Betsy Brandt (8:22)

He was tossing candy bars into the blue skies over Miami beach, watching them drop, and then their parachutes pop open and then tumble for a moment, then sway and then glide away.

Nate DiMeo (8:41)

So Ryan Reynolds reads a story in this audiobook, and he is so good at it. And because he said he'd do that, I was able to get the go ahead on my so crazy just might work plan. And so now I get to have stories that are read by, you know, some of my favorite voices in public radio and podcasts who are also so many of my favorite people. So these are Rishi Hiraway from SongXploders, Avery Trufelman, Daniel Arakon, Roman Mars, Jad Abramrod, Latif Nasser Kai Rizdal, my former colleague from Marketplace. There are three of my very favorite audiobook readers, like, people who to me, as an audiobook fan, like, feels like the biggest deal, including one of my dearest friends, Rebecca Lohman. There are a couple of my favorite actresses who have the most incredible voices, Lily Taylor and Carrie Coon, who over the years have reached out in their own way to say that they loved a specific story. And now they are in my audiobook reading those stories. And that is amazing to me. And also amazing to me is that my daughter reads the story Dreamland, and this was her favorite story when she was a little girl. And so now forever in this audiobook, there will be her voice at 15 and a half, and she is now 16. One last little story. So last week I was coming home from my book release event here in Los Angeles. It was a wonderful night and I will always remember it. But I suspect what I'm going to remember the most happened right after we got home. I was a little wired after this big day in my life and so had a little energy to burn. So I took our big dog, Goldie, as opposed to our little dog Walnut, for an extra long walk. It was a cold LA night. The wind had blown the clouds away so I could kind of see the stars, which is rare around here. I was flipping around on my phone through the audiobook, just getting a little bit of a flavor of each story, hearing each voice, these voices that I knew so well, reading my stories, what a thing that was. And I want to share one of those stories now. There is another actress I love. Her name is Betsy Brant, who I first knew from Breaking Bad where she played Hank's wife. And then, as happens from time to time when you live in la, I got to know her as a friend. And this friend of mine has one of my favorite Midwestern accents. And I have a Midwestern story that I knew she'd be perfect for. And so as I walked around in the dark listening to my stories being read by these voices I loved, and something about that making all of it the book, the audiobook, the kismet of it all, the achievement of it all just kind of feel real in a way that it hadn't until I was listening to these voices. Listening to Betsy, I was struck that this story that she reads is kind of a quintessential memory palace story. That kind of everything that I do and care about when I make these stories is kind of in here. So I thought it was a good one to share. So here from my audiobook is Betsy Brandt.

Betsy Brandt (11:52)

The Prairie Chicken in Wisconsin, Highlights of a study of counts, behavior, Turnover, Movement and habitat. There was the time in 1914 when Frances Hammerstrom was seven and told her mother she wanted to plant a garden behind their big brick mansion in the woods outside Boston. And her mother said, of course, gardening is a fine pastime for a girl. But Fran, she said, pronouncing the girl's name with the moneyed mid Atlantic accent of a Katharine Hepburn or George Plimpton or Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's island, the staff will dig the holes. Your job as someone who will someday run a household is to instruct the help as to where you'd like to plant the flowers and how. And then later, if you would like to cut some of those flowers for an arrangement to brighten up the parlor, bring some cheer to the landing on the grand staircase. Why, by all means, enjoy. Just be sure to wear a proper pair of gloves and to keep your hands free of dirt. But Frances loved the dirt. She loved bugs and birds and worms. Once one of the servants had fainted when she poured out cold water for a ladies luncheon and found tadpoles swimming among the ice cubes. A garden, well ordered and contained, her mother figured, would keep unruly nature out of her house and out of her daughter. So she smiled with approval as she watched her daughter through the back window, telling the gardeners how to place the begonias in neat rows, looking every inch a proper little girl and the future lady of the house. She did not know that Frances already had a secret garden out by the potting shed where she dug holes with her bare hands, collected insects she'd unearthed, put them in jars, pinned them and labeled them, planted rhododendrons so she could hide beneath them if anyone came looking for her. She realized she was resistant to poison ivy, so she planted a wall of the stuff around her real garden so no one would ever bother her there. Then there was the day she went to the dentist, and for a treat her governess took her to the Natural History Museum, and she saw all those insects and arachnids mounted and labeled with names Frances hadn't known, species she'd pinned at home but couldn't identify, and she loved it, and she cried when it was time to go home until the governess promised her she'd take her again the next time she went to the dentist, and there was the night the following week when Frances took a pencil and poked at her gums until they were gross and inflamed and her parents were alarmed and they told her she'd have to go right back to the dentist, and then they couldn't figure out for the life of them why she was smiling. There were all those nights when she'd wait for everyone to go to bed and she'd slip out her bedroom window and head out across the moonlit grass and lie beneath the stars and fall asleep to the sound of the night alive around her until she was awoken by the dawn and she'd hustle back home before anyone knew she'd been gone. There was the time before that. She was about 5, when her family was on a grand tour of Germany and a famous actress, some beautiful stage star, came to visit and lit a cigarette, flouting her father's strict rules against smoking inside, and Frances was sure her father was going to go ballistic. But instead he scrambled to find an ashtray. And there was the time when she was 84 and looking back on her life and remembered how she became determined to be like that woman one day, so famous she could make her own rules so she wouldn't have to hide. How odd she was, how unlike other people. Few people, she'd write, really held my attention. It was the birds and mammals, reptiles and insects that filled my dreams and internally whetted my curiosity. For nine years, on Saturdays in the ballroom at the Milton Club, she learned to dance and all that went with it. The entrances and exits, the curtsies and steps. How to hold one's head and one's partner's hand. Where to look, where not to look. How to twirl but not too fast. How to smile but not too wide. To prepare for a future of balls and cotillions as the wife of a diplomat or a man who owned factories. But no one ever asked her to dance. There were more girls than boys and the boys didn't quite know what to make of her. She sat by the wall and watched and waited. Then she'd go home and return to her secret garden to be alone with all the things she kept hidden away. Her sick animals, her cigarettes, her rifle and ammunition. And to lie in the grass and dream of Africa and the Amazon. There was a night, years later, when she had to tell her father she'd flunked out of Smith College. She couldn't be bothered to be interested in things that weren't interesting. All the preliminary courses and well mannered nonsense. Her father told her she would need to get a job. Then, perhaps assuming she would repent, slink back to him asking if he knew anyone at Mount Holyoke or Vassar. She got a job. She became a model. The only marketable skill she had was wearing dresses. There was the night she went dancing. She was 20 and boys wanted to dance with her then, especially when she wore her red velvet dress. And one young man, tall and handsome, came up to talk to her. He told her how he wanted to be a scientist, a naturalist, and to study animals in Africa. And she asked him if he wanted to get out of there. They went down to the beach and the pier where people like them didn't go, where there were honky tonks and hot dog stands and the place where they spun sugar into cotton candy. And they wound up at this joint where they played jazz. They had never heard jazz before, but they soon found their rhythm and they danced until the sun came up. Frances thanked the bandleader on her way out, saying that it had been the best night of her life. Three nights later, three nights after seeing her in her red velvet dress, Frederick Hammerstrom asked Frances to marry him. She asked what had taken him so long. And there was the time that Frederick's grad school advisor said there was a job working with animals for both him and Frances. The job wasn't in Africa or the Amazon, as they'd hoped, but in Wisconsin they would study prairie chickens. And then there was the day they showed up at an abandoned farmhouse on the Wisconsin prairie and her high heels clacked on the frozen ground. In the mornings, they'd start a fire and wait for the room to get above freezing and celebrate if it was warm enough that they couldn't see their breath. During the days, they'd go out looking for prairie chickens, studying their ways, trapping and branding them, day after day, season after season. Some days she would stand in front of an ornate antique mirror they'd brought with them out to the Midwest and see if she could still curtsy. Other days she got letters from her mother reminding her how to set a table when they were entertaining guests, should she send more dessert forks. And she'd laugh at how much her life had changed. There was the night the pump froze and there wasn't any well water and not enough snow to melt, to drink or to wash, and they needed to light a fire to unfreeze the pipes. So she soaked her red velvet gown in kerosene and burned it and knew that her old life was over for good. And good riddance. There were 21 years in which they studied the Wisconsin prairie chicken, struggled to understand why they were dying off, why they were on the brink of extinction, when they weren't being overhunted like buffalo or the passenger pigeon. Two decades of hosting grad students and volunteers, sometimes dozens at a time, who'd marvel at Frances and Fred and how they seemed one with each other and one with the land, immune to the cold and to boredom. Their visitors would be slack jawed when rugged Frances showed them her curtsy or recalled some cotillion or other strange story of society life that seemed to come from a whole other life entirely. Some nights the wind would howl and scare their two children, born to a fine family, but born to the prairie. Some days they couldn't believe how fast the children had grown and how happy they were out there in the wild. There was the time Fred's doctor told Frances her husband had pancreatic cancer, and the day not long after, when he died. And there were times when she read tributes to her husband and to the work they did together, how it had saved the prairie chicken, how the two of them were people who'd figured out that extinction didn't come only from overhunting, but could be caused by habitat depletion. In their decades, tromping through the low grasses of Wisconsin, they developed an approach to studying animals that is common sense now, but was revolutionary then. It was interdisciplinary. Zoology needed botany, which needed meteorology, which needed limnology, and on and on. They realized you couldn't understand what was happening with the chickens that ate the seeds without understanding the plant that dropped the seeds, or the creatures who burrowed beneath the seeds, or the stream that fed the seeds. They learned that the prairie chicken needed the prairie itself to survive. They discovered that all the prairie's creatures, its bugs and its grasses, its birds and its trees and its creeks that froze over, all the countless little things combined somehow to give the species life. They were all connected. And when she was 90 years old, a few years before she died, there were trips down the Amazon and to Africa. Frances would listen to the night and think of her husband and their 59 years together, and of her life before, and the countless moments and choices, big and small, and the days, unmarked or wholly remarkable times, remembered and lost, that combined somehow to make a life. And she would fall asleep beneath the stars.

Nate DiMeo (22:07)

This episode of the Memory palace was produced by me, Nate DiMeo in December 2024. Audio Excerpted courtesy of Random House Audio from the Memory palace by Nate DeMaio read by a full cast excerpt read by Betsy Brandt Copyright 2024 Nate DiMeo Published 2024 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. This show is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not for profit public media company and a 501C3. So if you are making your end of year donations and you want to support independent media and what I do at the Memory palace, now is the time. Go to Radiotopia FM if you want to follow me on Instagram and threads. I am there at the Memory palace podcast on Twitter which is basically collapsing right when I could have used a robust social media platform to share information about my book and various appearances. But no, I'm at the Memory palace there. I'm also the Memory palace on Facebook. I am on Bluesky now as Nate demeo and I, if all this wasn't complicated enough, have a substack at the Memory palace podcast Zod Substack. And if you ever want to shoot me an email, you can do so at one more address. That is Nate. TheMemoryPalace us. I'll talk to you soon.

Betsy Brandt (23:46)

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