Decoder Ring | Jane Fonda’s Workout, Part 1: Jane and Leni (Encore)

Summary

Slow Burn x Decoder Ring | Jane Fonda’s Workout, Part 1: Jane and Leni (Encore)

Podcast: Slate Podcasts
Date: August 27, 2025
Host: Willa Paskin
Guests: Jane Fonda, Leni (Lenny) Kazdin

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Episode Overview

Main Theme:
This episode dives into the untold story behind the legendary Jane Fonda Workout—a cultural phenomenon that originated in the early 1980s and became a best-selling home video, transforming both exercise culture and Jane Fonda’s image. But behind its creation lies a complex, decades-long relationship between Fonda and fitness instructor Leni Kazdin. This episode, the first of a two-parter, explores the emotional and professional dynamics that birthed the workout, focusing on issues of credit, regret, and reconciliation.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Setting the Stage: Why Jane Fonda?

• Trigger: Hearing "9 to 5" makes Willa reflect on Jane Fonda’s multifaceted identity—actress, activist, and fitness guru.

  “[Fonda] produced a lot of movies…they had progressive themes because Fonda was an activist, although a lot of people really don’t like her for that.” (00:44, Willa Paskin)

• Curiosity: Willa sets out to answer how these different "Janes" fit together, focusing on the origins of the Jane Fonda workout.

2. Meeting Jane & Leni: The Unexpected Interview Dynamic

• Condition: Fonda insists the interview happen with Leni Kazdin, the original creator of the workout, to give overdue credit and make amends.

  “I have become famous for the workout…but the person that created the workout was not me. It was Leni Kazdin.” (04:08, Jane Fonda)

• Dynamic: Jane is eager to focus on Leni’s contributions; Leni is more reserved, repeatedly stating she’s happy and not fixated on past grievances.

3. The Subtext: A Relationship Marked by Creation and Estrangement

• History: Jane and Leni met in the late '70s, when Jane sought a new exercise routine and was blown away by Leni’s challenging, choreographed classes.
• Business Venture: They attempt to start a fitness studio together, but miscommunication and legal maneuvering by Jane's team edge Leni out of her own creation.

  “Jane handed me a contract which might as well have been a job application. She wanted me to sign the contract…she said, ‘This is going on with or without you.’ And that was that. I mean, you just literally took everything from me. I didn’t have anything else to do. It destroyed me. Of the top three things and I lost a child. That’s one of them.” (37:23, Leni Kazdin)

4. Leni Kazdin’s Story: Hardships and Resilience

• Tough Childhood: Leni’s mother suffered from mental illness and alcoholism; Leni was essentially on her own from an early age.

  “My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic…my mom was always surprised to see me. When I walk in, she’d go, ‘oh, hey, hey, how’s it going?’ So I was virtually on my own from almost day one.” (10:01, Leni Kazdin)

• Athletics as Escape: Roller skating became Leni's salvation, then dance, then instruction.

  “Skating changed Leni’s life, saved her life. She says she was looking for structure…They gave it to her.” (11:33, Willa Paskin)

5. The Birth of Dance Fitness Culture

• Context: Early fitness culture for women was primitive and restrictive; dance-based workouts in the ’70s, like Jazzercise and Leni’s routines, revolutionized women's fitness.

  “Up until the 70s, there was no workout for women…women weren’t supposed to break a sweat. Women weren’t supposed to have muscles.” (14:46, Jane Fonda)

6. Jane’s Turn to Fitness—and to Leni

• Turning Point: After breaking her foot during a film shoot, Jane seeks Leni’s exercise class to get back in shape.

  “I walked into this room, there was this person in the front, Leni, this tiny little person with short brown hair with a kind of fabulous boyish body…It lasted an hour and a half. It never stopped. The next day, I couldn't move…My body had never been through anything like it. I fell in love.” (20:14, Jane Fonda)

7. The Split: Business, Betrayal, and Departure

• Omission from Profits/Recognition: At her lawyers’ advice, Jane transfers ownership to her political PAC, the CED, effectively excluding Leni.
• Leni Departs: Feeling sidelined, Leni leaves to sail around the world with her new husband. Meanwhile, the Jane Fonda workout explodes into a massive franchise.

8. The Fallout and Aftermath

• Pain and Longing for Credit: Leni is deeply hurt, feeling invisible, especially as others (like Gilda Marks) claim her achievement.

  “It just felt kind of bad that I had a lot to do with it, but I couldn't tell anybody because they'd look at me like I was nuts. So I just never mentioned it. Sucked it up.” (36:14, Leni Kazdin)

• Years Later: Jane publicly credits Leni in her autobiography, but Leni never reads it; mutual friends and family facilitate some financial recognition and a resumption of tentative friendship.

9. Reconciliation—After 20+ Years

• Chance Reunion: Jane and Leni reconnect randomly at a gym nearly two decades later, begin meeting socially, and never openly discuss the past at first.

  “I said, I know you thought I was dead.” (41:26, Leni Kazdin)

• Therapy Session Thwarted: An earthquake literally interrupts their planned therapy confrontation; they revert to stasis.
• Final Confrontation and Apology: Years later, Leni demands credit after hearing Jane mention the wrong person (Gilda Marks); this interview, coincidentally, becomes the vehicle for Jane’s long-overdue apology.

  “Oftentimes I say, okay, if I were then where I am now, in my head, in my heart, it would have gone down differently.” (48:54, Jane Fonda) “We can let that go now.” (49:43, Leni Kazdin)

10. Epilogue: Acceptance, Irony, and Moving Forward

• No More Bitterness: Leni's hard-won peace and insistence on not being a “bitter old woman.”

  “One thing you must avoid is being a bitter old woman. I think that’s not a good look.” (51:58, Leni Kazdin)

• Irony Not Lost: Leni notes the ultimate irony: Jane’s pursuit of economic democracy resulted in her own marginalization.

  “It was Campaign for Economic Democracy—about that.” (50:24, Leni Kazdin)

• Reflection: Mistakes last a long time, but setting things right can last even longer.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "This is an important interview that we're doing, Willa, and let me explain why. I have become famous for the workout...But the person that created the workout was not me. It was Leni Kazdin."
  — Jane Fonda (04:08)

• "Jane handed me a contract which might as well have been a job application...she said, ‘This is going on with or without you.’...It destroyed me. Of the top three things and I lost a child. That’s one of them."
  — Leni Kazdin (37:23)

• "Oftentimes I say, okay, if I were then where I am now, in my head, in my heart, it would have gone down differently."
  — Jane Fonda (48:54)

• "One thing you must avoid is being a bitter old woman. I think that’s not a good look."
  — Leni Kazdin (51:58)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00–01:42: Willa introduces origin of Jane Fonda episode idea and themes
• 02:00: Jane Fonda introduces herself; immediate focus on the workout and its real origin
• 04:08: Jane admits Leni Kasdin as true creator of the workout
• 10:01: Leni describes her difficult childhood and family background
• 14:46–15:19: Context: The state of women's fitness before the 1970s
• 16:20–17:11: Rise of dance-based fitness and early female fitness instructors
• 20:14: Jane first takes Leni’s class—her transformative experience
• 33:08: Origin of Jane & Leni’s business plan; the crucial “gas station” moment
• 37:23: Leni’s emotional reflection on being edged out
• 41:26: Mid-1990s: Jane & Leni’s chance reunion at a gym
• 48:54–49:43: Jane’s direct apology and Leni’s acceptance

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Tone and Style

The episode maintains a tone that is simultaneously intimate, reflective, and slightly bittersweet. Willa’s narration deftly oscillates between journalistic curiosity and empathetic listener—honoring the personal stakes and emotional weight behind what could have been a mere footnote in pop culture history. Both Jane and Leni’s voices are candid: Jane is vulnerable and self-critical; Leni blends humor, resilience, and tough-lived wisdom. Their exchanges blend reverence, regret, and acceptance.

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Conclusion

Why Listen:
This episode offers far more than the behind-the-scenes tale of a famous fitness brand. It’s a moving investigation into collaboration, erasure, feminism, and the enduring impact of unresolved personal histories. Through first-person interviews, archival research, and rare moments of real-time reckoning, Decoder Ring uncovers how the Jane Fonda workout was actually the product of a partnership—and how recognizing the pain and beauty in that partnership can be as transformative as any exercise routine.

“Mistakes and misdeeds can happen in long lives. Another way to think about it is that sometimes trying to set things right can have an even longer one. Life is long and complicated and you can’t undo what happened. But maybe piecemeal, bit by bit, you can work it out.” (51:16, Willa Paskin)

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Next Episode:
Part two will explore the broader cultural legacy of the Jane Fonda Workout and its ripple effect on fitness, celebrity, and activism.

Transcript

[A]

Hi, it's Willa. So more than a few years ago now, I was out and about in the world when I heard the Dolly Parton song 9 to 5 playing. And as I was listening, something like this ran through my head. Oh, I like this song. And I like the movie. It comes from the 1980s Workplace Comedy Co starring pardon, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, who actually produced the movie, too. Fonda produced a lot of movies, didn't she? All of them were really big hits. And they had progressive themes. And they had progressive themes because Fonda was an activist, although a lot of people really don't like her for that. I remember her, though, for sure from the COVID of my mom's vinyl record of the Jane Fonda Workout, stretching her legs and wearing leg warmers. I can't swear that's exactly what ran through my head as 9 to 5 was playing, but it was something like that. And as this jumble of Jane Fonda thoughts ran through my brain, so did another one. Jane Fonda would make for a great decodering subject. I mean, how do actress Jane and activist Jane and exercise Jane all fit together? So that's what you're about to hear. The first episode of our two part decoder ring. All about Jane Fonda. This one is about how the Jane Fonda workout came to be. Next time, we'll play you the second episode about how the exercise tape fits into the career of Jane Fonda. More largely as you'll hear. These first came out in the summer of 2020, just a few months after the start of the COVID pandemic. It's a whole five years ago now, but this episode is still one of my very, very favorites.

[B]

I hope you enjoy.

[A]

I can see that you're here, but you're muted.

[B]

Hi, Willa.

[C]

Hi. There you are. Hello.

[A]

Hi. A few weeks ago, I had a zoom call that I was really excited about.

[B]

I'm Jane Fonda and I'm talking to you from Los Angeles, and I'm an actor and an activist.

[A]

There are so many things that one could want to speak with Jane Fonda about, but I just wanted to talk with her about one thing in particular. The Jane Fonda Workout.

[B]

Are you ready to do the workout?

[A]

Yeah, let's do it.

[B]

This is the beginner's workout. Stand with your feet a little more than hip distance apart, stomach tight, buttock pulled in, pull out of your torso and head right to and Back to.

[A]

In 1982, the Jane Fonda workout became the best selling home video of all time. Over the next decade plus it and its 22 follow ups would spawn a fitness empire, sell over 17 million copies, and transform. Transform Fonda into a leg warmer. Clad exercise guru. Yes. One leg it burn.

[B]

3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and.

[A]

40 years after its initial release, the workout tape is having a moment. Like Amazon and Yeast, it has been a beneficiary of the pandemic. People are doing it alone and on zoom. They're tweeting about it, writing about it. Jane Fonda. Tiktoked about it.

[B]

TikTok. My name is Jane Fonda, and I'm going to bring back the Jane Fonda workout.

[A]

The workout is in the air, and I figured that's why she agreed to speak with me about it. She had one condition, though. She would only do the interview if she could do it with a woman named Lenny Kasdan.

[C]

I'm Lenny Kazdan, and I survived all these years.

[A]

Jane and Lenny have known each other for over 40 years. They met in the late 1970s, when Lenny was the instructor of an extremely popular exercise class in Los Angeles. And Jane, a lifelong ballet dancer, needed a new form of exercise.

[B]

I want to interrupt. Linda, your face looks so beautiful.

[C]

I actually had a makeup person come before it was audio, but I'm happy about it.

[A]

In the four decades since their initial meeting, there has been a lot of water under their bridge. And within seconds of starting to speak with them, it became clear to me that that water and not an oral history of the Jane Fonda workout was going to be the subject of our call.

[B]

This is an important interview that we're doing, Willa, and let me explain why. And I'm very moved that we're going to do this. I have become famous for the workout. It's been known as the Jane Fonda workout. But the person that created the workout was not me. It was Lenny Kasdan.

[A]

Jane has written and spoken about Leni, but they had never done an interview together before this. She was doing it now to try to credit Lenny and to make amends for a wrong she'd done her back in the 1970s.

[B]

I did not really understand who Lenny was and what the workout meant to her. And it was like it was. This is her Sistine Chapel. She put it together deliberately, and it was her life. And I am sorry to say that I didn't really realize that Lenny, for.

[A]

Her part, appreciated what Jane was doing. She wants the credit that she deserves, but she also wanted to make it really clear that she's fine.

[C]

She.

[A]

She's good. She's not fixated. On any of this.

[C]

I'm loving my life and I'm happy and I'm so glad, because in today's world, you better be healthy.

[A]

This dynamic happened all call long. Jane wanted to bring it back to Lenny. Lenny wanted to bring it back to how she's fine. Meanwhile, I just wanted to talk about the exercise tape and how it was made, even though the tape itself was made years after Jane and Lenny had fallen out. I got off the call thinking, I can make this work. I can do the episode that I've been imagining and reporting about how the 1982 exercise tape came to be. But that's not really the episode they want me to do. They want me to do an episode about Lenny. I'm not going to do that, though. But I had always been planning to follow up with Lenny to take a detailed personal history, which would have taken up too much time on our call with Jane. And it was during this second call that I began to wonder if the conversation I'd had with Jane and Lenny, which had seemed so sweet and lovey as to be almost cloying, might not have been a lot more complicated than I'd first thought. Was it okay for you, that last call?

[C]

I thought it was good. What do you mean? With Jane?

[A]

Yeah, with Jane?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With Jane, Yeah. Well, that's the first time we've talked about it, actually in our life.

[A]

Really? Yeah.

[C]

So there's a lot going on.

[A]

Yeah, I could tell. I mean, I was like, I shouldn't even be here. Like, you should just be talking.

[C]

Yeah. We made an appointment about, I don't know, 20 years ago to meet with our therapist. And I was going to lay out all the pain and agony and everything. And that was a 9 o' clock appointment. At 6:30, the biggest earthquake happened. And I just said, wow. I knew she was powerful, but, God, that's really powerful. We never had the meeting until you.

[A]

What I started to realize was that within the subtext of my zoom conversation with Jane Fonda and Lenny Kazdin had hung the weight of decades of friends, indifference, betrayal and love. A subtext I was only just beginning to get clued into. What had gone on between these two women? What was going on with them now, and why on earth was I a witness to it? It turns out in agreeing to talk to me, they hadn't just given me an interview. They had handed me a kind of puzzle, a jigsaw portrait of an extremely long, fraught relationship. It's not what I had been expecting or looking For. But when Jane Fonda hands you a jigsaw puzzle, you try to put it together. This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Willa Paskin. We're gonna do something that we haven't done before. A two parter. In two weeks, we're gonna do the episode we were planning to do all along about the 1982 workout tape and all it wrought. It's a story that involves the creation of the modern gym, basically the entire VHS market, dozens of ridiculous celebrity exercise tapes. And that hinges on the changing ways we have seen Jane Fonda, one of the most substantial and controversial celebrities of the last 50 years. The Vietnam War and her activism there. But we're going to start with something more intimate. The story before the story. A look at the complex relationship that birthed the workout in the first place. It's a tale about creation, regret, fame, forgiveness, trauma, survival, politics, and exercise. And when it's done, hopefully you'll know more about someone you didn't and also more about someone and something that you did. So today on Decodering, who created the Jane Fonda workout? To begin to put together our puzzle, we need to start with the part with the most missing pieces. I had heard of Lenny Kasdan before I spoke with her. Jane credits her with creating the workout in her autobiography. And I'd reached out to her before Jane's people had even suggested we do a three person interview. But I hadn't heard that much about her. My first glimpse at Lenny's past came on the call with Jane and Lenny when Jane spoke in broad strokes about Len.

[B]

People who are listening to this broadcast who have had a difficult life, who have had challenges, I can tell you one thing. I have never met a human being that has had a more challenging life than Lenny Kazdin. And I'm so proud of her. And I just want to say that make me cry.

[C]

Thanks, Jane.

[A]

I didn't know what Jane was alluding to, so when I spoke with Lenny one on one, I asked her, if you're comfortable, I want you to tell.

[C]

Me some of what was going on.

[A]

In your life that was making things.

[C]

So crazy and hard. Oh, well, I just had the worst childhood for parents. My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic with bipolar affect complicated by alcoholism, just for openers. And then I didn't know my dad. I think I met him around 12 years old. And so I was just a tomboy. I could run away and nobody missed me. My mom was always surprised to see me When I walk in, she'd go, oh, hey, hey, how's it going? So I was virtually on my own from almost day one.

[A]

Lenny, who spells her name L, E, N. I grew up in Newport Beach, California in the 1950s. She remembers getting on a swing with some other little girls and being told, you can't swing with us, you're too ugly. And running off to hide. She remembers jumping off railroad cars with her friends if she got scared because the train was going too fast to jump off. She stayed on until the next stop and then walked the tracks back home. And she remembers roller skating. One day a woman zipped up to her at the rink.

[C]

I think she thought it was a boy with the name Lenny and my hair I had cut at a barbershop. She came up to me and she really handled those skates.

[A]

She invited Lenny to a club meeting that Sunday night. Leni went and started competitive pairs roller skating, which is very similar to pairs ice skating and was at the time enjoying its first, first major wave of popularity in America.

[C]

This is roller skating, America's favorite fun sport.

[A]

A wholesome year round recreation.

[C]

One of our truly great all American participant sports.

[A]

Skating changed Lenny's life, saved her life. She says she was looking for structure. She needed a structure and athletics and exercise with coaching, guidance, discipline. They gave it to her. But even the skating couldn't stop. Was going on at home.

[C]

I kept getting thrown in what I call jail, but they called it protective custody because my mother would break down, they would put her in a state mental institution and there was no one else. So at 16 I married my skating partner, which made me an adult. So now everybody can have their breakdown and I'm good.

[A]

Her husband, who had been the president of her roller skating club, was about 20 years older than her. It started a pattern for Lenny of getting married in times of doubt.

[C]

I was 16 when we got married, had two children by the time I was 20. I lost the first one to SIDS, the second one survived. Just walking around right now. I love her to death.

[A]

Lenny's daughter Lori was in the room with her while we were talking, chiming in sometimes to jog her mother's memory. You may hear her at certain points in the audio. Leni's first marriage didn't last very long. And by the time it was over, it was the 1960s.

[C]

Absolutely would have won medals as a hippie. I mean, I ripped through the 60s like big time and had a little baby on my hip and we'd go to Love ins and all the concerts and we just went up and down the coast.

[A]

She got married again to a doctor. When they got divorced, Lenny, who was all of 25 or 26, realized she needed some discipline. Back in her life, she got seriously into dance, going to a dance academy to learn how to teach. And she also got seriously into psychoanalysis. One day, her analyst suggested she go to her daughter's school and offer to teach the students to dance.

[C]

So I went there and we got the sixth grade boys and we decided we danced and I worked them hard and we put on a performance that knocked everybody out. And that was the beginning, it was.

[A]

The beginning of Lenny's career as a fitness instructor. So before going forward with Lenny's story, I want to go back and give you some context about the dance inflected fitness world Lenny was about to enter. Americans first really started paying attention to fitness as a way of being healthy, living longer and staving off heart disease in the 1950s. But at that time, there were a lot of things about fitness that we did not know yet. Exercise. How long do you do it for? How sweaty should you get? Should you get sweaty? There are plenty of people, they're asking their doctors, you know, should I exercise? How long? And doctors know what to say. Shelly Mackenzie is the author of Getting the Rise of Fitness Culture in America. And in fact, there are some anti exercise physicians saying that it's a bad idea, saying that you're born with a finite number of heartbeats and that exercise is going to make you use them up too fast and that, you know, too much vigorous exercise will kill you. Even experts and instructors who were sure about exercise's benefits tended towards workout routines that seem, by today's standards, fairly unstrenuous. And this was especially true for women who weren't supposed to be doing hard physical exertion for social reasons as well.

[B]

Jane Fonda, up until the 70s, there was no workout for women. If you went to like I did to the Beverly Hill Women's Health Club in Beverly Hills, Lenny knows this. What you did was you stood on this thing with a strap around you and it kind of made you.

[C]

I remember that, remember that?

[B]

That was it.

[C]

It was like tenderizing our behinds, right, tenderizing our behinds.

[B]

But women weren't supposed to break a sweat. Women weren't supposed to have muscles. It just didn't exist.

[A]

This started to change in earnest with a couple of bestselling books. One of them, Aerobics, by a former Air Force surgeon named Ken Cooper, was published in 1968. It contained concrete steps for ass and improving your fitness level and sold millions of copies, along with a book by Bill Bowerman, the track coach and future co founder of Nike. It would kick off the jogging craze. But Cooper's book also inspired another set of people, women dancers. Shelly Mackenzie. Again, people are hearing, get exercise, get exercise, get exercise. The acceptable sports background for women, if you think about it, is dance, right? That's where women are allowed to get sweaty and to use their bodies. Over the course of the 70s, what happens is that women who have dance training in various parts of the US are figuring out ways to accomplish the fitness goals. But they do it by setting dance moves to.

[B]

The hipstrugger. Come on and shake that cute little booty of yours.

[A]

Jazzercise, an enthusiastic workout in the spirit of a jazz dance class, was founded in 1969 by Judy Shepard Musset. It was, to quote some of its press materials, a jazz filled fitness program that conditions your body, lifts your spirit, puts a smile on your face and a bounce in your step. Jazzercise wasn't the only dance based exercise program to take off in the 1970s. A woman named Jackie Sorensen founded aerobic dancing around this time, which, though less well known today, was just as influential.

[B]

Skip right, run back.

[A]

Knee lifts, 1.

[C]

2, 3, skip right.

[A]

These fitness programs and others like it spread grassroots style, woman to woman, across the country. The women teaching these guys classes tended to wear leotards and leg warmers because that's what dancers were, and they were dancers. The classes usually took place in any space that was big enough, community centers, churches, school basements. By the mid-1970s, this style of exercise, while by no means everywhere, was popular enough that a small handful of boutique brick and mortar studios had started to pop up in cities like Los Angeles. And this brings us back to Lenny Kazdan. Lenny is of course also a female athlete from a dance and roller skating background. After working with the sixth graders, her first job was at the aforementioned Beverly Hills Health Club, which had an old, sleepy, affluent clientele. She took over a half hour exercise class and made it her own. She stretched it out, started with a warmup and then ice cream, isolated the different muscle groups in a taxing rapid sequence that includes poses from ballet and other dance disciplines. She spent hours and hours in her living room timing and counting out the different sections, figuring out the right tempo, the right order so everything fit together correctly. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. Basically it was choreographed.

[C]

It's really just kind of a reorganized dance class.

[A]

If you're curious about what Lenny's class was like at the time. It was faithfully reproduced by Jane in the Jane Fonda Workout Challenge, a follow up to the original workout tape that came out in 1983. Leni's class was so hard that Jane had modified and shortened it for the original workout tape. There's something missing from that clip, though, that Leni's classes always had and that the previous instructors who had led the class with snapping and clapping hadn't used pop music. Vinyl records of, say, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, Al Green.

[C]

When I got in there, I asked if I could add music to it. And then all of a sudden, there was no room. It was just a happening.

[B]

Make sure your torso is lined up with your legs.

[A]

Lenny became an in demand instructor. She worked for a little while at Richard Simmons exercise club, the Anatomy Asylum. And she came to the attention of Gilda Marks. Marks was another exercise pioneer with a dance background who owned a number of upscale fitness studios in LA called Body Design by Gilda. One day she went to scope out Lenny in person.

[C]

And so Gilda walks in in a complete disguise with a hat, coat, sunglasses and a cane, okay, which is so obvious in the middle of summer. She was coming down to see me teach. She needed to hire someone to teach in her studio in Century City. And I wouldn't go unless I could teach my own theory. I didn't want to do what anybody else did.

[A]

So it's 1978, and Lenny's teaching in a penthouse studio in Century City, and that's when Jane Fonda walks in.

[B]

I had made a movie called China Syndrome, and I broke my foot doing that. And the next movie I was going to do was called California Sweet. I had to wear a bikini. And I was used to doing ballet. That was my form of exercise. I was panicked because I had to get in shape. And my stepmother said, well, I go to this workout. And so I went. I had never done calisthenics. I didn't know from aerobics. I walked into this room, there was this person in the front, Lenny, this tiny little person with short brown hair with a kind of fabulous boyish body that was just like, perfect. And the room had about 60 people in it. She put on some music. They were records. They were vinyl records. She dedicated the class to the first woman to have ever sailed around the world, Maui James. And she started. It lasted an hour and a half. It never stopped. The next day, I couldn't move. My body had never been through anything like it. I fell in love I was blown away. I had never seen anything like it. I became addicted.

[A]

So to go forward and fit in a few more puzzle pieces, I have to go back again to fill in the history of the other person. In this story, I have to talk about Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda, actress, author and award winning creator of one of the most innovative and inspiring approaches to physical fitness. Jane C. Morfonda was born In December of 1937, the daughter of Henry Fonda and Francis Ford Seymour. Jane adored her father, an emotionally remote movie star who appeared in films like Grapes of Wrath and Twelve Angry Men. Jane's mother was bipolar and her mental health got worse as Jane got older. She was hospitalized frequently and When Jane was 12, she died by suicide in a psychiatric facility. Jane was told it was a heart attack and only learned the truth after reading about it in a movie magazine. As this anecdote suggests, Jane grew up in a family that did not talk about feelings. In her autobiography, My Life so Far, she writes extensively about learning from a young age that she should suppress her emotions and stoically soldier on, which made her extremely competent, but often totally alienated from herself. She began appearing in movies in 1960, though her first film, Tall Story, like many of her earliest pictures, was not particularly distinguished.

[B]

Basketball players flock to Custer, don't they? They're usually tall, aren't they?

[A]

Why, of course. What better reason could a girl have?

[B]

Tall girl, tall boy, it all adds.

[A]

Up to tall story. In 1965, she appeared in her first really notable film, Cat Ballou, a western comedy in which she played the title character. That same year she married the French director Roger Vadim, with whom she would soon collaborate on 1968 Sci Fi Pop art movie Barbarella. In that movie, Fonda plays the title character, a representative of the US government who frequently finds herself wearing little to no clothes on a groovy and futuristic space mission.

[B]

I'm positive I could get you some sort of recompense from my government. I mean, if there's anything you need or that I can do, please tell.

[C]

Me where you could let me make love to you.

[B]

Make love, did you say?

[C]

Yes.

[A]

What do you mean?

[B]

You don't even know my psychocardiogram.

[A]

Barbarella is still one of Fonda's most famous roles and she's very winning in it, both hilariously wide eyed and totally in on the joke. But it, like all of Fonda's parts up to this point, are not quite what I think of as quintessentially Jane Fonda Rolles. They don't make full use of her ability to project intelligence and a barbed vulnerability. Those qualities would only get their first proper showcase in her next film, 1969's they Shoot Horses, don't they?

[B]

Maybe it's just the whole damn world is like central casting. They got it all rigged before you ever show up.

[A]

Dark as a black hole. They shoot horses, don't they? For which Fonda would receive her first Oscar nomination, is about a Depression era dance marathon whose contestants are so economically desperate they're willing to die on their feet from exhaustion to win a little bit of money. Fonda plays the bleakest of all the competitors in an uncompromising performance that established her as a different kind of actress than people had thought.

[C]

I'm so sick of the whole stinking thing. What thing?

[A]

Lies the historian Mary Hirshberger, in her book Jane Fonda's War, a political biography of an anti war icon, notes that there were a lot of resonances between the shoot horses, don't they? And the still raging Vietnam War. The dancers are told they can survive if they dance to victory. They sleep in barracks. Basically doctors and nurses fix them up and send them back out to compete, hirschberger writes. Audiences in 1970 were not indifferent to this symbolism. The film established Fonda as a person to whom politics mattered before she first spoke out publicly on the war. But she would soon speak out publicly on the war in France with vadim in the mid-1960s, Fonda had paid little attention to the news, but that changed in 1968 when, pregnant, she had to go on a month of bed rest seeing footage of what was going on in Vietnam on tv. She began to pay attention. Soon after, she was given a book by a young GI and army resister titled the Village of Ben Suk by Jonathan Schell, which had first been a series of articles in the New Yorker. It's about the U.S. army's leveling of a Vietnamese farming and it politicized her.

[B]

All the deaths on both sides, be they the liberation people struggling or the arvon troops, all of those deaths are American responsibilities because South Vietnam and the division of Vietnam is an American invention.

[A]

She moved back to America and got a divorce.

[C]

Do you ever miss living in Europe?

[B]

No.

[C]

No.

[B]

One day in 68, about the time of the Chicago convention and the riots, I went to the fish market and I suddenly said, what am I doing here?

[C]

What am I doing here?

[A]

And I We're going to explore Fonda's activism and the reaction to it in detail in the next episode. But for right now What I want you to know is that at this point Fonda is a full time activist as well as an actress. In 1971, she stars in the thriller Klute, where she gives a monumental performance. A watershed in American screen act the sex worker Bree Daniels, a part she performed while feverishly doing anti war work during set break.

[B]

What's the difference between going out on a call as a model or as an actress? As a call girl you're successful. As a call girl you're not successful because when you're a call girl you control it. That's why. Because someone wants you, not me. There are some johns that I have regularly that want me and that's terrific.

[A]

In 1972, she wins an Oscar for her performance and later in the year goes on her infamous trip to Saigon, the one that will later get her branded Hanoi Jane. After the triumph of Klute, Fonda steps back from acting to focus on her anti war work, appearing in only a handful of movies over the next five years. She cared about acting, but social justice was more urgent for her. Here she is in the late 1970s on Boston's the Good Day show talking about this period of time.

[B]

Once I once had to give up a film career because of my politics and I might have to again, and I would be prepared to do that, but I would be miserable because I take my work real seriously.

[A]

Fonda appeared on the Good Day show with her second husband, Tom Hayden.

[C]

When asked what was the greatest award you've ever had? She answered this way, oh God, I.

[B]

Think when Tom wanted to marry me.

[A]

Hayden was a movement heavy. He was the author of the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of the student activist movement. He'd been a key member of Students for a Democrat Society, and he was a leader at the 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention for which he'd been prosecuted by the Nixon administration. As one of the Chicago 7, Fonda and Hayden met through activism and their romantic relationship from the start was completely intertwined with it. In 1976, with the war finally over, Fonda began acting in earnest again and Hayden sought public office. He primaried California's Democratic senator and lost. Afterwards, Fonda and Hayden started a political action committee called the Campaign for Economic Democracy ced, which tried to enact progressive leftist policy in California. Their appearance on the Boston talk show was as part of a press tour for ced, not one of Jane's movies.

[C]

Well, I should tell, I think everybody's aware of the fact that you're got a new organization going The CED fights inflation and gets results.

[A]

Now, right off the bat, you're zeroing.

[C]

In on energy, housing, health and safety, economic justice and women. Have you had protesters?

[B]

The Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and Young Americans for Freedom.

[A]

From the start, the CED was funded in part by Fonda's earnings, and Fonda's career was going better than it had ever been. She had gotten really good at melding her values and her art. Starting in 1977, she had a string of critical and commercial successes, many of which she developed herself, that had politics and a point that used Fonda's activist brain, but that also worked as movies, which is very rare for a typical issue film. Probably the best known of these today is the feminist revenge comedy 9 to 5, in which Fonda co starred with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. But before that, she made Coming Home, for which she won her second Oscar, about a returning Vietnam vet, and the China Syndrome, a film about the dangers of nuclear power and unethical businesses that came out just days before the Three Mile island disaster. Her.

[B]

We're on the air. I met Jack Adele two days ago, and I'm convinced that what happened tonight was not the act of a drunk or a crazy man. Jack Adele was about to present evidence that he believed would show that this plant should be shut down.

[A]

It's on the China syndrome that Jane breaks her foot and has to stop ballet dancing, and so starts looking for other ways to exercise. And that brings us back to where we started from in 1978 in a penthouse exercise studio in Los Angeles. So Jane, trying to get in shape for a forthcoming movie, starts coming to Lenny's class every day. And the days there aren't classes, she hires Lenny to teach private ones at, say, Barbra Streisand's sister's apartment or Jane Fonda's ranch. Lonnie even makes Jane a vacation location cassette tape to use when she's not in la. And Jane starts teaching the routine to the female staff on one of her movie sets. They're spending a lot of time together, but they're not exactly intimate.

[C]

When you have a life like mine and someone asks you, that's the worst thing. I think the reason my classes never stopped is I didn't want anyone to ask me anything.

[B]

She was a very mysterious little character. She was this little person who would come in and do the. This thing for an hour and a half that people became totally addicted to, and then she would disappear.

[C]

Yeah, I was kind of like Johnny Carson.

[A]

Jane was struggling with her Own things too.

[B]

Well, I was totally compulsive. I had been bulimic from age 15 to in my 40s around this time. And I had gone cold turkey. You know, it's very hard. It's hard to give up an addiction. And it was very hard for me. But it was a matter of life and death. And with what the workout did for me was fill in that hole.

[C]

It.

[B]

Made it easy for me to not go back to having eating disorders. It was a way that I could kind of control my body without having to do bad things to it.

[A]

So here they were, two people who saw a lot of each other but maybe didn't know each other as well as they thought. And then they decided to go into business together. It starts in Jane's telling, when she and her husband, Tom Hayden, were trying to figure out how to raise more money for the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which was very expensive to run. She read an article about a fringe political character who funded his organization with a sideline, computer business.

[B]

Tom and I said, oh, wow, we gotta start a business that can fund the Campaign for Economic Democracy. And we thought of all kinds of things. And then one day we had a ranch. It was a children's camp up north of Santa Barbara. And Lenny and I were going up there and she was in the car ahead of me. And I remember we stopped for gas and I remember exactly where it was. And I thought, oh my God, this could be the business.

[A]

The idea here was not to film a best selling workout tape. It's 1978. Video is barely a thing. The idea instead is to open an exercise studio based on Lenny's exercise technique. The two of them throw themselves into the project. Lenny's scouting locations and hiring staff and talking to architects. They pick out a space on Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills and a name, Jane and Lenny's Workout. But there are no contracts, no official deals of any kind. And Lenny, for her part, doesn't even know that. The whole point of the business as far as Jane, is concern the ced. It's when they start to make everything official that it all goes pear shaped. So I need to give you the basic gist of what happened because it's hard to parse just from what Jane and Lenny said on the call. Going into the call, I had this gist myself because Jane wrote about all of this in her autobiography. Jane says she was persuaded by her lawyer that would make the most financial sense to have CED own the business, even though this would shut Lenny out. At the time, Jane could Only see the forest, not the trees, only the ced and the value of its work, which was so intertwined with her marriage that Lenny became an afterthought. And as this is going down, Lenny just removes herself from the situation. She tells Jane that she's met a man with whom she's going to sail around the world. And she leaves, abdicates with nothing to show for it.

[B]

Lenny and I went and had lunch at. She just, you know, she told me that she felt that given the way things were going, she didn't see her place in it very clearly and that she was going to go sailing around the world and that's what happens. But I feel badly that she never got the credit publicly that she deserved for the workout.

[A]

Thanks. On the phone with Jane, Leni pretty much matched her tone.

[C]

Well, we didn't do it together. I had this guy who wanted to get married and sail around the world. He was building a 76 foot cutter named Free Spirit. That was gorgeous. I thought, well. And I was used to working alone and without an education and all of a sudden people are talking about other things and I go, wait a minute, wait a minute. It got too business, like, I guess or something, I don't know.

[A]

But did you have. Did you have like, at the time, like, did you have any feelings about like, it took over the world?

[C]

Like, did.

[A]

Was that, like, how did that make you feel? Like, what did it feel like?

[C]

It just felt kind of bad that I had a lot to do with it, but I couldn't tell anybody because they'd look at me like I was nuts. So I just never mentioned it. Sucked it up. Hey, it is what it is. I'm not sorry about it. I mean, I've had a phenomenal life. It wasn't like I went left and went into the ditch. I sailed around the world on an amazing boat.

[A]

As you can probably tell from my fumbling question. As I was on Zoom listening to all of this, I was thinking, Lenny's holding back. Like we're talking about getting elbowed out of a million dollar business based on one's own work. Either she's super enlightened or that has to have sucked way more than she's letting on. But that's what people do with journalists all the time. They put on their best face. So even as I was thinking this is kind of whitewashed, I was also thinking this is just the version of the story that Jane and Lenny want to tell one with the mutual admiration dialed up and the edges the conflict dialed down. So what happened next surprised me, which was that on the phone by herself, Lenny was ready to get right into how painful this had all been for her.

[C]

Jane handed me a contract which might as well have been a job application. She wanted me to sign the contract. We actually had a lunch. We were sitting at a table and she looked at me and she said, this is going on with or without you. And that was that. I mean, you just literally took everything from me. I didn't have anything else to do. It destroyed me. Of the top three things and I lost a child. That's one of them.

[A]

When she was talking to me, Lenny repeated a phrase a couple of times.

[C]

They weren't thinking about me at all.

[A]

For a person who grew up with a mother who always acted surprised whenever she showed up, who, in other words, was not thinking of her nearly enough, this whole situation felt horribly familiar. In a number of ways, it was pretty bad.

[C]

And it reminded me back on the schoolyard where you're too ugly, you can't swing with us.

[A]

So she did what she knew how to do. She left. In her own words, she went on a soul retrieval out on the ocean. It wasn't just that a man who would become her third husband was building this beautiful boat. Lenny's father, who she'd met when she was around 12, had been a world class sailboat racer too. Sailing meant something to her. She was out on that boat for six years. And it's while she's on that boat that the workout business, one that no one had had such high expectations for, just takes off. Lenny's not there when the exercise studio, now called simply the Workout, opens to the public in Beverly Hills in 1979. She's not there when it becomes an immediate smash, serving 70,000 clients a year. She's not there when it expands to Encino and San Francisco, when it becomes a best selling book, when it becomes a chart topping video, and then another video and then another. Minting money all the while, even on the other side of the world, Lenny hears about it.

[C]

It was real tough on me hearing about all, oh, it's a cash cow, oh my God, it's making so much money. I walk in a hotel in New Delhi, India, there's a life size cutout with all her videos.

[A]

The whole thing is such a hot property that everyone wants credit for it. Even as Lenny, whose technique is the bedrock of the whole enterprise, goes unmentioned. Here's Gilda Marks, the fitness entrepreneur who came to scope out Lenny's class in disguise and who had employed Lenny in her studio when Jane met her, saying, jane's doing her technique. In a 1983 interview on Canadian TV.

[C]

Jane Fonda, who began her exercise career in my studio learning the body design program, has made it a way of life for herself and millions of people. She's made a fortune. Let's. She's just done an incredible thing. And bringing the awareness of the body design program to millions of people.

[B]

She worked out with you for seven months, didn't she, preparing for California Suite.

[C]

Longer than that.

[A]

When Lenny returned from her sojourn on the ocean, it was to a whole new fitness scene, one that had been so altered by the Jane Fonda workout that people were now wearing sneakers and instructors talked into microphones, which would have been unfathomable in the 1970s. She eventually integrated back into this new world, though, and became a personal trainer. Jane spent much of the 80s focused on the workout business. But in 1991, divorced from Tom Hayden, she married CNN founder and billionaire Ted Turner and retired from acting. So if you were to have made in the early 1990s a movie about the Jane Fonda workout and all of its success, those two things I just said about where Jane and Lenny end up would be like the pieces of text that flash at the end of the film telling you how everything turned out. The story of the workout, it seems like it's over. But this isn't just a story about the workout. It's a longer story about the relationship between these two women. And that story is just about to pick up again. Jane and Lenny's saga restarts in the mid-1990s when Jane walks into another Los Angeles gym.

[C]

Eighteen years later, she walks into pro gym. And I'm standing there and she goes, lenny, like that. And I said, I know you thought I was dead.

[A]

They sit down and talk. And after everything that happened, they start a tentative friendship.

[B]

We stayed together. We stayed in touch. She was telling me her life story. I said, I had no idea. I didn't know any of this. And she said, you never asked. And that was how I really started asking her about herself and getting to know her.

[A]

Lenny filled in some more details. She says. A few days after she and Jane ran into each other, Jane's husband, Ted Turner, gave her a call.

[C]

I get a call from Ted. Ted says, hey, I need a workout. Maybe you could work me out. I said, okay. So he came in, worked him out. Of course, we hit it off. Cause I was there when he won the America's cup because I'm a sailor in 1977.

[A]

Turner, who in the world of yacht racing really did count as a scrappy underdog, had won the America's cup and become one of Lenny's heroes. A few days later, Jane and Ted invite Lenny to Colorado, where Ted was giving a commencement speech.

[C]

And then we were sitting there, and then he says, well, I'd like you to see my ranch. And I said, okay.

[B]

And she became a friend of me and Ted, you know, and whenever we came out here, we would go to dinner together, and, you know, Lenny would come with us to places.

[A]

Some pretty amazing things, actually, in my life so far. Jane's autobiography, Jane even says that when she found out Ted Turner had cheated on her, she holed up in a hotel in Beverly Hills. And the only person she told was Lenny, who would come every day and give her coffee, nips, candies, and hold her hand. Lenny was Ted's trainer, and they had become close friends. He would walk her daughter down the aisle, and he kept calling, trying to get her to get Jane to give him a second chance. She did. Jane had Ted meet her at Lenny's apartment, where he won her back. As this suggests, they were all close, but they did not talk about the workout.

[C]

I never confronted her on it. I don't think there would have been anything to gain by bringing that up. They were inviting me to incredible places, showing me their ranches. I just. Just thought that getting along is a lot better than bringing up something 20 years ago.

[A]

Actually, that's not entirely true. At one point early on in their new friendship, Lenny set up a therapy session where she planned to lay it all out for Jane with both of their therapists there. But as she mentioned at the top of the episode, there was an earthquake instead.

[C]

And I just said, wow. I knew she was powerful, but, God, that's really powerful.

[A]

The session was never rescheduled, but after that, Lenny's daughter Laurie, wrote Jane and Ted a letter about how important it was to her mother to get a chance to talk about how devastating everything that had happened with the workout had been. It was at that point, still without talking about it, that Lenny was given some financial renumeration. She didn't say exactly how much, but it was enough to live comfortably. And after that, stasis, no one talked about it. After Jane and Ted got divorced in 2001, Lenny stayed friends with Ted. They're still close, and she and Jane didn't have a lot to do with each other. The whole thing, though, it niggled at Jane. It must have, because she wrote about Lenny in her 2005 autobiography, My Life so Far in a self critical way. In it she starts what happened then is painful to write about before going on to say that she let her lawyers, everything and got into an adversarial relationship with Lenny because she was focused on the CED. It's a couple of pages in a 500 page book. But it makes really clear that Jane feels lousy about what happened, that she thinks she did Lenny wrong. I've mentioned this part of the autobiography a few times now because it was exactly the thing that kept tripping me up. The piece of the puzzle I could not find the right place for. Because of the autobiography. It's a matter of public record that Jane feels bad about what happened. And so every spoke with Lenny and she said we've never talked about it. I couldn't comprehend what she really meant.

[C]

I kind of felt sorry for you because I feel like you stepped into something that was never solved.

[A]

I know, and that's. I sort of want to talk to you because I, I am having such a hard time wrapping my brain around that I need, I just need some concreteness. I got that they had never spoken about it in detail, but there are details in the autobiography and I figured Lenny must know about that and know how Jane felt about all of this because like I know how Jane felt about all of this and I don't even know Jane. All I'd done was read her book. But that's exactly what Lenny had not done. I mean she's taught, she's written about some of this stuff. She has, yes, in her, in my life so far. She writes about you? Abashedly I ended up reading the section out loud to her on the phone. It is important that I tell this story and that Lenny finally got the credit due to her for her original routine.

[C]

Wow, where did you find that?

[A]

It's literally in her autobiography.

[C]

This first I've ever heard of that.

[A]

It's funny because in a case like this, explaining what happened publicly counts for a lot. Lenny really wants credit for her part in the workout and she can't get that for herself. She needs Jane to do it. So in writing about Lenny, in my life so far, in mentioning her in speeches, Jane is doing the most she can, choosing the most public way to tell the most people. Except Lenny didn't know was happening. It's totally possible Jane sent the book to Lenny. Lenny's daughter Lori's reaction to hearing this part of the autobiography was to say to her, mom, you never check your mail, but sometimes it's worth picking up the phone, too, to make sure your heartfelt message has been delivered. Someone finally did pick up the phone in the last year or so, but it was Lenny who called. She was watching something. We can't quite figure out what. And there was a part in it where Jane mentioned Gilda Marks, the woman who owned the studio where Lenny was working when Jan walked in and who has been taking credit for the workout for decades.

[C]

Jane Fonda, who began her exercise career in my studio. Learning the body design program has made it a way of life.

[A]

This is the thing that has always made Lenny angriest. Not just not getting credit, but other people getting credit instead.

[C]

She said Gilda's name and that was the end for me. I just called her directly and finally confronted it and that my heart was pounding when I did that. And I have to say that wasn't an easy call for me. Jane says, well, what can I do? And I said, get us on the front of a fitness magazine.

[A]

They could not get one, though. And it's at this point, months later, and totally coincidentally, that I wander in with an email asking if Jane Fonda would speak to me about how the workout came to be. On our last call, Lenny read me the email that Jane sent her asking if she would do the interview with me in it. Jane told Lenny, it's not a magazine, but they want to do a nuts and bolts piece about how the workout started. Quote, let's give them more than they asked for. It was on the call that resulted from that email, our call that Jane finally expressed directly to Lenny what Lenny has so wanted to hear. It doesn't actually contain the word sorry, but it is an apology. Have you been feeling guilty about it, like, up until then? Like, had you. Had it been niggling at you that, yes.

[B]

It still does. Oftentimes I say, okay, if I were then where I am now, in my head, in my heart, it would have gone down differently.

[C]

I know that it would have. I want you to know I know that.

[B]

But because I wasn't able to yet really deal with the tension that existed between the fact that this was a business now that was going to be supporting a political organization and what was Lenny's role in. Was easy to have figured that out. It would have been easy, and she may have gone off and married and sailed around the world anyway, but it would have been different. And it's something that stays with me like a in my heart to this day.

[C]

We can let that go now.

[A]

Lenny is ready to let it Go. It was one of her only regrets. They hadn't hashed it out and that's gone now. She doesn't hold a grudge. Everything's cool. But she remained, as ever, a little more real about all of this. When Jane was not on the phone.

[C]

She feels terrible about it, and I know she feels terrible about it. And I think now, in reflection, she. She knows that. That it was just a very shitty thing to do. And here's the irony. I love irony. It was Campaign for Economic Democracy about that.

[A]

I'd wanted to talk to Jane Fonda about the workout because I thought there was a lot to it, but I had no idea that there was this. I thought it was an artifact, a perfect snapshot of its time, all leg warmers and VCRs, but that it was also a roadmap pointing to the future, to wellness culture and the celebrity lifestyle brand and another way of seeing Jane Fonda. But I hadn't a clue that it was a sticking point in a 40 year relationship, alive and meaningful in a wholly personal way. Listening back to the first Zoom call, now that I know what Jane and Leni's dynamic really is, I understand some of the things I misunderstood the first time around. One happened in the opening 10 seconds of the call.

[B]

This is an important interview that we're doing, Willa, and let me explain why. And I'm. And I'm very moved that we're going.

[A]

To do this Jane's saying interview. But the part that's moving to her is not that it's an interview, it's that it's a long overdue exchange, a testimonial. I thought it was overwrought when I first heard it, but I missed the trick. I don't think it's overwrought anymore. One way to think about all of this, the saga of Jane Fonda and Lenny Kasdan, is that mistakes and misdeeds can happen long lives. Another way to think about it is that sometimes trying to set things right can have an even longer one. Life is long and complicated and you can't undo what happened. But maybe piecemeal, bit by bit, you can work it out. So I'm just trying to understand your orientation right now.

[C]

Here's the deal. One thing you must avoid is being a bitter old woman. I thinking that's not a good look.

[A]

It also seemed like it was maybe important for you for her not to think you're a bitter old woman. It just seemed like you wanted to make clear to her like your life's fine, which it sounds like it is.

[C]

I am doing great. Unfortunately, it wasn't much different than the rest of my life from not knowing my father, being disappointed that I didn't have a mother. It just crazy, crazy. It's just nuts that I should end up happy. And yet I really am.

[A]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you aren't already a Slate plus member, please subscribe now out from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, or visit slate.comdecoder ring+ to get access wherever you listen. This episode was written by me and it was edited and produced by Benjamin Frisch. We had research assistants from Cleo Levin. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Katie Shepard, Max Friedman and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merrick Jacob, is Senior Technical Director. Thanks to Lori Torgason, Mark Harris, Amanda Cormier, Fred Hills, Kathy Hills, Mary Hirshberger, June Thomas, Sasha Leonard, Jared Holt, Gabe Roth, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email [e-mail] you can also call us at 347-460-72811. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. We'll see you in two weeks for part two.