Endless Thread - MEMES, Pt. 4: Woman Yelling at a Cat

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Humor is a key ingredient of any unit of culture that morphs and spreads over time. But humor isn’t always there at the beginning. For “Real Housewife” Taylor Armstrong, the meme that made her even more famous on the internet has bitter roots: physical domestic abuse exposed on television. In this episode, we hear the little-known origin story of the "Woman Yelling at a Cat" meme -- straight from the Woman herself -- that might make you think twice about ever using the meme again. We also explore why a loss of context is crucial for the spread of memes, but often problematic.

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Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Quick heads up, guys. This episode deals with physical and emotional abuse and mention suicide. We have resources on our website if you're experiencing anything like this. So listen with care, or you could skip this one,

and we'll catch you next time. Okay, here's the show. Hi. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can hear you. I'm using my... Do you recognize this voice, Ben? Isn't it real housewife? Isn't it a real housewife? Unless it's the Real Housewife Severson edition, because that's my sister, Julia.

Oh, man, sister. You really pulled the fast one on me. Well, I called her up because a few years ago, Julia made a meme. This was one of the multi-paneled ones featuring a father and son, and I'll let her describe it. The dad is like a gray-haired guy in a black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He's got a bunch of tattoos and a huge handlebar mustache. Uh-huh. He's sitting at like a desk chair yelling.

And then the next panel is the son in a ball cap yelling back and like pointing. And then the dad yells more. And then the son throws a chair. And then the dad continues to yell pointing. So it's a back and forth argument. Love this meme. Great meme. Good job, Julia. That's the template. I'm glad you can picture it.

So Julia, inspired by a low-stakes kitchen implement-related argument she'd have with her husband. Oh, boy. She captioned the meme like so. So the dad yells, you can't use the microplane for cheese. The son says, yes, I can. The dad yells, it is for citrus zest and spices only. The sun throws the chair. Cheese is literally one of the examples on the blade cover.

The dad says, then please wash it right after you use it. Okay, so first of all, I definitely use my microplane for cheese. Like, come on. You're not alone. You're not alone. So Julia, in this case, was the dad in the mean. the handlebar mustache guy, and her husband was the son

who in this scenario used the microplane to great cheese. You mean the one who's correct? Well, correct or not, there were some results from this meme that Julia made. I've got to say, me posting this

did lead to him not using the microplane for cheese. Congratulations, Julia. You've used a meme to browbeat your husband into doing the wrong thing. A small marital victory with a meme to thank. But anyway, this is from a show called American Chopper.

It was a reality show on Discovery and then TLC. It doesn't exist anymore. It followed a family-run custom motorcycle manufacturing company. And this scene is from an episode in 2008 featuring the father and son who run the company, Paul Tuttle, Senior and Junior. Yep, Mr. Handelbar, Mustache and the Boy. Yeah. Exactly. Yep.

And in this scene, Paul Sr. is confronting Paul Jr. about how he's like late and lazy. And so things get heated. Paul Jr. throws a chair. You know what? Get the fucking out of here. And don't fucking father coming in tomorrow can you fucking terminate it. Good. It's about that. So that's what's actually going on in the scene. They got memed. But Julia had never seen American Chopper. She just saw this meme template and thought, oh yeah, I got something for this.

was a good representation of how we communicate about things that we disagree about. And one of his friends, his comment on it was, this is so romantic. And I thought, yeah, that was the intention. I mean, hey, if you think the meme version of whatever dad is romantic, then I agree. This does get at the heart of something, though, right? Which is that we see ourselves and our own relationships in these caricature-ish meme templates. Memes are so powerful because they get it reality in this way. And they really hit us in the fields. And when we get hit in the feels, it's hard not to join in on the fun, often without really

thinking too deeply about who the real people who are becoming our avatars in these memes are and what the original scenario was. Well, fortunately for Julia, this quote unquote real reality, TV scenario on American Chopper had relatively low stakes. But imposing our own story on a scenario without knowing the actual backstory can get tricky. You know the one that's popular now that's like the woman screaming at the cat? That's meme chorus member Sarah Laola, assistant professor of digital culture and design at Coastal Carolina University.

I think she's like blonde and she's always, it's two panel one where she's yelling and then there's always a cat on the other side that's like, ah. For the first time in the history of this meme series, this was a meme that I was actually more familiar with than Ben, who sort of fancies himself the meme lord of the E.T.T. Oh, come on. I think I can picture the woman you're talking about. I don't remember the cat. Is the woman, does she, like have her mouth open and she's pointing? Yeah, and there's a girl, like a friend behind her, like either holding her back, like pointing her back, yeah. I think I have seen that. Yeah, I'm sure that you've seen it.

Yeah. This meme that I definitely have seen is very ridiculous, absurd even. A woman on one side screaming and pointing, and she's, of course, pointing at a picture of a white cat, totally unrelated to the woman sitting at a table. The cat's got like a plate of salad in front of it, making a kind of derpy cat face. Like, I did not order salad. And so when the two pictures were put side by side in a tweet in May of 2019, the internet went to town. One person put a little Santa hat on the cat and captioned it, Merry Christmas, while the woman yells, it's November. Another version has the woman screaming, Target! And the cat responds, targeet, and so on and so on.

And the cat is named Smudge. And the picture of the cat giving salad some attitude was first posted on Tumblr by his human, who says he really does like sitting at the dinner table and he really doesn't like vegetables or vegetals in the parlance of the internet. But who is the woman in the meme? And what is she yelling about? Look more closely at the picture and you'll see that she has tears in her eyes. Her face is red with rage or pain or both. The friend behind her is gripping her just under her outstretched arm, She's holding the crying woman, or maybe holding her back. But from whom?

And why is she crying? Thousands upon thousands of versions of this meme have been made by people who likely didn't know the answers to any of these questions. And even more people have seen and had a good laugh at those thousands of memes without knowing either. But we do know now, and the answers will make you never look at the meme the same way again. And so she was trying to like stand up for herself and it's become this like, no, I know. Another dark perhaps origin story of that meme. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson and this is endless thread.

We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station and we are taking a closer look at memes that have been seen, shared, and remixed countless times before they've been fully understood. When the meme first came out, it just... was called woman yelling at cat. We typically don't go looking for the backstory of a meme before putting our own spin on it, right? But for the one we now know as woman yelling at a cat, maybe we should have. Because in the very moment that's been freeze-framed and memeified, this woman was going through one of the darkest experiences of her life. I was trying to explain in a very dramatic way that this could get me killed.

You know what? This is interesting. Let me just shut my phone completely off because Robin from Bravo, coincidentally right in that exact moment, just sent me a text message and it just pinged onto my computer. It's not every day Ben and I get to talk to a reality TV star.

So my wife watches, and I watch with her sometimes. That's always everyone's excuse. And it's not every day we get called out by a reality TV star. a reality TV star who says, at first, she wasn't trying to be one. Well, in the beginning, I didn't even go out for the show. And a lot of my friends around Beverly Hills had gone out for it. And my name came up, I guess, in a few different circles. And that name?

This is Taylor Armstrong from the original Housewives of Beverly Hills. Original, as in Taylor Armstrong, was an original cast member of the real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It may look like I have it all, but I want more. But Taylor's also the original and only woman yelling at a cat. Except, of course, she wasn't yelling at a cat. She was yelling at a cast member of the show, the real housewives of Beverly Hills. That's Taylor there, yelling,

you have no idea what she's done to me. And this is the scene the screen cap was taken from, the scream cap that became woman yelling at a cat. But in order to understand what the hell is going on here, we have to go back several episodes of the show. Really, we have to understand a little more about the show itself. And Ben, since you watch it... My wife watches it. Oh, yes, I'm sorry, since your wife watches the show and you've, you know, kept her company for an episode or two, why don't you do the honors?

Okay. So, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills debuted on Bravo in 2010, and it followed. six wealthy socialites as they just, you know, lived their lives. Slum, long, long, long, long. You look gorgeous. Running errands. You have the seating chart and everything? Planning parties. Oh, that looks really good. I love the way you put the roses in.

Yeah. Attending those parties. You know, kind of like what we do every day, Emery, right? On the invitation it says pink, sparkles. Wait for it. Wedge heels. At the beginning, this is exactly what Taylor thought the show was going to be. Oh, this is going to be so fun. We'll throw parties and take trips, and it'll all be glam and fun.

But of course, if a reality TV show is any good, at least by standard definitions, it's not just fun stuff, let alone reality. Production crews manufacture drama and how the video is edited, as we know. But they're also behind the scenes manufacturing meetups between characters, developing whole storylines before filming even starts. They're adding booze to tense situations. They're dialing everything up. Even if you know this, which we all do, you forget it, which is part of the magic and part of the problem for the reality TV viewer and the reality TV subject. And in the end, we had a divorce in season one, divorce in season two, divorce in season three. and only five of us were married to begin with.

So that kind of tells you where the odds lie on keeping things under wraps. And Taylor in particular had a big something she was trying to keep under wraps from the other women on the show and its millions of viewers. It was definitely a different experience for me than it was for some of the girls who had a big support system at home like Kyle and Lisa. Kyle Richards, Lisa Vanderpump, two of her castmates. They had an awesome support system in their family home to go home too after the stress of filming some really trying moments on the show. But for me, it was like chaos on the show and chaos at home. The physical abuse started when I was pregnant with my daughter. That was the first time he choked me.

So that particular day, I was getting ready to go to a charity event. And my step-sons were visiting, and I had made them, I ordered them a pizza. And he was just going to come home. We were going to leave right away. So I was kind of rushing around. And he came into our bedroom and he just grabbed me and had me by the throat and pushed me up against the wall. And he said, if you ever feed my children a pizza without a vegetable again, I'll kill you. Taylor is talking about her former husband, Russell Armstrong. She says he was emotionally abusive from their very first date. when he accused her of having a relationship with the waiter at the restaurant,

just based on the friendly way she'd greeted him when they got there. He was so insanely jealous, and those things came out very early on in our relationship. Crying on a first date. Right? I know. Should have walked away. It's ridiculous. Hard to fathom in retrospect, maybe,

but Taylor says Russell's jealousy felt flattering sometimes. Other times, it was an exhausting barrage of verbal attacks as Russell spiraled out of control. Sometimes it was hours of me having to listen to him yell and scream and call me every name in the book before he would get physical with me. And I remember one time, I finally said to him, will you just hit me so we can get this over with? I carry the emotional scars far more than the physical ones. While it was happening, though, the physical scars were actually the easier ones for Taylor to concede.

from her real housewives castmates. Abusers are really good at hiding the types of abuse that they inflict. For instance, one of my former husband's favorite things to do was bang my head against the car. And he would grab me by one side of my hair and then bang my head against the window if I was sitting in the passenger seat. Or if we were outside of the car, he might grab one side of my hair and then hit my head against the out. outside of the car. Taylor was able to hide the bumps and bruises from these incidents under her long blonde hair. Others, she couldn't hide. Like on Super Bowl Sunday in 2011, Russell and Taylor were in Texas for the big game. And when they went back to their hotel room that night, Russell accused Taylor of cheating on him.

He hit her across the face, hard. It just popped my jaw out, and I was laying over the toilet with just slothed. are running out of my mouth, and I couldn't get any help or anything. So finally, I just had to maneuver my jaw enough to get it back in place. And it still pops out now. Russell wouldn't let Taylor call for help that night. Other times, Taylor wouldn't let herself call for help, mostly out of fear that it would somehow backfire and have a negative impact on her five-year-old daughter, Kennedy.

He would say to me, go ahead, call the police. I'll go to prison. and you will, I won't be working, you'll be destitute, they'll find you an unfit mother, they'll take Kennedy away from you. And then on other days that were good days after something bad would have happened, he would say, I'm afraid I'm going to kill you one of these days. Good days and bad days didn't matter on the set of real housewives, where none were supposed to be the wiser.

But Taylor's attempts to hide the abuse weren't working because the show was supposed to capture her real life. and Russell was her real husband. And despite thinking that the cameras would encourage him to be on his best behavior, he stayed on his real behavior. So what's the latest with your little company? I love it if you wouldn't call my company little. We just need to take some time out to have fun together.

I need to get to the office. All righty. Does he not like to see you have fun? I just don't, I don't know. And audiences took notice. outspoken TV talk show host Wendy Williams had Taylor and one of her castmates, Adrienne, on her show during season one of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

And Wendy kept it as real as it gets. The part I didn't like Taylor about your story is that we're getting to see your husband, all due respect, is a disgusting man to you. Oh. He's disgusting to you. It's like abuse without... I don't like the way he treats her.

No. I don't either. Well, you know, I think a lot of it, That's a hard one for me because, you know, we're really doing a lot of work right now and we're both taking time to re-examine what we each need in our marriage. How did you feel watching that back? Because while you're in the moment taping the show, you're not watching what we're watching. You know what I'm saying, Adrienne.

How did you feel watching that? You don't feel remotely abused by... I don't feel abused. I feel, you know, I deal with people that are abused and I know what that looks like. I feel like we have been disconnected for some time and that we've both been focused on... Taylor clearly wasn't ready to confirm publicly what Wendy Williams and probably many others suspected.

But while filming season two of Real Housewives, she opened up to a castmate, Camille Grammer. She had been going through her divorce with Kelsey. Kelsey Grammer, the actor from Frazier. And I asked her to meet me for lunch, and I wanted to get some insight from her as to what it was like to get in a custody battle and to get divorced with someone who had so much more economical advantages.

And during this off-camera lunch meeting, Taylor told Camille about Russell's abuse, including the time at the Super Bowl when he dislocated her jaw. And she thought she was doing this in confidence. Fast forward to the filming of an episode that ended up being called Tempest in a Tea Party. Taylor had been emotionally unraveling over the course of the season, but at a tearful, truth-slinging tea party at Lisa Vanderpomps' house, Camille confronted Taylor in front of the other women

about the abuse that seemed to be bubbling up to the surface more and more. And she even questioned the abuse. Be careful what you're saying there, because we're all protecting you. About my marriage? About your marriage. What you told us about your marriage. We've been protecting. You.

Because we don't say that he hits you. Because we don't say that he broke your jaw or that he beat you up and he hit you. We don't say that, but now we said it. Okay? We're supposed to walk around going, yeah, we can't wait to see Russell. We can't wait to see him. But we don't know if it's true because you come over and you don't have any signs of physical abuse on your body. It's a really uncle.

I don't even think I spoke. I just was in shock because I knew. In that moment, something was going to change drastically, and it could have gone in a lot of different directions. We could get divorced. He could kill me. Things could get better. I had no idea what the outcome of that moment was going to be like. Taylor at least knew that the episode wouldn't be coming out for months. That gave her some time to make a plan for dealing with the fallout from Russell. But she was terrified for her safety and her daughters. And she felt deeply betrayed and exposed. I thought I probably could, in some respect, hide what was actually going on in my real life from the cameras. And I think we all know how that turned out.

Taylor wasn't able to hide any of this from the audience or her castmates. But things were about to take another big turn. More in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of. stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. I'm just started. You're amazing. Hi. It's a picture perfect evening in Malibu in 2011, and a friend of the housewives is hosting a party at a house overlooking the ocean. We're all drunk and you guys are coming to drink.

As is often the case at a real housewives party, the guest's cups runneth over, literally. Taylor Armstrong arrives with castmate Kyle Richards, hoping that Camille, the woman who outed her abuse on the show a couple episodes ago, isn't there. But she is. And between the unlimited wine and the limited amount of space at this party, things get testy between Taylor,

and a friend of Camille's named Didi. She's not going to fight with you. She doesn't want to fight with you. She's been calling you for days. She wants to apologize. Taylor isn't having it. The more Didi talks, the more on edge Taylor becomes. Outside.

Taylor, there's not the way to conduct a discussion. And from there, the party devolves into true chaos. Taylor's suddenly surrounded by women, basically yelling, calm down, which of course has the... the opposite effect. Didi persists. Several of the women start physically jumping in between the two of them as Taylor shoves a pointed

finger closer and closer to Didi, crying about how Camille's indiscretion has hurt her. All the words that were coming from me were based in pure fear. I was terrified for my life at that point and not knowing what my future was going to hold and just this isn't just reality TV fodder. This is my real life. you have no idea the repercussions that I'm going to suffer from this. Were you conscious when this was happening that the cameras were there? I mean, by then you're so far into this experience of being on the show that I imagine part of the process is them trying to make you guys forget about the cameras, right?

That's a good question. I feel like when you are, I feel like when I would get so amped up, it wasn't like the cameras were even a thing. thought. It was just, I was so upset and so scared and afraid of what this outcome was going to look like that in those moments, I was just going to express myself regardless. And at that point, the cat was out of the bag. So there was really nothing more. I couldn't make it any worse. Kyle Richards wraps an arm around Taylor, comforting at first, but then forceful. And it's at some point in this moment that someone. watching this somewhere in the world went.

This episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, known as Malibu Beach Party from Hell, would get plenty of tabloid attention in the days after it aired. It would go down in Real Housewives history, but it wouldn't go down in Internet history until years later. But first, to the weeks and months immediately after the episode was filmed, it was a tumultuous time. Taylor told her husband that he'd soon be outed on the show as an abuser, but she did so with her psychiatrist present. Russell wrote a letter to the show's producers and to Camille,

threatening to sue if the footage was released. But that was still a little ways away. And in the meantime, Russell gave Taylor glimmers of hope that things would turn around, including a birthday card saying that he knew he hadn't been a good husband, but he wanted to be. But later that night, on her birthday, In yet another jealous rage, Taylor says Russell punched her in the eye.

Her orbital floor, the bone structure under her eye, was fractured. She had to have reconstructive surgery. Believe it or not, it took me that happening to be able to say, I'm in an abusive relationship. Like, I can't sugarcoat this anymore. I can't sweep it under the rug. I can't rely on the good times. This is dangerous, and I have to get out of this. And when I went in to get my orbital floor reconstructed, I was in my room in recovery, and he walked in the door with roses.

And it makes me cringe to say this, but in that moment, I wanted him to crawl in bed with me and lay there. Why? Because that's the roller coaster of abuse. I mean, I wanted him to come and protect him. me and to make me think everything's going to be okay and that my family isn't just crumbling around me. And in that moment, I thought, well, this is really what it's like to be in a horribly abusive relationship, the fact that as you're laying here, just coming out of surgery because of what this person did to you, that you would actually want him to stay with you. Taylor stepped back

from filming Real Housewives. She filed for divorce. Russell moved out of the house. But the way forward from there wasn't clear, especially because season two of the show, including the footage that outed the abuse, would start rolling out in a couple of months. There was also talk that the DA might press charges against Russell for the incident on Taylor's birthday. My hope was that he would take the opportunity and come out and make a statement and say, I have anger management problems, I'm getting treatment, you know, become an advocate for other people. And I thought with our platform, that was his best out. August 15th, 2011, it was a Monday, and Taylor was supposed to have a meeting with Russell

at his office to talk about the divorce, which hadn't been finalized at this point, and about custody of their daughter. But Russell didn't show, and no one at his office had seen him that day. I just started getting this really weird gut feeling that something had gone wrong. And I went to the residence where he was staying, and the, the, The gate was closed, but his car was there. A neighbor said he hadn't seen Russell all weekend. The neighbor helped Taylor and a friend pry open Russell's bathroom window so they could go in and look around.

And we started in, and then we found him hanging. There were so many emotions going on in that moment. Of course, shock and disbelief, fear, you know, just complete and utter sadness to think that anyone, regardless of what they put me through, would make that decision. Three weeks after Russell's death and just 11 days after his funeral, season two of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills premiered. So one of the most traumatic experiences is that you get your, we get the episodes in advance because we blog on bravo.com.

And so we have to watch them in advance so that we can tell our site of the story or blog about the events that occur. It's a lot of reliving of trauma. Isn't it, though? Taylor tried to move forward in this new, real reality, the one where everything was on the table. She published a memoir the following year titled, Hiding from Reality.

She gave talks about domestic abuse around the country, and she starred in a third season of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I wanted people to see, in retrospect, that that didn't define who I was going to be going forward. And I do a lot of public speaking, and I visit a lot of shelters. And I think it's important for people to see me out and see that there's life after. And there really was for Taylor.

She got remarried in 2014 to a man that she says celebrates everything about her. She was moving on and putting the darkest days of her relationship with Russell and of real housewives behind her. But then, five years later, and a full eight years after the infamous Malibu Beach Party from Hell episode of Real Housewives, through the weird, mysterious forces of the internet, Taylor found herself in another yelling match with a cat named Smudge, thanks to Twitter user Missing E-Girl, who seems to have created this meme. So when did you first see this meme and, like, what was your immediate reaction? I would say confusion and humor. I mean, at that point, it was just laughable.

I couldn't figure out why I was yelling at this cat and know who the cat was. Considering the circumstances that led up to the moment in the memed screenshot, you'd think she might want to detach herself from the image however possible. But instead, she shouted it from the social media mountaintops. So I tweeted, something along the lines of woman yelling at cat is me. And I just found it humorous because I didn't get it. And Kyle and I were messaging each other back and forth. And she was like, I don't get it.

And I'm like, I don't get it either. Where does this cat come from? I thought the cat was maybe on a reality television show or something. But then they just kept coming. I've just seen, I feel like thousands of them. It's unbelievable. But pretty quickly, it became very easy to get and very easy to caption. And a lot of the captions, Taylor saw, were surprisingly,

clever and timely. There would be a big sporting event, and the next day there would be a meme of the cat and myself in the role of the baseball manager and the umpire. And it was just like their creativity was so quick. It was fascinating to me. Fascinating. Not devastating. Even though the internet is collectively laughing at her pain, albeit mostly unknowingly,

and not re-traumatizing, at least not in the way. that watching the advanced episodes of real housewives was for Taylor. And as glad as we were to hear this, we were surprised. Wow. Well, then allow me to just project some of my own shit onto this, I guess, a little bit. Because if, you know, that picture captures a very real raw moment of human emotion and then to have it juxtaposed with something humorous and have it get turned into this big Internet joke,

especially eight years after the event itself happened so that it's got this extra layer of like old wound being uncovered. That is just not the reaction I was expecting, Taylor, I have to say. Well, maybe at first when I saw it, I thought maybe it brought up some past memory of that time. But it isn't like whenever I see. it, I don't cringe or feel upset or wish it wasn't out there. I guess a lot of it is just accepting when you put your life on reality TV, not as much life as I put on reality TV, but that it's going to still exist.

You know, I am reminded of what that time of my life was like, but not, it doesn't hurt me anymore. A big part of that, she says, is time. A lot of therapy and healing happened in the eight years between the height of her ex-husband's abuse and his suicide and the birth of her. of woman yelling at a cat. Taylor says she hardly recognizes the woman in the meme. And it's quite possible, likely even, that most of the people spreading the meme don't recognize her either. Or if they do recognize Taylor or the show the image is from, the context has been

lost to time. This episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills came out 10 years ago. A decade later, this probably looks like a moment from any of the many other alcohol-fueled spats on the show. Why not turn this one into a spat with a cat? And Taylor can appreciate that on some level, because this was just one moment out of many for her, too. When I look at the whole experience as a whole and what my life was like during that time, it almost just feels like that exact moment

was a blip on the radar of something so much bigger. And the where is? Woman yells at a cat! A year after the meme first appeared online, it was named meme of the, year by the internet-focused Shorty Awards, and Taylor accepted the award in a video with grace and a little humor. So I've decided it's time to bury the hatchet.

So let's give Smudge a call. On the other side of the phone is the famed feline, looking like a pretty normal cat, a black rotary phone in front of him this time instead of a salad. Hey, smudge. No, don't hang up. I'm not here to yell. Taylor proceeds to apologize to a disinterested smudge who's just doing cat things. And the whole thing is a bit, obviously.

But it's also, yet again, a woman having to apologize for something she should absolutely not apologize for. But Taylor says there's a reason she plays ball with this kind of stuff. My not letting the meme get to me and even at times tweeting them or just saying people are so creative, I do think that it helps other people to see that you can put all of this behind you and have a completely new, healthy relationship built on equality and all of the things that we deserve and dream about,

they do exist, regardless of what our past looks like. Taylor clearly wasn't the first reality star to get memified, and she won't be the last. Reality TV's brand of absurdity and alcohol-infused, engineered drama and detachment from actual reality, is exactly what makes its star as easy, and some would say willing, targets of mockery. But as you've heard, Taylor is both a real housewife

and a real person who is experiencing real terror in the moment that became a meme. And once you know that, what do you do with it? Do you tell everyone you know? Do you take down iterations of the meme that you personally have shared? Or do you continue forward with the new life and context

the Internet has given this image? Is it okay for me to have a laugh at this? Or should I be asking more questions before laughing, potentially at someone else's expense or at someone else's pain? I think my meme is a little unusual based on some of the other memes that are out there because that was such a terrifying moment. I had one friend stopped me in a restaurant one day and he said, I feel so bad.

I sent you all those memes and I had no idea. what you were going through in that moment. And I just feel horrible. And I, of course, just, like, don't worry, it doesn't have an effect on me. And of course you didn't know. But I think some people who've come to the realization that that was such a traumatic time in my life,

they feel a little guilty about laughing about it. But I don't want people to feel guilty about it. You know, that was a whole different lifetime for me. And as Taylor said, sometimes owning a joke is the best way to ensure it can't own you. If you were to caption your own meme And connect it to your life, the life that you've lived so far And play any role in the meme that you want,

whether it's yourself or the cat How would you caption it? That's a really hard question. I don't know what I would do if I were having a meme. Maybe I would let the cat yell at me for a change. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Tickets to events, swag, bonus content, pictures of Amory's home studio or My Home Fashion, join our email list. You can find it at WBUR.org slash endless thread.

Also, we want to know what you think is the most underrated meme. Yeah. So call us 857-244-0338. Call us. Or better yet, record a voice memo and email it to endless thread at WBUR.org. We just might feature your voice memo and your meme suggestion. on the show. Big thanks to our meme chorus. That is Sarah Laola, Joan Donovan, Gianluca Stringini, Amanda Brennan, Kenyatta Cheese, and Don Caldwell. Please go find their work and benefit from their

meme genius. Our series and show is made by producers Nora Sacks and Dean Russell. We're co-hosted by us, Amory Sebertson. And Ben Brock Johnson. This episode was edited by Maureen McMurray. Mixing and sound design by Paul Vicus. Original music and music. in this episode also by Paul Vigis. Mind blown. Special thanks to an additional production work from Josh Crane, Frank Hernandez, Kristen Torres, Sophie Codner, and Rachel Carlson. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and, um...

She can't even say it. This is like... I'm in just the right mindset right now for this to be unreasonably funny. And a massive gassy exoplanet. It's not that funny. Right now it's very funny. Okay, if you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email endless thread at wbUR.org.

Stay cool forever.