Rowan Mangan:
Hey, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Hey.

Rowan Mangan:
So we’ve got a fun episode coming up for the peeps today.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s basically just storytelling about times that we’ve gone way outside the culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We figured that when we all tell each other stories about going outside culture, we kind of give each other permission to do it more.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So today you’re going to hear stories about invisible whales, public nose picking, polygamy, always a standby. Yes. Many stories.

Rowan Mangan:
We even developed a new word for our bewildered community now, which is the Kahoot.

Martha Beck:
The Kahoot. It’s fabulous. You are fabulous. Kahoot nurse. So let’s get started. Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered. That’s right. The podcast for people trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
So many people,

Rowan Mangan:
So much to figure

Martha Beck:
Out so much. Why? What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
I’d like to say I am trying to figure out something original, but once again, where I find myself at this juncture, Marty is mired in the endless infinite mystery that is your relationship with other people. Scrolling social media.

Martha Beck:
I

Rowan Mangan:
Just,

Martha Beck:
It’s

Rowan Mangan:
So baffling to me. It’s so baffling to me. And why does it always end up with animals as well? It’s this strange thing. All right. We’ve gone down few rabbit holes with talking parrots lately. No,

Martha Beck:
You just mentioned rabbit holes. Again, everything’s about animals. It can’t be helped.

Rowan Mangan:
So one night, recently, we’re laying next to each other in the evening in bed, and Marty is, God knows what she’s doing. God knows she’s

Martha Beck:
Working on something,

Rowan Mangan:
Working, reading quantum physics or writing it or something. But I know what I’m doing. I’m scrolling Instagram like a normal person, and Marty’s little like Beaty eye of attention drifts over to my phone where, and people who aren’t like, well, I don’t know. I don’t know what anyone’s like, but for me, scrolling is a very, it’s very loose attention. I just like la la. The things go by and every now and again, some little part of me goes, I wonder what that is and I will stop. But mostly it’s just like a meditative, oh, there it all goes. Easy come easy go. Not Marty the second, her little bd eyes land on the phone screen, mid scroll, she immediately says in her little voice, is that a real monkey?

Martha Beck:
Pretty much always.

Rowan Mangan:
Is that a real monkey? And I was struck by this, Marty, because what you were looking at at the moment when you said is that a real monkey was literally a photograph of a birthday cake with Taylor Swift’s face on it as art.

Martha Beck:
Oh, are Taylor Swift fans going to attack me now? I really thought it was a real monkey. I wanted it to be a real

Rowan Mangan:
Monkey. It was a cake. But while I’ve got you on animals and real monkeys

Martha Beck:
Always,

Rowan Mangan:
We were having a conversation the other day, and I just have to crow about this in. Sorry, I need to process it myself. What happened because it is just in my mind, the mystery just goes on and on. We’re talking idly about maybe something we might want to do on a future episode of the podcast. And I’m in the bath as I so often am when we’re having these sorts of conversations. I’m in the bath, Marty’s sitting on the bathroom floor, la, la,

Martha Beck:
La,

Rowan Mangan:
La. And we’re thinking, oh, we could talk about this, we could talk about that. And then suddenly Marty goes, it reminds me of how birds get angry if you feed them too much. And then her little eyes lock on my eyes for a minute with deep significance, and there’s just this silence in the room that falls, and then suddenly she goes, we’re getting some really good stuff here. I need to write this down. And she grabs her computer and opens it. Birds

Martha Beck:
Get angry if you feed them. At least raptors do. I don’t know about songbirds, but it’s fascinating. Right? It’s fascinating. What would you rather think about than that?

Rowan Mangan:
Almost anything.

Martha Beck:
Angry raptors, their owners are trying to feed them to placate them. And the birds are like, I’ve heard enough, and they attack. Oh, it’s fantastic.

Rowan Mangan:
So it does beg the question though. What are you trying to figure out this week?

Martha Beck:
I am trying to figure out, and this is like it has taken many, many months, years of dealing with this in public before I actually said too much about it, but it’s time on our

Rowan Mangan:
Record, not this is a safe space.

Martha Beck:
I glued it in place before we started, but already it’s happening. My piece of hair, I have a piece of hair that creeps onto the center of my forehead away from all the other hair. No matter what any one does, hairstylists have used their blow dryers and they’re magic wands and they’re incredibly like substances to try to glue my piece of hair in place. I mean, it is sprayed within an inch of his life. And sure enough, I haven’t touched it since we started. The piece of hair is already migrating to the middle of my head, and it’s always, if my hair sort of blue proof to cross, it would be kind of cool. But it’s not like a fringe of hair. It’s just a piece of hair. And it’s because I,

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, I just want to bring to your attention the fact that it might be that piece of hair is like the brave soul going against the mainstream culture of the rest of the hair on your head.

Martha Beck:
Well, apparently it’s also widowed because it’s called a widow’s peak that makes it do this. And I got so frustrated last week, I was trying to figure out how to tell somebody how to put the piece of hair so it doesn’t migrate

Rowan Mangan:
Somebody like a passa by

Martha Beck:
Anyone at this point. Freaking squirrels are doing better than I’m. So I looked up widows peak and it’s really frightening. I thought I just had a hair that went a certain way. Turns out I’m like super abnormal and I have, it said to me, online hair growth on the forehead is suppressed in a bilateral pair of periorbital fields. I was like, yes, speaking of physics, I’ve got a whole physics experiment going on on my head. God is doing a physics experiment and I have a piece of hair that crawls out in front of me no matter what I’m doing. And I’m always in interviews with Oprah or Anderson Cooper. I’m trying to get the piece of hair to just go back where it came from, but it never will parted on different sides. The piece of hair always migrates. I don’t know what to do, so I just decided to come out and everybody sees it. I might as well talk about it.

Rowan Mangan:
So interesting. I feel like in a way you’ve hit on something quite universal, which is where people get frustrated by their own hair, but you’ve managed to make it as uber nerdy as it’s possible to make it by using the phrase

Martha Beck:
Peral

Rowan Mangan:
Fields, bilateral pair of periorbital fields. And that’s probably what the physics that you were doing while I was scrolling past not a real monkey, is you were learning about orbital fields, which is both super intellectual and super not. It’s like the paradox of you.

Martha Beck:
I love it. Yeah, it’s called love. Stupid smart.

Rowan Mangan:
Stupid smart.

Martha Beck:
Somehow I’m stupid, but in a smartish way. Yes,

Rowan Mangan:
You are. That’s exactly it. Also the opposite.

Martha Beck:
Yes, yes. I’m stupid, but in a smartish way and the piece of hair is always trying to crawl out of my head and tell people that and they get the message. I’m the only one. We all pretend. We all pretend it’s not happening. So embarrassing. I’m never going to really figure it out, but I thought I’d at least fess up

Rowan Mangan:
Accepting that you have a problem is the first step.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep bewildering new souls and how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously, the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven and we read everyone and exclaim over them and we just love you all. So anyway, how about we get onto today’s topic,

Martha Beck:
A topic, what a great idea.

Rowan Mangan:
And we thought we’d talk about the times that we’ve gone outside the culture and how it

Martha Beck:
Felt. Yes. And not just outside, but in the words of the poet laureate of this show, Anita DeFranco, she’s a she, right? She’s not a they is she?

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, a she

Martha Beck:
Wrote in one song that Ronan’s the title of

Rowan Mangan:
Splinter.

Martha Beck:
Splinter. Oh yeah. It’s a really, really good song. And part of her summary is basically culture is really going to mess you up. But remember, you can always go outside and then she adds really, really, really far outside

Rowan Mangan:
And you know that what she’s really saying is get bewildered.

Martha Beck:
Bewildered, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Come

Martha Beck:
To your senses, not to consensus. Yeah. She’s like all

Rowan Mangan:
That stuff on

Martha Beck:
Our wavelength. Yeah,

Rowan Mangan:
She’s totally on our wavelength. So we thought we’d talk about times that we’ve gone really, really, really far outside the culture today, just because I think the practice of storytelling of this stuff is it makes us feel freer and hopefully it’ll make you feel free.

Martha Beck:
And as we were discussing it, I thought this is really, it’s the basis of the whole podcast, but also of our entire life. And we always say, what does the culture say about our topic? Well, about this topic going really, really, really far outside the culture says one thing, don’t

Rowan Mangan:
Stay inside,

Martha Beck:
Don’t do it. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Stay inside. It’s safe there.

Martha Beck:
And sometimes we’ve done that and it hasn’t felt good, and sometimes we haven’t done that and it has felt good. So let’s say, is that a real monkey?

Rowan Mangan:
Is that a real monkey though? So let’s tell some stories, Marty, let’s kick us off with, you have a good one about going really, really, really far outside.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I think the first time I was really aware of doing this, I was in college. I was still in college and I had a baby. I was in graduate school and I had a new baby. So my then husband and I, we had no money. We spent literally all our money on a laser printer. So we didn’t have a car or anything.

Rowan Mangan:
Smart, stupid slash stupid

Martha Beck:
Smart. Yeah. So somebody, a friend of ours had gotten these tickets to go on a whale watching expedition in Boston Harbor. They were very expensive tickets and he couldn’t go, he and his wife. So he gave them to us and we were like, wow, this is so cool. And is that a real whale? I was obsessed. So on the appointed day, we show up and it is one of those gray Boston days that freezes you so hard. There’s not a cell in you that’s not frozen solid. And we go to the wharf and it smells like dead fish. And the ship, the boat is pitching wildly in the harbor and tourists are already vomiting off the side. We just looked at the boat and we looked at each other and then we turned around and walked the other way and we didn’t say anything for like 45 minutes.

We just kept walking straight into Boston. We’d come on the subway from Cambridge and we spent that entire day. It was a whole day whale watching expedition, and all we did was just ramble through Boston, going wherever we wanted. We had this little baby, and every now and then, my ex-husband would stand watch in a park somewhere and I would go under some bushes and nurse the baby and put her back together under my coat and we’d trudge on and we decided on this whole story. We had to tell the guy who gave us the tickets that we had in fact gone whale watching. And we said, yeah, the boat was, yeah, but we saw that boat. Yeah, the boat was something. Yeah,

Rowan Mangan:
I remember it was definitely red

Martha Beck:
And the ocean was so choppy and gray,

Rowan Mangan:
Really wet as I recall. Wet, salty.

Martha Beck:
It was damp. Did we see whales? Maybe. It’s hard to say

Rowan Mangan:
For sure.

Martha Beck:
But then every time after that we decided there was something we were supposed to do or we planned to do it and neither of us really wanted to do it, we’d just look at each other and go, you want to go whale watching? And that meant just running off, pieced off turf into wildness somewhere. It was great fun.

Rowan Mangan:
I know why this is such a good thing to do to tell these stories is that you’ve really, for me evoked that feeling of when you make the decision to do something naughty and there’s that rush, that adrenaline thing of like, oh, we’re going against the culture. And don’t you think maybe that adrenaline rush is sort of like our little clue from the universe? Yes. Yes.

Martha Beck:
Remember when we were in Austin and we were going to go see the sites of Austin

Rowan Mangan:
And we

Martha Beck:
Didn’t

Rowan Mangan:
Went well watching in our art auditorium. So it was, the thing that’s tricky in these situations that Marty won’t say is that we were staying in a hotel. She was doing a speaking event in the hotel. So basically everyone else in the hotel had seen her speak that morning. It was like a corporate thing. I dunno, it was their annual something or other. We don’t really know about these things. They went there, Marty spoke to them, they loved her. But sometimes, and I don’t blame people for this, but sometimes they just love her a bit too much. And then it can get real scary to be in the hotel if you’re Marty, because suddenly people just bear down on her with their life stories trembling in their throats

Martha Beck:
On my introverted self.

Rowan Mangan:
And so we didn’t go out. Well, actually I went out for a while. You went out once? Yeah, once. Put

Martha Beck:
Loin flesh.

Rowan Mangan:
I have the advantage of not being recognizable. So I was just undercover. And I should say these days we don’t eat a lot of meat. We’re moving towards more plant-based lifestyle. But at this time it, look, it was the ketogenic years. It was a crazy time. Everyone was doing it. You had

Martha Beck:
Insulin resistance really badly. You couldn’t eat

Rowan Mangan:
And you just are codependent and couldn’t let do

Martha Beck:
Anything.

Rowan Mangan:
So you would not let a carb pass your lips for many years. Luckily we got over it, but at the time it was just like we were in Austin and I was fetching us a lot of meat.

Martha Beck:
Meat

Rowan Mangan:
At a barbecue joint up the street. Oh my God. It was so good of meat. And so I just got this back. I can remember the heft of this. I’m so sorry, vegetarians and vegans. So it’s, it’s wrong. I know how bad it is, but I brought that meat back up and we spread it so we’re disgusting. We spread it over the bed. Well,

Martha Beck:
We put a towel down first. We knew it would. Yeah. We

Rowan Mangan:
Put something

Martha Beck:
Ugly.

Rowan Mangan:
We didn’t make a terrible mess, but we did have a bed picnic of meat

Martha Beck:
Bed meat picnic. That could be taken a lot of different ways, I think.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it just the most literal way. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun.

Martha Beck:
But I’m not the first time you ever did that. I wasn’t the first person to drag you off. Culture was I?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh god, no. No. I’ve always liked abandoning culture and I remember the thing is I don’t tend to have the proper guilt thing with it. So when I was a teenager and my friends and I would cut school, I’d just make sure I told my mom about it ahead of time in case the school called or something. And we literally would say to our parents, we’re taking a mental health day on Thursday, and sometimes we went sailing on our tall ship that we used to sail on. And sometimes we had this thing where I think you have to be a teenager in some way to really understand this urge. But we used to get on trains and just go to where they went, the end of the line and then just explore a little bit, but then just get on the train. I think it’s that thing of when you’re a teenager and you don’t have any money and you don’t have anywhere to go, you tend to, and you live in the city, you tend to gravitate towards public transport. It’s just like a room to be in you

Martha Beck:
Or call ships. I mean, you just threw that all tall ships. Just to be clear, you and your friends did not own a tall ship

Rowan Mangan:
Because said, no, we did. We

Martha Beck:
Go sail our tall ship.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we did own it. It was like we’d all gone in for a tops of schooner together. Crazy. We actually won it in a card game. Crazy days down on the war. I believe it. No, we were volunteers, volunteer sailors on an original 1903 tops of schooner called the Alma and it was great times, great times. So yeah, sometimes we did that when we needed a bit of mental health and sometimes we just, so

Martha Beck:
Ships twin, basically 19th century transportation forms where you’re,

Rowan Mangan:
Now that you mention it,

Martha Beck:
If you had a donkey, you probably would’ve ridden that all over as well.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but if we’d had hovercrafts, forget about it.

Martha Beck:
No, no, no. We’re going old school.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, totally old school. But I love, you’ve got this story, I dunno if you’ve told it this way on the podcast before, but about how, in a way, your whole life’s trajectory, oh my God, has been a series of weirdly going really, really, really far outside the

Martha Beck:
Culture. If you start really, really, really far inside the way a very rigid religion will make you. I mean you had no guilt. I had enough guilt for 10 of you. I remember the first time I really went outside, I was a freshman at Harvard and I was doing a lot of all-nighters and I did these without caffeine because caffeine is not, oh my God. Yeah. It’s not okay for Mormons. And so one day before a test I was so exhausted and I really wanted to do well on it. I was so tired. I actually got a coffee flavored yogurt and I

Rowan Mangan:
Whoa, whoa. What?

Martha Beck:
There was coffee flavored yogurt in the science center cafeteria. Oh my God. And I got it hoping that there was enough caffeine to give my brain a little lift, but I felt was

Rowan Mangan:
That like a God loophole? There will be no coffee, but there will be coffee flavor

Martha Beck:
Doing it. No, no. It was just sin. It was straight up sin. Then

Rowan Mangan:
Why didn’t you get a goddamn latte?

Martha Beck:
Because coffee flavored yogurt for me at the time was really, really, really far outside. I’m not even kidding. I’m not even kidding. You have no idea.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I don’t. I really don’t know how far inside you have to be.

Martha Beck:
It has a slingshot property where if you pulled back far enough as a child, you zing forward as an adult. Because then I went on to break, go outside every culture I was in. Once I got, okay, forget religion, I’m a Harvard intellectual. Then I chose to keep a child with an intellectual disability with down syndrome, which took me really, really, really far outside Harvard culture. Then I retweeted to Utah because I thought everyone would understand and they did understand about the baby. What they didn’t understand was that I was also a lesbian. So I went to

Rowan Mangan:
Is that a real lesbian?

Martha Beck:
And then lesbianism became passe and I was in the center again. And then you showed up and now we’re in a throuple. So let me

Rowan Mangan:
Recap.

Martha Beck:
Let me break this down for you. I went to Harvard to have a child with an intellectual disability. I went to Utah to come out as a lesbian. Then I left Mormonism and started practicing polygamy. I am going really, really, really far outside any rule you want to give me. That’s how

Rowan Mangan:
It’s, I mean, no one could beat that, but I mean,

Martha Beck:
Oh, I intend to dunno what’s next, but something, what’s next?

Rowan Mangan:
What’s the next frontier? I

Martha Beck:
Don’t knows the next frontier.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s very exciting.

Martha Beck:
Tell them what you told me about India and the thrill

Rowan Mangan:
In India. There were so many ways that, because when you’re in quite a different culture, you get experiences of being really, really, really far outside your own culture. But never will I be able to recreate or re-experience. The high of the first time I picked my nose in public. I remember it. It was yesterday.

Martha Beck:
It was yesterday. Honey.

Rowan Mangan:
No, that’s just the most recent honey. This is the first.

Martha Beck:
Okay, sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I was in some town in Raan and I had been noticing everyone. I was traveling by myself. I was 25 and I had noticed that you picking nose, there’s no taboo, there’s no problem. Also shocking urinating in public if you have the kind of plumbing that makes that easy to do, but not if you don’t. Anyway, so people are just picking their nose. At some point I thought, I’m going to, I’m try it and I was sitting outside in an open area. Imagine a town square for want of a better way of describing where I was. And there’s people everywhere. There’s always people everywhere.

Martha Beck:
Everywhere.

Rowan Mangan:
And so I’m just like, oh my God, I’m going to do it. I’m actually going to do this. Yes. And so I did. I put my nose in public. People saw me, their eyes just went past me. Amazing. Nothing, no interest, nothing out of the ordinary happening here, Marty. I felt so alive.

Martha Beck:
I felt

Rowan Mangan:
Like anything was possible. I felt released from the shackles of everything that kept me down. It was like the man was finally like, I’ve exercised the man from

Martha Beck:
Myself out of your nose. You picked the man out of your nose.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. What’s the thing that you said about picking your nose, your kids, you said about masturbation. Yes.

Martha Beck:
This is my plan. If my kids ever asked me about masturbation, which they never did, they were far more savvy than I ever was, but I was planning,

Rowan Mangan:
I didn’t think this was just

Martha Beck:
A plan. If they ever asked me about it or attempted to do it in a place that wasn’t a public square where people’s eyes would go off, just slide across it. I would tell them, sweetheart, that is picking your nose. We all do it, but in private, simple,

Rowan Mangan:
Simple.

Martha Beck:
I love that. You don’t build up a whole huge thing about it. When I was growing up in Mormonism, there was a pamphlet to help people, teenagers keep themselves from masturbating. And they literally suggested tying one hand to your bed frame and then holding a book of Mormon in the other all night

Rowan Mangan:
Long. Oh my God, that is the kint thing I ever, I right.

Martha Beck:
It just, it takes an ordinary thing and makes it really filthy. That’s

Rowan Mangan:
Amazing.

Martha Beck:
And it literally said at one point, if that doesn’t work, get out of bed and go downstairs and make yourself a sandwich even if you are not hungry. So yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so fun going outside when the inside has been that weird. Yeah,

Rowan Mangan:
Right. But in a way, all cultures insides are weird. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I talk about the India stuff because it was such a marked contrast. So in Australia I had a nose ring, not just a stud, but a ring in my nose. Well, now when do you had to pick in nostril?

Martha Beck:
That’s a lot

Rowan Mangan:
Of, oh yeah. Oh god.

Martha Beck:
In there. God get

Rowan Mangan:
Started. Oh, it’s so true. Stuff gets stuck up there. It is. It does. It takes maintenance. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about right now. I’ll discuss it privately with anyone who really wants to know the detail.

But yeah, so I wore this nose ring, and it wasn’t long before I left India, so I must’ve been somewhere in the south, I think. Anyway, this, I was walking along the street and this old, old lovely lady stops me. She’s got her S on, and she was carrying all these bags, but she just started talking to me, not in English about my nose ring. She was pointing to it. She was pointing to her own nose ring that she had, and she was clearly just like, that’s beautiful. And I was like, this is supposed to be my rebellion bitch. No, I wasn’t. I was actually felt a very deep moment of connection. But what was fascinating, and I swear to God this is true, is that two weeks, maybe later, I had gone for some reason to bke Stan, and I was on the street in Bke. It was freezing. There was snow everywhere. And an old lady, I swear to you, Marty, I’m not making this up, came up to me on the street and started busting my balls about my noise ring. And again, not in English. And again, it was very clear what was going on. It was like a message of how fickle culture is and how anything is anything arbitrary.

Nothing is anything. Pick your nose, pierce your nose. It doesn’t. And people think that it is genuinely

Martha Beck:
Intrinsically

Rowan Mangan:
Disgusting to pick your nose.

Martha Beck:
A moral wrong. Yes. Or a moral right.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Exactly.

Martha Beck:
And it’s just an arbitrary nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
And in case people think that Indians are just awesome about everything, try being a left-hander who’s not used to. You can only eat in public with your right hand and accidentally do a little eating in public with your left hand. And then you’ll see the other side. The eyes did not go past me when I forgot myself and started eating with my left hand one time.

Martha Beck:
But at this point, we are verging on the biological.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I appreciate that. But

Martha Beck:
What left hands are used for,

Rowan Mangan:
But I am from a toilet paper community, so it’s not such a, anyway, what I wanted to say to them was, that’s just culture because I am from a toilet paper community,

Martha Beck:
But you can’t, once you’re in the culture and they’re all staring and pointing at the scarlet letter and it has an L for left hand,

Rowan Mangan:
You can’t explain. And seriously the shaming, I felt I was so horrified when I saw people looking at me and I didn’t understand why and pointing and whispering, and I realized what it was and what they thought. And I was hold my fork in that. It’s nothing. It’s just everything’s arbitrary.

Martha Beck:
The’s shaming, and it’s different. And you hit the ground in different places, different cino as my oldest child used to call them when she was tiny. When they were tiny. And you have to learn the local culture. So remember the time we hit Hollywood thinking we were fine and Hollywood thinking we were fine and promptly found out we were not. Very few people in Hollywood really feel like they’re okay because it is filled with Barbies. Right. And cans

Rowan Mangan:
In fairness. Marty, let’s be clear. You were fine.

Martha Beck:
You were fine. I have a piece of hair to deal with Ro. Oh,

Rowan Mangan:
For God’s

Martha Beck:
Sake. But you had more, I have to say you have great hair. But at that point,

Rowan Mangan:
I think we’ve talked before about the time that I spontaneously shaved all my hair off after it.

Martha Beck:
Difficult only it started with kitchen shears. The shaving is a very polite word for what you did to your hair that day.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you cleaned it up afterwards.

Martha Beck:
I did. I had one of those little things,

Rowan Mangan:
But yeah, I had a difficult day and I cut all my hair off and then Marty tidied it up ready

Martha Beck:
On the bone and said, Marty, I’ve done something really bad. Because culturally it’s a bad thing, even though it really isn’t. But go on.

Rowan Mangan:
At the moment, when I took the shears to my hair in a fit of rage, I wasn’t thinking ahead necessarily to the time in, I don’t know, 10 days from then when I would be walking into a meeting in a Hollywood room with Hollywood people, including a couple of, no, at least three really famous people,

Martha Beck:
Really famous and really beautiful women.

Rowan Mangan:
And you know how my hair, it’s not you can do a shaved head. The problem for me is that I went gray very, very young. And there’s a weird kind of, when you actually see it, the whole thing, and I’m not dying anything. There’s just weird splotches of what’s gray and what’s whatever color it used to be. And so we couldn’t let that happen. Once you’d cleaned it up that day, we couldn’t just let that be as it was. That was truly horrifying in any culture. People would just be like,

Martha Beck:
Definitely the kitchen shears cut would not go even in the Garden of Eden. They would’ve shrieked and run from you.

Rowan Mangan:
So we went through, I feel like we must’ve talked about this on the podcast before.

Martha Beck:
I did express your rage that haircut did.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it just

Martha Beck:
Said rage when you walked into the room.

Rowan Mangan:
Anyways, but what had happened at that point was we’d been trying to deal with the color situation, like the splotchy salt and pepperiness, very uneven. So we had a weird day. I’m not going to go into it. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about it before, but where we drove back and forth from our ranch into town, which is about 50 minutes each way going to CVS and getting different hair dye things. We went and got bleach. I bleached it. That was bad. Oh, bad. We went back in and we got blue. Blue. I blew it. Not wasn’t what I was going for, or at least

Martha Beck:
Not a little blue. It was really blue.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we have

Martha Beck:
Talked about this. I remember.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So anyway, but then the blue, I just washed and washed and washed and washed and it went kind of orange,

Martha Beck:
Weirdly orange,

Rowan Mangan:
Weirdly orange. But at that sort of henno way where you can still see the sludgy bits where they’re different colors naturally a sl of gray. And then

Martha Beck:
You forgot where I tried to dye orange over the blue to make it brown as if I were mixing paint. And it did not act like you looked like you had moss on your head.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. Looking back. So we wake up, fast forward, really not that many days. And we’re in LA and we’re in a hotel room and we’re about to go to this meeting and I’ve agreed to, it’s all about Marty’s stuff. It doesn’t matter what it was about, but it was to do with Marty’s work. But I was expected to be there. I wasn’t getting out of it. So we’re like, what are we going to do about this whole situation of the hedge alert region? And Marty’s like, I’ve got it in the same way. She said, oh, I know how to mix paints. We’ll just dye at this color and we’ll magically that’s what paints do. She’s like, oh, no worries. Eyeliner. Was it eyeliner?

Martha Beck:
It was an eyebrow pencil. We finally figured out, at first we tried that spray dye that dudes are supposed to use. And it was horrible. It was like when Rudy Giuliani started to sweat and the dye dribbled down his face. It was that kind of dye. It was that

Rowan Mangan:
Exact,

Martha Beck:
It was not. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That was a different part of the trip, which we talked about last time when we came over here to look at a house. But this was the same trip, but earlier on when we were still on the west coast, and it was at that point we were into eyebrow pencil. So Marty colored in my head as though she were coloring in a coloring book, but she had a eyebrow pencil. I

Martha Beck:
Just colored her head dark brown. And we went. And whether people knew or not, I do not know. I’m not going to ask them. I’m just out about my piece of hair. I cannot go there yet. But it was intense.

Rowan Mangan:
I give myself props that whatever I looked like that day, and there is no photographic evidence of how I looked. I feel like I carried off the, I meant I’m intending to look this way. This is what I’m going for. Yeah, yeah.

Martha Beck:
At least we’ve,

Rowan Mangan:
The thing that we’ve always had in those sorts of situations is that we’ve been together at least, right? Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I guess in our own little consensus, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. We build another little culture. And because I live my life by the wisdom of internet memes and Anita Franco, I have an internet meme that says the most important thing about any relationship, romantic or platonic or familial, and ours is all three.

Martha Beck:
Yes,

Rowan Mangan:
It is. Is that you’ve got to be in cahoots.

Martha Beck:
You got to be in cahoots. Yes, you do. There’s culture. And then there is the cahoot, and we’ve got cahoots. The cahoots of culture. I wouldn’t typically do with kitchen chairs to my head what you did. So it’s not like we had an obligation to chop off our hair. It’s just that we fully accepted each other’s weirdness. And I think that qualifies as Kahoot.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And you walked by my side into that room. You stood by me. I proudly

Martha Beck:
Actually, our Kahoot nest. The fact that we’re always in Kahoots,

Rowan Mangan:
Our Kahoot.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Our Kahoot tude. And I hope this is true of us and some of our listeners. They’re in the same Kahoot.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re in our Kahoot.

Martha Beck:
It makes culture matter less because the Kahoot is not a new culture. It’s an acceptance of difference. So, so the culture starts to matter less. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I really think we’re going to have to do something with this language. We’re all in a cahoot, the listeners and us. I like this.

Martha Beck:
I like this. Let’s figure it out after a brief pause.

Rowan Mangan:
So we thought that we don’t want to leave the elephant in the room to go by.

Martha Beck:
Did you learn to do that in India too? Just let it go by.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not that much space, just get out of its way. It’s living its own life, for God’s sake. The furthest outside, it’s so funny because it’s the elephant in the room, but we’re talking about the furthest outside that we’ve ever been, that we continue to be, God help us is in our weird, platonic, romantic,

Martha Beck:
Familial,

Rowan Mangan:
Familial Kahoot that

Martha Beck:
We live in. Yeah. We have all forms of relationship going on in a single cahoot. I think people think that we’re tough and don’t care because we’re in a lesbian throuple. Like what do we care about? But we do. That’s the thing. We’re horribly obsessed with pleasing people. And it’s not that easy to be in this weird cringey, throuple situations where it’s really hard to explain it.

Rowan Mangan:
And yet maybe the fact that this was the only way that we could figure out how to be genuinely happy in our lives is too also be in this situation that puts us in perpetual discomfort. Yeah, that’s true. In any mainstream cultural situation, you’ve got to enrolling our daughter in a preschool or any of those sorts of things. There’s just constantly this thing of having to navigate it and what terms do we use. So it is always this thing, but in a way,

Martha Beck:
It forces us to be okay. It

Rowan Mangan:
Forces us if we’ve gone really, really, really far

Martha Beck:
Outside

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s in something that we can’t compromise on because it’s our very deep happiness and it’s the center. So because of that, I think we’re more able to push other boundaries of culture because this one is non-negotiable. We’re always outside anyway.

Martha Beck:
It’s not wandering on the ice outside of culture together though.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But it is awkward. It’s not like we’re here, we’re queer. Get used to it. It’s like we’re here. We’re queer. A little bit more queer than that. No, keep going. Still. Queerer, queerer, queerer, queerer. Look, you’re never going to get used to this,

Martha Beck:
But

Rowan Mangan:
We are here. I’m sorry.

Martha Beck:
You’ll never get used to this. We’re here. We’re not used to it. Good luck people. It’s so funny. Oh my gosh. Remember when we first got together in this little tiny house? It was a four room house, not a four bedroom house, a four room house on the edge of a national park in California, 50 minutes away from the nearest town. And your mother came to visit. So we’re trying to carry on this lesbian throuple ship. While you’re very, very perceptive and intelligent. Mother is living in one room of the four rooms and with no distractions and no noise. There’s no traffic, nothing. And we were trying to hide everything from her in a house designed by nudists. There was nothing but glass.

Rowan Mangan:
It was no big deal. I thought it all through all I needed. Oh my God. All I needed to do was just come out of the French doors in the bedroom and just walk around the outside of the house to the other. There was another external door in another room where I conceivably could have slept and then walk out of that room as though, oh, good morning, mom, sleep. Well, I sure did. But what I hadn’t thought through when I thought through this brilliant, is that not only was the nudist designed house fully glass, the path I had to walk was really loose gravel. It

Martha Beck:
Was so

Rowan Mangan:
Loud. My mom is sitting there, oh God, it’s so embarrassing. At the breakfast, what do you call it? The kitchen island having a cup of coffee. And I’m walking that far away,

Martha Beck:
Scrunch,

Rowan Mangan:
Scrunch. And she’s only that far away. But I’ve really committed to it. And so I just am looking down, looking straight ahead, literally just here and here. It was like I was forcing her to pretend something absolutely incontrovertible wasn’t happening. It was so bad. It was so bad. And it went on and on. It was a long, it was crunch. She

Martha Beck:
Was there for a long visit.

Rowan Mangan:
Crunch. It was crunch. Oh God. And we never talked about it on that trip. I went back to Australia. Or do you want to say God

Martha Beck:
Bless her for not saying anything? We thought we were pulling it off.

Rowan Mangan:
I did. I did not. I, I knew her better than that, but I was very grateful for her silence. And then there was a trip where I was back in Australia by myself, and I just said, one night we were chatting and I said something like, so speaking of things that we haven’t really talked about that much, me and Karen Marty. And she went, yeah. And I went, yeah. And she’s like, does this mean next time we don’t have to do the thing with the gravel?

Martha Beck:
I,

Rowan Mangan:
I died.

Martha Beck:
I

Rowan Mangan:
Died.

Martha Beck:
See, that’s why you can go really, really, I mean, once you’ve gone that far outside and sat with your mother and looked at her squarely in the face and had to deal with this, you’re kind of beyond it after that.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, if I had any real chops, I pretend to have, we would’ve just told her. But I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready.

Martha Beck:
No, really. I actually think I wouldn’t even Karen, who was actually the ringleader of the Kahoot, nobody leader. They think she’s the normal one, knew. Do

Rowan Mangan:
You not be deceived? Can we make her write a memoir called the Ringleader of the Kahoot?

Martha Beck:
Yes. But I thought it would be called parenthetically speaking.

Rowan Mangan:
This is our new how we used to have charisms listeners. We’re now going to call that these parenthetically, parenthetically speakings.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, she’s the really weird one. Trust us. And even if we hadn’t been physically away from culture in this tiny house in the woods with no other, no roads going through past, I mean, there were no people. We were genuinely really, really physically far outside the culture. And I think that enabled us to get together because we’d been there for a while. And it starts to fall off you

Rowan Mangan:
If we dated. You know what I mean? What if we dated, we went out for dinner. It’s like table for three. Can you imagine? So it just couldn’t have been. Couldn’t have. But it was all just without social context. It was without cultural context. And so we didn’t have to name it for a long time. We didn’t have to justify it or describe it, which is probably why I couldn’t, at that time when my mom came, I couldn’t acknowledge it. I think I still didn’t have language for it. Honestly. I still don’t have good language for what we have because I don’t see a model for it anywhere else.

Martha Beck:
I don’t either. I just know it’s really, really, really far outside. It’s

Rowan Mangan:
Really far

Martha Beck:
Outside. Outside. And also, I love that there’s this guy who studies myth, I forget his name, but he says, culture is three days deep. Once you’ve been away from culture for four days, you start to lose language and you start to lose the rules. And we’d been so far outside culture for so long, it did not seem strange. It would’ve seemed very bizarre not to get together because from my perspective, because the natural connection seemed to be so obvious somehow,

Rowan Mangan:
It so clearly wanted to happen. We would’ve had to be very strong to resist it, I guess.

Martha Beck:
But

Rowan Mangan:
I will say everything about that ranch was outside. And

Martha Beck:
Here’s the thing. The reason that I was there was that I went really, really, really far outside because this is so weird. I would see this ranch not in dreams, but in a hypnagogic state. When I was halfway between sleep and waking, I would see that I was living on a ranch in California. And this has been happening for 20 years. I know this. This is a real curve ball if you haven’t heard this, but this is the way I live my life. I kept seeing this W Ranch and knowing I was going to be there. And then I finally knew it so well that I was able to go on Zillow and find it. And it cost absolutely all the money I had in the world, but at least I had that much money in the world. I was not going there to ranch. I just got this W Ranch because it sort of appeared in my dreams. And then

Rowan Mangan:
Ranch, noun, not ranch verb,

Martha Beck:
Ranch noun. Ranch verb is alien to me. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And

Rowan Mangan:
It was so even the process of finding it and purchasing, it was really, really, really far outside,

Martha Beck:
Really far. And I had to make up reasons. I was doing it even for myself. And then I made up such convincing reasons for it. It’s magical. It’s amazing. And I will never, ever regret it. We wouldn’t be together, I think if I hadn’t done that. But then after we got together, it felt like, okay, now we move. And yes, and people were really distraught because they had come into the Kahoot. And now I was changing the rules again.

Rowan Mangan:
And the thing about a Kahoot, what you’ve got to keep as a Kahoot so that it doesn’t become a culture, is don’t get to don’t let things once. It will start to tend towards becoming a culture. And it will start creating mythology. And you are a natural storyteller. And you would begin to weave the ranch into the stories that you told in books. When you spoke to groups and people were in the Kahoot, but they wanted it to be a culture. They wanted it to be more solid and so reliable. They turned stories that you were telling into a mythology. No, you partly turned them into a mythology. Yeah. But then the cultural urge that people have started turning it into law. So Martha is not extractable from the story of the ranch. This is, and so must it ever be. Right?

Martha Beck:
Right. It has to be that way forever.

Rowan Mangan:
And people did. It freaked people out when you said you were moving and you were like, but I did that part.

Martha Beck:
Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence. Any Asian philosophy will tell you the first thing to accept about the world is that everything’s changing all the time. And then you have

Rowan Mangan:
No, yeah, it’s like, guys, if you are freaked out about real estate, wait till we tell you about death.

Martha Beck:
Right. Jesus. Did we mention, yeah. And that’s ruffle thing wasn’t part of any new, I mean, we were always looking for the thing that was pulling us outside. And it’s very interesting that the pandemic made it so hard to go physically to other places. And like Bo Burnham, this comedian made this brilliant show about the pandemic, and he called it inside. We all had to be inside. We had to go inward, but we literally had to physically stay inside. And I think that it was almost, as I was saying, if you get pulled back far enough like a slingshot, it shoots you forward later. Because I’ve noticed that since the pandemic, I have more of an urge to go outside. And for me, that’s saying something

Rowan Mangan:
Interesting. We do go really, really far outside our project with this podcast is that we’re trying to go really, really, really far outside. And like our Costa Rica retreat that we’re dreaming up at the moment that we’re hoping to bring your listeners along is about getting really, really, really, really far outside

Martha Beck:
Costa Rica. Jungle, outside. Jungle.

Rowan Mangan:
And we are planning this life that’s going to be lived more in seasons than in quarters. Good. That’s quite a good thing, isn’t it? Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Seasons not quarter quarters. We forget quarters. Let’s do

Rowan Mangan:
Seasons. Yeah. So we’re always trying to go further outside, even when it’s fucking freezing, like in Boston.

Martha Beck:
But if you’re able to go to wherever is warm and green, that’s even better. But anytime you’re feeling crushed in, overwhelmed, pulled apart by culture, it’s like it’s as simple as going outside. And I love the australianism about it. Let’s get rugged up. Let’s get kitted out and go to the Outback or the Bill. You try a

Rowan Mangan:
Mix

Martha Beck:
For the Billabong. I have

Rowan Mangan:
No idea what a billabong is. No, billabongs are. Okay. But you’ve got to look out for the Bunyips when you’re there. Oh, oh God. Okay. That’ll be our next episode. And in the meantime, go outside to the places where we can stay wild. Really, really, really wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
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 on 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.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.