Sarah: Who's not threatening? A dead guy who was last cute in the Great Depression.

Hello and welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. Today's episode is a little bit different. It's a variety hour/pinata episode. I have Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria as my guest. We are doing a lightning round of misconceptions and things that weren't there. 

We get topic suggestions for this show all the time, and I find it so interesting to think about what can be expanded into a whole episode, and what feels like it would be a really interesting conversation but one that would maybe only take about five minutes. And this conversation was really fun for me because Chelsey makes a wonderful podcast, and we got to talk about what do we have to think about when we're choosing a topic that we're going to talk about for an hour or so. And also when we only have so many topics that we're able to choose and do justice to in the course of a year. 

American Hysteria, if you haven't listened to it, is about moral panics, which are of course a great way to understand America itself, and quite a lot about the satanic panic. So if you're not tired of the satanic panic, and how could you be, you got to listen. And of course, because it's so rare that I get to have fellow satanic panic podcaster shoptalk, Chelsey and I also get into that. 

This was a really fun one for me. I hope it's a fun one for you. And if you haven't gotten to enjoy Chelsey’s work yet, I hope this is a gateway to that for you. You deserve it. Here's the episode. Enjoy.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where sometimes we eat all the little mini candy bars at the bottom of your pumpkin. Chelsey, who are you, and what is your show, and what happens when we discuss things together? 

Chelsey: For sure. My show is American Hysteria, and it covers a lot of similar topics to Sarah's show. We do moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and more so even now I would say fantastical thinking. So anything that has strange undertones or things that are relevant historically to today, but maybe not necessarily would qualify as a conspiracy theory or a moral panic. We just covered boy bands and fangirls. Yes. The hysteria of the fan girl, but also how we've manufactured an idea and an archetype ourselves. We try to approach things with empathy, like you guys, and try to understand what the fuck's going on a little bit better. 

Sarah: What the fuck is going on? In the words of Lucas and Empire Records, “What's with today, today?”

Chelsey: Exactly. 

Sarah: Have you ever felt, oh boy, I might run out of stuff to talk about? I have never felt that. It seems if you're looking at moral panics as the central theme of the history you're examining, that it feels like America is like moral panics held together by freeways.

Chelsey: Yup. No, I don't feel like I'm going to run out of things to talk about, but do I want to talk about moral panics and conspiracy theories only? I think maybe that is more accurate as opening up myself. 

Sarah: Like, you could.

Chelsey: I could, but I just get pretty exhausted.  It's disheartening a lot of the time. And sometimes I like to just veer into things that aren't quite so… I mean, I don't want to say relevant to right now, but sometimes I need to just take a step back from things that are happening again all the time and travel back into history that's still super relevant, but maybe less saturated. I think there's the satanic panic, these things we talked about a lot have become really saturated. And I think there are a lot of other things to talk about as well. 

Sarah: Do you feel in retrospect like the fact of both of us being really invested in the satanic panic in circa 2017 was perhaps the fact that we were just looking around and being like, boy, it seems like this is about to make a giant comeback. Knowing that on some level.

Chelsey: I think on some level, for sure. 

Sarah: Right? Not conscious. I'm not saying consciously for myself, but yeah. 

Chelsey: No. And I mean, my history is with my dad being an Illuminati conspiracy theorist when I was growing up. And so he didn't veer too heavy into satanic stuff. He had his satanic phase when I was a baby, but not when I was tiny. 

Sarah: You and Dean Winchester. 

Chelsey: So, the Illuminati though has so many of the same characteristics and foundations. Maybe I was more apt to have a reptilian stand in for a Satanist.

Sarah: It’s the same basic argument, right?

Chelsey: It’s the same thing. There is a cabal, which in itself is an antisemitic term, right? But a group of people controlling the world and harming children, and hypnotizing all of the youth to become satanic agents or stupefy them with fluoride in the water. Same type of stuff. What about you, Sarah? Do you think you were like, where did it come from? What was the crackle in the air for you, do you think? 

Sarah: One thing I find interesting that I've been thinking about a lot lately with regards to this is that when I was in an MFA, I was writing a lot of short stories that were really gritty. I was like Raymond Carver and Dennis Johnson are kissing, and this is the baby they had. That was the dream, obviously. 

Chelsey: God, I wish. 

Sarah: Yeah, we all wish.

Chelsey: What a weird trip that would be. 

Sarah: Yeah. But so I was writing these stories about this family of polygamist brothers who they weren't religiously polygamous, they just were in a very true crime paperback kind of way, they had this like auto salvage yard. And they had like fighting dogs, as gritty as you could possibly get. I was like, more grit. I was like Vincent Gallo. And it was all about these sort of teenagers who they married and who bought into this sort of patriarchal power system and microcosm kind of way. Which is what I was telling myself it was about at the time. I was like, it's political. And in retrospect, I'm like, yeah, that's true. Because you were very smart and everything, but also these were stories where you were talking about characters where their outsides matched the inside of how you felt, and you were trying to express your psychological reality by talking about characters who deserved to feel the way you did and have the problems emotionally that you had. And that's what you had to do to get there. 

And when I think about the satanic panic, and part of it being therapy as a way to validate emotional suffering, and also this idea that if anyone has any kind of familial trauma at all then it must have been this satanic sexual abuse that was apparently so everywhere the whole time. And no one stops along the way to be like, maybe nothing illegal happened and people can still really suffer and develop trauma because of that. And I think that's certainly one of the things that draws me to it because I've had this journey of being like, I've had what the true crime paperbacks call an idyllic upbringing. So it's fine. 

And a lot of, to me, the process of healing is just sort of validating the reality of what happened to me purely because of how I feel. And the fact that there doesn't, no one had to participate in a group pony sacrifice. Even though that yes, that would feel validating, I imagine. If you were like, listen, I was one of those group pony sacrifice kids. I have a right to be unable to get out of bed today. 

Chelsey: Right. Because beyond these stories is also recovered memory. And I think recovered memory is big, because it extends so far beyond the satanic panic and into this very day. It’s shocking how much media is based around this really intense, complicated thing called recovered memory. And I think that the heart of it, and we did this in our alien abduction episode, because so much of alien abduction comes from recovered memory as well. You get this primordial soup of imagery of the grossest, it's like satanic panics, very unnerving the darkest of the dark. But does seem to stand in for not being able to have your trauma validated. Trauma that isn't as sensational. It's this way to externalize a trauma, make it big enough that people give a fuck. Right. 

So I also went to an MFA program, but in poetry, and what I think I'm so interested in is that moral panics are in a way like metaphors, right? So they're this way that you blow out the satanic panic into this huge thing. But what you're really trying to say is children are being abused. But your metaphor is this almost poetic, anti poetic, whatever you want to say. But nonetheless, poetic in that it's exaggerated and translating like an emotional experience into a visual image. So yeah. Somehow, it's an extension in more than just writing. 

Sarah: Yeah. Maybe the central truth of it is that only when we were like children are being abused in service of Satan by these satanic churches, where male authorities are like, “Heavens, no! We must do something.” Because before when the feminists were like, “Children are being abused by guys,” everyone was like, well, ah… *whistles* 

Chelsey: Yeah. And then as soon as they could blame it on women who were putting their kids in daycare.

Sarah: Right. It's like what's the fastest route to blaming a lesbian, and how do we get there? 

Chelsey: Yeah. Or gay panic. It was just immediately like, yes. All of these children are being molested by gay men. Absolutely unequivocally. But, yeah. I think that has a ton to do with it.

Sarah: So I want to do a couple things with you today. This is a more game show-like episode than usual. So I did a call out on Patreon. I asked people for episode topic suggestions, and I think I got about a thousand responses. And they were just really fantastic. And I wanted to take a look at some of those with you and talk about what your thought process is thinking about how to make your show, which is pretty similar I think, to a lot of the questions I have to ask myself making this show. I have a little grab bag of misconceptions and I want to go through them with you, and talk about basically all of these are things that people falsely believe and that we can do a debunking of. But which of them are interesting and why and so forth. And we're going to get more galaxy brain as we go on, and I've saved my favorite one for last. Okay. Number one, baby carrots. Do you know where I'm going with this? 

Chelsey: I don't, no idea.

Sarah: So I've heard people express amazement when they realize that a baby carrot is not in fact a juvenile carrot, but it is actually an adult carrot that has been whittled down to be small and oblong. 

Chelsey: So each of those just wastes a bunch of carrot? 

Sarah: You know what? I have no idea. Let's see if we can find a video.

Chelsey: Maybe the rest goes into shredded carrot bags. That would be nice.

Sarah: I like to think that they have some kind of system that uses almost the whole carrot. It could go either way in America. Oh, yeah. We got a video. All right. I like to say 3, 2, 1, go.

Chelsey: 3, 2, 1.

Sarah: Oh, they start in the field. Good to know. I didn't know where they were grown. 

Chelsey: Looks like a thresher. Beautiful carrots, fully intact carrots.

Sarah: Okay. They're washed, cut, and peeled. They're going on the belt. Polished with smooth stone rollers. That's what I should do with my face every morning.

Chelsey: Now they’re ready to go into bags. Did we miss something?

Sarah: See, and I was wrong. They're not whittled. They're buffed. 

Chelsey: You're out here spreading misinformation. 

Sarah: Okay, so that's baby carrots. 

Chelsey: So if it were me, I would take this grain of something of baby carrots, and I'd want to expand out. So what is this baby carrot? A symptom of what's a bigger issue that's happening here. Is it food waste? I think I would go with ridiculous ways that we've altered food to make ourselves comfortable as humans. I don't know. I would want this great baby carrot story in there, but it's not going to be enough for an episode. But it could be a heart. It could be the main story.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. It's like the popcorn method, I want to call it. Where you have the kernel, it can puff it out into something much bigger than what you started with. How popcorn works for people who don't know. So if I'm thinking about this as a topic, you're hearing, to me, how the process starts, because I was like, baby carrots, that's a thing people think. One thing, baby, right, in the name, but they're not. They're adult carrots. So technically that's a debunk misconception. And I was like, and that's obviously pretty simple and who cares? But we watched that video and I was like, okay, this is causing some thoughts to happen in my brain about the mechanization of food, the issue of supply chains, which are all anyone ever talks about anymore. There is a big topic here, and it's not baby carrots exactly, but baby carrots lit the way to the topic. 

Chelsey: Yeah, exactly. And what is up with the way that we fake food? Why did we make a baby carrot? Why did we say we need this carrot to be buffed completely of life and look like a cartoon, taking this wild looking thing and making it as sanitized as possible? That's the story we’d tell. 

Sarah: Okay. All right. Number two, the War of the Worlds. So the legend of course, we should listen to some of this because it's just quite fun, is Orson Welles - on whom I had a giant crush when I was a teenager - in the early two thousands Orson Welles, who by that time had been dead for 20 years, who's nonthreatening. A dead guy who was last cute in the Great Depression. 

Chelsey: Was he cute? 

Sarah: He was so cute, Chelsey. 

Chelsey: All right. Okay. So hot Orson Welles.  

Sarah: Hot, young Orson Welles. And he's working for CBS. He's doing a ton of radio drama. So it's like a documentary. It's basically a faux news broadcast based on H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds about our invasion by aliens. And let's listen to a little of it. 

*recording* 

“You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in an original dramatization of the War of the Worlds, by HG. Wells.

The metal casing is definitely extra-terrestrial. I have been requested by the governor of New Jersey to place the counties of Mercer and Middlesex as east to Jamesburg under martial law. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes, lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the Vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. 120 known survivors. 

What is there to live for? 

Well, there won't be any more concerts for a million years or so, and no nice little dinners at restaurants. If it's amusement you’re after I guess the game's up. 

What is there left? 

Life, that's what. I want to live. 

I'm speaking from the roof of a broadcasting building, New York City. 

Now the smoke's spreading faster. It's reached Times Square. Now the smoke's crossing 6th Avenue a hundred yards away. It's 50 feet. *thud*

Sarah: It's good stuff. 

Chelsey: It's great stuff. It's great stuff. 

Sarah: But yeah. I mean, so basically the narrative that I grew up believing a lot of people grew up believing and that you get from official sources about this was on PBS retrospective not long ago, stuff like that, is that this caused mass hysteria. That the streets were flooding with people panicking. 

What is an interesting thing, I'm sure you have a lot to say about this, is the Blair Witch Project, the Exorcist, the War of the Worlds. What thing are audience members supposed to be doing? 

Chelsey: What do you mean? 

Sarah: They're getting sick, they're getting injured, they're fainting. There are all these legends about people being injured by scary stories. And when you check it out, it's either not true or partially a little bit true.

Chelsey: Like one person fainted for reasons unknown, maybe not related to the movie, right? 

Sarah: A legend about a guy having a heart attack while listening to the War of the World's that was never confirmed. What's interesting is that apparently not that many people were listening to it. A lot of markets didn't even carry it. A lot of listeners were actually listening to Edgar Bergen, who was more popular. And to me the funny thing about that, is that Edgar Bergen was a ventriloquist. And I will remind you that this medium is radio. 

Chelsey: Anyone can be a ventriloquist on the radio. 

Sarah: However, some people get scared. There's a little bit of anxiety. It doesn't appear to be happening at anything approaching a significant scale. People aren't fleeing the cities. People aren't engaging in mass hysteria, but the newspapers exaggerate the idea that people are panicking because of this radio show. And there's an article on Slate about this from 2013, I'll put it in the show notes, that makes the argument that this is a time when newspapers are feeling a little bit anxious about the radio snapping up their job. And this is a nice time for them to be like, hey, radios are unreliable. They'll lie to you about being invaded by aliens. Trust the newspaper. And they're doing so by kind of making up a story. So ultimately no one really looks good. 

Chelsey: Yeah, that's great. The other thing, if I were going to make an episode of this, would be how it's coinciding with the first UFO sightings actually a little bit later. But one of the reasons I started wanting to make American Hysteria was reading Carl Jung's book about flying saucers. Which yes, whatever Carl Jung, whatever. Just let me be. I was really interested in that book though, because it talked about how these anxieties came about as the Nazis were invading different countries. So the idea of being invaded by an external force that you don't understand is permeating. I like to put it like a crackle in the air. There's something that's going to catch. 

And so that would be what I would be most interested in is again, it's the metaphorical part of it where what are the conditions that are leading us to accept something fantastical in place of something logical, which is usually something scary. Something real and scary going on that we'd rather be like, oh, I'm scared of crazy UFOs, then I'm scared of getting invaded. 

Sarah: Right. And if it's 1938, it's kind of a stressful time. I mean, I'm just going off of my only historical literacy, which of course comes to me through a combination of Newsies and Swing Kids. But even that tells me that this was a time when if you are listening to a show that you understand to be fictional, and you still hear this format of a nice evening of music repeatedly broken in by an urgent news broadcast that's telling you that the invaders are coming, they're coming now and they have superior technology and you're just fucked, aren't you? 

One of the things that I would argue is that this is just a really good piece of horror.  And highly effective horror tends to be so effective for us because it connects to something that we're actually afraid of in the real world. And it can lead us to create mythology about how it's capable of causing actual harm, because we want to express the power of the text. 

I'm also reminded of the myth that The Omen was a cursed movie because people died while working on it. When people die working on romantic comedies, but we just don't create mythology around them. 

Chelsey: Yeah. Exorcist, too.

Sarah: I mean, I would say that the Exorcist, people were injured making that movie.

Chelsey: Probably due more to irresponsibility. 

Sarah: Yeah, I know. And to me that's the curse of the auteur. That's the curse of directors at the time, not giving a shit about their performer’s safety. So it's that's the curse of the male artistic ego. Woo. 

Chelsey: Exactly. 

Sarah: Yeah. So the War of the Worlds. I think that would be great for an episode because there's clearly so much going on there. I think that would be an easier lift than baby carrots. 

Chelsey: And it’s a meta, right? The hysteria about a hysteria, or the you're wrong about something that people are wrong about.

Sarah: It's a stromboli.

*recording* 

This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen. Out of character to assure you that the War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. 

You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it. So goodbye everybody. And remember please, for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That was no martian, it's Halloween.

Sarah: All right. Number three, the minute waltz. The minute waltz is two minutes long. 

Chelsey: Oh, wow. Okay. No. I would be interested in the history of the waltz, but not, I don't know about this. 

Sarah: Do you know why it's called the minute waltz? 

Chelsey: Why? 

Sarah: Because it's not minute, it's minute. It's a minute waltz. It's small. 

Chelsey: Oooh, little waltz. I'll do a little waltz. What a nice dance. 

Sarah: Truly, I don't know what a waltz is.

Chelsey: It's just a 1, 2, 3, pretty much. Like step, step. And then you go up on the balls of your feet. It's just steps and then you go in a circle, and you go in a larger circle around the room. This is from my time living in Virginia, I learned about a lot.

Sarah: People are just waltzing all over the place down there? 

Chelsey: No, we'd go to punk square dancing, which was sick. Like traveling punk bands that were also called square dances in like houses. But I learned about waltz in there from all my cowboy boyfriends. Minute waltz. 

Sarah: Oh, how long are they normally? Like four? 

Chelsey: I mean, like a song, I guess four. 

Sarah: All right. Good. Because this is also, children, why you should take your ideas to your friends and colleagues. Because I was just like the minute waltz, it's not minute, it's minute. I've known that for years. I think I learned it on QI. It's just a fact that makes me happy. I could not think of a single way to expand it outward. And then you're like, history of the waltz. And I was like, yes, waltzes, what was it like to write waltzes? Were there like waltz one hit wonders? Was there waltz-mania?

Chelsey: Great questions. Yeah. Did the parents freak out about the waltz? I'm sure they did. What's the history of the time signature? That would be maybe a little more boring, but you never know. All you have to do is find the freaky inventor of the time signature and tell his story, and that’s all you need.

Sarah: Otto von Time Signature. There's often such fascinating human history attached to sort of dry facts, because who comes up with these things? People. Who has messy lives? The very same ones. Yeah. What would you think about a waltz episode? What's your level of enthusiasm for that? 

Chelsey: I mean, we did a lot of dance stuff in our teenage sex episode, but there was definitely a time that the waltz was the hot, new dance that only the teenagers were doing. I love that.

Sarah: Yeah. Right. That's just a fun concept to play with. I think there's a couple of themes here. One is that you're never that far from a moral panic as the crow flies. No matter where you are in history. So, just enjoy that. 

Chelsey: Yes. Throw a rock and hit a moral panic.

Sarah: Anything that teenagers have ever had anything to do with. I know the concept of the teenager is new, but the numbers are not. There'll be interesting stuff around it, I promise. 

Are you aware of the phenomenon where every quote in the world has been attributed to Marilyn Monroe? 

Chelsey: I've heard this before. 

Sarah: This also happens with Audrey Hepburn. A need to believe that quotes were said by really hot people, I think. Yeah, sure. Especially on Tumblr. This was huge on Tumblr when I was on Tumblr.

Chelsey: Ask not what your country can do for you.

Sarah: Exactly. “Ich bin ein Berliner” - Marilyn Monroe. But my favorite one of these is the phrase, “well-behaved women seldom make history”. Have you encountered this phrase in your life? 

Chelsey: Yes, I believe that I have. Who said it? 

Sarah: Well, I first want to know where you've encountered it, because I definitely have memories of growing up with it on merch as a tween.

Chelsey: Yeah, I feel like it's common knowledge who said it and I just don't have it. But maybe that doesn't sound like it’s the case.

Sarah: It's not common knowledge. I wouldn't say. Yeah. I would say it's common knowledge around maybe sort of historian academics. But I would say that as a feminist tween in like the year 2000, this phrase was on bumper stickers and shirts at Powells. Next to the ones that said, “a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle”. 

Chelsey: “Sorry I missed church today. I was off practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.” You remember that shirt? That was a good one, spicy stuff.

Sarah: This was quite an era of shirts. 

Chelsey: Yeah, no, “You laugh because I'm different. I laugh because you're all the same.” 

Sarah: Yes. Well, I had an earnest feminist shirt in eighth grade that said, I think I’m pretty sure it said, “feminism is the radical belief that women are human.” And I thought that was just the bee's knees.

Chelsey: Hot shit.

Sarah: Which it is, of course. But it was just like, Sarah, like you could have taken things slightly less seriously. You were in eighth grade, have some fun.

Chelsey: Yeah, I wasn't a feminist yet. 

Sarah: But it is a very much merch phrase. And its origin, unbelievably, is in an academic article by a historian named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, that she published in 1976. 

Chelsey: Who's that? 

Sarah: So what I find most interesting about the original use in the article is that it's not like an encouragement. It's a statement. 

Chelsey: Statement of fact.

Sarah: So it's from an article called, Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735, which you would not expect to contain a sentence that moves bumper stickers, and yet here we are. Which was an American quarterly in 1976. And this is the passage preceding the sentence, “Cotton Mather called them the hidden ones. They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench, nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither because they were virtuous women did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth and they haven't been. Well-behaved women seldom make history.”  

Chelsey: So it’s somebody quoting Cotton Mather?

Sarah: No, he didn't. No, he just called them the hidden ones. No, wouldn't that be incredible if it were a direct Cotton Mather quote? No.

Chelsey: Yeah, that would've made me the happiest.

Sarah: That would be truly outrageous. 

Chelsey: Yes. Wow. Not what I expected though, at all. 

Sarah: How would you describe that passage? 

Chelsey: Well, it doesn't seem to be saying what we are saying, it's saying, right. It seems to be saying that you should behave and that your behavior, your lack of noticeable behavior or doing anything out of line is bad because you want the modesty of not being remembered? Is that totally off? 

Sarah: I think that's descriptive of the people who this passage is about. Yeah. This is a descriptive passage essentially saying women who fulfilled their duties as prescribed to them by the male society in which they live by Puritan New England in this case, didn't tend to leave a mark on history. We have historical records of murderers and revolutionaries, and people who either royally fucked up or were very wealthy a lot of the time. 

Chelsey: And Cotton Mather did write the first true crime book.

Sarah: Of course. Is that the Elizabeth… No, he didn't write about Elizabeth Nat. What? What's the first true crime?

Chelsey: It was actually just a compendium. It was a compendium of criminals and his sort of chance to proselytize about their sins.

Sarah:  If I could take a single thing from this conversation, I would probably pick Cotton Mather wrote the first American true crime book and just stick with that for an hour. 

Chelsey: Stick with it. You can learn more about it on our true crime episode, everyone.

Chelsey: But anyway, all right. I promise that's my last Cotton Mather-ism. 

Sarah: Oh, please don't promise me that. And so Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, after this phrase becomes the meme that it becomes, writes a book.

Chelsey: So did it become a meme in the seventies, or did it become, was it pulled in the nineties?

Sarah: Yes, it was the nineties. Yeah. Do you want to hear that story? This is from her book about that. Because she's really one of the few academic writers who I enjoy reading.

Chelsey: God bless. 

Sarah: So she writes, “Some time ago, a former student emailed me from California. You'll be delighted to know that you are quoted frequently on bumpers in Berkeley. Through a strange stroke of fate, I've gotten used to seeing my name on bumpers and on t-shirts, tote bags, coffee mugs, magnets, buttons, greeting cards, and websites. I owe this curious fame to a single line from a scholarly article I published in 1976. In the opening paragraph I wrote, “well-behaved women seldom make history”. That sentence, slightly altered, escaped into popular culture in 1995, when journalist Kay Mills used it as an epigraph for her informal history of American women From Pocahontas to Power Suits. Perhaps by accident, she changed the word ‘seldom’ to ‘rarely’. Little matter. According to my dictionary, seldom and rarely mean the same thing. Well-behaved women infrequently or on few occasions make history. This may be one of those occasions. My original article was a study of the well-behaved women celebrated in Puritan funeral sermons. 

In 1996, a young woman named Jill Portugal found the “rarely” version of the quote and her roommate's copy of the New Beacon Book of Quotations for Women. She wrote me from Oregon asking permission to print it on t-shirts. I was amused by her request and told her to go ahead. All I asked was that she sent me a t-shirt. The success of her enterprise surprised both of us. Her success inspired imitators, only a few of whom bothered to ask permission. 

My runaway sentence now keeps company with anarchists, hedonists, would-be witches, political activists of many descriptions, and quite a few well-behaved women. It has been featured in Cosmo Girl, The Christian Science Monitor, and Creative Keepsake Scrapbooking magazine. According to news reports, it was a favorite of the pioneering computer scientist, Anita Borg. The sweet potato queens of Jackson, Mississippi have adopted it as an official maxim, selling their own pink and green T-shirt alongside another that reads, “never wear panties to a party”. My accidental fame has given me a new perspective on American popular culture.” 

Chelsey: I love that. You know how they're like, one person can't change anything. And it's no, and it's usually not for the best that one person does change a whole lot of shit, but that woman just did this one small thing of I'm going to put this on t-shirts having no idea that it would echo the way that it has until it's a Marilyn Monroe quote. This random person who didn't actually have any systemic power, we could get into that, but I guess I just mean not a corporation. Just a single person doing this Avant Garde t-shirt printing. 

Sarah: Riot girl t-shirt. 

Chelsey: And now it's a total, I mean, it's become a very corporate co-opted.

Sarah: Yeah. As everything relating to feminism apparently does. It's obvious that this kind of started off as like a kind of a riot girl thing, and then has also become, I think anytime a phrase becomes a meme, you like start to hear it a little bit less. It's a big cycle when a runaway sentence happens, as she put it. I really like the phrase runaway sentence. 

Chelsey: Yeah. I like that a lot.

Sarah: And so later on in this chapter, she says, “when I wrote that well-behaved women seldom make history, I was making a commitment to help recover the lives of otherwise obscure women. I had no idea that 30 years later, my own words would come back to me transformed. While I like some of the uses of the slogan more than others, I wouldn't call it back even if I could. I applaud the fact that so many people, students, teachers, quilters, nurses, newspapers, columnists, old ladies in nursing homes and mayors of Western towns, think they have the right to make history.” 

Chelsey: I like it. Is it harmful? Probably not. 

Sarah:  Don't attribute it to Marilyn Monroe. That's not really harmful either, but Marilyn Monroe deserves to be known for what she actually did. And other people deserve to be known for what they actually did.

Chelsey: Yeah, you don't need to make up stuff about her for her to be a compelling individual.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And I love that we have a story of an academic writing a sentence one way. It's like when you have an outdoor cat that adopts another family and then they just think they found a really friendly stray, but it's really that the cat has been presented with two options and chosen one. I think this tends to happen to people sometimes after they've had a baby.

Chelsey: Okay. Not enough attention. 

Sarah:  Because cats, they can be free agents and it feels like this sentence did that.

Chelsey: Yeah. I think that's what makes it the most interesting is that it meant something different. The statement is obvious in its truth as just a blanket statement and not an empowering political statement. It's just, I don't know. It's really cool. I love how academia can get translated into popular culture because that's its own need. And I think that's what we try to do is take, because I read so many academic papers and I'm like, how am I going to make this fun?

Sarah: Right. Yeah. How do I translate this into English? 

Chelsey: So yeah, that's fun. I think it could be an episode. Misattributed quotes and why. And why they get attributed to either hot people or presidents, maybe. I feel like a lot is misattributed to presidents, which is its paternal nightmare.

Sarah: Or Shakespeare, which is fair, because he did make up half the words we use, it seems like.

Chelsey: He did. He did. 

Sarah: Why not? Oh, speaking of Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name.” Where does this scene take place that I am quoting? 

Chelsey: I mean, I want to tell you it's a balcony, but now I know I'm wrong.

Sarah: You do want to say that. 

Chelsey: And I've read that book so many times and I don't remember. I just remember the Baz Luhrmann scene. 

Sarah: Yes. And who wouldn't? Okay. But Chelsey, oh my God, there's no balcony in Shakespeare. 

Chelsey: Is there no balcony even invented back then? 

Sarah: No, there were no balconies. The word ‘balcony’ didn't exist. Shakespeare invented many words, but not balcony. 

Chelsey: Wow. Well, where did it take place, Sarah? 

Sarah: It's just a window. I mean, yeah, it doesn't ruin anything. It's fine. But I'm just like, this is the kind of thing that can make you question everything, in my opinion. And so the reason that we have that I was looking up an article that kind of explained the phenomenon here, and it turned out to be written by Lois Leveen, who I once did a book event with eight years ago in Corvallis. So hi, Lois. Thank you. She wrote a book called, Juliet's Nurse. 

So first of all, we didn't have balconies in England at the time. Partly because it was too chilly, and we have an account by somebody who went to Europe in 1608 and described seeing a balcony. And I'm just going to read you this passage because I love it. 

Chelsey: That's great.

Sarah: “I noted another thing in these Venetian palaces, and it is very little used in any other country that I could perceive in my travels, saving only in Venice and other Italian cities. Somewhat above the middle of the front of the building, or a little beneath the top of the front, they have right opposite unto their windows a very pleasant, little terrace that juttith or buttith out from the main building. The actuara is decked with many pretty little turn pillars either of marble or free stone to lean over. These kinds of terraces or little galleries of pleasure serve only for this purpose. That people may from that place as from a most electable prospect contemplate and view the parts of the city around them.”

Chelsey: Galleries of pleasure that juttith and buttith. And just like the awe inspiring first time you see a balcony in England, right? It's beautiful. I love it. And I mean, this also to me screams the Mandela effect.

Sarah: Yes, totally. 

Chelsey: We all are remembering we're misremembering collectively. Or do you think more than Baz Lurhmann, it was the convenience of set design originally because it would be easier to, or would it be not easier to have a balcony on set?

Sarah: These are great guesses. But you're never going to extrap- well, you could extrapolate, but it would take you like at least 12 more tries. 

Chelsey: Time we don't have. 

Sarah: Yes. Okay. So to quote Lois Levine again, the answer is that Romeo and Juliet were usurped by a similar play by someone named Thomas Otway. This happened because, quoting Lois Levine again, “In 1642, the Puritan parliament, at war with King Charles I, first closed London's theaters. After Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 and the theaters were reopened, Shakespeare plays were put on again, including a 1662 revival of Romeo and Juliet. But far more popular was Otway’s 1679 play, The History and Fall of Gaius Marius, which crafts dialogue characters and plot from Romeo and Juliet onto an ancient Roman military and political struggle drawn from Plutarch. Although Shakespeare himself often borrowed heavily from a wide range of sources, Otway’s own substantial appropriations, as when the young heroine Lavinia liloquises,Oh, Marius, Marius, wherefore art thou, Marius? might strike modern audiences as a nearly sacrilegious level of plagiarism.” 

So Otway, because he lived later on, was like, I'm putting a balcony in my show. And so for quite a while this was the dominant play, and it had a balcony in it. 

Chelsey: I mean, is this any different than Shazam, really? The story of Shazam? 

Sarah: It is Shazam, yeah. 

Chelsey: But it's the same thing where two things are merging in our memory. Two similar things are creating a false memory. And somebody was just ripping off this play and changed the course of its history, I guess. 

Sarah: Yeah. And then Romeo and Juliet starts becoming ubiquitous again in the 18th century, and it has a balcony in it. Because we've been doing the rip-off version of it and that has a balcony. So why wouldn't this have a balcony? 

Chelsey: Now, Sarah, do you think in 200 years, they'll think Romeo and Juliet had an aquarium and a pool?

Sarah: I think it had an aquarium and a pool in it.

Chelsey: And maybe Radiohead was there too, making the soundtrack. 

Sarah: And John Leguizamo.

*recording*

You know those dates you see printed on food packages? Well, a lot of people think that's when you should throw the product away. Let's talk a little bit more about what the sell by, used by, and other code date phrases really mean.

Sarah: Chelsey, let's say that you've bought some sour cream. And you take it out of your refrigerator and it's April 10th, and it says used by April 10th. What is this package telling you?

Chelsey: It’s telling me, though I wouldn't heed it myself, it's telling me not, it's telling me that it has expired.

Sarah: This is perhaps the most consequential piece of information that I have to share in this episode, nay, perhaps in this program. ‘Used by’ means this is the last day of this product being at peak quality. If you were past the ‘use by’ date, it is below peak quality. 

Chelsey: But does it mean that it is harmful to you?

Sarah: No!

Chelsey: I could have told you that based on my intuition, because I eat things.

Sarah: The amount of yogurt that I have wasted in my life, because I believed ‘used by’ meant expired and that even if it looked fine, probably they knew better than I did. Probably it made sense to play it safe. Because I'm phobic about getting food poisoning. And it turned out they just meant like this yogurt it'll be a little bit less perky. 

Chelsey: But that is such bullshit, because I feel like there's something in that. I mean, here's my conspiracy that never leaves me. Yeah. But come on, ‘use by’, that language is saying, throw this out and buy more.

Sarah: Listen, I have no proof of this, but yeah.

Chelsey:  Sarah, this is.

Sarah: Right. Because if they wanted you to know the last day of peak quality, they could find a way to print that on the package, right?

Chelsey: It’s a demand! Use by. Yeah. Well, I feel really vindicated in that I've eaten things way past their expiration date and just a generally gross individual, but now I can tell other people and they'll have to believe me.

Sarah: Yeah. So take that. Yeah. And then, and so ‘best before’ means the same thing. ‘Best by’ means the same thing. ‘Sell by’ means that's the last day at which should move out of the store. So if it's in your house after it's sell by date, that's fine. That's where it's supposed to be. Only if it says expiration date, does that actually mean that's when it's supposed to expire. And obviously, even that's conservative. 

Chelsey: They got to really play it safe on that date.

Sarah: Don't eat anything you reasonably expect to be expired. But also, we've apparently been told to throw away perfectly good food for our entire lives. So that's nice.

Chelsey: I say follow your heart.

Sarah: I like that, too. Okay. And now our final debunking. I'm just going to search up a very short video to send you.

Chelsey: Perfect. Okay. 3, 2, 1. 

*recording* 

Kylie Jenner to the foyer, Kylie Jenner to the foyer. I have a little surprise for you. 

Is that a chicken? Wait, what is that?

Chelsey: Okay. Alright. Okay. 

Sarah: This is a Vine. 

Chelsey: Is it Chicken of the Sea, is what it's reminding me of. Jessica Simpson. 

Sarah: It is like that. Yes, well, because this is an audio medium, can you tell me what renders the situation humorous? 

Chelsey: Sure. Well, Kris Jenner is holding a pig, as - is it Kylie? So Kylie then says, “Is that a chicken?” Is that what she says? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the humorous thing, is that it is clearly not a chicken. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's clearly a pig. So it's an amazing out of context clip and it's sort of a meme that sort of still is around. I think, I certainly think partly in memes and a lot of people have this meme in their brain and so I guess think this is a funny one to debunk because the context, apparently, I looked this up the other day, because I was like, how could Kylie think that was a chicken? How did she think that was a chicken? I was trying to think, could I possibly think that was a chicken? Who knows? Right. 

Chelsey: Always the empathetic person. 

Sarah: And I think like part of what made this. Popular is a meme is this idea of like, how could you think that's a chicken that's ridiculous. You're what an idiot. And what she says is that, she had asked for a chicken, she had specifically asked her mom for a chicken as a housewarming gift. And then she was coming down to the foyer, knowing that there was a surprise and knowing that she had asked for a chicken and apparently, she couldn't see very well. And so she asked, is that a chicken? Not because she inexplicably thought a pig was a chicken, but because she has specifically asked for a chicken, like the country boy she is.  

Chelsey: And she got a pig, like the country boy she is. Yeah. Well, that makes perfect sense to me. Although I will say that if you are getting a present from someone, you shouldn’t say that out loud.

Sarah: No, you shouldn't. You should keep it in your head. 

Chelsey: That's the real part of this meme that's important. 

Sarah: Yes. So, yeah, and I think that's just a good one because it's like the answer's right there. It makes total sense. It's still a classic meme that people love, and it also falls into the category that I think is very well represented in misconception, which is look at this dumb bitch. And I'm not going to spend a lot of energy going to the mat for the Kardashians. You guys have noticed that they don't appear on this show that much, other people are taking care of them right now. But I always think that it's silly if you have misgivings about what someone is up to morally or the implications of their vast wealth or whatever, you still can't frame them for not knowing what a chicken looks like. It's not fair. It's not just.

Chelsey: No, because it affects everyone, trickles down, yeah. Attack her for her wealth and the way she treats her workers, but not for thinking a pig was a chicken. 

Sarah: So here's an interesting question too, is that I think to me there's a subtle but important difference between is this a debunkable thing versus is this something that people have some prior investment in. Not necessarily they think they know a story, that you can then show them is untrue. If I were to say we're going to do an episode on Amy Fisher, which we have in the past, you would be like, yes, I probably as a millennial have some awareness of who Amy Fisher is. She was mentioned in the Addams Family Values. I kind of know that she did something bad in the early nineties, but what were the circumstances? So that could be debunking someone with the specific idea that she was a criminal mastermind. Or it could just be you're invested in this, you know that it happened, you know adults were talking about it when you were little. I guess that's more of a popcorn. 

Chelsey: It's often you think the story is about this, but really the bigger story is about this, right. Like a larger, you would think, oh, Harry Houdini, we're going to learn all about him as a magician. When really you would learn probably all about him as a spiritualist debunker. Because that story is so fantastic.

Sarah: And then you're like known as a musician, also did this.

Chelsey: Sure. Yes, exactly. A character like him is great because you can reach into different things. Simultaneous truths.

Sarah: Yeah. The truth being bigger than the space it takes up in your brain is probably the biggest theme. 

Chelsey: That's great. Yeah.

Sarah: I feel like that's maybe the theme of this whole episode is that it's not the story itself so much as the way you approach it. And the way you're able to look at it in ways that tells you about what are the sort of human desires and fears and longings that people are projecting onto these events this time. And then what does that tell us about the creatures that we are? 

Chelsey: Yes. Perfect.

Sarah: And that was our episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you to Chelsey Weber-Smith. And if you want to hear more of Chelsey on this show, we have a Patreon episode about the Westborough Baptist Church. Which is just a beautiful, harrowing, and really thought provoking dive into not just an area of culture and religion, but just what it means for all of us to be human. Which is what Chelsey's work often gets back to in the end. And thank you as always to Carolyn Kendrick, producer extraordinaire. See you next time.