Stories From the Middle of Nowhere

From a 13‑year‑old’s makeup‑caked attempt to buy TJ Swann, to Donny aging himself with motor oil, to Judy dodging a police raid by pretending to bus tables, this episode dives into the chaotic, unspoken rite of passage that underage drinking became in small‑town North Dakota. It’s a story about risk, improvisation, and the consequences that usually showed up in the form of our dad — the one authority figure we never managed to outrun.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection. 

At seventeen, both Judy and Donny were evicted from their homes for wildly different reasons — one for smoking, one for a hammer and a radiator — sending them into parallel journeys through mice‑infested trailers, chaotic jobs, and the strange freedom of starting adulthood with absolutely nothing. Judy becomes an apartment manager overseeing convicted felons and whackado renters, while Donny heads to Gillette, Wyoming for his first DJ gig, where the men outnumber the women 12 to 1 and the odds are stacked against him. From mice nightmares to brand‑new trailer houses, surprise firings, and Donny’s ever‑expanding list of aliases, this episode isn’t where the chaos began… it’s where the childhood chaos leveled up.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.

Judy and Donny are back with a collection of stories from a childhood where every minor incident somehow became a headline. In their family, even the most ordinary days had a way of ending up in the newspaper — whether they wanted the attention or not.

There’s the time their mom called 911 over a beehive and a reporter showed up with the police. Judy’s first day at work turned into a public spectacle after her car was smashed, her commute was broadcast on the traffic report, and she arrived two hours late on a flatbed tow truck. Donny’s smoking habit sparked a chain of disasters that followed him everywhere. And in the middle of nowhere — where people call the cops for littering — Judy’s attempt to hire painters spiraled into a stolen‑truck fiasco that no one could have predicted.

This episode is a reminder that when your family has a knack for becoming breaking news, even the simplest moments can turn into a story the whole town hears about.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.

In this combined episode, Judy and Donny revisit the week that proved Donny should never have been left in charge — and the lifetime of spectacular bad luck that followed him everywhere he went. It starts with a rear‑end collision while driving our mom, escalates when a bicyclist flips over Donny’s hood on the way to pick her up (with a TV news crew filming the whole thing), and ends with a backyard grilling disaster that singed off her eyebrows.

But that week was only the beginning. From sneaking off to hotels to hiding cigarettes, borrowing cars, skipping school, and drinking and driving, Donny was the kid who got caught every single time — usually by accident, always in unforgettable fashion. This episode sets up Part Two of the Donny saga, where the bad luck only gets bigger.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.

In this Fast Forward episode, Judy and Donny jump ahead to the years when the family’s car chaos didn’t calm down — it evolved into something stranger, darker, and somehow even funnier. Their dad asks Donny to drive a corpse across the country to save money, suddenly can’t see white cars, and relies on their mom to guide him from the passenger seat. Meanwhile, Judy racks up hit‑and‑runs and Donny hits a streak of accidents that prove adulthood didn’t make anything safer.

This chapter blends dark humor, family logic, and the kind of real‑life absurdity that only happens in the middle of nowhere.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.

Donny’s dream car, the Gran Torino, turns into a highway nightmare when it breaks down on a road trip with his high school buddies, leaving them stranded with a stranger whose offer to “hang out” feels helpful at first but, in hindsight, was a close call they were too young and too invincible to recognize. Judy rents a car at age 16 in Miami on a school trip only to abandon the car at the airport a week later. Mom’s driving lessons end with the kids in the field crying.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.

Left alone while our parents were in Winnipeg, we turned loaded guns into a pretend war game—until a real bullet blasted through the picture window. What followed was a secret we kept all winter, only uncovered when the spring thaw revealed the casing and the truth our childhood imagination never understood in the moment.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.

In Part Two of The School of Strange, North Dakota school life takes an even stranger turn. Field trips to the mental institution and the funeral home, PE teachers driving frozen buses to roller rinks, ski hills, and bowling alleys, and Donny setting off firecrackers in the bathroom reveal how the very institutions meant to protect us instead shaped our toughness, humor, and understanding of authority in ways no textbook ever could.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.

Judy and Donny revisit the family’s most unforgettable sports chapter — the era when football dreams were built on hope, hypnosis, and a whole lot of wishful thinking. Donny’s football career began with big ambition and even bigger expectations, including the time their dad hypnotized him to throw perfect passes. But despite all the effort, all the rituals, and all the belief poured into him, he still ended up as the backup quarterback behind the neighbor kid. And just when he thought he’d redeem himself at basketball camp, he was banned before he ever arrived — all because he was labeled a “foam drinker.”

Judy’s own football moment was even shorter. Her powderpuff debut lasted exactly one play before she was carried off the field on a stretcher, ending her athletic career before it ever had a chance to begin. Together, their stories reveal the hilarious and bittersweet gap between the athletes kids imagine themselves to be and the reality that unfolds when the whistle blows.

A nostalgic, sharply funny look at childhood ambition, family mythology, and the dreams that never quite matched the bodies trying to live them out.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.

Judy and Donny revisit Perkett Elementary, a North Dakota school that operated by its own logic — where recess was never cancelled, even in subzero wind chills, and frozen dodgeball turned the courtyard into a survival arena. They remember the humiliation of being wrapped in a stiff paper skirt after wet‑pants recess disasters, the secretary who ruled the office with a disciplinarian’s certainty, and the drills that weren’t for tornadoes but were never explained.

Inside and outside the building, toughness was expected, fear was normalized, and childhood unfolded under rules no one questioned. Yet amid the cold and chaos, there were rare flashes of warmth — like the day their mom showed up to cheer Donny on at a basketball game, her voice echoing louder than anyone else’s in the gym.

A sharp, nostalgic look at growing up in a place where the cold was constant, the rules were rigid, and resilience was the only real curriculum.

Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family experiences. Some details may be condensed or combined for clarity. Names and identifying details may be changed to protect privacy. All events are recounted to the best of our recollection.