Swing Your Partner

Hey, true weirdos, thank you so much for all your support. Because of your support, we were able to win some awards with this podcast in the past year. And be sure to stick around for the conversation we have after the episode. Have you ever wondered why square dancing was such a big part of your childhood in the American public school system?

Rainy days in the school gym, learning how to promenade, and California twirl. Why square dancing, though? Why that particular skill? I spent a big chunk of my childhood in cowboy country, and I don't recollect even a single barn dance being thrown. And there we were, trained and ready to ala man left and swing, all dressed up and nowhere to do-si-do.

As a little kid, square dancing was a blast. As a middle schooler, it was an embarrassing nightmare. And as a grown-up, I'm like, wait, that's why they made us learn how to square dance? And when you find out why, I think you'll agree that the United States of America really is just one giant Bieber dream. True. Weird. Stuff.

28 states in this country have declared square dance their official state dance. In case you were thinking it was some hee-haw-flavored relic of the Deep South, nope. It's everywhere. Connecticut and Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington State, and I'm not even going to pretend to be cool. I loved square dancing as a kid, probably because someone was hollering out exactly what to do and when, which is super helpful for those of us who lack rhythm and talent, but just love getting out on the dance floor.

Listen to this mad patter from famous square dance caller Joe Casey and tell me you don't want to jump up and join in. Joe Casey's calling the shots in heaven now. He passed away in 2012, but square dancing is still going strong. In July 2025, Shreveport, Louisiana, welcomed the 74th annual National Square Dance Convention and it kicked off with something called the Parade of States.

There you go. Congratulations. New Mexico 21. New York 10. Watching the dancers filing in, most wearing costumes, all proudly carrying signs bearing the name of their state, almost all of them older folks, puts a lump in your throat because you can see, despite the gray hair and laugh lines and little old man paunches, you can see the apple-cheeked fourth graders they once were.

It's so damn wholesome, it makes your teeth hurt. The square dance is solidly American, but like so much of American culture, it's imported. The waltzes, cotillions and quadrilles of Europe, folk dances, the jigs and reels of Scotland and Ireland. Enslaved people and African-American musicians gave it its hallmark feature, calling.

That's the announcing of what steps to do next that makes a square dance a square dance. Here's a beloved icon of the art named Jerry Junk from Wayne, Nebraska, calling a dance for the ocean wavers. Even the Puritans enjoyed square dancing, which is astonishing in all the proof you need that humans must surely be wired for joyful movement.

We are literally born to dance. Even Oliver Cromwell, who, remember, wasn't enough of a Puritan to suit the Puritans of the New World, which is why they came to the New World in the first place. That dude was a lover of music. At the wedding of his daughter Frances on November 11, 1657, Cromwell introduced something that was near scandalous.

Mixed dancing. Oh, the debauchery. Once over here, the Puritans continued to dance. Mixed, mixed even. Though the Mathers, both Cotton and Increase, would have preferred to see that dangerous practice ended. Both men were influential pastors in Boston, but even their combined influence wasn't enough to kill the music.

Although being Puritans, it was hard for them to accept that pleasure for its own sake wasn't a great sin. Anything that was just a good time was certainly the work of the cloven hoofed one, Satan himself. So as a workaround, the Puritans told themselves that dancing was a way of learning good manners and what were good manners, but the outward manifestation of good morals.

Dancing in the new world was more of a community activity than something reserved for a fancy ballroom. And a lot of the credit for that goes to a guy named John Playford back in England. He wrote a book called The English Dancing Master. Eighteen editions were published. That's how popular and significant it was. Thanks to Playford, dance steps and melodies from centuries ago were preserved.

Playford's most profound contribution to the art of communal dance. He made it democratic. Gone were the lords and ladies, the rigid social hierarchies of the European aristocracy. In Playford's dances, it was just men and women dancing with each other in turns. They first called it the long ways, which eventually came to be known as country dancing.

So the long ways, picture two long lines of dancers facing each other. Any new couple could join it at any time. All they had to do was take their place at the end of the line. A person could walk in not knowing a single step. And by the time they reached the top of the line and it was their turn to dance down, they probably had it all figured out.

You have seen this so many times in movies and TV and in real life. And you've probably danced in a few long ways yourself. In the first edition of Playford's book, there were 38 long ways dances made for unlimited and 41 that specified a set number of couples. In the 18th and final edition of 918 total dances, 904 were long ways.

And that's because no matter when you were born or how cool you are, there's something inside each of us that really does long to grab a partner and swing them around. Something inside us that craves the joining and the abandon that we find on the dance floor. That feeling of connection, of pulsing sensation, of escaping our mortal heaviness into the weightless freedom of music.

Unless you're a seventh grader and enduring the most awkward period of your life filled with mortification at how stupid and ugly and awful you are, paralyzed with the sure knowledge that the instant your crush grabs your disgusting sweaty hand they will puke in horror and your life will be ruined forever. What really helped cement square dancing in this country was the U.S. declaring war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812.

The beef was over territorial expansion in North America, in case you thought the American Revolution was the last quarrel we had with England. The war was fought on land and at sea and on the dance floor too. New Englanders were mostly Team Britain and refused to dance anything but the old English styles. The anti-England crowd spit on that, insisting on dancing only the French routines.

And it was this very moment that America showed the world her potential. Forget England, forget France. We'll take both and turn it into something entirely new and entirely our own. And that was how the Square Dance Caller was born. From Foster Damon's 1952 book, The History of Square Dancing. Like all great inventions, it was simple.

The fiddler or the leader of the orchestra merely kept telling the dancers what to do. Nobody who knew the six or eight fundamental calls could go very far wrong. The fiddler thus ceased to be an accompanist. He became the creator of the dance. He could vary the figures at any moment just to keep the dancers on their toes.

He could invent new dances. He could even call at random anything that happened to pop into his head. These fancy figures, when nobody knew what was coming next, became popular as the dance in a set. The prompter could and eventually did sing the calls, weaving rude rhymes and filling out the calls with comments on the individuals present.

But most important of all, he kept square dancing alive, fluid, growing at the very time it was becoming formalized in Europe. Eventually, though, this kind of dancing fell out of favor. At first, because the fashion for women's clothing made for such heavy skirts that even a do-si-do was an ordeal. Plus, some folks got kind of snotty about the whole notion of country dancing.

Country dances became nearly obsolete in fashionable assemblies, but are still in comparative favor at provincial balls and private parties. They belong to a ruder age than ours and were relished by a merrier people than now move in the circles of fashion. Their characteristic of merry England in the olden time, of the cheerful, gay and lighthearted, but hold an inferior place in the program of a modern assembly.

In the heat and pressure of the American melting pot, the courtly old quadrilles of Europe, the formal bow and curtsy of the Puritans, the high society waltz and newer arrivals like the polka, all collided and were transformed into something new. In the cities, young people were finding their way around the rules, adding polka and waltz moves to their long ways.

That was a problem for the old guard, as such things always are. This practice became so popular that the Congress of the Episcopal Church in America debated in 1877 whether or not to ban all square dancing, hitherto the bulwark against the wicked round dances, because they now had a resistless tendency to round off into the waltz.

The Episcopalians decided, however, that it was a matter of taste and not of morals, so the ban was not passed. Oh yes, yes, the filthy, lecherous temptations of the waltz. To actually clasp a girl close in your arms and then revolve dizzyingly seemed to many people the depth of wickedness. There were such possibilities of contact.

It took Emperor Alexander of Russia, waltzing in public in 1816, to make filth that socially acceptable. That's how scandalous it was. By the end of the 19th century, square dancing was no longer so popular in the big cities, and even in Europe, people were turning away from the old folk dances in favor of more modern choreography.

And then came Dr. Luther H. Gulick. Call him Mr. Phys-Ed. Dr. Gulick's resume is one of those casual mind-blowers that leaves you thinking, oh, God, why even bother trying to do anything in life? Let's just go get nachos. Dr. Gulick was the founding superintendent of the Physical Education Department of the International YMCA Training School, and he also designed the iconic triangle logo, Spirit, Mind, and Body, that represents the YMCA.

Are you a basketball fan? It was Dr. Gulick that encouraged a young teacher and physician named James Naismith to invent the game, and that's why Gulick was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1959. Today, Gulick would probably be a famous fitness influencer, but in 1903, which is when we're about to cross his path, he was the newly appointed athletic director for the New York school system.

Dr. Gulick loved exercise, but he wanted it to be fun. Dr. Gulick thought dancing was fun, way more fun than hoisting weights. Gulick sent 100,000 boys to learning European folk dances. In a very few years, they were in the curriculum for girls as well as boys. Thanks to American enthusiasm and efficiency, the movement spread rapidly through the schools and colleges of many big cities.

The English dances arrived in 1911. Soon, May festivals and other celebrations attracted huge crowds to the playgrounds and parks where the children and a few older groups put on their show. It was prophesied, confidentially, that within a generation, these foreign dances would become a permanent part of our melting pot culture.

That didn't happen. The peasant dances pleaded for peasant costumes, particularly in the public exhibitions. And as the little boys wouldn't dress up, the bigger girls had to take their places. And the teachers turned these games into drills. It was down in the book how it had to be done. Plus, times were changing. The waltz and the two-step had new competition from the Foxtrot and the Lindy Hop.

Square dancing seemed like a point little activity from a bygone era. At least in the cities, it was still a thing in smaller communities. The end of World War I brought a new appreciation among Americans for our own culture, and square dancing benefited from that for sure. But we probably wouldn't be talking about it right now, much less learning how to do it in gym class, if not for one man.

Henry Ford, as in Ford Automotive. That Henry Ford. 4,000 persons packed the Arcadia Dance Hall last night in Detroit to see and take part in the old-time square dances, as demonstrated by Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Lovett, instructors for Henry Ford. Music was provided by the special Ford Orchestra. Henry Ford, that titan of American business who revolutionized both transportation and industry as a whole.

A car the middle class could afford, the assembly line, the five-day work week, the concept of franchising. That's all Henry Ford. There was another side to the man, though. Henry Ford was an anti-Semite, all in on conspiracy theories about how the Jewish people were undermining American society. Spoiler, Ford's bigotry wasn't limited to the Jews, of course.

But Ford had something your average racist basement dweller only dreams of. The power that comes with enormous wealth. Power that can be used to bend the world to your will. In 1920, Henry Ford decided to get into the newspaper business. He bought his hometown paper, a weekly paper called the Dearborn Independent. He promptly ordered that paper to be distributed at the roughly 10,000 Ford dealerships all around the country.

And then he used the paper to sow suspicion and distrust of the Jewish people. Ford had the Dearborn Independent republish something called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Today, we know Protocols is a hoax document. First published in Russia in 1903, this is the source of some of the nastiest, nuttiest anti-Semitic thought that festers even now on the Internet.

It's your typical global conspiracy plot. The Jews provoking violence and unrest toward the goal of world domination. In the years following World War I, many more fooled, gobbling up that hateful propaganda. But most people saw the Protocols for what it was. The most dangerous and sinister propaganda document directed against the Jewish race that has ever been issued.

It purports to reproduce secret lectures and notes, stolen by some heroic Christian, that reveal a worldwide Jewish plot to seize power in all countries and make a descendant of David the king of the universe. Okay, sidebar here, but one thing I will never understand when it comes to these zealots. The way they believe they can manipulate human events to trick the creator into following their weird scripts.

Like, when I was a kid, we learned from TV commercials that we shouldn't even try to trick Mother Nature into thinking that chiffon margarine was butter, but you're over here plotting to trick the Lord God Jehovah and whatnot. You puny talking monkeys, please be serious. Anyway. The so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, now being circulated in large numbers by secret agencies, are condemned as a forgery.

And the conspiracy of Jews to secure world domination is denounced as a malicious intention. Inspired by foreign reactionary forces for the purpose of breeding suspicion and hatred of the Jews in the United States in order to discredit free government and thus facilitate the restoration of absolutism in government. If the stakes weren't so high, we could all agree how boring these lunatics are.

How tired their arguments are. Their bigotry, their racism, their fear of their own shadows. The fact that there are whole swaths of the Internet still bubbling away in the cauldron of hate that is the Protocols, it's a harsh indictment on us. Whole generations discovering the wrought and new, thinking they've uncovered some hidden truth, when the truth is, all they've really found is a place to holler their own self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy.

But the echo that ricochets back sounds to them like the approving roar of the crowd. In 1920, Henry Ford began republishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper, every week on the front page. And the headline was always the same. The International Jew, the World's Problems. The Dearborn Independent had a neat little trick it pulled.

The paper would condemn the violence being perpetrated against Jews in Europe, while simultaneously blaming the Jews themselves for provoking this violence. They were bringing it on themselves, was the message. Why won't they just comply? So Henry Ford, rich, successful, future founder of Fordlandia, his very own city-state in the Amazon jungle, he hated the Jews, more than anything.

Though his hatred for jazz music was in tight competition for second place. Ford blamed the Jews for jazz. In 1921, in volume three of his The International Jew, Henry Ford wrote, Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons.

Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes are of Jewish origin. Meanwhile, the black artists who actually invented jazz were like, hold up there, what? This is the thing about bigotry and hatred. It makes people crazy.

So blinded by dread of their own manufactured monster that before long, they start seeing it everywhere. And when it came to jazz music, Henry Ford was out of his mind. Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps, suggestive of cave love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes and admitted to homes where the thing itself, unaided by the piano, would be stamped out in horror.

Now remember, this is going down in the 1920s. Prohibition. People were drinking illicit cocktails and speakeasies. Women were tossing their corsets, cropping their hair and hiking their hemlines. Everyone, it seemed, was listening to jazz and dancing to it. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, the Charleston and the Black Bottom, the days of swinging your partner round and round were in the rear view.

People were going to movies, listening to the radio. This was the jazz age, the dawn of the modern consumer-driven world. It seemed unlikely that people would trade that for a square dance. For Henry Ford and others like him, the jazz age represented the end of everything good and decent and fundamentally American. That's what Henry Ford said he was trying to preserve and protect.

But you know what? What he was really serving up was just the same old tired anti-Jewish propaganda. The great Jewish banking houses of the United States are foreign importations, as perhaps everyone knows. Most of them are sufficiently recent to be considered in their immigrant status, while the thought of them as aliens is stimulated by their retention of overseas connections.

It is this international quality of the Jewish banking group which largely accounts for Jewish financial power. There is a team play, intimate understandings, and while there is a margin of competition among themselves, as at golf, there is also a wiping out of that margin when it comes to a contest between Jewish and Gentile capital.

What the people of the United States needed, according to Henry Ford, was a return to traditional values. A simple, more wholesome time. A time when folks gathered to hear fiddle music, grabbed the hands of their neighbors for a little bit of frolic. Not this drunken, groping, and dark nightclubs, no. Not this urban decadence of couples jazz dancing, where flappers and heavy makeup and gangsters in cheap suits were a tawdry rebuke to the hardworking and sober men and women who were the heart and soul of America.

Country music and square dancing, said Henry Ford. That's what this country needs. When you're rich enough, you can do almost anything, including pouring your fortune into remaking the United States into your own vision of utopia. Not saying you'll succeed, but the point is, you can try. And Henry Ford did, with gusto.

In 1926, he published, Good morning. After a sleep of 25 years, old-fashioned dancing is being revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford. A catchy little title for an instruction manual for would-be square dance teachers. Any trend needs early adopters if it's going to take off. So Henry Ford cheated a little by forcing his own workers to participate in square dancing parties created just for them.

He went beyond that to funding contests for fiddlers and financing radio programs that showcased old time dancing music. That Henry Ford likes music of a classical trend, as well as the lively tunes of country fiddlers, will be proven when some of his favorite selections are broadcast from coast to coast through the NBC system.

Ford also put into motion the creation of square dancing clubs across the U.S. If fiddle and country music was the proper birthright of the white race, then square dancing was its official dance. The publicity he furnished gave a great spurt to the revival. You can accuse Henry Ford of a great many things, but refusing to drink his own Kool-Aid isn't one of them.

Henry Ford wanted you to learn how to square dance. Henry Ford himself took lessons, too, from his own personal instructor, Benjamin Lovett, whose official title appears to have been head of social activities department of the Ford Motor Company. Lovett, along with his wife, Charlotte, were soon put to work teaching the youth of Dearborn, Michigan, classic country dances like the Virginia Reel.

The Lovetts were frequently the featured entertainment at Fairlane in Florida State. These old fashioned dance parties were a coveted invitation for Detroit's elite. The Lovetts also traveled to Henry Ford's home in Richmond Hill, Georgia, to perform and teach guests there. With his employees gamely do-si-do-ing, Ford's next move was to win over America's children.

Benjamin Lovett began visiting local schools, talking about and teaching square dancing. And you know, you product of the American school system, that the administration was super delighted to have a member of the community volunteer to provide educational programming for the children. Yeah, but square dancing? Come on.

No, you come on. Do you not remember your childhood at all? What a treat it was to get a break from the routine for a special visitor, especially one that wanted you up and away from your desk and dancing around? Best day ever. When I was a third grader in Thane, Wyoming, the local taxidermist popped by with a bucket of cow eyeballs and let us hold them.

Pure magic. And the core memory, let me tell you, to have Mr. Henry Ford's personal dance instructor offer to come to your school to teach the kids. Yes, please, said every principal who was asked. So Benjamin Lovett sang and called out the steps and encouraged the kids to experience the joy of dance. Mr. Mays go forward and back, holly hoo, forward again and goes a go, holly hoo, goes a go and you're flown along, Holloman right in the grass, say no, kinky dinky, holly hoo, grand right and left, holly hoo, holly hoo.

Kinky dinky, holly hoo. Would you be lucky and the very best in class, Mr. Lovett would take you along with him to Mr. Henry Ford's magnificent home where you would dance for his glittering and often famous guests. Henry Ford put together his very own old time orchestra in 1924. William Halep on the cymbalom, that's a kind of hammered dulcimer.

Maurice Castell on the bass, Clayton Perry on the fiddle and Edwin Baxter on dulcimer. Ford himself enjoyed fiddling and would occasionally sit in. The Henry Ford Orchestra was a fixture at the Dearborn Country Club and of course, at Ford's homes and the Ford Engineering Laboratory, where an entire dance studio had been created.

With Benjamin and Charlotte Lovett on the payroll, Ford was free to send them all over the place, teaching square dancing. Michigan, of course, but also North Carolina, Alabama and New York. Classes were free and when it was possible, the Lovetts brought along the whole band. And all of this helped spark a square dancing boom in this country, beginning in the late 1940s and going straight through the 1950s.

The square dancing craze sweeping across the nation keeps on growing in New York in a big way. Ten thousand dancers turn out on Central Park's Mall to swing their partners. In spite of the heat, the big city folk have a high old time following the corner. Your corner lady, swing. Come round and round, you promenade. You promenade the town.

Same gang up the center with a different gal. Bring them back for the willy well. Pick them up and lay them down. Where you go all around the town. Separate, go round alone. Right elbow swing when you meet your own. Swing on the corner, swing around all. Swing your corner lady, swing. Your corner lady, swing. Come round and round, promenade your partner.

Go on, go round the town. All that calling gets you mighty dry, eh, Zeke? Now the second couple ready. Second couple out center, the old brown zoo. Bring those monkeys back with you. Pick them up and lay them down. Where you go all around the town. Separate, go round alone. Hey, these big city rubes are good, by heck.

Swing on the corner, swing around all. Swing your corner lady. It was looking like Henry Ford's vision of millions of American school children learning moral purity by promenading and alimanding and bowing and curtsying would take hold. But even when they call you the world's greatest businessman, it's hard to change the soul of a nation all by your lonesome.

Just when it looked like America's newly discovered enthusiasm for the square dance might fizzle, a teacher in Colorado stepped in. His name was Dr. Lloyd Shaw. Folks called him Pappy Shaw. In the 20s, I became interested in European folk dancing. And I found that the students responded very warmly to this. And after about a year, they came to me and said, we would like to have this done on Wednesday nights.

Could you open up the school and we could come and just dance? Well, I thought that was a good idea. So not only did the students come and dance, but also faculty members were coming, parents, members of the community. Pappy Shaw started his career teaching high school biology and English and eventually was named superintendent of the Cheyenne Mountain School in Colorado Springs.

It was while teaching folk dancing to his students that he realized a couple of things. First, square dancing wasn't consistently embraced all over the country. And second, the square dance callers were getting old and there was no pipeline of youngsters to take their place. So Pappy Shaw hit the road, meeting with callers from everywhere, learning their styles and transcribing and compiling their instructions for traditional square dances.

Back home in Colorado, Shaw shared what he learned with his students. The Cheyenne Mountain Dancers was born, an exhibition team of high school kids. They toured the United States for a decade, starting in the 1930s, visiting more than 50 major American cities. And here they are, with Pappy Shaw himself calling the steps.

Everybody swing his prettiest gal. And promenade, boys, promenade. First couple out with a couple on the right. Form that star with a right-hand cross. Back with the left and don't get lost. Now we'll swing your opposite with your right. And now your partner with your left and on to the next. Let's form that star with a right-hand cross.

It's back with the left and don't get lost. Now we'll swing your opposite with your right. Then in 1949, something amazing happened. The American Academy of Physical Education declared the Lloyd Shaw Folk Dance Program a noteworthy contribution to physical education. The job Dr. Luther Gulick tried to start back in 1903 with his folk dance classes in New York schools, Pappy Shaw finished with that endorsement.

And none of it was likely to have happened without that king of capitalism, Henry Ford, getting himself all worked up into a fit over his weird fixation on the Jews inventing jazz music. Here's a fun fact. Ford's anti-Semitic frothing at the mouth caught the attention of the Nazi party in Germany. Ford earned himself a mention in Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf.

The only American in those pages. Hitler was a huge Henry Ford fanboy. Did you know that? Did you know that the flatulent fiend kept a life-size portrait of Henry Ford in his office? Hitler once told a reporter for the Detroit News that Henry Ford was his inspiration. If Hitler had his way, Ford would lead America into fascism.

Who better to clamp down on all that messy freedom, wink the dolph, than a successful business man? Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler described Ford as being one of our most valuable, important and vetty fighters. Back in June 1927, Ford publicly apologized for the dozens of anti-Semitic articles that had appeared in his newspaper.

Don't give him too much credit for that, though. He did it to shut down a libel lawsuit and in hopes of making an avalanche of negative publicity go away. He didn't even write that apology himself. He handed the task over to a Jewish man, Louis Marshall, who was president of the American Jewish Committee. Marshall wrote it. Ford signed his name to it.

Listen to this section. For some time past, I have given consideration to the series of articles concerning Jews, which since 1920 have appeared in the Dearborn Independent. Some of them have been reprinted in pamphlet form under the title The International Jew. Although both publications are my property, it goes without saying that in the multitude of my activities, it has been impossible for me to devote personal attention to their management or to keep informed as to their contents.

It has therefore inevitably followed that the conduct and policy of these publications had to be delegated to men whom I placed in charge of them and upon whom I relied implicitly. Hmm. As the boss loves to remind you, there's no I in team. Look, there is an E, an A and an M, and that gets you almost all the way to the word blame.

And Henry Ford was blaming everyone but himself. As for Louis Marshall, it's unclear even now why he agreed to write this for Ford. Did he have the best intentions and saw an opportunity for a teachable moment? Or did he do Henry Ford the ultimate favor and help him dodge the legal hot seat? Power and politics and money always make for the strangest bedfellows.

Even competing agendas can somehow find their way to a backroom deal when the price is right. From the Model T to the F-150, Ford Automotive is one of the world's most iconic brands. Today, more than 100 years after the company was founded, many people don't seem to know that Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer with a genuine passion for square dancing, and I'm guessing even fewer people care.

If people like what you're selling, they'll try to find a way to be okay with whatever dark secrets you're keeping. Plus, Ford's brand of bigotry feels like a familiar story, one we've watched play out countless times. Rich guy nearing the end of his life, wanting to exert the last of his power to control the world that's leaving him behind.

That leaves all of us behind, sooner or later. Most Americans probably had no idea why we were forced to learn square dancing in school. What kid would have thought, hmm, is this gym class activity actually a covert scheme to indoctrinate me into some notion of superior white culture? No, kids don't ask those kinds of questions.

The nerds like me were just happy to dance. The cool kids prayed for someone to pull a fire alarm. And our gym teachers, they also probably had no clue why they were required to teach us how to bow to our partners and then bow to our corners. But you know, it was probably a good day for them, too. Hit the music, watch us stumbling around in the fog of giddy clumsiness and hormones.

There had to be some laughs in that. Because of a teacher in New York who enjoyed folk dancing and a teacher in Colorado who discovered a love of Western dance and a wealthy old car maker who feared his own extinction so much, he created a fantasy to live inside where the Jews invented jazz music to lure whites away from their own culture.

Like, sir, you are first. Completely wrong. But also, you're disturbed and gross. But this bizarre trifecta is the reason we all learned the square dance in the school gym. Not a bad thing at all, even if you hated every minute of it. Because you helped keep a folk art form dating back to the 15th century in this country alive.

Are you ready? Oh, come on. Are you ready? That's what I want to hear. So, right now, I officially have eight teams registration. Is that correct? Do I have another one? Nine. I need the 19th. We have nine teams. Competitions, conventions, clubs, and little kids learning to swing their partners. Can we do a square dance? Can we? Can we? Please?

Sure. Now cross your arms and circle around and do a do-si-do. Everybody, grab a partner. Here we go. Around your partner, do-si-do. Around your partner, here we go. Around your partner and you'll see how much fun square dance can be. Now bow to your partner and say hello. Bow to your partner and say hello. Around your partner, do-si-do. Around your partner, here we go.

Around your partner and you'll see how much fun square dance can be. You can thank an artist named Patty Shukla for that earworm. Very few things in this world are exactly as they seem. Look, even square dancing, that humble homespun bit of Americana, even square dancing had some secrets to keep. Which makes you wonder about another peculiar tradition in American public schools.

Another odd phys-ed classic that so many of us participated in without ever knowing why. The parachute game. Oh sure, they'll tell you that it was the brainchild of a Pennsylvania gym teacher named Betty Warren who thought that vigorously shaking a parachute and running under it would teach kids both coordination and cooperation.

That's what they say. That's what they want you to believe. But what if the parachute game was really designed to prepare elementary school kids for combat? Think about it. Little kids, small, bursting with energy, pint-sized paratroopers. You could drop a whole class behind enemy lines and be just about guaranteed they'd make a mess of something important.

Spilling juice into enemy comms. Clamming up during interrogations on the grounds that the Inquisitor had failed to say please. Responding to every accusation of being a spy with I know you are, but what am I? No way. That couldn't even be a little bit true. Could it? Next time on True Weird Stuff. We have a brand new conspiracy theory waking up in the world.

A conspiracy theory that disgraced financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein didn't die. And it sounds kind of crazy and it sounds kind of kooky. But what if Jeffrey Epstein wasn't just a regular terrible man? What if Jeffrey Epstein were an immortal undead vampire? And once upon a time, he had a different name. And he served as the seventh president of the United States of America.

Andrew Jackson, Jeffrey Epstein, vampire on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Erin Cox and Don Morgan. So Sherry, as someone who never had to square dance in school, ever, no, not once, because half of my high school experience was at a high school seminary and we weren't square dancing there.

And the other half was at a regular Catholic high school and we weren't square dancing there. I never had to deal with any of this. First of all, you had to do this in school, first of all. And second of all, how did you stumble upon the origin of this being part of a phys ed education in schools? Well, we played the parachute game in Catholic school.

But my years in public school, we did the parachute game and square dancing. And I just loved it. Oh, my God. I loved square dancing in school the way only a graceless, arithmic little white kid can love a thing. I just loved it. I used to, when I took tap dancing lessons to try to learn how to tap dance, I told my tap teacher, if you yell the steps at me like a square dance caller, I might could do it. And we tried that and it worked.

Oh, wow. I'm classic white, classic uncoordinated white people. So I never knew why we did square dancing in school. And honestly, I thought it was a Wyoming thing. It wasn't until I became a grown up and, you know, had met people from all over the country who had also done square dancing in school. Square dancing in Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Arizona, California, Montana, Vermont, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas.

Like what I thought was some quaint like Wild West thing turned out to be everywhere. So I did wonder about it. But but you go, I guess, you know, that's some some teacher thought it was a good idea, which was true. We have a couple of teachers that are really heavily responsible for dancing in gym class. And then one day I, you know, I knew about Henry Ford.

Like if you read American history at all, you know, you come upon Henry Ford. And so one day I'm doing something else. And Henry Ford crosses my radar in the middle of researching something else. And he had some quote about the vile jazz music invented by the Jews. And it stopped me in my tracks and I went, you know, you're racist when you are so determined to not give a black person credit for anything that you blame another ethnic group that you're oppressing for this this thing.

Like we you he could not give blacks their great art and culture. He had to strip. He had to make it bad. Strip them of that accomplishment and and blame somebody else for what is one of the great American art forms, which is jazz music. It's one of our original. Absolutely. As you know, you saw this go over and over again.

It happened when rock and roll happened. You know, people said the same thing. It happened when hip hop music started. Rap music started in the 1970s. Once again, you saw this kind of backlash to it. That's all based in fear. It's really tiring. Y'all, I just want to say that among the many, many, many, many things you can say about this kind of bigotry, it's so boring.

It's so. For bigots and racists, especially when they're frothing at me online, if they understood like how boring they are to me, you're just so bored and you're revealing yourself to be so very small and frightened in those moments. And I could not believe I could not believe that Henry Ford worked to contort it himself.

Because that's the other thing about bigotry and racism. It requires that you contort yourself in all sorts of uncomfortable ways in order to uphold these really like distorted beliefs. So that Ford had managed to work himself up into a froth over jazz music and that he really thought that square dancing would set the country to right.

So one of the things that's interesting about this moment, Henry Ford in the early 20th century, the early 1900s, compared to the moment we're in right now, the fear is the same. I'm a white man and I'm worried about being replaced. I'm a white man. I'm worried about not holding all the reins of power. And part of the reason for that fear of replacement and displacement is the certain knowledge that the people that you have harmed and oppressed may now do those same things to you.

Is that not at the root of it, Max? I would say. Is that not just at the root? It is. So it's there's nothing new here. It's tired and boring. The accusations that you hear Henry Ford make toward the Jewish people and black people in 1926 say all you have to do is change the slang a little bit and it sounds very contemporary.

So I was shocked. I was shocked. I was shocked that Henry Ford thought that he could force white culture through square dancing. So let me be clear. I love square dancing. I don't square dance. I mean, my husband would. The only way he'd square dance is a good boy. Right. I loved it as a kid. I watched so many square dance videos working on this episode and watching these old people, because a lot of the people doing this are old now.

You know, I mean, they just are. There are kids coming up. They're doing the square dancing clubs and conventions. They're doing everything they can to keep it alive. But a lot of the dancers who compete at these events are older people. They look like your grandparents, maybe your parents. Their joy, their absolute unabashed joy in swinging their partners.

I love it. Now, the Henry Ford part of it. I'm going to give the old racist bastard this. I'm going to give credit where it's due. He didn't just declare. And so you shall square dance. The investment that he made in the art form of square dancing. He the jobs that he created. And he like I said, he drank his own Kool-Aid.

Henry Ford played the fiddle. Henry Ford square dance. Henry Ford's employees, whether they wanted to or not, were square dancing at Ford Automotive. He didn't just say it. He really fully lived it. And even though his motivations were absolutely foul and insane, you have to give some credit for the fact that he got out there and did it, too.

I'll give him that. Well, what I was fascinated by with this story was that its roots were much older than I thought they were. If you were to have told me, when did when did square dancing start? I would have gone, oh, probably in the eighteen hundreds. That seemed to me to be, you know, and that it was from this country.

I didn't realize that it had its roots way back into Europe. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised because bluegrass music certainly has its roots from Celtic music. So I shouldn't really be surprised by that. But I had a beautiful. Let me say let me say this before I forget, because what's really beautiful about square dancing.

You know, I grew up being told a story about America and being fed a vision of America that involved the melting pot. That give us your huddle, you're tired, you're poor, you're huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That's the and that's the American story you grew up with. We grew up being told that this was a great melting pot and that our strength was in our diversity.

We're in a different kind of moment right now and mostly despair. Max, who has to listen to it all the time from me, will stop right there. But that is the version of America we grew up with. And square dancing, the art of square dancing is uniquely American, but its roots, like so many American inventions, come from everywhere.

Folk dances in Eastern Europe, folk dances on the African continent, the minuets and waltzes and the formalized social dances of the nobility and the aristocracy. All of those things came together. Call and response, like when enslaved people were working in the fields, they would have these call and response songs and that inspired square dance calling.

And a guy we used to work with, he once said something that was really funny, but also deeply true. He was like, you know, there's a connection between square dance and rap. Square dancing didn't inspire rap. Both rap and square dancing come from those old folk call and response traditions. So even though, Max, square dancing is old, old, like centuries old, the version of it that we're talking about did kind of lock in here.

So you're not wrong about that at all. Well, I've only square danced once, Sherry. It was something that I saw on television and people dressed up and it just looked, it looked wholly ridiculous to me. So I'm dating somebody. This is many years ago and I'm dating somebody. And we go to the mountains and she says that we go to this place and they're having a square dance that night.

And I am like, really? No, I really don't want to do this. But, you know, sometimes you've got to be a good sport, especially when you're dating and especially early on. So I went, OK, fine, we'll go and do it. And I had a blast. I had a great time. So I will tell you that if you've never been square dancing, it can be a lot of fun, mostly because they are telling you what to do and it's not about doing it well.

It's about just letting yourself go and, you know, just having fun with it. Yeah, you're in a big, square dancing feeds a couple of really basic human needs. It's the need for community, like we're wired, we're very social creatures, right? So you're out on the dance floor and it's always informal. Square dancing is not a black tie event, right?

So you're in jeans and boots or sneakers or whatever. Everything is very informal. You're in this big, joyful community of people who are laughing. And it's not about expertise, unless I guess you're at some competition. It's just about getting out there and doing it. And even the clumsiest white person, and my hand is in the air.

I do. Yeah, we should have named our company Clumsy White People. But even the clumsiest white people, if you say to me, bow to your partner, I understand what you're asking my body to do, and I think I can barely manage it, right? It's fun. And the reason that these long ways and group and social dances have been with humanity for eons is because human beings, even if you say you hate dancing or parties or whatever, your body starts moving to the music.

Your body wants to move. You want to grab people's hands and swing them around. It feeds that basic need. It's so fun, as you learned. As I did learn, yes. Is it possible, Sherry, that even if his motives were not good, that he perhaps unintentionally did something really positive because of this? Oh, a gazillion percent.

When you have a situation like this where his motives were just... It's not just that his motives were bad. They were nuts. His motives were nuts. But very often, all you need to do is lift one level up on a really racist or bigoted person's agenda, and it looks insane. Because it is insane. Folks, it's insane. You're all made.

We're all humans. We all are meat-covered skeletons. Any variety of person, innately superior to any other variety, all you racists sound crazy to me. But you can say, yeah, he was a whack job. But this is a good thing. In the same way that we say, oh, my God, Henry Ford loved the Nazis, and yet look at the innovations he put into the American manufacturing space.

He did. Right? There were a couple of things that were interesting about this. First of all, I didn't know his home was called Fair Lane, and what's interesting about that is there was a car called the Ford Fair Lane, so that's where it got its name. I didn't know that until today. So that was kind of interesting. And there was one other thing, the idea of having your own orchestra.

That's kind of an interesting thing, and it seems strange today, but I'm guessing that there were a couple of things true. First of all, they had enough money they could afford to do such a thing, but it was a different time, and so you had to provide your own entertainment in a lot of cases. So I can sort of understand how all that happened.

So they were around for, best I could tell, about 25 years, somewhere in that vicinity. And the thing about Henry Ford and the dance classes and the music and all of it, there was no charge. If Henry Ford's orchestra and Benjamin and Charlotte Lovett, if they came to your town and they traveled, they went on the road, if they came to your town, they would have an open square dance event for the public.

And they did this on college campuses, and they did this in town auditoriums and stuff. And there was never any charge, because Henry Ford believed that if he could get American schoolchildren on board with square dancing in a generation or two, there would be no challenge to monolithic white culture. So the motivation is completely Batman villain level crazy, but I read so many little newspaper stories, some of them only a paragraph long, Miss so and so of such and such college will lead the Ford orchestra square dance party on Tuesday night.

All are welcome. There is no charge to attend. And, you know, you think about, like, this is back in the 1940s, right? Into the 1950s. You know, there wasn't a lot to do. Well, television didn't television didn't really start until 1948 and was really not a big thing until the 1950s. So you're right. I mean, you had to, which is why I was saying the thing about the orchestra.

You kind of had to create your own entertainment, because most of the times they determine whether songs were were hits by how much sheet music they would sell or something, not how many records they would sell or something. It wasn't until later when they started to make the recordings that the recordings started to outsell the sheet music, because you had somebody in the family who could play the piano and they were the entertainment for a party.

Think about what you just said, like the ability to record events is a very recent human invention, meaning not just writing them down on a parchment or in a book, but the ability to make a movie or a video and photography. Even these are pretty new inventions for humans. So the fact that traditional songs and melodies and dances were preserved over time, they were preserved by people learning them and then teaching that.

You know, sheet music, Playford's book of dances, where he did diagrams and explained all the different steps. That's how that stuff got preserved. Now, of course, you know, if you want to learn how to do the wobble, you just pull up a YouTube video tutorial. But, you know, once upon a time, the steps of the wobble were transmitted person to person in the village.

So a lot. And if you for people that are experts in the history of dance and that's its own whole fascinating thing. But you can look at contemporary dances, including contemporary square dances, and they can point to that's a remnant of the minuet, which was danced in George Washington's day. Right. Right. And that's an example of the such and so, which is a folk dance from Eastern Europe that's all but obsolete now because we like humans are like magpies.

You know, we grab little bright scraps and we knit them together and keep them. So the unfortunate part of the story of square dancing in America is how nuts and twisted Henry Ford's thinking was. But he did do. And this is where, you know, this is where you're weighing things. Right. He made a pretty big contribution to.

American folk music and dance and country music. And fiddle and a little bit of bluegrass, even like by by putting he bought radio time and put these artists on the national airwaves and exposed people to music that they maybe never heard anywhere else. What's interesting about this, and I don't want to get too far away from this story, but what's interesting about what you just said, I I read an interview with a rhythm and blues singer who was from like late 40s, early 50s.

And he said, we listen to country music stations because we could get them. And we didn't think that's music is different. We just went, that's good music. And we indoctrinated certain things from that into our music as well. And I think the point is you can't stop people from being. You can try to separate people, but people are going to meld together one way or the other.

And their cultures are going to meld together in that way. And it's going to create things because the melding of that culture ended up creating rock and roll. I mean, so whatever Henry Ford was was trying to do. You know, I agree with you. He it ended up being a positive because it did preserve that culture. And and for good with good reason, like when you watch when you watch a really skillful square dance performance where these are people that are I mean, they are they are doing the steps that have been carried through time. Right.

They're incorporating all that when you see that it's it's it's its own really gorgeous folk art form. And the thing with Henry Ford and square dancing and where it's relevant for us in this moment is the simple truth that we we have to relearn every few generations. And that is that art is not something you can dictate or legislate.

Art is almost always by its nature a radical and revolutionary act, because what are artists expressing? But the things, the feelings, the ideas, the stories that don't comfortably fit anywhere else. Look at the blues. Look at the history of country music. This was the music of people that were oppressed. They were working in coal mines.

They were working in fields. They were poor. And they were they were using if you ever want to have your mind blown. Watch the Ken Burns documentary. Oh, that's that is amazing. They were bringing in, yeah, the folk traditions of the places they'd emigrated to the to the United States from. And and so, again, the melting pot. Right.

So what we see now when there's like this huge uproar in this country over, you know, the Super Bowl halftime show, like, please, folks, we have so many real problems. Let's don't manufacture drama. But what you see, what you saw on the field at the halftime of the 60s Super Bowl, you saw what Max was just describing, where, you know, you take all these pieces and they they become an amalgam and they blend and they become something new.

That is an expression of the culture in the moment. There's a little bit here and a little bit there. And you can see the roots like in country music today. You can see folk music and you can see that you can see blues in there and you can see some of this. You can see hymns like religious songs in there. And so square dancing is truly American in that way.

It's this crazy patchwork quilt of all these different influences. And the fact that the granddaddy of this agenda is a nutty old anti-Semite doesn't change, doesn't doesn't taint square dancing or it shouldn't anyway. No, no, absolutely not, because there's nothing inherently anti-Semitic about square dancing. There's nothing there. I mean, when we try to politicize art, which is what Henry Ford was doing by declaring jazz music to be you, you, you played Henry Ford in this episode, mush and slush and vile and filthy.

What is that but politicizing an art form, trying to make a value statement on it and trying to say that the people who create and present that art to you are less. Well, the word Henry would have used was subhuman, but less than. But I think great artists recognize great art, whether it's something that they're creating or what somebody else is creating because of the way because of the part, the part of you that it speaks to.

I just. I mean, there's a lot of things I'm never going to understand, and I've had to accept that, and one of them is people who are afraid of music or or afraid of the unfamiliar. Right. Everything everything starts out as unfamiliar. You know, everything begins. Everyone starts out as a stranger. Every book is unfamiliar. Every new piece of music is unfamiliar.

And to be to be so fearful and guarded about that. And also the other thing that blows my mind, Max, is. How is it that you don't know by now that nobody ever wins that fight? No, but it's so much fear of people, people, if it's if it's not something that is in their world, they have. We all we all have these blinders on. We have these cultural blinders because we're only watching what we what we're watching while a bunch of other stuff is happening out to the side that we're not aware of because because of the blinders that we have on.

And I think that people get afraid when when anything seems to threaten them with any with anything, whether it's cultural, athletic, whatever it is. Yeah, the new, the different and you do feel I was talking to a mutual friend of ours a couple of days ago, somebody we used to work with, and he said we were talking about the Grammys and Super Bowl and all that.

And he said to me, he goes, I, I just I don't know what anyone's talking about. And I just don't have the energy to learn. Right, because it's I think it's more it's healthier to go. I don't know what this is. And I don't have the energy to learn about it. Namaste. I don't know what this is. And you're not allowed to listen to it. Or watch it or experience it or taste it or whatever.

Let people leave people alone. Stop trying to be the arbiter of everybody else's taste, especially when your motives are what Ford's were mean. It'd be if Henry Ford had just said, Look, I'm a I'm a white guy. And I am baffled by this, this and this. And I think that somebody needs to be the champion of white people, culture, whatever that is.

And so I have decided that I shall become the champion of square dancing. The same things would have happened, probably in the same ways, minus the hideous bigotry. Yeah. But that isn't ever really how it goes, is it? No, it's never. I want to promote this. It's always I want to promote this while annihilating that. And maybe that's a people.

And and you and somebody might say, Yeah, but Henry Ford was an anti Semite. But he wasn't. He wasn't in favor exterminating Jews. But it that's how it starts. You know, that, that, that, that, when you when you write something out and put it in a newspaper that's like that, it's inflammatory. And that's how that school of thought starts.

I have to remind you that Henry Ford is probably the reason that the filthy propaganda that is the protocols of the elders of Zion is still enjoying a robust life on the internet. And in some of the more unsavory corners of the internet. Henry, Henry Ford turned the Dearborn newspaper that he bought into a screaming megaphone of anti Semitism at a time when that's where the that was that's where the that that was what was happening in Europe in the days and months leading up to World War Two and the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany.

Henry Ford was part of that part of that messaging. And so you know, lol the square dancing how goofy and silly what a sweet old man. He was also a very loud voice and an amplifier of the kinds of dangerous propaganda that led to millions of people being murdered. Yes. We turned away boats that had Jewish refugees on them.

We knew that there was a general knowledge about what was going on, just not the extent of it. But there was a general knowledge about what was going on. And people kind of acted like, I'm going to put my hands over my ears and close my eyes and act like it's not happening. People said things like, I don't pay attention to politics. And why can't we all just get along? And I'm leaving it in God's hands. These are not what's happening in the United States today is not new. And this is what's really like uncomfortable for, you know, nerdy history, people, because we're all like, Oh, my God, do you not see it, we're doing the exact same thing.

And the people, the first round of people that did it, some of them were still alive. Like, that's how recently we just did this. I can't believe we're doing this again. So I'm not giving Henry Ford any kind of a pass. I think that his voice and his amplification of other such voices were a part of the darkness that descended over this world. I think he has that blood on his hands, too. But I don't think square dancing should be punished for that. I think square dancing is an innocent bystander.

I think you're right. In that. And, and that's, and it is dorky, and it is silly. And I know you were so embarrassed that night as a grown man, that you had to square dance. But I love that you admit that you had a really good time. I did have a good time doing it. Tell me, tell me, in your own words, what that experience was like for you. And what made it a good time?

I think what made it a good time is the idea that we, we have, we don't let ourselves go enough. Do you understand what I mean? We're taught as a child, you must be quiet, you must be this, you must be this, you must be that. And then and you're in this little box all the time. And if you get out of it, you become kind of self conscious of if I get out of this little box, people are going to look at me and they're going to laugh and they're going to make fun.

And the fact of the matter was, everybody who was there at that dance tonight, that night was having a good time. And there wasn't a single person who was doing it that wasn't smiling. And I think that's, I don't always know what's best for me. You know, I really don't. And I think when I try things, and I let go a little bit, then I realized, oh, there's, there was great fun in doing this. And it really was. And it was a release.

So if that explains why that was such a good time for me. It's time for the cupid shuffle. We've got out there. I'm a terrible dancer. But if I see like at my niece's wedding, her father in law, he loves to dance, nobody would dance with him. He's out there. Jaime is out there on the dance floor by himself. And he's a good dancer. And I stood up and say, excuse me, I have to go dance with Danny's dad, because he's all by himself. And nobody should dance by themselves. It is our job to get up on the dance floor. And even if you're terrible at it, look how much fun you had.

Nope, nobody, nobody makes fun of you. If they if they are, they're not having a good time. They don't have a smile on their face while they're doing it. That's for sure. I was at my my bonus son's wedding last summer. I was like, ladies, up you go. Your brother, we need to be on the dance floor for your brother. Because there's nothing worse than a wedding where people won't dance. Stop it. Stop it. This isn't the Oscars. You're not being judged. Just get up there and do it. And if square dancing is like, you know, the only dance you can manage, because you need somebody yelling the instructions.

Well, then isn't it wonderful such a thing exists? Amen. Amen. That's party. That's partly why I can do the Cupid Shuffle because he's telling you left y'all. One one time. If you tell me what to do, I can get out on the dance floor and do it. So I'm a fan. And didn't you love the connection between school square dancing and basketball?

Yeah. Yeah. Wasn't that like a neat little fascinating little thing? Yeah. And one last thought on that before we talk about what's coming up next week, the two the two school teachers that were really instrumental in dancing in school because Henry Ford put square dancing on the map nationally and on the national radio.

And he he kind of helped inspire another generation of fiddlers and dulcimer players. But without those two teachers who were in schools, in classrooms with kids teaching hundreds of thousands of these kids to dance, it may not have made the leap into the school gym. Right. Right. And so the first teacher in 1903 who was like, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

I'm going to teach the boys European folk dancing. So I want to point out to you that in 1903, that man did not think there was anything unmasculine about that. No. But back in the day, men danced with men. That was that was just a thing. There was no there was no. Oh, what does that mean? There was straight men dance with straight men.

Do you see what we've lost because of homophobia and the patriarchy? Do you see how like it hurts people? This idea, these these rigid ideas of masculine and feminine. What is masculine? How hurtful that is, because in 1903, that school teacher who was the superintendent of Phys Ed from New York. I mean, this was a no slouch. Okay. He was like, these boys need to learn how to do folk dances.

And the only reason it didn't go bigger was the boys didn't want to wear the costumes. They were willing to do the dance. They didn't want to wear the costumes. So that's the there he goes. And then go to Dr. Golic, who inspired James Naismith to invent basketball as it is currently played. Right. It was the same thing. He was an athlete. He was a teacher. He was a respected sportsman. And he was like, we need to be dancing. These kids need to dance.

And there wasn't even like the whisper of, oh, well, that's not how men. That's a more recent being a middle school and even high school young man is a very difficult thing. It really is. I look back on that part of my life and I go, I would never want to go through that again. I think it probably like if I could go back to high school, knowing what I know now, I still would fail geometry, but I'd be successful in other areas. But I think it is hard to be a boy. It is in those ages. And I'll tell you why. And I know, don't you even think about rolling your eyes?

It's hard to be a young boy now and a young dude, because the rigid expectations imposed upon you by toxic patriarchy. We discourage your sensitivity. We discourage your creativity. We we we ask you to absorb and endure pain without complaint. We we are not gentle with your emotions. We're not gentle with your heart as a culture. It's pretty rough. And if you deviate from the standard and it's a very narrow tightrope that a dude has to walk, if you deviate from that in any way, what are you, a homo? What are you, queer? What are you gay?

Well, and for a minute there, for a minute, it seemed like we were making such progress in freeing ourselves from some of this because they're shackles and they're it's a form of it's a form of violence, actually, on a human soul. We thought we were moving away from it. And I believe that we ultimately will and are. But we backslid into a very, very difficult and dangerous moment. Thoughts.

Well, I think the whole thing about men and emotions, its weakness, you know, if you if you admit that you're having emotions about anything, if you show those emotions in any kind of public display, that that's a sign of weakness and you're not allowed to be weak. And so I think that there is this idea of just clench your jaw and get through it. But the fact of the matter is that we do know we at least we know enough now to know about emotions that you're the only way through it is through it and you're going to go through it. And one way or another, no matter how crazy it comes out, it's going to come out. It may not come out in a good way, you know, but it's common, but it's common.

It's I've had such an interesting life because most of my life has been spent with men. Like I'm starved for a girl around here. Right. Think about it. I spend all of my days. Sherry, I can only do but so much. I just want you and I appreciate you're so good, though. I'm willing, you know, I'm willing for certain things, but I can only do but so much.

You never you never get bored when I want to talk to you about girls kind of stuff. I mean, I've always I mean, my whole life has been men, which is hysterically funny to me. And something that I've experienced over and over and over again in the course of that is the expression. Well, that's not how a man acts. That's not what a man would do. That's not what a man would say. You know it.

Don't act like a girl. Oh, what are you? What are you, a girl? Yeah. So, I mean, I've been surrounded by that. And it's so interesting to me because the restrictions that society imposes on me come from outside of society, whereas the restrictions that society imposes on men. Some of y'all seem really good at inflicting and reinforcing on yourselves. Well, I can't I can't be sad that my dog died. That's not how a man doesn't act like that. Well, what? Why? A man doesn't wear this and a man doesn't say that. And a man wouldn't. Okay. Now that we've established what this mythical man does and does not do. What about you as a human being? What do you do and say and where and think?

And so for me, like it would feel like, well, I can't do that because these gatekeepers won't let me and you can't do that because you won't let you. And that's super oversimplified and cartoony. But I I have I've heard the phrase that's not what a man does so many times in my life. It makes me sad because except for like, you know.

Having your period, why why would that what what what can I do that a man shouldn't be able to also do apologize, have feelings, fall down and and get back up, take a risk and maybe fail. How is that not something that a man does? Explain. Sherry, I can't explain that. And in that moment, you're you're bigger than yourself. You're part of something outside of yourself and you're sweating and laughing and flying and you're free. Why is that something a man doesn't do?

These are the questions that Becks. So I'm proud of you for square dancing. So thank you. Here's what we're going to do next week. And I can't tell you if it's going to work or not, because it is one of the more masochistic challenges that I've set for myself. There we go. There's a conspiracy theory. It's a pretty new one. You know, some of these conspiracy theories are, you know, they've been around since before you were born, the fake moon landing and who shot JFK and all that. But every once in a while, we birthed up a brand new baby conspiracy theory. And this is one that never had to crawl because it was born walking the conspiracy theory, the disgraced financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein isn't dead.

So what does that mean? Well, it means there are two. There are two conspiracy theories that live right next to each other. And next week on True Weird Stuff, we're going to nestle one inside the other like a Russian doll. Conspiracy Theory 1. Jeffrey Epstein did not die. A government conspiracy, mostly the Israeli government, conspired to swap out the body. And he is alive and well in Tel Aviv with a beard, surrounded by bodyguards. And there are things in the Epstein file drop to support this. And I'll have them for you in next week's show.

Really intriguing and compelling breadcrumbs in those files that kind of suggest this man doesn't appear to be dead at all. In fact, he appears to be having a robust email correspondence using his Fortnite and FedEx accounts. So the other theory that lives next door to that one is Jeffrey Epstein isn't dead because Jeffrey Epstein isn't human. Jeffrey Epstein is an ageless vampire who rolls through identities over the course of time because that's the burden of being a vampire.

You know, you have to keep yourself hidden. And that once upon a time, the vampire we call Jeffrey Epstein was the seventh president of these United States, Mr. Andrew Jackson. And the biggest piece of proof for this conspiracy theory is the $20 bill. And we will see you next week for Jeffrey Epstein vampire on True Weird Stuff.

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True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

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