Ep 68 Author/Podcaster Nancy Davis Kho

Midlife Mixtape

“It gets easier to find things to be grateful for”: The tables are turned as “A Word on Words” host and author Mary Laura Philpott interviews Midlife Mixtape Podcast host and author Nancy Davis Kho about her new book, The Thank-You Project.

• Buy Nancy’s book, The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time
• Nancy’s upcoming events and appearances
• Mary Laura Philpott’s website and her book, I Miss You When I Blink
• Episode 52 Author Mary Laura Philpott

Lyrics Born uses the same audio recording studio as me, what what? If you ever have a chance to see him perform live, DO IT – funkiest show ever.

Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 68 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on December 3, 2019. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email [e-mail] *** Nancy 00:00

There are things in my life at 50 that I picked up when I was 22 that I’m really grateful for.

00:07

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy 00:32

The presenting sponsor of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast is Goldenvoice. Goldenvoice presents LaRue in concert at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on March 23^rd, 2020. Plan ahead, folks. Here’s something I like to do when I hear a new song, do you guys do this? I squinch up my eyes and I try to hear who it reminds me of from the 80s and 90s bands that I store in my brain encyclopedia. It’s a really good anti-aging exercise for your brain because it forces you to make connections, but I don’t recommend it when you’re driving. I try not to do it then.

Anyway, of course, it’s not always possible to make a direct connection but the first time I heard the song Bulletproof by British synth pop band LaRue, I nailed it. “You Spin Me Right ‘Round” by Dead Or Alive. It’s got that same upbeat synthy vibe as Dead Or Alive. So, if you’re looking to recapture that 80s dance for energy in a new century, I encourage you to check out LaRue on March 23rd at the Regency. For more information, go to www.goldenvoice.com. And while you’re over there, make sure to sign up for their newsletter!

[MUSIC]

Nancy Davis Kho

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. And thanks so much for tuning into the show that contemplates what midlife feels like for those of us whose youth spanned the era from pet rocks to grunge rock. Thankfully, we’re not quite at rocking chairs yet.

I’m your host, Nancy and we’re going to get right into things today. But before we do, I wanted to ask you to stay tuned all the way to the end of today’s episode because there’s a bit of an announcement to share and I don’t want you to miss it.

So today is my book’s birthday. The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time is available on bookstore shelves and online everywhere as of this morning. So, I decided to turn the tables and switch seats with my friend, author and interviewer extraordinary, Mary Laura Philpott. I interviewed Mary Laura in Episode 52 about her wonderful 2019 memoir in essays that’s called I Miss You When I Blink. So if you haven’t read that one and are in search of a funny, poignant read about midlife, it makes a great holiday gift too, make sure you check out the interview and her book.

Besides being an author, Mary Laura is an Emmy Award winning co-host of A Word on Words, a literary interview show on Nashville Public Television. Even so, it kind of freaked me out to relinquish control of the interviewer slot but I’m glad I did.

I guess this is the part where I introduce myself as today’s guest which feels hella awkward.

I, Nancy Davis Kho, am a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, US Magazine, The Rumpus and The Toast. I’ve been recognized as a Voice of the Year in the Humor Category by BlogHer and I was the inaugural champion of Oakland’s Literary Death Match. I don’t have the prize belt to prove it, but I swear it happened. I cover the years between being hip and breaking one on midlifemixtape.com and on the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. Here we are. So, let’s do this. Here I go with Mary Laura Philpott.

[MUSIC]

Nancy

Mary Laura, I don’t know if I welcome you or you welcome me? How is this going to work?

Mary Laura Philpott 03:35

I am the captain now, Nancy. I’m going to start this. You get in the guest chair.

Nancy 03:40

I’m nervous about this, honestly. My palms are sweating right now.

Mary Laura 03:45

The tables have turned. Okay.

Nancy 03:47

I’m used to being in control. That’s a good feeling. Okay, you go.

Mary Laura 03:51

You’re not. I’m Mary Laura Philpott. Hello, listeners. I’m the author of the memoir and essays, I Miss You When I Blink. And today I have taken over Nancy’s podcast, Midlife Mixtape. I’ve wrestled the controls out of her hands. And I’m here in the guest seat. So here we are. Also, I will go ahead and mention if you hear exciting sounds in the background that there are home repairs happening in my house right now.

Nancy 04:14

Fantastic.

Mary Laura 04:15

That hammering it’s not someone like trying to break the wall down to get to me here.

Nancy 04:18

You’re not just whipping up a quick bookshelf while we talk?

Mary Laura 04:22

Yes, no, that’s what I’m doing, totally.

Nancy 04:23

Hold on a sec. I’m installing a kitchen counter.

Mary Laura 04:27

Exactly. So, Nancy, this is my vision for this conversation. I feel like you are going to have so many conversations coming up over the next few months where people are asking you about this book and asking you about your work on The Thank-You Project and everything else that you do. So, I want this to be sort of your practice because you know me, I know you. I’m gonna let you sort of test out some of your answers on me. How about that?

Nancy 04:51

Okay, that sounds good.

Mary Laura 04:52

I have a way that I like to start interviews with people who have just written their first book and it’s actually meant to sort of help you get your elevator pitch ready. Not that you’re pitching this book to anybody at this point, but you’re about to be asked a million times to describe your book in a nutshell. Here’s your chance to practice it. Nancy, give me the fourth-grade book report version of this book. Like, my name is Nancy, and my book is, and it’s about. Go.

Nancy 05:22

My name is Nancy. And I wrote a book called The Thank-You Project. And it’s about a year that I spent writing thank-you letters to 50 people who had helped or shaped or inspired me up until that point in my life and it turned out to be a really gratifying and persistent way to create more happiness in my life and the lives of the people who received the letters. How’s that?

Mary Laura 05:47

Oh, that’s perfect. You’ve been practicing, haven’t you? Have you been practicing?

Nancy 05:51

Well, I’ve been sniffing glue sticks is what I’ve been doing. But you know, fourth grade, if we’re being honest.

Mary Laura 05:57

That’s excellent. You’re ready. So, let’s talk about this book. The year you did this note writing project, the thank-you note writing project, was the year you turned 50, right?

Nancy 06:10

That’s right.

Mary Laura 06:11

What was it about 50? What were you feeling or needing or wanting at that moment in your life that made you turn to this gratitude exercise?

Nancy 06:22

Let me take a step back, because I think this is interesting for people at midlife who are worried about trying new things or, you know, trying something that doesn’t work out. What had happened was, I wrote what I called my Midlife Music Crisis book. This was all triggered by the time I went to a Vampire Weekend concert and the bouncer asked me if I was there to drop off my kids. And I was like, wait, what?

Mary Laura 06:48

Oh, bless.

Nancy 06:49

Yeah, well, you are from the south. Oh, bless your heart. I felt, my God, am I not supposed to go to concerts anymore? What do I do? I spent a year trying all these different kinds of music. And I wrote what I still think was a pretty funny memoir. The problem was there wasn’t a lot of character development because as one of my blessed very, very honest, early readers said to me, “What? You started off wanting to go to concerts. You’re still going to concerts.” Like, where was the conflict?

I had an agent and we sent it out to publishers, and it didn’t get picked up. And I felt sad because I had put three years into it. I was really down about it, just stuck on it.

And then finally, one day, I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. The reason my memoir didn’t sell is because I’m too happy.” Like, I didn’t really encounter a problem. It was not a midlife crisis. And that was as I was coming to the end of 2015. And I was going to be turning 50 the next year.

And I was like, you know what? I’m really lucky. I’m so fortunate. And what I’m going to do for this year, it felt very important to me to acknowledge that milestone by thinking about how other people had helped me get there. I think I was just really reflective and also trying to convert something that had been sad to me before and felt like a failure and turn it into something empowering. So that’s where the letters started.

Mary Laura 08:13

God, I love that. I mean, I feel like every writer I know has, you know, that book or many books that are in a drawer or didn’t quite get lifted off. And I mean, that can turn you bitter if you’re not careful. But I love that you looked at it and went, oh, maybe I’m just so happy. That, you know, I’m in too good of a place.

Nancy 08:35

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s not bad that, you know, you didn’t have enough crisis or conflict in your life to get a memoir out of it. That’s not a bad thing.

The other thing, by the way, is I had really spent a lot of time and honed that book. And I was like, I’m gonna be damned if nothing comes out of this in a written format. Because that was kind of the place where I crystallized this idea that Gen X is going to have a different midlife than the Boomers did and the Millennials will, that we’ve got kind of a special way of looking at it. I was like, you know what? I’m going to write one essay. I’m going to take those 75,000 words and I’m going to whittle it down to 1500 words and submit it to TueNight.com and I wrote that essay about Gen X and midlife.

And it was the response… I got a really, really positive response. And people said, nobody talks about Gen X and midlife, it would be so great to hear more stories and I’m like, oh, I know a way I can do more stories. I could have a podcast. So that was the other thing that came out of it.

Mary Laura 09:31

That’s wonderful.

Nancy 09:32

Yeah, whenever I have people on and we talk about things that felt like failure at the time that turned out to be really important steppingstones, that’s my failed midlife music crisis book.

Mary Laura 09:42

That’s so good to hear. Did any of the text from that book end up in your new book? Were there any sentences or paragraphs that you harvested?

Nancy 09:52

No, I don’t think so. I actually think it might be interesting to go back to that book and figure out something else I could do with it. But I’m not sure what that thing is.

Mary Laura 10:03

To be clear, I want to talk about this as well. So, you know, you were 50 in the year that you undertook this exercise. But the exercise of writing thank-you notes to people and indeed, this book itself, they’re not just for people at midlife. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re wondering if you should buy copies of this book for everyone you know from ages 20 to 80 for Christmas day, the answer is yes. Go do that, everybody. Can you imagine having undertaken this project at a different time in your life like when you were, say, 30?

Nancy 10:33

I can. Because I think, and I tried to say this in the book, yeah, I mean, I wrote it for my 50th. But I think there are different milestones or different bridges we come to in our lives where it is helpful to look back because I want to say a couple things.

I went into this, as you know, saying, oh, my gosh, I’m really fortunate, everything’s so great. Well, you tell the Universe everything’s great in your life and the Universe is like, oh, here’s a person who’s got some capacity for suffering right now.

Mary Laura 11:03

Right. Balance that out.

Nancy 11:04

It ended up being a very hard year. My dad died suddenly; our oldest daughter left for college, which is not a sad thing, but it was a big adjustment. And it was three weeks after my dad’s funeral and then there was a really contentious presidential election because it was 2016. I don’t know if you guys remember that.

Mary Laura 11:25

I remember.

Nancy 11:26

It was a really hard year. And I felt anxious a lot. I felt grief a lot. There were some very low moments that year.

But I could sit down and write a thank-you letter to somebody and I would immediately have what I learned, and this was… I got to totally nerd out on the science around it, but gratitude is a really effective way of resetting your nervous system. And you can get this phenomenon called “elevation”, where your chest fills with warmth and your shoulders lower. An expression of gratitude really has a helpful way of working on your anxiety levels, your nervous system. And every week when I wrote a letter, I would experience that.

And so that’s why I think it’s pretty evergreen, because 50-year-olds don’t have a monopoly on suffering. I think using gratitude as a way of coping with the anxieties and stresses of modern life is really effective. I also think it was such a helpful exercise in reminding me of how connected I am in the community in the world. And you know, all these people with whom I’ve crossed paths … some are still in my life, some aren’t. But you know, there’s always someone around and I worry so much about younger people and the way we’ve gotten so isolated with devices and how alone people feel. And this is a way to remind yourself that you’re not alone and also to strengthen the relationships that you have.

Mary Laura 12:51

Yeah, and practice connecting with people. I want to give this book to my teenagers this year at Christmas because I feel like they are at an age, you know, they’re still in formative years, they can still form habits that might stick with them. And I want them to practice, first of all, thanking people. But I want them to practice the letter writing and the connecting and the thinking about other people and how they’ve affected your lives and reaching out and forming that bond. I feel like this would be such a great book for teenagers as well.

Nancy 13:22

I was super gratified because one of my early readers has kids who are a freshman in college and a high school sophomore. And having read the book, she told her son, who at that point was about to graduate high school, to write thank-you letters to his teachers. She said, “I really thought about your book and I told him I thought it would be a good thing for him to do.” And she let me know that he came to her afterward and said, “I have changed so much in four years of high school and I could not have gotten through high school without these teachers.” He said, “I never realized how much they helped me.”

And I almost started crying because YES! That’s exactly it. And what a great thing to instill at a young age. So yes, I hope… well, your teens aren’t going to enjoy any of the 80s references in the book, but you can explain it to them.

Mary Laura 14:13

That’s fine. Do you wish you had started doing this earlier? Regret isn’t interesting thing to talk about. But do you regret not writing these letters earlier?

Nancy 14:20

That’s a good question. I don’t think I regret it because you only know what you know when you know it. But I can think of times in my life where I would have been helped by doing this earlier. There were certain periods where I could have done with more connection and more reflection and more get your head out of your ass, you’ve got a lot of great things going on around you. And that was Tuesday.

Mary Laura 14:44

And that was yesterday. I get asked a lot about my book like, could you have written it a decade ago? And I feel like the answer is always very meta because it’s like, well, first of all, I couldn’t have written it a decade ago because it’s about things that were still happening a decade ago. But also, if I could have learned the lessons I learned through the experience I was living in the past decade at an earlier age, I wouldn’t have gone through that same life trajectory. And I wouldn’t have needed a book like this. And then I wouldn’t have, you know, not found it and then written it myself. So, it’s sort of a weird rabbit hole to go down the hole, the whole “what if I…”

Nancy 15:20

Thanks for thanks for inviting me in.

Mary Laura 15:22

Yeah, if I have to be here, you have to be here. One of the things I love about this book is that it’s such a delightful blend of narrative, like you have stories in here. It’s memoiristic in some ways and also, it’s got a kind of a how-to element to it, a self-improvement element to it.

And I think there’s a whole extra dimension of benefit to be gained by actually reading this book versus just skipping to the takeaway advice and going okay, so Nancy says, I should write thank-you notes. Got it.

And I remember thinking, I wanted to put that into words when you asked me to blurb the book because I wanted people to not just grasp the concept and go, yeah, I get it. But to really read it because your voice and your storytelling, it makes me get it on a whole deeper level, the variety of ways that this exercise could change my life.

Nancy 16:14

Well, thank you.

Mary Laura 16:15

I just think it’s a lovely blend. I love when people don’t try to stick to one particular format and go, everybody does this like this so that’s what I have to do. What were your thoughts about format as you were starting this project as a book? Did you consider going like, straight up how-to and including less of the narrative stuff? Or where was your mind back when you were beginning?

Nancy 16:37

I had had a conversation with someone at a party about a year after, I think by then I was 51, and she had heard that I’d written these letters. And she sat me down at this party and said, “Okay, so how did you do it? Who did you write to? How did you decide what to write? How did you organize?” And she asked me all these questions.

I’m like, dude, it’s totally self-explanatory. But the longer we talked, I was like, well, maybe it isn’t self-explanatory. Okay. I knew going into it that I just wanted to lay it out really clearly: This is how I did it. And throughout the book and I say, “this is what I did, this is not what you have to do.”

And I worked really hard to bring in other people’s perspectives. I was able to find a few other people including past Midlife Mixtape guest Kathy Valentine, bassist for the Go-Go’s, who wrote thank-you letters to a whole bunch of people. You know, how fortuitous was that I already knew Kathy? I tried to include a lot of examples, first of all just to really take away any kind of judgment. So that people reading this won’t say, “I don’t have time to write a letter a week.” Great, you don’t have to. You write whatever works for you.

So I felt like it would be helpful for people if I at least said, though, this is what I included in the letters, this is how I organized for them, this is how, you know, I sort of prepared to write them. Because a lot of the work and actually a lot of the benefit of the gratitude letters is thinking about what’s going to go into them. Because you’re already activating all of the good parts of neuroscience for your brain, just thinking about what you might want to put in a thank-you letter to somebody. With regard to the stories, that’s kind of how it’s structured. There’s the “here’s how you do it.” And then the whole rest of the book, the bulk of the book is, “Here’s categories of people you might want to write to.” And I just hope that it will be a helpful way a way for people to say oh, she wrote to her aunt. Well, I’m not going to write to my aunt, but I have an uncle who this reminds me of. I tried to cast the net really wide beyond even who I had actually written to. I tried to think really hard about who are kinds of people that other people might want to write to? I just tried to pepper it with as much food for thought, as many jumping off points for people to think about, “What does this look like in my own life?”

Mary Laura 18:53

Well, you did. And you set a good example for that because I think if someone had just said to me, make a list of 50 people you should write thank-you notes to, I would have come up with a lot of really obvious ones, like important teachers in my life and family members. And I might have thrown in a couple of quirky ones just because I’m weird, but I don’t know that I would have thought deeper and more creatively about people.

Like you talk about writing letters to people that you’re not actually going to send these letters. But it is important to go through the thought process of being grateful for things that people taught you. Can you talk about maybe one example of someone who you might write a letter that wasn’t sent?

Nancy 19:32

Sure. Well, it’s hard to get a letter to Jane Austen because she died.

But by the time I wrote that letter… I recommend you start off with the actual people who you know, send a letter to your friends and family – start with the easy ones. That kind of gets the muscle in shape and you kind of start figuring out okay, this is what I need to put in a letter and this is the kind of thing that I want to say, but as you go through the process, and again, this comes back to research, but it gets easier and easier to find things to be grateful for.

So that to me was when the project totally opened up was when I was like, wait a minute! I don’t have to send the letters. I could write letters to people who I’m no longer in touch with. And I can write to people who are no longer alive. And I can write to concepts. By the end, I was like, I’m writing to the live music industry, I’m writing to the city of Oakland.

One of the letters that I didn’t mail, there was nobody to mail it to, was the city of Munich. I moved to Germany when I was 22. And I was so smart. I knew everything. And it was like, a fun and risky thing to do! It was totally dumb. Oh, my God. But it was the place where I learned to be a grown up, it’s the place where I became independent. And, you know, my whole goal as a teenager was to move to Europe, I really just wanted to live in a different country. And, you know, the fact that it actually happened and the fact that I grew up so much during that time, I’m really indebted to the city of Munich because it shaped me as a young adult.

And I don’t know who I’d send it to. The Burgermeister might want it, I guess? Even so, it was fun to write it and think about the time I spent there and what I took away from it. And in all these letters I talk about think about how you are now. And aside from the fact that I’m a real snob about beer and pretzels, I’m really curious about people who come here from other countries because I know what it feels like to do that and how brave it is to do that. And I keep up with, the political stuff going on there. Because it feels very much like a dear cousin that I want to keep track of. There are things in my life at 50 that I picked up when I was 22 that I’m really grateful for.

Mary Laura 22:03

You know, earlier when we were chatting, you mentioned all the science of going through gratitude. You get the benefits of all that even if you don’t send the letter, right?

Nancy 22:03

That’s exactly right. That was the cool thing to realize. We have, right up the road in Berkeley at UC Berkeley, we have the Greater Good Science Center, which studies positive psychology and the science of well-being. I got to dig into their research and interview a couple of their senior fellows. And, yeah, you don’t have to write a letter to reap the benefits of this gratitude practice. If you are simply thinking positive grateful thoughts to somebody who’s had a positive impact on your life, the phrase that researchers use is “the neurons that fire together wire together.” So in other words, you can train your brain to look for positive things by looking for positive things.

Mary Laura 22:55

That’s so cool.

Nancy 22:56

Yeah, and I tried to make that clear too in the book because everybody’s busy. And some people, maybe they don’t want to write the letters, but just going through the process of thinking about the letters can already have positive impacts on you.

Mary Laura 23:07

So just thinking about Germany and how much it meant to you was making your brain look at life in a more grateful way?

Nancy 23:14

Right. And thinking every week, okay, I’m going to write a letter this week, who’s it going to be to? Well, let me look around and figure it out. You really are kind of challenging yourself every week, in my case once a week, to look around and find the positive thing. There was one woman who I interviewed who did a gratitude project where she wrote 100 letters in 100 days.

Mary Laura 23:35

Holy smokes.

Nancy 23:36

I know. That felt like a lot to me. For her, it was perfect. And she said it was great because she reached the same panic point I did, like, “oh, God. I don’t know anybody else to write a letter to!” But then you get creative. And in her case, she had to do it a lot faster. And you think, okay, who’s somebody who positively impacted my life today. And the example she gave me was that she’s a runner. She’d broken her foot. And she had a plastic boot on her foot that was enabling her to get around and she wrote a letter to the guy who developed the plastic boot.

Mary Laura 24:06

That is awesome. It really works. I mean, training yourself to think more gratefully does work because I mean, if she was doing this for 100 days, and you were doing this for every week, you do have to get faster at thinking things up because you’ve run out of obvious examples pretty quick.

I have a writing question for you. If we can get as the Beastie Boys would say, crafty.

Nancy 24:24

Crafty. We went to the same song at the same time.

Mary Laura 24:32

Of course, we did. Midlife Mixtape. Let’s talk craft. I mean, speaking of music, you have such an ear for music. And I wonder if this is not too dorky a question, do you hear rhythm and melody in words when you were writing? Like, do you hear the sentences that you’re typing out loud?

Nancy 24:52

I never thought about it, but I absolutely do. You can tell, “I need a long sentence here. I need a short punchy sentence here,” And I read everything aloud that I write. One of the last steps in the editing process was to read the book cover to cover out loud in my office to thin air. And I think that’s exactly what I’m listening for. I don’t know about melody, rhythm for sure.

Mary Laura 25:18

I mean melody, rhythm, but melody. Like, maybe melody is the wrong word. Rhythm, I’m thinking about things like sentence length and sentence structure. When I say melody, which is maybe the wrong word, I’m thinking of things like I need a word here that has a long vowel versus a short vowel like sounds.

Nancy 25:37

Like word choice, though. Yeah, I think I do. I never thought of it that way. But I absolutely think I do. And that’s what I’m listening for when I’m editing. I mean, the shitty first draft is the shitty first draft. But after that, you get right over and kind of try to bring it all into a cohesive song, I guess. Melody. Rhythm.

Mary Laura 25:58

Speaking of editing out loud: audio book. Will there be an audio version of this book?

Nancy 26:01

Yes, Mary Laura Philpott, there will be! I was so excited about this. They agreed they wanted to do it. And they said, “Do you want to call an audition for it?” And I said, “How about if you just listen to my podcast?” Because, you know, I’m a pro at this stuff, dudes. I can do this. They were so nice. They said, yeah, you can come in and record it. And this was my favorite part.

Can I share this little story?

I worked with two great audio engineers. And I was glad I had read the book aloud before I turned it in, because I didn’t come across any errors, which was huge. I was so worried I was going to come across, you know, some major thing I’d missed in copy editing and I didn’t. But when I wrapped it up on the last day, the senior engineer said oh, you know, there’s a band setting up next door, but they were just playing acoustic so luckily, it didn’t leak in and I said a band, do you say? And he said yes. Do you know Lyrics Born? Lyrics Born is my favorite East Bay rapper. He’s fantastic. That’ll be the video include for this episode because he’s amazing. His wife performs onstage with him. He’s an Asian rapper. He’s from the East Bay. Super cool guy.

Anyway, I was like, yeah, I love Lyrics Born. And the engineer said, oh, come on, and meet him and the band. And I said, okay, so I did. And I said, “you guys, I was just playing your red vinyl Best Of hits yesterday.” I literally have it on the turntable right now because I was playing it yesterday. And they all started laughing and the drummer said, yeah, this is gonna be a good session today. And I thought, “This is a peak moment in my publishing career.”

Mary Laura 27:43

Seriously. I mean, how do you beat that?

Nancy 27:45

You cannot. I think it comes out the same day as the book. That’s what the publisher has told me. I haven’t seen anything since. But there will be an audiobook and I totally enjoyed reading. Oh, and the other thing is, there are playlists at the end of every chapter and the engineer said, go ahead and just riff on. That’s not scripted. When I’m talking about the playlist, that’s just me talking about song choice. It’s kind of an audio book extra.

Mary Laura 28:10

Bonus material. I love it.

Nancy 28:13

I hope people like it.

Mary Laura 28:14

I love it. When I was recording my audiobooks, I live in Nashville… the funny thing was the publisher was like, “Do you think there are any recording studios new in town?”

Nancy 28:23

Nashville, very quiet town.

Mary Laura 28:28

And the place where I recorded one day, during one of our breaks, I was asking the sound engineer, like who has he had in here lately? And he was saying, “We just finished recording the new album for the Head and the Heart.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s so great, this must feel just exactly the same sitting here with me reading my memoir into your ear.”

Okay, so normally, you ask your guests about their first concert experience. But I’m not going to ask you that because you’ve already talked about that on your show. You talked about that you were chatting with Martha Quinn.

Nancy 28:59

Miss Martha Quinn, the MTV interviewer extraordinaire turned the tables on me. So, if you want to hear about my first concert, go listen to episode 33.

Mary Laura 29:06

I love that you know the number of the episode.

Nancy 29:08

I looked it up right before we talked. I’m not going to lie.

Mary Laura 29:11

Do you know how many minutes comes in that episode? Can you tell me exactly?

Nancy 29:14

Listen to the whole thing including the pre-roll, people.

Mary Laura 29:17

Okay, but I have an alternative question, if I may.

Nancy 29:20

You may.

Mary Laura 29:21

On that note, kind of tying into what we were chatting about earlier, which is something that I think comes up at admin life a good bit, which is the question of regret. Is there a show you regret not going to like something you had the opportunity to see? What?

Nancy 29:38

Yes. Well, give me a minute to get my head off my desk.

Prince, two times. Not once, two times.

He was playing in San Francisco at the DNA Lounge, which is a tiny, tiny theater and my best friend Maria, who goes to a ton of shows with me, offered me a ticket and I was like, I don’t think so. So she went with her husband. Our husbands are always our second choices for concerts, by the way. It’s always me and her. And she was so close to Prince that they made eye contact and laughed together. It’s probably going to be what is on her tombstone because she and Prince had a moment. So that was concert number one that I missed of Prince’s. I have seen him perform, but I should have gone to that show.

The second one, he played in Oakland a lot right before he died. He was popping up here all the time. He was doing these shows that would get announced, you know, a day ahead. And I take a hip hop class and one morning in hip hop, the teacher said, “Hey, I’ve got an extra ticket to this Prince concert that just got announced – if you want the ticket, come over talk to me after class.” The last song of class ended, and a lady beat me over there. She ran faster than I did to get him. She got the ticket. Prince died a week later. So yeah, thanks for asking that question. There’s a reason I wear a little Prince pin on my bathrobe each morning because I try not to regret things. But those two concerts I do regret.

Mary Laura 31:07

Can I tell you something? I have two concert regrets. One of which is Billy Joel and Elton John together were touring when I was in college and everybody in my hall went to go see the show. And I didn’t have a lot of money. And I was like, yeah, I’m sure they’ll play again together soon. And I didn’t go, and I regret it. But my second one is Prince.

Nancy 31:27

Oh, you’re kidding.

Mary Laura 31:28

You know, he played that show in Atlanta right before he died. And I used to live in Atlanta. I lived in Atlanta until five years ago. And when that show was announced, I remember thinking like, “Oh, should we drive down for it? That would be fun. We could see friends.” And then that you know, just that stupid laziness took over where you start going oh, the traffic will be bad.

Nancy 31:46

I know. Come back. Tom Petty will come back. The Beastie Boys will come back. David Bowie will come back. I could go on.

Mary Laura 31:53

Yeah, I will go to my grave regretting not going to that Prince show in Atlanta. Okay, the other thing you always ask people, as you close out is what one piece of advice do you have for people younger than you or for your younger self, if you could go back and give your younger self a piece of advice?

Nancy 32:10

This is a very specific piece of advice to Nancy at age 32. I had a baby. And I had also been in an international business career. You know, when I got out of school, I went and lived in Germany. I got a second degree in international business. I was like a highflyer. I was always traveling, and I loved it. I had a baby… I will someday show you the passport picture I took of my newborn who couldn’t even hold her head up. I have my thumbs in her passport picture because I’m propping her head up, like, “Oh, I’ll just keep going. I’m a gal on the go! I’ll just circle the globe with my baby!”

Mary Laura 32:47

My daughter has one of those with my hands holding her up.

Nancy

Oh, my God. What was I the hell thinking?

So anyway, Maddy was, you know, six-months-old or something. And I was up at on vacation at Family Camp, which I write about in the book. That’s also one of the letters I wrote. And I had a job as an international product manager, and I’d taken the week off. It was all cool, but I had a new boss. And this new boss said to me, “There’s an all-hands international staff meeting in the middle of your vacation, you should come back for that.” And instead of saying, “I already took the week off, you guys will be fine without me” … I was so determined. I was so convinced how important I was in my organization. How important it was to my career that that I could not miss this, that I would leave my baby who I was nursing!

My dad drove me to Syracuse, which is the closest airport, like a two-hour drive, at four in the morning. I get on a plane fly to Washington, leave my baby who’s nursing with my family and her dad but still, left her, went to this meeting that was 100% waste of time. Nothing got accomplished. Nothing happened. My flight was delayed going home. It was awful.

And this old man at Family Camp and a dear man who, I’d known him forever…He had said to me the day before, “Oh Nancy. You think you need to go to this meeting. But you do not.” And I look back and I am so mad at myself. I mean, whatever, like we said earlier, you do what you do with the information you have at the time. But that was a dumb thing to do. And it didn’t mean anything to anybody except the boss who was like, “Well, I can make her jump. I can get her to do what I need to do.” To all you new moms out there who are not listening to a show called Midlife Mixtape, just make your priorities, follow your gut instinct. You’re right. That’s it.

Mary Laura 34:45

Especially in work context, people can do without you so much easier than you like to think they can.

Nancy 34:54

So that’s it. Just Nancy, stay at Family Camp. Don’t miss the square dance.

Mary Laura 34:58

Yeah, just keep your vacation. This has been fun taking over your podcast.

Nancy 35:02

Thank you for doing it so masterfully.

Mary Laura 35:05

It’s fun. Well, good luck with everything.

Nancy 35:09

Alright. Thanks. I feel very honored to have you grab the mic on this because you are such a great interviewer. And thank you very much for giving me the Mary Laura Philpott treatment.

Mary Laura 35:21

Happy to. Have fun.

Nancy 32:23

Alright. Talk to you later.

[MUSIC]

Okay, I mentioned at the top of this episode that there is a special announcement. And that is that this is the last Midlife Mixtape Podcast for the next little while.

I love this podcast, from deciding who to interview, to doing the actual interview, to the editing and production and even finding sponsors to cover the costs of making the show. I actually enjoy every bit of it. But I also love my sanity. And if you’re not steeped in the world of publishing, you may not know that most publishers will support a new book for about 90 days after launch and then it’s on to the next big thing. I want to make the most of the coming three months by doing lots of readings and appearances and interviews and essays. And there’s the little matter of family and my day job too.

I can’t do all that and produce a quality podcast at the same time, so I am taking a little break from this show. But I promise I will be back. I have a whole file already full of names of kick-ass mid lifers I’m planning to reach out to in 2020.

But do this for me, please. Please make sure you don’t miss an episode by hitting Subscribe wherever you’re listening right now. Stop for a second and do that because otherwise you won’t know when I come back. But if you subscribe, I’ll pop up in your device one day like a caption from MTV Pop-Up videos and maybe, it’ll be just as delightful and enlightening.

I also thought of another way you could pass the time: you could leave a rating and a review of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast where you listen to. It makes it so much easier for people to find the show. And there are 68 back episodes to catch up on so if maybe you’ve missed one, go back and listen. Of course, if you think you’re gonna miss my voice, there’s always the audio version of The Thank-You Project that Mary Laura and I talked about. I found out after we recorded the interview that my audio book is coming out on January 7th. I also found out that I’ve been mispronouncing Machu Picchu, lo these many years! It’s not “Pitch-u”. That’s what I’ve been saying. It’s “Peechoo” and I had to go back into the studio to re-record that and a couple of other flubs. The More You Know^tm.

Anyway, this isn’t goodbye. It’s just “see you soon” or I guess I could say “talk to you soon.” It’s more accurate.

And we can stay in touch. You can email me at [e-mail], or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @midlifemixtape. And if you head over to www.daviskho.com , check out the Events and Appearances page and maybe we can meet up in person!

I want to thank all of you for the support and encouragement for both the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and now for my debut book, The Thank-You Project. I may be the world’s oldest debut author, but hey, I can tell you it was worth the wait.

Alright. I’ll catch you on the flip side.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Ep 68 Author/Podcaster Nancy Davis Kho appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .