Martha Beck:
Do you ever lie awake, burning with embarrassment about your most awkward moments?

Rowan Mangan:
In today’s episode of Bewildered, we are going to talk about how those awful, awkward moments—when your child pulled your pants down in front of the babysitter—could actually be the moments that give us access to personal and maybe even global revolution.

Martha Beck:
Come figure out how those two go together.

Rowan Mangan:
See you on the other side.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I am Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Oh me. Well, an incident occurred in a friend’s apartment recently.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
And it made me question my judgment and what’s become of my, well, my mind, to be frank. Because here’s what happened. We were going out to dinner, and I have to take medication at very specific times of day to cope with my MCAS, if nothing else. Anybody else out there an MCAS sufferer?

Rowan Mangan:
They are, but they don’t it yet because it’s something that’s just—

Martha Beck:
Yeah, nobody knows. It’s hard to diagnose. Anyway, so I carefully tucked away a couple of these little pills I was supposed to take, which aren’t really familiar to me. I just started.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, when you say “tucked away,” it really makes it sound like you’re doing illicit drugs. “I just tucked them away.”

Martha Beck:
I was wearing pants that had fake pockets. You know sometimes on women’s pants—this is part of misogyny—they put what appears to be a pocket, but it never really is.

Rowan Mangan:
No, that’s right.

Martha Beck:
It’s like just a tiny little slub of fabric that could be—

Rowan Mangan:
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making fake pockets on pants.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. That’s true. Wears ’em all the time. So there was this tiny pocket around my hip area where I could’ve stuffed a couple of pills, and I could just poke my butt and see, oh, they’re there. I could take them at the appointed time. I just have to remember. I’m putting a little reminder on my watch so I’ll take them during dinner.

Rowan Mangan:
Just randomly poking your own butt at various times to make sure they’re still there.

Martha Beck:
It’s what I do best. So—as you well know. So then I went in to do my prophylactic pee before we went to the restaurant. You always gotta do the prophylactic pee.

Rowan Mangan:
You really must stop saying that because I know that, I know that it’s okay.

Martha Beck:
It’s preventative peeing is what it means.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I know, but it just sounds like you’re peeing into a condom.

Martha Beck:
Well who says I’m not?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, this has already gone weird.

Martha Beck:
I know. I know. I have problems to deal with, and that’s why we’re here. So anyway, I do my pee and I come out, and then one of the people in the apartment was going in to do her own. You know, we do these things. We pee in preparation for everything. Everybody knows that peeing is the most sacred act of preparation.

Rowan Mangan:
None of that is the problem. Just stop using the word “prophylactic.” Please.

Martha Beck:
You just did. You did.

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m not weird. They’re weird.”

Martha Beck:
So the next person in line was going into the bathroom and she said, “Oh, a pill.” And she reached down and she plucked a pill from the bathroom floor. And I thought, oh, when I pulled down my pants, the little slub pocket spewed out its contents, and now my pill is on the floor. I was like, you know, this is getting nerve wracking. I’m not going to do this right. I should just take it right now. So I said, “Oh, let me see it.” And she handed it over and it didn’t look familiar. That’s on one hand, but on the other hand, it was sort of wet and soggy. So I thought, “Oh, it’s lost its little outer coating.” So this is a pill with which I’m not familiar. So I thought, “Okay, my pill is dissolving. I have to take it now.” So I just took it. And then I checked my hip pocket and guess what was there? All my medication!

Rowan Mangan:
Obviously.

Martha Beck:
So now, this is what I’m trying to figure out: Why I would just take a limp, soggy pill…

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
…from someone else’s bathroom floor without even, I didn’t even vomit or anything. I was just like, “Here we go!” God knows what kind of evening I might’ve had. By the way—

Rowan Mangan:
There’s so many things wrong with you.

Martha Beck:
I know! I was considered once to be a person of some intellectual capacity, and it’s gone. And now I’m just sucking pills off floors. But not like an addict, just like an idiot.

Rowan Mangan:
I just love—and the way you told me this story, I enjoyed the way you played it out for our listeners, but when you told me this story, you were like, “So I found a pill on our friend’s floor and I took it.” I was just like, what is going on in your mind that you would just take? Like at least poke your own bottom first and see if you’re missing one? And I love that you were like, okay, so somehow you’ve pulled down your pants, the fake pocket, it fell out, by the way, that was a stupid system, then, so it’s fallen out. It’s somehow gotten wet enough on the floor—

Martha Beck:
I figured I’d splashed a little when I washed my hands.

Rowan Mangan:
Eww!

Martha Beck:
I know, it’s not good! It’s not like I’ve figured it out, Ro, I’m trying to figure it out. That’s why I’m on this podcast. I am trying to figure it out. So then, here’s what was even worse. I had to ‘fess up to the friends: “What pills do you have, just sort of lying on the floor for fairly long periods of time?”

Rowan Mangan:
“What’s the name of the pills you keep on the bathroom floor?”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, “So what are you on?” And it was a best-case scenario from then on because what it turned out, at least this is what she told me, I’ve never heard of it before, and maybe I should have interrogated further before just accepting it. She said, “Oh, that was a toothpaste pill.” And I did notice it was a little minty.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, I’m speechless. Completely speechless.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It just gave me pause because the next time I see a random pill on someone else’s bathroom floor, am I just going to be down there like an anteater just sucking it into my face? What’s gone wrong with me?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, Marty.

Martha Beck:
I know.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Okay, I shouldn’t go anywhere without a handler.

Rowan Mangan:
You shouldn’t go anywhere. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. That wouldn’t have happened.

Martha Beck:
Okay, what’re you trying to figure out? Let’s take some of the pressure off me so that I’m not the only person trying to figure it out. What are you trying to figure out, Roey Jo?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I had this whole thing prepared that was about the time that I found you Googling people who have hair all over their body.

Martha Beck:
But that’s fascinating.

Rowan Mangan:
Which is still funny.

Martha Beck:
That does not need figuring out. There are people with hair all over their bodies. Mic drop, mind blown. Just Google.

Rowan Mangan:
And it wasn’t her first time Googling it.

Martha Beck:
Not by any means, nor will it be the last.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s funny when you say it, but you have to imagine seeing “people who have…” like just typed out in Google with no— “people who have hair all over their bodies.”

Martha Beck:
Well, okay, first of all, of us have hair all over our bodies, pretty much. So we all fit into that. And the other thing is they’re beautiful, lovely human beings who deserve our respect, our attention, our compassion. And how could I not be invested in their cause?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m crying.

Martha Beck:
No. And seriously, we are not poking fun at people who have this genetic aberration.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m only laughing at you, babe.

Martha Beck:
There’s an old village—Okay, good. Good.

Rowan Mangan:
I was just wondering if maybe there was something in the pill that raised your curiosity.

Martha Beck:
That made me grow hair all over my body.

Rowan Mangan:
No, just made you more curious about it. Anyway, that’s not what I’m trying to figure out as it turns out. Because even though I’m literally crying with laughter, remembering that. What I’m trying to figure out—

Martha Beck:
We should just publish my Google list because that was one of the least interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
There is a thing that you once Googled and it was in no way sexual at all. But I will never be able to say it on the podcast because it would embarrass you so much and require too much backstory. But let me just say, finding “people who have all over their body” in someone’s Google search list is not, definitely not the weirdest, but hey, I’m about to embarrass myself. So listen, here’s what I’m actually trying to figure out.

Martha Beck:
Please, please.

Rowan Mangan:
I have a situation that happens to me regularly that you don’t know about.

Martha Beck:
Oh?

Rowan Mangan:
But it hasn’t happened before just when we’re about to make a podcast and today that has happened and what it is is that I’ve got a really great system going where I get these vitamins that I call my “eaty vitamins.” They’re not pills, such as you might find on a friend’s bathroom floor and immediately ingest.

Martha Beck:
What could it hurt?

Rowan Mangan:
Rather, they are little chunks of food that come in a bag. And it’s easier for your body to absorb nutrients when it’s in food than when it’s in a capsule form. Especially—

Martha Beck:
But do these say, by any chance, do these say “Dorito” on the package? Because I do find it easier to access vitamins when they are in these little packs of food as you say.

Rowan Mangan:
I know for a fact that when you take your handfuls of supplements that you take every day, you are saying in your head, “M and Ms, M and Ms, M and Ms.”

Martha Beck:
I have MCAS. I get to take all the supplements I want. And I don’t chew. Anyway, go on. Keep talking about, I could probably eat almost anything without chewing now, given the number of supplements I have to take.

Rowan Mangan:
M and Ms, M and Ms, M and Ms.

Martha Beck:
What happened to you with your eaty vitamins?

Rowan Mangan:
So then when I’m up in my room getting ready to go on a podcast, thinking about the podcast, getting in the mood for the podcast, I get hungry sometimes. Hey, I’m only human, all right?

Martha Beck:
It happens.

Rowan Mangan:
It happens. It happens to the best of us. I get hungry and this is where the brilliant system comes in. Then I think, “Oh, I know what I’ve got to eat, my little chunks of nutrients in my little bag.”

Martha Beck:
That should be on a menu item. It’s so sad. You don’t own a fast food restaurant.

Rowan Mangan:
Well I do. It’s called my top drawer with my little eaty vitamins in it.

Martha Beck:
Little chunks of food is, I think, the most beautiful name for a restaurant that I’ve ever heard.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so what you don’t know about, well you actually do know because you like my chunks of food. But is that one of the most important things that we can get in our lives is turmeric. Our bodies need turmeric.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
We need turmeric.

Martha Beck:
Why?

Rowan Mangan:
It’s an anti-inflammatory.

Martha Beck:
I know, but how many people have access to that ‘round the world? Why would that evolve as an issue?

Rowan Mangan:
Dude, the spice corridor thing. Turmeric, we all have turmeric.

Martha Beck:
But is it like a flower or bark?

Rowan Mangan:
Do you not know what turmeric is? It’s a spice.

Martha Beck:
I know it’s a spice. It turns everything yellow. But what is it? Is it a pill you might find on the floor? Or is it bark you might chew off a tree? What?

Rowan Mangan:
It is a spice. It is, oh god, I don’t know what it’s from. No, no, actually I do—it’s a root. It’s like ginger. But anyway, they dry it out.

Martha Beck:
Now you got me.

Rowan Mangan:
They dry it out, they grind it up, and they make it into a powder or a little chunk of food. Little chunk of nutrition right there.

Martha Beck:
Little Chunks of Food: a restaurant.

Rowan Mangan:
And then I ate about four of them. And then I’m also in a great mood. And so I began to sing a lot as I was getting set up, but not like I can’t do what I was doing because as I opened my mouth wide to let out the beautiful notes, I realized that the entirety of my inside mouth is bright orange.

Martha Beck:
Oh! Okay. Come on, come on. Open up. Open up for your mama.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I shall not because it turns out people do actually watch this on YouTube. I didn’t think they did. And then I went there and discovered, “Oh my God, there’s all these people who watch this nonsense.”

Martha Beck:
I know. By the way, your mama is in the house with us. I was not saying, “I’m your mama” because that’s gross.

Rowan Mangan:
What?!

Martha Beck:
I was saying, “You need to show your mama the inside of your mouth if it’s bright orange, only your mama knows what to do about it.”

Rowan Mangan:
What?! I didn’t even hear you say that.

Martha Beck:
I said, “Show Mama your orange mouth.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
And I stand by it. I stand by my statement.

Rowan Mangan:
What was in that pill?

Martha Beck:
Come on.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. We’re both weird. We’re both weirdos. We’ve established that. And actually it’s quite a good segue into today’s topic, which is…

Martha Beck:
Awkward moments.

Rowan Mangan:
Awkward moments. We’ve all had them. Some of us—

Martha Beck:
It’s the most awkwardly spelled word.

Rowan Mangan:
Right now.

Martha Beck:
No other word has a WKW in it.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it’s spelled especially weirdly, when you’ve randomly put a backslash at the beginning before the A. I am not sure what you were going for there.

Martha Beck:
It’s my own special sauce. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Rowan Mangan:
If you are enjoying Bewildered, there are a few ways you can express your support for us. You can subscribe to the pod or follow it depending on your app. It’s a great way to get us in front of more people. And as always, we love a little rate-and-review action, especially when the reviews are kind and the ratings are high, strangely. And finally, if you really want to go to the next level with Bewildered, check out our online community, wildercommunity.com. We’ll see you there.

Martha Beck:
So you had an awkward moment to send us off on this topic, yes?

Rowan Mangan:
Cab Daddy. Cab Daddy. Not so very long ago. Our small child, we’ve got a small child. Don’t know if we endlessly use her as content material for our podcast.

Martha Beck:
She’s all we ever do.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s all we ever do. It’s just our child. So I was in New York with our small child. Oh, child of lesbians, let it be said. Very relatable story for children of lesbians or lesbians with children, I imagine. Get in the car, cab. It’s called Cab Daddy, so we got in a cab. And Lila immediately proclaimed, having learned it from Peppa Pig or whatever show was raising her that week, “Daddy!” to the cab driver, who was like 21 years old and literally looked so terrified like I was about to force him to give me alimony. And his whole face was just like, “Oh no, you are not pinning this one on me. Not this one. No, no. I never with—no, I did not.”

Martha Beck:
Oh God. Did she ask him to take her to the waterpark or anything?

Rowan Mangan:
No, but there was a very tense, very silent, long cab drive uptown.

Martha Beck:
That’s brutal. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So Cab Daddy happened and will always linger in my memory. But thinking about awkward moments, we’re thinking there’s something magical about awkward moments.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, there is. So first we just went to the internet looking at awkward moments because I do Google things that are a little less interesting. This is quite interesting. “Awkward moments.” Google it, it’s great. But then I started remembering all the awkward moments I’ve had and I said, “We should swap back and forth and tell some awkward moment stories.” And it turns out you don’t have any. All you have is stuff from the internet because you have not been resourceful in your creation of awkward moments. That is my standing on this.

Rowan Mangan:
Did I or did I not flash my vagina at our babysitter?

Martha Beck:
It sounds like you’re in the woods or something and you just lift your tail to invite, to say, “I am in estrus.”

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t have a tail.

Martha Beck:
Only I have a tail. But you know, horses and stuff. You know what? Female horses, they do that. They put their tail to one side and it’s called, and I did not make this up, this is literally true. Google it. It’s called winking.

Rowan Mangan:
So they just stick their tail like, “Like what you see?”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. They move, see the boy horse and they move their tails to one out. Or maybe they see the other girl horse.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re like, “I’m not a boy horse. Look at this.”

Martha Beck:
Okay, so I think you’ve explained this on the podcast before, but I think you should refresh people’s memories just in case they think you’re doing this deliberately and even illegally. Were you winking?

Rowan Mangan:
So once upon a time, I slept in when a babysitter was coming. And so when the babysitter came at 9:00AM, I was a little bit frazzled because I’d just gotten up 10 minutes before. I was in my pajamas, I was running around, I was trying to feed our child. I had promised to have her fed by the time I left her with the babysitter. So picture it: I’m in the kitchen. I’ve got a bowl of oatmeal for our daughter. In one hand I’ve got a cup of coffee for myself, very much needed, in the other hand. The babysitter has just walked in the door. Okay, that’s fine. It’s a bit embarrassing to be in your pajamas, but that’s okay. So I am like, “Hi. Hey, how’s it going? We’re just—” And at that point, Lila decided she was going to do one of those things where she pretends to be shy. And so she comes around and she hides behind my legs, kind of coyly and that’s sweet. That’s all right. She’s so coy. And then I start to walk forward. Remember, I’ve got both my hands full of hot stuff, right? And then Lila just stays put, and she’s short, I moved forward, my pajama pants came down, and as I believe I said last time I brought this up on the podcast, I don’t wear undies to bed. All right? So there you have it. If that’s not an awkward moment, I really…

Martha Beck:
And what did she do? The babysitter, I mean?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, we both tried very hard to pretend it hadn’t happened.

Martha Beck:
That’s what you do, don’t you?

Rowan Mangan:
But it did happen, and it happened for a bit longer than it should have because I had to figure out what to do with the two—

Martha Beck:
With the hot stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
I couldn’t just pull them straight back up. They couldn’t go straight back up. No. I was like, “Oh, uhhh…” And then she’s like, “Ohhh…” And Lila was just there going, “Oh, I didn’t know I could do that!” So there was just…

Martha Beck:
Imagine if you’d just grabbed for your pants and thrown a cup of hot coffee all over the babysitter as like a finale to the great moment.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. No, I mean, because I’m picturing the moment and where everyone was relative to each other—it’s burned into my skull—it wouldn’t have worked that way. What I would’ve ended up doing is pouring oatmeal over my own left side and coffee over my own right side and then stood there in that.

Martha Beck:
Well, you’ve done that a lot, as we know.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. You’re right. Oh dear. And I didn’t even know. So actually it’s good. It’s good to tell this story because I, later that day—I’m usually, I’m quite a reserved person, I don’t usually talk like this. But anyway, later that day I was telling everyone I knew about it and my colleagues reacted in a very favorable way to me telling them this story. And I was like, “Oh, interesting that people are really into hearing this incredibly embarrassing story.” And I think that’s when I started to wonder if there’s something more going on when we have our awkward moments, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Ah, interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
Have you ever had an awkward moment?

Martha Beck:
I have. This reminds me of a time—

Rowan Mangan:
Other than when you took the pill off your friend’s floor?

Martha Beck:
Other than when I took that pill, yes. Mine are, I have them by the dozen. But I remember long ago, this is one of the most awkward moments of my whole life. So I had just moved to Phoenix, Arizona, didn’t know a soul there, wanted to become a writer. I was just working on my first memoir, but I’d never been published or finished the book or anything. And I happened, through a series of really fortuitous coincidences, to gather together three other people who wanted to be writers. And we formed a writer’s group.

Rowan Mangan:
Lovely.

Martha Beck:
And we had our very first meeting. Nobody there had met everyone. So it was this very formal, one of the ladies had offered to let us have this at her house. And she had a beautiful deck out on the patio. It was a cool evening. We all sat out there. The crickets were chirping. It was very idyllic. And we were reading each other’s pages and eating a lot of nachos and bean dip, which if you would know, is a way to get vitamins into your body without taking a pill.

Rowan Mangan:
Interesting. What a great system.

Martha Beck:
Little chunks of food. Little chunks of food. We were munching and munching. And the bean dip was wonderful. And you know how beans do.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, do I ever.

Martha Beck:
The musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot. Well, I was okay because my paranoia about farting—

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so extreme.

Martha Beck:
I’ll just say it, I’ll use the clinical term—flatulence—is so extreme that my entire digestive system had tied itself into a tight double knot, which took years to untangle. So I was okay, a little bit puffy, but okay. And then, we’re reading this woman’s very, very heartfelt novel, and things were really silent. And I think, I don’t know because I never spoke to her about it, but one of the other ladies, very classy, very wealthy lady, I think she had so much bean dip going on in there and the pressure had become intolerable. And I think that she took a calculated risk. I think she decided I’m going to let it out slowly and silently. We’re outside.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ve all been there.

Martha Beck:
No one will ever expect it. It’s going to be slow and silent, just a little at a time.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll feel better. No one will know. It’s fine.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. That’s right. And maybe this has happened to you too. You think you’re going to do a strategic silent fart.

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely.

Martha Beck:
But it just so happens that the physics of your rump, your chair, your clothes—

Rowan Mangan:
Did you just say the “physics of your rump”?

Martha Beck:
Rumps have physics. Everything has physics. But they are so arranged that you basically have a musical instrument down there. And it was loud. It was very loud and it went on a long time.

Rowan Mangan:
But believe it or not, that’s not the most awkward part of this story because Marty has this way to make everything weirder.

Martha Beck:
But that is not, yeah, that’s not the embarrassing part. The other two women just held form, just kept reading the pages. “Hm, yes, I see. Let me adjust my reading glasses.” But I reacted. I thought it was an animal that had come, like a coyote or something. I didn’t know what would make that call. So what I did was to sit up right as it began and just look wildly around, “What is that? What is that?” And it just went on and I went on.

Rowan Mangan:
And was there a point where you realized what was happening and it was still ongoing?

Martha Beck:
Yes. And then I just froze, eyes wide, in my chair as if I’d seen some sort of, I was in a rictus of horror at what I had done. There was no going back. Right? What was I supposed to say? So I just—so it was, “What is it?” The fart was still going.

Rowan Mangan:
I love the idea of your wide eyes, like just, “What is happening?”

Martha Beck:
What have I done? We never spoke of it again.

Rowan Mangan:
Of course not.

Martha Beck:
We never spoke of it again.

Rowan Mangan:
Quite rightly.

Martha Beck:
So yeah, that was an awkward one for me. But as we were talking about our awkward moments and you looked on the internet, internet, internet for a few fabulous ones.

Rowan Mangan:
We had this memory of seeing a Buzzfeed collection of tweets about awkward moments. And so we tried to dig them up because I mean already I have cried with laughter twice since we started doing this.

Martha Beck:
And you’re a sad woman.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m a very amused woman, for your information. And so anyway, we pulled some of these up because it’s fun, right? It’s fun.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And we do have a point, we have a nugget of truth that came into our brains as a result of this topic. So it’s fun.

Rowan Mangan:
Boy, we’re stringing you along for a while before we get to it. I’m gonna, hmm, I have two to choose between. What do you think?

Martha Beck:
I definitely think it’s the library one.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so this one, this is an old, I think this is actually, believe it or not, from Tumblr, based on the font and the general sort of look of it, and I’d like to give attribution to Ghost-Plot. And this is what it says: “I had to go to a library to pay a fee. And I was practicing in the car between, ‘I have to pay a fine’ and ‘I have to pay a fee.’ And I walked in and firmly stated, ‘I have to pee,’ and slapped a five-dollar bill on the counter—ahe fee was like 10 cents—and walked out. This was like three years ago and I still haven’t been back.”

Martha Beck:
And see that’s the thing is there’s that, once that’s happened, there is avoidance, right? So it separates, it probably tears families apart: awkward moments that no one can talk about. But then I remembered another really awkward moment and it turned out a little differently. So I’m going to tell them about it. Can I tell them about it?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, please do.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So at the time I was married to a dude and he was a business school professor, and I was a sociologist, and there’s an overlap there. So he was teaching this class of business school students. Now you have to picture: Business school classes in a lot of universities are shaped as amphitheaters. So you go in at the ground level and it goes down, especially because it was in Arizona and everything’s underground to try to be cool. I mean literally, physically cool.

Rowan Mangan:
“Wow, that’s really cool.”

Martha Beck:
There are a hundred chairs kind of in a semicircle going down like a funnel. And the teacher is at the bottom of the funnel at a lectern and there’s a blackboard behind you. And there were 92 students arrayed in this room. So I had this clever thing I was going to do to start because he wasn’t even coming in. I was starting, and his name was Beck. I took his name when I got married and kept it because it’s a great beer. But I walked in early, had my little business suit on, the students came in, they filed in, they’re looking for the professor. I finally stand up and they’re all quiet. And I said, “You’re probably waiting for Dr. Beck and I have to tell you I am Dr. Beck. This is how I dress sometimes.” And there are some—and then I was like, “Ha ha, no, I’m actually married to the Dr. Beck you’re expecting.” I was being, oh so cute. And then I said, “Here you’ll find some differences between him and me.” That, by the way, is the grammatical way to say it, not between he and I, between him and me, just learn it. Okay. So I said, “I am more in the sociology thing. I tend to be, I remember people’s names, whatever.” And I said, “I think you’ll find I’m less pushy than he can be.” But what I actually said was, “I think you’ll find I’m less pussy than he can be.” And I said it clearly, there was no mistaking what I had said. And the silence was deadly.

Rowan Mangan:
Golden.

Martha Beck:
So what I did was I closed my briefcase that I had there on the lectern. Without saying a word, I packed up and I walked up the steps between all the students and out of the room and just let the door shut behind me.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s awesome.

Martha Beck:
And then I waited for about 30 seconds and then I came back in and I said, “Okay, so now you know how badly I can screw up. I’m sure you just want to learn everything about business from me.” And what it did was form this bond between me and the students because something about my own reaction was I had taken it on but without shame, so it created this bond. And from then on, they were my favorite people in the world, and we had a wonderful time.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, so there’s this kind of theory that Marty and I are working on that embarrassing moments like that or awkward moments are magical, that they can be a hack, a portal, if you will, to connection between people because you are breaking the rules of the culture in that moment. And so either you can go back to, you can do what I and the babysitter, with my pants around my ankles, did and went, “That never happened. Let us continue.” Which was understandable.

Martha Beck:
That’s a way.

Rowan Mangan:
Or you can do what Marty did by turning the comedy of the moment overt and bringing everyone into breaking the rules of the culture, and humor is amazing like that. And so when you’ve got that intimacy or that potential for intimacy, that comes with the taboo thing—

Martha Beck:
Yes, you’ve broken the taboo.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, so we can use those moments if we see them as portals. And then when we next find ourselves in one, what if we could use them just when it might seem most dangerous? What if we own our embarrassment and the truth of the awkwardness? And what if that gives us immense power?

Martha Beck:
Power!

Rowan Mangan:
What then?

Martha Beck:
It’s so interesting because I love the whole Chinese philosophy thing that whatever yields, whatever gives up its rigidity is what wins a contest.

Rowan Mangan:
I was totally going to Chinese philosophy as well with that.

Martha Beck:
The ego is—of course, you always do—the ego is very rigid, and in the moment you accept that you have been embarrassed that a part of your ego liquefies and sloughs off, you can’t hang onto it. You can’t get your dignity back. You have to give up ego or try to hold onto it by the cultural norm of pretending nothing happened.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And I think when one person is embarrassed, I think for most of us, if we’re the students in the amphitheater, in your example, what we’re experiencing most is embarrassment because we’re so tuned in to you, we’re an empathetic species or whatever. And so you are smashing through the egoic structure with culture by—go on.

Martha Beck:
No, no, I love it.

Rowan Mangan:
Please, after you.

Martha Beck:
Well I love what you said about the people who are watching and are embarrassed as well. It’s not just you. I was not the one farting at that thing. I was watching, but I was extremely embarrassed. But also other people weren’t looking wildly around for bears. But I read a study once where they wanted to study blushing. They wanted to make people blush for this study. And so they had to embarrass them and the way they did it, they wouldn’t humiliate anyone. So they hired these college students to come in and they were people who did, who were not trained singers. And they would put a student who’d been paid like $10 for this into a room, and then in a room that was separated by a one-way glass, they would put the subject that they were looking at and try to make ’em blush. And the thing they did to make the subject blush was they forced the student that they’d hired to sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” which is almost impossible to sing. I mean that’s why they throw it out at the Olympic event, or not the Olympics, but at sporting events.

Rowan Mangan:
For people who— America’s not the center of their universe—”The Star Spangled Banner” is the national anthem of this country.

Martha Beck:
Of the United States, yes. And it’s very hard to sing. It has tremendous range. It was originally a melody that came from a drinking song. You have to be very drunk or very loose to sing it. And nobody remembers the words because they’re weird. So these students would start singing and they would just flub it so horribly and they would get embarrassed. And the person watching them almost could not bear it.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
They would get so shame-bound and embarrassed, and they would blush, like forest fire would start from the necks and go up to their heads. And it was because—maybe it is the mirror neurons you’re talking about and the empathy, how we all, when someone is being embarrassed or humiliated, we all sort of feel it. And then a few years later after I read this study, I saw Eddie Izzard, who’s a wonderful, wonderful comedian, pronouns she/her. And at the time she was doing a comedy act. And part of it was there’s no way to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Just give up on trying to make it sound good or to remember the words which are completely impossible to remember. So Eddie said, “You really get into it, and you always either confirm or deny. So you bring your face up and sing, ‘Rah rah, rah,’ and then you sweep your arm down in defiance. You just make it really big. If you’re going to flub something, own it!” And that’s the same principle.

Rowan Mangan:
I’d love to try that, but the entirety of the inside of my mouth is bright orange, so I can’t even try it.

Martha Beck:
From watching me sing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Yeah, Ro blushes in her mouth.

Rowan Mangan:
I blush orange, bright orange in my mouth. It’s just this weird thing.

Martha Beck:
Wouldn’t that be cool if someone their tongue turned green or something when they were embarrassed?

Rowan Mangan:
Mmm. Maybe. Let’s take that one offline.

Martha Beck:
I would Google that.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
Anyway. Back to our topic.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So many things that are going on, you bring the other person or people into your embarrassing moment by laughing at yourself.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And that’s very countercultural.

Rowan Mangan:
And then that releases the humor, the acknowledgement that the taboo thing happened is the opening of humor and intimacy and release. It’s cathartic, actually, isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a catharsis, laughing at embarrassing moments.

Martha Beck:
I think it really is because everybody’s holding a sort of rigid mask for the culture and we’re trying to hold our egos up and present well. And then when we see someone embarrassed, we get into that excruciating place. And when that person seems at ease and to be enjoying it, it is a catharsis because we’re all afraid of doing something stupid, of doing something that is deemed clumsy, like taking a pill off somebody’s bathroom floor.

Rowan Mangan:
Something like that, yeah. For instance.

Martha Beck:
And so everybody’s always got a little bit of fear of being mocked and humiliated. And when that becomes a possibility and the person at the center of it is relaxed and willing to let go of ego, everybody’s true selves, true nature, can relax with that. And everybody sees, “Oh, I can let go of that cultural mask. I can let go of that rigid ego in this room with these people.” And it starts to forge a bond.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So what if in these embarrassing moments—we’re standing there, the pants get pulled down, you say “pussy” in front of a whole bunch of business students, whatever it is.

Martha Beck:
At the same time, at the same. “This is a lecture, I would use a drawing, but I would rather model it.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s weird that both these things have to do with pussy. Anyway, so when you have your embarrassing moment, two doors appear before you, let us say, metaphorically: Tragedy is one and comedy is the other. Now there is a school of, I dunno, story theory or something that says that basically what determines a story is someone who wants something, right? That’s what drives a story. And what has to happen at the climax of the story is that the person is presented with the choice to either get what they want by giving up a crucial sense of who they are, their ego, and getting what they’ve always wanted. Or they choose to hold onto their self-image, and that’s what forms a tragedy if they can’t allow themselves to shed the skin and move into their own dream. And so if the hero won’t give up his or her ego, it can be comedy or a hero saga, but otherwise it’s a tragedy because the ego cannot stand to be laughed at.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You think about King Lear out there screaming in the storm and going mad because he could not stand that his youngest daughter—he asked his daughters how much they loved him, and two of them gave him flowery ego-pandering accounts like groveling flattery, and the third daughter said, “I love you as salt loves meat.” And so he casts her out and he tries to depend on his two older daughters. And it turns out they hate him and throw him out in the street, well, onto the moor. And he realizes out there that his youngest daughter was the one who loved him the most, but he’s a king and he won’t give that up. So he’s just out there taking the storm in the teeth because he won’t say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I was wrong. I’ll go back and find my younger daughter and apologize. And really, that’s a pretty good way to be loved.” So anyway, sorry to get all Shakespearean. When you said comedy and tragedy, that’s where my mind goes.

Rowan Mangan:
Listener, she was like reciting Shakespeare to herself in the bathroom yesterday. I overheard that, Martha. I know you were doing that.

Martha Beck:
I think I was just singing a little ditty to myself. And you didn’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
You were reciting Shakespeare to see if you remembered it.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s right. That is right. And that was from The Tempest, which is about somebody who similarly has assaults on his ego, but he decides to give up his noble standing and he becomes somebody who forgives and who can therefore create magic. It’s in the Tempest. Compare: King Lear, the Tempest, my favorite two plays to compare. Now—

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so cool that on the one side is comedy, magic. Because think about Midsummer Night’s Dream or whatever. On the comedy side, there is so much potential, and it just feels more colorful and more dynamic. And then on the tragedy side, it’s just like this wall of no. This wall of ouch.

Martha Beck:
And when I was, I took one Shakespeare class in my life, it was my first year at that university. [Coughs] Harvard. And they got up and told us, the professor got up and told us that the four tragedies where people choose their ego and their life shatters and everyone ends up dead, those were Shakespeare’s moments of greatness. And then he started writing these plays where there were magical components and people loved each other and people forgave each other, and there was connection between everything and everyone. And they said that was because he was probably losing his mind. He probably had dementia. He was fifty.

Rowan Mangan:
Aww.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, Shakespeare. He would only write these redemptive, wonderful, beautiful, uplifting plays about connection and letting go of the ego because he was out of his mind. Because we know, and I’ll never forget, the professor would read to us and some person in the crowd raised a hand and said, “I have a question.” And he said, “Yes?” And the student said, “Where does your accent come from?” And actually he did it, he said, “Pure affectation.”

Rowan Mangan:
That’s awesome.

Martha Beck:
And everybody, yeah, because he knew they’d go find out that he was from Des Moines, so he had to own the ego slip. And by doing that, he won more affection from me than with all his loftiness.

Rowan Mangan:
But at the same time, he’s the one pedaling the theory that to write a comedy, you must be out of your mind. I think it’s really interesting because it’s saying, and I think it would probably be a pretty relatable idea for our listeners that in the culture at large, comedy is seen as lesser, as a lesser form.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That like, serious is superior to silly. And isn’t that interesting? Because if we’re sort of arguing that in embarrassment, in laughing at yourself when you break a taboo, you’re breaking down the culture. So isn’t it in the culture’s interest to make sure that we are like, “Magical fairies dancing about? He’s crazy! He’s crazy and stupid! Stupid Shakespeare. I’m going to kick you in the knee.”

Martha Beck:
“Get back here, I’ll bite your kneecaps off.” No, that’s from Monty Python. I’m confusing my British geniuses here. So what you’re saying is that our culture sends us out into the world with a mind primed for tragedy, a mind that is primed to grab the ego with both hands and never let it go: “There is nothing wrong with me. Everything about me is fantastic.” There are politicians like this.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, very much like King Lear wandering around on the moors, right?

Martha Beck:
Wandering around. That’s where you end up. And he says, “Unaccommodated man is nothing but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.” I love that. That’s the first thing I said to my son when he was born. And—yes I did—and he just dropped his ego right at the door, my little one. But here’s the thing, if you walk around, instead of being afraid to be humiliated or embarrassed and thereby having a life primed for tragedy, if you walk around with a mind primed for comedy, for opportunities to let go of ego… It makes me think of when I learned karate in Phoenix, because I took Adam when he was five and started school. He has Down syndrome, of course. I took him to this place called Special Dragons where they worked with special needs kids. And because I wanted him to be able to beat up anybody who made fun of him. And he was like, we did the first lesson, he was like, “I don’t want to hit anyone. Why would I do that?” And so he never went back, but I did because I wanted to beat up anyone who made fun of him. Not little kids, adults. And I never actually did it. But the thing was, this was a very special dojo and not everyone in it had a disability. The instructor did. He had a cerebral palsy, fought from a wheelchair, and my God, he would take you out. Oh, by the way, that’s an awkward moment. When he used to make us, he’d hold a paddle and he’s sitting in his wheelchair, J Cool, what a cool dude he was. Literally, that’s his name. And he would hold this paddle way up high and we would have to kick it, which is fine the first hundred times you kick it. But the 200th, I mean the guy was relentless. “Kick it again, kick it again.” And your leg starts to sink because it’s tired. And pretty soon what happened to me all the time is I would accidentally kick his wheelchair and cut open my foot or my leg.

Rowan Mangan:
So then I was beating this guy up, I kicked him 200 times and then I accidentally clipped his wheelchair with my foot.”

Martha Beck:
Actually, people would say, “Oh my God, what the hell happened to your foot?” And I would say, not thinking about it, “Yeah, I was kicking this man and then I accidentally hit the wheelchair.” And it’s, it’s not a good look. It’s not a non-embarrassing moment when you say that. Anyway, but this dojo, everyone went in primed for comedy. That was the culture that they had. They had created a subculture where we’d just pound each other’s senseless for an hour and then we’d all sit down and have a beer. We’d all be bleeding and bruised. And I was the only woman. And there were all these beautiful big adolescent males and they would sit there and trade stories that were always putting themselves as the butt of the joke. Everybody would talk about how they had to find this woman who was 85 or something, and she she’d been doing Tai Chi her whole life. And they’d be like, “That, it looks weird when you do it slowly, but when you’ve done it for all those years, it is the deadliest.” So they would go to fight her and they would come back and they would say, “It was like a religious experience. She deconstructed my entire body. I don’t know if I’ll ever move comfortably again. The woman is deadly.” And then somebody else would say, “You think she beat you up? This is what she did to me.” And everything was always laughing about how they’d been bested by some person who is small and didn’t appear very threatening. And I loved those dudes.

Rowan Mangan:
I swear to God. There was once an intruder in my mother’s backyard in the middle of the night, and my mother is a diminutive older lady. She stormed up to the back door, opened it up and screamed, “I have a brown belt in Tai Chi!” at the top of her lungs, and the guy was so confused, he bolted.

Martha Beck:
I love that brown belt in Tai Chi. People don’t know it’s actually a fighting art. You know, you sent me, you showed me a quotation yesterday from Audre Lorde who is just an absolute genius. And it stopped my mind, it was so profound. And it really pertains here. It pertains to different things that have much more depth and evil to them, like racism and all the isms. But what Audre Lorde wrote is: “Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.”

Rowan Mangan:
Mic drop.

Martha Beck:
That’s how you prime your life for comedy. Accept about yourself the things that embarrass you. Once you have deeply accepted them, they cannot be used to humiliate you.

Rowan Mangan:
That is so true. It’s almost like that’s the map. Everything we’ve been talking about is like the map for spiritual enlightenment, for saving us from capitalism and patriarchy, for transforming the world is radical self-acceptance. And in the process, allowing yourself, like laughing at yourself, because you won’t be diminished, even in these embarrassing moments. And so there’s that vulnerability and becoming the safe space where it’s okay, we can laugh at ourselves.

Martha Beck:
It reminds me of the contrast between a certain politician who was, I don’t know when you’re listening to this podcast, but obsessed with crowd size, just an anonymous politician.

Rowan Mangan:
Could be anyone.

Martha Beck:
Could be anyone but obsessed with size. And I compare that to a fabulous, very successful writer and I don’t know if he’s a coach or what he is, but he’s a self-improvement guru, Jay Shetty. And he had an experience, he was a monk briefly in India, and he wrote a book called Think Like a Monk, which is a huge bestseller all over the world. But he talks about getting out of monkness and going to university and deciding that people needed monk skills to tolerate university living. So he decided he was going to give a little seminar on how to think like a monk for college students. And he put up flyers and he tried to advertise it around the school. And then he went in at the appointed time, he’d gotten permission to use a classroom and everything. And he went in, and no one came, not one single person. And you know what Jay Shetty did? He got up and he gave his full presentation in an empty room because that was okay with him. He did not need one single person there to validate his ego. What he needed was to give the performance. That’s what he felt in his heart and that’s what he was going to do. And he did it. And now he tells this story. There’s no embarrassment in it. And that’s why he’s massively popular because he’s willing to say, “No one came and I gave my presentation anyway and my heart was broken. But it all turned out okay.” That’s a life primed for comedy, success, happiness, whatever you want to say.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Wow. I think maybe the component that needs to be there. So here is us, this little human animal, this creature who’s been taught this set of norms that we call culture and that to go outside of the norms is taboo. Something happens that forces us into that liminal space of the taboo thing. We didn’t mean to, but it happened.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And the one other thing that needs to be there in order to have the kind of breakthroughs that you’re talking about and that we’re talking about in this episode, the one component that’s necessary is someone else: to laugh with, to tell the story of when nobody showed up, to—there has to be a sharing of it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I think we don’t talk about that enough on Bewildered because it’s not about having no culture because we are social primates. We need each other, we need people. And anytime two people create a relationship, they have a little mini-culture with them. I think it’s about being very aware of the fact that you are in culture and you’re moving in culture and your ego is interacting in culture. And I’m sure that Jay Shetty was thinking, “I’ll go tell my posse about that. I’ll go tell my friends or my parents.” Or whoever he went to tell this story. But he also told it to the whole world. And during some of the worst times of my life, well, I wrote a book that it was embarrassing in a way because my publishers said it was crazy. It was called Finding Your Way in a Wild New World. And it was about people who have a sort of magic and a calling to heal the world, heal each other, heal the planet. And I just wrote this book against considerable pushback from my publisher, imagining that there were people out there that I was writing to who were longing for wildness and who were longing for healing and to be healers. And I had this community, but it was in my imagination. But I believed that it was real. And I sent the book out to find it, to find them, to find, as it turns out, you.

Rowan Mangan:
Among others.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So I think you do. You need somebody, even if it’s an imaginary person in the future that allows you to be totally yourself with complete acceptance, it’s great. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me, but also nothing my posse accepts completely about me can be used as powerfully to diminish me.

Rowan Mangan:
And when I tell the story to my posse, every single one of them gets permission to be vulnerable and shed that flake of ego at the same time. Not at the same time, but in the same way. And I mean this is a big part of why we created our community, Wilder.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the Wilder Community.

Rowan Mangan:
The Wilder Community. It’s that we wanted a place where we could come back to. Sometimes when you’re trying to live counter-culturally, you can come back home feeling like you’ve kind of got some cuts and bruises.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s big weather out there on the countercultural fields.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and so that’s part of what that is designed to be is a safe space where you can tell those stories and turn what sometimes can feel like tragedy into comedy and magic on the other side of it.

Martha Beck:
I think that is a great note to end on because even if you’ve done it the other way, even if you’ve made a fool of yourself and then grabbed your ego with both hands and run away, it’s never too late to go back and find whoever you were ashamed—you could go back and find our babysitter and say, “I deliberately showed you my naked body and I would like to do it again. You don’t need to be afraid. I’m not going to try anything. This is just something I do with the people I feel close to.”

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m just trying to become enlightened. Just let me pull my pants down one more time.”

Martha Beck:
“This is my road to awakening.” Wah!

Rowan Mangan:
“This is my spiritual practice.”

Martha Beck:
Can I tell you one last thing? since we’re doing this? It’s been a long hot summer as we’re recording this. It’s at the end of summer. And I make the same mistake over and over again when I do presentations, I’m working with corporate clients, I’m doing Zoom group coaching stuff, and I always put on nice clothes so that they know I’m going to, that I care about them. And then I come over and the little cranny where I do all my recording—

Rowan Mangan:
Eww.

Martha Beck:
Get your mind out of the gutter. A cranny is just a little nook, so don’t say “eww” again. So what happens is I start to sweat, and of course I’m wearing makeup for the occasion, so I am afraid I’m going to start an avalanche on my face. And that’s very disconcerting. We saw it with Rudy Giuliani where his hair dye melted and rolled down his face. It’s disconcerting for the audience. So for their sake, not yours—

Rowan Mangan:
Take off your pants

Martha Beck:
I take off my shoes and socks quietly, just using my feet under the desk. And that cooled me down.

Rowan Mangan:
And what do you take off next?

Martha Beck:
My pants.

Rowan Mangan:
I happen to know about this. I happen to have photographic evidence of it, actually.

Martha Beck:
Oh shit. Oh good heavens.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so funny because it’s like upstairs is all business. Downstairs does rawr!

Martha Beck:
I have underwear on. At least I wear underwear, Rowan Mangan.

Rowan Mangan:
Flesh-toned underwear.

Martha Beck:
Well, all right, well with that awkward moment out in the blogosphere, pod-o-sphere, I don’t know, I’m having—

Rowan Mangan:
You don’t know what this is, do you?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know. My brain is in spasm right now. Anyway, yeah, hang with people who love you. Hang with people who accept you as you are. Always remember that nothing you’ve fully accepted about yourself can be used to humiliate you.

Rowan Mangan:
And…

Martha Beck:
Stay wild!

Rowan Mangan:
Stay wild. We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word wild to 570-873-0144. We’re also an Instagram, our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review and stay wild.