J. Smith-Cameron: ...we did a couple of plays together, and we used to go to the O'Neill playwriting festival when we were younger and like-

[dog barks]

I didn't know you could have dogs in here!

Anna Sale: I know, as long as the dog's vaccinated!

[laughter]

Anna Sale: This is Death, Sex & Money. The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. I'm Anna Sale.

When I still lived in New York, I frequently ate at a diner at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place in Manhattan, just a few blocks up from WNYC's offices. And I was back there a couple of weeks ago with Anabel, one of our producers.

Male Speaker: Hello.

Anabel Bacon: Hey how are you doing? There's gonna be three of us but we're still waiting on our third person. Can we sit down or should we wait?

Male Speaker: Yes. You have your vaccine cards, right?

Anna Sale: Vaccine cards weren't the only thing that was different from the last time I was here. Between the lines of booths are Plexiglass barriers, and everyone working was wearing masks. But the restaurant did still have real menus instead of QR codes, those oversized diner kind, a dozen pages long or so in plastic sleeves.

Anabel and I were at the Waverly diner to meet actor J. Smith-Cameron. You may know her from the HBO show Succession. She plays Gerri, General Counsel for a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate, who's the only adult in the conference room, who takes care of business while everyone around her acts like a maniac. In person, J. comes off as warm and chatty, and not even a little bit cutthroat.

J. Smith-Cameron: Hi! I was so worried I'd be late. How are you, guys?

Anna Sale: Good. I'm Anna.

J. Smith-Cameron: Hi Anna! Nice to meet you!

Anna Sale: Hi. Nice to meet you, too. I'm so excited to do this with you.

J. Smith-Cameron: Me too. I'm so curious why you picked me.

Anna Sale: Because you're interesting.

J. Smith-Cameron: I'm so fascinating.

Anna Sale: Yes.

J. lives in the neighborhood. We'd suggested meeting at the Waverly diner after noticing she posted a picture of their egg cream on her Instagram. I think of that as a very New York thing to order, but J. grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and moved to Manhattan in her early 20s. She has spent her entire life since then performing. Before Succession, J. was on another critically acclaimed TV show Rectify, but a lot of her work hasn't been on screen, but on stage -- on- and off-Broadway, where the audience is right there, breathing the same air as her.

All that went away with the pandemic, and that was a big part of what I wanted to talk with her about, what the last 18 months has been like for someone whose work depends on being around other people, and how re-entry has been going for her. And this was a re-entry for me to. This was one of my first in-person interviews since the pandemic, and you can tell that I was a bit anxious and overexcited. You'll hear me as we talk breaking in awkwardly like a little terrier.

Anna Sale: You've been in this neighborhood for a long time.

J. Smith-Cameron: I have yes. I have been in and out of this neighborhood from the very beginning. My first apartment I moved in with a college chum on Grove Street till she kicked me out because it was really not big enough for two people. Then I moved back for a while on West Fourth Street and then moved away and then Kenny, who I eventually married...

(That's Kenny as in Kenneth Lonergan, the Oscar-winning writer, and director. They've been married for over two decades.)

J. Smith-Cameron: The Waverly Gallery. We lived there for, I don't know, a long time, and we've recently moved down to SoHo but still basically the same zip code.

Anna Sale: When you come into the Waverly Diner, is this a place that you have spent a lot of time?

J. Smith-Cameron: Oh, yes, definitely. My best friend who passed away about three going on four years ago, although it still seems horribly fresh. His name's Kevin Geer, he's an actor and we were very close. We lived in Washington Place, east of Sixth Avenue. He lived on Washington Place, West of Sixth Avenue and we would just kill time. This is a little, I'm carrying with me a chapter from James Joyce's Ulysses.

Anna Sale: Do you know what you want to order?

J. Smith-Cameron: Yes.

Anna Sale: We can order. We can pause for a minute, and then we'll go back to Ulysses.

J. Smith-Cameron: Oh, well, I don't have much to say about Ulysses!

[laughs]

J. Smith-Cameron: Hi. I'll have chocolate egg cream.

Waiter: Chocolate egg cream.

Anna Sale: I'd like an omelet. I'd like a peppers, onion, and feta omelet, please.

Waiter: The one with feta cheese, right?

Anna Sale: Yes. Thank you. Egg cream, is this something you get?

J. Smith-Cameron: Well! I do love an egg cream. I don't know why they call them that. There's neither egg nor cream in it as far as I understand.

Anna Sale: What's in it?

J. Smith-Cameron: We should Google it. Have you had one?

Anna Sale: No, I think I should order one to taste.

J. Smith-Cameron: Yes, definitely. [crosstalk] [unintelligible 00:04:56] that seems a little COVID-y. [laughter]

Anna Sale: So you're carrying this around, a chapter of Ulysses.

J. Smith-Cameron: Yes. My point was about how he writes about Dublin, this thing of kind of wandering around and running into people and just losing a sense of time. So for actors, I don't have very much to say about Ulysses-

[laughter]

J. Smith-Cameron: -except this chapter that I'm reading, it makes me think of how Kevin and I used to be because when we were between gigs and we were just auditioning, actors have a lot of time to fill without trying to fall into a desperate void in your mind. Kevin was just great. He was a little bit older than me, and he had started Off-Broadway in the era when all that was really new. He knew all these people. He just had a fascinating life, and he was one of these really observant people who had an incredible memory. So we would come in this diner and nurse a cup of tea and a corn muffin for many hours.

Anna Sale: What did he die of?

J. Smith-Cameron: I don't know. I think some heart thing. It was a sudden death in his home.

Anna Sale: I'm sorry.

J. Smith-Cameron: Thank you.

Anna Sale: Are you carrying around this just for your own--are you just reading...?

J. Smith-Cameron: It just makes me look intellectual. My husband printed out this chapter for me because of something that he's working on, that this somewhat inspired him. 

Anna Sale: Was that like, "I'm thinking about this thing that's inspiring me and I want you to read it so we can talk about it," kind of thing?

J. Smith-Cameron: Well, I don't know. He mentioned it some time ago, and I said, "Oh, I want to read that chapter." Then just as a gift, he printed it out for me. I don't think-- I was just curious.

Anna Sale: You expressed interest?

J. Smith-Cameron: Yes. I could have just picked up the book, but he kindly printed it out.

Anna Sale: Yes, that's a nice gesture.

J. Smith-Cameron: Very nice.

Anna Sale: I've heard you were interested.

J. Smith-Cameron: Yes. After our talk, I have to go to the doctor and I might have a waiting room wait. I thought this is a perfect thing to have with me.

Anna Sale: When have you found that you get that itch that you're like, "I'm going to go to the diner. I'm going to walk down and go to the diner"?

J. Smith-Cameron: Well, I have to tell you too that my daughter who's now 19, this was her favorite spot to meet friends from middle school on. That time when kids began to do things without their parents, this was a place she could walk to and a really popular place to go for a burger. I have also those associations and when she was younger than that, picking her up after school and if she was starving and maybe with another mom and another kid coming in here piling into a booth, and so I also have those associations.

Anna Sale: It's interesting for me that this has been a place where you came of age in this neighborhood, and you've had a lot of different life phases, both in this physical place and then walking these streets. Now I'm thinking about you sitting with Kevin and how that it's a memory that can't happen anymore when your daughter was young, and that's a memory that can't happen anymore and it all was in this space.

J. Smith-Cameron: Yes, exactly.

Anna Sale: How many times have you been here since COVID?

J. Smith-Cameron: When I come in from Long Island, I usually do come here, so I have-- I don't know. They ask for the-- All the restaurants here do that. They ask to see your vaccine records. I don't know. I feel safe here.

Anna Sale: What's your routine like right now in this time of early fall in New York? Are you mostly in the city? Are you still going back to Long Island?

J. Smith-Cameron: Going back and forth a lot. We just bought a home up there. It's also pre Succession premiere, so I'm doing a lot of press for Succession. I have to be in a lot for things like that. Also, Nellie is getting ready for school or just whatever she needs. She's really doing it all herself. It's one thing to go off to college, but to go off to college in a foreign country after a pandemic, this is something interesting. I don't know. It's off-topic maybe but-

Anna Sale: Thank you.

J. Smith-Cameron: -Nellie was a senior when the pandemic hit. In Nellie's case, she didn't have her-- I don't know. Even though she was the type of kid who would go to the prom, they didn't get to have their prom or their graduation or perform their spring play, all these rites of passage. I think this really drives it home, doesn't it? That initial lockdown with all three together, in some ways it made us all closer and in other ways, like probably every other family, we all wants to kill each other.

[laughter]

J. Smith-Cameron: What happened is after the first month or two of COVID, we rented out in Long Island so that we'd have a little bit more space and have some outdoor space. That's when we started letting Nellie--she graduated high school and we started letting her have more alone time. That alleviated that but at first, we all had that cabin fever.

Anna Sale: What were the rules for when you were on Long Island and your daughter was here in your apartment? Did you have strict rules? [laughs]

J. Smith-Cameron: Rules for her? [laughs] Well, we could tell ourselves there were rules, but who knows what happened if these walls could speak kind of thing. I don't know. I'm sure it was party at Nellie's a lot, but the house is still standing. There's nothing broken that I know of. There's maybe less vodka in the vodka bottle. I don't know. I don't know who did that, that might have been me. No, she's been very adult and responsible, and she has a nice friend group.

Anna Sale: How are you feeling about the stage of motherhood? Do you feel like the year of your daughter being here and beginning school was like a drawn-out transition or does it feel like you were able to-- Did you get in denial about her leaving home? How did that work out for you?

J. Smith-Cameron: A little of both, definitely. Then I'm sure I'm in denial about it but it was a practice for us to live apart a lot of the time. I'm sure it will still be a huge emotional slam when she's over there. If she's like every other teenager who goes away to college, she will not be texting or calling particularly unless she needs some money or something. I'm trying to wrap my head around that.

The other thing is we were in Italy filming for Succession, the last couple of episodes. Then my husband, he was in Italy as a jurist, a president of a jury may be for a film festival, so he just started shifting around Italy and writing. We were in Siena together, in Florence together, and briefly in the country in Tuscany together.

[phone ringing]

I thought I turned this off. I'm sorry.

[laughter]

Anna Sale: That's a funny ringtone!

J. Smith-Cameron: It's "Bewitched."

Anna Sale: I know.

J. Smith-Cameron: Sorry about that. My text alert is Samantha's Twitch.

Anna Sale: Oh, like the [noise]?

[laughter]

J. Smith-Cameron: I thought I turned it off, I guess it turned it on. That's correct.

Anna Sale: You had this extended and this was just-- Your daughter was not there. When you were in Italy with your husband during this time working and then you're meeting up in Europe and he's working...

J. Smith-Cameron: What I was getting towards is that he had this feeling like, "Oh, we could do this now." Because our daughter won't be in school in New York City, we didn't have to be tied to the city. There's really nothing to hold us here the same way that we have been from bound here when we had a school-aged child.

Anna Sale: I was assuming a kind of grief for you. I also hear you saying when you use the word bound, there's an expansion that comes with this transition too for you both in your marriage.

J. Smith-Cameron: I'm trying to think of it that way.

[music]

Coming up, how J.'s years of honing her craft in theater has helped her on the set of Succession, and when she's had to let go of that entirely.

J. Smith-Cameron: We often feel like we weren't enough on Succession. All of us often feel that. It's never true when you see the show, everyone seems good on it to my eyes, but it's like, "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." There's a lot of that. "Forget it. It's Succession." It's messy and that's one of its virtues.

[music]

Anna Sale: As a team, we've been talking a lot lately about bodies and our relationships. Specifically about physical size and how it shapes our romantic lives. Our intern, Sarah Dealey, brought this up in a recent editorial meeting. And Sarah, I just wanted to talk with you a bit about where that idea came from for you. Why did you bring this up?

Sarah Dealy: Hi, Anna! I have been thinking about this a lot. I am fat and my girlfriend is not. And I think that the fact that we have these differences has really impacted our relationship. In a lot of interesting, complicated, and a lot of times really positive ways.

Anna Sale: And, and for you all, is this something that you all speak openly about that you have you named this difference between you two?

Sarah Dealy: Yes, definitely. And like the fact that we talk so much about how each other's bodies move through the world and are perceived by other people, has just, I think, made it easier for us to go through other challenging things as a couple. So I want to hear from other people who have similar situations in their relationships. I'd love to hear from fat people who are in relationships with thin people, fat people in relationships with other fat people, just about how weight has impacted your intimate relationships, and if it's changed anything else about their relationship.

Anna Sale: And speaking of change, that's the other thing I'm interested in because of course our body sizes change over time, can change over time. So we also want to hear from people who maybe you or your partner has a different body size than you had when you first got together, when your relationship started. And I want to hear about how you figured out how to communicate about that, or not. So that's what we're collecting: stories about body size and your romantic relationships, how you've talked about it and how you've not talked about it. You can record a voice memo or write an email and send it to us at deathsexmoney@wnyc.org.

Thanks so much, Sarah.

Sarah Dealy: Thanks. I'm excited to look through the inbox!

This is Death, Sex, and Money from WNYC. I'm Anna Sale. When Succession premiered in 2018, J. Smith-Cameron was not expecting it to be a hit. She wasn't even expecting to be a series regular. Her role as Gerri, the general counsel was originally written for a man. But Gerri became a fan favorite, especially after an unexpected twist last season. Her relationship with Roman the much-younger son of her uber-wealthy employer turned a little bit spicy. He's played by Kieran Culkin.

"SUCCESSION":

Gerri: You're acting like an over-excited little boy.

Roman: You know, technically, I'm your fucking boss.

Gerri: Go to bed, Roman. Go to bed, and masturbate all your ideas out, and let's see how excited you feel tomorrow.

Roman: Well, maybe, maybe I will. Maybe I'll just leave you on the pillow so you can hear my brilliance cascading.

Gerri: Fine, I've heard plenty worse than a spoiled brat ejaculating on himself.

Roman: Oh, yes?

J. Smith-Cameron: I've known Kieran Culkin since he was really young, we were on a play together, we went to Havard together, he's been in other Kenny shows. He's sort of still 20-something in my mind, and yet he's also my age in my mind. Of course, he's neither of those things. He's an example of, I don't know, maybe I assume that being an actor or being friends with other actors that they're ageless.

Anna Sale: My idea of your career has been that you have had a full life of performing and being exposed to interesting creative people, but Succession has catapulted your public image and your face into broader consciousness. Are you experiencing a loss of privacy since Succession in a way that you haven't experienced before?

J. Smith-Cameron: Not that much because really COVID, [laughs] and now when we're out and about we have a mask on and I don't actually look that much like Ger-- I mean, I'm dressed like Gerri, I don't particularly look like Gerri. Once in a while, someone will be like, "Is it you?" [chuckles] Then I'm like, "Yeah!" No, it's a little surreal but it's a little, I don't quite have the sense of that. I have to remind myself that that's the case.

So what's incredible about Succession is that you have to think and keep up, it's very plotty but it's also all the characters' struggles are layered in and the audience has to work to keep up with it and I think that's the secret sauce for something to be successful but the formula for TV is, no, make everything accessible and all the leads have to look like models and I don't think people actually like that. I think they like things to be interesting and have nooks and crannies to them.

Anna Sale: I've seen you reference people watching as something that's informed the way you think of performance and acting.

J. Smith-Cameron: Definitely.

Anna Sale: Did you notice the closing off of access to public, and then re-opening? Like, are you super sensitive to it now because you haven't had that input for a while just as a working person?

J. Smith-Cameron: I still feel like we don't quite have it because of the masking and the social distancing. I'm not going out to see things as much, I'm happy that some of my friends are getting to do plays again but I don't even know if I'm-- I'm nervous about going into a theater and watching for that long even if the seats are spaced out and everyone's vaccinated and so forth. I'm still a little wary of it to be frank, and Kenny's very wary of it. He has an elderly stepdad who he's protective of, so he just does not want to carry COVID into that household when he goes to see him.

So I still feel like there's a dearth of that, but yes, you're right, I'm really into that. I feel that observing people is a huge boon for actors or writers. I used to love the subway for that because you would just sit there and somehow there's this pact where everyone behaves like they're alone, [crosstalk] they can't be seen. As if they're are all in their own invisible space, there's just an accepted convention that you're privately sitting there. If someone catches you staring at them, studying them, it's very upsetting to that person.

[laughter]

J. Smith-Cameron: I do like that. I really want to take this class that Linda Barry, do you know who Linda Barry is?

Anna Sale: I don't think so.

J. Smith-Cameron: She's a cartoonist, writer and she's fantastically gifted, very funny, and she teaches a class and she has, I think I want to she has a blog or something, she's on Instagram. I follow her on Instagram. The Near-Sighted Monkey is the name of her Instagram. You can see online she teaches what must be this incredible course but some of her syllabus is online or you can see it in some of her books and one of her assignments that she has our students do is a diary. You try to remember each-- You time yourself. You only have a couple of minutes, everything you remember from yesterday. Then a separate task, another two minutes, just everything you remember seeing, every visual image you saw. Then and then I saw the same exercise in another place where she had added on to it one thing you overheard.

Then eventually you make a little sketch of that thing that was overheard, but you put yourself in the drawing. You have a minute or two to draw. It's nothing to get self-conscious about, you just try to make your point. It's the thing you witnessed but also your reaction. I'm not as disciplined. She would drum me out of that class in no time because apparently you can't be late once or something, she kicks you out. I can't even do the diary every day, but I aspire to that.

Anna Sale: That idea of having a method for forcing yourself to be observant and to capture it.

J. Smith-Cameron: If you can train yourself to be observant, you will never be bored. It's a great tonic for artists because it keeps you from being sentimental because people behave admirably and embarrassingly all the time. People are human, the more you witness real people being real. That's why I think my tastes for acting and writing, I like realistic stuff because I think it traps you into getting more deeply involved. There's less of a barrier between what you're watching and yourself. It's something so real that you forget you're watching artifice, or if it's so familiar to you. That's so engaging. That's when you step in the trap of that and you get caught up in it. I think that's everything for me. I love that.

Anna Sale: I just love how you said it's a tonic for artists because it keeps you from becoming sentimental. The becoming somewhat sentimental is this hazard.

J. Smith-Cameron: Well don't you think? One of many.

Anna Sale: I love that. It's like, "No, no, no though you're over-emoting, you're going to complicated this."

J. Smith-Cameron: It's just how real people behave. It always surprises you even though you see it every day of your life. There's an apocryphal acting story. I don't know who's the teacher supposed to be but supposedly a famous acting teacher had written out a transcript of an everyday family having dinner. They have a discussion about all kinds of a banal everyday things. So, pass the pepper, I like the way this casserole turned out, whatever. She wrote this out, or he wrote this out verbatim, divided up his class into family casts, assigned it, and then they perform them.

Apparently, the story goes that cast after cast knocks themselves out, muttering and being boring and throwing everything away, and the things that were banal being really boring and flaky. At the end of the whole thing, he played the recording that he'd taken the transcript, and it was like [enthusiastically] "Oh, my God, do you believe the price of tomatoes?!" And like, "Oh, my goodness, you see her how much she's grown." People were far more dramatic and animated, but they were real. They were the real people, they weren't performing.

Anna Sale: The content of their words didn't contain at all how they were expressing care for one another and interest.

J. Smith-Cameron: It's not always true for every scene, but that's a good cautionary tale. I just think that's a good guide. When I'm stuck, I'm like, "Well, what would you do?" Instead of thinking, well, I'm not really a lawyer, and I don't know that much about business at all, et cetera but just the situation like-- For instance, in Succession, when the storyline between Gerri and Roman began, I really had no idea how Gerri would feel about it. I had a few ideas, but it was so perplexing. Then it just dawned on me that that's perfect that that would be perplexing for her too and that that is always going to be more interesting as, "What would a real person do is a good place to start?", rather than deciding that she was dominatrix or that she was going to seduce him [crosstalk]

Anna Sale: If you're thrown by it, have the character be thrown.

J. Smith-Cameron: That's pretty much always true, for my tastes, let's say that.

Anna Sale: I'm want to go back to where we started with thinking about your conversations with Kevin. When you think about that time of your life when you're learning how to deal with downtime and uncertainty as you're in this moment of transition in your own family life right now, I'm thinking that a lot of us as you were describing in that start and stop and what's going to happen and inability to see concretely what the future is going to be in two months or four months.

J. Smith-Cameron: Which is always true for actors!

Anna Sale: Yes. What have you learned when you feel that creeping sense of anxiety? Do you have any practices or things that you try to tell yourself?

J. Smith-Cameron: No, that remains a big occupational hazard for people in my business. That is a really tricky thing. I don't know if there is absolute [crosstalk]

Anna Sale: It's probably in living, yes. [chuckles]

J. Smith-Cameron: For everyone, right? Because it's just very patently obvious for performers but the real truth of it is, it's only always this moment. I know that's a big philosophical idea too but it really is true that if you're just in the present, there is no remorse or longing for the past or fear of the future so it's impossible to do. But also a big famous acting dictum is to be in the moment and be present.

If you try to practice that as a kind of mindfulness or just as an acting exercise, just being in the moment. When I'm nervous about remembering my lines, which happens a lot, or nervous about anything on set, but I get nervous as a performer a lot about all kinds of things. If I just put my focus on my partner, even if it's I'm just watching how often they blink or, are they preoccupied about something? Why does he keep looking over there? It's always the observation exercise again in another guise. That's what I strive for, is just try to be occupied fully with what I'm doing now.

And Kenny, [chuckles] one of Kenny's first jobs apparently way before I knew him before he was a famous writer. Before he was a writer at all, he was a bartender for a while, but he said the thing that someone taught him about being a bartender is to do one task at a time. Which is, for a bartender, always being invaded, and like something gets spilled over, someone shouts out drink order. Somebody sent something back right in the middle or a waitress needs to get by or whatever. He said, "You just have to make yourself finish the thing you were doing and then go, 'Okay, now.'" That just sounds so obvious but--

Anna Sale: It's hard.

J. Smith-Cameron: Yes. Not only is that myth of multitasking a demon to avoid, I think, to expect that of yourself, but it's also can be a cure for the blues or for anxiety, I think. To just fully throw yourself into, but easier said than done sometimes. I'm not some great master at it by any means.

Anna Sale: I have one last question. I am just curious, you said your place on Long Island is new. Having had this very full stimulating, active, crowded life in this part of New York City, when you think about what you're looking forward to in that space, what seems really exciting about getting to spend more time there, is there a hobby that you're interested in?

J. Smith-Cameron: I do. I swim a lot during warm weather and there's the ocean, there's the bay and there are swimming pools out there so that is the obvious easy answer but also, it's in the Hamptons and that Hamptons are really now a suburb.

Anna Sale: It doesn't feel uncrowded. [chuckles]

J. Smith-Cameron: It's still filled with natural beauty. It's a very beautiful, lush place. And my husband grew up in the city and he would love to just leave it all behind. It's so funny and I am the person--you know that famous EB White essay about New York and about the three basic people types that make up New Yorkers? But the people that migrated here-- the writer with a manuscripted newspaper or the spinster seeking anonymity or whatever, remember.

Anna Sale: Yes. [to waiter] Thank you.

J. Smith-Cameron: That's the quotient of the population that gives New York its energy and light and hunger. The beat of it. I think among my friends, that Kevin was definitely someone who migrated here. If you're an actor or any artist or in any creative type position and you come to New York, just that action alone is a huge achievement. It's so bold, it's so brave to do it. It's a heroic journey. You've done that and you know, in the back of your mind that you did. It's a big rite of passage that native New Yorkers don't get to feel that, I don't think. It's weird, it's hard and you feel lost and you don't know if you'll ever belong there or may have a niche. It's a great benefit. It's a great blessing to have in the end because that alone like anything else is gravy, like, I came here.

That's J. Smith Cameron at the Waverly Diner in the West Village. You can see her on the latest season of Succession, which just started HBO.

J. Smith-Cameron: Thank you. To be continued!

Anna Sale: Yes.

J. Smith-Cameron: That's all.

[laughs]

J. Smith-Cameron: Thank you so much [crosstalk]

Anna Sale: Really a pleasure to spend time with you.

 

J. Smith-Cameron: Bye.

Anna Sale: Bye. Take care.

 

[music]

Death, Sex & Money is a listener-supported production of WNYC Studios in New York. This episode was produced by Anabel Bacon. The rest of our team includes Katie Bishop, Afi Yellow-Duke, Emily Botein, and Andrew Dunn. Our interns are Sarah Dealy. The Reverend John Delore and Steve Lewis wrote our theme music. I'm on Instagram @annasalepics, that’s P-I-C-S, and the show is @deathsexmoney on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Thank you to Sarah Dacey in Austin Texas who is a sustaining member of Death, Sex & Money. Join Sarah and support what we do here, by going to deathsexmoney.org/donate.

[music]

For the record, before we left, J. and I did Google the ingredients of an Egg Cream. It's 3 tablespoons of chocolate syrup, mixed together with 1/4 cup of milk. You beat that together while adding club soda to fill up the glass. Add a straw and serve cold.

I'm Anna Sale, and this is Death, Sex, & Money from WNYC.

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