. And I am assuming you did, too, knowing who your friends were that you brought around the kids. But I mean, part of the reason I went to the quote unquote “gay church” when we lived in New York City, right? It was filled with Broadway performers and costume designers and artists and musicians, just a shitton of gay men. Lutherans have always been very progressive, and they were having gay pastors before it was officially okayed by the denomination.  Almost every Lutheran pastor I know was doing gay marriages. Many Lutheran churches were safe places for gay people, but we were also, this was a church that was on 54th and Lex. It was just close to Broadway and musical tradition, right? Like the Lutherans, like Beethoven, Bach, we were singing serious music. And so they could come and join the choir and participate that way and like not have to feel bad about it, right?

Doug: We're so off topic by the way, we're talking about Wendy.

Magda: Yeah, I know. Maybe you can stick this in.

Doug: I mean, we could make the segue point that she's from North Dakota, which is very familiar with the Lutheran tradition. And I think she definitely brings her Norwegian sensibilities and her North Dakotan sensibilities. I mean, she went to school in Oregon and then worked in LA for a while and now is in Austin. And I think when you look at LA and Austin in terms of places of artificial trappings, she never bought into any of that. I think that's part of her sensibility as a really down-to-earth person. And I think part of her humor is a way of participating in that, but in a much more removed way so she can see the humor in it.

Magda: Well, I also think she got to Austin right when things were changing. Like I think if she had moved to Austin 10 years earlier, she was 10 years older and had... 

Doug: When you Jabba the Hutt me like that. Ever since you did that, now you're Jiminy Glick.

Magda: Okay, did you read that Slate hit piece on Martin Short?

Doug: Yeah, I know the guy who wrote it.

Magda: Oh, my God, it’s such trash. Like, who the hell cares? Why would you write something like that? Literally, like he should have written something that was like, “I hate peanut butter. Oh, my God, it's horrible. It sticks in your teeth.” Like, who the hell cares?

Doug: Well, the shape of media. It's like, let's ax some sacred cows.

Magda: What is wrong with somebody who would write that?

Doug: No, Dan Foist is a nice guy. He came and spoke at Dad 2.0. He's got a bitter streak to him, but he also had this great memoir. He took his kids out of school and spent a year living around the world with his kids and wrote a memoir about that, and it's amazing.

Magda: Well, I'm never going to read it because he wrote this truly moronic, vitriolic piece about somebody that it's like, either you like Martin Short or you don't. Who cares? Why are you so cranked up about it?

Doug: Oh, dear. Yeah, well, it's clear that it was an editorial strategy piece to get the attention that it got. So there you go. “Oh, wow. Is Slate still in operation? Wow. Ok.”

Magda: Exactly. Well, but I mean, okay, that's great.

Doug: Wait, is Slate still running?

Magda: Because even people who don't think Martin Short is funny, still appreciate that Martin Short exists.

Doug: One of the best parts about this whole thing? You know what Martin Short’s middle name is?

Magda: What.

Doug: Hater.

Magda: Ok. That’s pretty funny.

Doug: So, it’s like, you know, Martin Short can handle haters, because Hater is his middle name.

Magda: Martin Short is making a shitton of money, and he’s on one of the funniest shows that’s streaming right now.

Doug: He’s got the best life in the world. The man has got friends, he’s got a career, he’s got, I mean, he’s a god.

Magda: He and Steve Martin got together and were like, “Hey, let’s do a show. We can play any characters that we want to.”

Doug: He’s 73 and has a full head of hair. I mean, c’mon.

Intro music crossfades in, plays for twenty seconds, then crossfades out.

Doug: Magda, your windows are open, right?

Magda: Yeah. Do you want me to put on my headphones? Do you want me to close the windows? What do you want me to do? Are you hearing these birds?

Doug: Well, I'm hearing a lot of bird song. Yes. Since she moved there, she's in this office that is a closed in former screen porch. And so there's clabbered siding inside her office that makes me think she's out in the backyard somewhere.

Magda: This used to be the patio of the house. So like you can see up there is the window that went into the kitchen and there's like a sliding door and I have all these windows.

Wendi Aarons: I'm just impressed you can be like close to the outdoors because I'm still avoiding it in Texas with our weather. We're all very excited because we're only in the double digits. We're 99 and 98 now.

Maagda: Oh my God.

Doug: I see that on Karen Walrond's Stories. Every once in a while she'll just post, you know, it's going to be 110 for the next 18 days and she's about to lose it a bit. Even with her Caribbean sensibility, she thinks it's just like, wow.

Wendi: Yeah, exactly. So imagine my Norwegian sensibilities.

Magda: Yes.

Wendi: Is this like where we've hit the age where we have big discussions about the weather or is this also because of climate change that we have big discussions of the weather?

Doug: I think a little of both. I mean, this is how every conversation with my parents starts. As a Norwegian from North Dakota, living in Texas now, I imagine, could you have predicted that was where you would end up as a mother of adult children when you were growing up in the tundra?

Wendi: No, no, no, no. We've been here since ‘99. And, you know, you've both been to Austin. I'm sure you have, Magda. I know you have, Doug.

wonderful and cheap and weird and easy. And it's only been in the last five or six years that the country's turned, but also Texas has really turned politically and Austin's have this exponential growth and it's getting too expensive to live here. I couldn't foresee that. I could foresee the North Dakota to like what Austin used to be, I guess.

Doug: See, what is it like to be an Austinite now? Given the political climate, given the fact that it's been gerrymandered into virtual irrelevance, that politics have changed, they're affecting women's health care rather alarmingly. You got a radio host as your lieutenant governor.

I mean, do you see a long-term future there? I mean, are you making plans to, you know, get closer to your parents or your husband's parents?

Or what's the story?

Wendi: I would like to leave because both the kids are out of the house, kind of. I mean, they're still coming back. But my husband had a late-age career change and he's a full time teacher at University of Texas and loves it. It's the best thing he's done in his professional career, so he's not so eager to leave. I'm the one that's like, look at this teaching position in Europe. Look at this one. And, but the other thing is Austin has this weird thing where people bought their houses when the interest rates were

pretty good. We did, like we have a 3% interest rate, I think. So if we wanted to move, it'd be like not as easy as maybe even 10 years ago. And then more to your point with the question, I've always had my core group of activists and concerned friends in Austin, many of whom you know. And I think we're all exhausted, but we are probably getting ready to rally again once the election season comes up again. But all of us just campaigned for Beto so hard, especially the first time against Ted Cruz.

We were knocking on doors and going to rallies and doing fundraisers and all of that. And it felt good to be so active. And then just, you know, it's heartbreaking. Once again, they win and it's no longer like a guarantee that it was a fair and square win, which I don't like. And I think the country's like this a little bit too. Texas used to be so great. You would go to the grocery store and just get in a conversation with anybody. And I was much more open and friendly than I had been in the past. And now that's gone away again, where you'll go to the store and somebody's wearing a t-shirt you don't like, or they have a bumper sticker that's offensive to you. It just feels more insular. I've noticed I stick to my own guns a lot. I don't try to make connections with as many people as I did before.

Doug: Well, it's Texas, so I guess everyone sticks to their own guns.

Wendi: I know, as soon as I said that, I'm like... 

Doug: Low-hanging fruit, I apologize.

Magda: Yeah. I completely get that. I feel like, I moved into the city of Detroit in 2017. I bought my house, and I remember a lot of people after the 2016 election just feeling scared to go out of the house. They had felt safe, and then to discover that their neighbors were not who they thought they were. I moved into a city that voted, I think it was like 94% for the Democrat in 2016 and like 95% for the Democrat in 2020, something like that. And New York Times put out some sort of, it was like one of their info-motion things where you could look at your neighborhood, your zip code and your neighborhood, and find out how many people in your area had voted for what. And I looked at my neighborhood and it was 4,000 houses they looked at. And, you know, not all of them voted, right? But it was 4,000 houses in this neighborhood and there had been 16 votes for Donald Trump in 2016. 

Doug: 16 in 16. Good campaign slogan.

Magda: My grocery stores all draw from my part of Detroit, but also from the suburbs above them. But those suburbs are completely, you know, like the two suburbs above that were also like, you know, 88% voting for the Democrat in those elections. The only time I ever have to go any place in my life–before I moved here to Massachusetts, which feels very conservative to me, which the Massachusans I talked to find bizarre, but it feels very conservative to me here–the only time I ever have to go any place that's below 70% Democrat is when I want to go to the really good, the big Lowe's that is also right next to the good Vietnamese restaurant.

And so when I'm up there, but the rest of the time I'm just in my super-safe bubble. And, you know, I feel safer at the grocery store in Detroit than I would if I lived someplace else.

Doug: That's the nature of the politics here. I mean, you know, Big Gretch is doing everything to bring people back to Michigan because we were still losing population to Texas. You know, Michigan lost an electoral vote and Texas got two. And she's trying to make this a place, the opposite of Texas in many ways, just in terms of political stuff.

Magda: Yeah. One of my best friends lives in Texas and has a trans kid and is terrified and has been extremely politically active. And she's somebody who was raised to be a good girl and be sweet. And she has not been sweet for the last, I don't know, 10 years, even before her kid came out as trans. She was very activist and she's just exhausted. And I keep saying, you know, come up north, like, it's not the worst thing.

Wendi: Well, a very prominent Austin writer, Owen Edgerton, who was just beloved in the Austin writing community and grew up here, he and his family just moved to Boston because they have a trans child. Because they just felt it wasn't safe for him here anymore.

Magda: Yeah, one of my other friends just moved up to this part of Massachusetts outside of Boston because they have a trans kid. And they moved from Miami and they had lived in Miami for 20 years and loved it. And they could not find a single school, public, private, anything, that was safe for their kid. So people ask them why they move up here and they say they're political refugees.

Wendi: Yeah, Florida and Texas are terrifying. And I saying it as a white woman, and I can go pretty much anywhere, but, God, it’s just heartbreaking.

Doug: Being where you are in this tiny blue pinhole in this red sea, I've noticed you have a lot more stuff published. I mean, you wrote 200 books this year, a lot more stuff in The New Yorker and McSweeney's.

And I imagine part of that is because you're not a full-time mom anymore, but do you find that this frustration, this fear, does that press your humor forward a bit? Do you feel more compelled to write because of your situation or is it just because you have a bit more time?

Wendi: I don't have that much more time. I actually had a part-time job for the last five years. I do social media for a domestic violence organization. My mind all day is flipping between that and then like, oh, let me write this funny thing about Love Is Blind. And so I think the humor, there's a couple of reasons why I've been so much more prolific, but it's that I've been collaborating a lot with people because to me, that's just the way I've been social lately. And I've found a couple of women that I really like working with and so I'll just have some thought that will pop in my head and it's so easy just to text and say, “Is this anything?”

And then they'll say, yeah, I'll start a Google doc and I'll come back my way. So to me that's kind of like a game. It's like back and forth and it's more fun and I'm not just sitting there worrying about getting back to this project that I started.

Wendi: But yeah, it's also a release. It's an outlet to take out my, not my frustrations, but just, you know, it's a moment of joy. You're both writers, so you know when you're in the thick of it and it's going well and it's just, you lose track of time because it's just fun. Not every day.

Doug: Writing's usually terrible, but I think I do that.

Magda: It really is.

Doug: Yeah, I have a couple things right now I need to get started on.

Wendi: That beginning of the project part, I hate so much. But yeah, and I say in my book, I'm Wearing Tunics Now, that I started writing humor to help me make sense of the world or to say things I couldn't say in real life. And the example I like to give is when the Me Too movement really took off on Twitter a few years ago. And it made me reflect on my time in Hollywood and all the opportunities I maybe didn't get. And I never had anything terrible happen to me, let me just say that. But it really made me wonder. What we ultimately wrote was a list for McSweeney's called “Things to Do at Work Besides Show Your Penis to Coworkers.” And it was still one of my favorite things I've ever written. I think it was the number one most read piece on McSweeney's that year because it came at the problem in a humorous way, still making some salient points within the humor.

Doug: It's the rubber sword thing. Humor is a rubber sword and you can make a point without drawing blood. Anytime somebody can laugh,

Magda: I want to thank you first of all.

Doug: Well, there's a delay or something.

Magda: I don't know. I'm starting to talk and you're launching in on me.

Doug: I'm starting to talk and you're launching in on me.

Magda: How about you hold back with your penis for a second? Because I had a comment directly about that.

Doug: Oh, it's like that? Is that what this is going to be like now? I'm going to get ganged up on? Wow. Thanks for acknowledging that I have one. My God.

Magda: All right. So Wendi, I think it's really not coincidental that you went at the whole thing from the angle of “what to do besides pulling your penis out for your coworkers at work.” A friend of mine, Angela Vasquez-Giroux, who is a communications genius, created an ad for Dana Nessel, who was running for Attorney General of Michigan at the time. And she created this campaign ad based on, you know, all these politicians, these male politicians, who had just been harassing staffers and campaigners and all this stuff for years. And she put it out on the internet and everybody freaked out, because it’s Dana Nessel, and I think she was even wearing a twin set, like all prim and proper, and she said, “If you want to have an Attorney General in office who isn’t going to pull his penis out in front of his staffers, vote for the Attorney General who doesn't have a penis to pull out for his staffers.” And people were just like, “Whoa.” Because it was so funny. And she did the whole thing really deadpan. And she ended up winning. And she I believe was our first lesbian Attorney General in Michigan and she kissed her wife on stage during her acceptance speech and all the stuff and it was just fantastic. But I think you're right that humor was the only way to attack it because that kind of disgusting harassment has been so normal for so long.

Wendi: So normal and women get accused of being strident, which is when they're fighting back about something. So yeah, it's disarming to make light of it.

Magda: I also think it has forced women to have to be non-sexual because almost every woman I know really loves joking around about sex. In theory, it should be possible to be joking around about sex with your friends in a semi-work context. But it's not because there's always that threat. There's the threat of the sexual violence there. Right? So why do WE have to not be funny because YOU don't know what's appropriate?

Doug: Remember that video from Amy Schumer? Our last fuckable day?

Wendi: Yeah, brilliant.

Doug: Brilliant. Yeah, it was Patricia Arquette and Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. And I think it came out right around 2016 and in that respect it may have been before its time I guess but it made a real mark.

Do you think because of what's happening now do you think there's more of a market for your work and do you feel more inspired to contribute to it based upon that kind of momentum?

Wendi: Since I first started contributing to McSweeney's in 2008 I think there's been just this huge surge of mostly women satire writers and humor writers which is fantastic. McSweeney's used to post I think three pieces a week and now it's about three pieces a day because there's so much of this work out there. So I think maybe I got a little bit more attention before, like all of us from the blogging days, you know, we're the first ones out there doing this sort of thing, so we got maybe more attention and now everybody else has caught up. So that said, what I've written about being middle aged and, you know, my tunic book, that's been well received by the intended audience. So, that said, I think people weren’t writing about parenthood until all of us jumped in and started writing blogs. I mean, they were, but not in the same way. And I think that’s What I’m trying to do with getting older and middle-aged. And the empty nest. I really want to write something about being an empty nester. But, I haven’t found anything funny about it, per se. Gosh, it's tough and I need to, I will, I need to just find that avenue. Like I'm going to be looking around and there's going to be a direction I can take or an angle I can take to it. But right now it's, yeah, that's a tough one. So I'm doing that thing where I'm writing humor based on whatever life period I'm in to some extent. 

Doug: And those drop off stories, there's gotta be great content there, right? That's amazing material. I mean, cause your nest didn't just empty, it flung apart. It flung apart.

Wendi: My son Sam, my oldest, is like your oldest. He graduated in 2020, graduated on the computer in his bedroom. Then he started UCLA from his bedroom and got very disenchanted with it. We let him go to LA to work on producing music for a while, which was stressful. And then he did that thing where he’s like, “I don’t even want to go to college. I’m done. I don’t need to go to college.” So we had that big fight, and that resulted in him going to London, to a music school in London, which was way farther than we ever dreamed or anticipated that he’d go. So, yeah, I had to do the dropoff three years ago, and leave him in this little flat by himself and, oh my gosh, I don't think I've ever cried so hard in my life as I did that night after I dropped him off. But, you know, it's now I'm going back on Tuesday to take him for his last year. He loves it there. He has friends. He's thriving. He wants to stay living there after he graduates. So it's all ending well, which is a hard thing to think about when you're in the moment, thinking like, oh, this will probably work out. You just never know.

Doug: Well, now that we can gin up some melodrama here because we know it ended well, but what was that fight like?

Wendi: I mean, it was so hard and he, you know, I don't know if you had done this, but we'd gone through taking the ACTs four times and the SATs and applying to all the schools. So you go through all of the college application things and then you have to make a decision and then him deciding on UCLA after flying out there for an interview. So we had done all of that. So all of a sudden, to have him say, “I don't think this is right for me anymore,” was just like, God. And Sam started working at Atlantic Records when he was 17 as an A&R person. So he was doing well in his profession and thought that he could just continue it. And he was in LA living in a rap mansion, which is a terrifying thing for a parent to hear.

Magda: A rap mansion?

Wendi: Yeah, like a mansion a bunch of the rappers and music people had rented. It's a parent's dream.

Magda: That's such not a thing in other parts of the country.

Doug: You know, when Sam first arrived on his day of birth, you thought one day, son, you're gonna live in a rap mansion in LA.

Wendi: You know, he's like, oh, they're going to buy me a car, blah, blah, blah. And we had to sit him down and my husband was very tough about it, too. But we're like, Sam, we know how this ends. We've had the perspective to know that something that seems too good to be true at age 17 probably is. And we don't want you all of a sudden waking up at age 23 and saying, oh, I don't like music anymore and not having a degree. So that's why we really pushed this on him. And it's not a very tough college. He's just getting a music business BA. And with that, he can either just continue working in music or he can go back to graduate school if he ever wants to. But yeah, that was really tough.

Doug: So do you think your experience in LA yourself helped your side of the argument a bit? I mean, not everyone has that.

Wendi: I think so. And we've just recently looked at the people he was living with in the Rap Mansion, these guys.

Magda: Don't you think some of that is the pandemic though? I mean, I think like a lot of kids sort of launched with vigor into the beginning of the pandemic of doing whatever they thought they were going to do that they could keep doing despite the pandemic. And then there was just that phase, that like 18 months, where everybody was just like, “Oh, my God, how long are we going to have to do this? My soul is dying.” I don't know. Right. And I think that's when a lot of the kids just lost their mojo for whatever they were doing, whether it was college, whether it was being a rapper in a rap mansion and like going out and handing your mixtape out to everybody on the street, like whatever they do now. I think so much of it is just the entire world just sort of ground to not even a halt, just like an ennui, like soul-deep. The class of 2020, it's fascinating and I don't know any kid that had a normal path after the pandemic started. Some have more than others, but imagine being like ready to launch and all this stress and excitement and all of a sudden it's just gone. I also think it's really interesting that this class, the class of 2020, was also the same kids who were all newborns or in utero when 9-11 happened. And so they were sort of marinated in this grand sadness and this grief for the beginnings of their lives.

Wendi: Sam was born three weeks after 9-11.

Magda: Wow. Yeah, I had just come out of the morning sickness. It was like my third or fourth day without feeling like I had to vomit. I felt like I had to vomit again for another two years.

Doug: See, and this is what men don't think about, frankly, because Magda, I remember when you first told me, and we were in New York during 9-11, so the stress of it was really in our faces for several months afterwards. And you really think that the stress of that worked its way into the fetus somehow.

Magda: Well, okay. So we know that there is generational trauma. We know they have done studies on children who were in utero during big, like sort of sadness events, right? We know that those human beings are affected and that that goes down to their children too. You know, it wasn't just the sadness. It was that I was inhaling that smoke for six weeks in my second trimester of pregnancy. And I don't think it's a coincidence that two different teachers of that class in two different public school districts in two different states, out of the blue, mentioned to me that there was something different about the kids who were in the class of 2020.

Wendi: Oh, interesting.

Magda: That they had less ability to impulse control, that they were more distractible, that they were more emotionally labile, right? Like there was just something different about them. And if it had all been New York kids, I would have thought it was the smoke. But since it was also Michigan kids, I think it was the national grief. I think there's just something that happened to those kids. And it's unfair that they were the big victims of the pandemic too.

Wendi: I mean, we're luckier than most and Sam's super happy now.

And I've gotten used to him being so far away. And my philosophy is everything, not philosophy, but what I remind myself of, is everything's a plane ride away. So, you know, there's a direct flight from Austin to London. It's an eight and a half hour flight. And we're taking it on Tuesday, and Jack is in Eugene, Oregon, which actually takes longer to get to than London, surprisingly. 

Magda: Well, because it's not a direct route, is it?

Wendi: No. 

Magda: Do you fly into Portland and then drive, or do you fly into Portland and then connect into Eugene?

Wendi: We've done that, or we've flown to a connecting city like San Francisco or Oakland and then to Eugene. University of Oregon is also my alma mater.

Doug: So how do you think Jack's experience choosing Oregon, apart from it being his mom's school, how do you think Jack viewed Sam's experience and chose his path?

Wendi: Jack does things that his brother doesn't do and I don't know if that's by choice or just more of his nature, but he just wanted to go to a school that he could see the football team play on TV. He's much more traditional. He's studying business. So he applied to a lot of the big state schools and didn't get into University of Texas because that's very hard to get into, but got into like everywhere else. Got a full ride to University of Arizona. So we were like, yes, you're going to Arizona. And he liked it there. And we already had a trip in the works for Eugene that I had kind of pushed him into. Like, let's just go look around Eugene. You can see what you think. And so by the time we got up there, I was already thinking, oh, he'll go to Arizona and we won't have to pay for anything.

But I would say probably 10 minutes after he set foot on the University of Oregon campus, he was like, this is it. This is where I want to go. Kind of like an anti-influence for me because I didn't want to pay out of state at Oregon. But I don't know if you do this, too, where I kind of, I think we tend to not indulge them more, but because they had such a rough end to the high school, we're more likely to be like, okay, this is what you really want. And this is going to make you happy. We'll make it work for you. So we did that and I guess it's no surprise that my boys both picked places to go that are cold and rainy after living in Texas their entire life. Yeah. Yeah, but he's thriving and he is majoring in business and then he started taking psychology classes for the first time and now he's minoring in psychology and yeah, he just loves it. So I couldn't be happier for him. And I don't worry about either of them. I would say as far as whenever I hear about a campus shooting, I get worried. But that's one thing I don't have to worry about was Sam being in London.

Wendi: That was a little sad.

Doug: Well, that's another thing we didn't anticipate having to worry about when our kids were born. Who would have thought we would have said, well, at least there's no gun violence where my kid goes to college.

Wendi: Yeah. 

Doug: I hear your point about that. I think the difference between our two sons is that they did not go to the same high school. So he was in Detroit with Robert. Then he came out and spent two years here. 

Magda: And he loved being at a big school, which is funny now as we're looking at colleges and trying to figure out sort of what size school he wants to go to. Some of these schools are smaller than his high school, which I find, it just seems odd to me. I see him at a school where he could, eh, minor in theater, or at least just do a whole bunch of shows and a whole bunch of performances all the time without having to minor in it or take any classes in it.

Magda: Yeah, Thomas’ high school is a big musical theater feeder school. I don’t know if you’re watching Only Murders this season?

Wendi: Yeah!

Magda: Ok, so, Ashley Park, she’s the one that was supposed to be having an affair with the lead guy this season? Right, she went to–

Doug: Kimber.

Magda: Kimber! That’s the character’s name. She went to Thomas’ high school. It’s a feeder school to the University of Michigan Musical Theater program, and there are a lot of young adults who came from his high school.

Wendi: One of my friends in Austin's daughter is at University of Michigan studying musical theater.

Magda: That's great. That's cool. It's a great program.

Doug: Not to be confused with Tobert. Kimber and Tobert, which is essentially the combination of our son's name. So, you know, it's a good, it's a good kick. You get a kick out of it.

Wendi: Since we're kind of on the topic, but I highly recommend reading Martin Short's memoir if you haven't.

Doug: Yes, I've read it. We're doing the great book purge here. And I found a copy of Katharine Hepburn's Me.

Wendi: Oh, that'd be interesting. 

Magda: OK, so…

Doug: DId you leave it here?

Magda: I did. I left it there because I thought you were going to be interested in it. Hooooly mackerel is that a really wild, weird memoir! She was with Spencer Tracy for thirty years and she gives him ten pages at the end of the bool/

Doug: I’m fascinated by how all of us who were blogging when our kids were born, and now we’re blogging about our kids leaving. Do you think we as parents were more prepared or less prepared to send our kids out into the world based upon how involved in their lives we've been all this time in ways that I think is unprecedented. 

Wendi: I wouldn't say prepared, but I think we were more attached because we are observant. We really paid attention to what was going on in their lives, whether we were writing about it or we're just that sort of person anyway. So I think that's why you see so many of our peers having such a hard time. I mean, I remember my parents dropping me off in a station wagon and waving goodbye and taking off, which is a pretty common story for Gen X. But now we've been so used to, like I said, observing everything and we're much closer as a family unit. I've been generalizing. But Ann Imig just said this too in one of her videos that, you know, we're in constant contact texting or calling them all the time. And you couldn't do that in 1986 when I was there. My parents would call on the pay phone in the dorm once a week, maybe. I think they maybe knew what my major was. I don't know. So I think it's good and bad that this generation is more attached, but also they tend to be more involved in ways that they shouldn't be. If you've ever been on a college parent Facebook page, you can see that. Yes. I think that's not good. And, and that to me is something that I'd like to maybe skewer a little bit and, you know, write a satiric piece about it. But then the other part of me is like, no, that's like, these people are just coping with it the way they can. They're probably grieving somewhat. So I don't want, that was my dog.

Magda: It does a little bit feel like punching down because if you're the parent who does not need to hold on like that, it feels like you've got something that those other people are looking for. I mean, I completely agree with you about that. I was talking to somebody yesterday who just dropped her kid, her only child off at college, I don't know, like a week and a half ago, something like that. And I asked if there were any parent orientation programs, because I think that's the new thing that colleges are offering. There's a move-in slot, and then there's a program for parents that night so that the parents aren't trying to crawl down the back of their kids' shirts while the kids are meeting their new friends, and the kids are whisked off to some orientation thing. But then there's an entire program the next day for parents. And to me, it's all busywork. It's like how to interact with the financial aid office, how to interact with the health center to make sure that your kids' ADD meds transfer over, and you know, stuff like that, right?

Doug: How not to advocate to his professors for his grades.

Magda: Right, exactly. But I mean, it's all like, it's the prime example of like, this could have been in an email. But they're adding this programming because the parents asked for it. Like, we want it.

We want to stay over that night. We don't want to let go of the kids' shirttails. And I mean, I remember when my parents dropped me off in the fall of 1990, like the event was they would move us in and then there was like cookie and lemonade reception with the president for two hours. And that was it. Like they got to shake the president's hand and like, look her over and see if she looked like she was gonna allow me to be murdered or whatever. And, you know, they drank some lemonade and I don't know, it was outside of Pennsylvania, so we probably had, I don't know, soft pretzels and Rita's water ice. And then they left. But now it's like, I'm in a parent group for my stepdaughter's college. And there were a lot of parents who were saying, Okay, so our move in is on Friday. Where is the best restaurant in the area that we can take our child to for a last dinner after the move in? And I had seen the orientation schedule, and I knew that at five o'clock, they snatched those kids and took them into orientation so that they could bond with their orientation group and I thought, what am I going to say, you know, and some of the older parents were kind of trying to gently say, you need to separate. And so I just said flat out, once your kid moves in, they are mentally a college student and they are going to run away from you. And so if you want to have that last night as a family together, do it the night before, because once they're moved in, they're a college student and they don't care anymore. But I feel like we as parents just want it so much.

Wendi: Well, I will say that when we had the parent orientation thing up at Oregon, after the kids moved in, my husband and I skipped it and went to a winery.

Magda: So good. I'm glad.

Wendi: So going back to the humor writing thing of, you know, this is something I don't want to punch down. I don't want to make fun of these parents on the college Facebook groups. So then I, then I grapple with like, what's the angle? How do I come at this? How do I want to address empty nest, but I need to put the joke on myself. So I've been working on  “meals for your new empty nest.” Like right, we've spent so much money on groceries this summer with the boys home, but suddenly they'll be gone and it'll, you know, my husband says that our fridge looks like we're supermodels because it's like a bottle of champagne from five years ago. So, you know, that's where for humor to be successful, in my opinion, it can't be mean. So that's, that's probably the angle to take for it.

Yeah. 

Doug: My water bill too was remarkably different. 

Wendi: Yeah. 40 minutes long. So we've had to have the shower talk a couple of times.

Doug: Do you think about your audience when you're writing in terms of evolving sensibilities as far as, like you say, you want to be aware of punching down, but you also want to be aware of arousing too much over sensitivity to humor in particular. Do you find that an issue when you sit down to try and write something?

Wendi: I do a little bit. I will say that when I looked back at some blog posts from the very beginning, there were some phrases and words

that were commonly used, like on 30 Rock or wherever, that are no longer acceptable. So I took those back, or I deleted, actually deleted all of those. And then sometimes I don't, as evidenced by my last Substack I wrote, where I said bad but true things about my awful neighbor. And then I posted it, and I'm like, “oh, shit.” And I ran and looked at my subscribers list just to make sure he wasn't one of the subscribers. So sometimes I, especially on Twitter, I used to just make something really funny and then I'd be like, oh, should I walk that back? But not that often. And I do know that most of my audience, as far as the books and everything, are pretty simpatico. I did regret the opening bit of Tunics where I say that something about hashtag blessed is a fucking stupid word that should only be seen on decorative signs in Waco, Texas kitchens. That was probably a little too mean. That was unnecessary. 

Doug: So do you concern yourself with stuff like that, with how well your stuff might age? Because it’s funny that you mention 30 Rock, because they’ve famously withheld some episodes. There was one episode with Jon Hamm in blackface, which was meant to show how awful blackface is.

Wendi: Yes, and I’ve been rewatching The Office, with some of the gay jokes and the, um, yeah, I mean, it's like, Oh my God, it doesn't seem like it was that long ago, but you know, society has been on light speed with getting more sensitive. I'm not going to say the W word, but when I wrote my, I have a middle grade book called Ginger Mancino, Kid Comedian. And I wrote that about a 12-year-old girl in Austin, Texas who used to be a standup comedian. And my editor is just brilliant. And she went through and did a sensitivity read just to see, you know, I think I used the word spaz because even five years ago, that wasn't like a word that people knew they shouldn't be using anymore. So she went through and did a read and, you know, you shouldn't say this about the lunch ladies or whatever. So they were like easy jokes to fix, but I was very happy that I had somebody do that just because–you've all seen it–like if there's a book that comes out and there's one word that people don't like or latch on to, then it sinks the book. Now with, you know, how Twitter can be and the literary community can be.

Doug: Sorry, Magda, I had to mute you there because the birds were getting super loud. We're going to have a discussion about outdoor podcasts from here on out, because I don't think you're going to find a closet somewhere.

Magda: There is no place in his house that's actually quiet.

Doug: You have twice the space you had in your own house.

Magda: I know, but they're the, because there is no place that doesn't have any external walls in this weird house.

Doug: Interesting. You'll have to just find a guest bathroom lined with pillows or something.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: You know, I really enjoy hearing about your parents when you write about them too, and depict them on Instagram. We talk a lot about our aging parents on this podcast and you bring the humor out as your gift, but I'm wondering what is your relationship like with your parents and how is their planning going? What is that situation like trying to be mindful of their lives from so far away and how do you see that playing out?

Wendi: Thank you for saying that. They're still living in their house and they're doing great. And the good news is I have a sister that lives in the same town as them, and another sister that's about a two-hour drive away, so they... 

Doug: Oh, you hit the lottery. That's fantastic.

Wendi: I know, I know. And I can kind of take the position of just enjoying them. You know, you have so many dynamics with your parents, and then I think you get to where it's like a sweet spot. Like you can just kind of go and spend time and hang out and do puzzles and drink wine and it's fun. Knock on wood, we haven't had any of the bad effects of aging with them yet. So we're kind of just enjoying this time. And they told me years ago that I can write anything about them and they're fine with it. So, you know, I'm planning on pushing that a little bit this next year. But no, they're great. They're a lot of fun. And they've been married 62 years, which is great and good role models that way. So I'm going there the end of this month, and I'm sure we'll spend some time at the Elks Lodge, like we usually do, start drinking Chardonnay at 4.30. You know, you get, like, of course, the Fox News contingent a little bit at that age group, but for the most part, they're really fun, and they just don't give a shit, and they'll just, you know, they're enjoying their lives, and, you know, because they know that the clock is ticking more so for them. So, yeah, it's really fun.

I highly encourage you to go, especially if they have, like, a polka band night or something.

Magda: I don't know if people out here know anything about polka. I haven't found any yet.

Wendi: There's your window.

Magda: I've been joking around that I'm going to start a “Midwesterners in Diaspora" group here and we're going to do things like polka, eat poke cake, that kind of stuff.

Doug: This is the part of you that I didn't hear about as much, just because it was so much more the Norwegian lineage. Robert has a shirt that proudly says Viking DNA.

Wendi: Oh, cool.

Doug: And we also bought matching UFTA shirts at the Scandinavian Festival.

Wendi: My parents just say that. It's not ironic. They just say that.

Magda: Yeah, it's just normal.You know, Robert told me that somebody had asked him once what UFTA meant, and he said that it stood for United Farmers Federation Dairy Association. And the person believed him.

Wendi: Have you ever been to Norway or Sweden?

Magda: Me? Yes.

Wendi: Yeah, it's bizarre. Like everybody kind of looks like us.

Magda: My aunt married a Norwegian. So I have been a few times and one time with Doug.

Doug: When I had hair, I bleached it platinum when I came home. And that was a whole other experiment. Anyway, I wanted to ask, too, about writing. When we talk to writers, we talk a lot about how writing has changed. Of course now we have two very existential threats aiming at us right now, one is the fact that people who pay us to write don't seem to value it as much. Part of that is because robots are writing stuff that we used to. When you map out your career as a writer, how do you see this playing out? Especially with your experience in LA and in that world, how do you see a future for writers and writing as a viable career?

Wendi: I kind of have my head in the sand with AI and ChatGPT just because I find it so depressing. And, you know, I did recently check out ChatGPT and put in Wendi Aarons' bio and everything that came up was wrong. It said that I was the co-creator of a show starring Paul Reiser called There's Johnny, which I didn't even know was a show. So I think there's still a lot of error in it that people are going to, hopefully they'll get disenchanted with it soon enough. And I know, of course, it's evolving and it'll get better. But I've read a lot of articles about especially the TV shows, you couldn't have AI create any of those, you know, Sopranos or The Wire, any of the great shows. But I think what's the most depressing about it all is with the writer's strike.mThey're trying to get rid of the writers room and just have like one person write all 12 episodes of a streamer because they can do that. They don't have a fall tv lineup deadline like they used to when we were growing up so all that it just seems like it's narrowing the field it's it's uh going to really crush a lot of creative people who won't get their opportunity to shine or have their voice heard in the room. In the book I mentioned earlier, my middle-grade book Ginger Mancino: Kid Comedian has been optioned by an LA stand-up comic and TV writer, and we started to pitch it to studios right before the strike started. So we're on hold for that, which is a little bit frustrating, but she wrote the pilot script and it's just, she hit it out of the park. It's amazing. So i'm waiting with baited breath for the strike to end so we can go pitch that again, but it'll be interesting to see how it'll be received. If anybody buys it, if it's like with an agreement to have more than one writer, I don't know. It's been crazy that the strikes lasted so long.

Doug: I saw Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler talking about this, like as soon as AI learns how to write a joke, we're screwed.

Wendi: I don't know if it will, though. I mean, I guess this is where just personal stories are going to have to outshine anything AI can do.

After I just talked for 10 minutes, but I don't know what to say!

Doug: No, but it's interesting that especially given your experience in that realm for a while, you mentioned they're trying to eliminate collaboration or at least not have to pay for it anymore. And you've said you're a big fan of that. You collaborate a lot with people and getting a bunch of people to look at something makes it better.

Wendi: Just coming up with a storyline only goes so far. And then if you can bring people in whom you respect to punch things up.

Doug:

Wendi: 

 to Ginger Mancino. So I'm working on it.

Doug: How old is she?

Wendi: She's in middle school.

Doug: So you've got several, you've got a Harry Potter realm heading out.

You can write a new one every year until she graduates high school.

Wendi: Somebody had asked me if I wanted to write a middle grade book. It wasn't my big passion until I actually did it. And what's been so fantastic is I've been able to go to schools and libraries and talk about the book and talk about humor with mostly, a lot of times just girls, but a lot of times just big classrooms full of middle school kids. And, you know, I teach them all of the life lessons you can couch in humor lessons, like taking a big bow and yelling, “I failed!” when something doesn't go right. And then doing it again, or, you know, punch up and knock down and helping these kids find their voices in a productive way at that age. Especially sometimes with boys, they have all of that humor or those thoughts or whatever, and it comes out and

Disruptive Ways.

So if I say, just slow down a minute and write that down, how can you turn that into a joke? What can you do with that? That is more of a productive thing. So I've really enjoyed doing that. And now I'm writing the sequel of the book, which is going a little slower than I'd like just from having everybody home and, you know, being too happy to live. And then I started, I wanted to write a funny mystery. And I've gotten about halfway on that. That's a fiction book I'm just writing on spec called The Chardonnay Mystery. So kind of leaning into that audience, but funny. And then I'm considering a follow-up to Tunics, and I have some ideas and thoughts on that, but I haven't started on the proposal yet. And then besides that, just doing a lot of short humor pieces.

Doug: So are you experimenting with other garments?

Wendi: I did see that Austin's having one of those Mrs. Roper caftan gatherings… 

Doug: “I'm wearing muumuus now,” “I'm wearing caftans now”….

Wendi: Like I said before, I'm not somebody who is dying to write all the time. I like it when, you know, what's that, Dorothy Parker. I like having written. I don't like writing. Should be some good humor pieces coming out at least. 

Doug: So I know a lot of people listening to this are our age and at this crossroads as far as kids are out of the house and have a bit more time.

I'm trying to negotiate my options and my responsibilities and I want to try and maybe start a third act and be creative, find a market for whatever I have to say. Do you have any advice for them in terms of how to persevere and it's never too late to find your voice in that regard?

Wendi: I read the other day on LinkedIn, which is a very frightening place for me. I don't understand LinkedIn, but I check in once in a while. 

Doug: You really know how to procrastinate though. If you're reading LinkedIn, you really are postponing a deadline. I hear you. 100%.

Wendi: Somebody had shared an article about, I don't know, it was a study, but it showed that the two most creative times in somebody's life are when you're in your mid-20s and then again when you're in your mid-50s, because in your mid-fifties you are creative, but you also have all of the experience and wisdom to add to that. So you maybe come up with solutions faster, or you are thinking differently than younger people because you have all this context you can add to it. So I think I certainly feel probably more creative now. I have more time just to mull stuff around because I'm not doing all the tedious day-to-day kid stuff, but I highly encourage anybody just to figure out what they really like to do, but what they've done in their past, even if they were at home for a few years, but that can translate into a job or working or a, you know, a hobby.

I don't think every hobby has to be monetized. I'll say that first, but you know, I worked as a social media consultant for the past eight years, I think. And I taught myself how to do all that just from having a blog back in the day and you know, being a Twitter early adapter, all of that stuff. So think about those things that you know how to do. Um, most parents are extremely well organized and a lot of places are now waking up and saying, like, Oh, we should hire moms. We should hire, you know, these people in their forties and fifties that know what they're doing. They're “no bullshit” people because they don't care anymore. They just want to get in on the job and go home to their mystery shows and their TV dinner or whatever. But yeah, you just have to do it. And I will say on that, related to that, is now is the time to get involved in any causes or campaigns or anything like that. And you don't have to run for office, but you can certainly join your local Moms Demand Action or Everytown or go volunteer to work for a candidate that you support because they can use you. They really can use people who know what they're doing at this age.

Doug: Thank you so much for procrastinating with us. You're on Substack and you contribute to that as often as possible, I imagine. Where's the best place to find you online and where can people stay in contact with you in terms of the classes you teach, the writing you're doing, and how else you're making your place in the world?

Wendi: I would say WendiAarons.com. I can be contacted through that.

Magda: And it's Wendi with an I, right?

Wendi: Like Gandhi. That's my joke, but I can't take that.

Magda: Okay, I thought that was funny.

Doug: There you go. There's evolving sensibilities, right?

Wendi: I'm in flux between Twitter and threads, so I'm not posting on either one really like I used to.

Doug: The thrill is gone. And it is good to see a lot of our friends are getting back on Substack like Eden, like Alice, Bradley, like Asha.

Wendi: Yeah, and podcasting!

Doug: It's really great to see your face again. I mourn conferences, and it's great to see that you're doing what you're doing. Thank you so much for the time.

Wendi: This is great that you're doing this. I'm excited to listen to more of the episodes. And it's great to finally meet you Magda. I've heard your name for years and years. In good ways, in good ways.

Doug: Thank you for clarifying that for sure.

Wendi: Yeah, exact same thing with you.

Doug: Listeners, thank you so much for listening to Episode 16 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecina and me, Doug French. Our guest has been humor writer and activist Wendi Aarons with an I and two A’s. We'll be back next week with another guest of someone who's more talented than you even realize. Thanks so much. Bye bye.

Wendi: That's one of those “fix it in post” things?

Doug: Yeah, hopefully.

<music>

Magda:  So his mother once told me that when she was pregnant with him, her doctor told her that she should stop drinking gin and tonic because the quinine in the tonic was bad for the baby and she should just drink the gin.

Doug: I came out fine.

Magda: Talk about parenting being different!

Wendi: The signature drink for my book parties was the gin and tunic.

Magda: I love that. What was in it?

Wendi: Just gin and whatever you put with it. Tonic water.

Doug: Yeah, I don’t want to know what tunic water is.