MFM Minisode 424

Speaker 1 This is exactly right.

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You will not want to miss this. Goodbye.
Goodbye.

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to my favorite murder. The mini sod.
Let me read you your stories. You love it.
We love it. You go first? Okay.
This is called Family Drama and My MFM Origin Story. Dear what?

Speaker 1 I like the idea. Do we ask for MFM origin stories? No, I guess we should.
Dear Karen Georgia, kitty cats, and the rest of the team.

Speaker 1 I am not a day one listener, but my college epidemiology professor is. And in epidemiology 315, she assigned us a project called My Favorite Outbreak.
Girl, I know.

Speaker 1 I'm so proud. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This was 2018, question mark. And she introduced the project by saying you were her favorite podcast, and we were going to research a pandemic and present it as a podcast.
2018? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Before.

Speaker 1 We needed the who, what, when, where, and how of the outbreak, and we would pull assignments randomly from a hat. Like, if I had known college, it was going to be like this.

Speaker 1 I know, there's would have tried a little harder. There's a difference between like good teachers and bad teachers.
We were just like, I like learning. Totally.
What did my group pull?

Speaker 1 The 1984 bioterrorism attack committed by followers of the Bhag Shri, what is it? Bhag Bogwan Shri Rajneesh. Rajneesh.
Bhagwan Shi Rajneesh. Shri Rajneesh.
Shri. Bhagwan Shri Ranish.
Rajneesh.

Speaker 1 Bhagwan Shi Rajneesh.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. Sorry.
I know. I got it.

Speaker 1 I get it. It's hard.
Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh. Got it.

Speaker 1 By followers of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. That's close enough.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that ending. You like pulled it back.
Whew, that's a hard one.

Speaker 1 Which you covered in episode 50.

Speaker 1 Can we please keep that in? The whole me trying to pronounce it? Sure.

Speaker 1 That's so funny. Oh, that was hard.
I obviously can't fit all the details in this email, so people can find them there in episode 50. Thank you for doing really good research.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, I grew up in a religious household and as a child, I had an aunt that I would describe as, quote, very cool.

Speaker 1 She lived in Manhattan, she worked in television, and then as a massage therapist. She always smelled like essential oils, studied film when she was in college, and at one point, she had a horse.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's all the trappings of a cool aunt. How did she check every box? Seriously.
Truly.

Speaker 1 We have to get horses now. Yeah.
To top it off, she traveled a lot, particularly to India, and always brought back jewelry, saris, and other trinkets.

Speaker 1 It was always the best when Aunt Holly, name changed, came back from India. Fast forward back to 2019.
I graduated with my degree in public health.

Speaker 1 And after a brief stint in the psych ward, I'm on my way to New York City to study theology. Yes, girl.

Speaker 1 You got to dip into maybe like just hang out in a robe and smoke some cigarettes and take it easy. And don't explain it to us.
You don't have to. Do you fucking get it? You owe no one any of you.

Speaker 1 Absolutely not. Hang out with Aunt Holly and live in Harlem.

Speaker 1 She did body work in a center with a lot of different therapists, and I attended workshops and listened in on their radio show and helped in the office.

Speaker 1 I got to meet some of her friends, going to meditations, and before you know it, I was in a retreat outside the city with followers of Osho,

Speaker 1 also known as

Speaker 1 Bhagwan Sri Rad. Rajness.
Rajness.

Speaker 1 Rajneesh. Rajneesh.
The only reason I know that is because all through the early 80s, he was on the news every single night.

Speaker 1 And because it was Oregon, and they were like, these people are taking over.

Speaker 1 It was a weird story.

Speaker 1 Come to find out as a fully grown adult that my aunt wasn't just visiting India throughout my childhood, but studying meditation in Pune at the Osho International Meditation Resort.

Speaker 1 There she met her life partner and remains a follower of Osho to this day. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 If I didn't do the My Favorite Outbreak project, I wouldn't have known the details of the 1984 Salmonella outbreak when i was introduced some to some of the group in 2019.

Speaker 1 my aunt maintains osho is innocent and personally i do vibe with some of the meditations however i'm quite distant from it all now the rajneesh and followers of osho are still very much a thing and they have really snazzy meditation retreats with names like mystic rose then it says don't be fooled though because in one of them all you do is cry for like three weeks done i'm done

Speaker 1 easy flying colors

Speaker 1 anyways thanks so much for reading and for all you do to highlight the lives and stories of victims.

Speaker 1 Stay sexy, listen to podcasts recommended by your professors, and don't eat from the salmonella salad bar. V.

Speaker 1 V.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 that's the thing about people like that, though, is that like, of course, people vibe with the meditations.

Speaker 1 All of it is based on really good, like, scientific, like breathing in a certain way helps you, sitting and concentrating helps you, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So it's like, yeah, that's all

Speaker 1 so beneficial. Totally.
Just like he didn't invent it. Your aunt was in a cult.
Oh, cool, and in a cult. I mean, we got some work to do.
Wait, well, kind of in a cult already.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is definitely cool. We started our own.
That's the coolest aunt move of all time. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 It's a fun cult. It's a fun cult where we're kind of not really in charge.

Speaker 1 But wait, the fact that V

Speaker 1 used the descriptor snazzy is,

Speaker 1 that was my mom's descriptor for things when she was like, you can get like a snazzy blouse. Like that was,

Speaker 1 it's the funniest. I haven't heard it in years.
Oh my God. No one says that anymore.
Snazzy. Snazzy.
Let's bring it back. Okay.
On behalf of V and their aunt. And your mom.

Speaker 1 And my mother, who is always with us. All right.
And speaking of which, the subject line of this email is stories from the golden age of parenting and landline phones. Oh, dear.

Speaker 1 Hi, Karen in Georgia and all who love you.

Speaker 1 A long time listener, but have never written in, you asked for stories of the kitchen phone and all its related trauma. So here you go.

Speaker 1 I was born the youngest of six kids with four older brothers and a sister who were all much older than me. Yes, I was a big oops four years after my dad's vasectomy.
I've been told. Shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 Can you get that DNA tested, girl?

Speaker 1 One guy that was like, I'm not ready to be done and he slipped on by. He's like, I'm a fighter.
Actually,

Speaker 1 actually.

Speaker 1 Anyway, one kitchen phone for all those people. Chaos, to say the least.

Speaker 1 It is so, it was not that long ago. And it is like the Stone Age, where it's like, if you're on the phone, that means somebody else waiting for a call couldn't get a call.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 And you fucking, you talked as long as you could just to fuck with them. Yes.
And these days, if you had to share a phone number with someone, could you imagine?

Speaker 1 When I have to hand Vince my phone so he can order what he wants off the food delivery app, I'm like, where's my phone? Where's my phone? I need my phone.

Speaker 1 Like, he has every two minutes to order sushi and I can't fucking handle it. There's no worse feeling in my world than when I'm like, I can't find my phone.

Speaker 1 I'm walking around looking for it forever and it is in your

Speaker 1 fucking hand.

Speaker 1 Okay. Okay.
Back to the email. Obviously.

Speaker 1 Do you ever do that when you're on the phone and then you're like, you're walking around? Where's my phone? And you're on it, like having a phone call. Did you never make a fucking phone call?

Speaker 1 I'm like listening to my sister talk but I'm like wait I have to get my phone before I leave

Speaker 1 okay we clearly drank a ton of caffeine before this episode

Speaker 1 I had a I had a cappuccino made for me in our kitchen okay obviously dinner time was not a good time for any of our friends to call although I'm not sure how they were supposed to know we were eating but if my parents friends called during dinner all good yeah we would wait at the table for a goddamn hour while my mom talked and we stared at our food it's no wonder that my brothers tried to distract themselves by making me laugh.

Speaker 1 Because I sat underneath where my mother would be gabbing on the phone. If I start laughing, I got a big crack on the back of my head.
No. And they got some big laughs themselves.

Speaker 1 Mission accomplished. But I digress.
One thing I definitely remember was how my parents used that phone to call Joe when any of us were misbehaving.

Speaker 1 Joe was a vigilante of sorts, who apparently roamed around the burbs, picking up naughty kids and taking them away in his nasty pickup truck.

Speaker 1 This This scared the shit out of all of us, although by the time I was of the age to get the calls made on my behalf, my older brothers weren't having it.

Speaker 1 They spilled the beans that Joe was fictional pretty early on.

Speaker 1 Anywho, after 10 years of therapy, much dysfunction, and lots of life later, we can all now laugh at that ridiculously sadistic parenting technique. So I

Speaker 1 haven't seen that one in the most recent parenting books, although it is 2025 out there, so you never know. It may make a comeback.
Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Stay sexy. And no matter what anyone says, thank God for cell phones.
Lisa.

Speaker 1 My mom had one of those. And she'd pick up the phone and like start ringing it to her ear and say she was going to call whoever.
Yeah. And it worked.
It worked. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was like Adrian's one of the man is going to see you.

Speaker 1 And she would say it scared her own kids like she was scared too. And it would, I was just like, Jesus.

Speaker 1 And she's like, have you ever had three kids under the age of eight in a restaurant, you know, at a table in Apple Peas? And I'm like, no, you're right. You got to do what you got to do sometimes.

Speaker 1 You do.

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Speaker 1 Terms and conditions apply. Goodbye.
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Go by. Goodbye.

Speaker 1 I really love this next one. I'm not going to read you the subject line.
Okay. Hello, friends.
You asked for crazy wedding drama. And do I have some telenovela level nonsense for you? Yes.

Speaker 1 My second attempt at marriage, first one is at least three separate emails, ended with an opportunity to embrace my entrepreneurial side and turn lemons into dough. Yes.

Speaker 1 I am a professional ballroom dancer and own a dance studio. Pause.
Sleeves. What? Amazing.
Professional. Yeah.
Do you know how hard that is? Yeah. To like make a living as a dancer.
God.

Speaker 1 And it's just a hard. I started, I started watching Dancing with the Stars only because of Alona Marr and her partner, Alan, something or other.

Speaker 1 And they were having, they were trying to do this thing where it was almost like a love romance thing that was so captivating on TikTok. It was the best.
But it is so hard. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And hard on your body. And

Speaker 1 which is where I fell in love with my coworker and fiancé number two. I was very happy despite the red flags littering our conversations.

Speaker 1 It says, in my defense, I was trying to be tolerant and he was super hot. And he found a non-refundable, all-inclusive wedding venue that we put a deposit down on.

Speaker 1 Five months before the wedding, he came home one night to tell me he isn't sure about the wedding.

Speaker 1 The next morning, he wasn't sure about our relationship.

Speaker 1 After he ended things a week later, I found out that he was already planning to move out of state to be with the new woman he met at a dance competition I didn't attend. I just don't understand

Speaker 1 why you meet that person,

Speaker 1 go with it, and let the other person fucking know.

Speaker 1 totally instead of immediately you're planning a wed why would you go all the way other in the other direction yeah no it's super up he leaves a couple months later assuming no financial responsibility for any part of our wedding then it says or the southern california rent he left me with And I put on my capitalism thinking cap.

Speaker 1 I couldn't get a refund and was left with all the pieces of a great party. So I turned my wedding into a ballroom dance competition for a few local studios.
Yes. Brilliant.
Yes.

Speaker 1 I had the pleasure of telling several vendors about the change in plans. Wedding cake is now cupcakes.
Dance playlist now is full of tangos and cha-chas. So many awkward phone calls and emails.

Speaker 1 I in no way covered the financial loss on that event because the wedding industry is a scam, but it certainly helped.

Speaker 1 However, the students love the event so much, it has since become an annual tradition that grows every year and this year is poised to be our largest yet.

Speaker 1 Can we host it? Let's MC it, you and me. Can we be judges? Yes.
And

Speaker 1 we go and we have to do a dance. We want to dance too.

Speaker 1 All caps, it's not a horrible reminder of my trauma, LOL.

Speaker 1 It was a bittersweet day that has been replaced annually with much better memories with much better people. I'm now planning wedding number three to a lovely man who is not in the dance industry.

Speaker 1 Good plan. He is a thoughtful, loving, intelligent person, and the cats love him the most out of any of my past partners.
Coincidence, I think you know the answer.

Speaker 1 Thanks for reading and stay sexy and don't date ballroom dancers. Kristen, Santa Barbara, California.
Kristen. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 So wait, is the fest, is this ballroom dance competition yearly in Santa Barbara? I think it must be, yeah. God, I love that idea.
It's like lemons and a lemonade.

Speaker 1 My friend, Jocelyn, he was on her, what was supposed to be her wedding day with fucking asshole, what she called an unwedding weekend, where she just, all her girlfriends came out.

Speaker 1 We did all kinds of fucked up, funny funny things around weddings, and it was not a depressing weekend for her. Nice.
You know? Yeah. It was really smart.
That's very good.

Speaker 1 It's like being proactive about. Yeah.
I know this is going to suck. Yes.

Speaker 1 I mean, I've seen a lot of those stories on TikTok too, where it's like, yes, you got left at the altar or you got, you know, two days before or whatever, and it could go this way, and you're going to just decide it's going to go this way.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I love that.
Okay.

Speaker 1 The subject line of this email is my petty family. Hi, Karen in Georgia.
My girlfriend is a longtime listener, but she knows I love the hometown, so we often listen to to the mini-sodes together.

Speaker 1 You guys ask for petty family stories, and boy, do I have some for you.

Speaker 1 The telescope. My family, so each one of them has its own title.
Okay. The telescope.
My family has an old farmhouse that we use as a vacation spot.

Speaker 1 One of my uncles had a rather nice telescope that he kept up there that anyone could use. One weekend, when my uncle's family and my family were up there at the same time,

Speaker 1 the telescope was found broken on the porch. But who was to blame? Three question marks.

Speaker 1 No one confessed. So my uncle, being a rational adult, used deductive reasoning and decided the most logical move is to blame my sibling.
Why, you might ask?

Speaker 1 That's a great question that I have no answer for. But for almost a decade and a half, he held a strong grudge against my sibling.

Speaker 1 He would be rude, mean, and not talk to them all over a telescope that he had no proof of them breaking. What?

Speaker 1 They did not break the telescope, and still nobody knows who did, but the grudge was formed. I bet he broke it himself.
Right? Yeah. Trying to get someone to pay for it.

Speaker 1 I mean, I would love right now to be able to see a family photo where we just go through and say who we think didn't do it. Absolutely.
It's a whole podcast.

Speaker 1 It's some like old, kindly grandma that no one would suspect. Yeah, that's what I like.
Smash.

Speaker 1 I don't like stars. Smash.

Speaker 1 Okay, this one is popovers. My grandmother was quite the cook in her day, and in her old age, would often still make elaborate breakfasts and dinners for the family.

Speaker 1 One day the whole family was up at the old farmhouse and my grandmother decided she was going to make popovers for breakfast. A small pastry-like pancake that you can put jam and butter in.

Speaker 1 They'll change your life if you've never had them.

Speaker 1 I don't think I've ever had them. It reminds me like a Dutch baby.
They kind of look like little muffins? Yeah, well, that's like a pancake. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I'll fucking eat it. I'll have to look into it.
They are a very labor-intensive thing to cook, and they take a rather long time. So my sibling and my cousin got hungry because it was already 11 a.m.

Speaker 1 and breakfast still wasn't ready. They went into the kitchen to make a piece of toast.
This was their first mistake. They made their toast and ate it in front of my grandmother.
Second mistake.

Speaker 1 She did not like this and decided she's not going to finish cooking because nobody's going to be hungry anyway because they're all too busy eating before breakfast is even ready. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 She stopped cooking completely, left the kitchen and went around telling everybody how breakfast wasn't going to happen anymore because everyone is is so full of toast.

Speaker 1 Oh my mother. That is so petty.

Speaker 1 If anybody in my family did that, the second they would start saying that, everyone else would be like, oh, shut the hell up. Like truly immediately crowd shamed.
Okay. Good.

Speaker 1 My mother made my sibling and cousin apologize to try to smooth things over.

Speaker 1 My grandmother, quote unquote, accepts their apology, finishes making breakfast, but doesn't allow them to eat any of the popovers because they were still too full of toast.

Speaker 1 This might be a deep lesson, a deep lesson lesson about patience or just extreme pettiness. The popovers were amazing, by the way.

Speaker 1 I mean, there is that thing where it's like, hey, my old wretched hands, you know, I have arthritis. It hurts me to make this.
And you're just going to like, you're just going to be uncaring.

Speaker 1 As long as you eat them still, you know? Yeah, and give people a chance to eat them. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Although it does feel good to punish. It does.
A lonely movie theater. Okay.
My sibling and my grandmother were spending a day together and they decided to go see a movie.

Speaker 1 My sibling accidentally, I don't know why I'm already laughing. I don't know what the story is.
I think it's Kaffy. Yeah.
My sibling accidentally inferred that my grandmother was old.

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 1 It's the same fucking grandmother, I think.

Speaker 1 My sibling accidentally inferred that my grandmother was old in front of her and my grandmother did not take this well.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 And so sat my sibling in the back of the theater and then went to the front of the theater and sat separately for the entire movie. Wow.

Speaker 1 After the movie, she drove my sibling home in complete and total silence. All things considered, though, my grandmother was a fantastic woman.

Speaker 1 It's too late. No.
It's too late. No.
She was a fantastic woman, a true badass, and could have very well been a NASCAR driver.

Speaker 1 I have many stories of her legendary yet terrifying driving abilities. Sorry for the amount of stories and the length of them.

Speaker 1 I hope my family's drama brought you laughs and maybe put a smile on your face. They did.
Thank you, as always, for the wonderful job you do.

Speaker 1 Your stories always make long drives and doing dishes far more entertaining. Sincerely, a friend.
Oh,

Speaker 1 definitely.

Speaker 1 I think this is a good reminder that you can write in your partner's story. If they don't listen, you can still use it.
Yes, exactly. Right.

Speaker 1 And also, this person's saying that they don't feel like they're a murderer in our country. They're not into true crime.
But then they're like, but also I like what my girlfriend likes. Right.

Speaker 1 And the hometowns are so different that it's like anyone could listen to that. I mean, who couldn't listen to this bullshit? Try it.
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Speaker 1 I know I've mentioned already how much I love my entryway table, but I swear to God, because the path that it's on, like you have to walk out of the front of my house to walk to the bathroom.

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Goodbye. Every holiday season, it's the same.

Speaker 1 You've got one person who's impossible to shop for and another who, quote, doesn't need need anything. Great, then they're gonna get my macaroni art.
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I think I put it on and walked directly to a record with you.

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Bye.

Speaker 1 Okay, my last one is called my greatest comedic moment home voicemail story.

Speaker 1 Hello, friends.

Speaker 1 While our phone number was never accidentally dialed for a funeral home or published as a doctor's office, it was one digit off from a classmate's and I would sometimes have to tell people they called the wrong house and what the correct number was.

Speaker 1 But that isn't my story.

Speaker 1 My best home phone story comes from my comedic genius as a nine-year-old. My family just gotten a new home phone with a voicemail system.

Speaker 1 Pretty sure we just had replaced the cassette voicemail thingy. And we were having an upbeat discussion about what our outgoing message should say over dinner.

Speaker 1 That's when it hit me, a bolt of inspiration. You see, our last name is Stump, like a tree stump.
Our voicemail message since I was nine is, thanks for calling the stumps.

Speaker 1 Now make like a tree and leave a message.

Speaker 1 I peeked Melissa.

Speaker 1 Melissa, you did. Yes, my parents still have a home phone and had to replace their phone system, which means I no longer greet incoming callers with my little voice, but I did for 20 plus years.
Oh,

Speaker 1 imagine being able to call and listen to your nine-year-old self right now. When you have like, When you have a bad day and you're like, I'm not worried, you know, you're feeling down on yourself.

Speaker 1 Just be like, when you were nine, you fucking did this. You had comedy coming out your pores.
Comedy gold. Here's the lastie.
You've got the stump. The subject line,

Speaker 1 you've got this stump. Subject line, no, you really won't believe this.
I was listening, it just starts.

Speaker 1 I was listening to Minnesota 418 and the writer mentioned how her grandpa rejected the opportunity to draw the golden arches. Oh, yeah.
Remember that one?

Speaker 1 He's an architect. It was beneath him.
Well, I got one better.

Speaker 1 My father told me the story that my great-grandfather was sitting in his recliner feeling lazy and decided to create something that would allow him to change the channels from his seat without having to get up.

Speaker 1 Somehow he macGyvered a box with a wire that went from his chair to the TV.

Speaker 1 He called my great-grandma in with excitement to share his invention with her.

Speaker 1 She took one look at the contraption and told him it was ridiculous to think that people would be so lazy that they wouldn't even be willing to get out of their chair to change the channel.

Speaker 1 She scolded him first, then took the invention and tossed it in the trash. Wow, now that's petty.
That is

Speaker 1 some old school marriage right there. I don't believe in you.
Get your shit out of my way. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 It wasn't until sometime later that the TV remote was invented by some other man who was lucky enough to not have a wife scold him and toss it in the trash.

Speaker 1 I could have been the heiress to the TV remote empire, but instead, I'm a public high school teacher.

Speaker 1 You're raising the next generation of mentors, at least. Yep, you with that bitterness in your heart, you could have had it all.

Speaker 1 And there's a, they do my favorite little typing smiley face that's sideways. Love you both more than you know.
What you do is needed more than you know.

Speaker 1 Keep at it. Christina, she, her.
Oh my God. This is why it's so important to be supportive in your relationships.
That's right. We need you guys to support us so we can keep reading your emails.

Speaker 1 You have to be sending them to my favorite murderer at Gmail, please, about anything and everything. So many things.
Just a good story. Yeah.
Good stories are. That's good stories are great.

Speaker 1 That's all we want. Stay sexy.
And don't get murdered. Goodbye.

Speaker 1 Elvis, do you want a cookie?

Speaker 1 This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alejandra Keck.
Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo. This episode was mixed by Liana Scolacci.

Speaker 1 Email your hometowns to myfavorite murder at gmail.com. And follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at MyFavoriteMurder.
Goodbye.

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Groons, get your greens the easiest way possible. Goodbye.