Gritty Is Beside Himself, With Lauren Theisen
We need to be adults about this: Hockey is real. The NHL’s playoffs are in point of fact going on right now. There is just no sense in hiding from it. While I wouldn’t say we were hiding from the reality of our current Hockey Situation in recent weeks, it is true Drew and I have talked much more about baseball, basketball, and even football than we have about our fourth and coldest major sport. It was with remedying that in mind, and also because she is a delightful person to talk to, that we had Defector Hockey Headmistress Lauren Theisen on the podcast to talk hockey this week.
After the usual prefatory buffoonery and accent work, we discussed Lauren’s recent adventure in New York City real estate and remembered some shitty apartments. This bit was brief, but it is fair to say that it has it all: an uninsulated and worryingly cold bathroom, a secret room high above Lauren’s kitchen, sneaky touristic visits to fancy furniture stores, the works. But, cards on the table, it does not contain any hockey.
That changes right around the 10-minute mark, when Lauren begins the work of guiding us through the current state of play in the Stanley Cup playoffs. We talk about the non-linear and extremely unhurried work of making the Buffalo Sabres good again, the importance of jumbo hockey man Tage Thompson, and why so many of the NHL’s best teams have been eliminated already. Drew discusses his Minnesota North Stars fandom and sings a little North Stars song; the rowdy Hughes brothers are discussed in some detail. I posit the not very useful thought experiment: “What if the Anaheim Mighty Ducks were the Anaheim Rocketeers?”
After the break, we turned to Lauren’s ongoing book journey with and within It’s a Wonderful Life, for the (nearly completed!) book she’s writing with the great critic Emily St. James. We talked about the work of stacking blogs to make a book, considered the goofy genre that It’s a Wonderful Life launched and the perspective it still offers on some foundational American realities, and got a tour of Seneca Falls, N.Y., which in Lauren’s description is something like the Cooperstown of It’s a Wonderful Life.
We followed this with a quick round of NBA playoff chat, with a special emphasis on the delightful insanity of the Minnesota Timberwolves, and then with a turn into Theisen’s Corner, Theater Edition. Lauren described her favorite weird off-Broadway theaters, parsed the difference between good and bad corny theater experiences, the mystery of what the musical Chess even is, and the risks and rewards of Broadway theater. There is also some frank talk about lesser Coen brothers films that may alienate some members of the audience.
The Funbag entry for the week used a simple question—how do you store your glasses at home?—as an entry point to a consideration of our stupid personal pet peeves. A good gambit, there, but it didn’t work. “I think of my pet peeves as pretty smart,” Lauren said, and we went back and forth passing around our extremely reasonable and not all that peevish beliefs for a while. We considered our own inability to deal with the passage of time where our coworkers are concerned; Drew took a hard line on zoomer slang and meme talk, and the courtesies that hold society together. There’s a lesson, here: None of this would have been possible had we gone on pretending hockey doesn’t exist. What a loss that would have been.
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