Ep. 66: "If I Could Stop Time"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How are you?
John: I'm fine.
John: How are you?
Merlin: Feeling somewhat muted.
John: You're feeling muted?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Just, you know, a little reserved.
John: You're feeling a little bit low ebb.
Merlin: Midnight storm.
John: You're listening to Daddy-O Records.
John: I'm sitting here reading the lyrics to Della Sol's hit song, The Magic Number.
Merlin: I think that's out of print now.
Merlin: I don't know if you can even buy that.
Merlin: Didn't they have a giant problem with clearing their samples?
Merlin: I blame Gilbert O'Sullivan.
John: See, that's an example of a clear situation where sampling produced a masterwork and all should kneel.
Merlin: I stand corrected.
Merlin: You can buy it.
Merlin: I just remember there was a time where it was kind of hard to get.
Merlin: But that's a hell of a record.
Merlin: That was an amazing summer.
John: You want to think about this for a second?
John: That was 24 years ago.
John: 24 years ago.
John: Della Sol's Three Feet High and Rising.
John: The 24th anniversary of Abbey Road was September of 1993.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I was playing this game tonight with my wife.
John: It's a terrible game.
Merlin: It's a horrible game.
Merlin: It's the worst.
Merlin: It's a game I've been playing for years, and I wish I had a name for it, but it had a little genius mix on.
Merlin: And If I Can't Change Your Mind by Bob Mould came up, and I was like, this song is 20 years old.
Merlin: or more that's about 20 years old which means that at that time a 20 year old song came out in 1973 this will mean nothing to the younger listeners that's right but it's harrowing it's harrowing to me it's harrowing and particularly i was thinking about this the other day in 1986 the it is not just that we were younger
John: And that time is longer for young people.
John: Because in 1986, clearly we had gone through, we had transitioned through a thousand years in the culture from 1966.
John: Right?
John: That 20-year period from 66 to 86, we had experienced...
John: The metamorphosis of a thousand years of human consciousness.
John: 66, we had not been to the moon.
John: 66, we were still wearing white go-go boots for the love of God and not even ironically.
John: And by 1986, we had been through a doo-wop revival.
John: We had been through AM radio songwriting.
John: We had experienced punk rock, disco, anti-disco, anti-punk, new wave, anti-new wave.
John: Post-anti-disco punk.
John: Post-anti-new wave disco punk.
John: We had then another doo-wop revival.
John: There were three rockabilly revivals between 1966 and 1986.
John: And, you know, in the same 20-year span, 2013 to 1993...
John: I challenge you to think of a single thing that's happened.
Merlin: I think it's a problematic heuristic of our age.
Merlin: Okay, here's one.
Merlin: This is regarded by some as such a classic that it's a cliche, but Grease, which had been a Broadway – I guess a Broadway show.
Merlin: Grease is the word.
Merlin: It is the word.
Merlin: It's the word you've been hearing.
Merlin: It's that move.
Merlin: It's got feeling, time, space, and the motion.
Merlin: Frankie Valli sang that.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: That's got a lot of soul.
Merlin: Not in falsetto.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: That's what threw you off.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: Grease, the movie that I think people are most familiar with, more than the show, Grease came out in 1978, which means that the nostalgia in Grease was 20 years old.
Merlin: And the Grease movie is now 35 years old.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: So I just had my first bowel movement in a month while you were thinking.
John: I am so nostalgic for the original nostalgia that I felt for a thing that I was not alive for.
John: There are so many layers of nostalgia between me and anything that I like.
John: I'm thinking about this.
John: In 1940, when my dad...
John: Went down to the Showbox Theater to see Benny Goodman and his orchestra.
Merlin: Wait, wait, wait.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: What year was that?
John: 1940.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Can you imagine singing, like, sing, sing, sing live?
Merlin: That was the punk rock of Swing.
Oh.
John: And people are flying through the air.
John: They're dancing so that they're causing the sprung dance floor to bounce.
John: People are flying through the air.
John: And my dad is basically with his teeth on the stage watching this band and thinking to himself, this is all I want to do with my life.
John: I don't want to be a lawyer.
John: I don't want to...
John: go into real estate or business or government.
John: I want to go with this.
John: I want to go with this band.
John: And there was no aspect of nostalgia in that music.
John: For its time, it was 100% original with no antecedents.
John: It was not aping.
Merlin: Well, any antecedent it had was like two years old.
Merlin: It wasn't like a throwback, a direct quote of ragtime or something.
Merlin: It was something really new.
John: Yeah, and I guess every once in a while they would tag ragtime.
Merlin: Yeah, play a little pavement riff or something.
John: Yeah, they'd drop it in.
John: But I mean, they were blowing people's minds with this music.
John: And I'm thinking now, like, everything I've ever loved...
John: has been filtered through at least one cheesecloth of nostalgia, right?
John: There was nothing about New Wave once you stripped the clothes off of them, which I tried to do at every opportunity.
Merlin: There was nothing about New Wave that hadn't been... If you turn down the Farfisa, it's like a Fast Kink song a lot of the time.
John: Right.
John: Or, you know, or, again, any one of a number of Beatles songs presaged the whole idea.
John: I don't know.
John: I'm just sitting here... I'm just sitting here in my nostalgia pod.
John: My nostalgia escape pod.
John: I'm looking around the room, and I cannot think of a single thing here that either...
John: isn't actually a thing from the 60s or 70s or a modern thing that has been made to look like it's from the 60s or 70s.
John: It's true.
John: Except for my Apple products.
John: They're the only modern thing in this whole, basically in my whole house.
John: And you're not that happy with them.
John: Well, you know, they just, they don't do it.
Merlin: You know what this is?
Merlin: It's like, I don't know how to explain this to you, but it's kind of like the days of the Wright brothers.
Merlin: It's like we're using bicycles to power airplanes.
Merlin: That's where we are right now.
Merlin: If this Apple product.
John: I have nostalgia for the early days of our shooting.
John: If it had been made, if this Mac thing had been made to look like an Apple IIe, I think I would be very satisfied with it.
John: Hmm.
John: I think I would be like, oh, look at this.
John: It's so quaint and quirky.
Merlin: Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
Merlin: Our friend Mr. Hodgman was on Marc Maron's podcast a while back, and there was a wonderful quote.
Merlin: I don't understand how you come up with something like this without writing it, but I think it was John.
Merlin: It might have been Marc Maron, but one of them said, nostalgia used to be better.
Merlin: But the sad part is I instantly understood what they meant.
Yeah.
Merlin: You guys don't know from nostalgia.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Nostalgia.
Merlin: Jesus.
Merlin: I remember when Grease came out, I was kind of torn because I had had kind of a split allegiance among the two cool guys on TV that I followed closely.
Merlin: The Fonz and… Yeah, Barbarino.
Barbarino.
John: Oh, and Barbarino, right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But then Barbarino was in Greece.
Merlin: So like the way that I found common ground was to go into the bathroom and take a giant scoop of Vaseline petroleum jelly.
John: Uh-huh.
Merlin: That you guys had in your house?
Merlin: My mom's a liberal woman.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: Actually, no part of that is accurate.
Merlin: And boy, I don't know if you ever put Vaseline in your hair.
Merlin: I never did.
Merlin: It seems so straightforward.
Merlin: Doesn't it look like when you look at Fonzie, you think he's probably got Vaseline in his hair, right?
John: Yeah, he's putting greasy kid stuff.
Merlin: Let me ask you, if all the things go back in your mind, imagine a young John Roderick going through your home right now, and you had to create Fonzie hair.
Merlin: Of all the things, don't you think that's in like the 0.5% of things that would make you look like you had Fonzie hair?
John: Well, you would think that except that, you know, my parents were a little bit older.
Merlin: Oh, so you knew about like brill cream or greasy kid stuff?
John: Yeah.
John: So I actually went to my mom and said, how do you get your hair to do that?
John: And she said, oh.
John: Shouldn't you be studying?
John: She did.
John: She did say that.
John: But then she said, oh, what you want is a Vitalis.
John: And so I went to the drugstore, Long's Drugs, in Anchorage, Alaska.
John: And there in the men's grooming section, in the section, you know, past the Drakkar Noir, down where only old men shopped, where you could still buy a straight razor, there was Vitalis.
John: You could buy it.
John: And I bought a bottle of it.
John: Which I still have.
Merlin: I don't think they go bad.
John: They don't.
Merlin: I know you're not a big bottle of water fan, but it's got an expiration date on it.
Merlin: I don't think Vitalis has ever had an expiration date.
John: No, and I still have the exact bottle of Vitalis I bought in 1983.
John: There's not a lot of Vitalis left in it, but I still use it.
John: Every once in a while, I'll put a little sprinkle of Vitalis in my hair.
John: And the fact is that my mom was wrong.
John: That's not how you get Fonzie hair.
Merlin: It's almost like Hanukkah.
Merlin: How is there still Vitalis in there?
John: That's right.
John: It's a miracle.
John: But this Vitalis, it's how you get Benny Goodman hair.
John: It's not how you get Fonzie hair.
John: He's a good-looking guy.
John: But my mom was in, but she was one of those in-between generations.
John: She was that thing, you know, she was 20 in the early 50s.
John: So she still was slicking her hair down in an old-fashioned way.
John: Anyway, I still have this Vitalis.
John: Wow.
John: So you put Vaseline in your hair.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: What did you get?
Merlin: Some things I've noticed about myself over the years, one thing I've noticed in the last five to ten years is occasionally I'll use a little bit of hair product if I want to achieve a certain look.
Merlin: And I've noticed that when I'm nervous, I use a little more than I should.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Some people talk more than they should when they're nervous.
Merlin: I use more hair product than I should, and that was –
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: You cut your own hair and you know the problem of like I'm just going to like even these sides up.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And then pretty soon you look like you're about to be put in the electric chair.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And that happened to me.
Merlin: And so I put in what seemed like – I remember hearing that phrase, that brokering phrase, a little dab will do you.
Merlin: I did not have a standard for what a dab was, but I thought it's probably applicable to this –
Merlin: obviously, applicable Vaseline.
Merlin: And then I needed more because I wasn't getting the effect I wanted.
Merlin: And pretty soon, I basically put lots of oil, like literal oil in my hair.
John: And it melts once it's in your hair.
Merlin: Yeah, once it gets to the 98.6, it gets real comfortable.
Merlin: Yeah, it starts to run down the back of your neck.
Merlin: So it was more of... I can't... In my head right now, I can't imagine what Ed Gein's hair looked like, but...
Merlin: I think if you're going – if somebody just knew enough about Ed Gein, you would use Vaseline.
Merlin: And then my mom was really, really unhappy with me.
Merlin: And so I went in there and I washed my hair and I washed my hair again.
Merlin: And I don't know if you're familiar with the axiom that oil and water don't mix.
Merlin: But the, my hair said, fuck you to the shower for four days, right?
Merlin: At least four days.
Merlin: I looked, I looked so bad.
Merlin: I looked like, you know, like Larry Daryl and Daryl.
Merlin: I mean, it looked really, really bad.
John: Yeah.
John: And I'm sure you, you smelled like a, like a refinery or you smelled like somebody like West Texas.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I mean, I looked, I looked, I smelled like a dildo and looked like a serial killer.
Merlin: It was miserable, but I didn't do that again.
Merlin: I learned more about stuff later, but I mean, this is an ongoing problem for me.
John: It takes a long time.
Merlin: Well, I've said before, I have my whole life, especially as a, an adult, a young adult and older adult, I always feel like I've somehow not gotten the manual.
Merlin: Like there was just like, I said this to my wife the other day.
Merlin: I always feel like somebody got like a three page printout, but what happened was we were watching that house of cards thing on Netflix and we accidentally skipped over a very important episode and
Merlin: And when the next thing one came on, we were like, what happened?
Merlin: So what do you do?
Merlin: You doubt yourself and you say, Oh, I'm stupid.
Merlin: Cause I can't figure this out.
Merlin: Obviously I wasn't paying attention.
Merlin: I was playing with my iPad.
Merlin: I just need to watch this more closely.
Merlin: And then two nights later, Matt's like, well, you know, we've missed an incredibly important episode.
Merlin: And that's how I feel.
Merlin: I feel like there was a three page handout that would have made everything like 75% better for me.
John: Well, that's why we're doing this podcast.
John: I feel like it is the three page handout for the next generation.
Yeah.
John: But, you know, my problem with Grease, the movie, was that I had a younger sister who was actually more culturally aware and more of a media consumer than I was, even at the age of 10.
John: She was...
John: eight and I was 10.
Merlin: Your sister seems hip.
John: Oh, she was very hip.
Merlin: Like, like, like she, she could get the things that you might try to dissect with a chart.
Merlin: Like she could just grok that.
John: She got them instantly.
John: So, so I wanted to be as a 10 year old, I wanted to be absorbed into the Greece universe.
John: Yeah.
John: And I wanted to drive a hot rod car that had a plexiglass, you know, bonnet.
John: And it might in the fullness of time fly into the sky.
John: It might fly into the sky.
John: I definitely, definitely understood the appeal of being a rocker girl.
John: But I also understood the appeal of being a good girl.
John: I mean, these were some of my models.
John: I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be a good girl or a rocker girl.
John: But then my sister was like...
John: seriously, seriously, heavily into Greece, and I felt an obligation as her older brother to be dismissive of it.
Merlin: It was like the girl version of Frampton Comes Alive.
Merlin: Like, every girl I knew had a copy of that soundtrack.
John: Every girl.
John: And my sister, you know, had it memorized, and she watched the movie 25 times, and she learned whatever bad thing you're supposed to learn about being a Barbie doll or whatever it is that people are mad at Greece for.
John: But, but, but I wanted to enjoy Greece.
John: I wanted to be an innocent 10 year old boy who loses his innocence to, I mean, you know, honestly, I was, I was more in love with Frenchie.
Merlin: Stucker Channing character.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, that's the guy from Taxi.
Merlin: That's the guy from Taxi?
John: No.
Merlin: I'm not thinking of which one's Kenicky.
John: Frenchie was the girl who wanted to be a, she was the beauty school dropout.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: The girl with the nose.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Bingo.
Merlin: She was a little hebrick.
John: She was, she was so, she was so dewy and so sweet.
John: So cute.
John: And I didn't understand why she wasn't the sex object of the film.
John: Because Olivia Newton-John, she's fine, she's cute, but she's a little plain compared to the exoticism.
Merlin: And everybody in the movie is obviously at least 30 in retrospect.
John: well yeah 45 totally but stockard channing was foxy too i mean i mean of all the girls to she had a tv show after that and i was attracted to her yeah she was hot she's puckish puckish is right although i thought i felt her character on the west wing was i thought she was not supportive enough of the president well that's your job when you're working for the president you should be extremely supportive
John: Yeah, particularly if you're his wife.
John: And I mean, I understand that she's a female empowerment figure, but come on.
John: Get behind the man.
John: He's the president.
John: He is the president.
Merlin: My file card on Greece, it's real straightforward.
Merlin: It came out, I think, in 1978.
Merlin: And I just have such a clear recollection of this one family at our church had gone and brought their child to it.
Merlin: And they walked out of it.
Merlin: They marched out of there in complete and utter outrage in like the first however many minutes.
Merlin: Like what happens in the first minutes?
Merlin: It doesn't matter.
Merlin: Like everything.
Merlin: Well, I think there's smoking and sass mouth and like all of the things like if this is what happens at the beginning of a PG movie.
Merlin: You know, you're putting your hands over the kid's ears and, you know, out of here.
Merlin: Leave the popcorn.
Merlin: Take the cannoli.
Merlin: Let's get out of here.
Merlin: And that was – the thing is, that was the word that you heard with groove and feeling was that Greece was not where people at White Oak Christian Church should be spending their time with their children.
John: Oh, it was dirty.
Merlin: It was bad.
Merlin: It might as well – you know, it was like the Holocaust or something.
John: People were dry humping.
John: People were finger banging.
John: Yeah, finger banging.
John: I mean probably through the pants, but –
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Huh.
Merlin: Huh.
Merlin: You know, for a long time, I was because of my very special things, I was very attracted to the weirdly disturbing, sexy Olivia Newton-John.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Because I think that's what you're supposed to do, even though she seemed really uncomfortable in her role as like fake slutty girl.
Merlin: Of course, I was attracted to her.
Merlin: But in retrospect, I got to say, you should show your vitalis.
John: Olivia Newton-John in those spandex pants is a little too bony, I have to say.
John: Huh.
John: She's a little bony.
Merlin: She's a little like boy-hipped.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What about the – I really don't want to know what your special thing is, but what about the physical video?
John: When that would come on, boy, that was... That transitioned into... Like, I had a very complicated relationship with leg warmers and headbands.
John: Because leg warmers and headbands basically were the... Those were the boundary fences of my whole young sex life, right?
John: There was a headband here and there were leg warmers there and everything in between was like...
John: How do you get there?
Merlin: It's like a pubescent DMZ.
John: Yeah.
John: First of all, how do you get the pants off with their leg warmers guarding the approach?
John: And I don't know what the headband is for.
Merlin: Yeah, but by that, you know, that kicked up.
Merlin: You got John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg with the headbands.
Merlin: I think they really want to kick that off.
Merlin: Olivia definitely carried that forward.
Merlin: And then Flashdance just blew that wide open, don't you think?
John: Yeah, but I wasn't into Flashdance.
John: I have a confession to make.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: This is one of those weird things that when I look back at it, I cannot know.
John: I cannot put myself fully in my 13-year-old mind.
John: Because when I was 13, I could not think of a more beautiful woman than Jamie Lee Curtis.
John: And then later, 15 years later, when I, in the fullness of time, had come to recognize that Jamie Lee Curtis was kind of repulsive.
John: Well, I tried to get back.
Merlin: I think she's a hermaphrodite.
Merlin: I hope that didn't color your opinion.
John: That would be gender normative.
John: That's one of those things like that they pumped a gallon of semen out of Rod Stewart.
John: I don't believe that.
Merlin: It's because he ate bubble gum with spider eggs.
John: But he ate Pop Rocks and then drank a Coke, and it turned into a gallon of semen.
Merlin: And that's why they charged him $10,000 for the cookie recipe.
John: But I honestly, my whole idea of, like, the foxiest girl in the world was Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places.
John: Oh, God.
John: And now I cannot...
John: I cannot get there.
John: Not at all.
John: You don't have access to that at all?
John: I mean, Jill St.
John: John, there was never any question.
John: I can always go look at Jill St.
John: John and I can find exactly what it was that I was thinking the first time I saw Jill St.
John: John.
John: But Jamie Lee, it's just – it's not the same.
John: It's not the same for me.
Merlin: But like you wouldn't be so vacuous as to say it was just because you saw her boobies for a second.
John: No, no, no.
John: Long before I saw her boobies.
John: Right.
Merlin: Because she'd been in, you know, what, Halloween?
Merlin: Yeah, I did see it.
Merlin: Well, no, but I'm just saying, like, I think she was in Friday the 13th?
Merlin: Yeah, she has.
Merlin: Anyway, she'd been in all these slasher films that were really popular.
Merlin: Those are two, like, canonical slasher films.
Merlin: The point being that, like, her face was everywhere for teenage boys.
Merlin: Like Fangoria staring out at you.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Like, she was a staple of our youth.
John: Yeah, she had that boyish haircut.
Merlin: She had the... I like, John, I like boyish.
John: Bubblegum snapping.
Merlin: I really like boyish.
John: But now, now...
John: As it probably should have been, Anne Margaret in Tommy is actually the peak.
John: She is the er.
Merlin: Do you enjoy the appearance of a more womanly woman these days?
John: Do I enjoy the appearance of a more womanly woman?
Merlin: I don't want to talk about this at all, but if we're going to talk about this, let's make it a continuum.
Merlin: I'm just making this up.
Merlin: I'm still kind of digesting dinner.
Merlin: But you have a continuum that goes somewhere between Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe.
John: right is that a fair one like because on the one hand yeah i mean that is a cultural reference that is literally 50 60 years old yes and it's so good established like a certain standard yeah well and the thing is i can find many i can find you know i know i can do a more modern one what about uh carly ray jepson and say ben gibbard yeah
John: I don't know what a Carly Rae Jepsen is.
John: I keep seeing that name.
Merlin: You mentioned that and I Googled it and I started playing her hit song for my daughter and now she loves it.
Merlin: She wants the whole album.
John: I feel like a Carly Rae Jepsen when I hear that name.
John: I hate her name.
John: I picture Punky Brewster.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: It kind of sounds the same.
John: Yeah.
John: I picture somebody that's like... Was that Soleil Moon Frye that played her?
John: Nine years old?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I don't know, but I did learn the other day that the woman who plays the blonde narcissist on 30 Rock... Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, Jenna.
Merlin: You know who she is.
John: Jenna was the girl with the side ponytail in National Lampoon's Vacation.
Merlin: My friend Michael, who you've met, went on a date with her a couple months after that.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: She lived in New Jersey where he lived and they went to a carnival together.
John: And she was already a movie star?
Merlin: Well, you know, it was Vacation.
John: Yeah.
John: One of the great films of the last 40 years.
Merlin: Can I help you with that, Eddie?
Merlin: Please?
Merlin: Hamburger helper.
Merlin: Real tomato ketchup.
Merlin: Nothing but the best, Clark.
Merlin: I've never seen it.
No.
Merlin: Sorry, folks.
John: The park's closed.
Merlin: The moose out front should have told you.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: You know, this is the beauty of having cable.
Merlin: Basic cable plus Showtime and HBO is there are so many – I'm coming back to something here – is that there's so many movies that I have seen.
Merlin: I saw Stripes six times in a month and a half.
Merlin: And at that age when I had retention, I mean, there's still lines to this day that are, you know, lighten up, Francis.
Merlin: Like there's still lines from that movie that are just, you know, just implanted on my brain.
Merlin: Kids a little younger than us had like a VHS player to watch their favorite movie over and over.
Merlin: But you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like for me, like sitting in the dark when I'm not supposed to be watching TV, like watching Escape from New York and Alien, like made such an impression on me.
John: oh my god me too and in spite of that fact i still i could not even the first time through could not stand the movie porkies it was so dumb it's pretty overrated i was just watching it to see the the shower shower scene yeah but uh but even then even at the at the impressionable age when i was the target audience for that film it was too dumb too dumb to believe it's not a well-made movie no
Merlin: I think it was done in Canada.
John: Well, see, that figures.
John: But like you say, I watched Stripes and Escape from New York and National Lampoon's Vacation.
John: I would watch them over and over and over and over and over.
Merlin: Well, you remember, I mean, until recently, you would still get this in hotel rooms where you get that little booklet.
Merlin: Like a little bigger than like a three by five card, that little like shiny booklet with all like what's on HBO at what times.
John: I think you still get that in hotel rooms.
John: It's just that you don't touch it.
John: Just never touch it.
John: Yeah.
John: You no longer touch anything in your hotel room.
John: So it's still there.
John: If you were willing to put your hands on the spine is bent to Cinemax after dark.
John: I, you know, I was in a hotel not very long ago and, uh, and I was, uh, you know, I, of course I put my remote in a plastic bag.
John: And then I'm sitting and I'm scrolling through and I was like, you know what?
John: Maybe I'm going to, I've been through the channels 15 times.
John: There's nothing on except like E entertainment television dubbed into German.
John: And so I'm going to, maybe I'll go watch a first run movie.
John: So I go over and I'm scrolling through the, the ads for the first run movies and I'm like, Oh, this is garbage too.
John: And then I think maybe I'll watch an adult movie.
John: like where you pay for it yeah so I go over to the adult movie menu and I'm scrolling through and it's all the same stuff it's just like cheerleaders babysitters scroll scroll scroll and then I realize these fucking things are $25 yeah $25 to watch an adult movie in the privacy of your hotel room and they're not that good $25 yeah
John: $25 I could go down to the nearest McDonald's.
John: Plus a 20% service charge.
John: I could meet a couple of girls for $25 and buy them both their dinner.
John: Sitting up in a motel, pay $25.
John: Back in the old days, HBO, you could potentially see one of those porn movies where all the good stuff had been edited out.
Merlin: Yes, which was plenty for me.
Merlin: Is that right?
John: Oh, goodness me.
John: You're pretty soft.
John: You're pretty soft core.
Merlin: Well, you know, I've really gone off the rails in the last 30 years.
Merlin: But back then, sure.
Merlin: I mean, me, man, I could break a pair of jeans with a ZZ Top video.
Merlin: You know, those were salad days.
John: When I was a teenager, I mean, I would get off looking at ski wear catalogs.
John: I love catalogs.
John: Oh, my God.
John: That puffy jacket is so puffy.
Merlin: You know, puffy jackets are a thing.
Merlin: I did not know this, but puffy jackets are somebody's special thing.
Merlin: Well, you're saying it's a sex thing?
Merlin: It's a sexy thing, yeah.
Merlin: Puffy jackets?
Merlin: Puffy jackets, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Boy, one time I said, why are we talking about this?
Merlin: I want to say probably about 1982, like right at the worst conceivable time.
Merlin: Somebody – this is back, of course, when the Postal Service was useful and competent.
Merlin: You're talking about the band?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I like that new song, by the way.
Merlin: Tell Marilyn Monroe I like it.
Merlin: They're playing a bunch of shows.
Merlin: Oh, they're so good.
Merlin: I went back to that record.
Merlin: It's so good.
Merlin: Okay, cutting this out.
Merlin: I don't know how this happened.
Merlin: Because remember, mail used to be like a real thing.
Merlin: You didn't get other people's mail.
Merlin: Half of our mail at our house is someone else's mail.
Merlin: Which leads me to believe, you know, by a priori.
Merlin: It was a good job.
John: Remember that movie?
John: You can always get a job at the postal service.
John: What?
John: What was that?
John: Isn't that blowing your mind?
John: That is a pull quote.
John: What is that from?
John: I'm going to let that sit.
John: I'm not going to search.
John: There's always work at the postal service.
Merlin: They brought somebody else's Victoria's Secret catalog to our home.
Merlin: I'd never heard of Victoria.
Merlin: I didn't know what her secret was.
Merlin: But all I know was this one little pile of shiny paper changed everything.
Merlin: Because you understand, we're right in the pocket for the ZZ Top era.
John: I'm pretty sure that I got the first ever Victoria's Secret catalog.
Merlin: You got it bagged and boarded?
Merlin: Sorry, it's a comic term.
Merlin: You're keeping it somewhere special?
Merlin: Oh, bagged and boarded.
Merlin: I get that reference.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like you did in Guantanamo.
John: No, I don't have it now.
John: But wait a minute.
John: You're saying that those go back to 83?
John: I don't think that's true.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I mean like Victoria's Secret like was the thing in malls by the time I was in college.
Merlin: But back then – so like years later, I would acquire like a Fredericks of Hollywood, but it was really gross.
Merlin: It was obviously like trailer park garter belts.
Merlin: By the way, those guys are great.
Merlin: I don't know if you heard them.
But –
Merlin: now wave but uh yeah but boy i just i that was a very very special companion for me yeah i knew what was on each page i mean i could come up with like a running order the early models in the victoria's secret catalog oh this is another this is part of the jamie lee curtis problem yeah i'm not sure if i went back
John: I'm not sure if I went back and looked at an early Victoria's Secret whether it would seem mundane to me.
John: At the time, of course, it was like it was a blazed a trail through the forest of my mind.
Merlin: It was like onanistic manna.
Merlin: It just showed up.
John: There was a there was a there really was on the back page of like some ski magazine.
John: There was an advertisement for Obermeyer Skiwear.
John: I'm talking now same same era.
John: 82 maybe.
John: Obermeyer and that it was a picture of a girl wearing an Obermeyer ski jacket and she was so beautiful and
John: And the idea that she was also a skier really made a connection with me because the girls that I knew that were skiers, I mean, most of the people I knew who were skiers were girls because they were at our ski club.
John: The girls team was very competitive.
John: And a lot of the girls that I was in love with as a teenager were these really mean, mean, rich ski girls.
John: Puffy jackets.
John: Puffy jackets.
John: And they always had, every season they had brand new skis and brand new poles, brand new ski pants.
John: And I was kind of like, I was already sort of, you know, slumping my way through, trying to get by on some three-year-old spider ski jacket with a flight suit underneath it.
John: And anyway, this Obermeyer ski girl...
John: She looked out of the back page of this ski magazine at me with laser beam eyes.
John: And it was the type of thing where I seriously kept that ski magazine like under my bed.
John: So that I could just... And I wasn't even... It's not like I was jacking off or anything.
John: I would just take it out.
John: I would take the magazine out and I would just stare at this picture.
John: That's very tender, John.
John: For hours at a time.
John: And I don't even think I was imagining...
John: scenarios with her it's not like i was saying and then we went to zermatt and we were skiing on the piste like i was just looking at her i was just looking at her face for hours at a time wondering what it was wondering you know even then you were working at a pretty high level well i was wondering if we were ever going to meet in a train station somewhere god like
John: And I'm not sure if I could go back and, you know, if I found that picture of that girl, whether she was... Now she would probably look like a teenage girl because that's what she was, but...
Merlin: No, you shouldn't.
Merlin: You should let that be special.
Merlin: You're going to leave that away.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, it's, yeah, you don't want to revisit that.
Merlin: I mean, look what happened with Jamie Lee Curtis.
Merlin: She's still a handsome woman.
Merlin: Yeah, that's true.
Merlin: But it's not your special thing.
John: Not so special anymore.
John: I wish I could have kept her in trading places.
Merlin: Once again, trading places, it comes up.
John: There's always work at the post office.
John: Hollywood shuffle.
Merlin: Is that the Robert Townsend movie?
John: Yes.
John: Remember?
John: Remember the impact that film had?
Merlin: I do, but I don't think I ever actually saw it.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Seriously?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: It was a good movie.
Merlin: It was around the time I was in college.
Merlin: So I had a pretty uneven – I had very uneven exposure to things.
Merlin: There were some things that I was way, way, way overexposed to and then other things – like people talk about Star Trek New Generation.
Merlin: And as you know, I'm not like a big Star Trek fan.
Merlin: So I didn't make the time to seek it out and I didn't have a – I didn't have a TV.
Merlin: So you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like it was – there's so many things from that time that it's just – I have this like black hole in my memory for those things.
Merlin: I should have seen it though probably.
Merlin: No, he financed that on his credit cards.
John: I know.
John: It was like a – It was a touchstone.
John: It was a touchstone.
John: It was an earth shatterer, a breaker.
Merlin: What's he doing now?
Merlin: You think he's working for the post office?
John: I don't know.
John: Probably.
John: What are any of us doing now?
Merlin: That's a good point.
Merlin: I watched – speaking of – but my point being that one of those movies was Alien.
Merlin: I mentioned this on another program recently, but Sigourney Weaver in Alien.
Merlin: That very, very – and it just – again, sorry to repeat myself, but beginning to end an outstanding movie.
Merlin: I watched it three nights ago.
Merlin: It's still so good.
Merlin: But then like, boy, you see her in her underwear and she was right in my wheelhouse.
John: Is that right?
Merlin: Oh, yes.
John: Oh, that's true.
John: You do have a Sigourney Weaver –
Merlin: Well, and like another program we're watching now with that girl from Felicity.
Merlin: She plays a Russian spy on this TV show we watch now.
Merlin: And she's just right in the pocket.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't have anything against girls who look like women.
Merlin: But I think I do like a boyish, pixie-ish something.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I've had Zoftig ladies.
John: But Sigourney Weaver was never – she's hard.
John: She's hard.
John: That's right.
Merlin: She's hard.
Merlin: Without being Hebraic.
John: She's hard and un-Hebraic.
Merlin: What's a canonical celebrity Hebraic for you?
Merlin: When you think about what you're looking for, assuming that she could get the right haircut and some combat boots, give me a sense of – if I were in the police station and we had to draw a composite sketch of your ideal Jewish, do you have a rough sense of how you put that together?
John: I can tell you exactly, and actually you wouldn't have to go far from a police station because –
John: The archetype is Jennifer Grey in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Merlin: You've got to be kidding me.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: She's the hottest of the hottest.
John: I love Sloan.
John: Jennifer Grey in the police station with Charlie Sheen and he is flirting with her and she is not having it but then she starts to melt
John: Oh, my God.
John: Jennifer Grey.
John: And then, you know, of course, when Jennifer Grey appeared in Dirty Dancing, a movie I have never seen.
Merlin: I've never seen it all the way through.
Merlin: I saw the end of it because I like Jerry Orbach.
John: Well, I didn't even know he was in it.
John: But a movie I've never seen, but I have watched the highlight reel of her dancing a few times because Jennifer Grey... Jennifer Grey.
John: Jennifer Grey pre-nosejob, super foxy.
John: Jennifer Grey post-nosejob...
John: One of those amazing situations, she had a nose job and it is like she disappeared from the earth.
Merlin: She's up there for me in – there's this weird Venn diagram of people who had like unimpeachably successful cosmetic surgery.
Merlin: And I'm not saying she looked better or worse, but she looked – I mean she didn't look like she had plastic surgery if you hadn't met her before.
Merlin: It was a great job.
Merlin: But I've never – I don't think I've seen many people with successful plastic surgery that looked more different and all they changed was her nose.
Merlin: She was – she really – I mean seriously, when that happened and people showed me those photos, I was like, there's no way.
Merlin: There's no way that's the girl from Ferris Bueller.
Merlin: Do you remember?
Merlin: Her whole face looked completely different.
John: Yeah.
John: She got a really great, super high-quality, expensive, professional nose job and she became the plainest-looking –
Merlin: albeit very pretty girl she looked like the prettiest girl in like uh like the traffic uh traffic class like if you went and had to like uh work off a ticket by going to traffic school and there was this girl across the room and you'd be like oh she's pretty wow she's she knows how to speed i'll try and sit by her but but not that she's a movie star anymore and i don't think i just want to be clear i'm not trying to impugn jennifer gray either way i have never met the woman but but you know nice lady
Merlin: You know, it's a lot like indie rock.
Merlin: People are always stampeding to get rid of the thing they still haven't realized makes them special.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: People can't wait to get to the middle of the curve, at least in my opinion.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: People can't wait to find somebody who will shave all of the edges that made them interesting.
John: That's why I religiously don't exercise.
Yeah.
Merlin: I had the same conversation today.
John: If I got to be super fit, I think I would lose a big part of what makes me so cuddly and lovable.
Merlin: Oh, John, in so many ways.
Merlin: I mean, just think about how much time you would lose over your brooding and your steaming and your organizing.
Merlin: You do a lot of organizing and moving around, right?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Well, if you spend three hours a day at the gym, that's just going to all go to shit.
John: Here's the thing about super fit guys that I don't quite understand.
John: Why do they look so clammy?
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like super fit guys, you can towel them a thousand times and never wipe the sweat all the way off.
Merlin: Oh, they have like some kind of sheen.
John: Yeah, they seem clammy and like covered with a kind of like greasy moisture, but they're dry.
John: Like they look like that even in a tuxedo.
John: Maybe it's endorphins.
John: endorphins make you look make your skin look greasy i'm not a scientist john all right you're right well see that's what i don't want i don't want no the natural sort of uh flat coloring the natural dryness of my skin and i mean appealing dryness but like appealing lack of greasy moisture on my skin i don't want to sacrifice that you've got that kind of whitish sweater weather look
John: I look like somebody whose cheeks are a little pink from it's hard to tell whether it's a cold wind or the exertion of walking up a flight of stairs.
John: Yeah.
John: But I don't want to trade that in for some kind of like Vaseline layer between me and the world.
Merlin: Is that one of those body dysphagia, dysphoria, one of those body things like the Michael Jackson disease where they think that looks good?
Merlin: They must.
Merlin: Not that they have any control over it, right?
Merlin: But, I mean, maybe they think that's... Maybe something's happened to their chemistry and they got that Karen Carpenter thing and they think they're looking moist, looks good.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: I think that's it.
John: Well, I think what happens is their skin becomes translucent because... Like, slightly translucent because the pigment that used to be... That used to make their skin...
John: look solid was redirected somewhere to like... To replace the necessary fats that they're burning off.
John: Yeah, or like as their balls shrank up into their body, the pigment from their skin has to go down and fill them back up
John: enough that they don't create an impaction.
Merlin: I can't believe you never went to medical school.
Merlin: It's astonishing.
Merlin: I had coffee with a guy this morning that I mostly just know from internet stuff.
Merlin: He's a really nice guy.
Merlin: But with just complete lack of irony, he asked me what kind of workout I do.
Merlin: Do you even lift?
Merlin: Do I lift?
Merlin: Well, I walk around the corner to my office and sometimes then I walk home and that's uphill.
Merlin: And that's a city block.
Merlin: That's not a small block.
Merlin: Even up the hill, it's a hell of a workout.
Merlin: That's a long walk.
Merlin: You got to blast the pecks or something.
John: My favorite 80s television personality... You were in college at this time.
John: I don't know if... No, no.
John: I'm sure I can phonetically follow along.
John: But it was Kevin Seal.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: He always seemed stoned on MTV, right?
Merlin: MTV's... He didn't do 120 minutes.
Merlin: What did he do?
John: He did.
John: He did 120 minutes.
John: He did headbangers ball for a while.
John: But he was... MTV is like fun, stoned...
John: slacker VJ.
John: The first one that wasn't like some radio DJ that they plucked and made into a VJ.
John: He really seemed not like a pro.
John: Yeah, he was a guy that they did a talent search and he showed up and he was like, hey, what's up guys?
John: And they said, for whatever reason, this guy with the super stoned eyes is our new VJ.
John: And when he appeared on the MTV TV, when he appeared on the screen the first time,
John: I was sitting in front of the, you know, sitting in my lounge, my Barco lounger, completely baked, drinking a Schmidt beer.
John: And this guy shows up on the screen and it's like I'm looking into a mirror.
John: Here's the guy that got the job that I wanted.
John: And yet I couldn't hate him because he was so amazing.
Merlin: It'd be like hating yourself.
John: It would be like hating the successful version of yourself.
John: Literally like hating myself.
John: And I watched, I mean, it got to the point where I had no interest in watching MTV unless Kevin Seal was on.
John: And then I would just sit and laugh and laugh and laugh at my good friend.
Merlin: I had such a different reaction.
Merlin: I mean, I didn't dislike him, but he always seemed a little affected to me.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Affected because he was baked.
John: You think he was really legitimately baked?
Merlin: Really?
Yeah.
John: I'm pretty sure he was pretty baked.
John: I was baked, and he seemed legit.
Merlin: And, you know, when you're really baked, you can tell when somebody else is baked.
John: They call it bakedar.
John: Yeah.
John: I love that show.
John: I was just sitting there.
John: I was just rolling on the floor, everything out of this guy's mouth.
John: One time he comes on and he says, you know, Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli, you know, they've been married for like 10 years already, and I'm trying to imagine what they talk about.
John: And I just picture them at home just going like, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.
John: And he starts doing the hand puppets of Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen like cuckoo, cuckooing at each other.
John: And I actually peed.
John: And it might have been because I was incredibly baked.
John: Yeah.
John: But he was speaking a certain kind of truth to you.
John: He was speaking truth to power.
John: And he was cracking himself up.
John: I wouldn't be surprised if he peed a little.
John: That was the heyday of television for me.
John: Yeah.
John: We can never go back to that.
John: Now we're back in a warm pool of nostalgia.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You remember when nostalgia really meant something.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So, nothing for Jamie Lee Curtis.
Merlin: She writes children's books now.
Merlin: We've got one of her children's books.
John: I feel like something has been lost, and it happened in me.
John: It's not anything to do with Jamie Lee.
John: Fish Called Wanda, still very, very, very attractive.
Merlin: I should watch that.
John: Is it still good?
John: Well...
John: I imagine it is good.
John: The drama that John Cleese brings to the proceedings, the seriousness of his character, I think is the tentpole that holds the whole thing up.
John: Everybody else is doing broad farce, but Cleese is bringing real pathos.
John: I think Kevin Kline's pretty great in that.
John: He's amazing, but it's not a subtle role.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: It's very broad.
Merlin: It's very broad.
Merlin: Well, John Cleese, I, he's such an interesting character in general and, you know, he's become well over the years.
Merlin: I mean, he's, I feel a certain resonance with him because he's made his own career out of being broken in public in some ways.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: I really admire the fact that he's, you know, he's, he's, I mean, part of what he brought to Monty Python was all of this ridiculous rage.
Merlin: He brought so much rage, you know, but very smart rage and,
Merlin: But and then by the time you get to Fawlty Towers, it's the time.
Merlin: I mean, you know, I guess I guess he went through a lot of stuff and he got into therapy and stuff.
Merlin: And now he's kind of a big thinker about this stuff.
Merlin: But, you know, there's there's something really resonant about his character in that movie.
Merlin: You know, it's just it's weird to be such a combination of like angry and, you know, fawning.
John: Cleese is one of those people that.
John: That I feel like he's kind of like Pete Townsend in the sense that the first time I ever laid eyes on him, before he ever did a comedy, when he arrived on the screen, the first time I ever saw him, he was the star of the show to me.
John: And I loved him.
John: You know, like the first time I ever saw Pete Townsend, before I ever saw him do anything, he was the star of the photograph.
John: And I knew that I loved him.
John: And there are those people in the world where you just... You see them and you know that they are the one you love and you will kind of follow them anywhere.
John: Like, why would John Cleese, in a cast of geniuses like...
John: like python why is cleese the star and he is you know cleese is the star in a in a democracy of of geniuses um and it's because he has this like this supernatural power i remember when i was a little kid my dad started a college and
John: in Alaska.
John: What?
John: He started a college for native guys, uh, like Eskimo guys who were at the time kind of being underserved by the university of Alaska.
John: And my dad started this, this kind of teaching.
John: It was like a, like a teacher's college called the Pacific rim.
John: Um,
John: not university but like it was called pacific rim and it was a he rented classrooms at alaska pacific university and he was giving he had he hired teachers i mean i was like six years old five years old i barely remember what he was doing and now looking back at it i cannot imagine what he thought he was doing but he had these classrooms full of
John: That was a time in Alaska when a lot of young guys were coming to Anchorage from the villages.
John: And they were having a hard time coping with city life.
John: And my dad had this idea.
John: He was going to start this school.
John: I remember walking into a classroom one time and there were like 40 guys in there that were all between the ages of like 17 and 24.
John: And they were all Native Alaskans.
John: And they were in this class and somebody was lecturing them about how to make the transition.
John: I don't remember what the class was about.
John: But I walked in and I was a little teeny kid.
John: And there was a guy in the middle of the room just sitting in a desk like any one of the 40 guys.
Yeah.
John: And I just went to him.
John: And he was just a young guy like any other.
John: And he was kind of like, oh, hey, kid.
John: And everybody laughed like the little blonde boy just kind of walked across the room, beelined for this guy.
John: And I stayed with him all day.
John: And my dad was off doing stuff and he didn't know, you know, he was just like, okay, well, I guess you're watching the kid while I go do whatever it is I'm going to go do.
John: You know, I think my dad probably left campus and went on a date, but I spent, I spent all day just like glued to this guy.
John: And my sister was with me and she, she, she was there with like the two of us and she was four.
John: The two of us were just glued to this guy.
John: And at the end of the day,
John: when it was time for him to go, they had to pry us away from him.
John: And it's not that he ever said anything to us.
John: He did not beckon to us.
John: It was just that this guy was, we knew when walking in the room, I still remember the feeling that he was a kind of royalty.
John: He was a prince.
John: And I wanted to be
John: I wanted to be with him.
John: I wanted to follow him.
John: And he was just a dumb teenager.
John: His reaction to us was like, I don't know what this is all about.
John: I don't know what these kids want.
John: But he was kind to us all day.
John: It's just that we knew that he was somebody special.
John: And...
John: I don't know whatever happened to him.
John: But every once in a while in life, you see these people, these magic people.
John: I think John Cleese is one where he walked onto the set and it was just like,
John: The star.
John: And I think he's borne that out, right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I mean – I'm thinking about what you said though because there's definitely been people like that in my own life where for reasons I cannot explain.
Merlin: It was not sexual.
Merlin: It was not intellectual.
Merlin: It was not familial.
Merlin: For no reason that I can quite –
Merlin: put my finger on, there were certain people that I was just, I was incredibly, I say attracted to, but you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like magnetized to that.
Merlin: I just want to be around all the time.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Like I want a piece of you.
Merlin: Like I want a piece of whatever your thing is, you know, charisma, maybe one way.
John: Maybe, but I mean, I don't even remember.
John: I mean, obviously, I'm trying to recall something that happened to me when I was five, but I don't remember this guy particularly doing anything.
Merlin: Well, it sounds like you remember when you say he's a teenager.
Merlin: It sounds like, you know, it wasn't like he was smooth or anything.
John: No, I mean, it was the early 70s, so he had kind of long black hair, and he was wearing an army jacket.
John: But half the guy's in the room.
John: met that description it was just that he was like you say he was magnetic in some way that at that young age i had no filter i had no social filter that kept me from just saying oh well that's the guy i want to go stand next to and you know you think about all the social i mean half of half of growing up is learning to implement social filters that keep you from making that terrible tragic error later in life you're like
John: Walk up to somebody and they're like, can I help you?
John: Oh, um, yeah, I, uh, yeah, I just wanted to come stand by you.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't really know why, but I don't know why.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I'm just going to be here all day.
Merlin: It's not sexual or anything.
Merlin: That's a sexual.
John: You're just magnetic.
Merlin: There's a, there's a, there's a, a little boy like that at my daughter's school who, I mean, it goes beyond a crush.
Merlin: Like his feelings for my daughter are, are on like this other level and,
Merlin: And it's really weird.
Merlin: Like he always wants to like – when we're getting ready to go, he wants to like bring her things and talk about our house.
Merlin: He's an adopted kid from China who's like just learned English in like the last nine months like amazingly fast.
Merlin: But he's a fantastic like smart, swell little kid and like he just cannot get enough of my daughter.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: But there's been so many people in my life like that.
Merlin: And you can't explain it.
Merlin: And you look back and like right now I can hear you almost kind of struggling to – if I'm hearing you right – struggling to describe what it could possibly have been about this person that you found so magnetic.
John: Yeah.
John: And what's astonishing is that it's entirely possible that he went back to his village and got a job pumping gas at the airport and now he is 60 years old.
John: If he's lucky.
Yeah.
John: If he's lucky, he's 60 years old and he might be sitting on an overturned apple crate watching Rachel Maddow on a satellite TV.
John: It's not necessarily so that anything amazing happened to this guy or that he became the leader of his people or anything.
John: He could just be a guy.
Merlin: No, that's the thing.
Merlin: It isn't like I've met famous people and it isn't that often that you meet somebody and they really are just a completely incandescent personality.
Merlin: You know, there are people like that.
John: Although Bobarino, Bobarino had that effect, right?
John: The first time Welcome Back Cotter came on.
John: Oh, it was obvious.
John: And it scanned, the camera scanned of the room.
John: You were like, who's the Goomba?
Merlin: I think Ron Palillo and Robert Hedges were definitely the superior actors.
Merlin: No question.
Merlin: You could tell they came from like a Shakespeare background.
Merlin: Yeah, they were actors.
Merlin: Absolutely, 100%.
Merlin: Shakespeare.
Merlin: Shakespeare actors.
Merlin: Do you remember as that show dragged on way too long?
Merlin: And then Barbarino left and they brought in that one guy who was always the replacement guy on TV shows.
Merlin: He was on Happy Days.
Merlin: You know that blonde guy, Skippy or whatever?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Not the one with the big glasses.
John: The little kid that showed up on Happy Days?
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no, no.
John: Scrappy-Doo?
Merlin: I didn't think of Cousin Oliver.
John: Oliver, yeah.
Merlin: Cousin Oliver.
John: Cousin Oliver showed up on Happy Days, right?
John: Of course he did.
John: Robbie Rist.
Merlin: He's a retired punk rocker now.
John: Where this show set in 1954 suddenly had a kid with a John Denver haircut and like poindexter glasses.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Let me start over.
Merlin: But I remember there was a very like a very special episode about Horshack.
Merlin: one time i don't remember it was i don't think it was something about horse to me all all very special episodes go through different strokes but always back to all in the family so i can't remember if it's like uh menopause or or rape or race but it was something there was something with ron palillo's character um they were they explored his shakespearean background
Merlin: See, I don't understand.
John: The Fonz is another one, like Jamie Lee Curtis, where I cannot return in my mind to a time when the Fonz... I cannot get back into the headspace where the Fonz was the coolest thing in the universe.
John: Because I have enough exposure to Henry Winkler and what a soft...
Merlin: Oh, like starting with the Michael Keaton movie.
Merlin: Starting with the Night Shift.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Oh, how about this?
Merlin: Do you remember when Diane was on there?
Merlin: What's her name?
Merlin: Sally Struthers, Johnny Martin.
Merlin: What's her name?
John: Remember that girl?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Diane.
John: What's her buddy?
John: Yes.
John: She was pretty cute in that movie.
Oh, man.
Merlin: Again, small cup, little boy top.
John: But I was stunned.
John: Oh, you know who's another one of my TV hotties?
John: Marky Post.
John: Oh, come on.
Merlin: I wrote one of my very first songs I ever wrote had Marky Post in it.
Merlin: It was a political song.
Merlin: It was about the apparent differences between us and the Soviets.
John: Well, your songs have a lot of lyrics in them.
Merlin: This is very political, John.
John: Squeeze Marky Post into there.
John: Was it a kind of a Russians love their children too?
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: There was very little yoga or tantrism.
Merlin: It was, but it was a, it was a, you know, not a Dylan ripoff, but it was one of those kind of like, you know, simple desultory kind of Paul Simon-ish kind of like list songs, you know?
Merlin: Yeah, I do know.
Merlin: Anyway, mark your post.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Well, no, no.
John: Back to Night Court.
John: Or not Night Court, but what was the movie?
Merlin: Night Shift.
John: Night Shift?
John: Yeah, when that movie came out, it was really the first film Henry Winkler was going to do after.
John: Radical, Chuck.
John: Radical.
Merlin: No, he'd been in the one where he was a pro wrestler with a worm farm.
Merlin: What was that called?
Merlin: The World's Biggest Loser.
Merlin: What was that one movie?
Merlin: You remember that one?
Merlin: His big, like, well, of course, Lords of Flatbush.
Merlin: So, as you know, Lords of Flatbush in 1974 with him and Sylvester.
Merlin: Sir.
Merlin: No, he was in Lords of Flatbush.
Merlin: Remember?
Merlin: I still remember the TV ad.
Merlin: The Lords of Flatbush, Flatbush, Flatbush, Flatbush.
John: Rated PG.
John: God, I'm cutting all this out.
Merlin: Square pegs, square pegs, square, square pegs.
Merlin: That was a good show.
Merlin: Now, boy, she had a serious proportionally giant nose at that time.
Merlin: she did i i thought she was totally cute i found her very attractive totally different head loads of flatbush totally different totally different head uh henry winkler this was 1974 and that's kind of where they came up with the fonzie character which as you know in season one was going to be this kind of minor character people loved him so much etc etc uh but henry winkler oh god this is boring i'm so sorry it
John: Well, you know... All this came about... I just recently tweeted a little thing about Pinky Tuscadero.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And her sister, Leather.
John: Leather Tuscadero.
John: Leather in the suede.
John: And what I discovered through the miracle of crowdsourcing, because I was like, whatever happened to Pinky Tuscadero?
John: Now, that was a...
John: That was a pre-runaway.
Merlin: All of a sudden you're Larry King.
Merlin: Brady's bits.
Merlin: You know who was great?
Merlin: What's the name?
Merlin: Hang on, I'll get it.
Merlin: Give me a minute.
Merlin: What's the name of that?
John: What's that gal?
John: People told me the whole story.
Merlin: Oh no, is she paralyzed?
John: no is it an other side of the mountain go to i don't know she paralyzed i thought it was an other side of the mountain thing like she got in the malachi crunch and now she's in a chair no it was a it was a situation where they loved the the audience response was so positive to pinky tuscadero that they they they uh were going to make her a major character in the next season
John: And all the promo ads in the off-season for the upcoming season of Happy Days, they were really selling Pinky Tuscadero.
John: No kidding.
John: She was in all the ads, and she was going to be a big part of the show.
John: She wanted more money.
John: No, it turned out nobody liked her.
John: Henry Winkler couldn't stand her.
Merlin: Oh, the cast couldn't get along with her.
John: The cast and the director, she was hard to get along with.
John: Oh.
John: And so they wrote her out of the show.
John: And apparently, very recently, she got sent to jail because she fired a shotgun into her neighbor's... I guess her neighbor's car alarm was going off.
John: She probably has her reasons.
John: She fired a shotgun.
John: She shot her neighbor's car.
John: I'm Pinky Tuscadero.
John: I'm Pinky Tuscadero.
Merlin: No, see, the poor thing.
Merlin: Now, that's our file card on her.
Merlin: Like, that was a thing she did for a few months in the 70s.
Merlin: Yeah, but that's what you know.
Merlin: But don't you feel lucky that there was no YouTube then?
Merlin: I mean, that poor lady, she got lucky enough.
Merlin: Gary Marshall said, hey, put this lady on the show.
Merlin: Let's bring her in.
Merlin: And now she's Pinky Tuscadero.
John: But the thing that really resonated with me was that...
John: At that stage in her life, how old was she?
John: She must have been 23.
John: She gets cast in the role of the tough girl in the pink satin jacket on the number one TV show in the country.
John: And for whatever reason, either she's a little crazy or she doesn't understand how the world works.
John: And I've seen this happen a million times.
John: She doesn't understand how the world works and she...
John: acts bigger than her actual station you know she i'm sure she was she was being lame around the cast and she didn't realize that she wasn't a big star yet and that it was not appropriate for her to be a jerk and
John: And she blew it and she got written out of the show forever after she's a footnote.
John: And you think about this person at 23 years old making what... I mean, I can put myself back in my 23-year-old mind and recall a time when I thought that success...
John: meant that i would be able to be a jerk to people and no one could be mad at me because i was successful like i legitimately suffered through a long period of feeling like the the reason to get successful was that then you would not have to be nice
John: That was the only appeal.
John: It was not money.
Merlin: Be nice to him on the way up because you're going to meet him again when you're on the way down.
John: Yeah, and I would hear those people would say things like that to me and I'd be like, you're not famous enough yet.
John: You don't know.
John: Marlon Brando didn't have to be nice to anybody.
John: It's not like Robert De Niro has to be nice to anybody.
John: Apparently De Niro is nice to people, although God knows why.
John: I think he's a little goofy, probably.
John: And it was only after many, many years of not being successful that I realized that I needed to learn to be nice to people.
John: Isn't that kind of a recent thing for you?
John: That's a fairly recent thing for you, isn't it?
John: Well, last 10 years.
John: I was 30 years old and still not entirely convinced that I needed to be nice to people.
John: You weren't that nice when I met you.
Merlin: Well... I have no role in this.
Merlin: Pinky Tuscadero is 69 now.
Merlin: she's 69 years old so how old was she in 1975 i can't do the math me neither uh she's born in 43 so she would have been 32 something like that i see a picture on her i'm sorry i did i did look at wikipedia uh picture of her with uh henry winkler in 1976 but i'm sorry you might have heard me make a little noise a couple minutes ago let me see if i can find this um
Merlin: On October 27, 2000, she was sentenced to 120 days in jail after pleading no contest to charges stemming from an August 20, 2000 arrest for hitting a man with her cane.
Merlin: Pinky Descadero.
John: That sucks.
John: Hitting a man with her cane.
John: I wonder if it's a sword cane.
John: Listen, if anybody's listening to this program and you want to get me a gift, sword cane.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, I worry about these things.
John: I worry about them, too.
Merlin: I worry about all of these things, John.
John: I was thinking of an event not that long ago where I was mean to somebody.
John: And I was like, I was mean to somebody.
John: I'm still being mean to people?
John: How have I not stopped being mean to people?
Merlin: Oh, John, everybody's mean sometimes.
Merlin: I guess.
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: Well, but...
Merlin: You're not made of stone.
Merlin: You have bad days.
Merlin: I suppose.
John: I'm trying to stop being mean.
John: Me too.
John: I'm trying so hard.
John: One of the things I've learned from Jonathan Colton, who is never mean to anybody.
John: That's because he's a pussy.
John: Well, see, that's the problem.
John: Don't you think a little bit?
John: No, in a good way.
John: I have accused him of being a pussy.
John: And you know what he says?
John: He's like, yeah, maybe.
John: I'm like, that's the pussiest thing.
John: How can you sit here and take this?
John: And he's like, I don't know.
John: Don't care.
Merlin: I'll be in my bunk.
John: But everybody loves him.
Merlin: He's a genuinely nice and thoughtful guy.
Merlin: Not thoughtful as in like he gives you greeting cards, but he thinks a lot.
John: He does think a lot.
Merlin: When you ask him a question, he very rarely, unless he's trying to make a joke, Jonathan will never, of his own accord, just shoot out an answer to be fast.
Merlin: He will almost always kind of make a face and look up at the sky and think.
John: Yeah, that's true.
Merlin: I really admire that.
John: But talk about somebody who has formed a cult around himself, which I have to say is not my goal.
John: That is not my end goal.
John: That is not why I'm saying this.
John: Please.
John: But he has really – He would love to have a cult around you.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: The people that terrify me the most are the ones that agree with me.
Merlin: How about if you could have a cult – I'm sorry to derail you.
Merlin: But if you could have a cult where you get to handpick who is in your cult, what if you get to vet them?
Merlin: Because the problem with a cult is you don't get to pick, right?
Merlin: This is the problem with a mob.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: The mob becomes this one mob mind.
Merlin: But if you got like five minutes with somebody to decide if they could be in your cult –
John: I am I am embarrassed to say that one of my long standing fantasies and this goes all the way back to seventh grade when I should have been a part of a forest service trail building program, but instead was at Wendler Junior High School in Anchorage, Alaska and forced to sit in a room with a bunch of other like pimply faced shit birds.
John: All of us with raging boners.
John: Just wishing you could go back to your bedroom and fantasize about World War I. We all had 10-hour boners, and we're sitting in this classroom being taught algebra.
John: And it was during this point in time that I developed the technology of imagining that I could stop time.
John: Because I was sitting in algebra class, and I had three...
John: Conflicting desires, all of them.
John: And I remember thinking about this long and in a detailed fashion at the time.
John: I had three desires and they were all equal.
John: I could not prioritize one desire over the other.
John: And the three desires were, A, that I wanted to go to sleep.
John: I wanted to go back to sleep.
John: Because I was very, very tired and had been forced to get up in the morning.
Merlin: Just so we're clear, this is not ranked.
Merlin: You're just starting randomly.
Merlin: One of them, one of any of them was you wanted to go to sleep.
John: I wanted to go back to sleep.
John: I did not want to get up in the morning.
John: I did not want to go to school.
John: I was forced to do these things.
John: And now I'm sitting in school and I just want to go back to sleep.
John: So that is desire one.
John: And if I could stop time, the first thing I would do is go to sleep.
John: Time would be stopped.
John: So there would be no penalty.
John: That is so practical.
John: I would sleep until I was done sleeping, and then I would wake up, and I would have lost nothing.
John: The second thing I wanted was to see naked girls.
John: And if I could stop time, I would first go to sleep, and then this was my plan in seventh grade.
John: I would go through the whole school.
John: Everybody would be frozen.
John: And I would move, I think, with a dolly.
John: I'm not sure.
John: I would move all the pretty girls that I wanted to see naked.
John: I would move them all to the gym.
John: And then I would take off their clothes and I would see them naked.
Merlin: And time is still frozen at this point.
John: Time is frozen.
John: Okay.
John: So I would have time to put their clothes back on and deliver them back to their classrooms via Dolly or whatever method.
Merlin: I mean, let's be honest, though.
Merlin: I mean, this might take four or five days for the round trip, right?
Merlin: To get them all the way back and, like, with the pencil in their hand and everything.
John: Time will stop, so.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And this was a long time before it had occurred to me that I would ever actually have sex.
John: I had no interest in, I did not understand how I, certainly you couldn't have sex with somebody without their consent.
John: So that was off the table.
John: I just wanted to see them without their clothes on.
John: It was a simple matter.
John: That doesn't seem that complicated.
John: It wasn't that complicated.
John: And if I could go back in time and talk to myself, then I would say, hey, listen, there's a better way to do this than stopping time and moving them all to the gym.
John: It may take you a couple of tries.
John: I can't wait to hear number three.
John: Number three was that I wanted chocolate chip cookies.
John: In no particular order.
John: All three desires were equal.
John: But after I had slept and I had seen all these girls naked, then I could eat.
John: I could find and eat as many chocolate chip cookies as I wanted.
Merlin: Time has stopped.
Merlin: Nobody's going to stop you.
John: Time has stopped.
John: And then I would start time again and no one...
John: No one would notice.
John: The girls might feel like, why are my panties on backwards?
Merlin: I was going to say, where's all the cookies and why are my leg warmers on wrong?
John: And somewhere in the town, there would be some large woman in a chef's hat that was like, what?
John: Where'd all the cookies go?
John: Why does John Rudder look so rested?
John: But that was how I was going to use the most powerful power of all.
Merlin: You should have been building trail, really.
John: I had no business being in that.
Merlin: If you had been really worn out by the end of the day, you might have had that dream, but you wouldn't have remembered it because you would have treasured it.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: You're going to get good sleep when you cut trail.
Merlin: Let's be honest.
Merlin: You won't be able to do it when you want.
John: My other daydream in that same era was that the Russians invaded.
John: Yeah.
John: And that all of a sudden we looked out of their classrooms and the gym was full of like paratroopers a la Red Dawn.
Merlin: It's pretty close to Red Dawn.
John: Although this fantasy was a long time before Red Dawn.
Merlin: I had to be a welder who danced.
John: No, I had presaged the... I had pre-visioned the... Oh, that was your IP.
Merlin: You came up with that.
John: Because we were in Alaska.
John: The Russians were like... Well, it was the Cold War.
John: Here they came.
John: You were right there.
Merlin: You guys were the front yard of America.
John: That's right.
John: And I imagined that the yard was full of paratroopers and that all the kids got up and started screaming and we all ran, again, to the gym because that's where you went.
John: And in my fantasy...
John: I was put in charge because I was in the Civil Air Patrol.
Merlin: You had the training.
John: And I had the training.
Merlin: You'd help direct parking at scouting events and stuff like that?
John: No, no, no.
John: That I would form the students into troops.
John: It would be a very brief training session because the Russians would be in the parking lot.
John: But we would mount a defense.
Merlin: But you would have time to give them basic, if you like, marching orders and then give them the appropriate amount of encouragement and direction so that they could go and fight back the Reds efficiently.
Merlin: But you would know.
Merlin: You would know in that moment other people are losing their heads, but you would have the focus to know how to bring those troops together, even those young, scrappy, unseasoned troops.
John: Yeah, I had the training and also most of the time I was wearing a flight suit under my canvas.
Merlin: You're like a kind of Spider-Man.
Merlin: You're always ready.
John: And I feel like by hook or by crook, the long way around, now, Merlin, you and I, we're actually in a position where we have a high school gym full of confused students.
John: And we have the opportunity in a few brief moments every week
John: to form them into hardened shock troops to defend not against russian paratroopers
John: but against snorks.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Is that the candy?
Merlin: Normals.
Merlin: Oh, God, you've been preparing your whole life for this moment.
Merlin: There's so many scenarios that you have gone through in your head.
Merlin: You know, I'm sitting around looking at garter belts, and you're figuring out how we're going to beat the Russians.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I feel like I've wasted so many fantasies.
John: I just got a text from a friend who is at a local auction.
John: Down in Renton and his text just says you missed the guns.
John: Hmm.
Merlin: So where the black people moved, right?
Merlin: Well, among other things, Renton is the town to the south where all you were suggesting that I think that's where a lot of people who got pushed out like rising prices.
Merlin: They couldn't keep up with the property taxes.
Merlin: They go to Renton.
John: Yes, that's correct.
Merlin: And they love guns.
Merlin: They love guns.
John: The town that our town made.
John: It used to be a town that had a drugstore and a hardware store.
John: And now it's just a town.
John: It's just one of those towns.
Merlin: You guys do podcasts that sound like John Mellencamp songs.
John: Yeah, and there's an RC modeling store on Main Street, though.
John: You know what I mean?
John: If an RC modeling store is on Main Street... Yeah, if it opens up at the old mall on the outskirts of town, that's pretty cool.
Merlin: Your town is dead.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Wow, wow, wow.
Merlin: Chocolate chip cookies.
John: That's right up there.
John: And I swear to you, right now, if there was a naked girl sitting on my couch and a bag of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, I would still be torn.
Merlin: But you've stopped time.
John: You don't have to choose.
John: You know what?
John: I think right now, I would probably go to sleep first.
Merlin: You've really grown.