Julia and Julie: Wiser Than Me and We The Wiser

On the road again to visit 94-year-old Dad, we listen to 88-year-old Julie Andrews in conversation with my high school chum from 45 years ago, Julia-Louis Dreyfus.

The podcast was a completely unexpected highlight of the drive.

I am embarrassingly deficient in podcast listening hours. I want to listen! So many friends tell me this or that podcast is wonderful. And yet! The time, the time.

Somehow, though, there is one that I have been swimming towards inexorably. And I – we – arrived at its door on Friday somewhere between the George Washington Bridge and the first field of soy beans just past the NASCAR race track outside of Dover. It was the right time.

My puffy face betrays the week of bad sleep, the rest of me – a month of too much chocolate. Also, I did spend eight hours in the ER last Monday, ironically after such a wonderful time at the wedding in Maine. Turns out the piercing pain in my chest was due to a lung infection, probably “walking” pneumonia.

So there was that – and a call to repeat the mammogram I’d had the Friday before with another mammogram and ultrasound on Wednesday. The very good news is that I am in the clear. Even better is that the news was delivered to me in person by a radiologist who happens to be the mom of one of my former colleagues. And she is the best. So, phew on all that.

But Thursday night after sending the Vine to the printer, I was scurrying around, cursing our choice of a 7 a.m. boat the next morning. So much to do – a slew of heavy garden pots to drag inside, a round of flowers in vases to take to the compost pile (leaving the dahlias – VERY HARD), two dinners to make (one to take with us to eat on arrival at Dad’s – he’s not up to having dinner on the stove for us when we arrive any more), the post-deadline mess on my desk and on my computer to tidy up, the about-to-be overdue bills to pay, and the packing – the dog medicine, the dog food, the dog bed; the garden tomatoes, the garden beans, the garden onions; the cooler, the ice packs; the shoe bag, the snack bag – yada yada yada.

I got frustrated with myself, wondering why I haven’t yet gotten to a place where I have breathing room in between commitments and deadlines. I am impatient. I know it will come. It has to, because the deleterious effects of not enough sleep and inefficient stress management are dogging me, quite obviously.

Yet somehow, Friday morning, despite only five hours slept, I was alert and animated, my chatty-Cathy self. I was so annoying, in fact, that my husband threatened to abandon me at the first rest area in Connecticut – the one just over the border that was probably built in 1958 when 1-95 first opened in the state. No McDonalds, no Starbucks, no gas station, no convenience mart. Just bathrooms, a vending machine, and a quaintly antiquated park featuring picnic tables and concrete barbecues — as if Mom and Dad and Dick and Jane and Spot were planning a big trip on the big highway, with a four hour rest stop to light a fire and cook hotdogs. Probably no one has used those grills in 50 years.

I was allowed back in the car, Farmer’s hot breath on my neck.

Most of my annoying behavior involved reading aloud, first from the Duke alumni magazine, then from my phone. In my defense, I was trying to process the extent of Helene’s destruction up and down Appalachia – trying to understand the repercussions and figure out where to donate. (I went with Barbara Kingsolver’s suggestion, Appalachia Funders Network. In her words, “I’m here to remind everybody that rural folks hold up half the sky, and it has just fallen on us.”)

And then something popped up in my Instagram feed: Julia Louis-Dreyfus talking about her podcast, Wiser Than Me, about to launch its third season on October 9.

Since we were in the car, and I was hearing Julia’s voice, I was immediately transported back to a drive I made with Julia in, well, if you can believe it, 1979.

It’s the end of May. We’re in Julia’s car headed from Washington, D. C., to the Delaware shore. It’s senior weekend (she and her pals are seniors, I am a junior, but along with my friend Liz, I have been tagging along with this crazy, funny, smart group of friends as often as possible) and we are headed to a beach rental. A last big blowout before they graduate. Julia has just completed her month-long senior project, which was working on the film Alien. She is describing the plot of the film to me in gruesome detail. What I remember of the rest of the drive is that Julia is not just entertaining, but kind and inquisitive. She is interested in how I am doing, and she makes me feel as if whatever I have to say might be worth listening to. (When you’re sixteen, your self-worth and self-confidence tend to wax and wane according to how your relationships with your peers – especially your seventeen-year-old-peers – are going. Maybe you remember.) 

My most vivid memory from the rest of that weekend is frozen strawberry daiquiris overflowing from the blender onto a Formica kitchen counter, dripping into an old wooden drawer of silverware and onto the linoleum floor. I think that blender was going the entire weekend. Also, I think there was a lot of sunburn involved.

Many years later, a friend would call me to tell me my photo was in the National Enquirer. It was a tiny photo of the Thespians (a drama group) cut out of our high school yearbook, obviously part of that fine publication’s attempt to track down old photos of the Seinfeld stars. I just happened to be standing next to Julia.

While I was simply a drama groupie – I worked on sets, managed ticket sales, that sort of thing – Julia was the star (and the singing star – she has a beautiful voice) of every musical and play we staged during the four years of high school. Better still, she and her friends, once the seniors got to be in charge of morning assemblies, would reenact skits from Saturday Night Live for us. They were hysterical. (And morning assembly at an all-girls prep school got a lot more tolerable.) SNL was only a few years old, but already we were enthralled by it, and Julia must have set her sights on it then. (She was a cast member from 1982 to 1985).

Unlike the rest of the world, I have not seen every episode of Seinfeld or watched much of Veep – only because I dialed television watching out of my life almost entirely for a while, and even now it is rare event. So I have not seen a lot of Julia’s television work. But I’ve tried to catch her in films, and I’m very intrigued by her latest, Tuesday.  

Yet when I heard that Julia was starting a podcast where she’d be interviewing older women, I was thrilled. Such a brilliant idea – and it made perfect sense to me that Julia would be the one to do this, to bring attention to a group so often overlooked and underestimated. I also thought it would be fun to hear Julia’s voice in conversation; when I think of it, I immediately smile and laughter bubbles up in me. But once again, it was something I just put on a wish list, thinking I’d make time for it soon. And apparently two seasons of it came and quickly went.

In the car, without my husband knowing what I was doing, I went poking around on my phone for the app to listen to Wiser Than Me. I realized once I got there that Season 3 hadn’t yet begun. But scrolling back, I saw that Julia’s last interview of Season 2 was with Julie Andrews – oh joy!

I hit the play button. Right away I was smiling and nodding, listening to Julia talk about how The Sound of Music is her favorite movie of all time, how she can never watch it too many times. Me, too, I thought! A few minutes passed and my husband didn’t beg me to turn it off. I lay the phone down on the console between us, and however many minutes later – 45? 50? - these two wonderful women said goodbye to each other, and my husband and I looked at each other with that “well, that was good stuff” look.

“She’s such a great interviewer!” he said. Yes, I agreed.

There were so many good bits – the two of them talking about how a singer must lean in to great lyrics as an actor would with great lines, bringing them to life with a deep understanding of what they mean. They talked about cursing (!), about Julie’s decades long friendship with Carol Burnett (who Julia is now friends with), her long marriage to Blake Edwards (the secret: laughter), about disappointments – why Julie was passed over for the screen role of My Fair Lady after performing it so successfully on Broadway –  and how she felt her subsequent academy award for Mary Poppins was something of a (somewhat embarrassing) make-up for the snub. (Of course Julie being who she is, said all this with grace and modesty.)

Julia worked her way delicately into asking Julie about the most difficult time in her life – the operation that left Julie with her singing voice ruined. It was difficult for her to talk about it. She admitted to a period of depression in the beginning. But, she emphasized, getting through it brought her to a whole new act in life: writing children’s books and co-writing books with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton. She has now written 38 books!

I was amazed to hear Julie say several times, “And I’m looking forward to doing so much more.” We should all be that proactive and optimistic at 88.

For my husband, who is 73 and a reluctantly semi-retired attorney (he can’t say no when old clients call and ask for help), this second act of Julie’s was particularly inspiring. He has not quite figured out what his next act is (I’m encouraging teaching), though he is constantly dragged into being the farm’s Chief Infrastructure Officer, the Chief Chauffer for frequent drives to Delaware, and very importantly, Chief Male Companion for Dad when we arrive at our destination. (My Dad loves him.)

As we pulled into Dad’s on Friday afternoon, the sun brilliant and the air summer-warm, we admired the latest round of landscaping improvements he’s been working on. He is intent on raising the value of the house through what could glibly be described as curb appeal but is so much more. He has a goal and a purpose. I thought about how important it is to have these things – they are what keep Dad going. That and knowing there are people to love and people who love him. Aging is not for sissies, as we say. It’s like the rest of life. You can sit down and give in. Or stand up and keep going. But you’ve got to have a passion, your health, and your wits.

That’s a lot. How do you hold on to all that and yet go with the flow, let grace happen?

I’m not sure. But I think if I listen to a few more episodes of Wiser Than Me I might get a hint or two.

💚

Click here or below to Listen to Wiser Than Me: Julia Gets Wise With Julie Andrews: