Her Story ­ Episode 4 ­ Transcript [MUSIC] NARRATOR: From MediaFace, this is Her Story: a podcast about Canadian, women owning it. [CHANTS] Ooh hah oh ya! Everywhere we go, everywhere we go! Let’s go, let’s go L­E­T­S G­O! ELLIE: I try to put myself in the other person’s shoes, why on earth are they acting this way, whether it’s the person who wrote me or the person they’re complaining about. NARRATOR: I’m Amanda Cupido and in this episode, we talk to well­known advice columnist Ellie Tesher and her daughter Lisi about the legacy of advice giving in their family, how the practice has evolved and why people ask for their advice in the first place. Dear Abby, when you are introduced, is it okay to say, I’ve heard a lot about you. MALE: Dear Ellie, my girlfriend is a flirt, she looks at other men. She says it’s no different than men staring at other women. FEMALE: Dear Mrs. Landers, I’ve always regarded most marital mix­ups are very humorous until now that is. FEMALE: Dear Abby, what is the difference between a wife and a mistress. FEMALE: Dear Mrs. Landers, I’ve just graduated from a great school and the boy I like is in the army. He’s written that he will be home on leave soon but my mother forbids me to see him… MALE: Dear Ellie, my fiancée had a relationship with another woman in university, she confessed this when we became serious. I believe this is only youthful experimentation, our sex life is great. FEMALE: Dear Ellie, I’ve been involved with an older man for seven months, I’m 21, he’s 40. He’s successful and established, I’m still struggling… FEMALE: Dear Ellie, a couple of my work colleagues were obsessed with the hacked Ashley Madison lists and said they found some names from our company. I repeatedly said I don’t want to know but they’ve kept teasing me with hints, which made me furious. I’m now less respectful of those two colleagues because of their self­righteous attitudes. I’m not sure how to stay on good terms. Signed, other people’s business. FEMALE: Signed, Curious. MALE: Signed, Tony. FEMALE: Signed, Wanting a change. MALE: Signed, Derek. FEMALE: Signed, Mrs. K. FEMALE: Signed, Heartbroken. ELLIE: And in this case, your wife is caught in the middle. NARRATOR: Sitting in her cozy home office in Toronto, Ellie Tesher is feverishly typing out her responses to loyal readers. The webchat is different than the six pieces a week she writes for the Toronto Star daily newspaper as it brings the advice column into the digital age. Mediaface producer, Amanda DeSouza was on location with Ellie for the afternoon. AMANDA: How is the chat different than when you do your column? ELLIE: Oh because it’s so direct and because people send in their own comments sometimes. Other people say, well I disagree with this and, not necessarily with my advice but I don’t think Sandy is looking at this properly or, they, you know, or I had a similar story and here’s how I handled it. It’s more direct and also I feel more direct with my readers. NARRATOR: This week’s topic is one she knows pretty well. ELLIE: So today’s topic on the chat is in­law drama and it’s a natural because a lot of the questions that come to my column are about in­laws and also I hosted an in­law TV show, a reality show called “Outlaw In­Laws” for three years on Slice TV. MALE: Can Ellie help these in­laws forever hold their peace. ELLIE: Across the nation, duelling in­laws are tearing families apart and it’s my job to get them back on track. I’m Ellie Tesher… NARRATOR: For more than a decade, Ellie has been giving people advice on life, love and relationships. Her column is syndicated in newspapers across the country and she receives questions from readers around the world. She’s part of a long history of advice givers, taking over from the late Anne Landers, someone readers came to love and admire. We asked Ellie to take us back to where advice columns first began. ELLIE: Advice columns to my knowledge, started in England in the mid­1800s, 1850s and British advice columnists to this day are called (inaudible). And when it started it was male editors who used pseudonyms and acted as women. Then it moved to the States, because it was so successful and in the States there was, long before Abby and Anne, there was Dorothy Dicks and others. And the first Anne Landers wasn’t the Anne Landers that we know. She was a nurse but she died and then the Anne Landers as we later knew her got that job. So Anne and her sister, Abby, as she was called, they were twins from Milwaukee. NARRATOR: Anne’s real name by the way, is Esther Pauline Letterer, while Abby’s was Pauline Esther Phillips. ELLIE: Now the thing about, why did they keep using pseudonyms? Well back in the ‘50s, it was considered, and before that in Britain, it was considered embarrassing for a man for his wife to work. If he was successful, why did his wife need to work? So the women used pseudonyms at that time and Anne got the first job doing it for the Chicago Sun Times but she was overwhelmed with letters so she started sending some to her sister who lived in San Francisco and said, here, you do these for me and send them back and, you know, we’re pretty much the same so it’ll be okay. So when her editor, the Chicago Sun Times, found that her sister was answering, he said, you can’t do that. So she called her sister and wrote her or whatever and said, sorry, the editor won’t let you. Well she was so annoyed because she liked it, ‘cause she thought she was just as good as Anne. NARRATOR: You can hear it from Abby herself. Here she is talking to Larry King on CNN in 1990. ABBY: South of the Chronicle, San Francisco, Cronker Arnold, the editor, I just really gussed my way in and I said, if I could do a much better column and than this Mayfield person that you got here and he said, listen, we’re very busy but I’ll tell you what we’ll do. So he called the copy boy and said, get about six week’s columns done by Mayfield and bring them over here. So he said, well what do you do, I said, I’m a Hillsborough housewife. I didn’t have a social security number, I’d never work a day in my life. LARRY: What did he have you do, answer letters? ABBY: He said, yes, you brought the letters back and he said, use the letters put to her, strike out the answers and write in your own and bring them back in about a week. Got, we had a typewriter and I went to work. NARRATOR: Some of Abby’s memorable one line zingers: FEMALE: Dear Abby, I’ve always wanted to have my family history traced but I can’t afford to spend a lot of money to do it. Have you any suggestions? Signed, MJB. FEMALE: Dear MJB, Yes, run for public office. FEMALE: Dear Abby, I’ve been going steady with this man for six years, we see each other every night. He says he loves me and I know I love him but he never mentions marriage. Do you think he’s going out with me just for what he can get? Signed, Gertie. FEMALE: Dear Gertie, I don’t know, what’s he getting? ELLIE: Abby was smarter than Anne business­wise for a while, the second sister was making more money than her and so there was a rift between them and the press really played up that rift as if they hated each other. Both of them have daughters who took on their columns afterwards. NARRATOR: In modern­day, history is repeating itself. LISI: And she’ll answer Middle Man, she’ll tell them, go read Middle Man and she’ll answer Middle Man then she’ll say, now go read Greta, she’ll answer Greta and while she’s doing that, I’ll be editing what she’s writing, I’ll be tweeting. And then she’ll say, okay, send over No Hair and I’ll send over No Hair so like it doesn’t make sense to anyone listening. I’ll send over No Hair, meanwhile… NARRATOR: That’s the only other person who can decode the method to the madness that is the AskEllie webchat: Ellie’s editor, website manager and daughter, Lisi Tesher. It all started when Ellie was sidelined by a back injury and needed someone to help type her book, so Lisi left her work on a cruise ship to step in, but not without giving her point of view. LISI: In fact, I wasn’t her editor, I was literally just her hands because she was lying on the floor and that’s how it started ‘cause she was saying something and I said, that does not make any sense whatsoever. She said, excuse me, you’re not supposed to comment, you’re just supposed to write what I say, but I’m not gonna write that, I’m just not gonna write that and that’s how we… ELLIE: We developed a way of communicating back and forth that became a sharing. We finished the book... LISI: We saw how we worked together that it was just so seamless. ELLIE: With this No Hair guy… NARRATOR: By the way, No Hair is the username of a reader who wrote in... ELLIE: He’s, I don’t know, what do you think about him? LISI: I haven’t read him all completely. ELLIE: Well his father in law is making fun of him for losing his hair, his father in law is obviously an old guy… LISI: I like doing this particular job with her because we, I mean, we have a good laugh and when, and the work is separate she… ELLIE: Not about people and their troubles… LISI: Oh yeah. ELLIE: …we just always have a good laugh. LISI: But she, there’s a question or if I disagree with her, we’re easy to work together. I can call her at any time of day or night, I’m her daughter. ELLIE: And she does. LISI: You know, I can call it, it’s not a 9 to 5 job for either of us. So we work really well together in that way and we… ELLIE: It also changes the mother daughter relationship during that period when we’re working because it’s equal voices, and that’s nice. It’s just, I think… LISI: I mean, it’s her voice, the chat is her voice and the questions are, the questions people write to her, they’re not writing to both of us. We did have an Ask Ellie and Lisi radio show on CFRB ten years ago but… ELLIE: That was fun. LISI: …that was super fun because they were asking both of us the question and getting both our answers. Now the… ELLIE: Do you wanna know why it ended? I wanna tell you why it ended. They wanted us to fight more, they wanted us to battle on the radio, you know, and be a little FOX News­y, and I said, that’s not my voice and the column and I can’t be that person. NARRATOR: So what person does she want to be? Well we asked Ellie and Lisi to describe each other’s voices and why readers relate to them. LISI: Her responses are always, they always veer towards the kind, the nice, the easy, like to make life easy for everyone. Not the easy way out, but to make life a nice place to be. ELLIE: I do lean towards compassion because I try to put myself in the other person’s shoes. Why on earth are they asking this way? Whether it’s the person who wrote me or the person they’re complaining about. I know that I’m only hearing one side, but the other is, I think I see the big picture and I think that’s what Lisi means about the nice, the kind. I see the big picture, I see that there’s not just this person and their partner that they’re dating involved but there may be children, there may be parents, there may be best friends. They may be in a school. I try to look at the bigger picture. Lisi’s voice is sharper and I don’t mean by that, meaner, she’s just sharper, she’s more direct, to the point. And also, she’s kind and caring, she has a very good heart but she’s more no nonsense than me. LISI: But also she’s lived more of a life than I have obviously, so she’s seen both sides like she’s had a parent pass away on her so she knows what it’s like to lose parents. She’s dealt with elderly parents, I haven’t dealt with elderly parents, my parents are young, hip, kicking and she’s dealt with relation­… ELLIE: Divorce. LISI: …serious relationship problems. ELLIE: Divorce, stepchildren. LISI: Divorce, stepchildren, remarriage… ELLIE: Right. LISI: …blending families. ELLIE: Right, right. LISI: I haven’t dealt with that. ELLIE: Different religions, that, yeah, lots, lots. LISI: Right so I haven’t dealt with that, so mine is from, in a way, a bit more of a naïve view but, and not that hers is jaded, she’s more understanding because she’s seen the other side. NARRATOR: You could say advice giving runs in the family and this is true even if you go back in time. Lisi is actually the third generation of Teshers to have wise words for strangers. Ellie points to a black and white photograph hanging by the office doorway. In it is a very distinguished looking man wearing a white lab coat. ELLIE: This is my father and his corner drugstore at the time. He was very wise, he was just a very wise man. My father had a corner drugstore and it was in an immigrant area but he was Canadian born and people at that time didn’t go to the doctor’s so quickly so here he was right at the corner of their street and he was a professional as well as a Canadian, he must know something as a pharmacist. So they would come in and ask his advice. I was five years old, I’m sitting on the lowest rung of his magazine rack where the comic books are. So I’m sitting and looking at the pictures and I’m hearing this, I’m hearing people ask the kinds of questions that Lisi would never want her little boys right now to hear being asked. And I’m just listening, I don’t remember what was said, but the idea of people coming and asking advice was just so common to me. And even growing up, somehow with my friends, among my circle, everybody asked me, asked my advice. So it just all came very naturally and when I went to the Star and I was a journalist, I was a journalist there for many years before I started being an advice column, I was the person people came to and asked questions, including the publisher about his relationship. LISI: And oddly enough, for no apparent reason, people talked to me about everything. People on the street, people, random people, they’ll just walk up to me and talk to me. ELLIE: Lisi and I both have that willingness to listen and willingness to respond if asked. And it’s the willingness to put yourself in the other person’s situation. LISI: I like when people ask me questions and talk to me and… ELLIE: It’s a sharing. LISI: It’s a sharing. ELLIE: It’s a nice sharing. LISI: And it brings you close, even to people you don’t know, it brings you closer to them and if they, if you help them in any way like… ELLIE: And you feel you’ve made them better. LISI: …you feel good, you feel you’ve done something good. NARRATOR: Mother knows best is something we’ve all heard. But imagine when your mom is a professional expert in knowing best and giving advice. AMANDA: What happens when it gets awkward? Or does it? ELLIE: Doesn’t get awkward. LISI: It never really gets awkward. ELLIE: Doesn’t get awkward. LISI: No. AMANDA: Ever? LISI: I mean I don’t really want her to start talking about really personal things… ELLIE: But it’s not personal, it’s about somebody else’s. LISI: She’s not, she’s talking about someone else. So if someone else calls up and says, I’m having a problem with my husband’s erection, if she said I’m having, I’d be like, okay, and I’m having dinner with him tonight, you know, no thanks, so, but that doesn’t happen. ELLIE: No, but that doesn’t happen. LISI: She doesn’t talk about her personal… ELLIE: No, it’s not, it’s not personal. AMANDA: So it’s not awkward? ELLIE: Yeah, I know what you’re saying that there are many a mother and daughter who either one of them wouldn’t, couldn’t stand hearing the word masturbation or climax or erection in front of the other but we’re way past that, you know, we’re way past that. My… LISI: I mean, to be fair, it’s like, it’s a little odd, right. ELLIE: I’m talking about others. LISI: So she’s talking about masturbation, I do sort of go, eh, but then I know that she’s not talking about her and then I relax back into the work. Okay then, we can continue. NARRATOR: Really there aren’t any topics that are off limits. They’ve been asked about everything from porn and addiction to cheating and affairs but some issues have definitely shifted from Anne and Abby’s days. Here’s host James Day talking to Anne Landers on CUNY from 1974. JAMES: Well the attitude I suppose young people have towards such things as sex and religion and marriage and so forth, have you had to change, any advice you’ve given had to change to keep up with that, that change in young people’s values or have you held to your own values. ANNE: Well I have had to change but not because there was any pressure on me to do so. I had to change because I felt that change is growth. The world is a different world today, Jim, than it was… JAMES: Yes, it is. ANNE: …eighteen years ago when I started to write this column. But I have changed my views, particularly in the area of divorce. You know… JAMES: You didn’t believe that divorce would be good under any circumstance. ANNE: No, you are right. JAMES: Mm­hmm. ANNE: When I first started to write the column in 1955, I was firmly convinced that marriage was forever. No matter how rotten it was, you stayed with the guy and you gussed it out because you had made a commitment, but I’ve changed my mind. JAMES: Also I think, as I recall, you were fearful of the damage of the children... what changed your mind? ANNE: Well I began to see too many situations where people were miserable together and their children reflected their hostility and their anger. JAMES: Mm­hmm. ANNE: And that such a marriage was not good for either man or wife or the children. NARRATOR: Decades later, Ellie has the same open­mindedness to change. ELLIE: It’s really to deal with the changing times. Anne Landers had to deal with the pill and the Vietnam War. I’m dealing with online dating, it’s not as important as the Vietnam War but I’m dealing with online dating, that’s a huge change. Online dating now is completely mainstream, you know, grandmothers online date, old widows and widowers are online dating as well as young people in their 20s. And then there’s Tinder and, you know, so many social media aspects and it’s all happening so fast. So we reflect our times, that’s what the need is, reflecting the times, making sense of them, some of them… LISI: It’s also an anonymous way to ask a question. ELLIE: And free. LISI: And free. ELLIE: But really the most interesting to me, because I didn’t expect it, and it’s sad. I get a lot of questions from 12 year olds and 13 year olds about bullying, about being asked to do blowjobs, I’m serious, about… LISI: A lot of questions about tran­, like about gender specification and gender identification. ELLIE: And that’s very new. NARRATOR: Interesting to know what you do when somebody really drops like a personal bombshell. LISI: The question came from an Asian man… ELLIE: He said he was Asian, that’s important. LISI: He said he was Asian. ELLIE: We never guess at what people are or aren’t. LISI: No, of course not. And that he had the most lovely girlfriend and in fact they were engaged and she was absolutely perfect and he said he loved her, didn’t he? ELLIE: Mm­hmm. LISI: And the problem was, he’s gay and what should he do? Should he come out now and not go through with the whole charade or should he live this life that was exactly what his parents wanted and then live his secret life. ELLIE: Right, now one thing I wanna add to it because it’s very important that in this particular question, he said his family were very traditional and that he would be shaming them in the community… LISI: Mm­hmm. ELLIE: …if he came out gay and if he broke the engagement. I think both things would shame the community, shaming the community and they, he also felt that they might not be able to deal with him ever and he’d be hurting her terribly. However, he also said that he had a secret life so, ‘cause he had sex with men. He also had said that he was intimate with her. So by the time I got all of that, I knew what I had to say to him. So I said to him that it was tough what he had to do but he had to be true to himself and his true to himself was that he’s a gay man and that he’s unfairly having sex with his wife or his girlfriend and with men which is gonna devastate her and he needs to be honest, he needs to break up with her, explain it to her and she’ll thank him later because she won’t want to have been married to a man with a secret like that. And then he has to go to his parents and hope that the love between parents and son will prevail. LISI: The thing is like that is obviously something that she can’t personally relate to, but the bottom line is, be true to yourself and everyone can relate to that. NARRATOR: With Google being able to answer many of our questions in a matter of seconds, we asked why people still even need advice columnists. LISI: I think people are generally insecure and they just want a little bit of boosting and to know that they’re on the right track to make it through the day to get to their next sort of insecurity whatever that may be, you know and… ELLIE: I think that’s very true. There’s a strong element there and then there’s the other element, the pace of change is rapid and people are stressed about, we have all these gizmos and devices to make our lives easier but in fact our lives are crowded by them. So we’re moving from checking our devices to having our personal relationships to achieving whatever we have to do at work to shopping for food, we’re just in constant flow and I think it’s stressful on people and they need sometimes to stop and say, you know, I’m overcome. I don’t know what to do about, suddenly I have a big decision to make and making this big decision’s gonna take a lot of time from me, you know, I can’t afford a therapist, I don’t know where to find one, I just need to talk to somebody. But the problem if you just talk to your friends or your colleagues, it’s rare that you find people that don’t have their own agenda, their own set of cultural input, you know, and biases and now you’re getting the answer you knew you’d get from the one who’s jealous and the answer you knew you’d get from the one who would never do that. So that’s why a so­called neutral advice person and that’s who you go to. NARRATOR: And those reasons don’t seem to have changed. Rewind to Anne Landers in 1958, talking to the CBC. ANNE: I think a great many people are too ashamed to go to anyone they know. They feel that, and unjustly so, I’m sure they feel that problems are a sign of weakness, most people are ashamed of a problem. They’re ashamed at their inability to handle it. So they go to an unseen face, someone who doesn’t know them. I’m a shoulder to cry on, it’s someone that they feel may understand. AMANDA: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given? ELLIE: Oh, I have to think, go back to my father and think about because all my good advice, the really great advice I got, came from my father. Well you got, you got something in your mind? Your best piece of advice must have come from me, of course. LISI: Oh god. ELLIE: Well if you say it comes from Anne Landers, you’re disinherited. LISI: I would say two pieces of advice. You’re gonna laugh at one of them. One of them was from a friend of mine who’s not an advice columnist at all. ELLIE: What was the advice? LISI: Say yes to everything and then if you have to say no to something afterwards, ‘cause if you say no, you’ve done, you’ve shut the door, but if you say yes to everything then all your doors are open. So I thought that was great and it added to something that my mom advised me years ago which was to never shy away from asking a question. Never be afraid to ask. Never be afraid to ask for help, never be afraid to ask someone a question because the worst thing they can do is say, I don’t want to answer or no. Ask, ask, ask. You gave me that advice. ELLIE: Did I? LISI: Yeah. ELLIE: Two things, and I really think they both came from my father but they weren’t so pippy as, to thine own self be true but in a way one had to do with really getting inside yourself and knowing what was right for you. So my career path was developing in a way that was kind of new all the time. It wasn’t like I went to journalism school and then, you know, got interned somewhere, it was kind of going in leaps and bounds of, it was very exciting and so the same with this divorce thing. He said to me, you know, just put it all together, the changes in your life, who you are, what you’re looking for and give it more time until you know for sure what you have to do. So that was kind of to thine own self be true but not said that way. But the other was, and it’s been very important to me all my life, was to find the humour in tough situations. To not just look at the hard side but to see the humour, you know, even if you’re arguing with your partner over something or the children are being obnoxious or you feel that you can’t keep up with what you’ve taken on to do, just step back and find the humour in it and it relaxes you and you get a little giggle. And you soften, you soften your position and then you can go forward from there. [MUSIC] NARRATOR: This episode of Her Story was produced by Mediaface, a digital content agency based out of Toronto. The show was written and edited by Amanda DeSouza, audio handled by Emanuela Orsini and special thanks to the team at Mediaface for lending their voices to the show. I’m Amanda Cupido, for more where this came from, visit Mediaface.ca.