Pushkin. Hello, Hello, it seems like the Spider has become this thing that catches the fly. You're welcoming me into the studio.
Am I the fly? No, I guess you're the fly. I'm the spider. Feels pretty good. So so what Yeah, As hopefully our listeners know by now, if they're paying attention.
Well, whoa, whoa. I was sensing a little attitude.
Don't antagonize the listeners.
That's rule number one in broadcasting.
As our dear audience should know, we have been encoring some episodes this summer, and usually at the end we'll have a little update with the guests about what's happened. Since, yes, this is going to be a little bit different, I got to interview someone I was really really excited to talk to. She makes one of my favorite shows. It's called Pen fifteen.
Yeah, we talk about it.
We talk about it like, yeah frequently we do.
Yeah.
When it was running, we really we talked about it a lot. I have to say. It's probably one of my favorite shows too.
For those who don't know the show, it is made by Anakonkole and Maya Erskin, who are two real life best friends and they play versions of themselves at thirteen, so it's about their middle school experience. They are playing themselves as adults, and then they are surrounded by literal children, people who are actually thirteen playing their classmates.
For the first episode, that concept felt like a big hurdle maybe to kind of like get into the story. But I was like over it and into it like five minutes in. Yeah, you stop thinking about the fact they're adults. Yeah, it's like a magic trick that they pull, and it's beautiful and so funny.
It's really good. That's right. I really think anyone who hasn't watched it, I would highly highly recommend it. And I was very excited to talk to Anna and Yeah, we thought it could be a cool conversation to put with this episode because both of us are revisiting that same age, in her case very literally recreating scenes from her childhood.
Yeah, so you guys end up talking about the episode and her show.
And about just our perspective middle school experiences.
So let's get to listening, shall we.
Let's get to listening. I'm Khalila Holt and this is Heavyweight Today's episode. Late right after the break, I'm walking to work one morning when I spot Laife heading towards me. From the ages of twelve to fourteen, Life was my crush, the object of my junior high obsession. I still google him occasionally, but he's completely absent from the Internet. I have no idea what became of him. It's like he just disappeared. So when I see him on the street, I feel my heart speed up. I wonder if I
should say hi. I wonder if I say hi in what tone I should go Life, Life, oh Liafe. But then as I dropped closer, I realized that the man I thought was life is not life at all, and in fact is not even a man. He's a teenager. This makes sense given that I've not seen life since I was fourteen years old. Still, having your heart speed up at the sight of a teenager is a sure
way to feel like a creep. And just like that, to quote Carrie Bradshaw, Liaife is back on my mind all these years later, and I remember the exact type of pen layfro with. I remember his birthday. I remember how he kept his wallet on a long chain, the first time I'd ever seen such a thing done, and wore a quicksilver sweatshirt with holes worn through the sleeves that he'd stick his thumbs through. He was pale, with blue eyes, short and slight.
I remember him being kind of like wayfish, almost like kind of almost like a furial.
Crushes do not exist in a vacuum. They require gleeful gossip with your friends. And so I call Itchia, who's been my best friend since elementary school, to talk about our old classmate Lafe.
He had this like light blonde hair that he died and was not a long like down to here, but hair long like like a bottling.
But like shag. And then yeah, there go the man's bob. Once, while away on a school sponsored trip, we phoned Leife from our hotel room, me, Lucia, and our other friend Emily, but three of us huddled together on the scratchy Marriotte comforter, stifling our giddiness as we dialed. I don't remember if we actually talked to the thing I remember is that we called.
We talked to his mom.
Our friend Emily asked if she could speak with Laife. It's Emily, she said. Emily said, Leife's mom go upstairs and talk to him. Then she hung up on us. Turned out he had a sister named Emily, so weird. Luccia's stepmom was a photographer, and she once mentioned that if Laife and I ever started dating, she wanted to take our portrait. I don't think she knew I had a crush on him. Laife was just so short and I was so tall that I think she found the idea of us as a couple funny. I was already
six feet tall by the end of eighth grade. I got pressured into playing basketball, but I was so meek that I usually just stood there while some terrifying girl shoved by me with the ball. I don't like to look at pictures of myself from that time. Standing next to other kids my age, I look like the teacher or like someone's off putting sister home from college. None of my pants fit correctly, and my socks were always pulled up too high. I used to listen to the
song eleanor Rigby and panic. In my interpretation, it was a song about how no one wanted to date poor old eleanor Rigby, just like no one wanted to date me. When I was thirteen. One day I was sitting by the gym after school with my friend desiree. When she told me, I picture you getting a boyfriend in college. She laid out this whole hypothetical where me and my future boyfriend reached for the same book at the library.
At the time I was offended college, other girls at my school, desire included, already had boyfriends, the middle school version of a boyfriend where you were afraid to touch each other and broke up after a week. But still I had to wait till college. But as it turned out, I did not get a boyfriend before college, nor in college, nor even for several years after college, And so I concluded the problem was not my circumstances. The problem was me.
I was not datable. After meeting me for the first time, people might say, oh, she was funny, but they'd never say, is she single. I was simply not a person that anyone could think of romantically. At college parties, boys would grab my friends and start dancing with them, and I would stay for a while, dancing alongside them, like I was part of the good time, but eventually I'd walk away. It was weird for me to keep standing there smiling
blankly at the wall while they were making out. By now I'm in my thirties, and I actually do have a boyfriend. Sam and I have been together for four years. We live together, We've taken trips, know each other's moms, list each other on emergency contact forms, and yet still I can't shake this feeling that I'm behind, that there's something wrong with me, that I started too late, and
now I can never catch up. Sometimes Sam tells me stories about the girls he used to hook up with, or about his high school girlfriend, or the girlfriend he lived with before he lived with me. I know that he's not trying to get back together with any of these people. I know he does invested in our relationship as I am. Still, when he tells these stories, I
feel so inadequate that I want to cry. A couple times I have cried, and he has been confused, and suddenly we're in an argument because I don't know how to explain why I'm crying. I want charming stif stories like that one of rhapsodizes about my past of young love and mutual discovery. Instead, my past is a wall I smiled at, and the only stories I have about people I've hooked up with are vaguely unsettling to repeat.
I liked Leife at a time before all that, back when it still felt like romance might happen for me, like any interaction could be the start of a love story for the Ages. One time I brought whole Food sushi for lunch and felt self conscious because I'd seen the Breakfast Club in which Molly Ringwald is mocked for bringing sushi for lunch. But Leif walked by my table and said, is that sushi? And I said yes? And he said I love sushi. And I said would you
like a piece? And he said really? And I said yes, And suddenly I was proud to have a lunch of whole food sushi. Laife talked constantly about a band called Billie Talent, a semi yelly alt rock group with lyrics about my I started listening to them because I knew Laife liked them, and from there became an obsessive fan myself. Once I ran into Laife at a Billie Talent concert, I pretended not to see him because I didn't want him to think that I'd followed him there, But he
came over and said hi to me. There were little moments where it almost seemed like he could be flirting with me. We followed each other on the blogging site zanga, and for a while there was some sort of glitch where Life was unable to comment on my page. When the glitch was fixed, he was so excited that he left me one hundred comments in a row. Comment forty two said, on the forty second day of Christmas, I gave to Kaylee one hundred comments, lots of typing and
a pear tree. I still have a journal from that time. In it, i'd write Laife all these vague letters. It is humiliating to read these letters now, to the point where I refuse to quote them here. Suffice it to say that I constantly referred to him as dearest. Surrounding the letters are my thoughts about myself, mostly how I wished I were a different person entirely, someone charismatic and sought after. Sometimes I'd have this huge swell of self
hatred that I didn't know what to do with. Once I tried to caught myself, but the kitchen knife I chose was not very sharp, and so it was harder than I thought it would be, and I gave up. When I find someone who wants to date me, I thought this feeling will go away. I hoped that life
might be that someone. I'd talked long fantasies about how we'd get together, and sometimes I'd realize what a good mood I was in, and then I'd realize the good mood was because of something I'd made up, something that hadn't really happened at all. In the winter of eighth grade, I finally decided enough with the secret pining. It was time to let Laife know how I felt. And so I took action. And by took action, I mean that
I delegated action to other people. There was a stairway right next to our classroom that was just a single flight and closed by doors on each side. It was in this room of stairs that my friends Lucia and Emily cornered Laife and told him that I liked him while I ran home and hid. Afterwards, I asked them what he said. They told me he said okay. That night, in a fit of panic and despair, I got online. I logged onto Zanga, and I wrote a veiled, angsty
post about what a huge mistake I'd made. Laife saw the post as I knew he would, and he I amed my friend Karina about it. And here is where something amazing happened, because, in this conversation with Karina, Laife said he would date me. He said he thought I was cool. He was going to ask me out on Valentine's Day. Seeing couples perform how much they liked each other made me feel inferior. So I hated Valentine's Day with a showy passion. Each February fourteenth, I'd wear all
black as a sign of protest. Laife's thought was that this romantic gesture might help me to reclaim the holiday. I know all this because at the time, Karina promptly copy and pasted the ims with Life into an email for me. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I was so happy. Finally, I thought, finally, the thing that only happens to other people, it's now happening to me. On Valentine's Day, I got up and my mom drove me to school. People were giving out candy and paper hearts.
I tried to look nonchalant. I went to science class, I went to lunch, to recess, to math, to basketball, and then school was over and I went home. Laife did not say a single word to me all day. I have no idea what happened or why he changed his mind.
Huh did you ever talk to him about it?
I rehash all this on the phone with Lucia. Never did we speak directly about it, like we spoke through you and Emily, through Karina on im and like through my veiled zanga posts. Interesting and having been my best friend for all these years, Lucia into It's what I'm building up to. So you want to try to find him more? Yeah, but I'm afraid. I tried a drafting a letter, and I was like, do I just sound into safe anyway? So do you think this is completely insane to do?
No?
I mean, I'm sure you wrote. You're a very good writer and a thoughtful person, so I'm sure.
The way you approached it was good. Since googling Life had always failed me, I turned to a public records database that I get through work. I was hoping to discover a possible mailing address for Life, and I did, looks like maybe he lives in Arizona. And I saw he had like a from twenty twenty court thing from defacing a political sign. Well, I guess you don't know which direction. I know it's a good direction. I want to talk to life directly, the way I never did
back then. I want to know what he really thought of me, and why he never asked me out on Valentine's Day. All these years, I've believed this story about how people don't see me romantically. But if I can to the beginning of that story, if I can see myself differently at thirteen, it could reframe everything that came after I name dropped you in the letter name dropped
me because I'm so well known well. I was like, we used to live together, but now we both live with our boyfriend, so that he wouldn't think I was like trying to date him now Highlafe, I wrote in my letter, I don't know if you remember me, but we went to Near North together. I had a huge crush on you, and I was hoping you'd be up to talk to me about what you remember from that time. I hang up the phone with Lucia and I walked to the mailbox. I send off my letter. But then
several weeks to go by and nothing. Did Laife get the letter and decide to ignore me? Or do I just have the wrong address. Usually when reporting a story, I tried calling at this point, and I did find a phone number for Laife. However, the idea of dialing it makes me want to lie down in the middle of the street and simply pass away. And so, just like I did at thirteen, I recruit someone else as an envoy.
And who is it? Someone else? You?
Oh yeah, it's you.
Okay, So I'm sort of like that whole quorum of girls all in one adult man.
This is a regular host of this program, Jonathan Goldstein. I want him to call Leife on my behalf to see if Laife got the letter. I would be open to speaking with me.
Yeah, no, I don't think that'll be awkward at all. Let me get my pattern down here. Hi, there was this girl. Her name was Khaleila hol.
You should say Kaylee first. I think you would know me by Kaylee.
Hi, I'm Kaylee Holt's boss.
What you say like that? It is really weird.
That is weird.
No, Hi, you don't know me, but I was enlisted by an old school chum of yours.
Oh, don't say school, an.
Old flame, a paramore.
My confidence is decreasing with every passing second.
I won't embarrass you in front of your crush.
Are you joking, choking on this bon bun.
As my boss asphyxiates on a piece of candy. I weigh the pros and cons of just making the call myself, but in the end I make the same choice I did back then, better to send an incompetent in my stead while I hide at home. I obsess all day Thursday, I obsess all day Friday. Jonathan doesn't offer me a single update. I can't even tell if he's made the call yet. Than the week begins and I still have
no idea what he's done. Okay, but whatever you did do it worked because Friday night checked my email and I had an email from Laife saying that he would talk to me.
Wow.
Okay, well, let me just say I am almost one hundred percent certain that I had nothing to do with that.
Well really, because it happens that day.
Yeah, it is suggestive.
Jonathan tells me that he had indeed tried calling Leaife's number.
Okay, here's the call.
You ready?
Okay?
Yeah?
Okay, Hello, is Laife there?
Yes?
Could I speak to him?
Yes?
This is her?
This is Laife.
Yes.
I just want to make sure I have the right person. What is your middle name.
Seek doodles.
No, No, that isn't. That isn't the life that I'm looking for.
I'm on a toilet rin.
Though, Okay, is there anybody else in the house.
In his email, Lafe proposed that we talk in nine days, which is kind of a weirdly long time. I can't help but worry that he'll bail last minute, that this will be just like Valentine's Day all over again. So in the meantime, hoping she might remember some clue about what happened back then, I text my old friend Karina, the one who broke her this whole Valentine's plan with life on I AM.
When you texted me that it was you, I was like, oh my gosh, Like, did something.
Happen she calling me to say that miss Bergen died, Miss Bergen being our longtime principal, which.
She did, by the way, he didn't I didn't hear that.
Yeah, may she. I felt deranged, texting Karina that I wanted to speak with her about life a random kid from her eighth grade class. But Karina responded, I legitimately thought about you in life last week, So, just like we used to in junior high, the two of us chat on the phone about a boy and then he I am you shut up?
Did I send you the conversation?
Yes? So then I and buried in an old AOL account, I find that email from Karina with the whole conversation between her and Life laid out.
I would like, absolutely love to see it.
Let me send it to you. I will. Life screen name was chaotic detortion, which I think is just chaotic distortion spelled wrong.
Okay, let me read this okay at ten seventy pm.
Nice and as Karina reads, here for you, dear listener is a dramatic recreation of that I Am exchange, with two young actors playing the roles of Karina and Life.
Hey, Hey, Life, what's up? Kayley's talking about what I think?
She is?
Right on?
Zanga, hold on, let me see Kaylee likes me, right, Did.
Lucia and Emily tell you something?
Yeah? After school the other day? Yeah, she does well. If she comes on, will you tell her something? Yeah? If she comes on, tell her that I'll go out with her.
But my health is always screwed with my life, so I'm probably not going to be able to be one hundred percent boyfrid material.
Laithe had some sort of illness the whole time I knew him, but I never knew how sick he was or what he was even sick with. He sometimes had to leave school early, he was on crutches for a while, and there were days when he just looked frail. But at thirteen, we didn't think to ask any questions. Back then, Karina just thought it was sweet he was considering his health in his role as my future boyfriend.
All but do you like her?
This is kind of awkward.
Yeah, all these years later and that, yeah, I makes my heart start pounding. I was wrong, I think see I was wrong. He liked me, he said he liked me. But then it goes on.
Ohmg, don't tell her. I'm not crazy about her, but hey, she likes me. I don't hate her or anything. And kaylee'school, Yeah she is.
So you want me to tell her that you'll go out with her? Why don't you just talk to her on Monday?
Do you think I should?
Yeah?
Because I mean I don't think she would believe me, and it would be nicer if you told her. Are you getting her something on V Day?
I guess when is Valentine's Day?
Next next Tuesday, Omga, you should tell her on V Day because she hates V Day.
WHOA, yeah, oh will.
I always thought it was Laf who came up with the Valentine's Day plan, but it was actually Karina. It wasn't a romantic gesture at all. It was the gesture of a thoughtful friend.
But I don't remember anything after that. I didn't even remember that. He didn't end up saying anything, like he didn't end up saying anything to you at all.
No, we never talked about it, No, Kaylee, he did.
I'm pretty sure he mentioned his health again. Maybe I like followed up and he was like, honestly, my health just like really isn't the best.
So did life not ask me out simply because he was too ill? Was his not asking actually a romantic gesture something worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy or did he just not like me? I'd ask Slaf to talk on Zoom and I pray I won't break out or have a bad hair day, because you know, I want to look good. The morning of I put on an eyeshadow that someone once told me was flattering, and wear a T shirt for my favorite band because I figure it's cool to like music. Then I head to the studio
and test the my her phone. Hello, Hello, all right, that's working. I feel ill. I feel physically ill. Oh my god, Okay, I can do this. Here we go on the zoom camera. You can't even see my t shirt or flattering eyeshadow. So that was a lot of wasted effort. I see that Leaife is in the waiting room. I press the admit button and he appears on screen.
Hi.
Hey.
In spite of his deeper voice and tattoos, life seems the same, like there's no discrepancy between the person I imagined all these years and the one I'm actually looking at. How are you?
I'm great, I'm doing great. How are you doing?
I'm doing you know. Unfortunately, faced with the person I imagined all these years, I suddenly can't remember how to have a conversation. It's like I've lost twenty years of social skills. What what what's your life?
My life? Well? I yeah, I don't know. I just do uh life things. You know, eat food, go to the grocery store. I've got a dog. You know, what's your dog of?
Like, what's your dog's name?
Ronan?
Good given that I'm incapable of asking any question more specific than what is your life or who is your dog? Life takes the lead.
They've been doing like a lot of activisty stuff in Tucson, and that consumes more of my time than I probably should let it.
In fact, the nine day delay lay fasts for was because of his activism. A few weeks earlier, he was at a protest with the Stop Coop City movement when he was tasted and slammed against the ground by a police officer. He's been recovering from a concussion at this point.
We're forty minutes into the conversation and I've somehow managed to avoid asking Laife any questions about eighth grade at all, Even though he knows we're here to talk about how much I liked him, Bringing up that time still makes me nervous. What do you remember about me?
Yeah, I uh, I remember you being very tall and maybe a little awkward. But maybe it's just because of the crush or whatever.
No, I was awkward, yes, yeah, yeah.
Like I know that you told me at some point that you had a crush on me. We have like a vague memory of like there's like that stairwell Lucia telling me or something like that, like in the stairwell.
Yeah. I ramble through my memories of what happened after that stairwell moment, and finally up to the question that I really came here to ask you were going to ask me out on Valentine's Day, but then that never happened, and I don't know why.
Oof. I'm sorry, Yeah, I don't remember. Like the Zanga post sounds vaguely familiar.
Can I send you, because I, in fact have these ims between you and Karina? No way can I email them to you?
Yeah? See what cringeysque things I have to say.
Leife mostly reads through the ims in silence, but at one point he makes a face and again goes oof. When he's done, he self consciously.
All right, well that was that was That was fun?
Do you you have no memory of this?
I don't know. Vaguely, I guess like it's obviously obviously it happened.
I mean, would be weird if I typed all this.
Suffen, Yeah, yeah, it'd be pretty weird.
What part were you oofing at?
Oh?
Just I mean, don't tell her. I'm not crazy about her, but hey, she likes it was just like that.
Yikes.
I don't really know what happened. Obviously we didn't date. I don't I don't think totally forgotten.
I mean that would kind of be worse if we did. Dan gone from your memory.
Yeah, that'd be yeah.
I mean, like, it seems like you did not like me.
I do remember you being like very funny, but uh yeah, I do agree, though, I think I like wasn't like into you.
To use the eighth grade parlance, But then Lafe phrase is a key thing. I've been wondering about the explanation that he gave to Karina at the time his mysterious health issues.
I was like very very very sick. I was like in the process essentially of getting diagnosed with Crohn's disease.
Crones is an autoimmune disease. Life's intestine was attacking itself, making it hard for him to do basic things like walk or eat. In the years I knew him, though, Laife didn't know he had crones. He didn't know what was wrong with him. He was just getting worse and worse. It took over two years of waiting rooms and misdiagnoses before he finally got to a doctor who helped him at that point he was so sick, but the doctor pulled his mom aside to say that she thought Leife
might die. They immediately admitted him to the hospital, where he stayed for three months. I'm not a monster, so of course I'd never say that I'm happy someone was so ill they almost died. But hearing all this, I can't help but feel kind of relieved, because if life was that sick the whole time I knew him, then it wasn't about me not being good enough. There probably just wasn't any space in his brain for dating and crushes at all. So I put this to.
Liife, I for sure had crushes.
Well there goes that theory. Can I ask you how to crush on?
Yeah? Yeah, I know I had a crush on Soca.
I was going to ask you that. Actually, that's what I always suspected. You got me figured out circa up at our school one year from Ireland, and all the guys instantly loved her. Somehow, in that one year she dated three or four people. I, as someone who'd never dated anyone, found this profoundly unfair, Like what about the rest of us? In my moments of insecurity, I always used to think there's no way Life likes me, because
I'm pretty sure he likes Cerca. So while on the one hand, it's validating to hear that my read was right, on the other hand, it's devastating to hear that my read was right. I move on to my next theory. Do you think that any of it was height related?
Uh?
I don't think so. I don't think so.
So what was my problem? I ask Laife if I had some defect that prevented him from seeing me romantically, and although he really thinks about it, an come up with an answer.
I'm just trying to think if like, there has ever been anyone where I like, I'd love to date this person, but they've got this defect.
You know who he falls for. Life says has always felt beyond words, especially in the eighth grade. Well, how do you feel about talking? Am I freaking you out?
No?
Not at all. Okay, it's fun to catch up and like hear what you remember. It's really nice to talk to Yeah, you too, killy, and talk to you soon, all right, talk.
To you soon.
I'd felt good while I was talking to Leife. He was cool and nice, as he'd always been, and yet as soon as we hang up, I suddenly feel really sad. I sit there for a while alone in the studio, and then, as I always have in times of stress, Hello, honey, I call my mom. I filler in on the conversation and how the only logical conclusion seems to be that, yes, I was right, I am in fact undateable.
Who wouldn't want to date you?
You're awesome?
Thanks, And I mean, I know i'm your mother, but that is also true. I feel like that's true in terms of like people wanting to like be my friend, but I don't feel like that's true for like dating.
You feel it not just from when you were younger, but.
You feel it even now.
Yeah, that makes me feel kind of sad. I'm sorry, don't be sorry.
It makes me feel kind of sad, and it makes me feel mad at people that don't see you. I don't Oh. Yeah. I think I'm having a hard time characterizing it because I do feel like weirdly emotional, but also like he was nice and the conversation was good, you know, So I don't want it to seem like I thought he was like being an asshole or anything like he wasn't.
I don't hear that from you at all.
I don't hear anything about any judgment about him. Yeah, you trying to piece it together for you? Yeah, yeah, give yourself a little space. I give myself several weeks of space. And then as I keep trying to piece it together, I decide there's one more person I want to speak with. Very excited to talk to you. So thanks for being up to do this weird thing.
Yeah, no, it is weird, and I definitely feel weird about it.
This is Circa, the Irish girl that Lafe and the rest of the entire fucking class was into. Because in case it's not weird enough to reach out to my crush after nearly twenty years, why not also reach out to my crushes crush. I always suspected he had a crush on you, and he said, yes, did you know.
That M like Jesus, like he would like he would like burn CDs for me and stuff.
She knows.
I feel like he also gave.
Me a sticker that said George W. Bush is a punk ass chump, So.
Like, yeah, I had an awareness.
I want to talk to Circa because I think of her as the anti me like, here's how Circa's Valentine's Day went. In junior high, she walked up to her boyfriend at the time holding a Hers She's kiss and said, do you want this or do you want a real one? I wanted to tell me how she achieved such romantic success, what she had that I didn't have. I had laid all this out and my initial message to her.
So I said this to my husband and he was kind of like, well, it's obvious, isn't it. Like you were just new and it And I think that's exactly it. Like you guys had all been together from the age of two, do you know? So I literally was just new and different. I honestly think it was that simple.
I think that's part of it. But I feel like there was something about your personality too, Like I feel like there was some like charisma or like confidence or I don't know. I feel like I think.
That that has got to be fakeatily make it though, doesn't it? Because looking back and looking at the challenge that was laid at my doorstep, I probably just leant into some kind of confident persona.
Sarah only attended Near North for a single year, and it wasn't an easy transition because of her mom's job. She was upbraided at twelve years old and plopped down in a foreign country. Her dad, all her old friends stayed back in Ireland. She remembers the day she came to visit our school for the first time.
And I remember crying, and I remember saying, I don't want to go there. My memory isn't a feeling invincible or anything like, quite the opposite, like.
Like overwhelmed and shut down.
You know.
It's that sense of panic. Sirka thinks that made her act so confident when she started school with us. It was her way of managing Still, in the year I knew her, she often felt insecure, and dating didn't make that feeling go away anyway you cut it. Boyfriend, No boyfriend junior high is hard, Sarka tells me she's been married for about a year and a half. Now, how did you guys meet? We went on Tinder. I'd ask Slafe the same question about how he met his partner.
Actually through Tinder. We are a tender success story. My boyfriend threw tender too, nice.
Sarca life me. Even though I always felt like they had some power, I lacked. Almost two decades later, we all ended up in the same place, living with people we met on Tinder. Back when I talked with my friend Karina, I'd asked her what her impression had been to me when we knew each other in junior high.
Oh my gosh, Kayleie, I adored you. I remember you being very intelligent, you were very funny. I know you like you were, you were tall, just you know, at that age, I feel like you always look at everyone else and like, don't form your confidence or like embrace every bit of yourself until later in life, and I remember being like, she has so many things going for her, Like I. I hope that she because comes more confident.
My past self was tall and awkward and the boy I liked didn't like me. And all these years later, I'm still tall and still awkward, and I still often feel left behind by romance. But then again, the junior high me would never have had the courage to have these conversations at all. So maybe I did become more confident, and some people do want to date me. I'd want to date me. These days, I don't think too much
about Valentine's Day. It turns out that I don't like being one of those performative couples anymore than I liked watching those performative couples this year. On February fourteenth, my boyfriend made dinner. I did the dishes. Happy Tuesday, He said, Happy Tuesday. I said. Then we watched TV. It was nice now that the fern ures returning to its goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is skiing with the damage to post, take this moment to dissolve, if we message.
If we tried, she felt.
Around for five two months.
From things accidentally.
Hello Hello, so as promised. My conversation with Anna Konkle, co creator of Penn fifteen, we talked about how emotional and viscerally bizarre it is to return to that middle school space again as an adult.
I mean it was so humiliating. Yeah, Like the first season, especially, nobody knew what it was.
The crew didn't know what it was.
So people signed up to come on set and a lot of them haven't even read the script and they're like, what the fuck did I sign up for?
Like day one, Maya's and her.
Bowlcut masturbating, like okay, wait, we're really going to try to play thirteen, like this is so embarrassing, and then being surrounded by the real kids and stepping on stage and be like.
Were you haha, you don't really think we are We're thirty.
The night before it came out, I just got in like the fetal position on the floor and was like, this is.
So embarrassing, Like what did you do?
And you know what the truth is is it felt embarrassing for years after actually, like people would come up to me and say like, I love it, and I'd be like.
What are you doing today, Like yeah.
I couldn't hear it. It just I felt so naked.
How was it for you making this versus when people started listening to it?
Or have you had and waves of.
This writing it and putting it together and like playing it for people here was actually like positive, Like I felt like, oh, I'm really expressing what I felt and it's connecting with people. And then I feel like once it was out in the world, it was a bit more of a mixed bag than I was expecting.
I mean, how people felt.
Yeah, like there were people who really connected with it, but there were a lot of people who hated it.
Really I loved it, I mean, but obviously I'm gonna love it, I guess.
I mean that is something I was curious about cause I feel like there were people who just I don't understand why middle school would be important or why you would want to think about it or go back to it, Like have you run into that at all? Are there people who just don't think about it?
There's something about it that makes people really uneasy. Yeah, from the pitches of us first talking about it, so many men in particular actually like had to get up from a table or would be like I'm getting nauseous.
Sorry, hold on. Maybe it's like physiological disassociation. Yeah, that a lot of people can do.
What was it like like working with the kids, Like do you feel like you had to translate to them or did they kind of get it?
Most of the kids, when they're actually thirteen, aren't at an age that they're going.
Oh, yeah, I get why that would be. They're like, I didn't do that yesterday, right, if that's true? Just so in.
It, like seeing the social dynamics play out on set, that was very meta. There would I won't say who, but it would be like, oh, okay, he's the most popular.
He's the most.
Popular yeah, like all the guys are texting her or whatever, and and we always found the right kids.
I thought the kids in your podcasts were great.
Thanks to my My dad runs a community theater in Iowa, and he helped me cast those kids. That was very sweet. Yeah, did you do community theater growing up? Yeah? I was never very good, but I because my dad like ran these like kids summer camps and stuff. I did always go.
That's a lot of pressure for your dad to run it and then like auditioning for your day.
Yeah. I think I wanted to be more of a like a star because I wanted to be like close to my dad, you know.
But I relate to that too.
I remember going on like some work trip with him, and I remember like going to a pub and they're being karaoke and a girl went up and sang yeah Nowhere Man by the Beatles, and he was like, wow, she's incredible. He almost like cried and he was clapping in a really intense way. I don't remember what song I sang next, but I sang a song and I remember like finishing and like waiting for the same eyes and being like I'm.
Right here, Dad, and be like no, that was good. I had been estranged from my dad.
I mean, this is another actually crazy layer to the whole show. It's like I hadn't seen my dad in five years, but I'm like acting with the TV version of my dad and the one that I missed. Yeah, and about a year before we started writing the last season, my dad and I had sort of been like communicating more and trying to fix things.
And then he called me and found out he had cancer.
Oh man, and.
Filming started.
Whoa.
So I was like trying to manage nurses and all these other things and be there as much as I possibly could, flying back and forth and filming the show. But there were these scenes that were like overlapping with these huge moments where like my dad went to hospice and I had to go back to la and film the scene where Curtis moves out of the house and gets an apartment and he has like a midlife crisis and gets this seabring convertible.
Yeah, and we're in.
The convertible, like the camera's right on us as we're driving at night with the top down and the air the cold air blasting, which is like what my dad and I always did. And he had had that same seabring, and we're having the talk about him moving out just as my dad's gone into hospice, like moving out of.
The world, right, yeah, yeah.
And I just lost it. Talk about feeling like a kid as an adult.
There was something about the extremeness of what we were trying to do, like, oh, we're building sets that look like our real houses.
It was like stepping into a memory.
Were there particular scenes that were particularly intense to shoot?
Definitely the first day of filming at my house, Anna Cone's you know house I had given so many specifics about.
It was nicer than my real house probably, But you know, my parents in real life divorced, they told me in seventh grade or eighth grade, and I've just had such a hard time accepting their divorce and walking in and seeing the house with like both of their things, like the drops being like together, like the loon blanket that I had described my dad having, or the kind of lounger you know that he had that went to his apartment and what my mom got to eat, and it
was like it was all intermingled. And then on the bookshelves or all of these like half funny half devastating pictures of me between two loving parents and they're my you know, set parents. So it was like silly, but I just wanted to cry. I was like going back to when to the good times, you know, and it was a better version of the good times than what I had.
Really have a lot of pictures the three of us.
I mean, like after doing the show and like being in those moments again, do you see anything in that time differently? Like did it change your perspective at all?
H I think it's interesting how people at that age have such different relationships with their own sexuality, Like that part in your podcast, in the episode where the sort of popular girl goes up to the guy and gives him hers she kiss and says, like what does she say?
So?
Do you want this or do you want a real one that's like the Like I was like, well, I don't have that DNA, Like I don't understand, And then she sort of went on to say, I think I created this persona, right, but how much is that persona?
And how much is that just a different physical comfort? I was always like such a goodie two shoes in that way, and like kind of known as a prude, and I.
Was just not physically.
Interested in guys like that, and if somehow they were like sensing because my friends were more comfortable with that.
Yeah, No, it's a good point. I think similarly, I was not the most comfortab with it either, Like I would have these infatuations with people, but Tybia just meant like, we're going to have this mental connection where we understand each other.
Yeah, yes, like it was romantic.
Yeah.
I remember when we first conceived a pen and our agents or something being like, you need to add like character descriptions, and we just knew how we'd play them, but we hadn't been putting words to it. And that was one distinction that I finally was like, she's romantic.
Do you remember what else you said in your character description. I'm like, I would find it so hard to have to like sum myself up in a character way, right, Yeah.
Yeah, I think like tall bad posture. I think that I would have had the like hand over my stomach that I always did loyal to a false friend probably like gets her identity from how much she admires Maya, and the fact that my admires her back gives Anna confidence.
I mean, that's another thing I feel like you guys captured so well. Was just like the energy that having a friendship like that gives you where you're like feeding on each other and amping each other up.
Yeah, that was the saddest part I think about it.
Ending was like that innocence of friendship as actors and adult best friends of going like right now we get to live in this world where playing thirteen is like you are just glued at the hip and as you get older, you know, so many of us will lean on their romantic act to you know, like to a romantic partner.
I feel like that's part of what's sad sometimes about being single as an adult is that everyone does lean so much on their partner and you're like, wait, where I now, I'm not anybody's number one because they're number one? Is the person at their west? Like yeah, yeah.
I think it's something I've really struggled with, to be honest, and adulting is that expectation same?
You know, I'm lucky that May and I think are a little bit aware of it and we will go to the doctors with each.
Other, like, you know, there's things like but I think it's not the norm.
Thanks so much to Anna and to everyone who helped put this episode together, and for all my fellow pen fifteen fans out there. You can listen to my full conversation with Anna if you subscribe to Pushkin Plus. I was very excited to get all this insight into making the show, and I don't want to hoard that insight from other pen fifteen heads, So go to pushkin dot fm,
slash plus to sign up. We'll be back next week with our final encore of the summer, and then the new season of Heavyweight begins September eighteenth, inst