← Becoming You with Suzy Welch
Becoming You with Suzy Welch
What If a Yellow Dress, in the Pages of Vogue, Told the Story of Your Life? Part 2
00:40:07
Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:00]
A
There's never been a better time to
- [00:02]
B
get outside and experience the benefits of nature, discover nearby trails and explore the outdoors with alltrails.
- [00:11]
A
Download the free app today and find your outside ready to level up. Chumba Casino is your playbook to fun. It's free to play with no purchase necessary. Enjoy hundreds of online social games like blackjack, slots and solitaire anytime, anywhere with fresh releases every week. Whether you're at home or on the go. Let Chumba Casino bring the excitement to you. Plus, get free daily login bonuses and a free welcome bonus. Join now for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Play Chumba Casino today. No purchase necessary. VGW Group void board prohibited by law 21/TNCs apply hello, hello everyone and welcome
- [00:47]
B
back to the podcast where I make my mother, my 98 year old mother scream. Yes, that's the scream. And that's my 98 year old mom. And this is the second and final part of a two part podcast series we're doing on on the Becoming youg podcast about a certain yellow dress and its 123 year story. I have been telling that story and I will finish it today because it has been a total eureka for me and I hope it will be for you. A eureka about how our origin stories shape our values for better and for worse. And that is information that is really, really worth knowing. It is. Now this dress story has so much drama and so many plot twists. It should be a freaking movie in my humble opinion. So before we get going, I want to catch people up to where we are at this point. If they've Not Heard Part 1 of the series which ran last week. And frankly, you could just go listen to part one right now. We will wait for you right here. Whatever. No judgment. I'm just going to do some catch up. But first before we do that, I want to make a brief detour and I want to talk about what values even are. Because after all, values are the top topic, the big uber topic of this podcast of becoming you and this podcast series. And bigger and even more important than that, you. You need to know your values. So let's talk about them. Because practically no one knows their values. That's true. Most people confuse values with virtues. And I actually have research on this. Honesty, kindness, compassion, fairness, justice, courage. These are all virtues. And they've been around. The first list of virtues that archaeologists have found is like from 380 B.C. okay, so virtues. People have been talking about them as long as they've been talking to each other. Values are choices about how we live, work, play, how much achievement we want, how much we value our marriage, how much time we want to spend with our family. The way I like to think about it is values are our whys. They're our whys. They're why we do things. They're our motivations. Okay? They're our wants and desires. Now virtues are also our whys, except for the values are truly choices. They're personal. Let's take the value of scope. Scope is a choice about how big or small a life you want, how exciting a life you want, how, how much chaos you want in your life and you'll tolerate. Some people want a very high scope life. I had a person, a student one time who had scope as her number one value and she used to say, I want to touch everybody's brain. People who are constantly trying to learn and travel and want jobs with a lot of challenges or people who are very high scope at the other end of that continuum. And there's no better or worse, there's no good or bad. There's just higher or lower and what works for you and what you want with your life. Person with lower scope wants psychological safety and predictability visibility. They want to know where they're spending the holidays every year. They don't want chaos. This is a choice about how we show up. And again, I believe that there are 16 values. I'm going to talk a lot about all of them in the podcast today when I talk about this story. And so with values explained and there will not be a quiz later, we will quickly recap our story to date. The story of the Yellow Dress. Now, I actually started last week's episode with the ending of this whole story, which was me a few weeks ago wearing a yellow silk ribbon dress of my grandmother's design to an event called the 44th Annual Frederick Law Olmsted Awards Luncheon, or it is more commonly called the Hat Luncheon. The Hat Luncheon is a large, fancy pants, delightful party every year in New York City to raise money for Central park. And this year it raised more than $5 million. It does its job. It's blow and it's showy and it's a very much kind of you feel very in crowd when you're there. I always feel very swishy and special when I go to the Hat Luncheon in my big hat. This year's every year I attended. But what has never happened before is that afterward my picture appeared in Vogue with me wearing this very special dress, this yellow dress in the last Episode we then rewound from me wearing this dress to the hat luncheon and being in vogue all the way back to 1903, the year my grandmother, Francesca Pilato, was born in Calton de Seta, Sicily, a grimy, gritty city at the heart of the island of Sicily, where the work was sulfur mining, sulfur being needed for fertilizer and gunpowder. This was grueling, deadly work. I mean, literally deadly work where boys who are as young as seven years old went into the hot tunnels with temperatures up to 116 degrees every single day. And they basically went in as indentured servants. The parents sold these little boys to the owners of the mines. The owners of the mines basically owned these boys and their labor until the parents could basically buy them back from their wages. And many of these little boys died and many got very, very sick with tuberculosis. It was a industry at its worst, and it was run by a small industrial lead of Sicily and then enforced by Mafia overlords. So one important note that I made about all of this last week when I was telling the story of, of my ancestral home of Caltena Ceda, is that the history of my family, this devastating history in this town because they were miners, was kept a virtual secret from us, from my siblings and I, when we were growing up. The story that I heard in my household growing up started when they landed in America. It was very bizarre and frustrating because of course we had curiosity, but I didn't realize how bizarre it was until 2018 when my sisters and I went to Caltonnesseta and we uncovered our true family story. We went to this town. I had hired a historian. He brought us to the house we lived in, Mamma mia, as they say. And it was just absolutely was a dirt floored hovel. And then we went to the part of the graveyard where our family was buried. And it became very clear to us that the reason why everything had been so shrouded in mystery was because it was too painful to talk about. I mean, the poverty and the. There were so many little tombstones of boys from the family who had died in the mines. And we were like, oh my God, this is. They weren't talking about it because they couldn't. So it was a very tough time. And so it's no Wonder that in 1912, when my grandmother Francesca was 9, her family made a break for it and they came to America with so many other millions of other Sicilian and Italian immigrants. And they went, made their way to Rochester, New York, which is Calte's American sister city. I found out her father found work in a canning factory, and she and her brothers went to American high school. After they graduated, her brothers got very good paying, steady factory jobs. And my grandmother, the only daughter, stayed home to care for her father, who was ailing. So, except for the patriarch sickness, which I. I'm guessing just from stories that came down, it was diabetes, because he was kind of on and off sick for a long time. The Palato family, you know, they were free at last. They had good lives. They had safe lives in Rochester. They had lives of hope, and everything was just going along. It was the Roaring twenties, which was a time of real prosperity for the United States. And again, everyone was employed except for my grandmother, who at 17, was basically a housekeeper and a nurse. And in the evenings, she sat out on the front porch of the house. But her father, despite being sick, he was still enough of a patriarch to rule that her rocking chair had to face away from the street. You know, I think I've been thinking about that since last week when I. When I spoke about it. You know, I don't know what the family expected for Francesca. She was 17. They needed her at home because of her father's sickness, so maybe they expected her to stay there indefinitely. I myself have cared for somebody in hospice because my husband was in hospice before he died. And so I know how hard it is. It's grueling, and it takes more than one person to take care of somebody who's dying. It's a 247 job, and Francesca's mother, which would be my great grandmother Filomena, needed her. I can totally relate, because when my husband was dying, all of my kids were around. They all came home, all four of them, and I needed them physically and I needed them emotionally. So Francesca was 17, and she must have been suffocating. I think she was super suffocating because she technically loved her father, but not very much. She only loved him out of duty, if at all. And she was never. She didn't say much, but she was never very shy about telling us when we were growing up about what a ass he was. I mean, so there she was at 17, filled with life, stuck caring for him, and she. She just had other plans. So she escaped. And how she escaped by a guy. This is a tried and true method used by women through the ages, for better and for worse. And here's what went down. Just to recap. When Francesca was 17, sitting on the aforementioned front porch, she must have twisted her head because she spied one of her brother's friends, who was a tall, dark and handsome widower named Justin tubiolo. He was 11 years older than her, but apparently a spark was there. She thought he was cute. And so using a go between named Ann Angela, one of her friends, there were a lot of secret notes passed back and forth and a lot of sneaking around. And then one day they eloped. They literally lied to everyone. She lied to her mother. And they got in his car and they went to the courthouse in Rochester and they got married. Well, it was a shock, I guess, but apparently everyone got over it pretty quickly. She was not pregnant, if that's what you were thinking. And the new couple went on to buy a little house near Francesca's parents. And Justin Tubiolo, her husband, had three jobs, including one that was as the. He was on the police force and he was the driver for the governor of New York when he came to Rochester. That governor was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And the story in my family was that FDR knew my grandfather by name. He would call him Justin. So. And then eventually, boom, boom, boom, boom. Frances had four kids. She had four kids by the time she was 26, it was 1929. And the new little family was living what from the outside looked like again, like the American dream. Until that dream exploded because Francis, boom, boom, boom, blew it up. And that is where we left off last week. So let's pick it up and get going from there.
- [10:54]
A
Ready to level up? Chumba Casino is your playbook to fun. It's free to play with no purchase necessary. Enjoy hundreds of online social games like blackjack, slots and solitaire anytime, anywhere with fresh releases every week. Whether you're at home or on the go, let Chumba Casino bring the excitement to you. Plus, get free daily login bonuses and a free welcome bonus. Join now for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Play Chump a Casino today. No purchase necessary. VGW Group VOIP board prohibited by law 21 plus TNCs apply on his podcast Chasing Life.
- [11:26]
B
I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent brings you the secrets of the happiest and healthiest people on the planet so that you can live your best life. Are some people just born happier than others? And what might they be doing that the rest of us aren't? Follow chasing life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Apple, Spotify, Iheart Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. At dsw, we ask the important questions like what shoes are you going to wear? Whether you're prepping for wedding Season, festival season, or just planning the ultimate vacay. The right shoes can make or break an rsvp. So own the moment. You've got big plans and we've got just the shoes at the perfect price, of course. Get ready to get ready with Designer Shoe Warehouse. Head to your DSW store or dsw.com today and let us surprise you. One afternoon, Francesca was out shopping for shoes with the oldest of her kids, my aunt Lucille, who must have been around five. And Francesca looked out the window of the store, she just lifted her head to look out the window of the store and suddenly she saw her husband Justin walk by hand in hand with a beautiful young thing, a young girl. And they were smiling at each other. He had his arm around her, they were all lovey dovey. And here's the story that was passed down. My grandmother looked out the window and she saw her husband kiss this woman on the neck. She pulled her daughter Lucille back from the window so she would not see her father outside with his arms around this young woman, kind of making out on the street. But Francesca saw it. Mother of his four children, 26 years old, she saw it again. It was 1929. My AI friends informed me that the divorce rate in America in 1929 was glancingly low. It was like 7% compared to the 30 or 40% we have today, depending on what statistics you believe. And basically in those days, people just really didn't get divorced. And when they did, it was only movie stars and business tycoons. Regular people did not really get divorced. High school educated, Catholic, Sicilian immigrant, 26 year old women with four children under the age of five did not get divorced. But my grandmother did. I will never know why she did. She never explained anything about her inner life to anyone. This is a theme we're going to come back to. And as an adult woman who has been through divorce with my first marriage for similar reasons, all I can do is imagine her pain. I mean, anyone can. She must have been very, very mad, shocked. She must have been incredibly hurt. I think maybe she really did love him and it maybe destroyed her emotionally. Once when I was older, I asked her why she didn't give him a second chance. And she told me in like a very rare revealing moment that she confronted him about it, of course, and he told her it was his prerogative as a, to essentially play around that women, the women he told her didn't mean anything to him and she just needed to get over it. But Francesca, my grandmother, with no power and no prerogative no, nothing. She was like, no, I don't accept those terms. And so she went back to the same courthouse where she married him and she divorced him for a family, my family, where most things were completely shrouded in mystery. And there was no discussing what, like, went on in Calton de Ceta. There was just so little discussion of people's inner lives or just details of anything. There's no mystery at all about what happened after the divorce. This we heard about. The collateral fallout was massive. It was like my grandmother suddenly became like the lead character in the Real Housewives of Rochester. People were scandalized. Her family, her brothers were scandalized. Everyone talked about it on the street when she walked by. People whispered. She was made to feel like she was wearing a big scarlet D everywhere she went. Everyone wanted to know why she did it and how. Thought she could survive on her own. She could survive on her own because she moved in with her mother. But that was not good enough for some people. When I was growing up, we repeatedly heard the story of the parish priest who came over over and over again and berated her for the divorce, and that neighbors crossed the street not to walk by her on the sidewalk. I mean, it's crazy when you think about divorce today, what she was put through with the scandal and the conversation and the priest coming over. Get a load of this. It gets so much worse. It gets so much worse because right afterwards, Francesca, this young, divorced woman, clutching for her life, gets her kids taken away from her by the state. Yes, that happened. In this period after the divorce, my mother and her siblings, her three siblings, were pulled out of the house by police and put into state custody not once, but twice. And I would give everything in my being to understand why and how that happened. There's no explanation, just that it happened. I mean, I had nightmares as a child about this moment that the police broke down the door, basically, and grabbed the children away from Frances. And I would love to know how Francesca got them back. But my mother and her siblings. But my mother has refused to talk about or explain these periods in foster care to us for her entire life. And I remember actually one time trying to press my mom on this and saying to her, this was so scary. It's so terrifying. Maybe I asked her about it when I was going through my own divorce. I don't know. And she went into her room and she slammed the door and she cried for a day. So, you know, I never asked again. And once the kids were back, though, so we're talking about the middle of the Great Depression, she gets them back. And Justin Tubiolo stopped paying child support. Maybe he lost all three of his jobs, Millions and millions of Americans did. Or maybe he was just a complete and utter jerk. And maybe both the money she was getting from him, it completely dried up. And Francesca and her mother were living off the very meager help from Francesca's brothers, who were also weathering the Depression. And if I had to guess, in this period, things were very, very dark. And I think things were very, very scary. And I bet that my grandmother and her mother were both hungry so that the kids would not be. That's my guess. And so this is the picture. I mean, Francesca, scandalized as she was and probably hungry as she was, decided to go look for work. She told me once that her motivation was that she did not want her kids wearing the government handout shoes, which were apparently very ugly and black. You knew a family had a government handout if you look down at their feet, and they were wearing the black shoes. And she did not want her children any more stigmatized than they already were by the divorce. She needed her own money, so her kids would not wear the black shoes, and she was going to go find a way to get it. But there were no jobs. I mean, none, especially for women in the middle of the Depression. And barely men didn't have jobs. And finally, in desperation, she heard that the bank, the local bank, was looking for somebody bilingual, Italian and English. The story is that she went in for her interview, and the president brought her back into his office, and she asked about the job, and he apparently said to her, yes, you can have that job, but I'd like something in return. When he said that to her, she threw an inkwell across the desk at him and made his shirt completely covered by ink. And she stormed out. And knowing my girlfriend, grandmother as I know her, this story is very likely true. I mean, there's a lot of apocryphal stories floating around in everybody's family history. But I think she did throw the stink well at him and then did storm out. That sounds just like her. When she did, that very day, fate crossed her path. And here's my mom explaining exactly what
- [19:22]
C
happened that day when she went to look for a job. After she threw the inkwell at that guy, she passed the shop that said Nipshot Knitwear. So she figured, hey, she could knit. And she went in, right? And they liked her, right? And they hired her.
- [19:39]
B
And then what happened?
- [19:40]
C
Oh, what happened? One day they said to her, well, we've decided to retire. So she said, you can buy the shop. She says, I can't afford the shop. They said, pay us every month, send us a check. And if you know, you have good months on this form, whatever, you could send this, send us. They went to Florida, okay? And that's what she did. She was honest. She gave them the rent, and then she could start experimenting around, you know, she loved designing. And is it two pieces in the other one?
- [20:13]
B
All right, so just to cut my mom. Mom off there. This was a very long phone conversation with my mom, by the way. After two years of working at Burwell's, she must have been about 28 or so, with four kids at home. Francesca, high school educated Sicilian immigrant, bought the store. She made a deal with the retiring owners, and she became a business owner. The Depression was just ending, and suddenly Francesca Pilato, fallen woman, was a entrepreneur. All right, well, I'm a business owner right now. Okay. I have a company called Becoming youg Labs. It has about 20 people. I am 66. My kids are grown and independent. I have two degrees from Harvard. I have a huge safety net. I'm a generally respected member of society, and I am scared shitless every single day of my life as a business owner and an entrepreneur. So I think about Francesca. I think about her in Rochester in 1932, with 13ft of snow on the ground one February day, slogging to the store, knitting sweaters and dresses and trying to sell them to people who were just. Just beginning to have money again. What a survivor she was. What a kick ass Terminator, you know, Terminator level badass. Because not only did she keep the business going with regular knitwear, but she decided the way to actually make this thing more successful was to start designing dresses and suits. Like unique, classic, kind of, you know, creative, ready to wear. And she decided somewhere in there that instead of hiding and muddling, you know, just sort of keeping the business going as it was, in sort of steady state, she decided to go with Big and put herself out there. How about that? She renamed the store Knitwear by Frances. She was undeniably an artist. She was so creative. My family's filled with creative people. I'm the least creative of the lot. That dress that I wore that she designed was in vogue for a reason. It's a beautiful, beautiful article of clothing. And just to fast forward a bit over the next 10 years, it blew up, as they say. The fancy ladies of Rochester came and flocking for this woman's beautiful knits, but I think they Also kind of came for her personality. Here's my mom. About my grandmother in those years.
- [22:27]
C
She made a lot of money. She was very good. The women liked her. It was like a club. Bail came for advice, everything. She knew all their business, and they could confide her. If she never talked to anybody about anything, they could always tell her their problems. And then I told you, I went in there, the woman was crying all. Just loved her, that's all.
- [22:45]
B
Do you think that she worked hard?
- [22:47]
C
Oh, I do, yes, honey.
- [22:49]
B
I mean, my memory is she worked day and night and night and day.
- [22:52]
C
Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. And you. You're right. Well, her cousin helped her. He had a shop where they pressed the knitwear and stuff.
- [23:00]
B
Yeah.
- [23:00]
C
Because that had to be done extremely carefully. Yes, she did that on those big presses.
- [23:06]
B
So she would like make the knitwear and then she would press and block it. Correct.
- [23:10]
C
Yeah. And even knitted sweaters, you know, the wool ones.
- [23:13]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [23:14]
C
We're supposed to wash or anything. My mother washed those by hand and then let them dry flat. People didn't know what to do then, but she. She knew how to treat the product.
- [23:25]
B
Were you the only person you knew whose mother was working?
- [23:28]
C
Yeah, everyone knew her and Rochester. Everyone.
- [23:31]
B
Okay, so it's the 1930s. My grandmother had built this thriving business based on beautiful artistic knitwear and the force of sheer personality. I remember that personality. I obvious knew her. She was very funny and quick. But the main thing about her is she just had so much mojo. I mean, she radiated confidence. She beat back this scandal. She rewrote the narrative about her. She uncanceled herself. It's just amazing, isn't it? She was fierce and she visited us a lot growing up. I knew her as tough and critical. She warm and fuzzy. She. She was not. She was a warrior. She was a fighter. She was a winner. I think people were. Were fascinated by her. I think there was something about her that was magnetic. And guess who thought that too. Well, well, well, her old husband, Justin Tubiolo did. Ten years after their divorce, after she had become a big success and rebuilt her life, he started coming around again. Frances. Mother Philomena, she died and. And Justin came to the funeral. He asked Francesca out to dinner and she said no until she said yes. He told her he still loved her. He said he wanted to be part of his children's lives. He swore he would never hurt her again. He would never do it again. He asked her to get back together. He begged her to give him another chance. Oh, Frances, don't Do it. Don't do it it. And she did it. She did it. In 1938, they went back to the courthouse and got remarried. There's absolutely no pictures of this event. None. I imagine her, she was wearing probably a dark suit of her own design. And the kids were not there. All right? Their mother and father are getting remarried, and they're. And they're not there. And I wonder if she was conflicted. She must have been. But whatever. She did it. She did it. And then they went home. And Justin dropped a big, big bomb. He decided the whole family was going to pick up and move to California. He said, kids, all of you who are settled into high school and wife, with your successful, thriving business that you built with blood, sweat, and tears for years and years and years to get over what I did to you, were moving to Hollywood, California. And they all said, okay. Can you imagine it? I mean, it was a patriarchal culture, the Italian culture. This was a man who destroyed their mom, made them all the center of mean gossip. My pastor always says, sin splatters. You know, that when somebody sins, it just doesn't. It doesn't affect them and the person next to them. It just gets all over the walls and the floors. So generations are affected by sin. And in this case, I'm talking about the sin of Justin, my grandfather, cheating on my grandmother. It splattered everywhere. The kids ended up being in foster care, as you'll recall. And my grandmother was made to feel like a pariah. And then she spent ten years working seven days a week to reinvent herself as a successful designer and businesswoman. I mean, the sin was everywhere. It took 10 years to clean it up, up. And then he comes back and he says, let's start again 3,000 miles away where we know no one and you are no one. I have to stop here. We talked about values earlier, and I want to consider my grandmother's values at the time. Without a doubt, one of my grandmother's values was the value of achievement. How much you want success, how much you want to look like a winner, how much winning matters to you. How could have it not been achievement? I have very high achievement myself. I know my grandmother. One of her top values, if not her number one value value, was achievement. And another value she had was certainly work centrism. Just this desire to work and work and work for work's sake. That work is your driving momentum. I also have that, so I can feel her. And then the third value that she had most certainly was something that a lot of women May have had, but didn't have. Weren't allowed to have, which was agency. Agency is the value of wanting to be the driver of your own bus. You want to. It's self determination by another term. She had so much agency, she was like, no, no one is gonna write the story of my life. No one is gonna tell me who I am. No one's gonna tell me I'm a pry. No one's gonna tell me I'm a loser. No one's gonna tell me I can't do anything. And in saying yes to California and moving out there, I know she essentially completely repressed them all. And she must have been in so much pain. It gives you heartache to repress your values. It does to put them under a rock and to bury them. It really is agonizing. On the test, the values bridge, which I keep mentioning, which you can find@thevaluesbridge.com if you're interested in finding out your own values. At the Values Bridge, we measure what your values are, and we ran to 16. But we also, on every single value, tell you how far you are from living it. You know, you can have a very small authenticity gap, as we call this zero percent. It's like you're living your value as much as you exactly want to. But I talk to people every single day who've taken the test and find out that they have a gap of 90%. Like, I have very, very high scope, and yet I never really kind of get a chance to leave my house. That's like a 90% authenticity gap, if you follow me. And these people are in a lot of emotional discomfort because when you are not living your values, you're like in a suit that doesn't fit it. And when Francesca picked up her four kids and left everything that mattered her, all I can think of is that she must have been in so much pain, and I think she must have done it for the kids. And maybe, I don't know, maybe she did love him. Although I guess from my perspective, he does not seem particularly lovable. But maybe he was also magnetic. I mean, I've seen his pictures. Great looking guy. I don't know. Nobody explains. So California, they go there and Francesca, the business entrepreneur, starts to be a homemaker. God, what did that feel like to her? And we don't know the details. Of course we don't, because they never talked about anything. The story is that he, Justin, almost immediately started stepping out on her again. One night, right after they moved to Hollywood, California. He came home at dawn and apparently there was lipstick on his collar. This is sort of the whispered story. And then he didn't come home another night. And another night he was cheating on her again. After all of that, that they went. And here's the thing. After five months of this. Five months. Five little months. Frances, one day when he was out, packed the kids bags, they went to the train station, she put them on a train, and they went back across the country to Rochester by train. And when she got there, she unloaded them and she walked back to the courthouse. And she divorced him again. Tyler redick here from 2311 Racing. And Bubba Wallace. You know what? What's the worst part of a race? A rain delay. Sitting around waiting for the track to dry is dull. But instead of waiting, we hang out with Chumba Casino. Social casino, slots, bingo, solitaire. Plenty of fun to keep us entertained. So why let a rain delay slow you down? Play now@chumbacasino.com. let's Chumba. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. BGW prohibited by law 21 plus. Terms and conditions apply. What is that? Oh, yeah, it's a World cup holder. Like the soccer tournament. World cup holder for the world. Fits every car, holds every cup. It has a Carvana logo. Carvana made it. They buy and sell cars, so they made a car cup holder. So. Got any good cups lately? Used to. I just couldn't figure out where in the world to put them. The World Cup Holder, brought to you by Carvana. Proud sponsors of the World cup holder, sign up today to win yours@cup-holder2026.com not authorized or endorsed by FIFA. Not a real product for parody and fair use purposes only.
- [30:41]
A
Real skin results start with one daily ritual. Meet daily microfoliant from Dermalogica. This iconic exfoliating powder activates with water to gently polish away dullness and uneven texture. It leaves skin instantly smoother and more luminous while supporting your skin barrier. Formulated with professional expertise to deliver visible results daily, even on sensitive skin. Discover your healthiest skin today. Visit dermalogica.com and use code smooth at checkout for an exclusive gift with your 65 purchase.
- [31:11]
B
All right, it's 1939. Francesca is back in Rochester. Twice divorced from the same man. A hundred times more defiant. And in this period, and for the next 30 straight years, she goes ham. She breaks loose. She breaks out. The store was big before she left. It gets bigger. She starts getting more. More creative than ever with her design. And her dresses get more and more expensive. Some of her dresses has sold for $2,000 each. We actually have a newspaper article about it. When she was named the Businesswoman of the Year. And that's like $13,000 in today's dollars. Okay. So she moved her store to a better, fancier part of town. She doubled its size. She became a member of the Chamber of Commerce. She was, as I said, named the Businesswoman of the Year. She became a very important local Democratic Party fixture. When the Democratic people came into town, they always had to meet her and shake her hand. She a local celebrity. And guess what else she became? She became rich. You know, she is making money in this period hand over fist. She sent all four of her kids to private colleges. You know, she sent her son, that was Joey, my Uncle Joey. That was no surprise when he came back from fighting in World War II, she sent him to college. People were very surprised though, early 1950s, that she sent all three of her daughters to college too. And when they said, why are you sending your daughters to college? They're just going to get married. She said, why would you say this to my grandmother by the way? But she would say they don't have to get married to have good lives. Lives. What a little rebel she was. And not really a little rebel. She was a pisser. Now when my mom was in college in Boston, she met my dad. She was going to Tufts and she was also getting her degree in ceramics from the Boston Museum School. And she was really, she was so artsy, fartsy. She was a hipster. You know, pictures of my mom in those days. God, she was so beautiful. She had, she had great legs. I did not get those. And my dad was a tall, good looking Jewish nerd from MIT's architecture school. And the guys from MIT used to go over to the museum school because it was thought that the girl artists over there were easy. In other words, they were gonna, you know, get lucky. And my dad really liked my mom. He asked to borrow a glaze from her and you know, sooner, sooner thereafter they got married and get a load of this. They then promptly moved to Finland, okay, for my dad's Fulbright. And my parents, whatever, they stayed in Scandinavia for four years being hippies and artists. Now meanwhile, my grandmother was just busy at her shop building her little empire. And I'm not sure she even noticed. I mean, and maybe that's an exaggeration, but let's be clear. My grandmother was not in the detail of her kids lives. I'm going to say the family centers was just not a value of hers. She loved her Kids. But she loved her business. And she was just on. She was fully on fire for her life, the one that she had built brick by brick. And I think it was a life that she really loved. I think she worked every single day. And she did until she was 70 and she retired. I remember this when she retired. Cause there was a party, and she did it because she had arthritis that was so debilitating. I mean, her hands. She was in so much pain. But in all those years until she had to retire, she was never off. Never off professionally. She was always working the phones. She was always going to somebody's house for a fitting. And it was in that period of those 30 years after she divorced him for the second time, and she just went ham that the yellow dress was created. And by the way, it's. It's actually not a dress. It's a suit. It's a beautiful yellow dress with a matching jacket. Okay. And a beautiful belt. And it was certainly designed by my grandmother, but my mother and I figured that it was probably made by one of the 12 knitters that actually worked for my grandmother. By the time the store was really, really successful, she had 12 people working for her. And I. My mom, recently. What was the exact year she thought the yellow suit was made? And she couldn't recall. Now look again. My mom is 98, so I didn't expect her to pull this date out of her, you know, memory bank. And I asked my sisters, and we think that the yellow suit was probably made sometime between 1950 and 1960. It could have even been made the year that I was born, 1959. Which would almost be too novelistic even for this crazy, crazy story. So here's my theory. My grandmother designed the suit, and she had it made, but then admiring its color, which is resplendent, it's like this just crazy saffron yellow. She decided, and she was so successful, she didn't have to sell it, that one of her daughters should have it. And my mother says she wore that dress to parties in college. And then a few times after she and my dad got married, she said she brought it with her to Finland. And then apparently, somewhere along the way, my mom decided to give it to me. Here she's explaining it. I have a question. How did I end up with that suit? Was it yours? Like, how did it get to me?
- [35:37]
C
Yeah. Mother gave it to me. And I don't know how it came up, but I remember briefly, you were going somewhere, and I offered it to you, and you said, okay.
- [35:48]
B
I said, okay, but this is the last chapter of this long story. She gave it to me, but I never Wore it. For 30 years I did not wear it. It laid flat because you do not hang ribbon dresses. And I put it on a high shelf in my closet and it just stayed there, untouched. You cannot miss that color. I saw it every day, but I never ever took it down. And I never once put it on. Why? Well, that is a very good question and I am going to try to explain it. So my grandmother, Francesca sounds like the heroine of this story. Right? And my mother kind sounds fabulous too. I suppose these are women you would think I would admire and revere, especially given how I have lived my life. And to be real here, I think my grandmother and I actually have some very similar stuff in our lives. Francesca had a first husband who almost broke her. And me too. Francesca had a scandal. I had a scandal. After I married Jack. Francesca had to reinvent herself and un. Cancel herself. And so did I. And we both did that by hard work, relentless hard work and invention and creativity, by sheer force of will. She was an artist, I'm a writer. We're creatives. We both had four kids and did a lot of things for them while we were trying to live our own values of achievement and work centrism, which is. Can be a hard and unnatural act sometimes. So, again, I think my grandmother and I, I think there's some serious echoing going on there. But here's the but. And it's a really big but. Here's the reason I didn't wear that dress. It's about two values, voice and agency. So let's start with voice. Voice, technically speaking, is the value that reflects how important it is for you to express your true individuality. It's the value you place on authenticity and giving that definition. You might think that Francesca Pilato was very high on voice. Right? Right. I mean, she could have stayed in that terrible marriage, but she didn't. Two times. And instead she said, I refuse to put my light under a bushel. I'm going to be me, fully me, no matter what anyone says. But that is not voice. That's agency. Agency is self determination. It's the ownership of your life. My grandmother was off the charts on agency, as I guessed earlier, but she was in reality very low on voice. Think about voice is that its full expression also means telling the truth about yourself. And Francesca Pallotto never really did that. She was incredibly private. That's all that mystery I talk about. She was an amazing listener, but she never Ever, ever, ever talked about her inner life. I knew her as well as you could know somebody. She was my grandmother. She was around my entire life until she died in 1986 when I was 27 years old. So I knew her as an adult as well. But I have no idea why she married Justin the second time, or how she felt when she was building her back business, or how she felt when my uncle went to war and they didn't hear from him for weeks at a time, or how she felt when she had to close her business, or what it even felt like when her kids landed in foster care. You have to believe me when I tell you I asked her about all of these things, but she never answered. Her inner life was one big secret. And I think to her, your pain was dirty laundry. You did not talk about the past. You did not explain yourself, your story, your truth.
- [38:56]
C
Truth.
- [38:56]
B
Those things were private with a capital P. I have to say, for the majority of my life, as you've heard me say, I hated that. I am not off the charts on voice, but I definitely value it pretty highly. I value personal truth telling very highly. And so I held her zero voice value against her. I wanted to know the answers. I wanted to know what was going on in her head and her heart. And I hated that. I didn't know. And I should not have. I should not have held that against you. Her. One of the things that I've learned the most in this process is that values, as I said earlier, they're choices. If you're not hurting anyone, they are yours to live. We're not talking about virtues, we're talking about personal choices. And I often stand up when I teach becoming you, either NYU or in the three day intensives, when I stand up and teach it, I say, I am a values agnostic. Your values are your values to live. I don't judge you. And I am. I really am. I am. Now, I don't judge anybody's values. But. But for decades, I judged and I judged my grandmother Francesco, for being so private about her inner life, for having lower voice. I judged her. I should not have done that. The antidote to judgment is curiosity. And I found over the past few years that I have tried to understand her better. I think I saw that dress in my closet and I tried to understand her lower voice. And I have begun to have a hypothesis because I can't ask her that her privacy was a matter of emotional survival. My conjecture is that she sensed somehow that if she started talking, maybe she would start crying and if she told the truth, maybe she would become too vulnerable and she needed all the armor she could get. Or maybe she found when she tried to explain herself, she couldn't do the work she needed and wanted to do. It got in the way of her building her business and her other values, her achievement. Whatever the reason, she had a reason reason. And letting her have that reason without judgment was what I needed to do. I have my values, and she had hers. I had to let it go. I had to set her free and therefore set myself free. It was such a transition for me, such a transformation. I could no longer be standing in that classroom or be up there giving speeches about how we need to stop judging each other's values and judge my grandmother for her values. I had to walk the talk. And then this spring came, and I was thinking, what can I wear to the hat luncheon this year that no one else will be wearing? I want to kind of go big this year because the hat luncheon is such so important, fun and important to me. I want to. What should I wear? And I, you know, I still can't believe that I, Susie Welch, get to go to this hat luncheon. And I really wanted to wear a fabulous outfit. And I walked into my closet, and my eyes lifted up and I saw the yellow dress. And I thought, of course I could wear the yellow dress. I pulled the yellow dress down from the top shelf, and it just slid on me like it was made for me. Because, you know, it was made for me. I just had to realize that,
- [41:49]
C
oh, my mother wasn't born on Susie. She's smiling in heaven. Oh, my God. Oh, Susie, she's smiling.
- [41:58]
B
Well, I'm smiling, too. I'm smiling. I mean, look at. This has been a long story, 123 years long. But to me, it's everyone's story. And so, because everyone has a family, and every family has a history, and every family's history is filled with people living values that they may be yours and they may not be. When I put on that yellow dress, I stopped fighting the war to make my values right and my grandmother's values wrong. I stopped judging her, which had been a terrible thing to do because she was an amazing woman. And I should have just loved those parts of her that I could, just as I want my children and now my grandchildren to love me for the parts of me that they can love. We cannot look at each other and think, you're a flawed version of me, because our values are different. That's what I was doing with my Grandmother, she had lower voice than me. And I judged that. I rejected it. But she was a perfect version of Francesca Pilato. I should have had compassion for her, not judgment. And when I put that yellow dress on, that's what I felt for my grandmother. I was just flooded with it. I told every person at the hat luncheon, my grandmother made this. My grandmother made this. A woman who would have loved the hat luncheon. She was this swish event with all the fabulous women of New York at it. And she should have been at it. But I am there for her now. I'm going for her now, honoring who she was, not me. But she's so much a part of me. And I'm ready, ready to celebrate that for the rest of my days. And here's the funny postscript in all of this. You know, we heard my mom say that one day she gave me the yellow suit. But the truth is, that day, she gave me three suits for my grandmother. One is this crazy, gorgeous fuchsia. It's insanely beautiful. And the other one is this pale, pale pink. So I actually know what I'm wearing next year and the year after, I will wear them. And someday, I can't wait to give those suits to my granddaughter, Liriel, with a long and precious story to tell. I'm Susie Welch. This is becoming you. I'll see you next week. Are you really buying a car online on Autotrader right now? Really? At a playground? Yeah, really. Look at these listings from dealers. Wow, your search can really get that specific. Really? And you just put in your info and boom, car's in your budget. Mom needs a second. Honey, you can really have it delivered. Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car. Mommy, look. I think your kid is walking up the slide. Kyle.
- [44:19]
A
Again? Really?
- [44:20]
B
Autotrader? Buy your car online? Really?