Finding Blessings and Throwing Vases

A few months ago, a listener we're calling Ethan sent us an email. The subject line was: "Sugar babies cost me $8,000 and my marriage."  Ethan told us that he hired sex workers from the website Seeking Arrangement for over a year, while also going to couples counseling with his wife as their marriage struggled. "My justification for it initially was, you know, I'm going to have a good time so that I can have more energy to try and fix my marriage," he told me. "'Cause I think, you know, when I first went on to Seeking Arrangement, I was exhausted. But I wasn't ready to give up on the marriage yet."  Ethan says he started going on Seeking Arrangement after hearing more about it on our show, from our episode "When 'Daddy Dates' Pay The Bills." And while we aren't proud that this story of the end of a marriage includes our show as a key plot point, we wanted to hear more about why Ethan decided to cheat⁠—and to understand what hard conversations he was trying to avoid.

4 Maalis 202031min

When comedian Maria Bamford moved to LA in her early 20s, she struggled to cover her food and rent as she was breaking into the comedy world. "Although I had a college degree, I just did not know how to get and keep a full time job, much less a part time job," she told me. When an unexpected medical bill landed her in debt, she almost moved home to Minnesota—but found the support she needed from a money-oriented 12-step program. She eventually held down a job working as a secretary at an animation studio, which led to her getting voiceover work—and, importantly, health insurance through the Screen Actors Guild.  Since then, Maria has developed a signature brand of comedy that leans into her mental health struggles, the quirky characters in her family and the anxieties of everyday life. I talk with her about the unconventional way she learned to manage money, her memories of psychiatric hospitalization, and how she's working on having better arguments with her husband.  Maria's new comedy special is called Weakness Is The Brand. Listen to this This American Life episode to hear more about the Gottmans, the husband and wife psychologists Maria has turned to for marriage advice.   If you or someone you love is at risk of suicide, please go to https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ to find resources and someone to talk to.

26 Helmi 202029min

Ken Jeong described his role as Mr. Chow in the 2009 blockbuster The Hangover as "the most obscene love letter to a spouse one could ever have.” He peppered his dialogue with bits of Vietnamese as an inside joke with his wife Tran.  Ken met his wife while they were both practicing medicine at the same hospital in Los Angeles. Ken had always done comedy on the side, even performing midnight stand-up while he was working long hours during his residency. But after he and Tran married, he quit medicine to pursue acting full-time. Then, a year later, Tran was diagnosed with stage III triple negative breast cancer, one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer. At the time, they had young twins, and Ken had just gotten an offer to play an Asian mobster in a Las Vegas buddy movie — the role that would be his big break. Tran encouraged him to take the part. "You're kind of burning out right now," she told him. So he channeled his anger about her illness into his character's comedic rage.  Back in 2015, he talked to me about raising a family in the shadow of cancer, and how his careers in comedy and medicine converged in unexpected ways.

19 Helmi 202023min

Twyla Tharp's mother first put her in dance classes when she was a child living in Southern California. "I've always been highly programmed," Twyla told me. But when she got to New York and realized her ballet skills weren't "top drawer," she decided to dig into modern dance and began studying with legendary dancers like Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. "I said to myself, 'Well, okay, Merce does great what he does, and Martha does great what she does, but I don't want to do what they do,'" she said. "And I think ultimately that's how I became my own dancing person."In the six decades since, she's done exactly that—and she's not done yet. Now 78, Twyla joined me from our studio in New York to talk about the start of her prolific career back in the mid-60s, the logistics of raising her son as a single parent while touring internationally, and how now, at 78, she's learning to deal with new physical limitations. Here is an excerpt of Twyla's first work, Tank Dive (1965): And here is a bit of The Golden Section (1983): You can check out more of Twyla's work on her website.  Looking for our Valentine's Day project? Go here!

12 Helmi 202029min

When author Carmen Maria Machado was in her mid-20s, she had her first relationship with a woman. She was in graduate school at the time, and in the beginning, her ex made her feel special. "I just wanted somebody to like, look at me and be like, 'I want you,' you know? And that's exactly what she did," she told me. While Carmen says the relationship quickly became abusive, she was only able to start describing it that way once their relationship ended. Carmen went on to chronicle this relationship and how she deals with its aftermath in her new, critically-acclaimed memoir In the Dream House. She sat down with me to talk about coming to terms with the relationship, and complicating common narratives around abuse. You can find the fact sheet Carmen mentioned in the episode here. It was put together by Hyejin Shim and Graywolf Press specifically for queer survivors of abuse, but it offers insights and resources that are useful for everyone.

5 Helmi 202032min

Last week, we partnered with the NPR podcast Code Switch to bring you two episodes all about race and friendship. If you haven’t heard those episodes yet, definitely go back, and take a listen to those first.  As part of that project, we also put out a survey about how race has factored into your friendships. More than 1,000 of you have taken it so far, and we’ve gotten some really interesting responses. And we’ve also heard from some of you that taking the survey felt...ill-fitting; that answering questions about the number of friends you have outside of your race feels like an experience designed for white people.  We wanted to talk through some of this with Dr. Deborah Plummer. She's a psychologist and professor, who’s studied cross-racial friendships and helped us create our race and friendship survey. Her latest book is called “Some of My Friends Are…: The Daunting Challenges and Untapped Benefits of Cross-Racial Friendships.”

29 Tammi 202013min