The moment that really sticks from this conversation is when Maggie Serota told us this experience was the one when she realized men just say things. They may mean those things in the moment, but they often don't stick. It's a real kick to the gut moment in every person's life to feel lied to. And when that lie is part of a big romantic gesture that ruins a song...well, that's unforgivable.

LINKS

You'll obviously want to read Maggie's interview with Johnny Marr.

And Melissa's interview with OMD.

Or Courtney on how the TV shows for the kids today are influenced by John Hughes.

TRANSCRIPT

Courtney: Hi there. Before we get started with today’s episode, we wanted to let you know that it contains language relating to sexual assault and rape. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to the National Sexual Assault Hotline. The number is 1-800-656-4673. Please, listen with care.   

Melissa: Hello, I'm Melissa Locker. 

Courtney: And I'm Courtney E. Smith. 

Melissa: And we are here to talk about Songs My Ex Ruined, on the show where we talk about songs that have been ruined by our exes. Delighted to have internet personality Maggie Serota.

Courtney:  Truly one of the best follows on Twitter, if you're still doing Twitter. 

Maggie: Aw, thank you. Just another thing in my life a rich guy came along and ruined, right? Under one of his whims, like including like publications I've worked for and… 

Courtney: Oh God, yes. Endless stories about that for all of us. 

Maggie: No, places I like to read, like all those fun little weird little websites that don't exist anymore cause they were a, they were just a budget item on a big balance sheet.

Courtney: Melissa and I met because of a website that doesn't exist anymore. 

Melissa: That is true. That is true.

Courtney:  It was the Hairpin. 

Maggie: Oh, that was one of the weirdo sites I was talking about. One of those fun little weird places.

Melissa: Yeah, and not that this is probably the venue for it, but I still really miss the Toast. And I know there was some deep reason that it disappeared, but I don't really know what the story is, and I'm always wanna know. 

Courtney: If anyone knows, write in. Find us on Twitter, let us know. Slide into those DM s. 

Maggie: If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by us. 

Courtney: Exactly, that is 100% the truth. 

Melissa:  There's the best line from Steel Magnolias. Can you tell us about a song that has been ruined for you, maybe by a rich guy?

Maggie: So the song is called “If You Were Here” by the Thompson Twins. 

Maggie: It comes at the end of Sixteen Candles. You can hear the, that kind of synth sound that's like the kind of universal sound of teenagers falling in love in the ‘80s. I had this very intense relationship when I was 18 going on 19, and it was with a guy that considered himself a romantic. Which kind of translates into, “I'm into grand gestures.” In my mind that song was just like connected to the idea of just true love. And he was like one of those guys that like fell in love very quickly, cause I think being like a girlfriend guy was his personality. That I'm kind of starting to realize. He said, I love you like right out of the gate, like two weeks in. And I was pretty resistant, but like after enough gestures I was like, “Oh, okay.” And, so this was the late ‘90s and I didn't have internet in the home at the time. So he drove up to the Princeton Record Exchange from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is a 40-minute drive, and got me the CD, the Sixteen Candles soundtrack. And then he put it on like the boombox in his room. I'm aging myself, he put it on a boombox. And then he just says, “May I have this dance?”

Courtney: Oh that is romantic though, like especially at the time.

Maggie: It was lovely, and I wasn't prepared for this rug he was gonna pull out on me a couple months later. Like once, when I felt like secure like months of this guy is saying things like, “Listen, if I'm ever stupid enough to give you up, I will do anything to win you back.”

Courtney: Oh, he was love bombing you. 

Maggie: Yeah, I got, I got love bombed. Yeah. 

Melissa:  Wow. Was this guy the same age as you? 

Maggie: Two years ahead of me. We went to the same high school, and so I was in this friend group of, I mean we were dorks. But he was the most handsome dork in the dork crew, if that makes sense. Like we were all theater dorks. And I say this with love, that's like the, that's the honest to God truth that we were all… 

Melissa: Oh, see, I feel like the theater dorks are a different type of dork than the dork I was thinking of, which are just like, non-theater dorks. People like that.

Maggie: Yeah, he was just like, he was the most handsome of the dorks. And he was like this devoted boyfriend to a girl in in my grade. And when she went away to college — she went to choir college. 

Courtney: Oh, that's pretty dorky. 

Maggie: Yeah, and so she went to choir college and met another guy named Jim that first week, and dumped him. So me having heard that like, “Oh, Jim is now single.” I did what every mature 18 year old does and I tell everyone that I've always had a crush on him. Knowing it will get back eventually, someone will eventually tell him. 

Courtney: Yep. Solid move, solid move.

Maggie: So like, yeah, eventually he just showed up at my work one night like, “Hey!” I worked at Nine West in the mall.

Courtney: Oh wow. So yeah, showing up at a lady's shoe store is a big move. 

Maggie: Yeah, exactly. So, and like he really came on so strong, where he like claimed every minute of my free time. And so one day he just goes away. He actually got back into school, so he was gonna go to school 40 minutes away. So he goes away one night. And I just don't hear from him for two days. This wasn't typical of him, and he wasn't returning my phone calls so then I felt like I was like going crazy. And then he just showed up to pick me up from work one night and just says, “I can't see you anymore.” The backstory was there was this girl that like, at the choir college that he would hang out with when he would like visit friends there. 

Melissa: Different  girl than the one who left him to in choir college?

Maggie: Different girl, not his ex. 

Melissa: Wow. How many- is this? Choir college is like a hot bed of sin, man. 

Maggie: Well, choir college is like right next to Trenton State or, I don't know what it's called now, but it was like right next to this college. So there was a lot of like socializing between the schools. So when he was visiting friends at Trenton State, he met this girl that went, this like tiny little pixie of a girl, that went to…

Courtney: Oh, that's the worst when you feel like they're either the total opposite of you, or they're all the things that are super prized in culture at that moment, and you don't feel like you are those things.

Maggie: Yeah, that was rough. Like she was just tiny, little short haired, little, like her little Natalie Imbruglia haircut and stuff. It was just…ugh.

Melissa: I don't remember what Natalie Imbruglia hair looked like. 

Maggie: Just like, you know, a nice little kicky little bob. 

Courtney: Yeah, it was sort of asexual, except that she was so adorable and cute and curvy that it was not asexual, but it was like a little pixie cut.

Maggie: No, it was incredibly sexy. 

Courtney: A little grown out pixie cut. 

Maggie: Yeah, she, so this is a girl he tried to date while we were like, after his high school girlfriend broke up with him. And then she wasn't interested, but when he started dating someone, she became interested. 

Melissa: Oh, one of those people.

Maggie: You know, the forbidden fruit. So he came back to tell me that like he was going to- it was just too much temptation being up there. And he's gonna be back in school in the semester, and all these girls are gonna want him because- he didn't say it like that, but it's like, there're gonna be all these girls up there because. Female to male ratio at this college or something stupid, like 70 to 30. And he is like, “It's best that we just avoid a disaster now.” I'm like going in through my head of all the promises he made to me of things we were gonna do that summer. Like, and so he just like busts out like, “Hey, I'm off to this new exciting relationship, bye.” Never called me again. Like, I did not exist. Like I was just like, yeah, I was just flabbergasted. Like I couldn't believe a guy could do that. And that's kind of like when I first realized, guys just say things. They'll just say things. And they probably meet it in the moment, but it doesn't, doesn't have a very long shelf life. 

Courtney: Yeah, I think this is a specific type of guy to me. Like I've also dated this guy who has big promises and little follow through. You're definitely right to call him like “the boyfriend guy.” He wants to be somebody's hero and he derives his whole sense of self-confidence from being that guy. And it doesn't matter though, you can't count on him. He will drop you like a frigging hot penny if something at all better, even a little bit better comes along.

Maggie: Yeah, like he had been with us like this other girl for like years. I figured, “Oh yeah, He's a long-term commitment guy. I'm set. Yeah, this'll be fine.” 

Courtney: And it's safe bet. 

Maggie: Yeah, no. No, I was roadkill on the way to his like journey into discovering himself or whatever. 

Courtney: How soon after this did you date someone again? Did this like stunt your romantic growth, make a big impact on you, impact your confidence? Or was it like, “Fuck this guy, if he can turn around and date someone, I could turn around and date someone.”

Maggie: I wish I just did, you know, if he could turn around, I could turn around. And I tried. I definitely threw some arrows out there, but I did just nothing really connected. I mean that's what kind of, that's what kind of made him special. Cause we had so much in common that it was like — or at least I thought we had so much in common. I think I found out later he just pretended to like things I liked.  

Melissa: That is like the worst, like when people are like, “Oh, I'm super into the Phillies.” And then in fact it turns out they're like a Red Sox fan. 

Maggie: Yeah, I mean it could have been just, he was just pretending to like things I liked to, you know, so I would like him. But in a way he did me a favor cause I feel like if we just stayed together, I never would've left South Jersey. I wouldn't have gone on to like just try to do something else with my life, I don't think. Or make that chance. f I found a relationship, that just seems like a fast track to just staying put where I grew up. and I mean, I would regret that now, if that was the case. It kind of like made me see the movie in a different light. I mean, eventually you kind of gain a more sophisticated understanding of how fucked up that movie is.

Melissa: That movie is deeply fucked up, in so many levels.

Maggie: Like Jake Ryan's like giving Farmer Ted permission to date rape his unconscious  girlfriend. 

Melissa: Yeah, and then the massive racism, plus all the date rape and you're just like, Okay. This is not a great, uh… 

Courtney:  This was actually not a great teen movie. 

Maggie: Like that disillusionment with this kind of like how quickly I can fall in love with this guy just also became my disillusionment with this movie and what this kind of movie was packaging. If that makes sense? 

Courtney: A thing that really still resonates with me with that movie though, is the idea- first of all, let's talk about the ridiculousness of Molly Ringwald being an outcast anywhere, in any school. Like for sure she didn't look like the blonde girl, but it feels like a stretch. But the Sam character, getting the hot guy in the end. And being like the younger girl, and being the outcast, and having this unrequited crush, and getting it is the thing that still makes me like that movie because it feels so good. It's that feeling of vindication, like this is possible. My dreams as a woman, or a girl, who's not seen as valuable, can still come true.  

Maggie: Yeah but it's also just like: she's the weirdo, I'm the weirdo. But I'm also not a weirdo that looks like that like. I am, I'm the weirdo you order off Wish.

Melissa: I know for me, like Pretty in Pink made so much more sense. Like Sixteen Candles, just never quite- I always loved it and I always loved the Molly Ringwald/Jake Ryan concept. Like I loved it, but relatability wise, Pretty in Pink made so much more sense. Just cause we were always poor, and we were always like definitely not hanging out with like the rich kids. And if like a rich guy had ever tried, I would've had the full on Molly Ringwald freak out. 

Courtney: Classism was alive and well in high school in the ‘80s. Like it was big time, for real. 

Maggie: I mean now that I kind of look through that dynamic though, as I'm older, I'm like, “Okay, older guy, younger girl.” The reality is it's probably like, “Oh, this is someone he can control.”

Courtney: Yeah, he has all the money and he's older and he has all the popularity. So yeah, there's a real- like there's no happy ending for their relationship. The power dynamic is off. 

Maggie: Yeah, there's like kind of a real dark side to that fantasy of you think, “Oh no, you're winning, but ah, are you winning? Is the weird girl winning?”

Courtney: She's winning when she's kissing him over that birthday cake. For that moment, she's winning. That's it.  No guarantees beyond or before, but right there.

Maggie: That glow of the candle, like, I can see it so vividly in my mind as she's perched on top of the table in her pink dress. And it's like I- that glow of the candle is so entwined with like those opening synth, like synth chords, that I almost like see them if I just hear the song.

Courtney: So did you then, after this breakup, put this song on and play it to death? Or was it like radioactive for you?

Maggie: No, what I did was, I took a big bag of stuff and I put everything that he ever gave me in it, including the soundtrack. And then I just handed it to a friend and said, “Just give it back to him when you see him. I just don't want this around.” And I just kind of wrote a note, and I put a date on the note. And then, so I gave it to my friend Larry, and it just sat in his closet for like two months. And then, so he finally gave it back to Jim and then like that was kind of the talk of our friends. “Larry, why'd you hold on to this for so long?” 

Melissa: “Larry, what are you doing?” 

Maggie: Here's a bizarre denouement. This guy is married with a kid now, and this has, I'm sure, this has nothing to do with me. This is probably just a name that his wife liked, but his daughter's name is Maggie. 

Courtney: Nope, it's creepy. I hate it.

Maggie:  I hate it.

Melissa: Yep, nope. I know. You gotta tell your wife if you dated somebody with the name they like, like you just do.

Maggie: And then treated them horribly.

Courtney: You know what? He probably doesn't, he probably doesn't think of it as he treated you horribly. Let's be honest, we are not the main character in other people's stories and he probably doesn't have the awareness to think of it that way. 

Maggie: Yeah, it's like,” Hey, at least I broke up with her before, before I went to college.” But okay, but,one the plus side, I heard that he lost his financial aid, so didn't even get to go to the school where he was gonna be like, he was gonna be fly paper for ladies. 

Courtney: Karma. 

Maggie: And I got a little angry when I heard that. It’s like, wow. So you actually just broke up with me for nothing. 

Melissa: Wait, did he break up with you because he like wanted to date this other girl, and like he didn't wanna cheat on you? 

Maggie: Yeah.

Courtney: What do you think about that, Melissa?

Melissa: No, I'm just, I, I honestly don't know. Like I feel like, cool he didn't cheat on you. But also… 

Maggie: Well, I don't know that he didn't cheat on me. So he was gone overnight and did not talk to me for two days. And that kind of went radio silent, and that kind of telegraph's guilt to me. But I don't know. He very well just, could have just felt guilty for even thinking about dating someone else.

Melissa: That seems unlikely. Can you imagine just sitting there and being like, “I'm thinking about sleeping with somebody else. The guilt is killing me.” Like, was he Catholic? Did he go like, through confession? Like he was too busy doing Hail Marys over the guilty feelings to like actually break up with you?

Maggie: At the time, like another friend, like another couple that we knew was having like a college, a freshman college type breakup where one went to one school, one went the other, and they were just having this friction. And we saw it up close. And I think that really, and actually Jim just said it really got to him like seeing that, like you could just see that being us when he went to school. And I was like, “Oh, okay.”

Melissa: I am just still really hung up on the idea of choir college being just like the den of iniquity. Like, come on.  

Maggie: I mean, to give you like a, a kind of complete picture. one time he picked me up from work when he was at a live action role playing convention.

Melissa: What? Yeah. He was a LARPer. Wow. 

Maggie: Yeah, this is a LARPer. 

Melissa: You should have mentioned this in the beginning, because now I just feel glad you escaped this and well done. 

Maggie: Now it's very clear that like I, I dodged a bullet. But then he really got into swing dancing after that. He became a guy I make, I make fun of. And I realized, no, he always was a guy that you would make fun of. 

Melissa: Yeah, one time I saw my friend at a party talking very intently with a, to a guy wearing a cape. And I was just like, “No. Like whatever's happening, absolutely not.” 

Courtney: We're pulling you out of here now. 

Melissa: Yeah, we're gonna call in the extraction team, the helicopters outside. Bring on some…like we are getting you out of here. 

Maggie: Where do you even meet a guy of wearing a cape? 

Melissa: It was just at like a house party. The guy just rolled up in a cape. It was Washington D.C. And yeah, and a guy just rolled up wearing a- he was probably a Republican, 

Courtney: So I told a story on a previous episode about my own Sixteen Candles moment.

Maggie:  Oh yeah?

Courtney: I told the story, and I won't make the listeners at home listen to it again. But the boyfriend that I very recently broke up, when we had first started dating had a moment that was like when I went to his house, one of the first times he had all of his records out. And it was like his record collection was only stuff that he'd gotten in high school, and he was pretty cool in high school based on this collection. I was like, ‘Wow, okay.”

Maggie: What were some of the ones that impressed you the most? 

Courtney: It's crazy cause it's like only the first two earliest Sonic Youth records and the first couple of Clash records. 

Maggie: So like the SST stuff. 

Courtney: Yes, like only the cool shit from everybody. R.E.M. only up to like Document, like just, you know, very cultivated early years stuff. It was very impressive, frankly, other than the Grateful Dead records that he got in college. Which is embarrassing. 

Maggie: Every punk dude listens to Grateful Dead now too, and you're just like.. It's kind of like when all, when all the millennials discovered like Fleetwood Mac, you're like, “Where, when did this happen?”

Melissa: You guys, I have a small confession. I have never heard a Grateful Dead song. 

Maggie: Ah, well you're lucky. 

Courtney: Well don't start now. 

Maggie: Yeah, there's no reason. 

Melissa: Yeah, no, I'm fine with it. I'm like, it's fine. I don't feel like problem. Cause all the people at my high school who listened to them were assholes. And so I just always associated Grateful Dead with assholes.

Courtney: You know what it is? It's not that they're assholes, it's that people that listen to the Grateful Dead get stoned a lot, and they're driven completely by their id while they're high. And it's really annoying to everybody around them.

Maggie: I went to school with a bunch of Grateful Dead and Phish fans, and I think I have a picture in my mind, uh, Melissa, of the kind of asshole you're talking about. Like kind of an upper middle class, like dipshit with like, a curved brim, baseball hat, and then like the kind of- that's kind of dirty. And then like the hair kind of coming out the bottom. Not quite a mullet, kind of overgrown.

Melissa: Exactly.

Courtney: So, this guy, I pull out the Psychedelic Furs Talk, Talk, Talk to listen to, and we sit down and make out over his record player. And it was extremely romantic, extremely a John Hughes moment. 

Maggie: I would be like, I would be like tingling. Yeah, that's just like even thinking about that, I'm like, wow.

Courtney:  Totally, like all moments it ends. So here's the part of the story, the months later, maybe even a year later, part of the story that I didn't tell in the last podcast. So, the Psychedelic Furs actually toured through town, and I got us tickets to go see them. They were playing at a really small venue and I was like, “Look, it'll be like romantic, like our thing because of this moment.” And he got us tickets to go see, what are they called? The Grateful Dead with John Mayer, like whatever it is? 

Maggie: Oh, Dead and Company or Dead and Co.

Courtney: Yes, Dead and Company. And it was like the week before the Psychedelic Furs show, and I was like, “Okay, great. I can't wait to go to this.” And it was really like a chance to meet some of his friends from college so I was cool about it. And we went and it was great. Except he caught Covid at that show. 

Maggie: Oh no.

Courtney: And so we didn't go see the Psychedelic Furs cause that dumb ass got covid. Yay. 

Melissa: You should have gone by yourself. Met a better person.

Courtney: Who wants to go to a concert that's supposed to be a romantic callback by themselves? It's depressing.

Melissa: I would totally do that, and then I would get real drunk at the bar and cry.

Melissa: So going back to John Hughes for a minute, do you guys know about the ending of Pretty in Pink?

Courtney: That it was supposed to be, she picked Duckie? 

Melissa: I actually interviewed OMD, and they were telling me about how they had a different song for the ending of that movie.

Melissa: And they were in L.A. for like one day before they headed out on their first ever U.S. tour. And John Hughes was like, “We focus grouped, everyone hates the ending of the movie where she ends up with Duckie. We need to reshoot the whole thing and we need a different song. Can you write one?” And they just went into the studio, wrote a brand new song, and there we have it. That was the end of Pretty in Pink.

Courtney: Wow, that's awesome. I love that. But also, why was John Hughes making it so hard? Like why did it have to be an original song? 

Maggie: He was a difficult guy to work with all around. 

Melissa: He also reportedly really loved music and would give iPods filled with songs to his friends, and just say, “Hey, listen to this. So soundtracks were really important to him. And the OMD song they were supposed to use at the end of the film was geared towards this Andie/Duckie ending that got killed, not an Andie/Blaine ending. Is it Blaine? Blaine ending.

Courtney: Yeah, Blaine. 

Melissa: They just needed a new song, so they wrote one in one day and then went out on their U.S. tour. 

Maggie: Like they, did they even see the new ending when they wrote it? Do you know?

Melissa: I think they did. I think, I don't, I think they knew what was gonna happen instead and so they knew it. But OMD's interesting, because as far as I remember from the interview, they actually didn't know how to write music. They would just get in there and just jam until something worked.

Maggie: Like something would come, a melody, and they would make something happen around that? 

Melissa: Yeah, they just loved playing music, but they had never really officially learned to write music or do musical notation or anything and just let to jam till something works. And then they come up with that song, which is incredible.

Courtney: That's a really lush song to just pull outta your ass. That's impressive. Like the programming of the synths on that is pretty spectacular for the level of skill that it sounds like they had.

Melissa: Yeah, they're one of my favorites, to interview too. And I saw them at Coachella a few years ago and they were fantastic. Cause they know everyone's there for the hits and they're like, “Look, we have two songs from our new album. We're going to play them. We're gonna get through this together and we'll go back to the hits at the end, okay?” And they're like, cool. And the whole audience was like, “Okay, we can deal with two new songs that we don't know.” So that was fun. 

Maggie: When you gotta treat your audience like a kindergarten class. 

Courtney: Maggie, did this like ruin synth pop across the board for you? 

Maggie: No, I love synth pop. I think it just, maybe it kind of hardened me. Like it, maybe it just made me a little more protective of the music I like. All right, I'm not gonna attach some massive symbolic meaning to this or expectation to it. Or just dangle some kind of weird like grand gesture possibility in front of a guy so they can come ruin it for me. Like I'm just gonna hold the things I like a little closer to my heart.

Courtney: I like that. 

Melissa: Do you remember the first time you heard this song after the breakup? 

Maggie: I was probably watching, like it probably came on ACM, or whatever. And I definitely remember like feeling that little bit of a gut punch. And I remembered like, I even like remembered, I think like what he smelled like. You know, like that kind of, that kind of soap smell. Like when we did that slow dance to the song, like that was kind of burned in my memory for a long time. And then, then I remember he got into swing dancing and then I'm like, okay.

Melissa:  Was this one like, everyone got into swing dancing when like Go came out, or what was that? There was this some movie that suddenly, everyone was super into…

Courtney: Cherry Poppin’ Daddies was in something. It was like ‘97. Oh, Swingers, maybe? 

Maggie: Swingers was the movie. I always think about like kind of retro trends where it's like, okay, we're gonna adopt these styles from this long ago era. And it seems like the only people that wanna do this are white gentiles. Like people, people of color and like, and like Jews are like, “You know what? I'm good on time traveling.” 

Courtney: Yeah.The ‘50s weren't so great, guys. 

Maggie: I uh, don't think I need to go anywhere. I'm gonna stay right here. Yeah, the late ‘90s were just kind of a lonely time. Like, I mean, I remember aesthetically it was just kind of a mess. Or just the idea of like how much music you could be exposed to, like how much different music? And then like as like the ‘90s went on, I would only see like five videos in MTV. And they were either like pop punk or pop singer. 

Courtney:  It was Eminem, the Spice Girls, N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, and like maybe something else, but those were the things that were on MTV in the late ‘90s.

Maggie: If you could like, were like in the early ‘90s, like, “Hey, maybe you'll see an industrial video.”

Courtney: I discovered Matthew Sweet. Randomly, “Girlfriend” was on MTV all the time in the mid-’90s. And a few years later it was like, “No way, this, that's not happening again.This whole channel's on lockdown for teens.”

Maggie: This is TRL all day, every day.  

Melissa: When else have you run into this song? 

Courtney: Yeah, do you run into this song anymore now unless you put it on? 

Maggie: I don't. I mean, now I can just put it on and enjoy it. Like, I'm kind of like liberated from the baggage it used to have cause it was so long ago. But, um, I only used to run into it like when I was watching the movie on TV. I think this is more of a deep cut that just ended up on a, on a soundtrack, but, um, it's a good deep cut.

Courtney: John Hughes loves the deep cuts. Like you can go through those soundtracks and hear that there are quite a lot. Like he'll do a well known single, but even when he put in this movie, “Please, Please, Please” by the Smiths, like that was a deep cut at the time. 

Melissa: It's still a deep cut, honestly. Like it's not even probably one of the top five songs on that album. Yeah, not that you can talk about the Smiths anymore.

Courtney: Well, Morrissey ruined the Smiths, I mean, what can we do? 

Melissa: Even Johnny Mar's awesomeness cannot really counteract that.

Maggie: And Johnny Marr is awesome. I've interviewed him. He is thoughtful and lovely and clever and kind and gentle. Like he's every- has like good politics. Like he's everything… 

Courtney: Morrisey's not? Yeah. 

Maggie: Yeah, yeah.

Melissa: But it also makes you realize like how much the Smiths are never, ever, ever getting back together.  

Maggie: Yeah, which I kind of like. I mean, I feel like they can't, considering like how horrific- I mean I think Morrisy was the first time like where I just had to take someone I loved for a long time and be like, “No, this is where the line gets drawn.”

Melissa: Like one of my brothers was obsessed with the Smiths when we were younger. And we went to go see him at this like outdoor music festival, and we suddenly realized that while we stopped listening to Morrisey, you know, after like his second album, he's actually gone on to put out a ton of albums. So, the concert was so boring because it was just all these songs that none of us knew. And we actually ended up leaving and going to get a drink cause we're like, ugh.

Maggie:  Oh yeah. Like all those like mid tempo songs? Like, “I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris”? Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Melissa: Yeah, it's, it's not worth it. 

Courtney: So, there've been a lot of things ruined for us in this podcast episode. Thompson Twins, Sixteen Candles, the Smiths. I think we can agree that just dating men is ruined, but that's not the fault of this episode. It's just where we're at in our lives. And that's it. But who's not ruined for us as Maggie. Maggie Serota is never ruined.

Maggie: Oh, give it time, baby doll. 

Courtney: Forever a delight. 

Melissa: I would like Maggie to go work on a feminist retelling of Sixteen Candles. 

Maggie: All right. 

Courtney: Reclaim the movie. 

Maggie: I'm gonna reclaim it.

Melissa: Reclaim the movie, because I swear to God, I have this conversation so often with people where it's like, everyone loves that movie except for the rape and the racism. And I'm like, I feel like we could do this, be this better. Without all of that. 

Maggie: You don't  need to make fun of someone who speaks English as a second language to make a nice teen movie. I'm adding that and also my other dream project is, um, just doing a female, a gender flipped version of the Michael Douglass film Falling Down.

Courtney: Oh, wow, that would be amazing. I would definitely watch that.

Maggie: And I feel like my inciting incident would be like just some dude not closing his legs for the female protagonist on the subway, so she can sit down. And that would just incite like her entire journey.

Melissa: Or just one guy just telling her to smile. Yeah, that would do it. Anyway, I've given you a task. I expect you to come back in one year and have it completed.

Maggie: All right, challenge accepted. 

Melissa: Thank you so much for joining us. And where can people find you on the internet? 

Maggie: Okay, so I'm @MaggieSerota on Twitter, and my Substack is called Professor Garbage. And that is maggieserota.substack.com 

Courtney: I got my first issue this week. It was good. 

Maggie: Oh, thank you. 

Courtney: I'm loving the Professor Garbage. 

Maggie: Oh, I am Professor Garbage, esquire, PhD . 

Melissa: Well, thank you Professor Garbage. We appreciate you coming and talking to us about a song that's been ruined for you by an ex.