Episode 42: Wash Your Damn Hands!

Prompts: Kitchen, Bronze, 80

Fresh off a trip to Boston, Lauren recounts her culinary and curatorial adventures (chocolate chip cookies in bed, lobster dumplings, and one surreal encounter with a butter-yellow sculpture of a woman peeing). Her topic? The extraordinary and unsettling work of contemporary artist Kiki Smith. Known for her sculptures, prints, and bronze bodies that explore everything from menstruation to myth, Smith is a feminist powerhouse whose work challenges viewers to confront death, discomfort, and the sacred messiness of being alive. Highlights include her crawling, glass-eyed Lilith, apothecary bottles labeled with fluids like “vomit” and “urine,” and a haunting series of woodcuts documenting her mother’s death.

Then Neal flips the episode’s aesthetic and emotional tone with a loving deep dive into the career of Nancy Meyers, queen of the romantic comedy, goddess of the marble kitchen island, and the only woman in Hollywood with consistent Final Cut. From Private Benjamin and The Parent Trap to Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, and It’s Complicated, Neal celebrates Meyers’ buttery, beige, beautifully structured world—and her game-changing success as a writer-director who made movies about middle-aged women... and made millions doing it.

Also: urinal etiquette, olive texture trauma, and what lullabies have to do with demons.

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