You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what Mango? What's that?
Will?
So? I was thinking about Carol Burnett the other day, and actually, you know, I think about her often.
I admitted before the episode.
She was one of my first crushes, which might come as a surprise to many, but she was just so fun and we used to love watching her show, The Carol Burnette Show in the evenings. But anyway, one of the things I was thinking about recently was how she used to tug her ear to say hi to her grandmother on air. Now, actually, did you watch the Carol Burnette Show.
Yeah, it's it's actually one of my earliest memories of TV, like watching that and also the Muppet Show because my parents loved both of those. Also, have you watched Pamroll I have not yet. No, it is so fun. It's like soaphi it but she's in a coma and somehow she's still funny. Like she's funny even when she's in a coma, like do these minor little actions and stuff, she can still get a laugh.
It's like he was the best of the best.
But I was thinking about this whole ear tugging story, and I decided to look into it a little bit more. And apparently the first time she was on TV in New York, her grandmother says to her, why don't you just turn to the camera and say hello to me
when you're on TV? And Carol's response was, of course, I had to explain to her that we're not allowed to just say hi, nanny on television, And so they came up with this secret signal that's now famous, where she would pull her ear lobe, and according to Carol Burnett, it meant HI, I'm fine, your check is on the way.
That's ridiculous. I think I've heard they were close because Burnette was raised by her grandma.
Right, That's exactly right, you know.
And part of the story that I thought was really funny is that this writer from Life magazine actually measured her ear lobe and found that she'd stretched it from pulling it so much over the years, and that her ear lobe was noticeably longer because of all the time she turned to the camera and let her grandma know that she was thinking about her.
I mean, that is both really sweet and I feel like it's real love, like giving up your symmetrical face for your grandma.
That's a real, real sacrifice.
But you know, in the interview, Carol Burnett did want to clarify that she only pulled her ear when she was on TV.
She didn't go around pulling her ear just for the heck of it.
But with Thanksgiving holiday right around the corner, we thought it might be the perfect time to do a little tribute episode to Grandma's So let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh Hot Ticket and sitting there behind the big booth glass wearing a vintage Charlotte hornets Larry Johnson basketball jersey.
Probably a lot of our younger listeners are saying, who the heck is Larry Johnson? Amazing basketball player. This is a real deep cut here, Dylan.
I love it when he goes for the deep cuts, making a throwback joke to those Grandmama commercials.
Yeah, he's nodding his head back there and just.
Smiling once again. That is our good friend and producer, Dylan Fagan.
You know, I watched this interview with Larry Johnson where he was talking about why he signed with Converse and did those Grandmama commercials. Yeah, and he said it was a total bait and switch. Like he was fresh out of college. He was the number one NBA draft pick, and Converse was like, we've got the perfect ad for you.
It's Larry Bird and Magic Johnson wearing surgeons gear and they've created this perfect basketball player, right, and they're just deciding what to name him, and Larry Bird's like, let's call him Larry, and Magic is like, let's call him Johnson. And they're fighting like Larry Johnson, Larry Johnson, and as they're arguing, he just kind of rises up like Frankenstein's mom, right. And so of course Larry Johnson is young, he's all in.
He's so sold by this idea. Also, I had a million dollars to give him, so he was happy to take that. And he went off and bought his mom a house with the money. Okay, and then Converce called him up and was like, Magic and Larry don't want to do the commercial, So we've got another idea.
You're gonna be a grandma.
I feel like a grandma, and you're gonna dominate the basketball court, and he was like, man, I wish I hadn't fought that house. Yeah, but barely. You ended up having a lot of fun with it.
I mean, it was a it was a pretty great series there.
But Menguel, you're already getting a soft track. We are doing a show that is a tribute to our grandma's And I know you knew my mamma and really loved her, and she loved you, and I think later in her life she actually thought you were one of her grandkids.
And I remember meeting your grandma in college when she'd come to visit from India, and you know, it was just always the sweetest visits to see how much she meant to you, and it was it was just a lot of fun that she actually came to college knocking in your dorm room one time, and she was actually just lying there on the bed like she was one of our friends.
It was she was small, she was lying on it horizon.
I wasn't going to say that, but actually I think she was there one time with one of your aunts and they were both lying there as far as that's you know, these tiny women.
But it was fantastic.
But anyway, I know this holiday season, we're both missing our grandmothers a lot, and I thought it might be nice to do a nine things.
In honor of them. So this one is for Nadine and Soushila.
Mm hmmm, that's so wonderful. So I'm going to start with a story about a group of grandmas in Zimbabwe. And this story actually begins with a young psychiatrist. His name is Dixon Chibanda. So Zimbabwe apparently has been dealing with an incredible shortage of mental health professionals over the past few decades. And the story comes from the Boston Globe and they say that Chibanda was actually only one of fifteen psychiatrists in the country of sixteen million people.
It isn't that stunning, But this starts with a really sad story. So Chibanda had a patient who was unable to visit him because she couldn't afford the fifteen dollars bus fare to travel this insanely long distance to see him, and she ends up taking her own life, and chibond is just devastated by this. He's like, we need to
be giving people more care, making the access easier. So he starts exploring all these different ways to recruit and train more mental health practitioners, but it is just really, really difficult. There are a lot of hurdles to jump to make it happen. And what he realizes is that there's actually already this incredible core of whys and empathetic caregivers who have a lot of life experience and a lot of time on their hands. And so, of course
we're talking about grandmothers here. So he pilots this program with fourteen grandmothers in her are and he gives them the tools to better listen, right. He helps them make people feel heard, He helps them give people a sense of belonging and confidence, and he also teaches the grandmothers to empower people to tackle their own problems. Right. It's a little tutorial he does. But instead of putting these grandmas in crowded clinics or hospitals, they come up with
this totally novel approach. They set up these benches that are in the open, that feel like you're just having conversations, so there's no shame around the treatments and no negative perception. Initially, Schibanda wanted to call these benches mental health benches, but the Grandma's actually pushed back on that branding and suggested calling them friendship benches instead. Nice and so then this idea of the friendship bench was born, and honestly, the
results have been incredible. The grandmas don't use psychiatric terms, so instead of talking about depression or anxiety, they use gentler Shona terms. There's actually one called Kufunga Sisa, which, as The Globe points out, translates as thinking too much. Right, You're just thinking too much. And they're just very warm. They're really colloquial and today there have been over one
hundred peer reviewed studies about these benches. According to one study, after six months, participants who interacted with these friendship benches were better off in terms of all types of indicators, including their fear head lessen, their anger head lessen, and they actually had improved sleep patterns. And in fact, the grandmas have helped over sixty thousand people in Zimbabwe to date.
But the best part is that it's also great for the grandma's self esteem, like they feel like they're being useful again and they're contributing to the health of this country, which is just kind of amazing.
I was thinking the same thing.
This is definitely one of those perfect scenarios where I think everybody walks away from it feeling a little bit better.
Yeah, that is amazing.
I would totally go to something like that too, if there was just a grandma, you know, it would be sitting on a bench and you could go sit next to or chat for a bit. But you know, I was thinking about the image that we have of, you know, the stereotypical grandmother. When you think of grandma's hanging out, you're probably picturing them I don't know, playing bridge or majog.
Or something, tea party or something like that.
That's exactly right, But you're probably not picturing them with cans of spray paint, right, Like tagging a wall with graffiti.
Is that something that.
Comes to mind for you. But that's exactly what's happening in Lisbon, Portugal, where the world's most lovable graffiti gang.
Has come together. I love this so much.
The group is called Lata sixty five and Lota refers to an aerosol can and sixty five because it's open to anyone who's sixty five or older. So, according to one of the group's co founders, Lara Rodriguez. She was watching Lisbon come alive through this incredible graffiti movement, and as she puts it, quote decaying cement walls were transformed into a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes. Abandoned factories breathe new life, and water cooler conversations moved to walls that
told stories. But while she was seeing this thriving art scene all around her, she was noticing something else. She was having conversations with older people in her community, and she picked up on this sense that they felt like a burden. There was this one seventy one year old grandmother who told her art is for the care free,
the creative, and the sensitive. I'm just a grandmother. And so Laura got this sense that these incredible women saw themselves as simply caretakers, or even worse than that, like nonexist from time to time. So she put this call out to anyone who wanted to give graffiti a try, and as she tells it, the youth were numb and bored to my outreach, but elders actually wanted to jump
in and participate. The response was actually overwhelming from this and ever since, the Grandma Graffiti Gang has totally taken off. So today these artsy grannies wander into the city's most neglected neighborhoods and they brighten them up with these vibrant and rebellious works. Actually, just talking about it doesn't do it any justice. I want to share a few photos with you right here, so you know it's like the sweetest vandalism you'll ever see. Like their smiles are so big.
They're painting the town red and you know, lots of other colors too.
But look at these pictures.
Oh, I love them so much. I kind of want my mom to join a graffiti Grannis group. It looks so fun. So here's kind of a quirky one. One of the first things I looked up when we decided to do this episode on Grandma's was if there was any scientific research on grandmothers, and there's actually lots of it. There's stuff fun how a grandmother's brain lights up when
they see a photo of their grandchildren. There's also research on how grandmothers have actually helped us evolutionarily, and how menopause may be linked to caring for younger kids because it actually gives women more energy for that, which is interesting. But the most fun paper that I encountered was one about the dead grandmother exam syndrome, and this was recapped in a special education issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.
But in nineteen ninety nine, a professor named Mike Adams of Eastern Connecticut State University noticed an interesting phenomena happening in his classes. So he wrote the Definitive Analysis on what he calls the grandmother exam syndrome, in which he writes, quote, the basic problem can be stated very simply. A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before
the student takes an exam than any other time. Of what I guess, people were constantly giving this as an excuse in his class, ye, And so he decided to make a point by writing a paper.
That is ridiculous.
All right, Well, here's a strange one about this awesome grandma who refused to be scammed. So there's this seventy three year old grandmother, Jean Ebert, and she's living in Long Island, and she gets this phone call where a scammer is posing as her grandson who claims he's been
in an accident. And actually, I remember my grandmother getting a similar kind of call, like it's a common scam of types of people calling and claiming to be their grandson or somebody also those lines, and I know this shouldn't be funny, but she would say, like you talking about will are you talking about and started naming her grandson.
She's like, yeah, yeah, of course.
So anyway, he says he's been charged with a dui and he needs money urgently to get him out of bail. But Jean's grandkids are in elementary school and they're not driving and they're definitely not drinking, so she knows that this is a scam. Also, she's a retired nine to one one dispatcher, so she knows how to work a phone,
and she decides to play along. So the fake grandson says he needs eight thousand dollars and he needs it soon because he doesn't want to be stuck in jail and he's really laying it on thick in this story, but she keeps stringing him along. She offers to venmo him the amount, but he says he really needs it in cash, so she asked him to call back, and she obviously needs the time to get the money, and in the meantime, she calls the police.
They come over.
They actually listen in on the follow up calls, and eventually the scammer says he's sending a bail bondsman over to her front door in ten minutes.
So when this guy arrives, she opens the door.
Hands him an envelope stuffed with paper towels so it'll look like it's this fat wad of cash. And then as he pockets the money, the officers yell surprise, jump out and arrest the guy.
I love him.
They actually yelled the prim Now they.
Totally were like, surprise, you're going to jail. But the whole incident was captured on Jean's ring cam and it wasn't long before the conman were thrown in jail. And as for Jeans, she's now Internet famous as the granny who scammed the scammers.
Oh, I like that. I also love that a lifetime of nine one one calls makes her super calm in like any phone call situation. Yeah, you have so much practice, so I know that I couldn't do an episode on Grandma's without talking about my favorite group of old women, the divers in South Korea known as.
Henyo, which I did not look into because I knew you would be doing something here, so.
You might remember this from when I commission a photo essay for mental phloss about those years ago. But the hen you are famous because they dive off the coast of the Jaju Island to harvest mollis, abalony, octopus, seaweed
and other tasty sea life. Right. But the society is particularly special because, unlike the rest of South Korea, it's a matriarchal community, and people don't exactly know how it came to be this way and how the women took over the diving, but it's been this way for centuries now, and the work is really dangerous. They dive between thirty to sixty feet. They free dive actually into icy waters.
They brave sharks and hypothermia, among other things. And you know, it might be that this diving culture started because men went off to war and the women took over. It's also thought that the women have more body fat, so they're better at dealing with the.
Very cold water.
But whatever the reason, it's led to the society that really values women and considers women more powerful than the men. Apparently, husbands stay home to watch the kids and they do the domestic chores. And unlike other parts of Asia, where you know, having a son is really valued, having a daughter here is really celebrated in the community because women bring in money. And what's really interesting is that a young woman often begins practicing these diving skills between the
age of eight to ten. We're often trained by your mother, but they're not considered experts until they reach their forties. And then women will keep diving well into their eighties, which is why you see these beautiful, mermad grandmothers still keeping this traditional live.
It's amazing, like it's just wild that they're willing to do that for me. If it's below seventy degrees and further than like five or six feet, I'm not trying to do it like.
It's it's too much.
But I love these stories about these Korean grandmas, and as I mentioned, at a feeling you were going to do a fact on them. So I also looked up a group of Austin diving grandmas, and I found a group from a slightly different part of the world. It's an island called New Caledonia, which is in the Pacific Ocean. So if you're trying to get your bearings here. New Caledonia is east of Australia and north of New Zealand. So the story starts with these two researchers who are
in New Caledonia and they're studying sea snakes. Now, in particular, they're looking at this harmless, small turtle headed snake that primarily exists there. But while they're researching, they end up seeing these much larger sea snakes that are super venomous. And these things are scary, like they're five feet long and lethal, but you know, it turns out they're also
really shy. So the scientists who are in this area studying for about three years, only end up seeing a couple dozen of these snakes and they can't get a handle on their behavior. Ayway, there isn't much research on
these venomous snakes. But then in twenty seventeen, a group of grandmas who by the way, call themselves the Fantastic Grandmothers, hear about this, and they're in their sixties and seventies and they decide they want to help out because it turns out this area where the sea snakes have been spotted happens to be the snorkeling turf of these grandmothers. This is just where they've been swimming for a good time, and they didn't know there was any danger lurking there.
So they asked the researchers, or rather tell the researchers that they're going to lend a hand and photograph any sea snakes when they see that they're out and about. Anyways, one of the researchers told Mental Flaws quote, as soon as the grandmothers set to work, we realized that we had massively underestimated the abundance of greater sea snakes in
the bay. So apparently the work was this huge boon to the researchers because over a short period, these grandmothers identified over two hundred and forty nine of the venomous sea snakes while managing.
Not to get didn't.
Also, they shed light on their breeding habits and offspring. So today the Fantastic Grandmother's project is regularly cited as a way that communities and scientists can work together to advance the understanding of animal life.
That's really cool. So I know we've got two more facts to go, but before we do, why don't we take a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking all about grandma's So will what do you want to do for your last fact?
All right, Well, I know we kicked this off with a Carol Burnett story, but I want to talk a little bit about another luminary who was raised and influenced by his grandmam, and that's Willie Nelson. And I guess I didn't realize how hard his life has been. But they rarely had money to buy food off and lived off of soup bones. And well, his grandmam had a job in a school lunch. She had a lot of odd jobs to just feed the family, and she often
took him with her. And so, as he writes, quote, I started picking cotton alongside my grandmother when I was maybe five or six years old. Wow. I had a little bit of cotton sacks she made for me, and some knee pads so I could crawl along beside her. I learned a lot about what hard work farming is. So this is probably why he's devoted so much of his effort to farm mate, if you think about it. And apparently those days in the field really shaped him musically.
There were a lot of black farm workers, he says, Mexican farm workers, a lot of guys like me, little white guys going to school, trying to make a living. We all came together out there working. You hear blues coming from over here, You hear Mexican music coming from over there, Bob Will's coming from over here. It was like living in an opera. And so his grandmother is
also the one who taught him music. One of his fondest memories that he had told Rolling Stone about was that if he got a lesson right quote that day, she'd take a gold star, a little star the size of your finger, and glue on one side, and she'd stick it on a sheet of music to let him know that he'd done a great job.
And he kind of lived for those moments. You can imagine it.
Yeah, it's amazing how much she shaped him. So I think I've got the perfect fact to end on and espartially because I miss my grandma or my almama's cooking. But if you're like me and you're missing your granny's comfort food, a good place to visit might be the restaurant where Nona's ruled the kitchen, and that's Enoteca Maria
in Staten Island. Now I've heard the buzz about this restaurant for years, and I've been meaning to make a visit, but I actually thought it was just a gimmick, like the old Ninja cafe where they're just Ninja's jumping out with your food or whatever. But the story behind the
restaurant is really sweet. So the restaurant was founded by Jod Scaravella in two thousand and seven after he lost his own grandmother, and as he put it, quote, I think subconsciously, I was just trying to patch those holes in my life, and seeing an Italian grandmother in the kitchen cooking was my idea of comfort. It was his way of dealing with the grief because his Nonah had
played a really big role in his childhood. Both his parents had worked day jobs, and his Nonah kept the house running in Brooklyn where he grew up, and as he tells it, she was this really big personality, Like one of the most fun things he did as a kid was accompanying her to the market where she would just sample all the wares before buying them. So like if she'd bit into a peach and liked it, she'd buy a dozen, But if she took a bite out
of a vegetable and was unimpressed. She just like angrily spit on the floor. That's rough, but if friendly. Everyone loved her and liked her, so he didn't really mind, and her cooking was divine. And while Jodie's initial idea was to serve Italian comfort food with nonahs from different parts of Italy, before long he was bringing in nonahs from around the world. So every day there's like one
Italian nona and one from various locations. So you might have like a Jamaican nona serving doubles, or a Bangladeshi won serving curries, or big bowls of oudon from the Japanese nona. And just like your own grandmother or my
own grandmother, they are very particular about the recipes. So, like one Greek nona was unimpressed with a feta that he had on hand, so she bought her own from Greece, Sri Lankan nona didn't think much of the curry powder, so she made him drive her to New Jersey so that she could buy all the spices to assemble a proper spice mix it. But what's interesting is that while the restaurant serves up comfort food, what's funny is that
Jody doesn't really think of it as a restaurant. He sees it as more of a community project, and as he told Travel and Leisure, what he loves most is the power of food to bring people together. As he put it quote, coming off a very divisive period in history, it really helps to bring down those barriers in the same way music and art does. It helps you engage
with another culture without even realizing it. And the fact that the food is served with extra dollars of love from a grandma who might remind you of your own makes experience that much sweeter.
Aw, that's a perfect story. I love that.
Although I know we pre decided that we weren't going to do a trophy, this episode took some of.
The pressure off and the spirit to Thanksgiving.
Right, that's right.
So instead, let's just end with a reminder to call your grandmothers and basking their love this holiday season, and if you have a second, share your best grandmam stories with us on our end stuff we're at part time genius. We sincerely want to hear about the wonderful grannies and grandma figures in your life.
Yeah, So that's it for this week's episode from Gabe, Mary, Dylan, Will and myself have a Wonderful Thanksgiving. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongschatikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norbel and Ali Perry, with social media support from
Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viny Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.