Episode 8: "All The Way To Canada"

Date

April 29, 2011

Guests

Joe Mande, Neko Case

Origin of the episode title

Neko Case and her cousin Jason made up songs as children. "All The Way To Canada" is the one she remembers most clearly.

Discussed

On this episode of How Was Your Week?, Julie talks to comedian JOE MANDE, who discusses his Kindle-hating dog, Blanche, his history of pets, and his father's dog-training business. Then, rock star NEKO CASE sits down to eat peeps and muffins with Julie, and the two of them talk about art school, walruses, Neko's crush on Michael Palin, and the myth of "Backstage Johnnies."

Plus: Carol Channing's definition of "Movie Night," Greeks versus Jaws, Kate Middleton's nose, how to compete with yourself instead of other women, the three different kinds of jellybeans, civil war monuments, iguanas versus cats, and what it means to be a redhead.

Trivia

Julie played Neko Case in The New Pornographers' music video for "Moves" directed by Tom Scharpling.

Download the Episode

Episode Link

Monologue Transcript

Hi. Hi everybody. It's Julie Klausner. I'm back for another episode of How Was Your Week? We have a great show. The excellent Joe Mande and the fabulous Neko Case are going to be on today's show.

I had a good week. I hope you guys did, too. I had a strong start to the week on Sunday -- Easter Sunday. I love Easter. I said at the end of last week's show that Easter candy was like the blonde men of candy because I grew up sort of not having access, and now I love Cadbury Cream Eggs and all that stuff, but I also just love the pageantry of Easter more than I do Christmas. I'm a Jew by the way; I don't know if I should have established that premise premisarily. The premise of my loving Easter is that I am a big Jew and I went to two Easter things on Sunday.

Not to brag, not to flaunt or flout or flute my social calendar, but I had a lovely brunch at my friend Nate's house. Jesse Murray (who you know from a couple episodes ago wherein he discussed big business with me at length) was there with our friend David, our friend John, and it was terrific. It was a great brunch. Jesse said to me no fewer than three times that he wants to eat a dessert comprised of jelly beans and Cool Whip called "Rhinestones in the Snow." I think that's a great idea. Our friend Brian Safi apparently came up with that. And now I've mentioned more gay men than I've ever even thought about without attending some sort of choral performance.

After the Easter brunch, we went to our friend Alex Scordelis' of cat whisperer fame. He and his girlfriend Melissa hosted a terrific Greek Easter feast. There was lamb, enough pasta shells to tile the roof of an edible house with. I consider Greeks the Jews of the sea. I mean that as a compliment. My friend Alex at one point toasted. It wasn't to life; I don't know what it meant, but it sounded comforting. There were all the same droning minor chords and it's a shouting-based culture; there's a lot of salty starch to eat. "It feels like home," in the words of Madonna Ciccone.

I did this thing after the Easter dinner in which, by the way, I've never been quite as sweaty. I'm not criticizing the air conditioning of my dear friends Alex and Melissa, but I have definitely just been sweatier than I've ever been in my life, and after a long and fun evening, I said my goodbyes after dripping a certain amount of sweat into, ugh, I almost said "into crevices." Wouldn't that have been terrible? I just sort of made a sweaty exit, but I tried my best to do it graciously. Jack and I were the first to leave and I said goodbye to everybody. Sometimes at parties I'll do the French goodbye, which just means that you leave and in this case I did my due diligence to be polite because it really was such a great affair.

As I was leaving, I said, "I gotta go back and get more jelly beans" because they had these See's - the California candy. There's three kinds of jellybeans. You have Brock's (Brock's or Brack's or Brach's?) Those are terrible, but they're also very large, to their credit, and they they taste like sucking candies. They come in sucking candy flavours. Then you have Jelly Bellys, which are just crack. I don't condone Jelly Bellys. They seem to me like the meth of jelly beans in that there is some science in the Jelly Belly jelly bean that is disconcerting in that you're just shrinking and replicating the flavour and then the speckles on the outside are just… They're also not big enough. Anyway, so See's jelly beans, it turns out, are the perfect jelly beans and they created this physical reaction within me that caused me to -- after I had made a reasonably elegant exit -- come back into the room. Everyone was like, "Hi again," and I, sweating, said, "I need more jelly beans," and then I went home and made Rhinestones in Snow in my stomach. No, there was no snow, but shortly after that there was a sunny day in New York City this week. Not that this is the weather podcast. Although, if it were, boy oh boy, with all the rain we've had, that bitch from Garbage must be thrilled, right? Shirley Manson who was only happy when it rained? Oh, my '90s stand-up is not going well.

It was the first 80-degree day in New York City and I was like, "I hate all my clothes and I am obese." This is not related to the jelly beans (although it is) and it's not related to the profuse sweating (but it completely is). You want to say, "Oh, finally, a nice day!" but all you can think is, "I hate myself for not retroactively correcting the problem that I'm now experiencing the consequences of," which is to say the fact that I look really bad in all of my summer clothes and I've gained. You know what? It's not noticeable to my friends, or they are lying to me. I've got a couple pounds to lose. Is that the worst thing? Is that the most humiliating thing - to be looking to lose weight or looking for love? Which is more humbling? We would love to be doing both. Yes, I would love to be a couple pounds thinner. How 'bout that? How 'bout putting that out into the world?

Along those lines, I am not fully back at Weight Watchers, which has been helpful in the past to monitor things like that. Although Jennifer Hudson, how 'bout that? Weight Watchers spokesperson Jennifer Hudson. Did you guys see her at the Oscars this year? She lost her breasts. She looks terrific. She lost a lot of weight, but she also lost her breasts and her family, which is terrible.

I am trying to exercise more. I took a gyrotronic class with a bonehead. I don't know if you guys know what gyrotronics are. They're like Pilates. I'll leave it at that and you guys can Google whatever I haven't filled in blank-wise with that information. This is not the "How 'bout those bimbo aerobics instructors" - that's not my women of the night premise or topic. I did have an introductory 60-minute class with a former dancer and she was just so dumb. She spent a lot of time explaining the machines to me and the line of energy that comes out from the bottom of your feet and she spent at least ten minutes demonstrating that. It's fine. It's pulleys and levers. This kind of bugged me. She also gave me some stretches to do where you arch your back to look like a cat (you don't make your back actually look like a cat, but you round your back) and then she said, "I insist that all my students do this every day whether or not they come to see me." And then she added, "I'm a real Nazi about stretching." Don't say that. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive. I know I'm being overly sensitive. And of course I wasn't like, "You know…" I didn't call it out. I obviously saved it to complain to you about later.

It reminded me of a yoga teacher I had once in New York. At one point you do a side plank to a back bend (sometimes people call it "rock star") and then you do a split where you put one leg bent behind you and you put the opposite arm out and she called it swastika pose. That was also a thing where I was more or less relaxed. In yoga class, you don't want to hear. Warrior Three - fine. Cat, cow - delightful. Swastika pose? Really? Oh, my great grandfather.

That's my week more or less. I hope you're having a good one. I hope that by now you have experienced and recovered from the royal wedding and that Kate Middleton had a pretty dress on and that it was great and lovely and that you woke up at 4:00 in the morning to see the pomp and…is it "pomp and circumstance"? "pomp and consequence"? I hope you enjoyed both of the things that were shown to you along the lines of that wedding.

What would you wear if you went to a royal wedding? Would you wear a fascinator? Do you know those hats that are like a headband? They don't cover your head. They're not good for shade provide-al, but they are ornamental and they do fascinate me! I would wear a fascinator and scrubs. I would not. I would be thrilled to be invited and I would learn all the etiquette and I would kiss everybody on the face and the hands and the feet.

I also want to make a point of saying that people who say, "I don't care about the royal wedding. I really don't care about it." You're talking so much about it that you may as well care about it because why not? It's fun. It's a wedding. It's not a funeral. Why don't we celebrate? Elton John will be at both, though. No one's gonna die. Let the record show I am not ordering anyone to commit a murder to, toward, near, by or about Kate Middleton, who is a lovely brunette. Did she have her nose done? I think she did. It seems a little small for her head.

I'm going to introduce the first interview because I'm going to keep talking about Kate Middleton's head…

I saw a documentary yesterday called Carol Channing: Larger Than Life. I guess there is a Larger Than Life. Isn't that the Bill Murray movie with the elephant? This was a little bit different. Same Act Three. My friend Megan Stern, who's terrific, took me to see it at the Tribeca Film Festival. I've never actually been to a festival. I've never wanted to deal with the waiting outside because I'm not getting passes. We got standby tickets to this documentary about Carol Channing. It was worth the wait and we managed to get in and it was fantastic. When it opens, I strongly recommend you check it out.

Carol Channing, for those of you who don't know, is completely batshit. She's wonderful. I'm a pretty big fan of Carol Channing. What was your Carol Channing introduction? Mine was the Free to Be You and Me record when she did her monologue about how people advertise cleaning and how it looks fun, but it's not and that ideally Mommy and Daddy should clean together, which revolutionized sexism. But also, just the way she said "waxing" and "mopping".

The Carol Channing doc is very much an overview of her career. It's less about her family and personal life, although she does have a great story that she and her high school sweetheart who were separated when he went to war, were reunited something like five years ago when they were both in their eighties and they got married after knowing each other again for two weeks, which is the sweetest thing in the world. Most of the time they travel together and you see them in the backseat of their limo holding hands and they're just the cutest thing. By the way, she did very well. It was worth the wait. Her husband looks good. He's a dapper gent; he's got his bow tie and glasses. He's got style.

So, that's adorable, but otherwise it's very much an overview of exactly how many times she did Hello Dolly, which is a million times. She said she never missed a show. She did the tour and the '94 revival of it. She said the only time she walked off the stage in the middle of a show was because she had food poisoning and was "throwing up all over the stage," which is a show I wish I could have been at. It seems like that would have made Hello Dolly a much better show.

Then you had interviews with producers like Nederlander Sr. who looks like a Martin Short character with more prosthetics somehow. He's saying "Well, you know Barbra Streisand got the part because people in Des Moines don't know who Carol Channing is." Oh, stop it. You're making this too big. Maybe reign it in. There are interviews with gorgeous Tyne Daley who looks fantastic.

It's definitely a fag-splosion, but my favourite story from the movie (and then I will leave you to what you were doing before I got on my Channing tangent) was an anecdote from one of her Dolly Boys (one of the men who danced in the chorus of the 1994 revival, as well as the 1977 revival, etc.) They're definitely a coven or a harem. They were all interviewed in a room together sitting around a table and these guys clearly have some kind of fraternal connection. They talked about how Carol liked to take them out to see movies. It was like movie night at the Hello Dolly ranch. One night Carol had said she'd heard about a lot of buzz in the media about this one movie and she really wanted to take them to check it out, so she went to this movie theatre with them in Midtown and got behind the snack counter and insisted on serving each one of the dancers whatever he wanted -- soda and popcorn. There's a photo of her behind the snack counter and the people at the movie theatre had no idea they were coming. It wasn't a private screening or anything, so the guy at the movie theatre was like, "What the fuck is going on?" So, they all go in and the movie ended up being Interview With A Vampire, which is so random. She's sitting in the front row and after it ends, she turns around and says to the guys, "Well, I didn't know it was that kind of a movie." What does that mean? That story killed me. It's just so weird. It might not be in the final cut of the movie, but that doesn't make my delight any less.

Moving on to matters more rock 'n' roll than Carol Channing...