Jakob Lazzaro, Mia Mamone and David Gleisner can’t let go of Dolly Parton and Coco, Harvey’s heckler and Chili’s, and time and Teletubbies. Stories featured in this episode hail from WNYC, The New York Times and BuzzFeed. Transcript below.

[Music: Little Lily Swing]

Jakob Lazzaro: Hello, and welcome back to Can't Let Go, the NBN podcast where we discuss the news stories and the personal stories from the past week or two that we can just not let go of. I am, as always, your host Jakob Lazaro and I’ve got two returning guests once again. Got Mia Mamone in the center, who is the current EIC of NBN, very powerful. And we've got David Gleisner on the far center who used to be Managing Editor, Executive Editor in days gone by but now is photo video editor, who would have thought that? How are you guys doing today?

David Gleisner: I'm doing good.

Mia Mamone: Good, pretty good.

David: Yeah.

Mia: My story isn't… It happened last night and it was Harvey Weinstein showing up at a comedy club in New York City thinking that it is okay to act like he's a normal person even though he has raped and abused multiple women. So, that's great.

Jakob: I saw that Twitter video.

Mia: Yeah.

Jakob: It was oof.

Mia: Yeah, I don't know. I guess I shouldn't be that surprised that he tried it, but also just disappointing that people were like, come on guys. Like God, just be nice like his life has been bad enough. Just let him have a nice night out with his pals. Which apparently, there were a bunch of young women surrounding him at the table he was at, which is great and makes me feel really good.

David: It kind of reminds me of Louis CK's come back tour.

Mia: Yeah, very similar.

Jakob: Louis CK never got arrested,  though. I mean, Harvey Weinstein’s out on bail.

Mia: Yeah.

David: I mean really, what the fuck?

Jakob: Speaking of the entertainment world, my news story is more of a, I'd say audio news event, because it is a podcast series that recently launched. So I'm sure many people are familiar with Radiolab from WNYC with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Jad Abumrad grew up in Tennessee. His dad is a doctor. For those of you who are not aware, Dolly Parton, famous American icon, also lives in Tennessee. And a few years ago, she ended up at the hospital after — I think it was a car accident — and Jad's father treated her and they became friends.

Mia: Oh my god!

Jakob: So, because of this, Jad just like was able to interview Dolly Parton for like hours and hours, you know earlier this year and it's been turned into a special miniseries with WNYC.

Mia: I had no idea about this.

Jakob: Called Dolly Parton's America. And it is wild. The premise is something along the lines of, you know, America's very divided right now, etc, etc. I'm sure we've all read a billion think pieces, right. But everyone seems to love Dolly Parton. So, like what? Why is she so special that all these people just love her and also, how how how did she become such an icon just in general? They’re two episodes in right now. Growing up. I never really listened to like a lot of Dolly Parton, my parents were much more of a let's listen to NPR in the car type family, as you can probably guess.

Mia: No, you don't say.

David: Whaaat?

Jakob: But I've heard a few Dolly Parton songs, but I would never say like
Oh, I'm a huge Dolly Parton fan.” But you know, from the periphery she just seems like a nice person, but listening to this podcast series — two episodes in, so far — it's absolutely fascinating.

Mia: Dolly Parton is, she's just everything. She's like, feminist icon but also like country hero and just she's so fantastic. And actually my Grandma has a story, don't know if this is true or not, but apparently when my grandma was a young woman, she was at a Dolly Parton show and like after like Dolly was like walking through the crowd and complimented my grandma on her coat that she was wearing.

Jakob: Nice.

Mia: So that could be completely fabricated like, you know a family tall tale, but I wouldn't doubt it because Dolly just seems so cool and she has her literacy project where she's donated hundreds of millions of books to underprivileged kids and stuff. So, yeah Dolly, Dolly is Queen of the World in my eyes. Yeah.

David: So mine is less of a hard news story, but it was something that BuzzFeed published I think today or yesterday.

Jakob: And for reference, today is the 25th of October.

David: Yes. It is. The headline is “The 2010s have broken our sense of time,” and I saw that and I was immediately like yeah, yeah they have. So I try to journal in my, like, personal life, but often times...

Jakob: That makes sense. Journal is a big part of the ism, as we do know.

David: [Groan] But I have not been keeping up with it super well recently and I feel like this quarter has just been, like… it's week five. How do we get here? I took a little break from Twitter and now I'm back on, and so just like the endless scrolling kind of gets to me. And this article was basically talking about how a bunch of things kind of culminated on the 2016 election election to make the Trump era kind of this, like, time-free zone. So it was talking about all of the launches of these social media platforms, like Instagram, Snapchat, Slack. All of these things were like early 2010's, between 2010 and 2013. And then in 2016, I didn't know this but like the launch of Apple Music. The launch of Apple News was in 2017, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu all of these streaming services that kind of like conglomerate all of this information into a singular place also occurred in the 2010s. And it was talking about how American life for the past, you know, 50 or 60 years has kind of been structured around, you know these daily or weekly routines like you get your news on the morning news on cable, you get it from the newspaper that you get delivered in the morning, you watch, you know, like I Love Lucy once a week or whatever. So you have all these routines to kind of keep track of time. And now we're in this era of like binging and scrolling, and just like it's up to the consumer to decide how they consume. I don't know. It just contributes to the sense that I've been having a lot for the past few years of just like, wow. We're really out here living in a dystopia.

Jakob: I agree, but also to provide a counterpoint, I think it just seems that way partially because we're living it right now. Like if you want to feel old, go look up like pictures of like the iPhone 4 and what the like the operating system looks like and you'll be like, wow, that looks really dated, you know.

Mia: I had an iPhone 4 until I was like 12th grade.

Jakob: Yeah, but you know, the whole operating system like how the apps look like a realistic instead of flat, which was because realistic was like the UI trend 10 years ago, and now it's the opposite. There's less physical things to look back on. You kind of to go and seek it out. Like you're not just gonna randomly stumble across the Spotify UI from six years ago and go, wow! It was so wacky back then! I remember when I was six years younger. You have to actually search for that. But if you look at it, you'll be like, wow. So wacky! But it's not like a random thing.

David: Yeah, in the story are references and this kind of makes me think of like all those memes that are like feel old yet? Shrek came out in 1902. And it's just like that variety of meme that there's so many of those things that it just kind of... Yeah. I think the article was trying to make the point that now if you do look back on things even like 10 years ago, it's ridiculous how much our lives have changed, and you like just kind of can't even keep track of that.

[“Twilight” by Electric Light Orchestra]

Jakob: And now of course, as always, it is time for the personal stories half of Can't Let Go. And Mia Mamone has said she would like to go first. So Mia, take it away.

Mia: Yeah, so this isn't really a story that's happened yet, but just a fact about my life is that my 21st birthday is coming up, and I'm very excited for that.

Jakob: Gonna go to Chili's.

Mia: Yeah, my plans are to go to Chili's, which I've gone to for every birthday since I turned 16 except for when I turned 19. I was really sick, I didn't go anywhere freshman year of college. I just stayed in my dorm.

Jakob: Did you order Chili's To-Go? It delivers.

Mia: No, I didn't, but my friends did throw me a Halloween birthday party in the CRC lobby though later that weekend, but yeah. So Chili's and then going to see Rocky Horror in Chicago, which I've never seen live. So I'm gonna do the whole virgin ceremony and participate in all the crowd stuff. So, we'll see how that goes. Hasn't happened yet, but I assume it will be interesting and fun.

David: It's hard to keep track of all that's going on once you're in there, so just get ready for sensory overload.

Jakob: So I like know, Rocky Horror the movie. So for a live show, do they just play the movie and people are just like riffing on it while it's going or is it like a live version, stage production of the movie?

David: Yes, so it's both. They'll play the movie on the big screen in the Music Box. And then they have actors, one of whom was my friend Elena, come up and perform like scenes from the movie in front of the screen.

Jakob: While the movie’s going on?

David: While the movie’s going on.

Jakob: Do they mute the movie when they're performing the scenes?

David: No.

Jakob: Oh, it sounds like that would drive me insane. But okay. I can see the appeal of the event.

David: Yeah. There's a lot going on in there. But it's a very good time.

Mia: I really wanted to go like freshman year of high school. And I was like, Mom can I go to like the Sooner Theater in Norman when they were doing a midnight showing on Halloween, and she was like — I was like 15. She was like no, you can't go. You can go when you’re older, and then I kind of lost interest when I was in high school, and then I realized like now I'm in college I can do whatever I want. Especially since I'll be turning 21, because my 21st birthday will be the night that I go see it. I think there is, yeah. There is a lot of opportunity for some good times.  I like being on the older side of my grade. So, thanks parents for enrolling me sooner rather than later.

Jakob: It’s the Oklahoma way, right?

Mia: Yeah. Yeah.

David: Enrolling you sooner.

Mia: Sooner. Oh, I get it. Yeah.

Jakob: David. I nominate you to go next.

David: Oh, no. Okay. We'll, going off of Mia’s theme of things that haven't happened yet, I'm also going to go with the theme of things that haven't happened yet because as Jakob mentioned earlier it is October 25th. The first night of the first Halloweekend, and I have been frantically scrambling to get my costume together. So at work today, my friend Kirsten gave me purple spandex that she runs in because my Halloween costume is going to be a slutty Teletubby named Twinkie Winkie. And I'm incredibly excited for this. So I have my purple spandex. I have a purple crop top that I actually wore to Dillo two years ago, and I'm gonna go to Blick right after this to get purple pipe cleaners and make myself a little triangle on my head to complete the outfit.

Mia: I actually have a bunch of purple pipe cleaners in my apartment if you want some. Like, I have the mixture pack of like sparkly and messy and everything, if you want to grab them. I was going to use them for the NBN poster board and I did not, so.

David: Mia, you just saved me like two dollars.

Mia: You fully can do that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going home after this.

David: Wow.

Mia: Serendipitous. Spirit of Halloween.

David: The things you learn on Can't Let Go. Wow.

Mia: For real.

Jakob: Are you gonna do purple face paint too?

David: I am planning on getting well, actually I'm probably going to do purple eyeliner and purple lipstick.

Jakob: But not face paint.

David: Not face paint. But the first party I'm going to has body paint. So probably do body paint. We will see.

Mia: I think I was regular, is it Tinky-Winky?

David: Yeah.

Mia: The regular Teletubby, the purple one? And I think I was that my sister was La-La, maybe? I can't remember what they all are. We have photos.

David: Dipsy, La-La and Po.

Mia: Yeah, like the whole squad. We were each one of them. I think the purple and red ones, and yeah, that was a good time.

Jakob: So, to buck this unexpected trend of talking about things that haven't happened yet that theoretically could go terribly wrong. I mean, those are still stories. If they go wrong, I’ll invite you both back and you can tell everyone about that. I'm gonna go thing that actually did happen to me already. So I'm a huge fan of the movie Coco. In my opinion. It is the best Pixar movie of all time.

Mia: Never seen it.

Jakob: You've never seen it?! Mia!

David: Mia!

Mia: Yeah, I know. I've been really bad about watching movies the past year.

David: Coco watch party.

Jakob: That’s my story! Is that... I found out that Mila, another friend of mine, and Priyanka, another friend of mine, had never seen Coco. This was in the presence of me, Maggie Harden and Libby Berry was also there. This was on Sunday. We were going to, as I like to call it, Tamale Girl Sunday because we were going to Pilsen to get tamales at El Milagro, which is like, they have great tamales. Then we also popped into the National Museum of Mexican Art because Maggie had never been to that, which was a shocker.

Mia: Oh, I saw your post about that, yeah.

Jakob: Honestly that museum is the best medium, Chicago. The tamales are great. I recommend both of them wholeheartedly, forever. That's not the personal story. The personal story is we found out that Priyanka and then later Mila, who was not there, hadn't seen Coco. So we were like what! We need to fix this shit now. So yes. Last night, Thursday night, we had a watch party at Priyanka and Lily's apartment down in Lakeview. And we just watched Coco, and it was fantastic. I love this movie. I was going to talk about how awesome it is, but now I can't because Mia Mamone hasn't seen it, and she needs to!

Mia: I mean, I know generally that there are very sad things that happen. I mean, I've been on the internet in the years since it's been released, like I know some things, kind of. I'm sure like, I wouldn't be too spoiled because like I feel like I would enjoy it even knowing what happens but…

David: It is an emotionally trying film.

Mia: Yeah, that's the sense I’ve gotten.

Jakob: But it's really good!

Mia: I saw something that it's going off of Netflix?

Jakob: Yeah. Yeah, it's apparently going off of Netflix at the start of November.

Mia: I guess I need to hurry up and watch that.

Jakob: So you got about five days.

Mia: Oh god, great.

Jakob: Um, so don't let me down Mia. I'm gonna check in with you about this on a Sunday and our editors meeting.

Mia: Okay. I make no promises, but maybe I will try.

[Music: Little Lily Swing]

Jakob: On that note, that's going to wrap things up for this episode of Can’t Let Go. This episode and all other NBN podcasts can be found on iTunes and on Google Play store and on Spotify.

Our show's theme is “Little Lily Swing” by Tri-Tachyon, which we use under a Creative Commons Attribution License. I'm, as always, your host, Jakob Lazzaro.

Mia: I'm Mia Mamone.

David: I'm David Gleisner.

Jakob: And this is NBN Audio.

[Music: Little Lily Swing]

Jakob: We’ve got David Gleisner on the far center, AKA my right. Extreme right. Who's the...

David: I don't want to be affiliated with that!

[Laughter]

Jakob: Okay.