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Hello and welcome to My Favorite Murder, the Celebrity Hometown Edition. That's right.
00:01:53
three episodes in one week for you. This is an extra special one. We can't stop podcasting. Would you like to join us?
00:02:02
That's right. The struggle is real. Just not put up an episode every day, but here we go.
00:02:07
We're going to do it. And we're very excited about our guest today. You know her from kind of everything from television. You've seen her in movies.
00:02:16
Yeah. You've seen her on Comedy Central doing standup. You've seen her on late night television.
00:02:22
You've seen her live in concert. You've seen her perform at clubs and colleges all over the country.
00:02:28
I can't not say that. I can't help it. It's funny, and it's what the emcee is supposed to do on a show.
00:02:36
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome friend of the family, Margaret Cho. Thank you.
00:02:42
Hi, friend. I am a huge friend of, and Murderino, and been wanting to be on your show since Karen Anderson left you a voicemail.
00:02:51
all the way back in the day. That's great. I think that was 2016, 2015. Oh, wow.
00:02:57
That was the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm a huge fan. And this is great. This is, it's a dream of mine.
00:03:05
Also, I'm on many shows on your amazing Exactly Right Network. So. Oh, yeah. We love you here.
00:03:11
I love it. You've done every, you've guested on almost every show. I love it. Yeah.
00:03:16
It's my favorite. And all my love to George. I just saw George. I know. I know. Sweet George.
00:03:24
I'm sorry. Sorry about that. Thank you. I mean, it's very nice how, you know, it's very nice that it's such a shared thing when
00:03:34
you lose a pet, but people know who your pet is. Like, I've never had that experience before.
00:03:38
And it really actually makes a difference. But at the same time, she was 15. She was truly, like, looking me in the eye, like, please let me leave.
00:03:48
I need to go. She had an incredible life. And I think I felt the same sort of sorrow with Elvis.
00:03:56
Oh, my God. Elvis was like really... I mean, and I would always try to visualize
00:03:59
That means so much to me. what kind of cookie it was that he was getting. I was like, is that like a Temptations cookie
00:04:06
or is it like a Greenies cookie? And Temptations was the way... If you could shake it and he could hear it,
00:04:13
that's all that mattered, like a bag of treats. Like a pounce. He would eat anything.
00:04:18
He once knocked a sandwich out of a friend's hand who was eating it here, so he wouldn't eat anything.
00:04:23
What if every time it was a freshly baked hot Toll House cookie that Georgia was handing him straight out of the oven?
00:04:30
Oh, didn't you know? A famous Amos. It's so cute. But I love his little, like, cry.
00:04:37
And I have a cat who, her name is Sakurkar, and she's deaf. And she has a little bit of an Elvis.
00:04:47
It's amazing. cry as well well she's a hairless cat right she's a hairless cat and today she's um zoomies all day
00:04:55
because she got her cone off oh she's had a cone of shame on uh since she's been licking her booboo
00:05:02
leg for a while and finally i just thought what if i just like let her just out of the cone and
00:05:08
just see what happens because the booboo's almost um healed and she's been like on the honor system
00:05:13
and she hasn't licked it today. Oh, good girl. So she zoomies all day. And if I could prompt her with,
00:05:21
do you want a cookie? But if she could hear me, she would make the same sound. Well, now our puppy's name is Cookie,
00:05:28
so I can't use it anymore. It would be really confusing to him or to her. Wow, misgendering my own animal.
00:05:35
I love that. And you've been on the purrcast talking about the cat too. So I love that.
00:05:41
I love, and I love that they got to come over and they actually probably are due for another because I have a new baby, Uju, who has come.
00:05:52
And so does three cats and one dog Do you is it weird to have both dogs and cats I think it new for me I never done it I hadn either but it feels like I just constantly in a YouTube video
00:06:05
It's like the most entertaining part of my life to have both. It's a level of chaos I wasn't prepared for,
00:06:12
but I do love it. Right. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We are so stoked.
00:06:19
And I know our listeners will be too. Yes. I just have a couple of questions because you are on one of our favorite TV shows.
00:06:29
We've talked about it on our podcast before, but you're on the second season of The Flight Attendant.
00:06:34
Yes. Coming up. I'm going to go and film pretty soon. So I'm going to start up with that, which is really exciting.
00:06:43
Yes. And I love the show. It's such a good show. Oh, my God. It's incredible. It's a great show.
00:06:49
And it makes me scared. Like, I watch the show and I'm really scared the whole time.
00:06:53
for all of the characters. So it's really exciting to be able to jump into that.
00:06:59
And so I know I'm going to be scared. It's going to be like a, I think like a 72 hour farthold.
00:07:04
Like a scared, you know, when you go on set and you're just scared, I'm like still,
00:07:10
I never got over being scared on sets. I think that's good though. Because that's part, it's like partly excitement.
00:07:18
It has to matter. So you need that, you need the stage fright focus energy to come in with you, right?
00:07:25
Right. And that show is such a high level of anxiety with everything that's happening
00:07:30
that I think it's going to fit, my fear will fit right in to everything going on.
00:07:36
So yes, I'll be doing an arc. I guess they call it an arc. Yeah. Because I'm doing a few different things.
00:07:45
So I'm really looking forward to it. It's very exciting. So that's pretty much the rest of my winter
00:07:50
is going to be wrapped up. We're going to Reykjavik, which I've never been. Oh my God.
00:07:54
To film. So yeah, it's very exciting. It's beautiful there, right? Yeah, I don't know.
00:07:59
I don't, I guess. I bring a jacket. And how long do you get to stay in Iceland? I don't know.
00:08:06
I guess it's, they just gave me like a lot of time to clear out. So I'm just going.
00:08:11
So we'll see. Till you get it right. Till we get it. And yeah, it should be really cool.
00:08:15
And I've never been there. I only remember that Karen does a really great Bjork impression.
00:08:21
Oh yeah. Yeah. Like the best. Truly the best. That's right. Yes. Sure. She's not going to do it.
00:08:29
I know. She's not going to do it. No. Not on cue. No prompting. No, it's like, it's very hard to do because it's kind of like animal.
00:08:37
It's kind of, I can't even like, it's not what you think. It's like an accent, but it's also like a place in the mouth where it occurs.
00:08:47
Yeah. It is. the thing is I have to listen to her first. Yeah. Like if I was going to do that,
00:08:53
I mean, that's from so long ago in my act, but you know, the way I started doing that impression
00:08:58
is I went with my boyfriend at the time to see Dancer in the Dark at that movie theater that's on La Brea.
00:09:06
Yeah. By the Indian restaurant. I did not like the movie. It bothered me, but I love her
00:09:15
and I love watching her and I love listening to her. but the plot of it was oppressive to me.
00:09:21
And the guy that I was with, this is one of the funniest things of all time. I was just sitting there kind of stewing
00:09:26
where I was like, I have enough problems. I can't take this on. Everything happens to this woman.
00:09:31
It's so awful. Yeah. It's stressing out. I look over at one point to say, do you want to leave?
00:09:37
I don't want to watch this movie anymore. And my boyfriend was doing a crossword puzzle in the dark.
00:09:43
Like purely as a joke, basically so that he knew at some point I was going to look at him and be mad
00:09:50
so he was pretending to do a crossword puzzle. That's charming. That's charming.
00:09:55
It was, he was hilarious. We left the movie theater and I could immediately, I was in a rage about the movie
00:10:02
doing an impression of her. And that's how I was able to do that. You know what I love about the movie though?
00:10:09
I love her boyfriend Jeff. It's Peter Stormare. Because he was so, he's so cute because he keeps showing up at the factory
00:10:16
and then she just like pushes him away, pushes him away. And then he's the only one there.
00:10:20
No spoilers if you're going to watch the movie, but he's the only one there at the,
00:10:24
I know it's too late. He's the only one there at the end and he's so sweet. And I actually did a,
00:10:30
his TV show called Swedish Dicks and I did an episode and I got to talk his ear off
00:10:36
about how much I love that character. And he was really, he was very moved that,
00:10:41
but he also puts, I think he put somebody's foot in the wood chipper in Fargo. That's right.
00:10:46
Oh, okay. Yeah. He's the guy that killed Steve Buscemi. Right. Right. Yes. Yeah.
00:10:52
Which is based on a real true crime story, although it's not as- Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:10:57
The wood chipper thing. It's not as, it's a lot more depressing than a Steve Buscemi type, but-
00:11:03
Is that the one where the, it was a guy, it was the flight attendant? Bringing it back to the flight attendant,
00:11:07
but it is actually a flight attendant, a pilot wife. Yes. Yeah. If I remember correctly, yeah.
00:11:14
He was like a pilot. He was having an affair with another flight attendant. And then she found out, and then he went and rented,
00:11:23
which he didn't even buy it, he rented it. Yeah. Ew. And put her through it. And they found like a little piece of her fingernail
00:11:29
with the polish. Yes, in the bushes or something. Yes. You should use this as inspiration
00:11:35
when you're on the flight attendant. I mean, think about the flight attendant. Well, it's, you know, I think like probably if you're like a comic,
00:11:43
you kind of do know what it is like to be a flight attendant, because I think the comics fly about as much.
00:11:48
When I first met you in San Francisco, Margaret, you were doing colleges, and it was just always me and Scott Silverman picking you up from the airport Yeah Like that it was like Margaret coming in and then you were going out It was constant It was constant And then you would see flight attendants again which is really weird
00:12:08
You know, because when you're like flying that much, you end up seeing people and then
00:12:13
you're like, oh, you actually, I know you because I've been on this flight before.
00:12:17
So it's a very, you shouldn't, shouldn't see flight attendants again. Right. That's quite a strange experience.
00:12:25
It's a lot of travel. I remember when I first started doing colleges myself, the first couple of flights, I would get nervous.
00:12:34
I would think, oh, do I have fear of flying or whatever? And then I would remember, how can you have fear of flying
00:12:39
when you know for a fact Margaret flew like 70 times this year and nothing happened to her?
00:12:44
Right. You were kind of the guidepost of like, oh, yeah, that's just a made-up thing when you never fly,
00:12:50
but actually you know the people that commute fly and they're fine so you're fine we're fine right
00:12:56
that era of comedy it was a struggle era but it was also there there were some good times the best
00:13:03
thing was coming back and having like you and Scott pick me up at the airport and then we would
00:13:08
just like go off and and have a good time in San Francisco which was the greatest time of like my
00:13:14
youth, you know? So that, it made me appreciate coming home and, and like the idea of like
00:13:21
being a touring artist was tough, but you always get to come home, which made it so worth it.
00:13:27
Yeah. You really appreciated like having friends and having a group of people that like you could
00:13:33
go eat with because you just spent a week having every meal alone and only being in your head.
00:13:38
Right. Right. Hating yourself. So you would come back on a Sunday, like we would
00:13:44
get back on a Sunday usually then they would do like the punchline Sunday night and then uh the
00:13:50
improv Monday night and after the improv we would go to Square which was a piano bar that was up
00:13:56
above the improv and we'd drink drink drink and hang out or we'd go see Laura Milligan and Jerry
00:14:01
Finelli play at the wine bar which was um they would do uh covers and we were all in our early
00:14:09
early 20s and just having the best time in San Francisco, which was really special.
00:14:15
Living it up and able to afford rent in San Francisco. Yes. Yes. And being young and smoking cigarettes and, you know, you would basically be able to party
00:14:26
until like Thursday night where your week would start up again. But we would do like shows every night.
00:14:32
And this is even before we moved to LA. So this is like the San Francisco comedy schedule, which is really precious.
00:14:37
Wow. Yeah. Love that. Which is where our story, our hometowns are, my hometown stories are two of them.
00:14:43
I have two hometowns, but they're based in this world. Oh, there's a segue. She did her own segue.
00:14:49
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00:18:10
So the first hometown is actually not my story, but this happened in 1976 on October 1st by Lake
00:18:20
Merced, which was Lake Merced was a lake that was catty corner to my first high school, which was
00:18:28
Lowell High School. And so we had the high school track and then across the street from the track
00:18:33
was a lake. And that's where you would go for a kegger. I don't understand how like teenagers are
00:18:41
getting kegs of beer. How do they do that? I don't think they do anymore unless there's like a quote
00:18:48
cool parent or cool older brother, sister, right? Mm-hmm. I would think. I think it's like back then,
00:18:54
because this was like the 80s, right? Mm-hmm. Like there was always one older guy
00:18:59
that could grow a mustache. I think there was like, or a creep at the liquor store
00:19:03
that would buy up for you. Yeah. That's amazing. Fake IDs were easier to make too, probably, right?
00:19:09
Right, right. But the idea of like giving somebody money to buy you alcohol at a liquor store,
00:19:17
Like as an adult now, I could not imagine doing that for children or even being like a cool mom.
00:19:25
That to me is scary. Like women who would give their kids access to alcohol. It to me is like, I mean, I'm no prude, but that's just beyond any kind of scope of reason to me.
00:19:39
Like that's so crazy. Well, because these days, the way we know about moms, the cool moms who like hosted parties is they're in the newspaper because some horrible thing happened and they're getting sued by everybody else.
00:19:51
Like you just can't afford to take that risk anymore. Yes. Right. Yes. So Lake Merced is where instead of going to the cool moms, you'd go to Lake Merced.
00:20:01
Right. Got it. So they had this sort of like this lake there. there were some kind of paddle boats, but not really, I mean, it's not really like a nice lake.
00:20:10
It's not picturesque or nice or anything, but there's just like some wildlife. It's kind of a
00:20:15
gross lake. It's just so stoners can go and you could have a kegger there and get fingered by some
00:20:21
boy when you go there. So he's just getting weird and fingered by some boy at the kegger at the lake.
00:20:28
But in 1976, there was a boy who was looking for turtle eggs. And he had found a nest of turtle eggs.
00:20:37
And so he's digging down. And he found a hand. What? And so this is October 1st, 1976.
00:20:44
He finds a hand and he gets the police. And the police come and they unearth a body.
00:20:50
It was a young woman who was not identified for 43 years or something. She was a Jane Doe 40, they called her Jane Doe 40, until 2017, a guy named William Shin, who finally realized like, oh, when I was young, I had a sister and they never told me where she went.
00:21:12
And I think I should try to find her. So he finally filed a missing persons report and he posted this all on Web Sleuths.
00:21:19
And I feel like a lot of the things like Murder Squad and all of this idea that you could actually have some sense of closure.
00:21:30
Like there's a lot of consciousness around there with like Web Sleuths and people really looking to podcasting and, you know, like Jensen and Holes and, you know, all these these ideas of like we can solve these murders that have been unsolved for so long or solve these missing cases for so long.
00:21:49
So he was like, I have a sister and I'm going to actually file a missing persons report.
00:21:53
I haven't seen her for some 40 something years. I'm sure that she's out there somewhere.
00:21:57
I got to know. And so he filed a report. So he had lived with his family and his sister in Park Merced, which is adjacent to Lake Merced.
00:22:08
And it's kind of like a, what do you think? It's like a group of apartments. You know, that's my parents' first apartment when they started their family.
00:22:17
They lived in Park Merced. with when my sister was baby. It's the same apartment setup
00:22:24
as those apartments that are across the street from the Grove. What are those ones called?
00:22:30
Like Park La Brea? It's exactly Park La Brea, but it's up in San Francisco. Like a little condo town almost.
00:22:36
Condo community. Yeah, apartments and condos. Yeah, yeah. And I think Leona Helmsley is the person who,
00:22:43
they're her buildings. Oh, wow. She owns all of them. Don't quote me on that though.
00:22:47
That's alleged. That's a ledge. That's interesting. I mean, it makes sense. Like somebody like that would have those kinds of housing developments all over the country.
00:22:56
My grandparents lived there too. So I lived there in the 70s around the time where this young woman was living there and disappeared.
00:23:05
Her name is Judy Gifford. And she lived there with her brother and another sister.
00:23:11
And the brother is much younger. And she just disappeared one day from Park Merced.
00:23:15
and Park Merced is like, it's a little bit larger than say an apartment complex because there's
00:23:20
parks in there. There's quite a few buildings. There's duplexes. So my grandparents lived in a
00:23:25
duplex there. And it's the kind of place where you would be in an apartment and some other girls
00:23:32
would come over to your apartment and you would braid ribbon into barrettes. I get it. It's specific, but I totally get it. Yeah. You know, like it was like,
00:23:42
like when I think about the thyme, I think it just smells like ginate. Oh. You know, the after bass splash,
00:23:49
that's like the yellow kind of liquid. Definitely. Burns so bad. It burns so bad.
00:23:55
It's like, why don't I just throw this like muriatic acid on? to my body that smells a little bit like lemons,
00:24:04
but also like urine. Yeah. I still remember the jingle somehow. Gina Tay. Gina Tay.
00:24:11
It was fast. It was jockey, sort of like you're a fast woman and you're going to splash.
00:24:17
You can't do anything after a bath, but splash this liquid onto your body. I have a giant bottle of it in my bathroom
00:24:24
just out of sheer nostalgia. Love it. I don't want to smell it ever, but I just always thought if I'm an adult woman,
00:24:33
I'm going to have a giant adult-sized bottle of ginette. It's like a two liter. I love it.
00:24:39
Like a display bottle. It's like a display from the May Company or Blooming, whatever, Jay Bullock.
00:24:49
But so this was like, this all kind of happened near Stonestown too, which is the mall that I grew up next to.
00:24:56
Did you go to Stonestown? with... I lived in the sunset, actually. Okay. So I totally, I used to also go, I mean,
00:25:02
this is in the early 2000s, but that whole area is really familiar to me. Yeah. Well,
00:25:07
this is also the same area where the Pans in 1984 were attacked by Richard Ramirez when the
00:25:15
Night Stalker came to San Francisco. Yeah. Right. So, and he had murdered Peter Pan,
00:25:20
the older Thai man, and then, this entire Chinese man, and then injured the wife.
00:25:26
And so this whole thing happened in 1976. So through this sort of idea of like murder squad
00:25:34
and this idea that we can solve these crimes, you know, this guy, William Shin, filed a missing report in 2017
00:25:39
and they took the DNA from his aunt, who's probably the closest match. And they also looked at photographs of her
00:25:49
and she had been found with a owl pendant in her pocket. and in one of the photos of her,
00:25:56
she was wearing the owl pendant. So they made a match. And so in 2017, she was actually identified as Judy Gifford.
00:26:04
So she's no longer a doe and now they're trying to figure out what happened to unearth the murderer.
00:26:10
She had apparently been strangled and left there in this very shallow grave by Lake Merced.
00:26:16
And, you know, it's one of those things where we have this technology now where we can figure out so much of these things.
00:26:24
And it's as simple as like looking into DNA. And, but it's really the consciousness.
00:26:29
And I really think that Billy and Paul and all the stuff they do on the Murder Squad
00:26:33
and the idea that we can have some closure with our own ability to look to what's happened,
00:26:41
to ask questions and to find out. I agree. I think it's a, people always want to talk about
00:26:46
the kind of downside of like citizen detectives where it's like, oh, people can mislead or lead people to the wrong person, which is absolutely
00:26:56
true. And people have to be very careful about that of like, who they're accusing or whose name
00:27:01
they're bringing up. But the thing that they should absolutely be talking about and focusing
00:27:05
on is what a beautiful thing it is, that there are all these people who have the focus and the
00:27:11
interest and the ability to do like digital searches to get into like libraries or say
00:27:17
they're stuck at home or that's where they already work and they want to do this. And they're just
00:27:22
basically going to, you know, in their free time, help people get some closure or solve some cases.
00:27:28
I think it's, I think it's amazing. Yeah. And it works. I mean, there's people that do it. Yeah.
00:27:33
Yeah. And even just bringing like what Billy and Paul do and what you're doing right now is
00:27:37
bringing the attention of the public back to these cases that are solvable, that aren't getting enough
00:27:44
attention, you know, that people don't know about. And that alone, you know, will maybe give like
00:27:51
this, like the Golden State Killer case will give some more traction to the attempt to solve that
00:27:56
case. Right. I mean, I think that the Golden State Killer, I mean, Joseph D'Angelo would not have been
00:28:02
found without people like what Michelle was doing with what Paul, of course, was doing. And, you
00:28:10
There's so much that we can have, even if we're not law enforcement, we can still have a say in
00:28:18
how these cases are treated, how they're looked at, how we can revisit them with the technology
00:28:24
that we have now, with what we know now. It's possible. So this is my hometown that I want to
00:28:30
talk about in the comedy world. So this was probably 1985. And I had just gotten that,
00:28:37
I don't know if you ever drove in that giant car, the Buick, the big Buick LeSabre that I had.
00:28:42
So I just learned to drive. And I was going to the Holy City Zoo. And this was like when I first started comedy.
00:28:48
And I was still like living at home. And I was still in high school kind of. But I was driving this giant boat of a car.
00:28:55
And I was really scared to drive it. But I was like, oh, well, I'm a comedian. So I can, I'm going to drive.
00:29:01
And I was driving home on like a it was like a Tuesday or Wednesday night It was like one of those Lank and Earl like comedy nights I was probably like 16 or 17 years old And I remember I was wearing this is so weird
00:29:13
but I was wearing an off-the-shoulder, like, thing with, like, an elastic in the neckline.
00:29:19
I would never, also Karen knows I would never wear anything like that, but for some reason,
00:29:24
I was wearing, like a St. Pauli girl, like a bodice sort of St. Pauli girl. It's just, I would never,
00:29:30
but, I mean, Karen knows I would never, but I did that night for some reason. And I was driving and I drove home
00:29:36
and it was like one in the morning on like a weekday night. And there was a tow truck following me.
00:29:43
And I parked and the tow truck pulled up next to my car and he was like, roll down the window,
00:29:50
roll down the window. And I was like, what? And I rolled down the window. He goes, hey, you hit a woman back there
00:29:55
and you really messed up her car and she's really upset. and I think she's going to call the police.
00:30:03
So I have to go back there. You're going to have to come back with me and make a report.
00:30:09
And I was like, I don't know. And he's like, get out of your car. And so I got out of the car and I'm standing on the street and talking to him.
00:30:16
And he goes, yeah, you know, and he was this huge man. Like, I think like, I'm probably blowing it up in my imagination,
00:30:25
but he was like this giant mountain of a man. He was bald, but he had kind of a dark sort of beard growth.
00:30:33
And he had just, I can't even describe it, but he was like that kind of very tall, very large person.
00:30:42
He just looked so menacing and scary, but he was talking really quietly to me. Like, look, I understand.
00:30:50
I know it's scary, but you're going to have to get back to this accident scene. And, you know, you probably just started driving.
00:30:58
And it was true. Like, I had just started driving. I wouldn't have known if I hit somebody.
00:31:03
Yeah. Because I was just, it's a huge, giant car that got six miles to the gallon.
00:31:10
And I was driving at night by myself, which was, like, really scary. And it was one of those cars that had an eight-track player converter.
00:31:19
So it came with an 8-track player, but I had put in one of those things that converted
00:31:24
so I could play regular cassettes on it. Yeah. And so I was just scared. And I almost got in the car with him,
00:31:34
and I looked in his eyes, and then his eyes just flickered like it looked like he looked to the door
00:31:42
and then looked back at me. And in that, I knew he's lying. so i just started running and he floored it and he was out of there so fast and i always think
00:31:58
about that like oh my god i wonder who that was and i wonder what that was like what because i
00:32:05
would have i almost got in the car with him yeah and i yeah i was so scared because any car with
00:32:12
lights on top is an authority figure. To me, like in a tow truck, even though it's not a police car,
00:32:20
there's still something about like, oh, they're here in case of an accident. They're here for that.
00:32:26
So I need to believe this person. Right. And he's somehow like almost he's an ex,
00:32:32
a quote unquote expert because he's a tow truck driver. Like I know accidents. I know what happened.
00:32:36
I was called. That's actually, what a scam. What a story. Because he's saying, the other lady called me.
00:32:46
I'm here almost on behalf of her. You have to do the right thing and get into my...
00:32:51
I mean, that is like, if you were 17... Oh, wait, you said you were 17. Yeah. He was, I think, preying on that idea that you weren't old enough to go,
00:33:04
hey, go fuck yourself. Hey, weirdo, go fuck yourself. It was like, you're basically right in that thing of you can't get in trouble.
00:33:11
What if your dad's insurance goes up? Like all those things you think of that are not priorities when you're older.
00:33:17
But when you're a teenager, you're like, oh, my God, I'm, quote unquote, in trouble.
00:33:23
I have to now go, quote unquote, do the right thing. Right. Yeah. And he's like, I'm going to help you.
00:33:29
Yeah. I'm here for you, which is so manipulative, especially. So scary. I'm just, I'm in awe that you turned and ran,
00:33:37
which is such a, it goes against, I think as a 17 year old, the thing of like, be polite to authority figures
00:33:45
that you had the wherewithal to do that is so impressive to me. Yeah. It's really, I mean, I'm surprised at that.
00:33:53
Cause like, I'm like, I can't believe that I knew that that meant untrue. That if you like are looking at me
00:33:59
and then you like kind of just avert your eyes for a second and look back, like it looked like he was like,
00:34:05
oh, she bought it. She bought it. Yeah. That sort of like, oh, she believes me. That kind of thing of like not believing
00:34:11
that I got away with it I getting away with it That thing So it like really about listening to intuition And it also like I really get that from your book the whole fuck politeness thing
00:34:25
of, you know, kind of being in that situation of like, it just feels weird. Just go with
00:34:30
your feelings as opposed to being worried about their feelings. It's incredible. It's like, you know, you can trust your intuition. And it was more than that
00:34:41
eye thing for you. It was like that told you something so deep in, in everything you've learned
00:34:47
up until that point that you just fucking knew. And I'm just like, I mean, who knows what would
00:34:54
happen? That's so lucky. It's so lucky. And it's so, um, it's so important to, you know, really
00:35:01
fuck politeness. Don't let anybody kind of like make you feel like you have to do something because
00:35:07
you have to be polite or any of that. Like we're socialized so much to squelch our own emotions and
00:35:14
feelings and intuition and to push that down. But really it serves us so much better if we listen to
00:35:19
it. Also, I think that idea of somebody saying this just happened, you know, for a fact it didn't
00:35:25
happen. Right. Suddenly he's saying it did happen. And I think whether women have this habit or
00:35:31
whether it's just people, it's a psychology thing with all humans, but it's that thing of, wait,
00:35:36
did it happen? Like when you know for a fact, it like you hit a car, you would have known.
00:35:42
Yeah. Like, yeah, I understand it's a big car or whatever, but it's like, but then he,
00:35:46
his ability, his tow truck, all those things. It's like the argument suddenly is like, you have
00:35:51
no one to sit there going, what? No, no, you didn't hit a car. Like tell this guy to fuck off.
00:35:56
There's no one on your side. So you had to be on your side. And that's, it's that kind of thing
00:36:01
where like you were waiting and waiting and then you took like, it's almost like the mask dropped for him
00:36:07
and his whole act of I'm the kindly man that's going to help you do the right thing.
00:36:11
Then it's just like, like you were smart enough to see it, interpret it and then actually move.
00:36:20
Yeah, it's really, it's really crazy. I mean, but I think about that moment and I think about how scary that was.
00:36:26
And I wonder like, I wonder who that guy was and I wonder if he did. I mean, I'm sure that he's done it again.
00:36:32
And I'm sure if he ended up doing more and doing whatever he did, but there's so many things that we don't know about people,
00:36:41
that we don't know who's doing what and what happened. And so there's scary people out there.
00:36:48
There is. And also that thing of he's asking you to trust him just kind of sight unseen.
00:36:53
The answer's no. It's just like the answer's no. Unless the lady comes around the corner,
00:36:59
unless you can show me a picture, like, unless you're a cop, unless even then, like, the answer
00:37:05
is no, right? It's, that is absolutely a boundary you can hold for yourself, no matter who, if you're
00:37:11
by yourself, like, right, you get you get to say no until, until they, you know, all of the sheriffs
00:37:18
come and take you out of your house or something. But it's like, but get in trouble. Yeah. Get in
00:37:23
trouble instead of getting into a car for sure for sure but that that's um yeah that was the world
00:37:29
of the scary coming home from the holy city zoo um doing comedy in the 80s i can't believe you
00:37:36
started comedy so young that's incredible too i mean yeah yeah we did well uh karen was still
00:37:42
she was doing comedy you were doing comedy really like what do you think your first sets were mine
00:37:48
were like in 84, 85. And then I, mine was, yeah, I was 90. I was 20 and I was in Sacramento. It was
00:37:58
on the younger side. Like I, I had to go to a club that let me get in even though I didn't have ID,
00:38:04
but, um, yeah. But by the time I got to San Francisco, I had turned 21 and, and I was like,
00:38:10
let's go to the piano bar. I'm in the drink. Oh, we're going to go to square. It was called square,
00:38:15
wasn't it? Yeah. The square was above the improv and then the piano bar was across the street.
00:38:21
So the wine, the wine bar was the wine bar. And, um, but, uh, we, we, yeah, we'd go up there and
00:38:29
drink and then, um, we would just laugh and make fun of people. And, um, and Dave Messmer was there.
00:38:36
And, uh, then we, we just like, we had so much energy. There was so much going on all day too.
00:38:42
We go to Nordstrom during the day and get our eyebrows plucked by... Oh, God, what was her name?
00:38:49
She really fucked up my eyebrows forever. Who was it? She plucked your eyebrows, too.
00:38:55
It was... Who? Christy? No, Christy did our makeup as well, but it was Greg's girlfriend.
00:39:04
Oh, the blonde? Yeah, what was her name? I can't remember. But she... She plucked her eyebrows.
00:39:10
She really fucked up our... I mean, I'm still paying. I know. I'm still... They don't come back.
00:39:15
They really don't come back. The 90s. I watched a TikTok where somebody actually did a 90s...
00:39:20
Like the one where Drew Barrymore was in Playboy and a guest model and she did her eyebrows with sort of like almost like a half brow Yep Yes And she did it like for real
00:39:32
She shaved off half her eyebrow to do it. And I was like, oh, God. No. It's the one where you have one eyebrow across the whole top.
00:39:40
Just one hair going across. It's basically like Clara Bow. Right. It was absolutely connected to being on white drugs for sure.
00:39:50
because it was like, that's the thing that kept me in that mirror. Like, I gotta pluck some more.
00:39:55
Well, somehow it only looked good on Drew Barrymore. Like it didn't look good on anyone else.
00:40:00
And yet we all tried. We did. I mean, but yeah, it was like, I think I went to Nordstrom
00:40:05
and somebody really went to town on the browse. It wasn't even my doing. It was somebody else.
00:40:10
I just remember going to Nordstrom and I wonder if you came with us because my mom had a Nordstrom charge card
00:40:16
that we didn't have the cards themselves, but our names were on the account. so and she was always like if you need a nice skirt like that's how she wanted us to use it
00:40:24
but what we do is go up to the Nordstrom restaurant and just drink beer and eat like
00:40:31
disco fries and then my mom would be like I saw that you were drinking beer at Nordstrom's again
00:40:36
because she would get the bill and I'd be like sorry sorry Nordstrom had beer I love that because
00:40:42
it was the fancy new one on Market Street down, you know, downtown. Union Square, right? It was
00:40:49
like in that mall. Yes. Yeah. Kind of across from like across the street from Union Square.
00:40:54
And so they had the Nordstrom was insane. It was like beautiful, fancy. And then at the very top
00:40:59
floor, there was like a it was like the first gastropub kind of thing. So it was like, right.
00:41:05
Sierra Nevada on top. Is this boring? Are we being boring? I'm fascinated by this.
00:41:11
It's fascinating. Do you remember? Abby worked at the, I think it was like the Italian coffee bar
00:41:17
at the Nordstrom on the bottom at the men's store. Oh yeah, like in the kiosk? Yeah.
00:41:21
Mm-hmm. Yeah. We were all over. We were all over that UU square. Oh, you want to do some plugs for the end?
00:41:29
Yes. Because you're going to be at, remember the DC Improv? Oh, we had so much fun.
00:41:34
I know. We played there with Mike Birbiglia. Yes, we're big. in the mid-90s. He's so great.
00:41:42
He's so great. But yeah, we did. We did such great shows there. And yeah, so many fun things.
00:41:49
But yeah, I'll be back there, I think in January sometime. I'm doing a bunch of shows
00:41:52
all over the place. January 7th and 8th, you'll be at the DCA Club. Yes, yes. So come on, come on.
00:41:59
Go to margaretshow.com slash tour. Thank you, yes. Please go. On the road. Yes. No better live show than Margaret Cho.
00:42:07
Amazing. Yay, thank you so much. That was great. Thank you so much, Margaret. Thank you.
00:42:11
Well, I'm an avid listener. And so I don't know why I haven't come to a live show yet,
00:42:15
but I still need to. So I'm looking forward to that. Yay, thank you so much. Thank you.
00:42:20
Thank you. It was great. Thank you. Bye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? Ah. This has been an Exactly Right production.
00:42:35
Our producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton. Our associate producer is Alejandra Keck. Engineered and mixed by Andrew Eapin.
00:42:42
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