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Improviser Jess Lee sits down with podcast hosts Puss and Kooch to talk about her thoughts on improv as it relates to theater, the expectations placed on women by society, and general budgeting tips for living in an expensive city.

Jess Lee on Heavy Flo with Puss and Kooch

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear everything Jess has to say, listen to her podcast episode.

The value of Jess Lee’s past selves

I lived in a suburban, idyllic place in Washington state. I grew up there for almost all of my life, except for this two-year period when we moved to a tiny village in the Cascade Mountains called Holden Village. It’s an ecumenical Lutheran retreat center. It used to be a mining village, and it was bought by the Lutheran church. It’s run by volunteers, and it’s inaccessible by road. So you take a boat 40 miles up and then a bus into the village. A hippie Lutheran community runs the village for people who come there for it to be a retreat center.

How old were you when you moved to Holden Village?

I moved there when I was 11 and lived there until I was 13. My family was part of the group of volunteers. There are a couple paid positions at the village, which were the directors and a pastor. They run things, but there are all these other supporting roles that need to be filled. So my dad, who is a family lawyer by trade, was the fire chief and head bus driver. And my mother, who was then a labor and delivery nurse and is now a NICU nurse, was the post eye and head librarian. Then there were folks who worked in housing because when folks came, they had to stay somewhere, and it had to be cleaned.

We had folks who worked in the kitchen because we all ate together. We ran on hydroelectricity, so there wasn’t enough power for everyone’s ovens to work. And there was a tiny school up there that was deemed remote but necessary. It was a three-room schoolhouse. There was the high school (seventh through twelfth grade) and the elementary school (kindergarten through sixth). There were two accredited Washington teachers who lived up there and taught the children. And I was one of those children, along with my siblings and a couple of other kids.

What are your impressions of doing that? How do you feel about it? 

We moved there because my dad was spending so much time away from the family. We’d gone there on a retreat before, for a week in the summer. And my family needed to take a sabbatical of some sort. But I ran upstairs screaming when my parents told me we were moving because I was going into seventh grade,