Linda Bailey Walsh (5:55)
So I recently found myself in the middle of a conversation about. Well, I overheard a conversation and then I inserted myself into the conversation and the conversation was about the movie Elf. And someone was talking about how much they hated the movie Elf. Like, really hated the movie Elf. She was like, I would pay someone to watch that movie for me again. And I realized I hated her. Like, I instantly hated her. I didn't know. I didn't need to know anything else about her. I was like, what a terrible person. Like, that's a terrible person. Like, if you don't have any room for like joy or whimsy, like hope in your heart and like, you hate Elf. I just, you know, that's the thing I learned about myself is that that's all it takes for me to hate you. And so, you know, I mean, I love Christmas. I love holidays. I really do. I get into all of it and I'm lucky enough. I know that's sort of a luxury to have memories of happy holidays, but I really do. I have a gigant crazy Irish family. I'm the youngest of six. I have 16 nieces and nephews. Like, we are the party. It doesn't matter. Like, wherever we go, we just bring the party with us. So I always, you know, most of my life, I have really great memories of Christmas and holidays and things like that. And I really like the traditions. I love the tree. I love. I never get tired of the music, Mariah Carey. But the rest of it, the rest of it I really love. And I love the traditions and you know, my favorite tradition is watching the 1946 Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life. And anybody. Thank God I don't have to hate all of you, but I love this film. And for those of you who don't know this movie, it's about George Bailey. No relation. And George Bailey, he's a good person. He's just like an undeniably good person. But he's not a good person, like in big, bold letters, like a Mother Teresa or like a Dolly Parton. Good person. He's just, you know, a good person who does a lot of things over his life that could easily be sort of forgotten or looked over. And some of the things he does, like when he's 7 years old, his brother, they're ice skating and his brother falls in the ice and he just dives in and gets his brother out. And then another time, when he's working at a pharmacy, he's about 10 years old, and child labor laws weren't really. And he realizes that the pharmacist actually put poison in one of the prescriptions that he's supposed to deliver. And the reason why is because the pharmacist just got a telegram that his son died in World War II, and George stops him from poisoning this child. And one of the main things that George does is he really kind of lets go of his dreams of traveling and going to college to stay and help his family and help the family business. And the family business is really important because it's the Belli Brothers Savings and Loan, and they offer mortgages to working class people. So immigrants, poor people, blue collar workers are able to actually, like, own their homes. So he makes a great dent in the community. And I won't tell you everything about the movie. I don't want to be a spoiler, but you've had since 1946. But there's a moment in the movie where George is at his breaking point. He's had it. He's in big, big, big trouble. And he is just about to do something very, very drastic. He realizes that he's worth more dead than alive. And just at that moment, we flash into heaven. And there's St. Joseph and there's Clarence. And Clarence, St. Joseph, I assume, you know, Clarence is an angel, second class, because he hasn't gotten his wings yet. And he's been trying for a very long time. And St. Joseph calls him in and he says, we have to help George Bailey. He's in trouble. And Clarence says, is he sick? And he says, no, it's worse. He's Discouraged. And with that, Clarence goes to save George Bailey. And he manages to catch him right before George Bailey throws himself off of a bridge. And what he does to try to save George Bailey eventually, because George isn't finding any value in his life. And he shows George what the world would have been like had he never lived. And you realize that his brother that he saved from drowning in the ice became a World War II hero and saved hundreds of soldiers. And the pharmacist that he stopped from poisoning the child would have been to jail and the child would have died. And then he also realizes that all of those people would not have been able to get mortgages. They would not have been able to build their families. They all would live in these slums. Like Mr. Potter, who is definitely a Trump relative, they all would be living in these slums without him. That, they point out, is what would have happened to George's wife Mary, because it's the most dramatic scene in the movie. And he says, what happened to Mary? Tell me what happened to Mary. He says, you're not gonna like it, George. She never married and she's just about to close the library. So as you can guess, all wads up, out. I won't tell you everything. You really should check it out. But in this movie, the thing that kills me, there's lots of very famous lines in this movie. You know, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings, all these things. But the thing that kills me is that line of, is he sick? No, it's worse. He's discouraged. Because that's all we have right in life. Like, even if you're physically sick, you still don't want to be discouraged. And it just, it breaks my heart to think of a good person being discouraged like that. And it makes me think of my own family around the holidays in about 1993. And although, like I said, big strong family we had gotten the previous years, we just gotten our ass kicked by the universe. And my father had died after a very long illness, my grandfather had died. And the worst of it all was my 6 year old nephew was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in the stem of his brain and died. And that year when the holidays came around, no one really felt like celebrating and we were just going through the motions. And just as we were getting ready to go to my sister's house who was hosting, my brother in law showed up. And my brother in law is like a total, you know, sports head football player type, not a fun in the kitchen kind of guy. And he showed up with these, like, hard boiled eggs that he also, like, sliced, like, black olives and made wings and then put a head on them and he made them penguins. And it was like the most random thing in the world. Just like, he just did this thing. And we thought it was hilarious. And we knew we were going to be seeing him later. And because I come from the most competitive family in the world, we immediately were like, oh, my God, Sean's bringing penguin eggs. You have to beat him. You have to do something better. You have to do something better. And, like, everybody scurried for the rest of the day to just make something else to beat Sean's eggs. And this turned into a massive yearly tradition. And keep in mind, no one in my family has any culinary skills whatsoever. Like, we're all Irish. Nobody goes to eat in an Irish restaurant. Like, you know, but. And it just eventually all just became about dessert. That's all anybody cared about was dessert. And it turned into, like, we would call each other and threaten each other during the year, and we would have. We try to pay off children to find out, like, what the mother was making. Like, we were nuts about it. And it wound up being a thing where, like, there was a trophy and you got bragging rights for a year. Like, it was a big deal. So around this time, a friend of mine started working for the Rosie O'Donnell show, and she just happened to mention to Rosie this crazy thing her friend's family does. And Rosie said, let's book her on the. Book them on the show. So in 1997, around Thanksgiving, do you guys remember we were on the Rosie O'Donnell Show? Spoiler alert. But do you guys remember at the beginning of the Rosie O'Donnell show, they would pick somebody from the audience to do the introduction? So it would be like, I'm Claire from Des Moines. And today's, you know, guests are blah, blah, blah. So that day, Claire from Des Moines said, hi, I'm Claire from Des Moines. And today's guests are Whitney Houston and the Walsh family Bake. And it was amazing to see the whole audience, like, who the fuck are the Walshes? So this was actually happening. We were the only guests on the show. There wasn't any other guests except us and Whitney Houston. And everybody always asks me, like, about Whitney Houston. I don't know anything about Whitney Houston. We were the stars that day. Like, the Walshes were the stars of the Rosie O'Donnell Show. I honestly have, like, no, outside of her sweating a lot, I don't have any memories of Whitney Houston that day. But my family was, like, amped, and we all came. So There was, like, 30 people, and we were like, the Walshes let loose in Rockefeller Plaza, like, in, you know, 40 rock. It was nuts. And, like, at one point, and no one in my family, like, they're not showbiz people, so nobody had any cool about anything. Like, everybody was just like, you know, Jim Carrey was there. They were like, Jim just screamed. And then at one point, we saw, like, Cameron Diaz. Cause she was hosting Saturday Night Live. And my sister, not knowing what she was doing, like, handed, like, Chris Kattan the camera and was like, take a picture of us with Cameron dance. And I was like, no, he's famous, too. We have to take a picture with him. And my whole family took a picture with him. And then there was, like, one point where we were going up in an elevator. And again, we're so hyper. Like, we're so excited. We're so hyper. And we're going up, and my mother's there and a whole bunch of people in the family. And the elevator door is open, and it's Rob Reiner and Jerry Seinfeld. And literally my whole family's just like, oh, my God. Screaming. And my mother just leans right in and looks at Jerry Seinfeld and goes, who are you? And then the elevator's doors closed. But as far as the actual set, the actual, you know, time on the show, so we divided up into three different camps, and we made our desserts. And my dessert that I made with my niece was a volcano. So it was like a layer cake. And it had, like, cookies that were islands and blue jello that made, like, a little river and things like that. And I had a special secret weapon was that my cake, my volcano erupted, which I had rigged with, like, tubing and a turkey baster. And right before we set up, like, the prop guy was like, you have to do it this way. I was like, it's not going to work. Back and forth, whatever. He jinxed me. But I showed that. And then Rosie's like, make it work. And it wouldn't work. So Rosie's like, all right, we'll come back to the sad volcano lady. And then we went to my mom and my sister, and they had made a Titanic cake. And it was this huge Titanic cake. And then they had a vat again of blue jello. It was, like, 50 bucks and of blue Jello. And they had a plate under the cake so that when they pushed the cake, it broke in half and fell into the vat of Jell O. And then we went to my niece and my sister and they made a cake that looked like a TV with Rosie O'Donnell on it. But what they did was they took the guts out of a Rosie O'Donnell doll and they put it in the cake so that when you push the candy button on the cake, it said like, dreams come true with Rosie. And so that was fun. And then Rosie came back and was like, okay, have we got Linda's thing fixed? And I'm still cursing the prop person. And so then we squeezed it and we did get my chocolate syrup came out of the top of the volcano. It wasn't that impressive. It was a little disappointing. So then Rosie wanted to try it herself. So Rosie starts squeezing the turkey baster to make the tubing spit out this chocolate syrup. And it's not really working. So Rosie pulls out the turkey baster and she decides to just blow straight into the turkey baster, which she does. And she's a powerful lady with strong lungs. So the chocolate syrup goes about six feet in the air and lands on my head, completely covered in chocolate syrup. You can see us on the Funniest moments ever of Rosie O'Donnell. There's some compilations where Rosie spits chocolate on someone. That's me. And we also won a 20 year supply of Betty Crocker baking products. So thank you, thank you. They come in very handy still. And the thing that brings this all back for me, when I think about, like, It's a Wonderful Life, for example, was Jimmy Stewart, the actor who plays George Bailey. He actually didn't want to do that movie. He had just returned from World War II and he was extremely traumatized. He was what we would now call ptsd, all these other things. But he was not okay when he was going to do this movie. And he really felt like acting was just such a silly thing to do when people were dying all over the world. And Lionel Barrymore, who plays the evil Mr. Potter in the movie and was a very well known actor at the time, said to him, so you're saying it's okay to bomb these people, but it's not valuable to entertain them. And it made Jimmy Stewart really change how he thought about this. Like this little gift, what he considered this little gift that he had would be useful to people and give them hope. And almost 80 years later, it still is giving so many people hope and joy. And my point about this is, you know, if you're not feeling great, if you're struggling a little through the holiday season or any other time. And there's something little that brings you joy and brings you hope, like the movie elf or some penguin eggs. Go for it. Do it. Because you never know what's going to be that one little thing that's going to bring back hope and show you that it is a wonderful.
