Jane Lynch

Hello, guys.

I am so happy to be bringing you more many questions, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't with an extraordinarily heavy heart. As my home is currently under siege. It feels like from wildfires and wins. So many of my friends and so many people have lost everything. I wanted to acknowledge that before sharing more stuff that I've made,

That's it, That's what I got.

I really hope you enjoy this season and these beautiful conversations. I love making this show. This show was born in Los Angeles, in my house with me and my computer and my amazing producer, Aaron, and I want to keep sharing through hard times and good times so please enjoy these episodes, and if you are listening from California, you stay safe. The very first time I met you was through my car window exiting right that movie theater on Sunset was The Sunset.

Set, Yeah, Sunset, and I've just seen.

Best in the show. We'd literally just been to see the film and with your.

Sister, right, yeah, yeah, I remember that.

Yeah, that when we lost our minds.

Yeah, and I lost our minds.

That was a big moment in my life.

So thank you.

Hello, I'm Mini Driver. I've always loved Preust's questionnaire. It was originally in nineteenth century parlor.

Game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing.

The other player's true nature.

In asking different people the same set of questions, you can make observations about which truths appear to be universal. And it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed if I asked these questions as conversation starters.

So I adapted.

Pru's questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think are pertinent to a person's story.

They are when and where.

Were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster? And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance

On the show.

We talk about our shared love of companionship and independence, and I reminded her of the first time we met when I was driving out of the parking at the movie theater where I just watched Best in Show, and I saw her walking down the street and I rolled down the window and I just screamed, like.

I said, she's a legend. What is the quality you like least about yourself?

Let's see my narrator in my head.

Ah.

My boyfriend calls that the bad guest. Oh good, And in fact, I was tearful yesterday morning about something, and he said, the bad guest has arrived. And instead of you telling them to get the fuck out of your house, you're not welcome here.

You are a bad guest. Get out.

I sit down and entertain them and try to feed them seven different types of food, try to appease them, listen to them, and allow them to have the floor. Yeah, so tell me about your narrator slash bad guest.

Well, sometimes the narrator isn't even really telling me bad things about myself or damn.

It's like from watching television too much as a kid.

I'm always telling a story to comfort myself or to enrage myself. There's just constant commentary that isn't even really me. It's about maybe it is a bad guest. It's like obsessed with fixing things. Well, we need to do that, and then we need to do that, and before I go over there and have to do it. It's obsessive, compulsive, and it sometimes is relentless.

Is there any way of shutting it off?

Is there anything that you do that is a definitive turns the volume down on the nariety there is?

I've been gardening a lot.

I don't know if you can tell, Probably not, but I have a bump into black eyes. They're kind of yellow. I put makeup on, but I've been crazy gardening and I took a big pot and I put it down and I hit my head on top of the fence and had like a goose egg and then woke up with two black eyes.

They're yellow. Now I'm fine.

But anyway, that's honestly come by though, I mean, yes, it's.

Honest hard work.

And then I don't have that narrator go seepy times.

Do you think it's because it's doing this other thing. I'm sure that neurologically using another part of your brain to do something creative does this silencing thing. But do you think it's like being in nature, like physically connecting with something else. I think it is now I do the same thing on I I surfing, Yeah, or if I go in the ocean and swim, does the same thing. It's the only real way of shutting.

That fom and it shuts everything. You become quiet of mind when you're doing that. It's like meditation. It's the discursive mind quiet.

Discursive mind quiet, Yeah, the narrator quiet.

All stuff that we all are habitually conditioned. The programs need to keep running, yeah, they stop. And living in nature is a really important thing to do.

They taught it in the school that I went to. You were quite literally taught that.

But if I was fucking around in class, which I think I was probably ADHD when I was a kid, or maybe still am, and I couldn't sit still or stop talking, and they would routinely send me outside to go and run around all these fields and these orchards. They were like do a lap and come back wow. Or they would be like do a handstand.

And it worked.

Yeah, it truly worked.

I really believe that. Yeah, it was amazing. We should be teaching that in the actual ways of dealing with what I think we would now call anxiety. Those voices, whether that's a narrator or a commentator, or a bad guest or whomever that other voice commenting negatively or creating negative reaction.

It's quite simple.

The solution, remove yourself from your current situation, go and do something else. And I do think that being outside, even if it's a walk around your block, does that.

Yeah, that is so important, you know. I called myself, I said to myself, the narrator, said to myself this morning, I'm kind of an Akham's razor, Gal.

You know what that is.

Okham's razor is go to the simplest solution for something. And for a child losing their little mind, anxiety and whatever, which is normal for a child, what's the simplest solution, Move them, move them in nature. Do it absolutely, you know, And I think that that's good for us too. There are simple answers to so much simple simple.

By the way, that's the other thing that I'm a huge proponent of, which is the solution to your problem is never commence your in size with the problem.

It is always a little tiny flicker.

Of the needle in another direction will have this huge effect. And I think we get stuck in the notion of when a problem feels overwhelming, the idea that we've got to find a solution that is as big as the problem, and it's just not true. It really is as simple as sometimes taking your shoes and socks off and standing outside.

Of the ground taking a shower, yeah, or going to sleep.

You're absolutely right, because our mind, it's our mind and our narrator and the unwelcome guest that tells us how big something is, and it's never that big.

Is that left over from like the saber tooth tiger? Like is that really just like reptilian brain just going, You've got to have my voice going roll the rock in front of the cave because the tiger's coming, right, Is it left over? Yeah, to the idea of trying to foresee danger's constantly.

That that is my thing, is it's averting some danger. But I would imagine that that that is true from most of humanity, and I think that we've gotten so far away from ourselves we can't even identify that that's what it is. All we know is we have this free floating anxiety, and it causes us to do stupid things like vote, vote for stupid people and elections because it feels so big, and this one person says, I got it.

Don't you worry about it? I got it?

Yeah, fair, Yeah.

I think fear is a big motivating thing and also free floating.

You know that we can't attach it to anything.

Yeah, untethered anxiety agreed? When and when will you happiest?

I could think of one moment where I thought I was going to burst out of my body. I have a very good friend. Her name is Laura Coyle, and we've been friends now for about thirty years. But we were on Melrose in West Hollywood in like nineteen ninety five. It almost sounds like I'm in love with her, and I am in a way, just not that kind of

To be in.

The wake of this person, of this person's energy and zest for life, and it inspired it in me and I will never forget that moment.

Wow, God, that I love that ton of phrase. To be in the wake of someone.

She's a force of nature, you know, and I'm kind of a force of nature too, but she's really a force of lature in the best possible way.

Will you, because it's so funny.

I use that lyric in a song with the Ira not smiling in somebody's wake, and it was in reference to the notion of being in a relationship with someone and you're just that kind of following to steps behind, smiling in the weight that they leave. I love the idea of being in the positive that you're drafting behind someone's energy and joy and more.

Drafting tour, as you would say at drafting exactly, and drafting in the way is another good one too. That's a beautiful image too, unless, of course, you feel like you're being dragged through it and no one's paying attention to you.

Well, that's exactly it. My son told me a terrible joke the other day that sort of pertained to this. He went waterboarding in Guantanamo Bay, sounds really fun if you don't know what either of those things are.

And quite good, isn't it.

That's quite good. It's quite a good one. But I was just thinking about being dragged. I'm always using boat analogies and being dragged behind boats or in the water or something, and how it can go from being super positive to super negative. Yeah, but in the same way that someone's energy can do that to us. What is it about your friend that was joyful to be in her experience, to be in her wake?

She us one hundred percent. She has the knowing that the world is good and kind and wants the best for everybody. She just knows this inherently.

Do you think that's true? Do you agree with that? Or do you want to believe that?

I want to believe that to I think everything's perception and I don't have that. And when I'm with her, I do or I stand back and go oh wow. Like she'll see someone upset in a restaurant. There was a girl in a restaurant who was at her computer and her face went into her hands and she started to cry, and Laura was up. She went over there and she's you know, I'm like, no, let the girl break down and you know, and let her have her own moment, and I don't want to get involved that

Do you think that astrology aside, even though obviously I love it.

I love it, dig it.

We're going to get back to that. Do you think the world is divined into two kinds of people? The people for whom it is inherently everything's not going to work out and it's fucked up, and all the good stuff is really just the gravy, and you have to enjoy it because really it is. We are in the hell realm here, and the people who go this is it's an amazing place. It is inherently kind and good, and we have to accommodate the hardship with our goodness.

Well, you know what, in the way you just explained it, I would say, yes, I agree with you, But I also think within each person is a nuanced mix of those things. I mean, there are some people in this world and we know them, they're in our lives who do see the world as being this awful place. I'm never going to get what I want. I'm being left behind but then they'll have moments like when they hang out with someone like my friend, where you kind of

I have a hard time in New York.

That's really funny that our binary nature would just be completely fucked by New York.

Yeah, totally.

Place is just completely it will either.

And yet there are people who would argue that it is the greatest city on the earth and you don't want to live anywhere else and it is extraordinary and that's funny.

Yeah, well that way, you know, I would say, from like twenty ten to twenty twenty, I felt that way that New York was the greatest city in the world. I went there three or four times a year. I loved it. And I also had a very good friend who I just adored, who has now passed away.

So I'm really.

Feeling the absence of her in New York. But the minute I would fly in, I mean there was such a bounce to my step. I would we go to the same restaurant and we'd have dinner and would sit there for like six hours, laughing and screeching. So she was New York for me. And now she's gone, and New York has kind of turned too since the pandemic.

It's it's kind of it's a very different place.

I agree, yeah, although I.

Got to say the other day, I was there because my mother and aw lives there and I was staying with her on the Upper East Side, and I went to a salon to get my hair done and I was walking out of the building and fran Leebowitz was walking out of the building at the same time, and it was just one of the and I was like, hey, Frian, and she immediately like I was just someone who was going to bug her, And then she saw it was me.

It's just the most New Yorkkee.

I'm like, there's got to be a hidden camera someone dorm and a waving at her HI brand and people going by recognizing her. She is this extraordinary character. But it was New York has movie moments, it does, and.

That's one of them.

For sure. The Upper East Side is a lovely place to be too. You know, tourism is it hasn't changed.

It hasn't changed. And the tourist us now like Disneyland, Yeah, exactly.

And then I was in Soho.

I was it was, she can't be in Soho anymore. I used to live there. You can't be there anymore. It's it's can't walk down the street. It's so crouded you can't walk. And many they're dead, they're like eyes are dead. A lot of them are young, and as they're walking around their phones. And I was in Starbucks and there was a line out the door and everybody in line was.

Kind of young, and they were all on their phones, and then there was a deadness. I almost started screaming, like, wake up.

Oh my god, that's the moment. That's the Peter Finch moment. Now it's study exactly mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.

It's now wake.

Up, beautiful city. Look at these old buildings. I know I'm not like an old lady, but I had a really hard time there it this last time.

Well, let's move on from mel okay.

Let's move on to something nice. I started so nice, so positive.

By the way, That's how I start every day.

And it's a it's a slow and always foreseen slump, slump yum into mine.

What would be your life?

Last meal? A ribbi from Luckies?

Have you been to lucky?

It's just ate the I just two nights ago and it was in I didn't know that it was outside of Raouls in New York. It was the best peppercorn steak I have ever had. And I eat I'm essentially I don't really eat meat. I don't eat I mean, I can't say I'm a vegetarian, because once a year I will eat a piece of meat and it will be usually from rowls. But it was from Lucky, Isn't It was the greatest thing I've.

Even I like the Romanian steak there, that's my favorite.

What's a Romainan?

I would have that The Romanian steak is it's not too big, but it's the most flavorful, tender rib meat and it's some kind of garlic oil sauce that is just I guess it's Romanian, but it's just delicate and wonderful and I just love it.

No, no, medium rare.

Hmm, I don't know that I could go medium rare. I think I could go medium.

Well, and there you might even want to go medium well, because you know it's still they're.

Just washing that they're not Yeah, they'd have it.

Yeah right, right, Yeah, that's cold blue center, right, that's cold in the center.

And then then it's signon, so it goes blue sign then, which I suppose is bloody, and then it's rare, and then they don't listen to you if you say anything.

We vegans with this talk.

Yeah, no, exactly. Everybody everybody's gone, everybody's gone. This just you in there right in your life?

Can you tell me about something that has grown out of a personal disaster?

Oh, God.

Yes, I'm a little reluctant to say it because it involves another person, but yeah, I was married for about a year and a half. It was disastrous. Yeah, and I emerged from it almost I had like a spiritual

You know, that's really amazing that you have quite definitive experience. It seems to me that you do learn from your experiences or the lessons that you are presented with, like, that's that kind of completion is I mean, I found that quite rare.

What doesn't happen all the time, But boy am I grateful when they do signify?

Yeah, I mean, never underestimate the things that we carry, right, and that when we are if we are lucky enough to finally be unburdened of some of those things, it's more often than not under really difficult circumstances that we might call this is a shitty, terrible, awful thing that happened. And yet the other side of that is this profound letting go. But we wouldn't necessarily choose it, Like, who knows if you'd known ahead of time that it was going to be a torturous relationship, would.

You have done?

Even though I'm really glad what happened, sometimes I go back in my mind and try to find the point where I could have walked away.

Oh I do that all It's a waste.

It is a totally in the moment, I'm kind of excited about it. Yeah, like, oh, there that was the point I should have just booked it.

Yeah, it's so funny though, that whole you know, I've had an interesting relationship with the notion of forgiveness, because I really genuinely think being encouraged to forgive isn't always the right thing to do. I think you have to arrive, yes, but sovereignly, independently, completely in the moment. The idea of it being an immediate response that's going to make you feel better, it's like telling someone to calm down when they're really angry.

It just won't do well.

It's a cultural thing, Judeo Christian cultural conditioning that says that's exactly want to just forgive them and then and so you forgive too fast before you're anywhere near I mean forgive means forgetting anyway. You have to be ready to let it go. And it's a process that happens organically. It's not a decision we make. Because we make that decision from our smallest self, the part of our self that is still injured, that still feels like we were

And I think also allowing it to be.

A process that doesn't look like one day I felt like I was resentful and couldn't forgive them, and the next day I could it's really interesting how it's a spectrum. Yeah, I think I will probably be working forever on this one particular relationship that I think forgiveness is a huge part of it. But it's fascinating just allowing that to be true and not thinking you have to radically do

Fear, say, a room of one zone.

But she killed herself, But that's okay, by the way, that's a version of love. It is, it is.

It is.

Weirdly, Virginia Wolf killing herself was an expression of of love because she I don't know.

That's hard to qualify, but I feel like for her it was.

I do too, and I think that Nicole Kidman did a very good job of it in the movie.

I did beyond her nose prosthetics, I don't know.

I guess I forgave that that was I guess I didn't. I didn't even forgive.

She's so brilliant. Yeah, she's brilliant.

She's just brilliant. But the nose was a bit warm.

It's a bit distracting, but it shows how good of an actor she.

I think that it didn't matter.

She acted past it.

She acted past her eyes. That should be a down.

Give us both credit for that. Oh yes, best defines love or a relationship, relationship and also real or fictionalized that could be in a poem or in a book. Oh how about? And I forget who said this? I think it was Khalil Joe Brown. Let the winds of heaven dance between you and I have have that with my beautiful partner, wife's spouse.

Do you, yes, let the winds of heaven dance between you? Okay, practically because that is a really beautiful and etheric idea. How does one do that on a rainy Wednesday in November?

How do we keep that?

How do we do that when life isn't as poetic as it sounds?

Well, it sounds kind of poetic to me, I know.

I think what it's talking about is now falling into each other where you lose yourself so you're deeply, deeply in love. And there's that do you know that painting where he's bringing his wife flowers and he's flying Basically he's levitating. Yeah, he's soofering. Yeah, but he's in his studio and he's doing his thing, and yet he's still very, very in love. I've never been tempted to have that

It's gonna say one thing, you're super hot, but let the winds of having Dan.

I'm going to be in my art studio thinking about you. In fact, I'm gonna be levitating. I'm gonna be hovering. But don't knock on my door except to bring the flowers, which she's doing. Actually she's levitating. Oop, there's my doorbell.

You need to get it.

You can't hold on our dog groomers stop by to bring me some peach rum jam What do you mean that's delicious?

Go and taste it, peach rum jama. Then it smells super rum.

It's a little you know, I'm sober. I could get drug from this.

Maybe they're scraping on your turst.

Okay, wait, I'm now really thinking about the winds of having danced between the two things. First of all, my boyfriend really early on we're six years in now, he said that our relationships, and I think this is the robot.

Version of the Khalil Gibran.

It's a then diagram that we are both those circles and we have that space in the middle where we cross over. But you know, ninety percent is us ourselves, and then there's the area that we cross over. And you must never think that it should be more than or more than that is healthy. I think you're absolutely right. I have been tempted into super codependent relationships and like nothing good lies down, well, you.

Lose yourself ultimately, you you you invest your happiness into someone else, and you know another person can't take that.

Who's that?

Mildred?

Who's there? Mildred? Mildred coming on? Cookie, Mildred on cookie over here? You want some peach? Mildred? Let me see?

Oh are you right there?

See?

What are you doing? She is a Belgian shepherd.

Oh look she's she's.

Trying to look all sexy. So I'll rubber belly. It's enticing. But I'm on a podcast with milk Driver.

Love.

What about the living next door to each other, like you know, Helen the bottom cart and Timber and live next door to each other with a connecting tunnel.

I think it's the most brilliant.

Modern and brilliant, and it's wonderful and it's great for.

The kids everyone has.

You know, if I had, it's really fun.

I would have a slide.

To connect them. Yeah, you know, Queen Christina. Though Greta Garbaum would be and I love Greta Garbo. She's talking to her man servant and she said, I would love to have a man as a lover, but I should like for him to live next door.

That is essentially well, I believe. I don't believe in sharing bathroom. I think you share a bed intentionally. But I like sleeping into a sort of sacred and singular. But I know that it's it's not easy.

I could never do that. And now let me give some support and some validation. I don't know if they need it, but like I'll hear about relationships where people just can't get enough of each other, you know, they just can't. My parents they loved each other so much. My father would go away for a weekend to do something, and God, when he would come home they'd be like, oh,

It's really sweet.

I mean, I really do think, like, like whatever blows your hair, like, is it just being entwined and that's your reality or is it more ostensibly aloof But your intimacy is really intimate because you choose it, and it's it's as long as a choice.

And it suits who you are. You know, it's not coming from fear. It's not coming from fear of intimacy, but it's it suits who you exactly. One of the things I've learned over the years is, I'm sure you have too, is what suits me?

I think it's a very intrepid and wonderful exploration to figure out what suits.

One and have no shame around it.

You know, that's a good point to have no shame and not be worried about identifying it to other people, right right, And thank you so much for sharing all your beautiful insight.

It's so lovely.

I love hearing all the expansive things that you think.

Thank you so.

Much and enjoy well.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

You're welcome. You're welcome.

Mini Questions is hosted and written.

By Me Mini Driver, Executive produced by Me and Aaron Kaufman, with production support from Jennifer Bassett, Zoe Denkler, and Ali Perry. The theme music is also by Me and additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay Addison, O'Day, Henry Driver, Lisa Castella, Anick oppenheim A, Nick Muller and Annette wolf A, w kPr, Will Pearson, Nicki Etoor, Morgan Levoy and Mangesh had Tiggadore