Behind the Scenes Minis: Cats, Caves and Scandal

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about the Kentucky cave Hors this week, which had some of the best names ever in any episode we've ever done. I think that did have some good names. Yeah. Yeah, you had something from the listener mail that you said you wanted to ask about, and I wanted to go ahead and say that before I forget. I meant to ask you about this a million times because we've talked about how you missed the hot dog culture in Iceland I did, which maybe you know, if you're not a hot dog person, you maybe wouldn't see it. But did you get into any of the cat culture? No, I don't think so. Tell me about the cat culture and Iceland, Like I literally have a shirt that's like Cats of Downtown Reykievic, like they you know about Bakou, Yeah, who is like the unofficial mayor of Raykievic, who is a big cat that wanders around and is adorable and has his own Instagram and apparently disappeared for a few days and they found him in a bank vault and nobody knows how he got in there, followed Bacdus on Instagram. He's gorgeous. He's like a big, kind of fluffy black and white kitty. He's adorable. But yeah, apparently, like I didn't realize, and we were there in May, so it would have been a little warmer than when you were there a little bit. Raykievic loves their cats, and like, apparently there are a lot of cats in the downtown area that are kind of like they're not feral, but they're sort of communally owned, like everybody kind of shares in their care, and they have merchandise that in depending on what shop you get it from. I think some of the proceeds from the sale of the merch goes to taking care of the cats and stuff. And I was like, I'd never asked Tracy if she noticed all the kiddies. I don't think I did. Was of course the stuff I brought home for our cat sitter. I was like, here's all your Reykievic cat merchandise. Yeah. I thought you were going to ask if we saw a lot of fabulous murals in Reykiovic, and that answer was yes, Like there were some really amazing murals that we saw in Reykievick while you were there, I wanted to talk about kiddies. Okay, So Cave Wars. We've gotten over the years many emails for episode requests about either Mammoth Cave the Cave Wars. A couple of people have written in and asked for an episode specifically about Stephen Bishop and like his his work as a cave guide, his influence on the cave, all of that stuff. And so this sort of wound up rolling multiple frequent topic requests into one episode. Yeah, Floyd Collins being trapped in the cave. So in more recent history, we all sort of probably remember the massive international news story of the kids that were trapped in the cave. Was that in Thailand? Yes, So the thing that it really made me think more of was something that happened in nineteen eighty seven, So when I was a child, which was baby Jessica being trapped in the well. Do you remember this? Oh? Yeah, it was similarly the biggest news story for what, in my memory feels like an inordinately long time, like's it. I feel like it went on for months. It did not go on for months, but it did dominate the news story for a very long time, and I remember just an astonishing amount of detail about it, considering that in nineteen eighty seven, I would have been like twelve, right, but uh, I was kind of refreshing my memory and I read an article about it, and I was like, well, I remember that moment on the television. I remember that moment. I remember when they said that in the news. Right. How did I retain all of this about this child who was stuck in a well? It made an impression, clearly, Yeah, don't. I don't think it turned into like quite the spectacle of massive, massive crowds of people and locals selling baked goods or whatever. Maybe it did, I don't know, but yeah, it seems like when Floyd Collins was trapped, it did turn into just like a giant fair almost. That whole thing is like Claustrophobia city for me. Yeah, well yeah, yeah, yeah. He was trapped in a very confined area, like I am claustrophobic. Hm. Like even lately I have been playing I'm late on picking it up, so don't anybody dog me. But Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, and there are parts of it where you shimmy between two things sideways, and it freaks me out, like it's literally a video game. I'm not doing it. It's fine, And I'm still like, Brian, tell me what I'm true, tell me what I'm true, because I'm so claustrophobic. So reading about him trying to like wiggle his toes to get free and stuff, I was like, no, they no, thank you. I hope the thing at the top of the show saying that it was about somebody being trapped in a cave was like enough of a warning for folks who feel similarly. I hope, I hope bye. Just kind of a weird coincidence. I read Starling House, which novel that inspired this episode. Yeah, at about the same time as I started listening to a podcast called Old Gods of Appalachia. Yeah, and there's some overlap there. So I was in this you know, space of eerie supernatural things, sometimes involving caves and underground spaces that wound up feeding into this episode. I have not made my way all the way through Old Gods of Appalachia. I am on. I think the last season that exists currently is what I'm currently listening to. So I've been listening to that for a while. It is, as its name suggests, set in Appalachia, specifically set in like Appalachian mining and railroad companies, like the parts of the Appalachian mountains and foothills that were really stripped by mining companies and railroad companies, and with supernatural flair that can feel a little Lovecraftian, But I don't think that's really Yeah, you've accidentally stumbled on to the next thing I was gonna mention, but keep going that well, they've talked about the inspiration not so much being lovecraft, although it does feel very Lovecraftian at times, but like driving through these parts of this region of the world and seeing adjacent to one another, like abandoned industrial sites that are like full of metal and destruction, and places where the green has taken back over and is like very lush and overgrown, and thinking about like the duality of all of that. One thing that I will note, because I know that people try to be thoughtful about the media they consume. The first season of this the characters are are all white. It is set in a predominantly at this point predominantly Why area, and the people making it seem to have been really thoughtful about like how to incorporate the perspectives of people that they aren't part of. So in like the second season, they got voice actors and consultants and and other people involved in the show who were black to add that perspective more. And they've also talked about really not wanting to try to represent an indigenous point of view in the show because they are not Indigenous, and not wanting to try to like claim a story that is not theirs to try to claim, right, So, I like, I know for sure I've sat down with people to talk about something that I'm reading and they've said, why is why does it seem like such a you know, predominantly white production. It seems like something that they have put care and thought into how to incorporate different perspectives and different representation into it. I said, Lovecraft in your face lit up. Yeah, Well, yes, we've talked about Lovecraft on the show before. He problematic, but I do love a lot of his work. And when we were talking at the very beginning of the episode about the eyeless species in the Cave, I immediately thought of At the Mountains of Madness, which have you read it? No? No, I've seen an adaptation of it though. Yeah, it's like one of those things has been trying to be made into a movie for a long time and gear Mother Toro was going to and like that has been put to the wayside. I really love that, and a lot of it is exploring these caves that are it's a very similar thing. But my favorite thing about it are there these big what he describes as flesh colored, which presumably means white people, flesh colored eye list penguins in the caves and I have a tattoo of one of them because it's my favorite thing because they look it's for me. The tattoos meaning is like things that seem very scary often are not. And in the book these look like terrifying monsters, but they kind of realize they're just bubbling around doing their understate business. They don't care about anything else. But I immediately was like, oh, this this cave is full of love Craft characters. It kind of is. Yeah, I love it. The Mountains of Madness. Yeah, because I do love Lovecraft, even though some of his work I gotta yeah, I gotta edit in my head as I'm going, yeah, that's true, But I do hope that one day, one day, that movie will come back under Gamba del Toro's wing because he did some like pre visualization stuff on it, which is what my tattoo is based on. Because there was a I think it was just a met cat. I don't think it was bigger than that of the penguins that was made and it was so cool and I loved it, Yeah, I loved it. Yeah. Anyway, caves scary. I don't go in them. I have gone into Louree caverns just in Virginia, I think, which was another like guided tour situation. Patrick uh for a time in his life was living in a place where there were a lot of caves and he went caving a lot, and his his hard no line was underwater caving because underwater caving can be really really dangerous. None of it because for me, uh yeah, in addition to like what happens if your light goes out when you're when you're caving underwater, it's possible to do stuff like kick up silt and get disoriented, yeah, and that kind of thing. And so he's been like, Nope, definitely not for me. I'm no plope on all the caves. Literally that tunnely area. Yeah, you go through on big thunder Mountain is as much cave as I can handle. Like I it's all tied to the claustrophobia thing. I am so convinced that I will be trapped. How did you feel about the Paris Catacombs when we were down there? Going down that very tight spiral staircase into them freaked me out, super bad. Okay, but I did not realize. I don't remember we might have been in like different parts of the group. No, because we were together. We filmed together down there. We filmed together once we were down there. Oh yeah, But getting down there, I was like Brian was definitely like experiencing the death grip of my hand, uh huh, because I did not like that. And I once we're down there though, like there are obviously like I have been claustrophobic as long as I can remember, so I have a lot of little kooky coping mechanisms. And in the case of the Paris Catacombs, this isn't legitimate. I can just it's a lie. I can tell myself, Okay, there's always way out because there are so many little hallways through it that I was it was also one of those things that in my head I'm telling myself like do you want to see this cool thing? Well, then suck it up, Like, get your act together. You're gonna be fine. It's an hour, you'll live. I'm still always scared and when like there was one point where our little herd that I was with, you know there are places you see in the Paris Catacombs where there's like an opening and you can't really go down it, right, But we would have people in our group that was like I wonder if I and I'd be like no, yeah, I turned into like such a panicky monkey. That again, Paris Catacombs very difficult, but very beautiful. That was where my love of the macabre and of French things had to overwhelm my panic over going down into the earth. Yea, if we had done our episode on the Paris Catacombs before we went, I never would have gone in really, because we talked so much about cave in's in the road. Yeah, that's the part that I'm scared of, is like stuff caving in on me. So yeah, yeah, everybody's got there quirks. Mine is that I'm claustrophobic. Had to just have this discussion with the doctor about claustrophobia. Yes, over the possibility of a seapap but she oh, we'll see, yeah, God do sleep study. We'll see. Yeah, I'll looking forward to that. But she was very like she's a sleep science and neurology specialist, and she's like, oh, I have a lot of clients that have claustrophobia, and we have ways we'll try to address it. I can't promise you nothing will be on your face, but like, there are different versions and we'll try. We'll see if we get my one that works, if you need it. So I'm sure I'm going to be in that party trained soon. Not looking forward to it. Claustrophobia don't like it anyway anyway, But I like the idea of crazy critters that are under there there. I like an eyelis bat in my head. Yeah for sure, even if they've like come with a weird syndrome, which reminds me. Also, have you read any of Chuck Wendigg's books? Now, if you are afraid of things, like you know outbreaks that can cause strange they bat cave type problems, maybe don't. But that man can write a scary book like no. Yeah, if you heard the part about people having to disinfect their shoes and mobility devices when leaving the cave, and you were thinking, well, I don't you have to go into the cave. People did until white nose syndrome was introduced into the caves, which was probably by bats, not by people, probably by you know, bats coming into contact with one another's and like, once it was in the caves, no longer a need to prevent it from getting into the caves. It was in there already, so that's why it's only upon exit to try to keep from spreading it to other caves. Cave caves, yes, cayes. Would I go on a mammoth cave tour? Probably? Would I go into the deeper levels of Mammoth cave? Probably not. The whole thing with like a torch would disappear before you could see it go out. Yeah, that's like some tomb raider stuff. I'm not. I'm not crow live down ladder, no fings. We talked about Dominica, Gil Walteraire and a whole big French scandal. There's there have historically been a lot of scandals in France, and I don't want to get into the details of the other scandals that were happening at the same time as this, because there were a whole out of things and some of them were very disturbing, but the reporting on them in American newspapers was like, Man, a lot of scandals happening in France. Right now, here are two gigantic, completely different scandals. Yeah, it's funny because you know, at the top of that episode, one of the things that came up was this idea that for both her and her first husband, for Guillome, they both wanted to live kind of a bigger, more exciting life than they had grown up in. And it's like, there's part of me that, like an old clucking grandmother, goes, you can do that without all the drama. But yeah, I guess just ough exhausting. I made a lot of progress in my ability to read French. There were some sources in French that I both read in French and then translated to make sure I understood them correctly. They were brief, they were not whole entire books. Yeah, but like I do wish that the two I only know of two books about this, both of them in French published in France. Neither one of them out of print, like one was published in something like nineteen ninety six, like out of print now. I think I saw like one copy of it in off site storage at a library I could potentially access, And it's like it was just not something that it was going to work out to try to use as a source for this. And I also would have needed help from someone more proficient in French than me, because what I'm definitely not going to pick up on is nuance, right, Like turn a phrase is hard enough sometimes to catch in your native tongue, right, It can be really hard when you're reading not just another language, but another language referring to much older events. Yeah. Yeah, And it is kind of amusing to me how there was a spectrum of how these things were written about. I read a couple of articles that definitely made it seem like, yes, absolutely, she did all of these things. She definitely plans to murder him, and when that didn't work out, she definitely plans to like have this sex worker claim that he was living off of her sex work earnings. And then she definitely number three negotiated a deal to sell the paintings an extra for not going to prison, and then others that were like, ah, all of these things were alleged and no convictions ever happened. Right, And then like if you look at the music in Larangerie's website, it talks about this collection, no hint of any scandal that could have been associated with it in any way, and like the website description of the collection, I went to this museum while I was while we were in Paris. In addition to this collection, it has the really really enormous Monet water lilies. I can't remember how many panels it is, but I think it might be four, and they are just it's a room that is just these enormous, very long water lilies. And that was what took Patrick and me to the museum, right, was the water lilies. And then I had no knowledge of like what was you know particular about the collection that was in the rest, which is not the only thing in the museum, but like, I didn't really know anything about that. I think though, that that was the museum where I first saw Marie Lawrence San's paintings, which has led me now on just a whole journey and Marie Lawrence att multiple other episodes stripped to Philadelphia that spawned this anyway, I had two things, Okay, One is kind of jovial, which is that the whole like mystery paperwork around Paolo's parentage and made me think of Ratituey. Okay, I mean I always want to think of Ratatouey because I love that movie and I think it is a masterpiece. But it reminded me of the whole Alfredo Linguini being in fact the son of the greatest chef in France. But here is where I kept being like, but why though, yeah, Dominica would have been dead, so why does she care so much if Paolo got her money or not. I had this mental question too, and the only thing I could really arrive at was that she hated him so much. Yeah, I mean that is vindictive. She was already a crap parent, right, like a D minus parent in terms of just like having sleep under the table, right, and like someone with you know, plenty of cash to let their child live at, even if not a luxurious life for whatever reason, physically comfortable and like safe life. Yeah, but she didn't choose to do that, which is awful. And then I'm just like why was it easier in her? And again this just comes down to you. I can only presume you're an evil human being, because why is it easier at that point to try to kill him then to like, she's clearly played fast and loose with like paperwork already in her life. Why couldn't she just like repaper the situation and claim like that she hadn't in fact adopted him, or that, you know, or exposed some previous secret that would have made his claim to her parentage and thus to the fortune illegitimate. In another way, like I don't understand why she's like, well, I guess we got to kill my kid. Yeah. I also have questions around her decision to acquire him right in the first place and then legally adopt him, because that's another thing where I saw like multiple possible explanations. What was that she would not be able to bequeath her estate to anyone unless she had unless like her late husband had an air and I was like, this doesn't really align with her later behavior. Another was that the possibility of like her not really knowing for sure whether he had made those changes to the will or not right and so whether like this child was a fail safe in some way, and like I have questions about all of this. Also when I I'd like, it's obviously been several months that I've had this on the list, and part of the reason was like just wondering is there going to be enough actual concrete information right to do this? And yeah, there's enough actual concrete information for a whole episode, but still alat of question marks around it. I man, I really would love to know for definitively sure whether the sale of the artwork to France was part of a deal, just for my own curiosity, that would be something great to know. And it's like the timeline definitely does line up right. Just because one thing happened after another thing doesn't mean the first thing caused a second thing anyway. I would like to know why people were so willing to be complacent in her villainous plans. Yeah, yeah, like if I I mean, I would like to think that if I were with someone and they had a child, and I saw them mistreating that child as badly as she did, not even getting to the murder part, I would be like, yo, I gotta I gotta roll and report you like I did write, Like the cruelty that people were willing to excuse is really really hard to wrap my head around. Yeah. Yeah, And that was one of the things that people did not understand about Jean Valtaire being in a relationship with her, Right, It does seem like people thought that was really out of character in a number of ways and in a like why are you doing this? And also what do you see in her kind of thing? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, a whole lot of drama. That's an exhausting way to live. Yeah. I don't have time for all that. No, if you have your weekend coming up, whatever is happening, whether you are taking time to do things for yourself, whether you're working, I hope there's not a lot of drama unless it's someone else's drama that you're enjoying watching that doesn't actually affect you in any way. And if that's the case, I hope it's going okay for those folks too, and that it's fun drama and not harmful drama. We will be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,