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[0:00] The Twenty Sided Tavern & Broadway Podcast Network.

[2:00] R. Alex Murray: Oh my gosh. Well, hey, welcome back adventurers to Ale and Wellmet. It's me, R. Alex Murray, your podmaster. And hey, Diego and Conner are here. Hi, Diego and Conner.

[2:14] Diego F. Salinas: Hello!

[2:15] Conner Marx: It's good to be here.

[2:16] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, what are you guys thankful for?

[2:18] Conner Marx: Goodness, I mean, if we're being earnest, I was just before we were recording, I was telling Murray how it's kind of blowing my mind that the year's almost over. Currently, it's like a rainy, like cyberpunk-y type of day in New York and reminds me of when I first moved here in March to start rehearsals for the production. And as sappy as it is, I am very, very thankful for the show and where it's taken me so far, you know?

[2:45] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, cyberpunk-y is really an accurate description.

[2:49] Conner Marx: Oh yeah, man, when you got the billboards and everything and the rain, it looks like, where's my hover car, you know?

[2:53] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah, for sure.

[2:55] Conner Marx: I was thinking about, especially, God, you walk through Times Square, right? And there's something about the haze, the rain turns into this weird light haze with all the billboards and stuff. Yeah, it felt very post-apocalyptic.

[3:08] R. Alex Murray: Or like after World War III, civilization rebuilt.

[3:14] Conner Marx: Like, yeah, anime, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[3:16] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, what about you, Connor?

[3:18] Diego F. Salinas: I don't want to out anyone's personal experience, but I think this one might have some commonality. Diego, knowing a bit about what your living adventures were in New York, that I find myself so thankful, particularly on rainy days, particularly as it gets cold, for a place to live that I like, that I'm really a home that I feel very happy with.

[3:43] R. Alex Murray: A little hole that I don't want to leave.

[3:46] Conner Marx: Oh man, not a wet, muddy hole, or a dry, sandy hole, but a Connor hole.

[3:51] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah!

[3:52] Conner Marx: That means...

[3:56] R. Alex Murray: Connor's got, honestly, one of the coziest bedrooms I've ever seen. It's very well organized, very well decorated.

[4:03] Conner Marx: I do prioritize coziness.

[4:05] R. Alex Murray: As you should, man. Coziness was a goal, and having it here, it's executed.

[4:09] Diego F. Salinas: Well, hold on, do you have roommates and stuff, or do you have your own weird little apartment?

[4:12] Conner Marx: I do, I have roommates, yeah, who are great.

[4:14] R. Alex Murray: Your room is your...

[4:18] Diego F. Salinas: I want to know more. What's in your cozy room?

[4:20] Conner Marx: I won't make it a long backstory episode. What's your address? Can we look in the windows?

[4:24] Conner Marx: For a long time, I didn't have what felt like a home. I was bouncing between places, whether they were sublets, whether, for a long time, jobs were taking me back and forth between different cities, and I came to understand how important it was to have a place that you could go and really recharge a home base, something that feels safe in a physical and metaphorical sense.

[4:55] R. Alex Murray: Oh, yeah, it's super nice to have a place to put your stuff where no one's going to stab you.

[4:58] Conner Marx: A place to put your stuff, just to feel like the metaphorical doors are closed, that there's not a draft coming in somewhere, and things are just up in the air, and you've got to use that mental energy to think, okay, I've got this here. Because you never really rest when you have that in the back of your mind.

[5:18] Diego F. Salinas: It's like you're always like...

[5:19] Conner Marx: Yeah, there's a fucking countdown clock going, like when you're subletting and stuff. I've sublet and been like, all right, I got... Okay, I'm chill here for three weeks, and then I got to make a decision.

[5:28] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, how about you? What are you thankful for, Murray?

[5:30] R. Alex Murray: I mean, these are all very good. Now I'm thinking, I'm currently, because of y'all, thankful for all my plants and my dog, I'm thankful to have things to nurture, and a space in which I can nurture them, right? And the show goes for that too. It's nice to have a thing to be working on all the time.

[5:47] R. Alex Murray: This podcast is nice to be like, yeah, all right, we'll get better and better and more and more interesting every week. But it's nice to have the energy and space to make things grow, right? I don't know if y'all are... I mean, especially y'all, because they're too... Diego, you technically don't live here, but you live here.

[6:05] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah, it's a very weird place to be.

[6:08] R. Alex Murray: I've been wanting to get a plant or something, something to cultivate.

[6:10] Diego F. Salinas: I got extras, you want a plant?

[6:13] Conner Marx: Yeah, give me a fucking cutting, man. I'll put in some dirt and I'll let it grow.

[6:18] Diego F. Salinas: Shove it in some dirt, spit on it, it'll be fine.

[6:20] Conner Marx: Yeah, I've seen a farm before. I played Stardew Valley, I know how this works. I have one stalk of corn in the corner of my bedroom as a fucking little scarecrow and everything.

[6:32] R. Alex Murray: Just chasing pigeons away from me all the time. Get out of here, it's mine.

[6:39] Conner Marx: I mean, we are in the time of harvest. I think that's one thing that's kind of wild, because what, this is going to go out on Thanksgiving?

[6:45] Diego F. Salinas: Yes.

[6:46] Conner Marx: Yeah, the harvest season for humans is always... There's always a cause to celebration, right? We've had a whole year, we've worked the fields, we've reaped what we've sown. And that's why we have so many big eating holidays right around the end of the year.

[7:05] R. Alex Murray: It's fucking dark.

[7:06] Conner Marx: It's dark.

[7:06] R. Alex Murray: We can't go outside, it's dark and cold.

[7:08] Conner Marx: Can't go outside, there's bears.

[7:09] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah.

[7:09] R. Alex Murray: Let's light a big fire, let's eat a bunch.

[7:12] Conner Marx: Yeah.

[7:12] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, tell weird stories and stuff.

[7:14] Conner Marx: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it starts late Halloween, right? And you get into just feasting holidays after feasting holidays, after big... I love a big fire holiday. Any holiday that's like, first thing, get a big goddamn piece of wood. That's your Yule log.

[7:27] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah.

[7:28] R. Alex Murray: It's gonna burn for two days. Throw that shit in the fireplace and start partying.

[7:33] Conner Marx: Ah, God bless. More holidays would be better if there were more fires.

[7:36] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah.

[7:36] Conner Marx: Do fireworks count?

[7:37] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, they do.

[7:38] Conner Marx: In this holiday criteria. I'm a sucker for... I love 4th of July rules. I love New Year's too.

[7:43] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah.

[7:44] Conner Marx: Oh God, New Year's. I'm from El Salvador and there are videos of people flying into El Salvador on Christmas Eve. And Christmas Eve is like a big firework night in El Salvador. And so there's videos of people filming out the plane window as it's landing. And you just see pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, like fireworks. Like the entire country is just lit up.

[8:04] R. Alex Murray: Wow.

[8:05] Diego F. Salinas: Like it's a Star Wars movie.

[8:06] Conner Marx: That's awesome.

[8:07] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah.

[8:08] Conner Marx: We've just overthrown the emperor.

[8:10] R. Alex Murray: Yeah.

[8:11] Conner Marx: I, this past New Year's, was ended up on a friend's roof. And it just so happened that in front of their building was right where the neighborhood had congregated with just like four cars just stopped in the middle of the street with their trunks open, just full of fireworks. So it's just, just rowdy. Delicious. Not like, not sanctioned, no rules, just right.

[8:35] Diego F. Salinas: Had it our way and like just firing off things.

[8:39] Conner Marx: And when it hit midnight, they were all blowing up like sort of directly on our eyeline. Like it was, we were like 15 feet away from being in the fireworks display, man. I was, I was feeling so good. I was just screaming 2024 over and over again into like 10 minutes of light explosions. It was great.

[9:01] Diego F. Salinas: Jeez, that's wonderful.

[9:03] Conner Marx: But that's right. This is the time of year, right? Light up candles, you know. Be thankful.

[9:07] R. Alex Murray: Yeah.

[9:07] Conner Marx: Keep the dark at bay. Get the people that like, yeah, around you. It was Thanksgiving like for y'all growing up.

[9:13] Diego F. Salinas: Nice. Let me share briefly before we jump onto this. And I've been trying, I've been a little quiet in the last couple of minutes trying to find a way to explain this at all much less a way to explain this where I don't sound like an incredibly cosmically esoteric asshole. And I don't know that I found one.

[9:30] R. Alex Murray: You're talking to the wrong two guys for being a cosmic asshole.

[9:32] Diego F. Salinas: So I, this is my first year on the East Coast. And it has been so remarkable to watch seasons happen.

[9:41] Conner Marx: Yeah.

[9:42] Diego F. Salinas: I really struggle to explain what kind of effect it has had on me and my level of happiness. LA is very nice, which is where I've been for the last chapter of my life. Sure. There's a lot of great things about it. I'm not here to necessarily dispute or compare but we don't have seasons. We have very hot and a little less hot but it is sunny and 70 degrees kind of every day. And you lose a sense of time.

[10:14] R. Alex Murray: And when I think about memories in LA especially when I was living there, I would think, oh, did that happen two weeks ago? Did that happen six months ago? Did that happen a year ago? I have no way to ground or place when a thing happened because I'm not, there are not leaves outside. There's not snow on the ground. It all looks the same. I'm not wearing shorts, you know?

[10:35] Conner Marx: Yeah.

[10:36] Diego F. Salinas: I had a loop that I walked with a friend for two years in Prospect Park. I mean, it's the loop in Prospect Park and there's one really big, beautiful tree. And I have like a hundred pictures of this tree from that like two years that we walked it and just watching it change.

[10:54] Diego F. Salinas: To be able to see that this is where I struggle because all of my words sound so sort of poetically overblown and therefore unspecific. But yes, you can see time and you can feel yourself move through time and you can chart the change and the progress that we have made, I've made personally and the ways that my life looks different now from before. And there's a sense of refresh and rebirth and ash and seed and all of these things.

[11:26] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, it's nice to see things die and then come back to life. It reminds you, a crocus breaking through the first crust of rhyme mid-February is, you know, you fucking live in a Walt Whitman poem. I keep saying to myself, you know, when I got here, these trees did not have leaves. I saw the leaves grow. I saw them bloom and burst. I saw them wither. And now I'm seeing the trees be bare again and it's gonna happen again. And it's somewhat reassuring in a certain way that there is a continuity beyond the things that I get anxious about day to day.

[12:01] Conner Marx: And you don't matter at all.

[12:02] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah, the sun rises, it sets.

[12:06] R. Alex Murray: I feel you a lot. I had in my old apartment here in New York, there was like a big tree right outside on the window. And it was really cool getting to see the Manhattan skyline behind that. And then eventually I couldn't anymore because all the leaves were full.

[12:22] Conner Marx: Yeah, that's great.

[12:23] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah.

[12:24] Conner Marx: Yeah, that's dope.

[12:25] R. Alex Murray: So wait, okay, you didn't grow up in LA though? You're not from there.

[12:29] Diego F. Salinas: No, I was an East Coast guy originally.

[12:32] R. Alex Murray: Okay, yeah.

[12:33] Diego F. Salinas: And then just, you know, have spent the last 15 years on the West Coast.

[12:39] R. Alex Murray: But childhood Thanksgivings were like East Coast, North Carolina Thanksgivings, right?

[12:44] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah.

[12:45] Conner Marx: Oh man, I mean, I'm from Northwest Georgia. So like similar biomes.

[12:50] R. Alex Murray: Virginia, we got the Southern boys here. We're all in the same, yeah, this is the I-85 crew. And like, yeah, man, but yeah, that's, I mean, you can't beat it. Like the Appalachian Mountains just absolutely changed colors. Gorgeous in the fall.

[13:05] Conner Marx: Yeah, so cool.

[13:06] Diego F. Salinas: Virginia, Mount Mamma.

[13:09] R. Alex Murray: Yep, country roads.

[13:12] Conner Marx: Take me home for a reasonable amount of time.

[13:16] Diego F. Salinas: When was the tough point in your lives? Because I moved to Chicago in like 2019. And after I moved like away from my home state, I was like, Thanksgiving isn't really kind of worth going back home for.

[13:34] R. Alex Murray: Sure.

[13:35] Diego F. Salinas: And that was mainly because obviously, like right after that, there was a bunch of COVID. But how do y'all feel? Like, what's your relationship to like traveling for the holiday?

[13:44] Conner Marx: I mean, for me, like this is the first, we're just going down to Philly again. My in-laws live in Philadelphia. And so for the last 13 Thanksgivings, it's been like, that's where I've gone. Like, and they used to have this big townhouse in Center City, Philadelphia. It's beautiful. And they would fill it full of people. It's like there, my in-laws were the people at their church and their communities that they just like, everybody who doesn't have a place to go, come. And so there were always the same like eight people, plus like another like 10. And like whoever, my brother showed up for a couple of them. And it was wonderful. And then, you know, we put all the leaves in the table and like a very, very, like almost Norman Rockwell, but like super.

[14:24] Diego F. Salinas: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

[14:54] Conner Marx: Yeah, happy Thanksgiving!

[15:24] Diego F. Salinas: So, what are you guys doing for Thanksgiving this year?

[15:54] Conner Marx: I’m just going to hang out with family, you know, the usual.

[16:24] Diego F. Salinas: Nice, nice.

[16:54] Conner Marx: What about you, Diego?

[17:24] Diego F. Salinas: I’m going to my parents’ place. They always make way too much food.

[17:54] Conner Marx: That’s the best part!

[18:24] Diego F. Salinas: Right? And then there are always leftovers for days.

[18:34] Conner Marx: Leftover sandwiches are the best!

[18:44] Diego F. Salinas: Absolutely! What do you put on your leftover sandwiches?

[18:54] Conner Marx: I usually go for turkey, stuffing, and a little cranberry sauce.

[19:04] Diego F. Salinas: Classic choice! I like to add some mashed potatoes in there too.

[19:14] Conner Marx: Oh, that’s a game changer!

[19:24] Diego F. Salinas: It really is. It’s like a Thanksgiving explosion in your mouth.

[19:34] Conner Marx: I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

[19:44] Diego F. Salinas: Same here!

[19:54] Conner Marx: So, any funny Thanksgiving stories from past years?

[20:04] Diego F. Salinas: Oh man, I have a few. One year, my uncle tried to deep fry a turkey and it went horribly wrong.

[20:14] Conner Marx: Oh no!

[20:24] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah, he ended up burning a hole in the backyard.

[20:34] Conner Marx: That’s wild!

[20:44] Diego F. Salinas: What about you? Any funny moments?

[20:54] Conner Marx: Well, one year, my cousin decided to make a mac and cheese dish, but she forgot to add salt.

[21:04] Diego F. Salinas: Oh no!

[21:14] Conner Marx: Yeah, it was like eating cardboard.

[21:24] Diego F. Salinas: That’s rough!

[21:34] Conner Marx: We all just laughed about it, though.

[21:44] Diego F. Salinas: That’s the spirit!

[21:54] Conner Marx: Exactly!

[22:04] Diego F. Salinas: So, what’s your favorite Thanksgiving dish?

[22:14] Conner Marx: Definitely the stuffing.

[22:24] Diego F. Salinas: Good choice!

[22:34] Conner Marx: How about you?

[22:44] Diego F. Salinas: I’m a big fan of the pumpkin pie.

[22:54] Conner Marx: Can’t go wrong with that!

[23:04] Diego F. Salinas: Right?

[23:14] Conner Marx: So, what are your plans for Black Friday?

[23:24] Diego F. Salinas: I’m not really a Black Friday shopper.

[23:34] Conner Marx: Same here!

[23:44] Diego F. Salinas: I prefer to avoid the chaos.

[23:54] Conner Marx: Agreed!

[24:04] Diego F. Salinas: I’d rather just relax and enjoy the leftovers.

[24:14] Conner Marx: That sounds perfect!

[24:24] Diego F. Salinas: Yeah, just chilling with some good food.

[24:34] Conner Marx: Can’t beat that!

[24:44] Diego F. Salinas: So, any plans for the rest of the holiday season?

[24:54] Conner Marx: Just spending time with family and friends.

[25:04] Diego F. Salinas: Sounds like a great plan!

[25:14] Conner Marx: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

[25:24] Diego F. Salinas: Me too!

[25:34] Conner Marx: Well, happy Thanksgiving again!

[25:44] Diego F. Salinas: Happy Thanksgiving!

[25:54] Conner Marx: Enjoy your holiday!

[26:04] Diego F. Salinas: You too!

[26:14] Conner Marx: See you later!

[26:24] Diego F. Salinas: Bye!

[26:34] Conner Marx: Bye!

[26:44] Diego F. Salinas: Thanks for listening, everyone!

[26:54] Conner Marx: We appreciate you!

[27:04] Diego F. Salinas: Have a great holiday!

[27:14] Conner Marx: Bye!

[27:24] Diego F. Salinas: Bye!

[27:34] Conner Marx: See you next time!

[27:44] Diego F. Salinas: Take care!

[27:54] Conner Marx: Bye!

[28:04] Diego F. Salinas: Bye!

[28:14] Conner Marx: Happy Thanksgiving!

[28:24] Diego F. Salinas: Happy Thanksgiving!

[28:34] Conner Marx: Bye!

[29:19] Alex: You heard ice cream sandwich and without it being explained or having seen a picture of one, it makes total sense that you would think this is what an ice cream sandwich is. Yeah, sure. I mean, that's, I mean, yeah, that's what those two words next to each other mean. Take fucking vanilla ice cream and put it in bread. Also, did you eat it? That kind of sounds pretty good. Nothing about, I was, I was certain that this wasn't going to taste good. It was an example of unparalleled, whether it was a sense of cultural superiority, my feeling ownership of what the idea of ice cream sandwiches should be and him presenting me with something else. I was just like, no, John, you don't understand. This isn't it.

And I took a bite and it fucking slapped. I mean, that's just wonder bread and vanilla. It was actually, it was one slice. He kind of made it one slice and he folded it up like a little taco. It is wild how good it came together. It really, truly, truly was great. And I immediately was like, John, I have so much to learn. I'm really sorry. I mean, shit, I know what I'm bringing for a friend's giving now. Talk about like the ultimate lesson in like improv, right? What a yes and like I hear something and like do it and you just like, okay, well that's what that means to me and just eat it. That sounds really good. I mean, I do love wonder bread is really just cake, right? Like it's like a half a cup of sugar away from being a pound cake.

[30:48] Diego F. Salinas: It's like a little handheld ice cream cake.

[30:49] Alex: Yeah. And if somebody like, God took two slices of Sarah Lee pound cake and just put ice cream in between them. Yes, please. What a great cultural exchange.

[31:00] Conner Marx: I know. Yeah, I really, we had a couple other moments. He made family dinner one time and I asked what the meat was. And he said in English, he said it was jungle rat. And I still am curious. Okay, hold on. What that referred to.

[31:17] Alex: Oh, you don't know?

[31:19] Conner Marx: No, I don't know. What could it be? And I asked for a while. Let's speculate. And he was like, you know, talking to some of his friends in Burmese and they were trying to help find the English word and jungle. I mean, it might've been a big fucking rat, dude. They used to, you know what a nutria is?

[31:35] Alex: What is that?

[31:39] Conner Marx: It's a big fucking rat that lives in a swamp. And it's like, I mean, it's like a, like a R O U S. Like it is like a, like, like possum size, like, but just a goddamn rat.

[31:47] Alex: I was thinking something like in like the possum raccoon.

[31:50] Conner Marx: Yeah. I guess those aren't really indigenous. I'm not. I really don't know. I mean, like, so in, in like Louisiana, like the Bayou areas of the, we have nutria and you like bake Cajuns hunt them and eat them. They're just, you know, you just shoot them like eating a big squirrel.

[32:04] Alex: Yeah. Yeah. So it could have just been a question. I, I have to that. I do not think we'll ever be subcontinent jungle rat, man. They might just have them down there.

[32:14] Diego F. Salinas: Oh, that's wild. I'd love it. If like he, like you, he showed you a picture. It's an ice cream sandwich.

[32:24] Alex: Oh man. This has been great. This has been a lovely, I love that it's turned into recipe corner and cultural exchange corner with Diego and Alex and Conner. I want to, do you guys have any Thanksgiving horror stories? Do you have like, a rough Thanksgiving or a bad, like it's worth telling?

[32:38] Conner Marx: Not in a comical way.

[32:43] Alex: Oh, just like a really sad one. You know, it's any, I think everyone's family is different.

[32:49] Conner Marx: Sure.

[32:49] Alex: But I think that probably everyone knows the experience of family dynamics allowing for some spirited exchanges.

[33:00] Conner Marx: Yeah. I remember this is not necessarily a horror story, but I think it was like one of those times where I realized how difficult Thanksgiving is. I was hosting like a friend's giving senior year of college. And I was really excited because I wanted to make a ham that my dad also like always makes for Christmas or Thanksgiving. Just, you know, nothing, nothing crazy, but like a big old ham that you can slice a hunk off of. And it's really good. Um, and they used to call me in high school, Mr. Ham, big old ham. You can, uh, but no, I like in my like, uh, little shitty party house. I got this big ass fucking ham and I like slathered it in all the like maple sugar glaze, whatever brown sugar baked Diego. Oh, so much. I was so stressed out too. Like I was sweating and I was like, Oh my God. Okay. Like everyone's coming. Like, like I understood how my parents felt.

[34:02] Alex: You wanted to call your mom immediately.

[34:04] Conner Marx: Oh yeah. I'm so sorry. So sorry I didn't help at all.

[34:07] Alex: Yeah. Cause it was like me wrestling this giant ham, like into the oven and like putting it on and trying to time it all out so it comes out like when everyone is ready to eat. Uh, and it just made me like really appreciate all the, all the people in my family and in my life who have ever made me food. Cause I was like, it is, it's not easy to plan for a feast. Like it, it is a lot of logistics.

[34:31] Diego F. Salinas: Cooking a feast is hard. Like, and it's like the first time I cooked for like a, you know, more than just like two or three people that a bunch of people were coming over. I was like, I looked at it. It was like, this is not enough food. Like this is grossly underestimated.

[34:47] Conner Marx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to do.

[34:48] Alex: Uh, my, my weird one is I couldn't get away. I lived in Nashville, Tennessee for like five years and I was just, I I've worked, I've worked a bunch of Thanksgivings in restaurants. So there've been a couple, like I did one Thanksgiving when I worked in a restaurant next to the right now at the Ted's Montana grill, which is a sort of fast casual restaurant, a fine casual restaurant next, right next to the Vanderbilt hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. So like we had people that like, had like just gotten cleared from their, like their last day of cancer, you know, treatment. And they were in, and then we also had people that were like, we are watching our mother die and we needed a place to come and like be, and like, just the emotions are crazy high. And like, you know, you got a weight staff full of fucking weed brownies, like trying to like, you know, be the therapist to people. And those are always weird, but like, like beautiful.

[35:46] Conner Marx: Yeah. Right. End up being like a movie, right? There's always like catharsis and stuff that you're having with at table nine. But, uh, one year I could not get away. I think I was doing a show and I couldn't get home. And I was just like, you know what? It's not worth trying to get home for one day. Thanksgiving day. I had off. I didn't have anything to do. My roommate was gone. It snowed like six inches and six inches in Tennessee. But nothing's going on. Right. That, that stayed shut down.

[36:11] Alex: Yeah. Nothing to do. The only thing open was the dollar general. So I walked to the dollar general. I bought a Turkey sub from a dollar general, like prepackaged food refrigerator and went home and watched. I think a Muppet's Christmas Carol and ate a Turkey sub. And I was like, happy Thanksgiving to me. Lord, just very lonely.

[36:37] Diego F. Salinas: God, in 2018, I was on tour during Thanksgiving and me and my, uh, tour mates. It's like three, two of us or three of us total. We are the only place like, you know, we don't, we're living out of hotel rooms. We don't have like a kitchen to prepare anything. So we just went to a cracker barrel and had a Thanksgiving cracker barrel. They crank out a feast. They know what they're about.

[37:01] Alex: I mean, a restaurant is essentially somewhere that does a feast every night. So like that's, you know, if you want to eat a buttload of food, a restaurant's a good place to go.

[37:09] Conner Marx: I ate a buttload of food.

[37:16] Alex: Yeah. I've got one that, that does not, um, poke at too many upsetting family dynamics. The one that where in which I am the only real, uh, idiot of the story. Um, I, it was, I was maybe 23 years old. I was working my very first job out of college, which was a line cook at a barbecue place in Seattle. Sure. Um, it was run by a husband and wife who did not seem like that marriage was long for the world.

[37:51] Conner Marx: I've worked in one of those.

[37:51] Alex: Yeah. Um, E3 was the name of the sous chef there. He was, um, uh, he was a big dude who would come in in like flip-flops and mesh basketball shorts and move incredibly slowly behind the line. And then one time he was like, Hey man, I'm in a band. Come see me. And I came and saw his show and he was a heavy metal drummer, just double bass. Hell yeah. So furiously nimble and agile and precise and quick. It was extraordinary.

[38:15] Conner Marx: Why don't you make hamburgers like this dude?

[38:22] Alex: No, I mean, I think that that's the beautiful thing about it. That there is, I'm not saying he wasn't also passionate about his job as a cook, but I think that clearly his music was something that really lit him up and to be able to see someone come alive in that way in their element was very cool. And it's always nice to be not proven wrong about someone, but to realize how little we know about people until we take the opportunity to learn more about them.

[39:05] Conner Marx: You see their depth, their other sides of them.

[39:05] Alex: Yeah. Um, and, uh, and so it was just like a bunch the, the two owners were not there often. So it was just a bunch of 20 somethings, like 20, 19 to 24 year olds running this barbecue place day to day. You think back on these jobs, right? You're like, who the fuck let us run a restaurant? I'm 20 years old now. And I'm like, well, I don't want you to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I was a 22 year old front of house manager. They gave me keys, a corporate, a corporation gave me keys and a card that would let me give my friends free hamburgers. What are you doing?

[39:26] Conner Marx: So for Thanksgiving, we were smoking turkeys. We had a giant sort of industrial size smoke around the back of this restaurant. We're staying there until 1am just churning turkeys through the smoker. So people come in and pick up a smoked turkey, get out of here. One dude comes in. He knows he three, I don't know how, but he's like, Hey, I know he three. I'm here to get a turkey. Here's my payment. And he slides over a tray of brownies.

[39:49] Alex: Oh no.

[39:49] Conner Marx: And at this point in my life, I smoked weed once when I was 14, got caught immediately and had not smoked weed all throughout the rest of high school or college. It was not a thing that was in my life. So this was maybe the second or third time that I had tried marijuana in any form. And, uh, he three was like, yeah, man, have a brownie. And I knew it wasn't a, I knew what was going on. And he handed me a brownie. I thought I was being very intelligent. So I cut it in half and I had half of it like a grownup, like a, like an, like someone who should be given keys.

[40:18] Alex: Yeah. And, and then, you know, time passes, we're all cleaning up. I remember, uh, I'm sweeping the front of the store. There was like E3s in there. Another, I think there was another Eric is that's why E3 was E3. Like just like three or four dudes there. We're all cleaning up. I locked the doors. I'm sweeping. Uh, there's a little magazine called the stranger in Seattle. It's like the little alt, whatever magazine. And I just flip it open as I'm sweeping, start to read the first paragraph of Dan Savage's stranger love column. And then I realized that I wasn't reading. I was just frozen staring at the last word. And then I looked around and all the lights were off and no one else was in the restaurant.

And I don't know when they left, if they said goodbye, how much time had passed. I looked at we had a, an analog clock that was doing me no favors whatsoever. And I didn't have keys. I had never been in this place by myself. Like put away the broom and just walked out the back door of the thing. And I was like, I guess I'll just leave. I don't know. I started walking down the street. It must've been 1 a.m. I had another job with a manager who was a little, I had been, I just got this job. I had been getting in trouble. I wasn't doing great. The manager called me and I picked up. I said, hello. And he started to talk to me about when he needed me to come into work. And then it was silent. And I didn't know if the phone had cut out or if I was just getting really high.

And I was like, hello, hello. And then I thought maybe he's saying hello back, but I'm just keep saying hello. And I thought the only way for me to solve this was, this was a flip phone. I took the battery out of my phone and I threw the battery in the bushes of whatever house I was walking by.

[42:12] Alex: And we'll pause that. I know we got to go. So we'll pause there. Friends, we got to go talk to the Australia cast. We're really excited. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Happy Thanksgiving. Grateful for you to listen to this. Come see the show. We'll be here. We're doing our thing. Travis McElroy is here all next week. It's going to be great. We love y'all. We're thankful for you. And until next time, Ayo and Christopher Columbus was a piece of shit.