You Might Be

People have been sending me frog pictures recently. Well, not just me. They send them to the show, post them on our Facebook group, and tag us in posts containing frogs on Instagram. We’ve seen cartoon frogs, real frogs, and frogs with macromutations resulting in eyeballs in their mouths. Most recently, we got a picture of a nude frog, though aren’t they all? This one was standing on its hind legs, its little froggy bottom on full display.

These photos started pouring in after we did an episode on The Loveland Frog Man. After the episode aired, two things happened. First, we were informed that we incorrectly pronounced the town’s name, saying “LOVE-land” throughout the episode. Native Lovelanders apparently say “luv-l’nd.” I issued an official statement on the next episode explaining that I say LOVE-Land because (1) I’m from Texas and that’s just how I talk, and (2) saying “luv-l’nd” before “Frog Man” misses the opportunity for a really great rhyme, and that is marketing 101.

Second, we started getting these frog pics, including the one of the little nudie frog booty. Confused comments on the tushy photo indicated to me that most folks were unaware that frogs had butts. I’m sure, of course, they knew that frogs had something back there. After all, every living creature has a built-in exit route. But people seemed amused and surprised at his little cheeks all popped out at the top of his skinny legs beneath his bulbous figure.

I, on the other hand, was not surprised at all. I learned about frog butts as a child. It happened when I stumbled onto a bootleg audio cassette that belonged to my Mam-maw, my grandmother on my mom’s side. My dad’s mom, Granny, sent religious literature and admonished us for never going to church. Mam-maw slipped me swigs of her piña coladas and gave me fun stuff like this stand-up comedy cassette.

I have no clue where she got the tape. The handwriting on the label was decidedly mannish and didn’t match the curly cues of her cursive style. A widow of nearly 20 years at the time and never having dated or remarried after my grandfather’s death, it likely came from a handyman or neighbor or person she met at the grocery store.

Mam-maw never met a stranger. She made every person she met feel heard and loved immediately. This created a swath of people who considered her to be their grandma, too, even though biologically she was nothing of the sort. My selfish little heart thought love was a limited quantity item, and so I believed if she had these hangers-on, she would necessarily have to love me less. This meant I had to hate them. Mam-maw taught me the opposite was true. She had an ever-expanding heart, and no new arrivals were going to bump me out. Her capacity to love went hand-in-hand with her generosity. She was generous with everything – her affection, her attention, her ear, her limited funds, and just about any item in her house.

“It’s only stuff,” she once said to quell my protests as she was forking over her wedding band to a ne’er-do-well cousin who once came knocking.

Given her generosity, it is no surprise I ended up with her bootleg comedy tape. I confess, I can’t remember much about how I got it. Maybe I asked for it, thinking it was a music cassette like my beloved Simpsons Sing the Blues album. What I do remember is taking it home and putting it in the enormous silver stereo that sat on a wooden entertainment center in our living room. I put my head next to the speaker and pressed play.

The tape began with an announcer’s voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jeff Foxworthy.”

A crowd screamed and a twanged voice thanked them very much. The tape was Jeff Foxworthy’s 1993 album You Might Be A Redneck If… recorded live at the Majestic Theater in Dallas. Foxworthy, then in his 30s, waxed poetic about how good it was to be in Texas and how crazy Southerners talked. He hails from Georgia, but his opening bit about words like yunto, as in “We goin’ tomorrow. Yunto?” and jeetyet as in, “You hungry? Jeetyet?” absolutely killed with the Dallas crowd. It was jokes about my people told in front of a crowd of my people.

He then launched into his signature “You might be a redneck” bit before he covered the difference in single life and married life, and the roles of men and women in relationships and society. You know, all the things a girl in grade school really related to.

I wasn’t a total comedy beginner. I was raised on The Dick Van Dyke Show and Seinfeld. I understood that comedy writing was a job, a real career people really did. I understood that stand-up comedy existed. I just thought it existed only in the state of New York and only in 2-to-5-minute increments before a sitcom began. Listening to Jeff Foxworthy’s voice for the duration of a full cassette tape – both sides! – recorded in my hometown, talking like my family and my neighbors, describing what our life was like, gave me hope.

It wasn’t all about my family. He also talked about fishing and belt buckles and boots, things that were a little more country than we were. In so doing, he let me feel a comfortable distance from the butts of his jokes. Still, he wasn’t necessarily mocking any of his subjects. His bits were an exaggerated celebration, and based on the audience’s cheers, a relatable and enjoyable celebration at that.

It wasn’t unusual for me to sit and listen to a voice coming through the stereo speaker. Throughout my childhood, we spent every school day morning listening to Kidd Kraddick in the Morning, a local drive-time DJ who eventually became nationally syndicated. From Kidd, Kellie, and Big Al, I learned you can be funny with your friends behind a microphone as your job. That part I understood.

The only thing missing from the radio show was an audience. My family and I may have been laughing while eating Eggos in the comfort of our living room or in our mini-van in the drop-off line at school, but the DJs never heard us. Listening to the Foxworthy tape, my tiny ear pressed against the black fabric of the speakers, I heard the immediate whoops and hollers resulting from Foxworthy’s jokes. I heard the subtle laughs that bubbled up after a particularly clever line. I heard crowdwork.

I had no idea what it looked like inside the Majestic Theater the night he performed this set. Like the radio shows, it was just a voice emanating from a void, except with an audience behind him. I think I just imagined him performing in a black void of nothingness, unable to conceptualize what a full-blown theatrical stand-up show should look like. I kept that mental picture of him in the void inside my head for years, until I finally caught one of his specials on TV.

Soon, I sought out other stand-up shows. That’s when I first watched Lewis Black and Dave Chappelle and Adam Ferrara. It’s why I later bought and memorized Shut Up, You Fucking Baby, David Cross’s 2001 album, and why I, along with almost everyone else I knew from high school, bought Dane Cook’s 2005 album Retaliation.

I studied the differences in their voices. The rhythm of their jokes. I learned timing and setups, though I didn’t know I was learning.  I was enamored with the act of standing up with a microphone and making audiences laugh, but none of them made me feel like I could do something similar as much as Jeff Foxworthy did.

To this day, my family – namely my mom – quotes several of his jokes, including the one about frog butts. The same joke that popped into my head when I saw those little green cheeks and made me turn his comedy on. The bit actually appears on 1998’s Totally Committed, a spin-off of sorts from Foxworthy’s previous redneck-heavy material. The redneck talk is still there. It’s just phrased in a different way.

Listening back now, the material in both specials holds up. More esoteric minds than mine may consider it a bit hack, but I’d challenge them to come up with a more memorable metaphor for what childbirth looks like than “a wet Saint Bernard trying to come in through the cat door.”

I’ll concede the path of marriage jokes and “men versus women” is well trodden. It’s also still true, and relatable as hell. Though they seem like we’ve always known the phrase, when he first debuted “You might be a redneck, it was revolutionary. He built an entire career, an empire even, on these observations. They resonated so much because they were largely true. Believe me, I know. I’ve lived some of them. He also provided the shoulders on which my current favorite comic, Nate Bargatze, stands. A much more evolved form of the schtick for sure, Bargatze makes me actually cry-laugh with his specials no matter how many times I’ve watched them. But he is undoubtedly inspired by Foxworthy. I’m sure others are, too.

Whatever anyone feels about Jeff Foxworthy, I can say this much: he made me laugh back then and managed to do it again today when I revisit his material. Today’s laugh came out a little different. It wasn’t based in the wonderment I held for him back when I was a kid. It was the type of laugh rooted in nostalgic recognition. Like jokes you heard from your schoolteacher. So clever and exciting at first, then by the tenth or twentieth time they’re delivered, you see them coming and slide into them like slippers.

Listening back now, I almost have the Redneck album memorized. I can finish the lines, not because the jokes are predictable, but because I was so changed by them. Could a setup like “If you’ve ever had to haul a can of paint to the top of a water tower to defend your sister’s honor…” ever be so easily forgotten?

For me, these jokes were transformative. I will always hold a spot in my comedy heart for them. Jeff Foxworthy was one of my earliest teachers, delivering lectures through those wood paneled speakers in my parents’ living room from each side of that tape. Lifelong lessons that made me who I am - like how to speak in your own voice, how to pull comedy stories from your own life, and just exactly what a frog’s butt looks like.

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This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

I Love You, You Monster

On the Pulaski stop of the orange line, headed toward Chicago’s Midway Airport, a man stepped into my train car wearing no pants. From the waist up, he was quite dapper, wearing a beige sport coat, a matching button down, and a dark tie, neatly knotted. His hair was a bit wild, a mess of black wiry strands pointing in all directions. He had a thick dark mustache. From the waist down, however, he wore only white underwear, dark dress socks, and finely shined leather shoes. It was business on the top, no pants party on the bottom.

He stepped onto the train and began to sing, which I only knew by the movement of his mouth. I couldn’t hear him with my headphones in my ears. All I could hear was the Dallas traffic and weather from an MP3 recording of The Russ Martin Show on Dallas’s 105.3FM.

I gripped my pink iPod Mini and turned the dial up, drowning out the pantsless man even more. At the time, I think the guys on the show were blowing something up or shoving fireworks down their manager, Gavin’s, pants. Probably pulling the cork from a bottle of whiskey, letting the small squeak and glug noises play into the microphone.

Nobody on the train ever noticed the times I doubled over laughing or cried from homesickness while listening to the recordings of this show. How could they? There were more pressing things, like today, a man with no pants singing an Italian aria.

Earlier that year, at 20 years old, I had headed off to Chicago for college, ready to leave the city of Dallas in my dust. Goodbye, you trash heap, I thought as I pulled away from my hometown in a red Dodge Ram dragging a U-Haul trailer behind me. I will never, ever come back.

It only took six months, maybe a year before the nostalgia and intense homesickness set in.

I should preface this by saying I love Chicago. It’s an amazing place with wonderful people. It’s one of my all-time favorite cities. Talking about Chicago, for me, is like talking about an ex who you parted with on really good terms, but who you know, ultimately, is not right for you. But damn, you had fun while you were together. And no hard feelings, but you’re just really happy with who you’re with now. That’s the love triangle between myself, Chicago, and Dallas.

The first few months up there were a whirlwind. I loved every single thing, from the snow to the busses, to the people on the busses, to the comedy theaters, to all my new cool friends with their Midwestern accents. I loved the food and the museums and the parks and the random street performers and the cyclists who took extremely dangerous risks with their lives. I even loved the nude cyclists who rode, balls out, down Michigan Ave.

Then I noticed the winters were too cold. There was never any parking. Traffic was horrendous. I couldn’t get cream gravy ANY FUCKING WHERE. No place served Dr Pepper. Tex Mex did not exist there except at one single Uncle Julio’s off the North/Clyborn red line stop, which was only just ok. Everybody loved the Bears. Nobody gave a shit about the Cowboys. Pretty soon, it started to feel a little lonely.

Heaven on Earth and yet WHERE IS MY GD CREAM GRAVY?!

In my desperation for a little piece of home, I figured out that I could listen to Dallas radio. For a recurring donation to the Russ Martin Show Listeners Foundation each month, I got access to an archive of MP3s of previous episodes of The Russ Martin Show.

I loaded up my iPod, and when I pressed play, I was not on a crowded bus or trudging through slush, a thousand miles away from home. I was in the treehouse with Russ and Dan and the gang. I was laughing at their less-than-appropriate jokes and clinging to every single word of the traffic report. 635, 35, 75, 30. My highways. My traffic.

I listened all the time, not just on my commutes. When my boyfriend and I broke up, I began living alone, but not really. By myself in an empty apartment, I would turn the guys’ voices up on my stereo. Neighbors probably thought a fraternity had moved in, with constant sounds of men laughing, the squeak of whiskey bottle corks, explosions, and that opening guitar riff of “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC, which always finished off the show. 

Russ was a polarizing figure in Dallas radio. Sometimes, he was flat out silly. When beloved Dallas icon Big Tex was set ablaze, Russ gave him a dramatic church eulogy backed by “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes. Sometimes he used a voice changer to become “Little Russ,” a child version of himself that asked inappropriate questions under the guise of innocence. He tortured his old boss, Gavin, by sticking fireworks down Gavin’s pants, putting sheetrock up over the man’s office door, or straight up stealing his pants in well-choreographed but real-sounding bits.

As Russ said, he was taken by a fire that burned him nekkid. RIP!

On Fridays, he left airtime open for local no-kill shelter Paws in the City to adopt out homeless pets. When police officers or fire fighters were killed in the line of duty, like the 2016 mass shooting in downtown Dallas that left five officers dead, Russ wrote checks to the families via his foundation to cover funeral expenses, mortgage payments, and other immediate needs.

On the other hand, he sometimes said racist, sexist, and homophobic things. Some coworkers hated him and claimed he was a tyrant with a horrible attitude. He was arrested and pleaded no contest for domestic violence. He struggled with substance use and health problems.

And this past weekend, he died.

I’ll be totally honest. I had not listened to the show in earnest in many years. On one of the episodes after Russ’s death, Dan, a co-host who has taken over as the de facto leader, mentioned Russ’s waning health in the past few years. Russ had stopped performing every day, and the show’s time slot had been cut down from four hours to just two.

Tuning back into the treehouse this week, you can hear how the guys were shaped by Russ. At the same time, it is apparent how they have evolved beyond him. For one, Russ absolutely hated crying and showing emotions. But this week, when one caller choked up, Dan told him, “Let it flow, buddy.” The guys talked about telling their guy friends how much they loved one another. They listened as widows of fallen police officers spoke about how much the foundation’s support meant and cried along with them.

It’s hard to reconcile my love for someone who meant so much to me, who was a constant companion when I felt so desperately alone, with the flip side of his personality and his actions off the mic. When I heard he died, I was devastated, remembered all the times the show made me laugh, and began replaying my favorite bits in my head. For the people he hurt, his death probably felt like a sigh of relief, which is fair. We all have our own experiences with the people who shape us.

This week, Alfie, another member of the crew, played one of my favorite bits. It’s from a time Russ went on a rant backed by an instrumental version of “God Bless Texas” by Little Texas. I remember hearing this bit while I lived in Chicago and playing it so often I once had it memorized.

It had faded from my brain over the years, but when I heard it this week, I started screaming in my office. When my boyfriend, Paris, walked in and asked what was happening, I burst into tears.

“They’re playing it,” I said.

The rant begins, “I am Dallas!” and reads like a love poem to our city. A truncated version appears below.

“I’m the flying red horse.

I’m the majestic Dallas skyline.

I’m the Dallas Morning News. (I was the Herald.)

I’m Central Expressway. I’m Schepps Dairy.

I’m the Old Red Courthouse.

I’m Union Station.

I’m the reflecting pond in front of City of Dallas.

I’m the star that glistens on the chest of Dallas police officers.

I’m White Rock Lake.

I’m the Dallas Mavericks. I’m the Dallas Stars. I’m the Dallas Cowboys (muffled).

I’m the pissy city council. I’m the lack of city management.

I’m buffalo-sized potholes.

I’m the Dallas North Tollway. I’m Big Tex. I’m Southwest Airlines.

I’m the zoo where the gorillas run free!

I’m the West End. I’m the great Tom Landry Freeway.

I’m the freaks in Deep Ellum.

I’m SMU. I’m Love Field.

I didn’t have nothing to do with Kennedy.

I’m John Steely Dan’s cabin.

I’m the dead bodies at the bottom of the Trinity.

I’m Reunion Tower. I’m the Adolphus. I’m that lipstick building on Stemmons.

I’m John Carpenter, LBJ, Marvin D. Love. I’m RL Thornton.

I’m the strength that took us from John Steely Dan’s cabin to the shining star of the Southwest.

I’m the sights. I’m the sounds. I’m the smells. I am its essence.

I am Dallas.”

He spoke with a self-deprecating reverence for our town, and it softened my heart. When I first heard it a thousand miles from home, I thought, That’s our town! That’s my town.

From Russ I learned the magic of getting on a mic and putting on the show you want to make. I am a better comedian and podcaster because of the hours I spent in my empty apartment in Chicago listening to him. I was also a lot less lonely because of it, too.

One of the best compliments I can get is from people in faraway places, even other countries, saying they want to come visit Dallas because of the things we talk about on the show. When I get on a mic now and talk about my town, I try to do so with that same unassuming pride I learned from Russ. It’s like, look, we know parts of it suck, but, dammit, its ours and we love it anyway and we’re doing our best to be better. It’s how we feel about Dallas and how I feel about Russ.

She ain’t much, but she’s ours.

You can never replace your hometown. And a hometown may not even be the city where you were born. I’m talking about the city that made you, the one that shaped you. It’s who you are. You can play pretend, sure. Try to adopt a new one. But no matter what, your hometown will always be in you, even if you try to move away or turn it off.

The years taught me that no matter where I lived or how hard I’ve tried, I am Dallas. Russ was, too. Rest easy, boss man.

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This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.