And That's Why We Drink - E234 An Anxious Tooth Mouse and an Amateur Alligator Charmer

Episode Date: August 1, 2021

It's episode 234, folks, and we've got some stories out of left field for you! First Em takes on the history of the tooth fairy so get ready for some burning and buried teeth. Then Christine brings us the story of a murderous post mistress, Lena Clarke. We also explore the world of knock-off Almond Joys... and that's why we drink! Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Go to ZOLA.com/DRINK today and use promo code SAVE50 to get fifty-percent off your save the dates! Right now, Modern Fertility is offering our listeners $20 off the test when you go to Modern Fertility.com/DRINKJust go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in DRINKGo to FunctionofBeauty.com/DRINK to take your quiz and save 20% on your first order!Simply visit athleticgreens.com/DRINK and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today!Just go to publicgoods.com/DRINK or use code DRINK at checkout to receive $15 off your first order!

hello em hi hello what are you doing just you know um hmm nothing what are you what are you doing listen i'm living the dream i have a cat on my lap uh I survived a Kroger incident Christine is not feeling good today listen we were we were supposed to record both of our episodes yesterday and I keep pushing it back Christine feels a little icky which is okay but it like it's getting worse is it well see I thought I had a cold then I went into the little clinic at Kroger to get a COVID test just to be sure. I'm vaccinated and everything. But since Blaze works at the ER, I was like, we should know before he goes out to work. Also, Delta variant, apparently, the rapid tests aren't showing it on their...

I've been watching a lot of Delta variant TikTok, and apparently it's not showing up on rapid tests sometimes. So that's an interesting. Hey, did Delta variant go viral on TikTok? Okay, you're ill. So I'm going to let you have it. Okay. Well, here's the thing. So I don't get the rapid test because whenever I have like strep or UTI, the rapid test never show up for me for some reason.

So I just got like the regular one. Sure. But I find out tomorrow but so i was there and i was in the waiting room and i was like i see like tunnel vision i'm so dizzy and then oh i forgot to tell you my my apple watch said my heart rate was 128 and i was just like sitting there and i was like i don't think that's normal so i texted blaze and he's like no that's not normal um and then my my blood pressure was fine so they just sent me home but um i'm uh m is watching m has blaze on speed dial in case i do go unconscious on the zoom well christine almost fainted in kroger it was so embarrassing dude it was so i've never almost fainted me neither it's horrible i don't know what does it feel like it felt like like just so dizzy and i was like there's spots in my eyes i don't even

know how to describe beyond that just felt like i was like gonna pass out were you aware that you were about to pass out yes or like were you like what's going on and then you'd be unconscious because i always play tune blast to distract myself and it didn't it didn't work as someone who's never fainted i always wonder what those couple seconds of consciousness left are like do you know you're going down it's like you're going to i'm going to faint now um that's what happened i mean and i didn't thank god but i was like very very close to passing out i think yeah i was just like very very dizzy anyway i'm fine it's all good but um well it's good enough that blaze is on is like a one button call away from me on my

phone in case you pass out on the show it's very convenient because he has like his blood pressure cuff and everything here so i'm just like just check me he just you know monitors me i'm still always impressed by blaze's bluetooth uh stethoscope that can just send your numbers immediately to a hospital i'm like that man's got it all including a sick wife a sick pregnant wife like the last thing anyone wants how are you emothy uh i'm all right uh nothing i mean i'm feeling pretty healthy but then like we're about to maybe jinx that because i'm going to florida for back to florida oh gosh i know so and even though i just came back from a cold i usually i mean it's been a while since i've gotten a cold so maybe my body chemicals have just completely

changed but it used to be that if i got a cold i had some like weird invincibility to colds for several weeks after right right and so i keep thinking like oh i just had the cold i'm fine now but like every time i've been to florida in the last like five years i've gotten insanely ill so i'm kind of nervous that i'm gonna come back this is like the ultimate test of like you go right back and see what happens i know so i have to pack but also my room is a mess one of the like worst qualities of me as a roommate is I'm so fucking messy. No, I thought you were not messy. I thought I was messy and you were neat.

I thought that's how our friendship worked. Then maybe it just got really bad during the quarantine. But I'm one of those people where I'll just leave something and forget about it for a week. And that happens until every item of my closet is on the floor oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah same so uh and poor allison who like is not like that lives in chaos in our bedroom oh my gosh she lived with me too this is her fault for choosing roommates that's what i'm saying so anyway i have i have a huge cleaning to do today and then i also have to pack so yuck yeah i'm not looking forward to it it's just a lot of tedious

stuff that i did to myself well do you have a trash pile um my clothes are the trash pile i think oh no clothes are not a trash pile clothes are like yeah no trash is so easy to clean up because you just pick it up and put it in the trash can but the clothes pile you gotta figure out what's dirty what's clean you gotta do a whole round of laundry no no no no you gotta hang things on hangers you gotta fold i know but what i'm saying is i have both of those things oh and obviously like my i'm never clean ever but i have both of those things and my trash pile it gets so monumental i don't i i don't have a trash pile but the thing that it's worse i think not to compare to crises. But I think mine's worse because mine are all these, like, I'm such an impulse spender

that I have all these random tchotchkes that I never find a place for and I already didn't have a place for. So now I have to, like, find, I have to unwrap every single thing I purchased in the last couple weeks and then I have to find a place for it in a space that has no rooms. Then I have to unwrap every single thing I purchased in the last couple weeks. And then I have to find a place for it in a space that has no room. So I have to rearrange everything. So that gets so overwhelming that I just don't touch it. And then I have 100 things I got to do that to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then it becomes a whole thing. I know. The cycle continues. Anyway. I'm just like, well, I should recycle that. And so then I just leave it on the floor. And then I never recycle it. Well, you're technically not throwing it away. That guess exactly right i'm upcycling it to my floor

it's carpet now yeah it's a it's a bug house where all the bugs live now but uh but yeah so it's i'm i'm fine i just know what i have to do today and i'm not it's the worst when you're like it's like an impending task and here i am like postponing a recording by three hours or whatever so i apologize i literally used the time to um depression nap anyway so it worked yeah i was depression fainted they were like what medications are you on i was like don't even get me started lady um but oh i want to say one thing too before i went to my kroger incident incident I went to UPS and I had all this mail and I'm just so thankful I just want I just want to do a big blanket thank you because a lot of people have been sending really nice little gifts that I'm going to send Emma big

picture while the lemon gifts that I've received for the baby also thank you everybody to for not sending me lemon gifts I know some of you still trickle in here but i appreciate that it's all being pretty much redirected to a different that's the best part is like if i get an email over here because i get obviously much less than like the main po box but if i get any here then i know it's like specifically it's like just a lemon po box it's just lemon no 100 and now my brother I share it. So it's either like weird shit for him or like lemon shit for me. And I've gotten so many sweet little like baby like gifties. And someone even sent the first blanket they ever crocheted to the baby.

It's just really sweet, thoughtful cards and gifts. And I open them because I don't like we don't we are still so backed up on gift videos and this is just a long story but so I just end up opening them and putting them up and away and I don't necessarily get to write like a thank you to everybody or like thank everybody personally so just if you sent something I did receive it and I am very very thankful for you oh and some people even bought stuff off the registry which was just so thoughtful oh nice and I made it some people found it which then there was it was like a little bit of like not drama that's not the right word but people were like oh my god people are finding Christine's registry and her address I just put my p.o box on there just in case so

fair enough don't you worry um well i still haven't everybody i still have not looked at your registry uh oh it's fine listen i i assume listen first of all hang on watch it that baby is gonna have so much unnecessary shit from me i would rather focus my money on that also like that child i'm gonna find a way to convert it into at least a fraction of a marvel fan even if it's just one character you can take the character please um it's i'm gonna be sending you a lot of weird crap i already actually just found i was cleaning out my car which by the way i had packages from people and uh in there was a whole bag of stuff i need to send you and i was like that's a weird thing for the baby and i like, that's a weird thing for the baby.

And I went, oh, that's a weird thing for the baby. And I went, this is going to be a good package. This is a solid assortment. Yeah. I just feel like everyone is so funny in something like the most random or the most like thoughtful. Even some people who work at like baby companies, like send little stuffed animals. It's all just very kind. And I just want everyone to know that I appreciate you so, much oh well that's very sweet of you and so so does this baby who's

literally finding different organs every day to poke really hard what's its favorite organ to kick in you i would probably say the bladder is a fun one oh fun yeah so like could the baby like do like a quadruple threat and like stretch and do like a punch punch kick kick all at the same time to different spots yeah definitely because there's multiple elbows and sharp points it definitely you can feel it it's it's also when the baby stretches isn't that like a two foot human inside of you no not two feet not two feet well i mean 15 inches tall okay well big enough excuse me i was born i was born at two feet to be clear so shut up 24 inches jesus lord help me that's insane i was always freakishly tall from the womb okay from the womb your grandmother when i was 10 i was taller than like some of

my teachers so it just happens just let it happen but uh yeah if i stretched in the womb my mother would have been dead i think so my brother actually i think i probably already said this on the show my brother broke my mom's ribs in the womb like only one of them but like kicked so hard it broke just the weak one weak one. Just one. Broke one of her ribs. And obviously they can't do anything because like what are they going to do? So she just had like a fractured rib for the rest of her pregnancy. That's why she had that huge gap in having more kids. She was like, I have to recover mentally about that.

She honestly was like, this isn't, you two are too much already. Ugh. well here by the way my story this week uh has i'm sure we could find a way to spin it and associate it into like baby stuff if you'd like oh boy uh but i decided that i was going to do a cryptid but it was going to be maybe not as mythological and spooky-ooky, but well-known and universal. And it all came from a TikTok where people asked me to do... A lot of people in the comments said I should do this. So this is a tale you can tell your little baby when they get here. This is the story of the Tooth Fairy, which is, by the way, kind of low-key inspired by

Kremit because that's a baby with actual teeth. So you can tell your baby about your first baby and how it had a very creepy smile. Inspirational Kremit. Yeah, I will. So this is the history of the Tooth Fairy. But before we get into it, I have like, I'm not kidding, like 15 fun facts. So let's just see as a soon to be mother, or I would argue you're already a mother because you're already putting up with some bullshit.

I'm suffering. Okay. So I think that counts. Let's see how much you know about teeth and babies. Probably zero. What do you think is the age of the last baby teeth that fall out like how old is a child when their last baby teeth fall out um nine ten to eleven oh okay i'm just guessing uh i don't remember a single time i ever lost a tooth which

is so really yeah i like i just totally forget maybe you were also born with all your adult teeth like a big and they just they came in and they fell out all all together on the same day yeah can you imagine the nightmare oh my god boom oh no no no no no uh at what age do most children stop believing in the tooth fairy what do you mean believing like believing that it exists believing that it exists well it doesn't exist okay well apparently the answer is 30 so great jesus um let's nailed it by the way because you even got me stumped i was like what is happening here i'm just gonna let this sit here because i'm trying to explain it okay beyond you as the outlier here what what age do most people stop believing in the truth how about eight yeah yeah oh okay that's what i

found out i don't remember i think i found out if you have little kids listening hopefully you've turned this off already hopefully they're over eight and they figured it out already oopsies yeah i figured out a couple different ways but it was basically not telling my parents i lost my teeth to see if money would still show up and then it didn't and i was like oh i get it so either you're the the like the person in between the go-between yeah or you're just giving me money got it um i probably should have figured it out way earlier but somebody had to tell me on the playground so uh this is another fun fact that august 22nd uh which is coming up exactly a month from now is national tooth fairy day oh my goodness didn't know that what does that mean a day where we celebrate celebrate okay the girl boss herself so we do uh another what percent of american

households do you think use the tooth fairy as like a thing with their kids i mean i'm a weird german family we did it so i feel like it's got to be quite a bit right like let's go with like 65 percent 80 percent of american households use the tooth fairy and uh let me see before some of them lead into new notes so i just want to make sure that i don't skip ahead um percent here is a super fun one there is actually a literal tooth fairy calculator so that parents can determine the going rate of their children's teeth hysterical oh my god so how much inflation has probably been nuts since i was a kid there's a whole piece of history that i didn't even insert in here about the inflation i will say from 1900 to 1975 so the first you know for those 75 years a tooth cost between 12 and 85 cents depending on how oh wow you know uh loosey-goosey your

parents were how generous they were uh so it used to be 12 to 85 cents at the beginning of the 1900s do you know what the average tooth uh what the average dollar amount a kid gets for each tooth in the u.s today oh god uh two dollars it is 370 okay average the universal average although you were gonna say five or higher i was be like, this can't be true because that's insane. The higher, apparently one of the higher averages based on like a study for just generous parents, the average was $5.40. Jesus Christ.

But the universal average is 370. I think my mom always gave me like a total like a look like a book i feel like i usually got like a little book or something like i didn't really get that's fun i got cash a little present i got cash and then when i told my mom hey i lost a tooth like a week ago and never got any money what's up with that my mom felt real bad and i had like i got a tenner under the pillow oh my god that's genius with a note like oh sorry i was in traffic like some bullshit like that i was stuck in traffic so uh okay here's uh another thing i'm gonna have you guess what percent of kids get a dollar or less oh for their tooth let's see i would guess like

50 only three percent shut up of kids get less than a dollar i'm bad at this game coins basically they get coins yeah and by the way this is like a psa to all parents like you don't want your kid to be like the lame one that only gets a penny you know like this is i'm trying to help your kid right now like get a little extra i don't know because i feel like you're telling you're telling the kid like hey you you deserve more no i feel like you're telling the kid, like, hey, you deserve more. No, the kid deserves more, which means, like, parents, you better cough it up for those teeth. No, man. No, no, no, no, no. Listen, give him a book.

It worked on me. What percent do you think get over $5? The 1%. Only 8%, which is still more than people getting yeah i feel like i would understand like a dollar because like you have so many t whatever but that means 89 of kids are getting between one and five dollars so if you're in that range your kid is i don't know average proud to proud to share with their friends what the tooth fairy gave them them, I guess. Wow. Fascinating. And then the last thing I'm going to, the last percentage I'm going to ask you is,

what percentage of people do you think the Tooth Fairy is female? A female human? Oh, God. Or a female humanoid or whatever, you know? 100%. 75%. Really? Yeah.

Apparently, that is only, not only, but that's that's in the states that's the primary belief but outside of that it's the tooth fairy is actually a lot of animals in different countries oh i wasn't even thinking outside of the u.s oh wow okay that's fascinating animals that's yeah so apparently uh animals that have inspired the tooth fairy or our versions of the tooth fairy are bunnies birds dragons squirrels mice bears bats and that's just some of them and it depends from culture to culture can you imagine telling your child oh a bat's gonna come into your bed and climb under your pillow and flap around if my mom were like a bear or a raccoon or a possum it's gonna come and take your teeth out of your pillow i mean that's talk about german

trauma but also think about like the people who think oh yeah cute little bunnies coming into my room they're like can you imagine in the states someone says a stranger is gonna invade your home and rip your teeth i mean you're completely right a child like a like a flying human is gonna come through the window yeah that's and there's nothing you can do about it. Yeah. And she might be stuck in traffic, so you never know when she'll actually show up. Yeah. Fingers crossed she'll get here sooner than later, so we're not just in constant stress. Here's a fun fact about Kremit. An infant is usually not born with teeth already in their mouth. you're cremant um do you know the age range of when teeth come in for a baby oh my god no uh i'm preparing you this is me being your

your guide as into parenthood uh babies get their teeth from four months to nine months on average okay psa if it happens earlier or later there's nothing wrong with your baby that is just the average uh and babies get a total of 20 teeth which is interesting because i think adults get 32 teeth i thought it was 16 on top 16 on the bottom well because you're like your wisdom teeth and stuff are in there molars i don't know what do i know canines uh vampire fangs i don't know so uh so for some reason this is just part of tooth history tooth fairy history for some reason i and i couldn't find the reason kids used to only get rewarded for the sixth tooth that would get taken out that's interesting but over time parents started

rewarding each tooth and this i gotta keep track of all six that seems like a lot to keep track of for each kid you might as well throw like a piece of candy their way or something right why not so this is probably around the time that the tooth fairy also became popular because so dentists really liked a tooth fairy because it first of all helps kids process the fact that they're losing teeth because that can be like a really scary thing and it's almost like the tooth fairy is coming that's like a rite of passage versus like something's happening to your body and you're too young to understand it's falling apart and then also they really like the tooth Fairy because it encourages kids to keep their teeth clean because a lot of the tropes or a lot of the lore with the Tooth Fairy is people will say, oh, the Tooth Fairy only takes the shiniest, cleanest teeth or like to like build her castle or some bullshit or like her castle of teeth.

um her castle of teeth or like people have told their kids like oh the tooth fairy pays you more gives you more money or gives you more whatever if your teeth are cleaner and so it is it promotes oral hygiene a lot of times and it also helps kids process what's going on so uh that might have been one of the reasons why people stopped rewarding only the sixth tooth and they just started rewarding each tooth because it was also promoting oral hygiene and all that look how clean it is yeah so uh the first animal or the first thing i guess to inspire the tooth fairy is actually rodents which is fun okay and i'm going to explain that in a second. But real quick, I want to talk about Norse, Norse tradition. So this is the 10th century. And the Norse tradition, there's something called, I'm probably saying it wrong. Sorry, Tondefe, Tondefe, which means

tooth fee, and like, like paying a fee for a tooth oh and basically all the way since the at least the 10th century and this is from the earliest writings that they have so pretty much like as far back as they can go in this history vikings would pay for children's lost teeth or baby teeth or often it was like the first lost tooth was the most special but they would pay for all lost teeth because baby teeth i, as a sign of innocence or purity or something, it was considered good luck charms. And so Vikings would wear baby teeth as necklaces to protect them in battle. Oh, wow. I think I've heard that. I don't know where I would have heard that. But that sounds really familiar. The necklace thing.

I always thought like, oh, when I see like, I mean, it doesn't happen a lot. But when I think about like a scary like pirate or Viking outfit outfit if they wanted to look super intimidating they would be like there'd be like a necklace of teeth or something i used to think it was like yeah i always thought it was like of their victims like a reminder right that's what it seems like it would be just little babies so it's just like oh my son at home lost his tooth so i stuck it and put it on and every now and then i kiss it for good luck, you know? Aw. So since all the way then, people have been exchanging teeth for money is basically what I'm getting at.

Fascinating. So we got a wide history here. But the main history for the tooth fairy really begins in the Middle Ages. Because at the time, Europeans thought that if a witch had your teeth then they could control or curse you and the more of your teeth they had the more power they had over you so it was very crucial in the middle ages to hide and destroy your lost teeth okay so they were like just get rid of it so which can't find you so a lot of teeth were burned sometimes they were buried if you a lot of people also hid them and this is where rodents come in

people would often like bury or hide they would bury their teeth like in the gardener they would hide them in like a corner where like a rat may come through because they would hope that rodents would find the teeth and eat them i know but it was it it's because i guess the the symbolism to it is that because rodents can like chew through literally fucking anything so because rodents teeth are so strong they thought if a rodent eating your tooth it would manifest that the next tooth coming in for you would be as strong as the rodents sure sure sure why not whatever we started this topic with like witches are going to control you through your teeth so i mean on and honestly like we still have fairies coming in and paying you for that it's like not like it's that wildly

it's just a different it's a different absurdity. So one of the big things was that rodents would hopefully eat your teeth to grant you a tooth just as strong as theirs. Fingers crossed. And that becomes actually, that's still common in a lot of cultures. Oh, okay. That like you'll give your tooth to, I don't know if it's a pet or if there's just like animals running rampant or something but a lot of people like hide it in a piece of meat and give it to like a dog or something oh dear okay i know i know i was like oh i had no idea so rodents being associated with teeth uh in the middle ages ended up inspiring this story in the 1800s it was a french fairy tale um and it was called la bonne petite suri

i think i said i think i said that right and it means the good little mouse oh dear very sexy maybe sexy for like like mickey mouse would like you know i don't know uh so it's an 1800s french fairy tale and it's a story about this tooth themed fairy like it was truly a fairy tale about a fairy but the story goes that this fairy needed to help a queen leave this evil king or get rid of the evil king so the fairy turns into a rodent turns into a mouse hides in the king's pillow and then when he's sleeping like basically punches out his teeth i'm sorry what like girl boss like like punches his teeth out and i think steals them and then i don't know what happens after that but the king and later dies and like they oh my god and the

fairy and the queen which are also interestingly two synonymous words for the gay men which i'm loving that this could be like a power book for them um i guess why don't you hide in somebody's pillow and punch their face in you know what if it's the establishment maybe it's all right i'm not too sure if it's symbolic maybe yeah i i at least would like to go to a reading i like a barnes and noble about this and see what the hell was going on this should be our next smash poetry talk about cryptids i know so anyway so the fairy tale was basically the fairy helped the queen by turning into a rodent and taking their teeth taking the king's teeth or

something so it became this tooth fairy you wonder if you woke up and a rat was just punching your teeth in and taking, by the way. Not even just punching them in, but like, hold on, let me grab that out of your mouth real quick. Putting them in like a little like one centimeter drawstring bag. Oh my god, no. And just kind of like throw it over the shoulder with a little like stick bindle and kind of running away. Just one at a time. So I'm probably butchering how that story goes, but...

No, it sounds perfect. I hope that's how it went. And so this story ended up creating the lore that there was a tooth fairy to begin with, but more simply put at the time, that there was a tooth mouse instead of a tooth fairy. I kind of like a tooth mouse. That's kind of fun. Well, a lot of places still have a tooth mouse instead of a tooth fairy um so there's still parts of france that still have this tooth fairy lore that instead of like a humanoid fairy coming in and leaving you coins or whatever for your teeth

it's actually a tooth mouse who brings you money for your teeth i kind of like that actually a lot maybe i'll be that weird parent in the neighborhood i'd like to think if i had a tooth mouse it would be like the what's the blue mouse from bear in the big blue house tutter or whatever it was the mouse with like insane anxiety and so like i like to think that my little tooth mouse would be so nervous about me like waking up or hearing them or being hurt uh if you need something to watch and feel like you completely relate to this character please uh go youtube like the mouse from the bear in the big blue house every single thing was an existential crisis with that guy oh sad mouse oh so i like to think that would be my tooth mouse if you needed a visualization so this story ended up there this fairy tale ended up introducing the

tooth fairy but people kind of ran with it as the tooth mouse because i think she was a mouse for most of the story okay so then the tooth mouse became this official lore so in the 1890s there was a prince alfonso the 13th yeah there was and that was in madrid and i think that was in madrid i'm pretty sure that was in madrid and he started when he was a little kid he started losing his teeth and he started getting nervous and so the queen hired this famous writer at the time named father louise coloma who ended up writing a story based probably on the this was around the same time that that french fairy tale came out so he plagiarized he it was loosely based on probably but so the prince was losing his teeth his mom hired this author to write a book for him to like kind of help him cope with it i know

and so they he ended up writing this story about raton perez which is basically the tooth mouse i'm so obsessed with that and so raton perez was a mouse the story goes that it was a mouse who visits this prince and brings him gifts in exchange for his teeth and the prince ends up befriending the rat and raton perez takes him to other sleeping kids in the kingdom to show like how he also gives them gifts and it was supposed to be this moral of like a prince and the pauper kind of thing where it's like oh now the raton perez is introducing the prince to people who don't live as flashy as he does and it was supposed to be like the queen like rip out all those pages and was like that's not the point it was like you had one assignment and it was about his teeth. What are you doing?

You are trying to sneak around my house. You are trying to make a lesson. But yeah, so that ends up being the story of Ratón Pérez. And so at least by 1894 in Madrid, since then, Spanish-speaking countries, at least a lot of Spanish-speaking countries, still have Ratoncito Pérez or also Ratón Pérez or also also el raton de los dientes which is the tooth mouse they're all basically the same character different names i love this tooth mouse i'm getting so attached to it i knew you might so i was excited for this so kids will at least in some spanish speaking countries they will put their tooth under a pillow for Ratoncito Perez to replace with a gift. And a lot of times they'll also just put an item in a box next to their bed

instead of under a pillow. And that's where the mouse will find it. But there's also places like Argentina, they will actually put their tooth in a cup of water. And Raton Perez will drink the water along with the tooth. So it kind of goes back to that middle age like eating the tooth thing and he'll leave a gift in the cup for them to wake up to oh that's kind of nice so there you have it so that's what if you accidentally leave your dentures out and you're you're like raton perez he might be uh that's a buffet that's a buffet for raton perez you like put your you like put your dentures in a cup and you wake up and there's like a little present. You're like, no, no, no.

I need actually my teeth back. Thank you for the candy bar, but no thanks. Say thank you, but that's literally my mouth. So can you give that back? You took my mouth. Raton Cito Perez, could you please throw out my dentures? I need them back. In that case, I think you put the gift back in the cup the next day and you reverse the whole process.

You're like, please, let's do an exchange. Yeah. Well, apparently Ratoncito Perez is also is like the is an actual icon like the tooth fairy. So he's used a lot in some dental marketing and things like that. So he's like arguably as someone who's never been to these places the internet makes me feel like he's as important or as big as the tooth fairy okay so in 1908 which was only like 12 years later after this book came out in the states uh the chicago tribune put out this uh article called household hints and lillian brown uh wrote in and like contributed to household

hints in the chicago tribune and this is basically the first print appearance in the states of the tooth fairy so uh lillian brown wrote this in the chicago tribune quote tooth fairy many a refractory child will allow a loose tooth to be removed if he knows about the tooth fairy if he takes his little tooth and puts it under the pillow when he goes to bed the tooth fairy will come in uh in the night and take it away and in its place will leave some little gift it is a nice plan for mothers to visit the five cent counter and lay in a supply of articles to be used on such occasions so i think it was just like a hint of like, hey, parents, if you do this,

you can give your kid five cents and then you go to like the penny candy shop and grab your supplies. It was like almost a little marketing tip on ways to entertain your kid when you have to bring them shopping with you. So that was the first real time we heard of the Tooth Fairy out here.

I guess it took off in those next 12 years because by the 1920s the french fairy tale from the 1800s i mentioned la bon petit siri the first the tooth mouse fairy so 12 years after the article in the chicago tribune this french fairy tale was re-released in the states and translated into english and so i don't know if that has to do i don't know if they have anything to do with each other but in 1908 and then in the 1920s the first times we're seeing the tooth fairy in america and the illustrations on this book this oh this book was also it was i think the first one that had illustrations in it and so now people could see what this tooth mouse actually looked like and it was drawn more as a winged human fairy i see and so now by the 1920s the united states

has this understanding of like oh this floating human fairy that brings you money we understand now exactly so in this same at the same time this woman woman named Esther Watkins Arnold, she writes a little play that also has to do with the Tooth Fairy. And so now there's two different books about the Tooth Fairy, basically. Okay. Both in the 1920s. So they exist in the 1920s. But in the United States, it does not become very popular until the 1950s. So there's 30 years where people kind of know about it, but it's not this like understood household name. Right.

That every family uses. Do you want to guess why in the 1950s the tooth fairy got popular? There's two things that cater to this. Let me think. The invention of toothpaste no no but that's you know what i don't know when toothpaste was invented but that's a good guess for someone who's not thinking about the year yeah let me see when was too because i i listened to a podcast uh about how like toothpaste marketing was like out of control anyway oh

1955 okay holy shit so maybe that was one of maybe that was one of the third one i didn't even think about that i hope i'm reading that right nope i'm wrong that's when striped toothpaste was invented ah oh i love striped toothpaste though yeah sorry uh that's my answer when striped toothpaste no i'm just kidding uh-huh yeah um let me think was it uh the 50s uh i was gonna say everyone before the 50s had bad breath i was like i just totally blindly ran with that i don't know what i was thinking i forget there was it was definitely like later than i thought that it was like widely used but interesting uh amethy was it like a marketing thing for candy or something no well no no

trick-or-treating i don't know so in the 1950s uh the tooth fairy finally became a big thing because it was officially post-world war ii right and now and people were now coming out of the war and it was after the great depression and people had a little extra money where they could now splurge on their kids and so giving them money for their teeth wasn't as outrageous as it might have been 20 years ago that makes sense um so this was like the beginning of kit i you know kids getting quote spoiled comparatively to the great fucking depression and world war ii so parents were now kind of doing extra things like that for their kids and then the second thing was disney is that interesting

the first fairy movies were coming out okay that's so interesting yeah i wouldn't have guessed that so in the 1950s or i guess in 1940 pinocchio came out and in 1950 cinderella came out and both of them showed a good fairy finding you when you needed help oh my god and then there was tinkerbell whenever she came out yeah when did peter pan come out that actually googled it recently because i watched it and i was like what the hell am i watching peter pan disney release year it was a long time ago 30s oh 53 so that might have also been one for all we know i just could have been because i feel like that probably would have been a popular character that totally makes sense so then okay so there's wildly racist movie i mean i know like most of those old disney ones are but i would watch that like holy shit this is worse than i remembered

it's they're all pretty rough they're all pretty like they literally on disney plus have those like opening credits that are like um we're really sorry about this anyway good luck our bad so okay so let's add peter pan to that then so from 1940 to the mid 1950s there were now three movies that every kid had probably seen all involving a fairy that helps you and so the fact that now people i'm assuming we're really getting into like the idea of fairies they probably went to go look at new books found out about the tooth fairy and so anyway so that in the 1950s is when we solidified the modern day image of what a tooth fairy looks like at least in the states yeah So from the 50s to the 70s, the tooth fairy really started to become a thing. But by the 1970s, it blew the fuck up.

Because there was this DJ in Chicago who mentioned her on the air. What? And the American Dental Association ended up putting out an unofficial statement because they had gotten flooded with calls from parents being like, what the fuck is the tooth fairy? Like, we got it. Like, what is this? Like, so interest really surged in the 70s. Oh my God. To the point where like the ADA had to say something about it.

So now there's an author named Michael Hingston, and he says, quote, every human culture has some kind of tradition surrounding the disposal of a child's lost baby teeth and apparently these traditions are called shed tooth rituals we're like shedding the tooth okay so that was the history of the tooth fairy but now I'm just gonna actually read off some interesting shed tooth rituals around the world oh yeah I love that so there's still burying the teeth which is more middle age uh england or middle age europe in general and european parents used to hide their teeth again from witches but now it has slowly grown into this general understanding

of like if you bury a tooth it's protecting your kid from struggles in the future oh okay it's just like a good luck thing yeah and uh american settlers also took this idea with them to the states which of course they took an idea and took other things from other places and other people okay so because they were from there right so like fair but it was their thing and then they brought any opportunity to say that american settlers stole something someone replaced what existed here already with their fucking tooth burials bingo they used to bury their kids teeth in flower pots i guess on the ships on the way over because they had nowhere else to bury it's how scary though if you're like wow what a beautiful architectural or not architectural beautiful like archaeological discovery and then

there's just like teeth children's teeth inside this like beautiful clay pot that's terrifying anyway maybe if you find a clay pot from american settler era that's not well you know what i encased in glass in a museum as we all know i have a metal detector which yes i know it's not gonna find a clay pot but maybe maybe just maybe just like reinvent it into just a plain old tooth finder what do you think no thank you so thank you so they took this idea with them put and were burying their kids teeth in flower pots and it was to manifest growing a tooth with these new roots you know i'm saying a lot of play on words there places that still bury teeth and by the way I got this from many a website.

I really tried to do as intensive a deep dive as possible because I don't want to give any wrong information. But if you are from one of these places or you know better than me, please tell me and I will happily correct myself. But apparently in Nepal, they still bury their teeth in a secret location to hide it from animals. In Malaysia, they bury their teeth in nature because they're the concept is they're returning their body back to the earth that's nice in afghanistan they uh bury their teeth in a mouse hole which i guess is it's interesting that there's still like mice involved in the lore and my favorite one is in turkey they bury their teeth near a place that represents success to them so that way when their kids who lost the tooth grow up it will almost like draw them back to that area

and bring them success so like if you bury the tooth near a hospital that kid will become a doctor it's like manifesting early like we'll end up in the hospital okay no it's like we're manifesting their future careers and so you could bury it on like a football field so your kid would become a football player i don't know so i think that's interesting that's in turkey that is people still uh in some places burn the teeth uh as another way to hide their teeth and the lore has come about that if you if you don't burn them that you would be looking for them for eternity. That's interesting to me.

You can feed your tooth to an animal, often a dog, so that your teeth grow as strong as theirs. This is in Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, and some Alaskan tribes. I'm sure there's others. I'm just listing off a couple. In some places, they still hide their teeth. In Russia, south africa new zealand they also have a tooth mouse that they hide teeth for in el salvador there's a tooth rabbit in the ukraine kids will hide their teeth in the darkest part of a house wrapped in cloth some native tribes will put their teeth in trees i guess because of the roots or maybe returning your body back to

earth or something interestingly i would say most places when it came to what they do with their teeth throw them into the sky or onto the roof of their house no no it was the amount of places that do this was shocking as someone who only knew about the tooth fairy. Wow. Like the raining teeth. I mean, they would like rain down on you. Oh, my God. So some countries and I'm just saying some countries because originally I was going to list this and it was going to take too fucking long.

And you won't remember the names of everywhere anyway. But there are multiple countries who throw their teeth at the sun. I think this I think this is like to throw their tooth at allah like okay okay there's also throwing teeth onto or over the top of your roof and in some places i saw this really in more like asian countries i think this was japan or korea you would you would throw certain teeth in certain directions towards the roof interesting so like you would throw some teeth up to the roof and some you would throw i think it was. So like you would throw some teeth up to the roof and some you would throw, I think it was your bottom teeth you would throw up to the roof and your top teeth,

if you lost one of those, you would throw it down to the ground and it was to represent the natural growth direction of that tooth. Oh my goodness, that's really fascinating. And I apparently, that's very common. Some people throw their teeth into rivers. Some people throw their teeth into the wind after being crushed by rocks. So the dust kind of flies away. Some people also, in combination with throwing the tooth to the roof or to the sky or wherever, the intention is to also have it be an offering to their own version of the tooth fairy, which is usually an animal. So in some places it's a tooth mouse, sometimes the tooth lizard, sometimes the tooth bird, sometimes it's a moon goddess. Or sometimes the intention is to throw it up onto the roofs that the sun will turn it into gold.

There are other there are a lot of places that have like a funny little saying that they'll say with the throwing of the tooth so in egypt apparently they throw the tooth to the sun and i don't know if this is still used but this was what i what i was told on a few different sources that in egypt you throw the tooth to the sun while saying shiny sun shiny sun take this blue this buffalo's tooth and bring me a bride's tooth. It's like a funny little saying to that. Okay. In Romania, you throw the tooth over the roof and you say,

crow, crow, take away this bone tooth and bring me a steel one. Oh, that's nice. In Sudan, you throw it to the sun and you say, take this donkey's tooth and replace it with a beautiful gazelle's tooth. In Romania, the kids say crow crow take this milk tooth and bring me a steel one instead of this bone tooth apparently in some native places this one was apparently cherokee uh they'll say a couple times in a row beaver put a new tooth in my jaw which would make sense because apparently beavers are much like rodents in that their teeth

are super strong sure well yeah they have to chew all that wood up. Yeah. No, that's a wood. Wait. Yeah. A woodchuck beaver dam. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So some places also make their teeth into tools. Some turn them into jewelry and some play games with them. I saw in a few places that they do dances with them. And based on how you dance determines how crooked your teeth will be. Oh, no. I did look up what they do in germany and i basically saw there was a tooth fairy named zonfi that just means tooth fairy oh okay so you have a tooth fairy great i was hoping something why my family did it yeah i

was hoping something really uh classically german fairy yeah she comes and rips your teeth out of your face she brings her own pliers um in ireland though apparently you leave a tooth to protect kids from changelings which oh sure would like to uh cover one day i'm excited for that that always creeped me out and apparently in ireland there's also a tooth leprechaun which is like so irish so on brand her name is anna bogle and she apparently lost her own tooth but she'll trade you coins for your your teeth to replace hers oh see that makes sense like oh i lost mine i'll trade you yeah yeah yeah that's fun in italy there's a tooth mouse called topolino and they

also there's another i guess kind of tooth fairy called saints apollonia aka santa polonia and this is the patron saint of dentistry and toothaches fun fact uh and i guess she also represents the tooth fairy in some ways in finland my favorite and also the last uh little ritual i'll talk about uh in the mid 1990s mid-1990s they had this like marketing tooth troll uh and this tooth troll was named hamaspeco hamaspeco or whatever hamaspeco i think and it was this cautionary tale oral hygiene campaign about tooth decay where they would tell kids that eating candy would lure in hummus bako who would drill holes into your teeth and leave cavities so it was like to promote oral hygiene i guess but there was a tooth troll which i obviously had to mention i love a tooth troll this reminded me this was before our time but in the 70s and 80s it's very funny that you mentioned earlier that you had recently looked up like

toothpaste history because i'd also looked up toothpaste history like i don't know how our brains synced up like that seems about right but i found out about this maybe like a month ago and this is the perfect time for me to uh address it which is but in the 70s and the 80s there was this crest campaign for children and it was this like commercial on tv or like tiny little episodes called the Cavity Creeps. Have you heard about this? No. So the Cavity Creeps, I'll send you a picture. Oh, God.

It was basically like a little superhero action sequence where the Cavity Creeps, they looked like built up plaque. They're like plaque monsters. Sure. And they were trying to take over the town called toothopolis sure um but there was this the superheroes or the avengers of this were called the crest team and they wore crest themed jumpsuits and they fought with toothbrushes and toothpaste but um let me please send you a picture of what they all looked like. Please do. Okay, so this is the Crest team. And then this is what the what the cavity creeps looked like.

Oh my God. Look at their svelte little outfits. They look like they're meant for this job. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then also, apparently people have heard about this more recently and someone did like another...

I'll put this up for if you're on YouTube, you can see their svelte outfits. What should people Google to find this? Cavity creeps. Oh, great. Okay. I sent you another one, and this is a more recent drawing of it. It looks kind of badass. He has like a toothpaste cap on his head.

It's so funny so anyway i just couldn't find another place but uh hama spico from finland made me feel like this was a great time to mention our own campaigns against plaque and oral with oral hygiene so um the tooth fairy has become very popular there's even like whole movies dedicated to the tooth fairy one being the tooth fairy starring dwayne the rock johnson a.k.a. RJ's future husband. Then there's Rise of the Guardians. There's Toothless. Darkness Falls, which is a horror movie about the Tooth Fairy that I it used to be like the go to horror movie that my dad watched when I was a kid.

And so I remember getting stuck in dark basements watching Darkness Falls a lot as a child. But it's basically if the lights are off, tooth fairy will find you and kill you what the fuck no no no so anyway there's a few movies if you want to go check those out there's also in some areas people uh encourage oral hygiene and use the tooth fairy for that so it's So it's in such popularity that certain places, official mints will actually print tooth fairy coins for people to buy and leave under pillows for their kids. So the Royal Australian Mint has a $2 tooth fairy coin. And the Royal Canadian Mint, they had tooth fairy quarters.

In most recent news uh in 2020 there was some tooth fairy news do you know what that is in 2020 hmm she went on strike i don't know close well not close but that's a good guess uh during the pandemic to keep morale up for kids apparently a little kid wrote in and said i lost my tooth during the quarantine is the tooth fairy still gonna be here like come get my tooth and canadian and new zealand governments responded saying that the tooth fairy was an essential worker and would still be coming to people's homes to let kids feel like they could still lose their teeth during covid and not have another thing missing in their life so precious what if my parents are like, I don't have the money for that? She's in traffic.

Oh, I see. Okay. I thought they were like going to send out like, I don't know, like maybe candy or something for the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy stimmy. Yeah. So anyway, fun fact, the tooth fairy is an essential worker. How precious.

Oh my gosh here are just some fun ways if you happen to have kids or if you're about to have a child in about 10 months they're going to have teeth it's gonna be born with a full set yeah i know i'm pretending and we've still got a little while though to that but here are some fun ways that you can spice up the tooth fairy experience um some of these were in parenting.com. So you know they're legit. Sprinkle. This is going to be a fat no from Christine.

But sprinkle glitter on the floor to show the Tooth Fairy's trail of where they came into your room. That should be a big no for every. I think that's a big no for every parent. I'm just going to like kind of give a blanket statement. I don't think anyone has the. That's why I said it first. I was like, that's a great idea aesthetically, also it's so quickly gonna be a bad call if you have like someone cleaning your house every week who can do yeah if you if you plan on like getting rid of your carpet in the

next week or so anyway like then do it as someone with a trash pile probably not the best for me but we'll see people will also instead of um dollars they will leave little trinkets like books and toys and they will also leave notes from the tooth fairy so like an affirmation from the tooth fairy did that i mean the tooth fairy did that yeah people will also buy tooth fairy pillows where it's a tiny little pillow with a pocket so you can put your tooth in there and that way as a parent you're not like digging under your child's sleeping head. Holy crap, yeah. Also, there's something online that you can print out and it's a Tooth Fairy receipt to show that like there was an exchange of goods. That's really cute. There's also an app for parents that adds the Tooth Fairy to pictures as proof that she was there.

So you can take a picture of your sleeping kid and it'll put a filter over it that the Tooth Fairy was there so you can show them the next day. That seems a little far for me, but whatever. She can also leave voicemails for you. There's like different numbers you can call and the Tooth Fairy will like text or call you back. And apparently, I did try calling it and it didn't seem like it was in service,

but it was also in the middle of the night. There is a Tooth Fairy hotline in Sacramento. Again, I don't know if it works it could have been shut down but there was a tooth fairy hotline if you want to google that you can also do that and get a like pre-recorded message from the fairy talking to your kid i love that you called in the middle of the night and they're like go to bed please the tooth fairy was like i'm literally so busy right now everyone's asleep that's true it's her on hours yeah anyway that is the story of the tooth fairy that's fascinating

i'd never even thought about that as like a cryptid story yep yep anyway man i don't know if she's a cryptid but like so many people were like you have to do the tooth fairy and i was like if it's what you want i'm gonna give you what you want fascinating i feel like as a future parent i just do i wonder like do you know what you're gonna do with the tooth fairy stuff like are you gonna like lean into it yeah of course yeah i don't know i get all nervous about like then the reveal of like i was lying to you the whole time but you know i feel like if that's the worst trauma i give my kid then i mean that kid had a pretty good life yeah that's the goal fingers crossed i am so good of a parent that the

only trust issues we have is the tooth fairy that they're mad about that at christmas 20 years later yeah i think they'll bounce back i think they'll bounce back from it it's okay and it's like fun while it lasts right like i don't know yeah i feel like it's a fun or i mean like i'm sure you could negotiate and be like oh i know the tooth fairy but she's busy so i help and i i give her the money or and that give her the money. That was always the go-between when we started questioning my mom why her handwriting looked so similar. And it was like, sometimes I step in while she's stuck in traffic. Hey, now there's a computer.

You can just type that shit and print it out. Oh, that happened, though. That happened to Blaze. They found the note on his dad's computer. You've got to learn to erase, my friend. You've got to be careful. Yeah, you've got to be careful with that. Anyway. You've got to learn to encry gotta be careful yeah gotta be careful with that anyway um gotta learn to encrypt however you do that well anyway there's the tooth fairy for you yeah

all right i have a story for you and this is kind of like a really random one also i feel like this is just a random episode uh i can't wait i can't what is it like santa claus now he breaks into your house or something that was the grinch weird oh right you already did that yeah yeah sorry is this the easter bunny and how he just like vandalizes every yard with eggs vandalizes eggs everybody's house i mean these creatures are dangerous maybe you also did the tooth fairy and how like there's this invasion, this mass invasion that like no one's talking about and children are just running rampant with no teeth in their head. With no teeth or with too many teeth. They get along with too many teeth.

It's an epidemic. No, I have a story that actually I covered in Orlando that I thought I had already covered on the show. And then I went and looked and i didn't i didn't check like three times fine okay i'm very excited about it it's it's really random but it like is so bizarre i'm just excited so this is the story of lena clark um and i actually titled it the strange story of lena clark so oh that must mean it's super strange if you're writing strange so lena clark she was born lena marietta thankful clark in 1886 in vermont but moved to west palm beach at a young age and her father was a minister named reverend almond taylor clark i'm sorry is

his name almond and he named his child thankful his name's albin without a d at the end so like almond oh almond okay yeah yeah that's that's a more normal name a-l-m-o-n it looks a lot like almond it's not like no that's not an a-n that's what i thought was still not quite a normal name realistically he should have instead of thankful named her joy so they could be almond joy but like wait a second that's good just saying i'm just saying good job anyway we're oh it's knock off like 99 cent store almond joy it's almond thankful you know it's like great value almond joy oh my god the florida version, yeah. Okay. Do they have a dog named Snickers or something?

No, I can't get over Almond Joy. Okay, so he was a minister, and Lena devoted a lot of her time to the Red Cross, the Congregational Church. She sold war bonds during World War I. She was just a very, like, how do you say it like a very uh generous charitable person a good person as they all are in the beginning of the story yes precise either they're nicely either they're all good and then they die or they're all good and then they and then they kill so it's one of the two you're completely right it never ends well wow that's all right why do people still listen to this? You know the Sparknotes. There's a lady either in white or black in my story. And in your story, they were good and then they're done.

Em, don't reveal. Come on. Cut this out. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Okay, so her sister Maude was the city librarian for West Palm Beach. And apparently Lena by age six was like reading philosophy books like she was very smart very charitable i guess thankful based on her name her brother worked as the postmaster at the west palm beach office but unfortunately on christmas day of 1920 he met a strange and untimely death when he died of a coral snake bite oh holy shit that is do you want to know how he died of a coral snake bite well i imagine in florida like anything with scales is just flying around like

i don't know yeah yeah you'd think so um well but no turns out he was a taxidermist and an amateur snake charmer okay wait i'm in florida right now what no right this doesn't sound floridian at all i know right it's like early joe exotic era um but he's literally the like you're already the postmaster you've already done a job yeah you're fine successful but i guess everyone needs a hobby so he decides to be a taxidermist and amateur snake charmer. The most dangerous of jobs, I would imagine. You know, every person he went and like told that that's what he does in his free time. They were like, that's a bad call. And then this might be the last time I ever talked to you.

And then he died from and they were all like, let me guess. Yes. Is that what this is? Let me stop you right there. I have a hunch. That's literally what happened. So because you hear snake in florida and you're like oh bummer and then it's like oh wow okay what do you expect yeah i you took

something that was in my mind so obvious and you really flipped it on its head there but you also made a good point that it's still very florida like the only way it could be more florida's if it was like an alligator or something an alligator bit him while he was an amateur snake charmer right or he was an amateur alligator charmer you know something like that actually if you told me he died from an alligator by in florida i the last thing i could do is be surprised so the snake is my like one percent ability to be shocked to be shocked okay, glad I got you on that 1%. So Paul had left the post office in 1918 and the man, I guess, to become a full-time snake

charmer and the man who became postmaster after him resigned shortly after. So in 1920, good old Lena, with the support of the community through a petition that she had signed by local businessmen was hired as post mistress so like this was not a thing that was like common you know as a woman to be hired to a job like this so she had to have local businessmen sign a petition to let her do the job but they did and so she was 35 years old and she became the post mistress at the west palm beach post office so at this time uh post offices made a lot of money not only from like stamps and the usual shit but also for money orders and war bonds and so about a year and a

half into her stint as postmistress on july 26 1921 lena sent two registered mail sacks to the atlanta federal reserve bank and the sacks contained 41 000 in cash okay except they didn't because when they arrived in atlanta they were filled with mail order catalogs cut to the size of u.s currency to feel like money but smart smart for stupid you know yeah like it worked ish yeah uh so with my trusty inflation calculator i determined that 41 000 back then is about 531 000 today so like a massive like half a million dollars oh my god okay yeah so more than half a million dollars a massive sum of money and a postal inspector arrived and was like hey lena girlfriend what is going on here? Hey, girly pop.

I feel like something's up. Like, don't take this the wrong way, but you were the last one to see $41,000 go missing. And she's like, I know nothing about this. No clue. Wow. Again, Kel Suprize. Kel Suprize.

So less than a week later on August 1st, Lena hired a driver named Baxter Patterson to take her to Orlando. Love it. Love it. She checked into room 87 of the San Juan Hotel in downtown Orlando under an assumed name. And later that evening, she walked into the police station in downtown Orlando and told police that she knew who had stolen the money. Oh. Was it a fucking snake snake it was a tooth fairy it was a man named fred miltimore and he could be found at the san juan hotel in downtown orlando

okay what are you talking about so they're like okay i guess we'll go to the hotel so the man she accused this fred miltimore was actually a friend of hers and he was a former mail carrier she had worked with in the past who had moved to Orlando and was running a restaurant called The Arcade. And so she tells police Fred Miltimore is guilty of the theft. He's the one who stole his money and you can find him at the San Juan Hotel. They asked, how do you know he's there? And she said, well, he still has to be there because I drugged him with a morphine pill. OK, well, so she really fucking knows what's going on then.

Okay. She's like, don't question me. She's like, I'm pretty sure you don't need to mansplain to me what the situation is. How somebody could be stuck in a room. I may have had a bag full of non-money, but, and also my brother died of a snake. We don't make the best decisions, but I can tell you for sure this one, bet your money on it. My dad, Almond Joy, sometimes names these really weird things. But you have to trust me on this.

I drugged the man and he's still there. We're just a kooky bunch, okay? So get through it. We're a little kooky. What of it? So once the chief of police confirmed with West Palm Beach that Lena was indeed the postmistress, because I don't think they literally believed her at first they were like this lady came in here and told us she had

a job ha ha ha oh okay how silly is that um they took her accusation more seriously and decided to go check out her story so they arrive at the san juan hotel expecting to find a drugged fred miltimore guess what they find look at this point i what an almond joy i'm confused what what what i just i knew you were gonna say something fun um instead they find a dead fred miltimore he had been not only drugged but then shot in the chest with a gun lying nearby holy shit so she just like casually forgot to mention the part where she was like shot him the big bang isn't the most important part here if you're looking for the body i won't tell you what state it's in yeah you didn't ask okay i gave you a very clear location that was all you wanted and that's all i gave you so that's all you needed don't make me

show all my cards they also found the two empty money bags which had been slashed open by a knife dramatic you could just literally untie it okay so during this discovery lena was still back at the police office so officers uh were like hey uh chief of police we just found him and he is fully dead so the guy goes to lena and is like um you killed the man like you said you just drugged him but you killed him and she was like no i didn't what are you talking about i like how that way she's aghast she's like me but i've done nothing that would imply that silly chief of police i would i don't know where you got that idea so she like wholeheartedly denies it but then like pretty quickly just fully admits to it because i guess she can't like stand by her

story i do appreciate that very quickly she was like i'm bored you're right yeah yeah she really does kind of change her tune really quickly i i i don't want to do this yeah okay she's a gemini for sure uh so she says she had shot fred because he said he would blame her for the theft and she's like i just couldn't since he was the one who stole the money i had to shoot him or else he was going to tell everyone i did it it's like okay all right then pretty soon after that she confessed to the theft of the forty one thousand dollars as well so she's like well actually, actually, I did do it. So I guess that's besides the point. This girl's all over the place.

She's not really good at like sticking to her story. But also she's so quick to give in. Like even she knows she's a bad liar. Like she's like she knows what she's she knows what she's not doing. And she knows like that that thing is the thing that she needs to be doing. And she's like, I we both know I'm going to caught pretty soon i might as i'm too i'm too overwhelmed like i don't have the energy to play this game anymore with you i'm sure you don't either i'll just give up the goat yeah i like how in my mind every time they ask her about some new

information she goes oh no yeah well technically it really is like an immediate like aghast oh you said shot him yes that part i did yeah yep yep oh my bad um yeah so she's like well he said he would blame me for the theft of the money and then literally minutes later she's like well i did steal all the money so that was on me um you got me you got me they were like well why did you do that she said she explained that the embezzlement was an attempt to cover up her theft of registered bank money she had stolen three years earlier uh in 1918 while she was the assistant postmaster so she's so it was like covering up a cover-up a covering up she was like listen let's listen i had to do it listen the first time i embezzled money, not a good call.

The second time I'm going to steal money to make up for that, still in the same place, but a bad call. But you understand where I'm coming from, right? You know this had good intentions, right? You understand. I was trying to fix my mistake. I officially haven't embezzled that money anymore. So that's checked off my list so just a different problem to deal with now that's a good point she's covering her tracks well not

really but she's trying except not at all except not even a little bit uh so her explanation was she had followed fred miltimore from west palm beach to orlando and lured him up to her hotel room okay and she said i shot miltimore i did it after attempting to make him sign a statement that he had committed the robbery he wouldn't sign it so in desperation i shot him it's not funny but it's like every single thing is her just giving up so quickly you know a hundred percent like every single thing she's like ah i she's like please sign it well okay i guess you're dead it's like she decided to go on this huge like excursion but after like not going to bed the night before like she's like i imagine she's

exhausted and like everything felt like a good idea going in and when she gets there she realizes how over it she is and she's like what i can't over it she's so over it over everything no 100 and so they were like well why did you shoot him and she's like because he didn't sign the paper like it's not even whatever so like it's such a in terms of committing a crime it's such a minor inconvenience like that's that's one of the things that i feel like if she held out for 10 more minutes she could have forced him to do like right it's like you didn't have to do that yeah like honestly you could have just like came i guarantee you based on the rest of her personality i feel like she wasn't coming off as very threatening at like once she's like well i didn't i didn't she was like can you just can you just sign it and he was like no and

she went this is so hard and then just shot him instead of going like instead of like getting in his face and trying to be assertive she was just like i asked once he said no i don't have it in me to ask now i mean it was easier to just pull the trigger i guess yeah so and this is her friend by the way like this is a friend of hers isn't just some random like this is really fucked up all i've learned is her patience is a five out of a million like it's like her name's thankful not patient so i think like if it were any other case maybe she should really change her name to fucking lazy like no commitment whatsoever uh so within a few days um lena was indicted on charges of first degree murder in Orange County, Florida.

And apparently old timers in West Palm Beach said it was common knowledge that Lena Clark and Fred Miltimore had actually had an ongoing romantic affair and he had jilted her. And that was part of the reason that she was so angry with him. Got it. So at least there's some sort of fucking motive. Yeah, that makes sense sign this piece of paper um so in the months before her trial her story became sensationalized she became like a celebrity um she started receiving fan mail and flowers she often sent her admirers poetry and letters and like her friend gave her a typewriter in jail so she had a typewriter in her jail cell it's just like how

did they pull that off back then like also like i guess if you're a woman they're like well you can write a poem i guess here you go i don't know why were that why did she have so many fans like so much admiration she was like a celebrity i guess because she like was a heist is it that like was this at a time when women weren't killing people and it was just like shocking to people? Well, it was the 20s and like people didn't even have like these high up jobs. So if she had to petition to even get the gig and then she stole a bunch of money out of it, I feel like she probably looked like a rebel. I don't know. I don't know.

But so she was given a typewriter in prison. So she wrote her admirers poetry and letters. And one of the headlines at the time read accused girl types poetry in her cell. And she's in her thirties. So like girl is a little diminutive, but whatever. Could have gone with like murderer or like embezzler or like criminal

heiress to the hershey company after almond joy follows through i don't know criminal with the vagina if you must know what her sex is okay so um if you think having a typewriter in jail is strange is what i put here which i do she was allowed to redecorate and paint her jail cell because it wasn't pretty enough fun yeah i mean why not she also wrote an autobiography sort of from jail um and it was sold through local newspapers for 25 cents uh-huh how long was this autobiography because i feel like based on like everything else she's ever done she gives up really fast she's like prologue she wrote she wrote the she wrote the table of contents and was like that you get it that covers it right like that about covers it

you can read the table of contents in summary yeah um and people bought it it was 25 cents which today of course it's 25 cents it was just a table of contents what are you talking about list it wasn't even a table. It was just a list. It's like if I had to categorize my life into chunks, it'd be this. $0.25, please. Childhood. Anyway, next.

Childhood, murder. Murder. Jail. It's been great so far. And so her autobiography was $0.25, like we said. But also nowadays, that's about three dollars and 50 cents so like still pretty damn cheap for today like if someone wrote an autobiography um she soon recanted her confession and claimed to have no recollection of ever confessing to

anything police had investigated several prominent men from florida to new york as accomplices because they couldn't believe a woman could have pulled this off by herself of course they were like she must have had a male counterpart uh helping her uh-huh so you know obviously because she's a female she has a vajayjay so she can't do this alone she's painting her bedroom her jail cell I mean she's too busy writing nothing yeah writing haikus to her admirers right um so while we're talking about sexism as always here's a quote from a newspaper article of the time in personal appearance and dress lena clark is far from attractive i'm sorry it's so i mean fucking ouch like to be clear yeah it's like really rude oh god her figure is

heavy and uncorseted which i'm like she's in jail but okay her figure is heavy and uncorseted and her clothes smack of the backwoods which woof that's the rudest uh smack of the back i've never heard that phrasing before and it is all bad wait hang on say it again okay her figure is heavy and uncorseted and her clothes smack of the backwoods so like calling her trash basically i love it um her shoes are generally without heels god forbid i know so she's got that clunky frumpy walk you'd never want she's just flat you know and her stockings of cotton her skin is very fine tech in texture but covered with large disfiguring freckles miss clark's only assets in appearance are her hair which is decidedly wavy and her eyes deep blue in color and absolutely straight and

unwavering in their gaze so they're like i guess her hair and eyes are attractive but the rest of her is ugly and it's like we'll throw her a bone her eyes eyes are attractive, but the rest of her is ugly. And it's like, we'll throw her a bone. Her eyes aren't the worst, but the rest of it is pretty insane. You're writing an article. Like, I want to know who she shot. Not like, yeah, whether she's wearing a corset, but OK. So when they asked Almond Joy, the father, the reverend. Yeah.

He says, the law of man may declare our daughter a robber and murderess, but in the sight of God and her aged father and mother, she is as innocent as a newborn babe. Oh. Take that for what you will. Okay. Lena Clark hired two firms to defend her, an Orlando firm and a West Palm Beach firm. They both settled on arguing on an insanity defense. So Lena obviously was great at this so when called to the stand she brought a crystal ball with her and she gazed into it as she talked for hours about the 12

past lives she had lived before this one this person is balloonatoons i was reading these the other day and i was like i have i cannot believe i never told this story on the podcast it's one of my favorites i was like i have i cannot believe i never told this story on the podcast it's one of my favorites i also feel bad that i don't remember a lick of it uh when you apparently have already told it it's actually one of the few that i do remember from a live show which like is rare as we all know okay remind me with the crystal thing her 12 lives what right sure sure sure so she went up to the stand her both her lawyers she hired to were like okay we're gonna go with an insanity defense she's like got it i'm on it i'm good at

that so she went up with a crystal ball and she said she talked for hours when she was on the stand about the 12 past lives she had lived and here's some of her in case you're wondering you know about those pause hang on like saved by the bell freeze time freeze frame uh okay so i like how they went in with an insanity plea and like she went up to a stand with the crystal ball and then she had to keep going after that like like that alone like i'm all for like thinking like like using crystal balls and like but if you're going to court and you put one up and go i choose insanity like you've already done it like you don't have to keep go and then she talked for hours and no one stopped her what she was like no no it gets better and they were like i think we've seen enough

she's like i'm only on number nine of my lives yeah there's a whole dozen yeah yeah okay to be fair her lawyer she knew her lawyers were going with an insanity defense before the trial so she brought it with her knowing that there was going to be an like she brought the crystal ball playing into the insanity defense thing at that point that she should be like she brought the crystal ball playing into the insanity defense thing at that point that she should have brought more than a crystal ball she should have brought like i don't know like a backpack full of games or something like i mean maybe she did but she got hung up on those 12 she only got to the ball and then she hyper fixated or something fixated and also they were like riveted you know so she was like well i gotta keep the entertainment

going yeah like i mean clearly i'm i'm i'm holding their attention this could get me out this is at least very entertaining um so she had like obviously been present for the creation in the garden of eden so that's what as a flower or something what was she was she was she eden oh no or eve she was uh blocked from leaving eden with adam and eve so she was just stuck in the garden i guess by herself she's one of the oldest people on earth is what she wants to start out like the oldest although i think maybe she's well maybe she was the snake remember there's that would be really symbolic in a lot of ways maybe she was the apple but also like she so she's literally one of three of the oldest people on earth on yeah and she watched

creation happen basically and yet she's only had 10 lives in between then and now um yep like you're really picking and choosing your times here my friend like what was going on in the 20s that you needed to be there um okay do you hear ready was she noah's ark or something she was the big boat with all the animals she she was she was just the wooden boat it's just the boat so she was the goddess isis in egypt obviously so like an actual goddess um she was bernice the last queen of the jews okay she was king herod's wife then she was eaten by lions oh okay then she that life got a little out of hand yeah really fully in grasp of like that one that one she had derailed into like that one was off color and she said

she had to start over i was gonna say like how did she not have a single boring life yet like she just kept going for like the new heightened prestige it's like when people are like oh i did a past life regression i was cleopatra and also i was so and so and also i was and i'm like how could you have been all those people like does that mean everybody else just i don't know whatever okay um so uh eaten by lions then she waited several centuries for her next life probably because she was like she's like i need a break that and i'm not lying you know god yeah yeah yeah then she waited a few light a few centuries and then she started hanging out with william shakespeare um and so she served as the muse for his character

ophelia well clearly why not and so there that was and then we jumped forward many centuries and now she's like the post mistress in west palm beach florida it's like you've really come far she really humbled herself this time around she was like maybe excellence isn't what's expected this time you know imagine though in her next life if she's like telling all this she's like i was blah blah and then i was a post mistress and i it's like the lion thing again she was like that was that one took a turn that was yeah yeah we didn't expect that i wasn't i didn't see it coming um so there was one constant throughout all of these lives though what she was a murderer i don't know what that fred miltimore was also there so he must have been either adam or there were three people on earth like so he so who was the third in that awkward transition

like so it was her i'm guessing he was adam who was the other homie like there was okay sorry i'm really fixating on the adam and eve and then there were fred and uh lena and they were just kind of there i don't know where they were i actually think they were adam and eve the bible just wrote it wrong it was just fred and lena you know fred and lena okay story so fred has been there all the times was he one of the lions maybe and got his revenge yes because he was always persecuting her in every life so either he like had killed her or he would have hurt her harmed her in some way made her life miserable um and that was the constant thread throughout all of their lives together so she gazed into her crystal ball and she's she made a prediction that she would be found innocent and would then serve as the vice president under the

head of the socialist party eugene v debs then he would be assassinated and she would then become the president of the united states of america if i were that soul i'd be so tired i'd be no wonder she fucking gave up so quickly and everything in this life she's like she's like i can't do it anymore like my battery is at two percent we're struggling i'm supposed to be president and you're trapping me in this stupid post office like come on yeah it's like after everything we've been through this is the vessel i have to live a hundred years in fuck off oh my god so several psychiatrists or back then they were called alienists uh okay were called and they testified to her mental state they found her to be insane while one thought the whole thing was a phony ruse which i'm like okay that guy was probably onto something the jury went to recession then came back two and a half hours later with their verdict they said not guilty by reason of insanity and the

judge committed her to the florida state mental hospital at chattahoochee oh okay so she was pissed about this which i'm like i don't know what you expected when you're pleading insanity but she was pissed and she said she would rather been sent to the gallows than go to this mental hospital. Oh, OK. And it's like you brought the crystal ball, lady. Like, I don't know what you expected, but you brought the crystal ball. But so she didn't stay there long. Less than one year after her sentencing, Lena returned to West Palm Beach and resumed her work with the church and the Red Cross, living with her sister Maude and her 88-year-old mother Marietta. Her handwriting in the census, you can still see it,

which is pretty cool, but it's barely legible. But it appears to say nurse. So it looks like she became a nurse. Wow, okay. That feels finally something stable. But also, why did she get that job? But also, who hired her? Yeah, who was like, I've seen your resume

of the last several centuries, and we need you. I mean, it's not centuries. It's literal thousands of years since the year zero. But okay. Okay. You're right. You're right. You're right.

So she, by 1940, neither Lena or her sister had ever married, God forbid. And they were considered spinsters. Last thing she needs is a man after everything else. You're kidding me. And then her occupation in the 1940 census was listed as writer so i guess she gave up on nursing and um wrote another quote-unquote autobiography solid um so she passed away in 1967 and is buried in woodlawn cemetery in west palm beach um and then i have a fun fact here which i've probably i talk about this a lot and i

feel like i've said it on beach too sandy too but do you know what the term going postal is from uh no but i'll take a guess is it from being a like a mailman and like having to like lick stamps or something and like going but good guess like the i would think like the stuff and the glue makes you chemicals. Yeah. Okay. No, but I love that guess though. Um, so going postal is an American English slang phrase referring to becoming extremely and uncontrollably angry, often at the point of violence and usually in a workplace environment.

The expression derives from a series of incidents from 1986 onward in which United States postal service workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder between 1970 and 1997 more than 40 people were killed by current or former employees in at least 20 incidents of workplace rage and between 1986 and 2011 workplace shootings happened at roughly two per year with an average of 12 people killed per year so oh my god from like this whatever phenomenon where there are much higher rates of workplace uh murder at postal offices than other places and there's a place like up our street in uh cincinnati called going postal

and i'm like don't it's like mail center I'm like, you need to look up that phrase. Jeez. Yeah. I feel like if I owned a business, the first thing I would do is go look up like every historical meaning behind every word in it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Always kind of threw me off.

But anyway, that's the really random story of Lena Clark that I decided to just throw in everyone's face today. That was fun. That was a nice little bantery one. It's like a weird, like, I feel like they've been, I mean, they're always very dark and heavy, but I feel like this one's at least a little, a little lighter. This one at least had some curve balls where I could have something to say versus, oh my God, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where I just didn't stun you into silence every 30 seconds. I swear to God, I thought at one point you were going to say one of her lies is that she's the fucking tooth fairy i was like that would be such a perfect circle i mean it might have been you never know she was a goddess isis so like maybe in her next life she'll take over that's true yeah and then you kids really should be nervous about and then we have something we have to reconsider this whole thing well thank you everyone what day did this come out this is on the first this comes out on the first of august oh my gosh we only have four months left until 2022 four oh shit uh-oh that means that there's

like less than two months till my baby is born oh lord m it's all happening so fast help me help i love you but you chose this pretty pretty actively dare i say i think really committed to this craft so uh you know me at a certain point i can't i can't just i can't just i'm not lena i don't i don't just give up, you know, I'm like. The tenacity is insane. Look, here's your reward for all of your efforts. Congratulations in advance for all of the sleepless nights you're about to experience. Thank you so very much.

I don't know. That's why I'm just still on that story. I can't wait to go think about every single life she's ever lived and how they're all more ridiculous than the last. And how like we'll never amount to anything even half as interesting as hers no well no oh but here's me trying to twist one thing into another thing if you do want something interesting since it's august 1st we have a listeners episode that comes out oh my god you're totally right today yeah yeah which did we record that yet nope we have not so we should do that asap oh literally by the way y'all eva's out of town well as we're recording this which is also why there's so much chaos probably happening in your ears um and so we're kind of trying to run the ship trying to figure it out uh we used to do it we used to do it it's been a while so we're trying

to run the ship and let eva her vacation. Well, we'll see. Anywho. Allegedly, a listener's episode came out today. All right. Well, hopefully you enjoyed it if it exists, and hopefully we have fun recording it when we find a time in the next like 48 hours. Uh-oh. And that's why we drink.

Oh, shoot. I hit the wrong button. Stop recording.