COLUMNS
Talk Show 8 with Allison Lynn, Joshua Neuman, Thisbe Nissen, Dan Pope, and Rachel Sherman
/ Jaime Clarke
01.30.08
––What was the genesis of this myth?
Lynn: Well, who knows, maybe it’s true. If not, the genesis was completely my grandmother’s imagination. She considered herself the family storyteller, and had a tendency to tell tales that just slightly romanticized her role in all sorts of situations. At the time of her death in 2004, she was writing these tales down for posterity. It’s not entirely clear who she thought might be interested. Other than Bette Midler.
Neuman: It started when my mother and I saw a young comic named Jerry Seinfeld perform on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I was probably around 10 years old at the time. My mother was named after her maternal grandmother, Jennie Seinfeld, who lived from 1890-1943. The Seinfelds, my mother told me, were originally from Poland (present day Ukraine) where their last name was Stanislavaw. She wondered whether the wise-cracking comic joking about missing socks and the cereal aisle of the supermarket was related to us. Phone calls were made. Shoe boxes of old photos were excavated from attics. Family trees were drawn up. In anticipation of tracing a straight line between us and comic aristocracy, my mother let me stay up late when Jerry made his first appearance on Late Night With David Letterman. We taped Jerry's first HBO special and watched it over and over again. Soon after, we learned that our suspicions were correct: Jerry was one of us.
Nissen: Like many small children, I’d really wanted a pet, and a cat was the only reasonable pet to have, living, as we did, in New York City. (This because the only reasonable kinds of pets to have at all, according to my parents, were cats and dogs, and though my mother claimed to really be a dog person, not a cat person, keeping a dog in the city was cruel.) The problem was that my dad was ostensibly allergic to cats. (I say ostensibly because we’d never actually seen him around a cat, but he claimed to be allergic. He also professed an allergy to Goldenrod, which always struck me as too specific to be legitimate. He also once told me that his favorite color was yellow, which I found out years (and many yellow Fathers’ Day tie presents) later was something he’d just said so I’d stop asking him what his favorite color was.) But we had some friends who had a cat named Pushkin who was a fancy breed of cat called a Korat––a short-hair, all gray, from Thailand––who was supposed to be hypoallergenic somehow. We had Pushkin come stay with us for a weekend, and my dad seemed fine, so it was settled that we too would get a Korat. Being a fancy-bred cat, we had to go to a breeder, so we drove to some crazy cat-woman’s house somewhere outside the city where she bred Korats for showing. It was Christmas time, and she had a tree up in her living room, and a million gray cats running all over the place. These cats were full-breed Korats, and they were seriously expensive, but there were two cats from a recent litter who had defects and were going for cheap. One had a white spot on her chest; that was her championship-disqualifying imperfection. She also had a cold and sneezed a lot. It was pretty cute. I thought the white freckle was cute too. Plus she’d been the runt of the litter, so she was tiny. As we watched the cat zip around the breeder’s living room we came to identify her as Sneezy. About the other cat-show-reject Korat I don’t recall any physical flaws, but I remember him as a gremlin of a cat, a hyperactive monster-child, a maniac in kitten’s clothing. By the end of the evening he’d eaten a box of tinsel and knocked over the Christmas tree. We called him Beastie.
Perhaps it’s needless to say that it was Sneezy we brought home with us that night. She got over her cold, but the sneezing continued, and her name stuck. The irony? She made my dad sneeze too.
Pope: My father, Donald Pope, referred to Colonel Pope and his descendants in the Hartford area as the money Popes, and whenever an opportunity arose in public, my father let it be known that we—my brother, sister and I—were Money Popes. My father relished the deference afforded to him by others who thought him rich and powerful, and I once heard him tell a car mechanic, in the middle of some minor dispute, Do you know who I am? I’m Don Pope.
Sherman: The genesis is a person. Her name is Mom. She is a Freudian psychoanalyst. The genesis is also four individual therapists, all working outside the home, unknown to one another, but existing inside our house in the forms of two parents, two children.
Lynn: Well, who knows, maybe it’s true. If not, the genesis was completely my grandmother’s imagination. She considered herself the family storyteller, and had a tendency to tell tales that just slightly romanticized her role in all sorts of situations. At the time of her death in 2004, she was writing these tales down for posterity. It’s not entirely clear who she thought might be interested. Other than Bette Midler.
Neuman: It started when my mother and I saw a young comic named Jerry Seinfeld perform on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I was probably around 10 years old at the time. My mother was named after her maternal grandmother, Jennie Seinfeld, who lived from 1890-1943. The Seinfelds, my mother told me, were originally from Poland (present day Ukraine) where their last name was Stanislavaw. She wondered whether the wise-cracking comic joking about missing socks and the cereal aisle of the supermarket was related to us. Phone calls were made. Shoe boxes of old photos were excavated from attics. Family trees were drawn up. In anticipation of tracing a straight line between us and comic aristocracy, my mother let me stay up late when Jerry made his first appearance on Late Night With David Letterman. We taped Jerry's first HBO special and watched it over and over again. Soon after, we learned that our suspicions were correct: Jerry was one of us.
Nissen: Like many small children, I’d really wanted a pet, and a cat was the only reasonable pet to have, living, as we did, in New York City. (This because the only reasonable kinds of pets to have at all, according to my parents, were cats and dogs, and though my mother claimed to really be a dog person, not a cat person, keeping a dog in the city was cruel.) The problem was that my dad was ostensibly allergic to cats. (I say ostensibly because we’d never actually seen him around a cat, but he claimed to be allergic. He also professed an allergy to Goldenrod, which always struck me as too specific to be legitimate. He also once told me that his favorite color was yellow, which I found out years (and many yellow Fathers’ Day tie presents) later was something he’d just said so I’d stop asking him what his favorite color was.) But we had some friends who had a cat named Pushkin who was a fancy breed of cat called a Korat––a short-hair, all gray, from Thailand––who was supposed to be hypoallergenic somehow. We had Pushkin come stay with us for a weekend, and my dad seemed fine, so it was settled that we too would get a Korat. Being a fancy-bred cat, we had to go to a breeder, so we drove to some crazy cat-woman’s house somewhere outside the city where she bred Korats for showing. It was Christmas time, and she had a tree up in her living room, and a million gray cats running all over the place. These cats were full-breed Korats, and they were seriously expensive, but there were two cats from a recent litter who had defects and were going for cheap. One had a white spot on her chest; that was her championship-disqualifying imperfection. She also had a cold and sneezed a lot. It was pretty cute. I thought the white freckle was cute too. Plus she’d been the runt of the litter, so she was tiny. As we watched the cat zip around the breeder’s living room we came to identify her as Sneezy. About the other cat-show-reject Korat I don’t recall any physical flaws, but I remember him as a gremlin of a cat, a hyperactive monster-child, a maniac in kitten’s clothing. By the end of the evening he’d eaten a box of tinsel and knocked over the Christmas tree. We called him Beastie.
Perhaps it’s needless to say that it was Sneezy we brought home with us that night. She got over her cold, but the sneezing continued, and her name stuck. The irony? She made my dad sneeze too.
Pope: My father, Donald Pope, referred to Colonel Pope and his descendants in the Hartford area as the money Popes, and whenever an opportunity arose in public, my father let it be known that we—my brother, sister and I—were Money Popes. My father relished the deference afforded to him by others who thought him rich and powerful, and I once heard him tell a car mechanic, in the middle of some minor dispute, Do you know who I am? I’m Don Pope.
Sherman: The genesis is a person. Her name is Mom. She is a Freudian psychoanalyst. The genesis is also four individual therapists, all working outside the home, unknown to one another, but existing inside our house in the forms of two parents, two children.