Episode 526
with Isaac Fitzgerald, Carmen Lagala, and No-No Boy
Host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello chat about childhood misperceptions; writer Isaac Fitzgerald grapples with identity, forgiveness, and a new vision of masculinity in his searing memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts; stand-up comedian Carmen Lagala explains how her love of the WNBA broke up a teenage relationship; and singer-songwriter No-No Boy performs "Boat People" from his album 1975, as a tribute to the millions who fled southeast Asia after the fall of Saigon.
Isaac Fitzgerald
Writer
Isaac Fitzgerald is the best-selling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, which Esquire calls "the best of what memoir can accomplish... pulling no punches on the path to truth.” Alongside writing about male misbehavior and discovering what it means to determine a sense of self, Isaac frequently appears on The Today Show and is also the author of the chart-topping children's book How to Be a Pirate. His other writing credits include co-authoring two anthologies, Pen & Ink and the award-winning Knives & Ink, which catalog the complicated and funny stories behind individuals' tattoos. You can read more of his work in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, and numerous other publications. He currently lives in Brookyn. Website • Twitter
Carmen Lagala
Stand-up Comedian
Standup comedian Carmen Lagala has a killer sense of humor. Her versatile style is matched by her content, as she shifts easily between one-liners and stories about everything from serial killers to mittens made out of her dead dog. Lagala has been featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's digital platform, and tours the country headlining shows and festivals as well as regularly opening for Hari Kondabolu. Originally from Vermont, she moved to New York City in 2014 where she quickly became a favorite on indie shows, and most recently was crowned the winner of 2019's New York Comedy Club contest. When it comes to dark, dirty, and playful comedy, Carmen Lagala kills. Website • Twitter
No-No Boy
Singer-Songwriter
Julian Saporiti is a Vietnamese American songwriter and scholar born in Nashville, Tennessee. His multi-media project No-No Boy has transformed his doctoral research on Asian American history into concerts, albums, and films which have reached a diverse public audience. His latest album, 1975, released through Smithsonian Folkways, has been hailed by NPR as "one of the most insurgent pieces of music you'll ever hear,” and American Songwriter called it "insanely listenable and gorgeous." Saporiti has been commissioned by such esteemed cultural institutions as Lincoln Center, the LA Philharmonic, the National Parks, and Carnegie Hall. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Luke Burbank: Hey, Elena.
Elena Passarello: Hey, Luke. How's it going?
Luke Burbank: It's going well. The weather is starting to turn, but this is the good part, right? This is where it's actually like it's been so hot in the northwest that I'm actually ready for sweater season.
Elena Passarello: Sweater weather.
Luke Burbank: That's right. Are you ready for Live Wire season? I.e. are you ready to do a little "station location identification examination"?
Elena Passarello: Does a cardigan feel good against your host summer skin?
Luke Burbank: Sure does. This is where I quiz Elena on a place in the country where Live Wire is on the radio. She's trying to figure out the place that I am talking about. These are a couple of really great clues. Okay. This place is the seat of the county that produces 95% of all the ginseng exported from the United States. And if you get this one, you could officially retire after this week.
Elena Passarello: I don't even know what ginseng is. Is it mined or grown?
Luke Burbank: I think it's kind of like a root of some kind.
Elena Passarello: Okay.
Luke Burbank: Okay. Let me go with hint number two. Maybe that'll help.
Elena Passarello: Sorry.
Luke Burbank: It's home to the largest curling facility in the country. Like, as in the sport curling.
Elena Passarello: Oh.
Luke Burbank: Now I'm going to help you. It's not Minnesota.
Elena Passarello: Fargo, North Dakota.
Luke Burbank: A little more over towards Wisconsin.
Elena Passarello: Wisconsin. Wisconsin.
Luke Burbank: That's right. You were thinking of Wausau, Wisconsin, where we are on the air on Wisconsin Public Radio. That's right. That's where that ginseng is being exported from. I am told by this script in front of me. So shout out to everybody listening in Wausau. Thanks for tuning into Live Wire. Should we get to the show?
Elena Passarello: Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: All right. Take it away.
Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire. This week, writer Isaac Fitzgerald.
Isaac Fitzgerald: The things I don't want to write, the things I don't want to talk about, the things that I don't want to look directly at. Those are usually where the most important stories are.
Elena Passarello: Stand up comedian Carmen Lagalla.
Carmen Lagalla: I don't know what sport you're a fan of, but what are you doing in the offseason, huh? Are you breaking up children online.
Elena Passarello: With music from No-No Boy and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello. And now the host of Live Wire Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thanks to everyone for tuning in all over the country, including in Wausau, Wisconsin. We have a really, really interesting show in store for everyone this week. Of course, we asked the listeners a question like we always do. We asked, tell us something you completely misunderstood as a young person. And that is because one of our guests this week, Isaac Fitzgerald, he writes in his book about how he and his teenage friends really, really misunderstood that fight club, the movie Fight Club, was a satire. They just took it as a sign to form their own actual fight club. So we're asking the listeners to commiserate about things they didn't quite fully grasp when they were younger. We're going to hear those responses coming up in a little bit.
Luke Burbank: First, though, of course, we got to start things off with the best news we heard all week. This right here is our little reminder at the top of the show. There is some good news happening somewhere out there in the world. Elena, what is the best news that you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Okay. I love this story. It comes from far, far away from where both you and I are over in Bangalore, in India. I didn't know this about the city of Bangalore, but apparently it's just notorious for its traffic. And there's like a bunch of tech talks about it. And there is a doctor, a gastroenterology surgeon named Govind Nandakumar, who was stuck in this notorious traffic. Unfortunately, he had a surgery to perform a gallbladder operation, and he knew that the patient was prepped and ready. And I don't know from surgery, but sometimes that prep can take days, right? You got to fast or you got to drink something. So this person had probably gone through a lot to get ready for surgery. And Dr. Nandakumar also knew that there were a bunch of other patients waiting. And so he just got out of his car and started running. He ran something like three kilometers, which is a little under two miles.
Luke Burbank: In, presumably his like doctor-ly outfit, whatever that looks like.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. In my brain, he's got on like full on surgical scrubs, which is probably not how it works.
Luke Burbank: No it's probably not.
Elena Passarello: The mask and the little hat and the gloves.
Luke Burbank: It also feels very like this is what happens in a rom com, except instead of running to tell the person that he loves, that he really loves them, he's running to take someone's gallbladder out.
Elena Passarello: Instead of Katherine Heigl it's a gallbladder.
Luke Burbank: Yes, exactly.
Elena Passarello: The object of his affection. But, you know, this is a pretty impressive member of the medical community. Eighteen years of service, 1000 successful surgeries, and hopefully only one that he had to sprint toward in order to get it done.
Luke Burbank: Like you're appreciative if the surgeon went the extra mile to get there, but then if they're drenched in sweat, you're like kind of like, well, okay, let's take a minute. Everybody cool down here.
Luke Burbank: I've got a story. Actually, I saw that it's also related to people going above and beyond in the medical community. It involves a recent Spirit Airlines flight that was heading from Pittsburgh, your old stomps Elena, to Orlando, Florida, and a three month old baby stopped breathing on this flight, just completely stopped breathing. And her parents were, as you might imagine, just absolutely terrified and started just asking if there was a doctor on board or anyone who could help. And luckily there was a nurse sitting a few rows behind them named Tamara Panzino, and she immediately jumped into action. She knew exactly what to do. She did basically massage on the baby's chest and legs and got this baby back to breathing again.
Elena Passarello: Wow.
Luke Burbank: I've seen a video of this probably on TikTok, don't judge me, where the entire plane is in like rapturous applause because this was up near the front of the plane. Can you imagine? You're on a plane and a baby stops breathing.
Elena Passarello: And the nurse was like seated directly behind them?
Luke Burbank: Like really close to them, close enough that she just jumped right up, immediately, started applying sort of medical care to the baby and got the baby breathing again. The baby, like, takes a breath in and is like, okay, the parents said nothing like this had ever happened with this child. It was totally out of the blue for them. It's just like a very heartwarming story and also so fortunate that there was somebody on that flight who knew what to do. So everyone's lauding Nurse Panzino as a hero. I feel like, you got to get some free miles out of this, right? If you're like a nurse, if you save a life on the Spirit, I mean, at least maybe they don't charge you for your luggage anymore. Yeah, like on your next flight. Like, they'll check your bags for free. Whatever like the gold standard of the Spirit Airline experience is, it should go now to Tamara Panzino.
Elena Passarello: They should invent first class on Spirit. Just for her.
Luke Burbank: She just gets her own row. They just take the front row of coach. They block it out and they just like, say, this is for you, Tamara, after your amazing life saving efforts. And that, my friends, is the best news that we heard all week.
Luke Burbank: All right. Let's welcome our first guest on over to the program. He frequently appears on The Today Show where he reviews and recommends books for them. He's also the author of the bestselling children's book How to Be a Pirate. And his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic and lots of other places. The New York Times Book Review called his new memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts an endearing and tattered catalog of one man's transgressions and the ways in which it is our sins far more than our virtues that make us who we are. Isaac Fitzgerald, welcome to Live Wire.
Isaac Fitzgerald: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Luke Burbank: I do not think I have heard one interview with you regarding this book that has not started in the exact place that we are also going to start because the beginning of the book and it kind of perfectly sets the tone. You write, your parents were married when they had you. They were just married to different people at the time. What I'm curious about is do you remember when you learned that fact and what that felt like for you?
Isaac Fitzgerald: Yes. I mean, again, the whole book is about stories and the stories we were told and the stories we tell ourselves. But I can kind of remember the first time I heard the story, which was I was pretty young. My parents, I think, were rather progressive. Again, they were part of the Catholic worker, which is this Catholic group, but it's a very progressive Catholic group. And so I think they wanted me to have an understanding of who my siblings were. And so I had these half siblings. So at a very young age, they tried to explain to me that they were married when they had me, just to different people. And part of that explanation was because they would show me photographs of their wedding that I was actually at. They got married when I was three years old. And there's a truck that's beat to crap that's just covered in toilet paper with like just mary cans hanging off the side. So that was like the story that was taught me at a very young age. And at that time I felt a warmth around it. It seemed like a nice you know, you're a young kid, you're seeing pictures of people being happy. Both of my siblings, I loved them so much. I looked up to them so much. So there was almost a warmth to the story. It was only in a few, like a few years later when things started to be a little bit more rocky, that I started to understand, okay, that maybe marriage had consequences, that maybe my existence was part of what caused those consequences, and maybe I'd actually made my parents not happy, but unhappy. And that is when especially I started having some real serious conversations with my mom at far too young an age that it started to kind of curdle on me.
Luke Burbank: And one of those consequences was that your parents' parents were pretty upset with them for kind of exploding the lives that they had before this because they were married. Was that part of what led to your parents and you, the three of you, kind of living among this new community of people who were unhoused while your parents were working at this place in Boston?
Isaac Fitzgerald: Yeah, that's that's absolutely right. So basically, my parents lived with friends for a little while, even before they were married. And again, these are memories of joy for me because I was surrounded by this rather loving community while we were in the city. It's only later when we made this move to kind of a lonely north central Massachusetts, that things took a turn. But we would live with friends. And and basically, my mother had a son who was my brother and my father had his daughter who was my sister. And their families did not take kindly to the decisions that they made, especially on my mother's side. So all of a sudden, there really was a lack of support. And of course, their partners basically were like, all right, get out. And they also lost their kids in that move. So it did become just the three of us. And at that point, they were involved with the Catholic Church. They were involved with the Catholic Worker. They had friends who worked in the community. And after about a year of living with someone who was very special to the family, this man named Doc Holliday, he basically put them in touch with the Catholic worker. And that is when we moved into Hailey House, which is this incredible soup kitchen. We eventually end up at John Leary House, which is basically this apartment complex that's run by the Catholic Worker. And it was a wonderful, wonderful childhood. I was surrounded by so many characters and so many loving people. But on paper, I know it looks like it's like, oh, he grew up in an unhoused living situation. That must have been so difficult. But those were actually the best years of my life.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Isaac Fitzgerald, by the way. His latest book is Dirtbag, Massachusetts. You write in the book about how things really shifted for you around the age of eight when you actually left that environment that seems on paper to be fairly chaotic. And I want to talk about that more in a moment. First, though, we've got to take this quick break here on Live Wire from PRX. Back in a moment.
Luke Burbank: Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello and we are talking to Isaac Fitzgerald. His latest book is Dirtbag, Massachusetts detailing his life, although it's it's described as a confessional. We're going to get into that in a moment because it's not strictly a memoir. I mean, it really gets into a lot of personal stuff that I'm pretty impressed, actually, that you were able to write as honestly about a lot of this stuff as you were. Isaac. We were talking, though, before the break about how you spent your early years living in Boston in an environment where there was a lot of people that were very marginalized. Your parents were working with people who were unhoused. And then you and your mom basically move out to a town in kind of out in the middle of nowhere next to her parents, who it sounds like we're still not okay with how you had come into the world because your existence had torpedoed your mom's existing marriage, basically. What was that like for you to go out there?
Isaac Fitzgerald: For me, that is really where I learned what we're talking about with that opening question. That is where I learned to feel real shame around my own very existence, basically, which was understanding that maybe my mother had had a better life before I came into hers. And I really, really internalized that. In Boston, there was community. There was camaraderie. It was a very impoverished life, but it was actually, at its heart, still a very social life. When we moved to north central Massachusetts, I want to be very clear. This is a beautiful part of the state and there's a lot of community out there and there's a lot of pride out there. But me and my mother weren't a part of that. We were very isolated. And so that is the first feeling that I think of or that the emotion that I feel when I think of that time in my life is loneliness and kind of the only other people in her life and therefore in my life in that time were her parents who lived next door, who were very clear in how much they disapproved of the choices that she'd made and how her her life had basically gone. Since that there was this sense of my mom, I think, as so many of us have in our hearts, she had this drive to get out of her hometown, and there she was years later with her parents, kind of getting to say, I told you so right there living next door. So that just created a very difficult environment where my mother didn't have many people to turn to other than me. And that's when we started having these conversations where she was telling me things that an eight year old is not supposed to know. I became a crutch for her, and looking back on it, I can see that I was basically raising her instead of her raising me.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Isaac Fitzgerald about his latest book, Dirtbag, Massachusetts, about his life growing up and his young adulthood out in the world. Another thing that you write about in the book is that violence was part of your life. Violence from your parents directed at you, sometimes from you back at your parents. And then also you and your friends like forming a fight club. Like you went to see the movie Fight Club. Sounds like you kind of walked out of the theater and was like, okay, we've found it. Was that you trying to get control of the violence? That seemed like it was just kind of like in the air? Because I grew up in kind of a rough part of the town that I grew up in. And I just remember violence was always like around the corner. Like if it was like an older kid wanted to beat you up or some kid from another school, you're always just kind of trying to figure out, am I going to get tested today? Like it really does a number on your brain.
Isaac Fitzgerald: No, but that's exactly right. Violence, especially in our households and I'm not just speaking for myself, but so many of the children that I grew up with, it could roll in like a storm. That's a perfect way to put it. It always felt like it was just around the corner. So you had no idea where it was coming from. And so when we started our fight clubs, after watching the movie Fight Club, we were grassroot. Of course, we wouldn't have said this at the time. At the time we would have just said, Oh, that looks fun as hell. And like Brad Pitt looks cool. There's sunglasses that I stole from the gas station. But in hindsight, I can so clearly see that we were desperate to control the violence in some form. This was our way of taking its power away, just creating a space where we all consented to it, and therefore it was okay. The other thing I'll say about it is I also think we were desperate for friendship, for a relationship, for camaraderie, dare I say, even love that we maybe weren't getting in our homes. And it's so clear to me now, of course, that book and then the movie that it's based on is this is satire. It's trying to point a finger at so many different toxic aspects of masculinity and how we're taught to be men in society. But when you're 16, that just goes right over your head. And again, we're just like, Oh, yeah, here we go. But in a way, I really do look back on it fondly.
Luke Burbank: Well, I had read that you kind of wanted this book when you started out to be -- you've got a big section on the band, The Hold Steady, and that you were setting out to write a series of essays that were largely about pop culture. But then it sounds like every time you were trying to write about pop culture, you needed to delve into your childhood to give some context. And then that eventually told you, the book is actually about growing up and about my life, essentially.
Isaac Fitzgerald: That's absolutely right. For very long time, if the three of us were at a party, I would tell you the story of my childhood and then I would tell you I will never write about it. I was so clear that that was not something I was ever going to write about. And, you know, we could impact that all day. But that's for therapy, not for radio. But at the end of the day, when I sold this book, it was supposed to be kind of like pop culture through a little bit of my own personal experience, a little bit through that lens, but nothing in the confessional that this book ended up being. And the reason that happened was I kept trying to write these essays and I kept finding that I'd write three paragraphs. Well, to understand that, you've got to understand them three more. Well, to understand that there's this thing that happened with my dad. And then I would look at it and I try to cut it all out. I tried that. I was like, okay, that's the private stuff. Take that away. And then I realized I was weakening these pieces. That's when I called my editor up. At that point, I'd already sold the book and probably two years before that, and I said, Hey, I think this is going to be about my childhood. To which my editor responded, Yeah, yeah, I've been waiting for you to figure that out. And I'm so happy that I did, which is like, you know, I don't have a lot of lessons. Like, I think everyone can come to writing or making art in their own way. I don't think there's any tried and true way. But one thing I will say that has at least been true for me is the things I don't want to write, the things I don't want to talk about, the things that I don't want to look directly at. Those are usually where the most important stories are.
Elena Passarello: It's interesting that you said at the very beginning of our conversation that it ended up that the book is about storytelling. I just wondered if you could say a little more about that. Like, in what ways are all these different parts of your life and your time in San Francisco and how are those framed as stories and stories that people tell each other in your mind now that you finished the book?
Isaac Fitzgerald: And now that it is, it exists as a story itself, which, let's be honest, is not even the whole -- you know, my mother and my father have actually been incredibly supportive of this book. But I had this moment when my mom first read the book. She's a very smart woman. I told her I was like, You don't have to read it. You don't have to look at it. We can pretend it doesn't exist. She, of course, read in a night. She had a lot of questions. But, you know, one of the early ones first on was just where's all the canoeing? Like, you know, come on. We did some fun some fun stuff, too. And and I realized in that moment and I explained it to I said, listen, the the truth is like, think of it like a block of wood. Think about it like a log. And of course, Mom, you're going to carve a much different statue out of that log than I'm going to carve out of it. Right. The whole truth is there, but we can't put the whole log in the thing. So you're going to carve out something that probably has a little more canoeing, probably a little more camping, but less maybe of this stuff that I'm actually focusing on. And I'm very lucky in that she really understood that in that moment. But to that point, this book is in of itself a story which is to say not the whole truth. These are the things that I decided to focus on. These are the things I decided to highlight. So part of the book, part of the spirit of it, part of what I only found through writing. It's not something I set out to do, was recognizing how the stories that were told to me as a young child very, very early, full of warmth and love. Then in the difficult times with my mother jarring to the point of being scarring, to being incredibly hard to be in things that I carried when I didn't even realize I was carrying them. Those were the stories that were told to me, and they were the stories to which I told myself the story of who I was. And it was only through years of trying to run away from it, ignore it, and eventually, thankfully, through the help of therapy, look directly at it that I started being able to tell myself my own stories. So that's the beautiful thing for me about reading, about writing about books in general is that they are these things that can make us feel less alone in the world. They're these incredible pieces of technology, if you want to call it that. We see things that we maybe don't even know about ourselves reflected on the page, or we feel things that we think only we have thought. And we see them right there on the page. It makes us feel so much less alone in the world, while at the same time you have to acknowledge that other people have their versions of the story, too. My mother's Dirtbag, Massachusetts, would probably look very different than my Dirtbag, Massachusetts. But I want to make space and room for all of these different stories.
Luke Burbank: I think that's incredible that you're saying your parents have read the book, which again, is just really unflinching and that they're that they are accepting of it. And, you know, I'm sure, like you said, they've got their own version of those events, but they can at least appreciate I mean, they also sound like they're lovers of literature and books. That's where you got it from. So if that's in their personality, they can appreciate what this book is. I mean, you tell this one story of like you're moving your father out to the part of Massachusetts where you and your mom have been living and you're in different cars. And he basically tries to lose you and your mom on the freeway so he can go visit his mistress for one last time. Why do you think they stayed together with so much chaos and infidelity and trauma? Was it for you?
Isaac Fitzgerald: That's such a great question. I'll tell you if it was. I appreciate their efforts. But if anybody had bothered to ask me at the time, I would have prayed for divorce. And that is the God's honest truth. It's okay. People get divorced all the time. Why not just put a stop to this? And I think there's a lot of different reasons. One, I do think they love each other very much. I think it's it's possible for people to have incredibly hard times and still love each other. And this is a big part of it, too, is I think when you're young, everything feels so big. Four years is half your life. When you're eight years old, that's almost everything you know, which for a child that feels really big, for an adult, it just feels almost like a blip. And it's one of the first things my mom said to me when she read it. She said, I'm so sorry. Which I felt like I've been waiting to hear my whole life. And then she said, I had no idea you were carrying this. And it's so clear to me that she wanted to believe that I had just put it all behind, just in the very same way that she had put it all behind. But to get to the point of why they're still married, I do. I believe they really love each other. I think they loved each other back then, as complicated and difficult as that time period was. Now that I am approaching 40, I'm so happy they have each other. I'm watching them grow old. They are some of the world's best grandparents to my siblings' children, I'm so happy they're still together.
Luke Burbank: I wanted to ask you kind of as we wrap this up about the cover of the book, so it looks like it's a reference to what maybe people would call like the power fist, this very iconic kind of form of resistance. It has a whole lot of different meanings or representations. But the cover of this book, it's like that fist is is crossing its fingers. And I'm just wondering, is that a sort of a message from this book about an almost like a radical or like aggressive form of hope?
Isaac Fitzgerald: I love that reading of that. That's incredible. Yes, I'm just going to say, yes, you nailed it. But but no, no, I have not articulated it that way. But I think that is at the core of what I was trying to get at. And the crossed fingers for me is very much about cross your fingers, let's hope. Good luck. But then I went and actually researched it. It actually comes from Roman times. Back before it was a Christian empire, they basically would ask people if they were Christian and you would cross your fingers behind your back when you said No, asking forgiveness from God for lying, which if you remember as a kid, you could use to tell a lie and cross your back. I was thinking cross fingers for good luck. But then I remembered it. In a way it is also cross your fingers is linked to religion. So I was interested in that the faith component of the book and is also linked to am I telling a story or not? So that for me was part of it. It's also very much a punk rock poster from like the Zeitgeist Bar that I worked at. They only had black and white Xeroxes. But I'm going to end with your answer because I'm going to I'm going to steal that, my man, and I'm going to use it from here on out. Yeah. I would like to believe that this book is about radical hope and that that cover really does a beautiful job of showing that.
Luke Burbank: Well, it is an intriguing cover and an even more intriguing book once people dove into it. It's Dirtbag, Massachusetts. Isaac Fitzgerald, thanks for coming on the show, man. This was really, really illuminating.
Isaac Fitzgerald: Thank you both so much for having me. And thank you to everyone that takes the time to read the book.
Luke Burbank: That was Isaac Fitzgerald right here on Live Wire. His memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts, is available now.
Luke Burbank: Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines offers the most nonstop from the West Coast, including destinations like Hawaii, Palm Springs and San Francisco, and as a member of the OneWorld alliance. Alaska Airlines can connect you to more than 1000 destinations worldwide with their global partners. Learn more at Alaska Air dot com.
Luke Burbank: This is Live Wire. Of course, each week we like to ask the listeners a question. And in honor of Isaac Fitzgerald's deep misunderstanding of what Chuck Palahniuk was going for with Fight Club and I guess David Fincher, who directed it. We asked listeners to tell us something that they completely misunderstood as a young person. Elena you have been collecting these responses. What are you seeing?
Elena Passarello: Okay, this one, I totally had this same misconception, the same misconception that Tim had. Tim says, when I was a kid, I thought artists sang their songs live on the radio. I thought they came in once an hour to sing their songs at the station so people could listen to them. I was always impressed at how they managed to sound the same every time. And I remember I thought I told my babysitter that I couldn't believe that Cyndi Lauper could play Rick Dee's American Top 40, which I knew was recorded in Los Angeles, and then come to the Charleston, South Carolina radio station later in the day to play. She bop against my babysitter was like.
Luke Burbank: I feel like you were already preparing for your life as a somewhat itinerant, somewhat performative writer, where you were just like the logistics of this make no sense to eight year old Elena Passarello. How could she be in these two places in such a close amount of time?
Elena Passarello: I mean, I guess it just really proves that I grew up in a house without a lot of records in it. They probably would have figured it out if that had been the case.
Luke Burbank: I was too busy just hunched over my radio, ready to switch it from the pop station to the Christian music station, because I wasn't really allowed to listen to non-Christian music, so I was never at ease while listening to Cyndi Lauper or anybody else. I was down there, like ready to change the station at a moment if I heard my dad coming down the stairs.
Elena Passarello: Aw.
Luke Burbank: All right. What's another misconception one of our listeners had as a young person?
Elena Passarello: Phil says, I grew up thinking Watergate was some kind of big dam. I guess it was just damn big.
Luke Burbank: Rim shot. Yeah, I could totally see that as a kid just because you would hear the word Watergate so much. And if you missed the part about it being a, I guess a hotel slash, you know, office complex, and there was no Internet presumably at this time for a young person. So, yeah, once that story gets in your brain that it's just some kind of aqua feature. Yeah, you could really carry that around for a while.
Elena Passarello: And I bet kids today are very confused. Whenever there's a controversy, we just add gate to the end of it. Like, I wonder if they think that's some kind of like etymological, like Latin, kind of suffix. But really it's just this hotel thing.
Luke Burbank: Right. Like, if it would have been at the Holiday Inn, we would call everything Inn at the end. Right. What's something else, though? One of our listeners was a bit confused about when they're young.
Elena Passarello: I love this one from Susie. Susie says, As a little girl, I always thought the universal remote could actually control the entire universe.
Luke Burbank: I think that Susie must be much younger than I am, because I still think that universal remote is kind of fancy. Like, I remember that coming out, I want to say, like, in my twenties or something or maybe that was the first time I saw one and I was like, Wow, how'd they do that?
Elena Passarello: I feel like it's always advertised and few houses had it. So like, of course you wouldn't have a universal remote at your house, but if you, you know, went to if you had the kind of family who shopped at whatever Circuit City then you could get it.
Luke Burbank: When you went to your like friends whose family were a little fancier than yours, they might have that universal remote or something. Okay, one more listener response before we get out of here.
Elena Passarello: Okay. I've saved this one just for you. Ashley says, I thought condominium was a bad word because it had the word condom in it.
Luke Burbank: I would have absolutely had that thought as a kid. Had I ever heard the word condominium, I would have assumed that that was something that was very fresh. As my mom would say. My mom was always describing things as fresh.
Elena Passarello: Maybe that's why we say condo, just to make it a little less -- a little more PG.
Luke Burbank: Take out some of the prophylactic connotations. Well, thank you to everybody who sent in a response to our question this week. We're going to another question for next week's show, which we will reveal in just a bit. So stick around for that. In the meantime, this is Live Wire Radio. Let's invite our next guest onto the show. She's been featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and was crowned the winner of 2019's New York Comedy Club contest, which was shortly before she joined us on stage in Portland, Oregon, at the Alberta Rose Theater. That was back in 2020. Take a listen to this. The very funny Carmen Lagalla right here on Live Wire.
Carmen Lagalla: Thank you so much. Wow, thank you. I feel a little weird right now. My mom figured out how to use Facebook Messenger recently, which I didn't know she could do that because this is the same month she printed an article off of the internet and mailed it to me. Pretty big leap through time for Rene. Felt like that scene in Jurassic Park where the Raptor figures out how to use the door handle. Oh, clever girl. All right. This is the message she sent to me. She thinks I'm not getting enough nutrients from our sun's rays. So she sent Carmen, make sure you're getting the D. I was like, my mom is cool. Nice, cool lady. She is. She's a Christian lady. She believes in God. She likes to throw the sayings at me. She'll be like, Let Jesus take the wheel. Like He never drove. His blood, his wine. That's a DUI. That's reckless, reckless advice. I don't believe in God. I do believe in aliens, though. One of those cool people. I don't think they're on Earth yet, though, although sometimes you see people walking around, right Portland? You're like, Oh, I don't know, what? No way. I have friends who think that crop circles were caused by aliens. This is my favorite kind of person, because you got to believe then that aliens are losers, that they made it here and that's their first choice. They're like, Oh, we made it to Earth. What should we do? One of them is like, Why don't we go into the agriculture, make some shapes and some some patterns, huh? I had to look up what cause crop circles because I was like, what is it though then? And I found out it started in England with two guys just pulling pranks. So the fun time for them, they did it for years. They didn't tell anyone until about ten years in. One of them had a wife that thought that he was cheating on her. I was like, I've been cheated on. That is way worse. Oh, well, you come home, you're like, Where have you been night after night for so many years? Is it Susan? He's like, Oh my God, no, you're going to laugh. Oh, classic misunderstanding. No, I've just been going into the field with Doug to bend corn. Oh, is that a euphemism? Are you with Doug? I don't. So confused. I spend so much time on the internet. It's a lot. I also. I love the WNBA. So women's basketball. Yeah, it's awesome. I love it so much. So here's what I've been doing in my free time. It's the off season. I've been going on to the WNBA Instagram page and policing the comments. It's like a volunteer position. Hold your applause. Because what you'll find in there, a lot of young men who hate women, they hate women's basketball, and they just talk trash in there. And I've made it my job to talk trash back at them on a personal level. Yeah, it's not hard. They didn't privatize it. They're all from New Jersey. You just go in and they are like, women suck at basketball and I'm like, Oh, learn how to land a kick, flip you little [beep]. It doesn't it doesn't have to be clever, just accurate. And I took it. I took it very far. A couple of weeks ago I went and there's this one kid he kept posting, make me a sandwich on every single post and I would have let it go, but he was spelling sandwhich wrong. So I got really mad. I took screenshots of that, went into his Instagram, saw he had a girlfriend, sent her the screenshots. Yes, this job, a lot of free time with comedy. And she didn't respond. She just sent like a single question mark. And I was like, Oh my God, that is weird. I should probably say what I mean. I was like, Oh yeah, sorry. It's someone that you love being mean to women online. I thought you should know. She did not respond. So I clicked on her Instagram, saw that she doesn't graduate high school until 2023. Oh no, I feel like I did the right thing. But on the other hand, I'm like, Who am I that I'm just barging into her DMs? Like, What are you doing with that? You should break up. He's immature. I'm 34, so you should listen to me. Felt very creepy. Feel very creepy about it. So I checked up on both of them two days later and they deleted all the pictures of each other. I was like, Oh, I broke them up. Oh, the power. Yeah. You know, you can make a difference in this world. Oh, my gosh. Right. Oh, I don't know what sport you're a fan of, but what are you doing in the off season, huh? Are you breaking up children online? That's what I'm willing to do for the New York Liberty. I don't get how you parent right now with the Internet the way it is, because you got to do you got to teach your kids about weirdoes on the Internet. But then, like, am I making it into the conversation? Parents are like, no, you got to watch out. These people are creeps and weirdos they're going to send your pictures there. Oh, no. There's so much out there that you don't even -- also, there's going to be this lady. Yeah. She just wants what's best for you. So don't respond. Just listen to what she has to say. So it's good. I love the Internet. I love TV. I keep watching True Crime. Big fan. Big fan of the genre. True crime fans. Three people. Nice. I am. I'm such a big fan of true crime. They say that people keep telling me they're like women, women love true crime. Well, it keeps happening to us. So more of a keeping tabs thing at this point. Right. It's crazy. These guys will still have the audacity to be like, women don't watch sports like we binge watch the most dangerous sport of all. That's what true crime is. Just the stakes are higher. Like, I'm sorry. Did your ball go out of bounds? Aw. Kelly's been missing for three weeks. She is the most out of bounds. All right. My name is Carmen. You guys are so great. Thank you so much.
Luke Burbank: Carmen Lagalla, everybody.
Luke Burbank: That was Carmen Lagalla, recorded in front of a live audience at the Alberta Rose Theater here in Portland back in March of 2020. You can find her on Twitter at Carmen Lagalla. And I'm at Luke Burbank here with at Elena Passarello. We're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere because when we come back, we will hear some music from No-No Boy.
Luke Burbank: Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. And our musical guest this week is a songwriter and scholars born in Nashville, Tennessee. Julian Saporiti has created the project No-No Boy. He did this while he was transforming his doctoral research on Asian-American history into concerts and albums and films. His latest album, as part of the project, 1975, was released through Smithsonian Folkways, and it's been hailed by NPR as one of the most insurgent pieces of music you will ever hear. Let's take a listen to this. It's our conversation with Julian Saporiti, a.k.a. No-No Boy, recorded back in April.
Luke Burbank: What song are we going to hear?
No-No Boy: We're going to close the show with a song called Boat People. The boat people were folks from Vietnam, Southeast Asia, who after the fall of Saigon or the reunification of the country, depending on your point of view, they were fleeing reeducation camps. Had they been on the wrong side of the war, death in some cases. And almost a million of these folks had to get out of, you know, their country. The only country that they'd ever called home because of this fear of death, not unlike a lot of folks from Central America or the Middle East these days in Europe, even the Ukraine. They were just refugees. And about a million of these people got on these rickety little fishing boats meant for a crew of ten who'd stuffed 200 folks onto these boats. Just just anything to get out. About half of those people died. Bottom of the South China Sea. It's a history that's too big. And we teach history too big, I think, you know. Whether it's dates 1975 or a million people or, you know, 200 people even. So this story, like a lot of my songs, tries to go into history from a personal level, a level where we just take one story. This is almost verbatim, these lyrics I heard on old Canadian broadcasts back in the seventies, one of these boat people, a Dr. Tran. And, yeah, his story is worth a movie, but, uh, you'll have to settle for a song tonight. Thank you so much for having. This is called Boat People. Thank you.
Luke Burbank: This is No-No Boy on Live Wire.
No-No Boy: Forty years ago. The doctor left on a boat. He'd never seen the snow. Felt it in his hand. Sail until you see dry land. I can't get off the news. I can't get off my floor. The good folks go inside. When we need you most. What to prayers do. Behind locked doors. Tuan went back to rebuild. Only to watch Saigon fall. Now he climbs up Mont Royal. Makes a life in Montreal. Donated winter coats. And Barbie dolls. So. I'll wrap myself in books. They're talking about this ban. I linger Bell Hooks. She helps me to understand. Some of this ain't new. No, man.
No-No Boy: Fourteen hours by car. Cargo trucks and cabs. Just to shake the cops. But Mom had to stay back. The Chinese safe house and covered tracks. Eighteen meters long. Two-hundred bodies full. A simple compass and a map. From a kid's geography book. Forget Ferdinand. Or Captain Cook. Bodies bobbing in. A rough South China Sea. Came across a Thai. Pirate ship, scavenging. Rip the doctor from his kids. Bleeding. Hours under gun. Then tossed into the water. He swam back to son. Held tight to his daughte. Drifting through the night. As the daylight broke. A mountain in the dark of the Malaysian coast. Sweet Pulau Bidong. He never cried so hard. Or so long. I can't get off the news. I can't get off my phone. My mother came here too. That was 40 years ago. So if you see somebody as cold. You give them a coat.
Luke Burbank: That was No-No Boy right here on Live Wire. His latest album, 1975, is available right now via Smithsonian Folkways. All right, before we get out of here, a little preview of next week's episode. We are going to be talking music on the show, Elena. And not just any music. Rock music. You're with with Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue. He's going to talk about his days growing up in various small towns where he had big dreams of playing rock and roll. Those dreams, it turns out, came true. Motley Crue sold over 100 million records. About 10 million of them, just, to me, in middle school.
Elena Passarello: I was just going to make that joke.
Luke Burbank: I did 10 million. You did 10 million. So that's like 20 million between the two of us.
Elena Passarello: 20% of the Crue's revenues.
Luke Burbank: That's why he agreed to come on the show, because he knew we had both personally supported the Crue back in the day. Then we're going to talk to Todd Haynes. He is the legendary filmmaker. We're talking about his documentary, The Velvet Underground, which documents that band. Now, The Velvet Underground did not sell 100 million albums, but they have had a huge cultural impact. So we're going to hear about that and we're going to hear some actual music from the very, very talented Melanie Charles. Her album, Y'all Don't Really Care About Black Women is a love letter to the underappreciated labor of black women in music. It's going to be amazing. So you want to tune in for that. Plus, we're going to be looking to get your answers to our listener question for the week. Elena, what are we asking the Live Wire listeners for next week's show?
Elena Passarello: We are dying to know your go-to karaoke song.
Luke Burbank: Gosh I was recently doing some karaoke at this like Campout, and then the next day because the people at the campout had set up the equipment. They were playing back some of the karaoke from the night before, including a song that I did, and it was sobering.
Elena Passarello: Oh, they recorded you?
Luke Burbank: It was recorded. And we were listening back to it. It did not sound the next day the way it sounded in my head the night before. But anyway. All right. Want to get your go to karaoke song. You can hit us up on Twitter or Facebook we're at Live Wire Radio. Pretty much everywhere on social media. All right. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. Huge thanks to our guests. Isaac Fitzgerald, Carmen Lagana and No-No Boy. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer, Heather De Michelle is our executive director. Our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our assistant editor is Trey Hester. Our marketing manager is Paige Thomas and our production fellow is Tanvi Kumar. Our house band is Ethan Fox, Tucker, Sam Tucker, Eyal Alves and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music. Molly Pettit is our technical director and mixer and our house sound is by Emile Blake.
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation. Live Wire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Ann Sue of Portland, Oregon and Phyllis Fletcher of Seattle, Washington, who also happens to be a member of the Live Wire board. Get more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast. Head on over to Live Wire Radio dot org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire crew. Thanks for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
