Wonderful! - Wonderful! 185: Pink Fink

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Griffins’ favorite cold summertime treat! Rachel’s favorite poems of the body!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Support AAPI communities and those affected by anti-Asian violence: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate Support the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund: https://aapifund.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. This is a show where we talk about things we like and that are good and that we're into right now. And I'm getting choked up already, and I'm not sure why. This show brings out all the emotions in me. You know how I don't show any of my emotions except for when we're doing this show? Yeah.

And then I just kind of dump them all out. True. You remember that week we watched Jerry Maguire for the first time? Can I tell you I've never seen Jerry Maguire? I haven't either, babe. Date night. Date night. I bet it holds up as most movies and TV from that era definitely do.

All I know is there's a Show Me the Money and there's a Had Me at Hello. Yes. And the end of my knowledge of the film. Yeah. All right. And the boy. The boy with the- The boy. The boy. Lipnicki. Lipn All right. And the boy. The boy with the... The boy.

The boy. Lipnicki. Lipnicki boy. And Cuba. And Cuba's in it. And... Everyone's in this one. And Tommy and Renee.

So what... Yeah, I mean, what is there left to know? What else do we need to see? There's a lot of films. I haven't seen Aaron Brockovich. I feel like if a film

was released... Oh, I have seen Brockovich. ...that had just a first name and a last name on it i was like skip it took me a while to see michael clayton and that one was like had oscar all the oscar buzz and stuff i was like yeah you need like a verb in there i need a verb michael clayton does dallas does doubt do you have any small one? I'm going to come up with one right now, and that is going to be one that I say out loud in just a moment. And the out loud word that I will say is.

You sound like Kurt Happley right now. Oh, no. I mean, let's just say doulas. Yeah, sure. Let's, let's just say doulas. Yeah, sure. Let's just put it out there. We've been having such a hard time. We have reached out to the village of service workers that support parents with difficult babies. Yeah.

And we have had a sea of people trying to help us. And we had a great doula come by and give us some tips on how to get our baby to sleep. Yeah, it was pretty choice. We hit a point where he was sleeping in bed less than five hours a day on average. And it was that if you've not had a child, not sustainable that. So it's been it's been rough. But yeah, that was very helpful. Yeah. And I appreciate how much these individuals that are professionals in the field

are concerned about our well-being. Because I am completely focused on keeping that baby alive. Right. And they are very helpful in reminding me, oh, you have to stay alive too. You also, that's why they have you put the mask on. If you're dead, you can't do the mask. What's your small wonder? There's a podcast I just started listening to called Welcome to the OC B-word. B-word. And it's hosted by two of the stars from the OC, Melinda Clark and, oh, my God.

Rachel Bilson. Rachel Bilson. Thank thank you that was embarrassing it was well you got melinda clark i know uh and they are uh they they were both in the show they played julie cooper and summer and uh uh it's got me re-watching the oc uh which is a true a crystalline sort of millennial kind of, and it summarizes a lot of, I was talking to Rachel about how it sort of made me realize that, and when I say this show has helped me realize,

I mean like all of the many ways that Gen Z is fully, fully dragging us right now, has made me realize that the early 2000s is our 80s. Like it is our, there's so many fashions back then that, uh, cause I definitely started to model my kit after Seth Cohen and there were some mistakes made there. Uh,

and that, that show is, is still, you know, probably my favorite, uh, scripted drama ever. And the,

the podcast, it's really cool hearing people who are in the show as guest stars um yeah the episode i listened to part of an episode with you and they talk a lot about the chemistry and i think that it's undeniable it's undeniable the chemistry um yeah i don't know if it's a show that people who weren't there who lived it uh it's it's preposterous otherwise and there's a lot of things that do not hold up to a lot of sort of scrutiny this day and age. But I don't know.

Man, I watch it at 2 a.m. when I get up with Gus at 2 a.m. Comforting. And it is quite comforting. Yeah. I go first this week. All right, hit it. I'm going to talk about the ultimate summertime friend, the nice cold treat, the ultimate summertime cold treat.

Bud Light Lime? No, I already did. I think I, did I already, it's kind of wild that I've talked about Bud Light Lime on this program. It was a different time. I guess it was, it was a much different time. I had my first beer in maybe 18 months

because I was having a big hamburger and french fries. I was like, let's try one of these. I know. I bought beer and I brought it into our house like some kind of 21-year-old. I know. No, I'm going to talk about the Slurpee or the Icy if you want. If you want all of the – you like one of these? I was just thinking about this the other day.

I didn't have one really until high school. Well, you were denied many of life's great pleasures by your we were not a sugar household no but uh my friend lived near a 7-eleven yes and i used to kind of coerce her into going to get slurpees with me anytime i would go to her house yeah i dated a girl at the marshall dorms and it was across the street from the 7-eleven and we used to go there a bunch and we went there one time and the guy working the counter looked at us and was like, oh, are you guys brother and sister? Oh, no. And we were like, no.

And he felt so uncomfortable that he gave us both free Slurpees. It was pretty tight. Can you see why he made that mistake? Absolutely not. No, I cannot. Slurpees were like the thing that when I moved away from home and like was living like in my own place with my friends in college, it was like the big like freedom I'd unlocked was, hey, whenever I want to, I can just go get a fucking Slurpee and nobody can stop me. Yeah. You know, I am not a huge snow cone fan, but I will tell you that texture of a Slurpee is perfection.

Hits the spot. Well, you know why it's different. The difference between a snow cone is shaved ice with the juicy juice dribbled on it. A Slurpee is carbonated. It's a carbonated beverage. Oh, that makes sense. I haven't had one in so long, I kind of forgot. It is a carbonated drink, and honestly, there's not much else to it than that.

and that it honestly like there's not much else to it than that a guy named Omar kinetic kinetic it sounds like kinetic but it's not really happening I was really hoping his last name would be Slurpee no the name Slurpee is onomatopoetic unsurprising yeah it was he owned a soda shop in the 50s and his soda fountain broke down. And to keep the soda cool, he put it in a cooler and it turned into slush. And he was like, hey, wait a minute. This is very good. Oh, frozen Coke. And it all sort of came. Oh, frozen Coke, frozen Mountain Dew.

Forget about it. I never had a frozen Mountain Dew. I thought that would be good. It better be better than a regular Mountain Dew. It is in every way you can measure it. So Omar, he went to his pal, Ruth E. Taylor, who came up with the name Icy, and came up with the logo of the white letters

with the icicles hanging off of them in front of the alternating blue and red flags. That is still the logo today. Oh my gosh. Crush it. Ruth got it in one. This is all I want right now. Is it slurping?

We can get some. We're grown up. We can do it. Icy beverage. Yeah, for sure. So 7-Eleven approached this new Icy company in 1965, and they worked out a licensing deal where Icy was like, yeah, you can sell Icy's at 7-Eleven and have them in all 7-Elevens no matter what, but you got to call them something else so that we're not competing with our

other I icy interests. And thus the Slurpee was born. Named for the slurping sound that you make when you drink it. I didn't write down the name of the fella at 7-Eleven who was like, you slurp it up. Because that's a wild pitch, isn't it? What's a pleasant word for consuming this fluid? You slurp it up like a dirty dog. I'm starting to think of an alternate name for the Slurpee. It's a pleasant word for consuming this fluid? You slurp it up like a dirty dog. I'm starting to think of an alternate name for the Slurpee.

It's a lappy. You lap it up with that sick dog mouth of yours. Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to come up with a preferable name that also gives you such a strong sense of what it is. Yeah, I mean, I can pick apart the slurpee name but it's it is strong and it has worked out for them uh slushy i mean slushy is a thing so there's slushy yeah and then they're in the world uh in huntington there were places that carried did you go anywhere that had slush monkeys no that was like its own that was like its own derivative that one was like

super juicy that one was like mostly liquid. The Slurpee, you know, it's this carbonated beverage that gets frozen in one of those like margarita make-up. The long straw and has the little spoon on the end. You're remembering great things about Slurpees as we do this segment. Completely like independent from my own notes. And I'm love it. So there's an ingredient in the Slurpee that not a lot of people know about in the united states and it is uh adrenaline adrenaline no it's uh

yucca extract or why why ucca how do you pronounce that i've always said uh and that is a foaming agent so that's how you get that the slurpee has a sort of dry finish. You know what I'm talking about though. And that comes from the Yucca extract, which is not present in the territory where the Slurpee is most frequently consumed. It is not America. Can you guess where? What country? Oh, I feel like I've heard this before. It's wild. It's wild how much Slurpee they drink. I feel like somebody mentioned this on a different podcast, and now I can't remember what it was.

Maybe I'll just say Canada. It is Canada. Yeah. See, I think I heard it on Stop Podcasting Yourself. Oh, yeah. Canadians purchase an average of 30 million Slurpees each year. I think that means total for the whole country. Not each Canadian drinks 30 million Slurpees each year. I think that means total for the whole country. Not each Canadian drinks 30 million Slurpees. And the 7-Eleven company, for their Slurpee capital of the world, they named Manitoba the Slurpee capital of the world in 2019 and also 2018 and also like the 20 years prior to that.

Manitoba has been like keeping it very real. You think a place that was so cold would not tend towards a cold drink, but here we are. I could see that. I could get in on that. I don't know. I mean, it's an exceptional beverage. It's a really phenomenal beverage. And the flavors are pretty tame these days they they aren't prone to a lot of experimentation but

back in the day 7-eleven used to throw some pretty wild flavors in the mix um i remember when it was like an event when they were like now we have orange orange soda slurpee and it was like yeah that's pretty good and the back door is all loaded into the family vehicle uh-huh uh-huh uh but the naming conventions are pretty boring now. It's like Blue Raspberry, right? And Coca-Cola. Let me hit you with some real actual names for flavors of Slurpee that existed in the past

when things were a lot more fun. Wait, let me think of the time period and say the Tub Thumper. No, no, no, no. We're talking about like 70s, 80s. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, it's way wilder than that uh disco fever uh you're you're getting closer how about uh pink fink how about moonshine that

seems like false advertising uh kissin cousin is one of them probably my personal favorite gully washer how about i would i don't even know what flavor that would approach. I'd go for a Gully Washer. Sounds like a drink you would get at a college party. Yeah, it does. How about this one? Hey, and this may be, hey, you know what? Let's cut him some slack because maybe this meant something else back then.

Okay. Sticky Icky. Wow. Do you have any descriptors on what these flavors are or just the names just the names sticky icky it clearly refers to the like a marijuana cigarette um but that i guess back then they wanted people to know that this fluid is sticky and it's icky that's a good name for a flavor and i would say that all slurpees are sticky yeah uh that is uh only it sticky icky is second only to a flavor

called adults only oh my god adults only slurpee did it have alcohol in it see really you need to you can't tease me with these names and then not deliver. We'll do some Googling afterwards. Well, I don't know if I want you to Google adults only Slurpee. I'm going to Google adults only Kissing Cousin Sticky Icky and see what sort of lists I end up on. It's just, man, when it's hot outside, it goes down so smooth. It is a pleasure to consume it. I wish you didn't have just five minutes before the flavor kind of concentrated at the bottom of the cup. I took Henry somewhere that had Icy's for sale.

And I was like, hell yeah, let's introduce my son to this beautiful new world. So I got one and I showed him how to mix up the red and blue. And I was like, tell me when to switch. And we made a little red and blue one and he took a sip of it he's like that's gross and I was like I was sad at first because I was like I want my son to like good things but then I was happy because hey I got a whole I got a whole icy just for me true and that is a lot of sugar for a four-year-old oh I was it's a lot of sugar for a 34 yearyear-old to consume. Oh, I was. It's a lot of sugar for a 34-year-old to consume. I was bouncing off the walls. Had a lot of go-go juice in me that day. Slurpee, Icy. It's,

damn, this is probably the most I've ever wanted something I've done a segment on immediately as I've done it. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're grownups. We can do this. We can do it. Yeah. DoorDash, or something. Hey, can this. We can do it. Yeah. DoorDash or something. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes. I have a grandpa John here and this one is for Essie and it's from SJ who says to my good, good Essie. This is a short message to let you know how amazing you are

and how happy I am that we get to be parents together. Now, let us eat some ramen and or cake from SJ. That's that kind of life of we're grownups. We can have ramen and cake now. Let's live our dreams, achieve it, accomplish it, grab your goals. I love parents coming together against the common enemy, which is. Your children. I just, there are times when I look at Griffin as my husband and co-parent and say, thank heavens it's you. Yeah. Yeah.

And it sounds like they have found that as well. Yeah. It's special. You want to read this next one? Yes. This is for Grace, Stella, and Harper. It is from Mom and Dad. To our oldest, middlest, and littlest beautiful daughters, every day with you three is truly

wonderful. You are the coolest babies. Grace, you make the best big sister, and it's going to be so fun when your little sisters are old enough to play D&D, enjoy all things McElroy, and all the other awesome things we love as a family. We love you three so much love mom and dad i mean they're gonna have to wait until they're 18 years old because all of our podcasts are adults only that's not true that's not true at all lots of young people listen

to it i would argue that a lot of uh young people D&D. Yeah, no, for sure. But it's just, we say so many foul words. I know. And I don't talk about this on the show, but I don't cuss at home in front of the kids. It's true. I really don't. I don't know that I've, but a handful of times. It's remarkable, actually, because, you know, I mean, I don't, you know, everyone knows that. But like, I never said like, Griffin, don't you dare. Right.

But we just don't. I think it's because I just don't want my child to say a bad word in daycare and then I have to hear about it and feel bad. I mean, I don't care about the the words but i do care about being pressured as a parent that is relatable content yeah video games video games video games you like them maybe you wish you had more time for them maybe you want to know the best ones to play maybe you want to know what happens to mario when he dies in that case you should check out TripleClick. It's a podcast about video games. A podcast about video games?

But I don't have time for that. Sure you do. Once a week, Kickback as three video game experts give you everything from critical takes on the hottest new releases to scoops, interviews, and explanations about how video games work to fascinating and sometimes weird stories about the games we love. Triple Click is hosted by me, Kirk Hamilton. Me, Jason Schreier.

And me, Maddie Myers. You can find Triple Click wherever you get your podcasts and listen at MaximumFun.org. Bye. Hey, what's your thing? My first thing. We're having a, we got a long Gus nap here. Let's ride this bad boy. Jesus, I always do that.

You would trust it. Okay. So I wanted, I've been wanting to, ever since we switched to this more supersized format, return to a larger, more spacious poetry corner. And surprise, surprise, that's what we're doing this week. Oh, okay. Let me put some reverb on it.

If you're not here for poetry, it's poetry corner, yeah. Is that suggesting that we're in a bigger corner? Yeah, it's like it's far away. Okay, okay, okay, because the corner is so large. Yeah, the corner's bigger, so there's more reverb in the corner. Or maybe there's more corners. Whoa, holy shit.

Welcome to the octagon. The poetry octagon. Now you're in the octagon. Prepare. I wanted to do a poet that I was only sort of familiar with. Like I had read some of the work and thought like, oh, that's pretty good. But I would never like list this person among my favorite poets. And then I did some exploration and turns out I really like the work of Sharon Olds. Okay, okay.

This is not what, this is, I'll tell you, this is one of the few I don't, I'm not familiar with. A rare occurrence in Poetry Corner. Yeah. Sharon Olds, she is a poet that grew up in California and currently teaches at NYU in their graduate writing program. So she was born in 1942 1942 has received a lot of awards including a pulitzer prize which anytime you hear that don't you think like i should know who this person is they want a pulitzer prize i mean a lot of people have won poems yeah it turns

out i guess yeah i guess so she writes a lot of really uh personal kind of intense poems focused on the body and has gotten some criticism for that uh the famous critic helen vendler have you heard of her no that's one of the few famous i heard about her a lot in grad school because she does a lot of literary criticism and uh she has disparaged old's work as self-indulgent, sensationalist, and even pornographic. Hello. Noted prude, Helen Vendler. Hello. Yeah, I know that characteristic about her.

But I would say her work is accessible and is beautiful. She has been viewed in the tradition of Walt Whitman in kind of celebrating the body and the pleasure and pain associated with it. So I have two poems by her. Ooh, a double corner. We can potentially do both or we can focus on one. But I have a more erotic poem.

Oh, jeez. Are you gonna make me pick between, are you gonna make me decide between are you gonna make me decide whether or not we want to go horny on me we can potentially do both i mean i will say the names of both poems and if we don't get to both then maybe the person okay the listening that is interested could seek it out okay uh they're both publicly available by the poetry foundation one and i'll let you guess if this is the erotic one, is called After Making Love in Winter. No.

The other is called The Cast. That one is the erotic one. It's not. For sure. Okay. It's not. If you don't do the Making Love in Winter one, we're never going to hear the end of it. Okay.

This poem, After Making Love in Winter, she wrote in 1987. Cool. You know, I was born. Oh, is this about you? Probably not. At first, I cannot have even a sheet on me. Anything at all is painful. A plate of iron laying down on my nerves.

I lie there in the air as if flying rapidly without moving. And slowly I cool off. Hot, warm, cool, cold, icy, till the skin all over my body is ice, except at those points our bodies touch like blooms of fire. Around the door, loose in its frame and around the transom, the light from the hall burns in straight lines and casts up narrow beams on the ceiling, a figure throwing up its arms for joy. and casts up narrow beams on the ceiling, a figure throwing up its arms for joy. In the mirror, the angles of the room are calm.

It is the hour when you can see the angle itself is blessed, and the dark globes of the chandelier suspended in the mirror are motionless. I can feel my ovaries deep in my body. I gaze at the silvery bulbs. Maybe I am looking at my ovaries. It is clear everything I look at is real and good. We have come to the end of questions. You run your palm, warm, large, dry, back along my face and over and over and over like God, putting the finishing touches on before sending me down to be born.

Fuck yes! Hot. Hot poem. It was a hot hot poem but it was also like incredible incredible poem yeah i mean you're like there you're transported you're like i'm like looking down at this woman lying in bed that was that was wild that was one of the more sort of like i don't know well it's been a while since you've been in the poetry that's true i forget how you may have forgotten it gets the power very visual in the in the poetry corner. That's true. I forget how visual. You may have forgotten the power. It gets very, very visual in the poetry corner. That is the power. There were so many parts of that poem that like really stuck out to me.

This is where questions end line. I was like, hey, what does that mean? And then we were already on to the next one. This is why I recommend if you enjoy listening to poems on this podcast, like seeking them out because one, I don't do any kind of analysis when I read it. No, yeah. And two, like you just miss a lot of stuff because you're just like image to image to image to image. That was phenomenal.

I'm glad you liked it. Yeah. Yeah, when I was taking notes, Sharon Olds understandably, I guess, is trying to be very humble about her work. But she said in a salon interview, I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker. I am not a, how can I put it? I write in the way I perceive, I guess. It's not

really simple, I don't think, but it's about ordinary things, feeling about things about people. I'm not an intellectual. I'm not an abstract thinker, and I'm interested in ordinary life. That is quite a big slice of humble pie because i would say uh you you would have to be a bit of an abstract thinker to generate some of the imagery that was uh just just delivered but she went she went on to say uh that she is not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets just being an ordinary. I love that shit when just like even just talking casually about this stuff is like, oh my God. I know. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen through the arm out of the body onto the page without distortion.

Hell yes. Isn't that great? That is really good. Yeah. A lot of people talk, you know, I mean, she has gotten criticism for her poetry because i guess i don't know there were these reviews that said like that they were like too personal and too inwardly focused uh that seems like quite a subjective i mean yeah this like self-indulgent claim which i think is ridiculous for poetry like right the act of writing a poem one might say is a little self-indulgent

otherwise you could just write like a few sentences and not worry about the rhyming or any of that jazz yeah so i have another one do we have time or should i just direct list direct people to it yeah i think we've got time it's not a long one uh this is just another one of those like poems of the, but it is not remotely sexual. This poem is called The Cast. When the doctor cut off my son's cast, the high scream of the saw filled the room, and Gaby's lap was covered with fluff like the chaff of a new thing emerging, the down in the head yard. Down the seam that runs along the outside of the arm and up the seam along the inside,

the line where the color of a white boy's arm changes like a fish from belly white to prismatic. The saw ranged freely. The saw that does not cut flesh, the doctor told us, smiling. Then the horrible shriek ran down in a moment to nothing, and he took a sharp silver wedge like a can opener and jimmied at the cracks until the creak of the glossy white false arm cracked. And there lay Gabby's sweet, dirty forearm thin as a darkened twig.

He lifted it in astonishment, like a gift. It's so light. He cried a lot of light coming out of his eyes. He fingered it and grin. He picked up the halves and put them together and gripped it and carried it out through the waiting room. And everyone smiled the way you smile at a wedding. So deep in us, the desire to be healed and joined. I love how delighted you get.

That last bit got me really good. I know. That was why I wanted to read it, honestly. Like, that is always, in the times that I have written poems, I always strive for that. Like, and I've mentioned this before, though, like that last little like, and here's why the poem I'm writing. Here's why this exists. Yeah. It wasn't quite as sort of consistently, I don't know, like transportative as the first poem was.

But that last thing was so hugely uh so hugely relatable like it reminded me of like the first time i went to school after getting my braces off and feeling like and everybody's like everybody said something because they recognize like hey this is a big this is a big deal for you. Yeah. That's really nice. Yeah. I would encourage folks to check her out. I was not as familiar with her work as I think I am now glad that I am. Yeah. And she's a good poem.

Sharon Olds. Yeah. Hey, thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. So many good shows on MaximumFun.org that you should be listening to.

I'm talking about shows like Judge John Hodgman and Triple Click and Jordan Jesse Go. Jordan Jesse Go. And gosh, what else? Flophouse. Flophouse. The whole dang yard of them. And I think that's probably it.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here with us and supporting us. And being patient with us when our episodes are late. We had a combination of like three different doctor's appointments this week. It's been a real fun one. Everybody's fine. Everybody's fine. We're just trying.

Well, I have some pretty severe psoriasis. So let's not like go, yeah, I guess we're all fine. Yeah, I guess we do. Yeah, it's not a big deal, guess it's not like prescription shampoo is like that big a deal i guess do you hear yourself sometimes i'm sorry honey it's so flaky People don't want to hear about my psoriasis. No, I don't think so. But now they have.

And there's nothing we can do about it. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture.

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