Guest Jane Borden talks about how debutante training did not prepare her for life in New York, how a night at UCB changed her life, how she built her writing career, and her 2011 memoir, I Totally Meant To Do That.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 9 - New York and Old South
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host Gil Roth and I have no intro for you this time. Why? Well, I've been too busy booking guests for upcoming episodes, that's why. I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of this whole podcasting thing, but I know I need more reps in order to build a good show for you. So I'm hoping to move up for my once-a-month schedule to at least once every two weeks. If all the people I've lined up actually come through, I may even go to a weekly schedule for a while, but I don't want to over promise. Some of the guests will be family or friends, and some will be people I never met before. Like this episode's guest, Jane Borden. A palomine suggested I contact Jane when I put out the call for, as I put it, good guests who can talk books and make for good conversation, and Jane sure fit the bill. She's the author of "I Totally Met to Do That," a memoir published in 2011 by Crown about how a North Carolina debutante came to spend more than 10 years living a pretty dissolute life in New York City. It's a pretty charming book, and yeah, I actually read a guest book in order to prep for an interview. And even better, she checked out some past episodes of this show to find out what it's about. Anyway, we had a fun conversation about her book, and building a writing career, and what comes after New York, and how a night at the upright citizens brigade changed her life, and what comic she reads. Anyway, let's join the fun already in progress. So my guest with a spritz, Jane Borden, author of "I Totally Met to Do That," essays or memoir? Memoir. Memoir, okay, I was going to say-- I stopped hedging. That's my decision. As a big Montaigne fan, I was saying, yes, it's more of a memoir of coming to terms with New York, but I guess it's just an opening question. What did New York City mean to you before you got here? What was your impression? I remember having a conversation with my sister, and I was too old to not know this, but she was saying something about New York, and then she was using the word Manhattan, and she was kind of using them interchangeably, and I said, wait, what? And we sat down, and she explained all the burrows to me, and she said, "When people say New York, a lot of the times what they mean is Manhattan, but not always, and we went through the whole thing, and after living here for a few years, I remember just thinking it's so funny that I couldn't have known that." But there's so much. I grew up 25 miles away. This has always been the city. To me, at any time I'm in conversation with someone, I said, you know, we're going into the city. Not realizing that to anyone else, the city is some other city. To me, this is the center of the world. It's also a very strange city when you've been to enough other ones. But yeah, I guess when I, to me, New York was midtown, Broadway, and, you know, burgdorffs, and very expensive lunches. But I guess I also knew that my sister wasn't in that world. In my mind, I guess her life was bohemian, although in retrospect, it was not at all a bohemian lifestyle. Well, again, did the village exist as we used to know it? That's true. That is where she lived in the West Village. But yeah, I mean, I guess as soon as I got here, it became something completely different, which is to say itself, and that can mean a million things. And it does, over the years, it can continuously change its definition. And how did it transform for you? I mean, obviously, 9/11 is the big transformative moment for a lot of people in the city. But beyond that, what did you see change over the 11 years, both within you and within your relationship to the city? I guess it was slowly peeling away the layers of the transient inhabitants and veneer of New York to try to learn more about people who actually grow up here and have generations here. And I'm not sure which of those two parallel New York world, the transient world and the, I don't know, habitated world is more real, because to a certain degree, New York is a transient city. And that's what kind of feeds it and keeps it going. And I wonder, I'm sure this information is available in the census somewhere, or maybe not, you know, what the percentages are. No, multiple generation. Yeah, what's the majority of population in New York, people from here, from somewhere else? It seems, I mean, the breakdown of the city has always been this notion of coming to reinvent yourself, a place where you're always making yourself into this person you wanted to be. Friend Leibowitz has a wonderful public speaking documentary. Have you seen that? Oh, I'll send you a copy of that. I'm sorry, I'll send you a legitimate DVD that's bought correctly and perfectly online of that. It's, she came here at 18 from suburban New Jersey and became friend Leibowitz in the process. The 18 year old was not the person she, you know, ultimately became. Did you have that sense of, of invention? I mean, it sounds. Well, it's interesting what you say about invention. I mean, because I guess this is another question is, is it that you come here to create an idea of yourself that's outside of yourself that you're moving toward? Or is it that you come here to become the person you are that outside of the city you can't? Right. Some people do think of it in terms of finding the new self or again, burying the awkward, you know, teenager, et cetera. And in your estimation, you came from a perspective of, well, I think that, and this is something I've really noticed since leaving the city, how you're giving away the end of the book. I know, yeah. How much of myself is defined by my, the way I am with other people, you know, your friends or your family bring out sides of yourself and you indulge that side when you're with that person. And so if you're not with that person, that side of yourself is dormant. And I think in New York, the anonymity allows you to, at the same time, be more just some purer form of yourself. If you're not, you know, in North Carolina, I was attached to only a couple of communities. And so I was mostly that person that was reflected by those communities. But up here, you know, a combination of being more by myself to find out what that was. And then on the other end, my interactions were with wildly different people who were bringing out very different sides of myself. And so I wonder if I discovered some way, I'm trying to think of a way to say this, it's not completely cliched. Oh, that's a New York brings out on us all. It's okay. I was thinking a purer form of the self, but that wouldn't be true for the, for the millions of interactions, because those are all in some way not false, but they're maybe just a less reflected version, one that you hadn't taken account of. Or a more hyper reflected, even more varied, triangulating some sort of truth out of a million reflections instead of just three, if those three are all very similar to begin with. And finding out which are common elements are among all those different perspectives or different performances you have to put on for other people. Yeah. So speaking of performance, or what brought you back to New York? Well, I'm bird sitting. We're sitting in my friend's apartment right now. They're out of town, and we're taking care of their parrotlets, which is a kind of animal. I didn't, I was not. I thought they were parotinos, but and also, you know, to be up here. And I am doing a lot of shows while I'm here, which is great fun because performing requires a lot of travel now that I'm outside of the city. So I only do it, you know, two or three times a month, whereas I'm up here for eight nights and I'm doing six shows. So that's fun. It's very fun. But what is the, what was the process like sort of down shifting, leaving New York and moving back to North Carolina? How did that? Was there any sort of PTSD, you know, the post-traumatic stress moments of just looking at people and thinking, you have no idea what's going on up there. Well, first I should say that I'm actually in Tennessee because the, in the book I write about choosing between New York and North Carolina, the big cosmic joke is that I fell in love with an academic and you kind of go wherever they get jobs. So we did get to the south, which has been wonderful. But Tennessee is very different from North Carolina. I was surprised to discover since their neighbors. But yeah, it's been, I had no idea how much of a shift it was going to be. I thought there were many, many mornings where I woke up and and just had no idea, like, where am I? You know, whose furniture is this and who is this hairy alien in my home? Oh, right. That's my husband. Yeah, it's taken a lot of time for me to adjust. We have a dishwasher. Who has dishwashers? I was just in an apartment in Williamsburg with actually had a washer and dryer set up and I thought, Oh, that must be wonderful unless it's like in that movie Brazil and the cops come in to bust you for having plumbing that you shouldn't have. But, you know, it's actually wondering because one of my wife and I were driving to that place before coming here, we got off the expressway, came to a traffic light and it's Williamsburg and on all four corners of the intersection, Hasidic Jews just started sort of congregating on the corners and it was like the Hasidic version of Inception where there were antibodies and they were all just just coming for a car and black hats and coats. And I just had that moment of, you know, three blocks from now, it's going to be some other ethnicity and then another and another and, you know, I don't know what that's like. Well, where I live, it's pretty much all the same. Yeah. We're on a college campus and so you're always going to have a wonderful collection of progressive and very, very well read professors, which has been a wonderful opportunity for me just to, I'm just learning so much all the time. It's incredible. What's your husband teach? He's a Renaissance scholar in the English, he's in the English department. Great. So he focuses on the time when they killed the King, the English Civil War in the 17th century. I've learned a lot about that since we started dating to a really interesting time period, but it's very different from palling around with a bunch of comedians, you know, making fart jokes. So, and I'm the one trying desperately now to find someone who wants to make fart jokes with me. Any comedy scene down there that you can know? Not at all. Where it's the wanney, which is a really small school and the town is the school, essentially, and there's nothing else around it. So it's very secluded and it's beautiful, it's gorgeous. I, you know, rediscovering nature and somewhat suspiciously, I can't even worry of it. I feel like I'm being repatriated somehow. And then drop back into the wild with a tag on your ear and... Yeah, I might steal that. Yeah, feel free. I'm the cause of humor and others. I think that that works well enough for me, so I'll never be on stage. I can at least, you know, give people shtick, but yeah, that's... I mean, I definitely feel like the big jerk on campus, you know, the big idiot who's just trying to keep my mouth shut and not get my husband fired, you know? The lady with the whoopee cushion. Yeah. That's pretty much, yeah. Interesting. Now the, in the book, you focus on sort of your immediate relationship, almost your physical relationship with the city. It doesn't go so much into, well, you didn't write the book for me, which would have been about the writing jobs and sort of the act of becoming an editor and writing and building a career in New York. You do mention a couple of the smaller scale jobs you were involved in, but can you sort of walk me through that process, what it was like building a writing career in New York in the last decade? Well, I started out and I really fell into everything accidentally. I have a career by attrition, so I understand entirely. Everyone asks me, you know, oh, you did, did you always wanted to be a writer or you, or you must have majored in English or creative writing, or did you do comedy in college? I'm like, no, any of those things have been true. I'd probably be a lot further along now, but I just moved up to New York and without a plan, just started working. I was a religious studies major, so I knew I wasn't going to do anything with that. Although I did, my plan on my back burner was go back and be a PhD and try to be a professor. Great. That definitely didn't happen. I fell into a comedy. A friend of mine took me to the UCB theater. They just opened and saw long-form improv for the first time ever and was just completely dumbstruck. I signed up for classes that night. I thought it looked like the most fun thing I'd ever seen. It did turn out to be the most fun thing I'd ever seen. I spent many years at the UCB. I was there, you know, four nights a week. My family was calling me like, Jane, I think you're spending too much time. I had a little bit of an aptitude for it. That was the first time when I thought maybe I can have a career that is somehow creative and comedic. First, I thought I wanted to write for television. I started getting jobs as a researcher on shows and assistant, or assistant, that sort of thing. I learned pretty quickly that prose and print was where I wanted to be. That little magazine, the L, was launching. Me, L? Yeah, the L. It's a bi-weekly. It's relatively young, obviously. This is where I show my suburban New Jersey roots. I apologize. But they were launching a friend of mine was involved, and I thought, well, if they don't have any money, then they can't afford to pay anyone with experience. So I said, you know, how about you don't pay me, and you give me a column. I wrote something on spec, and they said, yeah, I really credit them with that. That's, I guess, where I cut my teeth, and they let me, I had 400 words in every issue, and it loosely based on the culture of food in the city. They wanted food writing, but they didn't want it to be reviews, and it was really fun. They let me write poems, sometimes I wrote a poem about competitive evening, I think, competitive years in the city. It was just fun. Nothing rhymed with Kobayashi, which was very difficult. Yeah, exactly. He was the only one. Yeah, and I guess from there I got the job at Time Out, which is where I was for seven years. And then I started to write creative essays and got a few placed and thought, maybe I should try a book and ask them. Are you trying a second book at this point, or is that? I am. I am. I like that you brought up Montana because trying is definitely. That was my moment of further. Kind of essays, but they're more, you know, life is a couple of the pieces in the book did seem to have a, you know, they get testing out a thesis about what the city is, or about what your relationship is. I thought, in particular, whether someone's a true New Yorker, as a local ish, we've had the who's a real Yankee and who isn't over the last 15 to 20 years, and it's reading your piece, like, I know that's largely, you know, the sort of barometer we went by for who, you know, matters on the Yankees and who, you know, he was nice, but he was never one of us, you know. But anyway, so yeah, trying the second book, yeah, you know, I had the benefit of a lot of hindsight with the first book and the topic for the second book is still happening. So I'm figuring this one out as it goes a lot more than I was with the first one. Still a nonfiction? Yes, still a nonfiction memoir, hopefully humorous. But, and you know, very similar, I'm, I'm discovering as well in theme, I'm writing again about being in a purgatory of sorts, you know, in a transitory place, except instead of geographically, it's a purgatory of time, I guess. I feel like I'm suddenly been thrust into adulthood. I don't know how to be an adult or what that means, and I'm already way too old to not know what's going on. It's, it's an interesting trip, but I most of the guys I know, most people I know, including, you know, couples, marriage, forties, kids, we still feel like children, or we still feel like, you know, a 40 year old boy, basically. And I'm largely convinced that previous generation didn't have this, although my father tried living up to that, that ethos in his forties and, you know, just trying to jerk everything and go be a teenager. I have that vibe, I don't think it's just an urban city thing that our generation has no idea how to grow up, and I have no idea what that means for, you know, the next 10, 15 years, kids younger than us. I, you know, we all have our theories about how bad, you know, each subsequent generation is. But yeah, it is an interesting take on how we, how we become adults. I mean, we have jobs and responsibilities and families, but I think a lot of us still have that sense of, well, that's really being a grown up. I could just, you know, go run away if I need to, or, you know, someone can take care of this for me. I think, I don't know, not that I want to steal your entire essay, say collection, but, but yeah, it's a, it's a phenomenon I've noticed more and more with, you know, friends who I essentially write off once they have children, I figure, I think I'm more important things than, than, you know, calling or hanging out or something. Then discover they don't. A lot of them, it's still the hey, I really want to get together, because, you know, kids, desperate for some adult time. Yeah, they can wear you down. Yeah, adult, there's that word again. I just haven't considered myself an adult. I mean, it took me seven years to consider myself a writer. I don't, it's been, you know, a decade and a half as an editor, and I managed, no, no, I don't write. I just kept a blog for nine years straight and do this, and then the other in my spare time. But how do you carve out time, or how do you allocate time in terms of writing? And we can make this one of those Paris review interviews where we do the, you know, what's it like? What wouldn't you actually sit down and begin writing? You know, I set a limit of however many hours a day, I, I think, I set, I set a deadline, and then I guesstimate how many hours it will take me to do the things I need to do. And then I count backwards, and I divide the days by the hours, and I have to do that many hours a day. And I try to have the different parts of the writing process all working in tandem so that, you know, you, I might not need as much brain power for an ideas generating session as I would when I'm actually sitting there with the keyboard. So if I wake up one morning and I'm tired or out of it, or just not, or I have, you know, I'm blocked or whatever, then I still have tasks I can perform to meet my hourly, you know, my hours for the day that I need to achieve. Editing is, is the thing that you need the least amount of brain power for in my hand. Oh yeah, no, I've been telling people that for years. That's, there was an interview I read years ago with a comics writer who had some horrendous sinus infection that that they couldn't diagnose couldn't treat for a while. And there was a moment where they thought it might actually infect his brain and give him trouble. And he said in the interview that he was really worried for his health. He knew his writing career would be over, but at least he could still be an editor. I don't think he knew what he was saying at that moment, but I took it badly anyway. Well, I should back up. I did misspeak a little bit. I don't mean to say brain power. I mean to say motivation. Yeah, it's more mechanical process. Well, and once, and you just start reading it and then I'm in it, you know, it's the, it's the getting into the writing with the keyboard that can be such a struggle. I mean, you know, I think frequently as many writers do of that scene in adaptation where, you know, the muffin and the coffee and the walking around the house. And it's just, you know, yes, yeah, I bridge from that to synecdoche New York instead, which can give you an incredibly wrong idea of what the creative process is like, even when it's going perfectly fine that you can see everything go completely off the rails. If you haven't seen it yet, that's, yeah, it'll, it'll horrify you and completely confuse you. But I go back every couple of months and, and you know, refresh it just so I can feel as though even if I'm not being creative, at least I'm not doing the wrong thing. That's, that's, you know, at least whatever idea I had didn't completely flail and go in the wrong direction. Have you ever looked at fiction or you really focus? I mean, obviously the improv and storytelling. Yeah, it's not all fact, but you know, do you think in terms strictly of fiction at this point or not? I love fiction. I would love to write a novel at some point or I, you know, I, at this point, I am humbled by it and a little scared of it. You know, I, that's not to say I wouldn't give it a shot. Like I said, I would love to, but I'm, I have an idea. I'm enjoying for another nonfiction. So I don't even have to worry about making that decision yet. But yeah, I have, I have so much respect for fiction writers. I just, I'm, I've never considered myself to be the kind of person who can just pull things out of the air. Although improv. Well, how does, how does your improv training? Sorry, it's atmosphere here in the basement. How did the, the improv training inform your writing, do you think, or how to feed the creative process and that respect? I mean, improv teaches you to not have expectations or assumptions. And I think that can be very helpful in the writing process. I'm not judging myself. I'm not really hard on myself when I'm coming up with ideas or trying to figure out what things are because I've just learned through the repetition of improv that you never know what's going to lead to something. And the biggest, you know, killer of an improv scene is hesitation or fear. They say follow the fear a lot and, and improv. But I, I don't know that I would consider improv to be the sort of thing where you're pulling stuff out of thin air because you're, you're feeding so much off of your scene partner. And you know, I guess you could make the argument that your scene partner is feeding off you. So you're, you're both generating and, and the great improvisers are the ones who can generate information. I mean, it can't just be a loop of feeding on, you know, the first two lines that you say. But the, the greatest improvisers are also really good listeners and they paying attention and any little movement or, you know, a hesitation in your scene partner in some way. That's the, where the interesting information is and, and really improv is just reacting. And I struggled, I love improv and, you know, I was not a bad improviser, but I, I don't consider myself to have ever been really incredible at it either because I struggled so much with getting out of my own head. I would just, and I think that's why it was so good for me to do it. Because it helped me a lot to get out of my own head. But those moments when I was able to not be standing over the scene and watching it, but to actually be in it, it's just an incredible feeling. It's like, you know, time disappears. Just those moments of, I must be very zen. I'm not trying to know what zen is, but I think that's it. Yeah, closer. If you can name it, then it's probably not it. That's, that's, you know, one New York question that I don't know how to ask without it coming off somehow as, as insulting. Yeah, I know, I know. It was a weird thing. The whole time I sat there kind of scribbling notes like, is there a way to bring this up? Do you, do you feel that you've proved what you needed to prove in New York? Is there that sense of, I mean, so well, so we should begin with, do, do I feel that I had something to prove or did you feel over the time that you were here that, that you started to, you know, was there, because it doesn't seem early on, at least from the Jane of the book, that there was a goal necessarily in mind in New York, but did you come to, to feel as though this is not that I've done everything I needed to do here, but I sort of either proved to myself or proved to the city or fulfilled something. I mean, I think the, that's not something I have, I had, excuse me, ever investigated in myself. I spent, you know, 10 years just floating around and having fun and experimenting and adventuring, and that was my goal. But in writing the book, I, that, that suddenly seemed somewhat distasteful to me and, and I became the sense of having those adventures without having something concrete. Well, I, I, I began to wonder if it wasn't important in life to make decisions and to actually be in control. That floating around is great, but maybe only to a certain point, and that's part of what the book became for me was, if I just continue to float like this, where, where am I going? You know, and, um, crazy cat lady, crazy cat lady. It's true. And, and, so I, I said, okay, well, there's going to be a decision in my life, and it's going to be about where I live, where, where is home. I want that to be a decision I make, and not just individuality. I ended up here. I understand. Right. And so, and, and in that regard, then I began to wonder, why am I here? If I, I have floated all this time, right? But I've never left New York. So what am I trying to prove? And I began to try to figure that out, I guess, and decided ultimately that, that the book was my love letter to New York and that after having written it, um, I would have said to the city what I needed to say. Do you see yourself living back here again someday online? I love it. I love New York. I always will. I'm here all the time. I, you know, I told my friends when I was leaving, I was like, don't, you don't need to say goodbye. I'm going to be here all the time. Yeah, how difficult is it doing, uh, having a career, as you want to have being in so why? Well, you know, when the, the 60 to 70 percent of the career that happens in solitude, it's just great. Yeah, I just don't know how much of it is networking, how much is, you know, and that's the part that, you know, being in front of people. Yeah. And I'm definitely the sort of person that gets inspiration from other people and, and thrives off that. So that's been a challenge for me to find ways, um, to creatively interact. And I think a lot of that is, it just takes time to get to know people. You'll be running open mic nights at the college. That'll be, you know, I had kind of thought in the back of my head, oh, well, you know, I can still enjoy improv to a certain degree and maybe make a little cash by coaching the local improv team. Surely they'll be interested in having people there isn't one. And they're comedy nerds everywhere. That's, that's, I don't know. I mean, there's 1500 students there and there's no, I went to Hampshire College, Chinese school, Western Massachusetts. There was an open mic night. I remember one kid I laughed at. I was pissed off that I didn't think of the joke that he thought up. And apparently that kid is Eugene Merman. I gave the commencement speech at our school now. I'm like, holy crap, that's the same guy who had a great joke back and okay. That's because he actually did this as opposed to my, you know, just making snide comments about people behind their back, which I find an art form, but nobody else seems to be wanting to paint me for. Yeah. I mean, I, I am considering this year just putting up a flyer or something because I miss it. I really do. And, you know, I don't, I don't need, I'm not necessarily interested in trying to be on an improv team in front of an audience, but I don't know, maybe when I'm traveling a local group would let me rehearse with them on a Sunday afternoon or something. I just, it's just so fun. It's so fun. Go. Is that what you missed most from the city? I really miss being surrounded by strangers. I really miss anonymity. It's when he's a fishbowl. And, you know, that has positive and negatives. There's a very supportive community. I've, I haven't felt this supported since I left North Carolina. And that's a really wonderful feeling. I mean, there were a lot of times in New York where I thought, you know, I could die and no one would find me for 10 days. And that's why you have roommates. That's why you don't find a one bedroom. And so that's been great. But at the same time, there's no isolation and isolation can feed you in many ways I've discovered. In these terms, at least you're in an academic area, so you're not, you're not in a small town, Hicksville sort of thing, or at least around, you know, people who are reading, people who are, I don't want to say making art, but at least people who are reading books. Yeah. No, wait, one of our, I have a more diverse group of friends than I ever had in New York, which was an interesting paradox for me to discover because in New York, just by sheer number, you know, you can be surrounded by two dozen people who are exactly like you. And that's wonderful. I mean, it's really fun, but it's also very self-indulgent. And now that I live in Solani, I have, you know, one of my good friends as a psychologist. I have a good friend who's a painter. I have a lot of friends who are over 60, which has been great. Yeah, that's a weird trip. When you start with a big age gap with people and realize that no matter what perspective you had among a variety of friends, it's still locked in that sort of temporal zone that, you know, you just don't have that range in sight. The literary part of this blog demands that our podcast demands that I ask, who do you read? Who have you been reading? Who do you like to read? Who inspired you? Well, my favorite stuff to read is pop science, I guess. Yeah. I was a, I was kind of a science and math geek growing up, makes no sense that I'm trying to have a career in creative writing. Although I think that we, I think that we move toward the things we aren't good at in life to a certain degree. No, I think it's just you, maybe. But so I still feed that, you know, I still feed that indulgence. One of my favorite books I've ever read, and this is the book that I'm always pushing on people. I've bought copies and threatened, I'm sure they don't read it, but there's this wonderful book by Richard Rangham and Dale Pearson called Demonic Males. That's a terrible, that's a terrible title. I, several times when I was reading it on the subway, I would get snide comments from men assuming that it was some feminist ranch about it. Yeah, and it's actually about, and I'd be like, no, that's about monkeys. But in a sense, you could also, yeah, yeah. But they, these doctors set out to find the roots of human violence, and it all started because they, there was a discovery probably in the 70s during or right after Jane Goodall's work that chimpanzees and humans are the only two species on the entire planet that commit violence against themselves for no reason. And so they began, you know, and of course they're also our closest relatives. So they began investigating this, and was this whole paradigm shift in understanding human violence? Because I feel like, or they argue, and I haven't to agree that we have always considered violence to be an aberration as if there was some garden, peaceful garden, even in our past, and it's just not true. It's, it's genetically in us, and they still don't really know why. Although, you know, their theories, it all comes down to sex and food. Well, it's like New York, that's, that's food and stand up, but you know, mainly. But I, I just, I loved this book so much because, of course, I mean, first of all, it was fascinating, but it made me feel really at peace about the violence, about our violent tendencies. It helped me to accept it, I guess, more as human nature. Is there any not to characterize or stereotype the entire South? Any issues in terms of the, you know, what we're not descended from, those things, we're created by God. Any, any creation versus evolution, you know, hassles with people you brought this book up with? Well, I guess I've been, I guess I've been selective about it. Okay, well, I hand it off too. Pick your spots, yeah. But I, you know, where we live is a very interesting place because it is a university and it is in the middle of the woods in a very rural part of Tennessee. The county that we're in is actually the meth capital of the country, maybe the world. Yeah, it always freaked me out that all those meth capitals tend to be in the most boring places, because you would think those are the last places you want to be up for 48 hours straight. You know, you think you'd want to be on barbiturates the whole time. Whatever, that's, that's, you know. So it's, it's a wonderful area and there's lots of state fairs and meat and threes, which is a phrase I had never heard that phrase before either, but a meat and threes, you know, where you go in and you choose, you want the ham or the fried chicken or whatever in three sides, meat in three. Okay. Yeah. And we went to the cornbread festival recently and it's just wonderful. I'm really enjoying learning about rural Tennessee, but it is so very different from Suwani and I think the phrase town and gown really applies in this area and there's some tension. So that's been interesting and not new to me. You know, I lived in -- I was going to ask for Chapel Hill -- well, a larger scale version of that, or at least in terms of the the college, the townies versus the -- Chapel Hill on the whole surrounding area is so progressive now. I mean, there's -- RTP is the highest concentration of PhDs in the country, or at least it was a few years ago, but this is, I mean, this is very, this is very rural and so it's been interesting and I guess the last time I felt that much tension was when I lived in Williamsburg because it was, you know, 11ish years ago and back when all the all the warring was going on between the hipsters and the hesitates and the Puerto Ricans. And so I haven't personally felt tension, but I see it and I know it's there. But yeah, I spent a lot of time at the Waffle House. There's one near my wife's -- my in-laws where we go down to Louisiana and we always look at it and, nope, never ended up there and hope never to be, you know, just pulling in there at, you know, in the late night or something. Yeah. I mean, you don't -- you don't see a lot of Obama stickers, I guess. The Subaru's either. The Subaru was a big thing. I, you know, when I bought one two years ago up here and I realized on the last trip to Louisiana, I haven't seen one of those nameplates on a car in three days. Okay. Why would you buy one down here? You don't have to go through snow and everything else. Yeah. We find those little regional differences that sort of magnify which is what your job was, you know, figuring out these differences and contrast with life up here and life down there, which to me was the most interesting part of the book was really contrasting North Carolina or home and this, as well as the Daffy Ant sending you great, great packages. Those are wonderful. I've got a friend whose mother is a New Hampshire, she's a professor at NYU and her mother sends her much more inscrutable packages in the mail, just things that don't add up, that don't make any sense whatsoever as opposed to an etiquette book with highlights. But one other question I figured I'd ask just based on, you know, one random line in your book because I desperately seek anyone who has a little commonality with me. What comic books do you like? Just sack of graphic novels and I thought, oh, she reads comics. Okay, that she can't be all bad. I love Charles Burns. Oh, wow. Really? Yeah. Dash Shaw, I'm getting his name right. Yeah, yeah. Frank Santoro and he were speaking of McNally Jackson last year when I was faking being a hipster and stopped him to see them. Yeah, I've never seen him in person. Cartoonists aren't impressive to look at generally. You know, I saw a panel discussion at the Aspen Comedy Festival many years ago, which I was fortunate enough to get to cover a few times. And it was Chris Ware who's just incredible. Jimmy Corrigan really affected me in a profound way. I had to use that word. But and that's better than deep. Interesting, but anyway, Chris Ware was a vast way. Chris Ware, Linda Barry, who's just genius. I love her work. I love her work because there's so much heart in it and it's never cheesy or chancy. It's just sincere in a way that's beautiful and without being, I don't know, I find so frequently that I just love her, I love her voice as a feminine voice. But not a feminist voice. It's it's female, but yeah, exactly. And I feel that way about Tina Fey. I love her work is very feminine to me, but it's not, yeah, you know what I'm saying. Anyway, Linda Barry's work is just so sweet and heartbreaking. I love it. Who else was on that panel, Charles Burns? And they were so self-deprecating in a really hilarious way that only graphic novelists can be. It's a whole bunch of them down in Bethesda this September. I was going to see Ware, Dan Klaus, the Hernandez's. Yeah, I got a signed copy when I was at Fantagraphics. I made my pilgrimage when I was in Seattle. Yeah, I'm gonna hopefully interview Gary Groth or Eric Reynolds during the Bethesda trip. And I don't know. Oh, Gary's a publisher of Fantagraphics and Eric's sort of the lead guy, their public face. Okay. And they're in addition to Hernandez's are there and a few other guys who might buy people we sort of idolize. A friend of mine, actually the made of somebody interviewed a couple of episodes ago, she's in love with Jaime Hernandez. And I told her about this, Chow down on Bethesda. And she's like, Oh, I don't know if I could see him in person. I'm afraid I would just, you know, like a faint or swoon or something. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I guess, you know. Yeah, I got the clumped in front of Chris Ware. And I don't do that. I mean, you live in New York, you see celebrities all the time, doesn't affect me. And I got totally tongue-tied. I went to after the Aspen thing that he was doing, assigning at the bookstore up there. And just totally stuttering. Why are you awesome is always the great moment where you just, you know, completely panic. Are there other writers you've had a meltdowns with? Basically, to me, it's one of those things where I think it's people like us who actually, you know, work at this idea of, you know, writing or creating or doing something that we find that much more impressive than somebody who can stand in front of a camera, even if they're, you know, funny, writers and cartoonists tend to be much more of a draw for me. But anyone else you've had, that sort of. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure I'm trying to remember. And best non-commissioned celebrity sighting in New York? Oh, okay. This is my favorite celebrity sighting. Okay. Probably the second favorite would probably be Queen Latifan and elevator. I'm an escalator. Sorry, important distinction. Yeah, world of difference. But I was at this coffee shop in the Flatiron district. It's probably 2000. And I don't think it's there anymore. I was meeting with some comedy friends. We were working on a sketch show. We were going to get together to drum up ideas. And I walk in and there was a children's birthday party happening in the back. And while I was waiting for my friends to arrive, I was just kind of, you know, enjoying the show of all these five-year-olds running around. And at one point, this little Asian girl comes running, screaming, "Uncle Joey, Uncle Joey." You look up and it's Joey Ramon. At a birthday party for a five-year-old. In full regallion? In full regallion. Because a friend of mine interviewed him for maximum rock and roll back in the early 90s and the maximum rock and roll days. And he said, you know, "What do you do in public? Do you go out like the gross resource again?" But, you know, my girlfriend, I guess, pushes the shopping cart. I mean, I'm Joey Ramon. I'm not going to stand there pushing a shopping, but he will go to the supermarket in full, you know. And he will go to his niece's birthday party, I guess. I guess you got to put on that show, man. That's what you do when you're a celebrity, I guess. If it was even his niece, I mean, if any child, he's Uncle Joey Ramon. Yeah, as he should be. He rips all of us in a sense. At least by the time they turn 14 and they're in their bedroom with their CDs. Thrashing away. Yeah, I know. I know. I was going to tell you one of my favorite, actually, a cartoonist around New York, Evan Dorkin. He did milk and cheese. He also did three panel strips. One of his all-time greats was name that tune with the Ramones. And it's basically a contestant. I can name that Ramones tune in 88 notes, you know, like just one after another one. Yeah, I know they all sound the same. But, you know, after a couple hundred notes, I'll finally figure out which song this is. Because, yeah, I basically translate everything into some sort of comics context. And the only other thing I wanted to share with you, the gypsies story that you actually, you have a pair of gypsies stories in your book, which revolve around your mother when she was a child being told the gypsies would kidnap her. And yeah, my father's Romanian. And nonetheless, when we grew up, he and my mother told us that they got us being my brother from gypsies, who lived in the woods behind the house, and that they kept the receipt. That was... We always worry. They could bring us back to the gypsies down in the woods. This was, you know, so again, coming across that passage at the... Yeah, North Carolina had a two, I guess, you know, but, you know, I guess a little worse when your father was, you know, from Romania itself. But, but yes, they kept the receipt. That's the sad punch line of my changeling joke. But anyway, I want to thank you so much for your time, Jay, and I hope you have a great time back in New York. Thanks. And that was Jane Borden. You can find her book. I totally meant to do that in bookstores or online. I needed it in a hurry, so I got it on my Kindle. Her website is janeborden.com. And if you go there, you can find her upcoming stand updates. I, meanwhile, try to get some more guest book so I can deliver more fantastic episodes of the Virtual Memories Show. If you'd like to find past episodes, search for virtual memories on iTunes, or visit our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemorieshow. All one word. I'm Gil Roth and you are awesome. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]