How to Happily Overcome Clutter & Why Pop Culture is so Valuable - SYSK Choice
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Today on Something You Should Know, if you're going house hunting or car shopping, there are certain days you should and should not go. Then how to get organized and clear out the clutter. Where do you start? Organize your junk drawer. You've all got one. Every house has a junk drawer. Get rid of the broken rubber bands, the dead batteries. Organize your junk drawer. Then see what it feels like when you need something. You know exactly where to go for it.

Then, one etiquette rule that's always right, never fails, and you should always follow. And a fascinating peek inside the Smithsonian's collection of American pop culture. So, you know, it's interesting. When people see our pop culture materials, they often say, oh, you have the, as if there's only one. And, of course, in many of these cases, with the ruby slippers, with Superman costumes, with all sorts of other things, especially costume items, there's often multiples.

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Something You Should Know. Fascinating Intel. The World's Top Experts. And Practical Advice You Can Use In Your Life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, the weather. The weather influences so much of your life. When you stop to think about it, it influences what you wear, what you do, when you do it.

But what you may not realize that it can also influence what you buy. If you're planning to buy something big like a car or a house, you really should check the weather first. It can actually have an impact on your choice.

The phenomenon, which is known as projection bias, can influence purchases that you might regret later. A convertible car may look a lot more appealing on a warm, sunny day than the one that you should consider for gas mileage and other practical reasons. You might fall in love with a house with a fireplace on a gray or chilly day and miss the one down the street that has a pool and central air conditioning.

It may not be as much fun, but experts say the best days to go house hunting or car shopping are not bright, sunny days. We're much more likely to take safety and security features into mind on rainy days, and we're less likely to splurge on unnecessary features. And that is something you should know. ♪

We all have stuff. Some of us have a lot of stuff. So much stuff that you might call it clutter. And it makes you wonder what it is that compels us to keep so much stuff. It's often stuff we'll never use, we'll never need, we'll never even look at again. Yet we somehow can't let go of it.

And while it might seem relatively harmless to keep clutter around, clutter does take a toll on you in ways you might not realize. Here to discuss the problems with clutter and how to let it go is Tracy McCubbin. She's a recognized expert on the topic of clutter and organization, and she is author of the book, Make Space for Happiness. Hi, Tracy. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me. Sure. So what is it about stuff and clutter that makes it such a problem for so many people? We are emotionally attached to our stuff. Right?

right? We've created this whole story around it. You know, my aunt gave it to me, but she's passed away and I can't possibly get rid of it because she'll be angry at me. I paid good money for this. I, you know, I never use it, but as it was expensive or this Letterman's jacket reminds me of who I used to be. We've created these stories around our stuff and we become attached to them. So because of these stories, we,

we don't let go and our homes start to fill up with too much stuff. I've often wondered why people would have so much stuff that they have to rent a storage unit. Because if it's in a storage unit, you never see it because you'd have to drive down there and go look at it. Maybe that's an indication that you have too much stuff.

Exactly. Look, I have helped people declutter. I've been a professional declutter and organizer for 15 years now. I have decluttered so many storage units. And I can tell you that there is nothing in those storage units that's worth more than someone's paying to store it.

But because we've told ourselves this story that this is somehow important, then we're, you know, financially taxing ourselves. And I think that's the thing to understand. You know, this is what I tell people all the time, that your home and your stuff is a tool.

It's a, you know, your home is a tool. It's where you rest. It's where you replenish. It's where you renew yourself, right? Where you connect with your family over the dinner table or get a good night's sleep. But if it's so full of stuff that it can't function, it's

It's detracting from you. Look, they've done the science. They've tested this. They've done so much research into how much energy our cluttered like sucks from us. You know, if you live in a cluttered home, you have elevated cortisol.

They've done it. They've proved it. So this is always what I say to people. It's not about creating a perfect home so that you look good on Pinterest. It's about creating a home that works for you. Don't you think, though, that there are some people that it's a spectrum, that there's people on the different parts of the spectrum where they can tolerate more clutter than people on the other end?

and not get stressed out by it. Some people just are wired different. 100%. And I never, I don't make some edict about, you know, you can only have 30 books and five shirts. It doesn't work that way. What's different? You know, everybody's different. And like you said, some people are collectors. Some people, like I just worked with a woman who loves roosters. She loves them. She has so many rooster things around her house. It makes her so happy. Yeah.

It would make me nuts. But, you know, I respect that. But what I'm talking about is when it stops working. If you start to feel like,

You don't own your stuff anymore, but your stuff owns you. That's when the clutter becomes a problem. So it's not a sort of, it has to be one way and everybody's the same. It's, has it stopped working for you? Do you have rooms in your house that you can't go into anymore? Right?

Right. That's usually the first time I get a phone call from a potential new client. They're like, we have two guest rooms. We want our kids to come and visit, but they're so full of I don't even know what we can't use them. That's when the clutter isn't working anymore. When people have garages full of clutter or bedrooms full of clutter and you go look at it, what does it tend to be? What is that stuff or or is everybody different?

You know, everybody's different. I mean, there are some thematic things, you know, a lot too many clothes, paperwork, tools in the garage. But the way that it sort of presents itself as opposed to a category of stuff, it's more about

the emotional hold they have. So if I go into a garage and there's tons and tons and tons of tools, and it's an older couple, the gentleman's in his 80s, he's not fixing cars anymore. He's not getting up on a ladder, right? This is sort of the stuff of his past.

You know, I go into work with young moms and their bodies have changed after having a baby, but they're keeping all these clothes from when they were a different shape. Like, oh, well, I'm going to get back there someday or that's how I'm supposed to be. You know, so much of it is about being stuck in the past or feeling wasteful. It's more about the emotional story that people tell themselves than what the stuff actually is.

It seems in some ways homes, the way they're designed, often promote clutter in the sense of like, you know, a lot of homes have built-in bookshelves. Well, then you need to put books on them because those shelves will look weird if they're empty. And, you know, people have shelves that like knickknacks should be on there. And if you don't have knickknacks, well, then it looks weird because it's just an empty shelf.

Yeah. And here's the thing. It's like, I collect cookbooks. I cook all the time. I love my cookbooks. I have two big shelves of them. I go back to them. I refer to them all the time. They're a part of my life. But I'm in so many kitchens where people are like, oh, we don't even cook. Like, we just have those for show. So it's about are the things.

things serving you? Are they helping you? And also about feeling good in your home. You should feel good. You should feel happy. You should want to be in your home. And so I think it's about finding the balance. Life's all about balance, right, Mike? It's like we strive to be something, but sometimes we're like, okay, we're going to have to give a little over here so we can get a little more peace over there.

So you had mentioned that, you know, they've done the science, they've done the research, and I don't know how much of that you know off the top of your head, but can you dive a little deeper into that and explain in terms of the benefits of getting rid of some of this stuff what they are?

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that they found, and this especially applies to women, but people who live in cluttered homes have raised cortisol. So we know that cortisol is our fight or flight, right? It's the thing that keeps the kind of fat around the belly stuck on us. People in cluttered homes have that.

They did a really fascinating study where I think they did it at Harvard, where they put people in a cluttered kitchen and they offered them the choice of a carrot or a cookie. The majority of the people in the cluttered kitchen took the cookie. Then they took people and they put them in an uncluttered kitchen. They'd offered them a carrot and a cookie. The majority of people in the uncluttered kitchen took the cookie.

the carrot and what they think that is about. And I'm not sure if you've discussed this with your listeners, but there's something that they've found called decision fatigue, which is where it's basically that sort of completely oversimplified. But the part of your brain that makes decisions, the more decisions it makes in a day, the more tired it gets. And when that part of your brain gets tired, it defaults to making bad decisions.

So it's why when you wake up in the morning, you feel fantastic. You're like committed to, I'm just going to eat grilled chicken and steamed broccoli and I'll be great all day. But then you've worked a 12 hour day and the kids are screaming and you find yourself eating a whole pepperoni pizza. You're making a bad decision because you've made so many decisions.

So I like to say to people that clutter is a constant decision. You always have to make a decision about your clutter. Where should, do I need this? Do I like it? Do I want it? Where should it live? Where should I put it away? Clutter is a constant to-do list. So having a house that's really full of clutter puts you in a space where you're making decisions all the time. And you basically just put yourself into decision fatigue.

And so for everybody who's ever thought, you know, we really need to get rid of this stuff. The task seems so daunting. No one knows where to begin. So imagine they don't begin anywhere.

Exactly. And there's also something else that happens in the brain. And we've all experienced this in our lives. Like you have a pile of clutter on the dining room table and you walk past it every day. You kind of start to not see it anymore. Like your eyes literally zone it out. And then all of a sudden you're going to have people over for dinner and you're like, oh, wow, I got to clean that off. So we really start to see it and people get stuck.

People get stuck on knowing how to start, where to start, and are really just daunted by the task. So I always tell people a couple things when it comes to their decluttering journey. First of all, spend a week just living in your house and figuring out where your house doesn't work.

Right. Are you is your kitchen? Are your kitchen counters so covered with stuff that you just don't even go and go in there anymore? You don't cook anymore. Are you you know, do you are you parking your car outside because your garage is so full? Figure out where your house doesn't work.

And then also what would you gain by decluttering that space? What's the positive outcome? So if you clean out your garage, does that mean this winter, you're going to be able to park your car in there and not have to scrape off the ice every morning? What are you going to gain by decluttering? We're talking about clutter, what it is, where it comes from, why we have it and how to get rid of it. And my guest is Tracy McCubbin. She's author of the book, Make Space for Happiness.

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So, Tracy, when somebody decides, OK, I'm going to start getting rid of my clutter, where do you begin? It would seem like, you know, the best place to start would be something where you can see the results pretty quick, like, oh, yeah, now I get it. Exactly. So I always tell people start now.

small. Rome was not cluttered in a day. This did not happen overnight. So start small and pick a category that you're not as emotionally attached to. So don't start with photographs. That's the mistake people make all the time. They're like, well, I tried to declutter all my photographs. I'm like, that's

the hardest thing. So start small, have success. So let's say do your junk drawer. We've all got one. Every house has a junk drawer. Get rid of the broken rubber bands, the dead batteries, like organize your junk drawer, then see what it feels like to when you need something, you know exactly where to go for it. So start small, have a small success, and then you build on it. I started doing these on Instagram

things you can declutter in under five minutes, coffee mugs, baseball caps, socks. And they absolutely blew up. People loved them. They were manageable, bite-sized tasks that people were accomplishing. And every day, I think we've been doing them for about six weeks or two months now, every day I get messages from people who are like, I started doing these videos. I've done my whole house. I didn't even really notice.

right, that I did it when I was listening to a podcast or watching the news. So it was a way to break it down into manageable chunks that people could get done, feel successful, and then move on to the next thing. And so here's the thing that often happens. I mean, I'm not a real messy person, but I'm not real neat either. I mean, I'm somewhere in the middle. And

And I go through these phases where I'll want to declutter and I'll take something, a drawer, a closet, whatever, and I'll do it. But it doesn't take too long for the clutter to start coming back in. Like, I can do it, but keeping it that way is a problem.

You need a regular decluttering practice. You know, it's like cleaning the house. You clean your house and it doesn't stay clean, right? It gets dirty and you have to stay on top of decluttering. The clutter builds up. The holidays are right around the corner. We're going to get gifts we don't want. You know, you're going to like clothes you don't want to wear anymore. You've got to make decluttering a part of your regular process. And this is also really interesting for people to think about.

Decluttering, organizing, and cleaning your house are three separate tasks.

I think a lot of people smush them together, but they're very different. Cleaning your house is cleaning your house. Getting a sponge, cleaner, cleaning your house. Organizing is finding a home for everything, putting it away, knowing where it lives. And decluttering is getting rid of what you don't want, need, or use. So I think people get really log jammed when they try and do them all together. And they need to understand that there are three separate tasks.

There are people who have a messy environment, a messy office, a messy living room, whatever, and they'll say, I know where everything is. When you go into a house and you hear that, are there people that really can live in a mess and know where everything is or is that baloney?

It's baloney because what they're really saying is I know where everything is. It's in that giant pile on my desk that it's going to take me 22 minutes to find it when I have to go through everything. You know, there's this there's this idea. And a lot of people have said this. Well, if I put it away, I'm not going to know where it is. And I'm like, that's not you know, I need a visual reminder. I feel like if you put something away and you make a conscious decision about

You know, these are where my pens live. My pens always live in this drawer. I put them away. I always know where to get them. You won't need the visual reminder anymore. So I think when people say that, they haven't set the systems up, right? This is where my tax documents go. This is where my X, Y, or Z goes. So it's about setting up systems so that everybody in the house knows where to put things away because then you know where to find them.

And so what are the some basics of the system that people could grasp pretty quickly? You know, I think it's about putting things in logical places, right? You know, putting hats and gloves to go outside in the hall closet, you know, put, you know, things that live in the kit that you use in the kitchen in the kitchen where I see things starting to fall apart for people is when it's there's sort of.

putting things away where they have space for it. Oh, well, this should just live over here because I've got an empty cabinet. It's like, but that doesn't make any sense because those are batteries that you use in the kids' toys and the kids' toys are all the way across in the family room. And where, when you work with people, where's the weak link? Where do things go wrong or don't go right or people have trouble with in kind of getting on board here?

When people don't acknowledge the emotional hold, I think when people don't understand how emotionally attached to their stuff they are, then it's

It all sort of falls apart because all of a sudden, if you don't have that conversation with yourself and realize that you're making your things important, everything becomes important. Right. If you keep if you keep everything because it's special, then nothing is special.

And I also think it's like you said, not understanding that being decluttered and organizing is a regular practice, something that you got to do, you know, once a week, tidy everything up. And also the number one thing that people can do to be less cluttered. It's so old fashioned, but it works. My grandma drilled this into my head. Don't put things down, put them away.

Don't dump it on the dining room table. Hang your coat up in the coat closet. Don't put it down. Put it away. What do you find in working with people that is like the hardest, the category of the hardest stuff to get rid of?

stuff from people who've passed away. You know, someone was in your life that you love dearly and you're keeping all this stuff and furniture and things, you know, things that you don't like and things that you aren't going to use because you feel, well, how could I possibly let go of that? You know, I can't do that.

What I always tell people is you're keeping that stuff because you don't want to lose the connection to that person that you loved. And I don't want you to either. But if you're keeping all this stuff of theirs and it's become a burden, you're actually dishonoring their memory.

Right? I loved my grandmother so I still love her. You know, she's the first person I hope I see when I go to the other side. I have like three things of hers. I don't have that much. But the things that I have, I wear her wedding ring every day. And every time I look at it makes me smile. But I don't have a house full of her stuff just to honor her memory. I have a few things that I use that make me think of her and love her.

So I've had the experience, and I'm sure many people have, of it's time to get rid of something. And I can think of a piece of furniture that I had that I just loved this thing, and I just did not want to get rid of it. And I kept finding reasons not to. Finally got rid of it, and I never thought about it again until just now.

Because once it's gone, it's gone. I've been doing this for 15 years. I think I did the math recently. I have something like 40,000 hours of decluttering and organizing under my belt. I can count on...

Three fingers how many times somebody's called me and said, you know, oh, I want that thing back. Like once it's gone, it's gone. And so it's about getting in the process of letting go. Is this thing going to help me? Is it worth it? You know, piece of furniture that you may not use in your new house. Is it worth the X amount of dollars it's going to cost to move it across town? Right. Like do the economic math of it. And it's the.

And it's the sort of muck and mire of the decision making. And once you make the decision, you feel great. So it's exactly what you said. You feel guilty or you feel like you're not being smart with your money. But if you can work through those decisions and let that thing go, you don't really ever think about it again.

You know, I think what often happens, certainly happened to me when I've had clutter, is clutter nags at you. When you see it, it just kind of nags at you that there's something wrong. And this conversation has explained why that happens and I appreciate the advice on how to get rid of it.

Tracy McCubbin has been my guest. She is an expert on clutter and organization, and she's author of a book called Make Space for Happiness. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Tracy. And this has been great, Mike. Thank you so much for having me on.

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Just go to Indeed.com slash something right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on Something You Should Know. Indeed.com slash something. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. People seem to like pop culture. That's my observation anyway. Particularly when it is from an era important to them.

I sense that pop culture resonates with people because it is part of history, but not ancient history. It's part of our history. We relate to it. And that is at least part of the reason we like it. And certainly, the Smithsonian likes it. There are a lot of pop culture items at the Smithsonian. Not by design exactly, at least not at first, but they have a lot of it now.

And here to discuss why pop culture is so important and popular, and why there is so much of it at the Smithsonian in Washington, is Kenneth Cohen. He is a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and Ken is editor of a beautiful book put out by Smithsonian Books called Entertainment Nation, How Music, Television, Film, Sports, and Theater Shaped the United States.

Hi Ken, welcome. Thanks for having me. So let's start out by discussing why the Smithsonian is the home of so much American pop culture today.

You want to go all the way back probably to the 1970s, if not earlier. The Smithsonian didn't consciously collect things that we would call pop culture until the 1970s. And then what happened in the early 1980s as this small collection was starting to grow was that the museum received a gift of materials from the TV show MASH and staged an exhibit about MASH called Binding Up the Wounds

And so that exhibit, which had one of the surgery rooms and a bunch of the props, including the famous sign, hometown sign post that has all the characters' hometowns listed on it. You know, this exhibit drew over a million people. It was the first time the American History Museum needed time ticket entry. And it really told museum and Smithsonian leadership that popular culture was an important part of American culture.

and that it needed to be preserved and interpreted, and that the American public really wanted to see and engage with it. And without that turning point, it's hard to imagine the robust collecting that sort of led up to now. And certainly the interest in the MASH TV show has waned somewhat since the 1980s, but...

But think about it. I mean, the way you described the exhibit, it wasn't a big, huge, complete catalog of things from the show. It was more select things from the show, not a big exhibit. And yet you said that it was the first time, the very first time that the Smithsonian had to timestamp tickets, I guess, to spread the crowd out across the day.

imagine that people really wanted to see that that much. That's right. You know, people really connected with that program. A broad cross section of America really connected with that program. And the show had the ability to turn on a dime from humor to really powerful reflection on the human costs of armed conflict. And that really resonated with Americans. The last episode of MASH was really,

you know, by percentages, the most watched TV show until the 2010s. So, you know, it really was a powerful program. You have at the Smithsonian and in your book, you have the red pair of slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. And it is such an interesting story about the pair you have because there was more than one. So tell the story of the ruby red slippers.

Well, they tell so many stories, right? There's the story in the movie and in the book that preceded the movie. You know, in the book, the slippers are silver and the path is gold. And there's a lot of conjecture about what the original author was intending in an era when the monetization, the discussion of how American monetary policy was going to be tied to gold or silver values was a really important political debate at the time the book came out.

But the slippers have real relevance today too, in sort of a real world crime sense. The museum has had a pair of these slippers since they're actually red pumps. We call them slippers 'cause that's what they're called in the movie. But we've had a pair since 1979 that had been on display almost constantly because of how popular they were. And there's five known pairs and probably at least six total because one of the shoes has a number six on the inside of it.

And there were six different pairs of shoes, partly because they might get worn out over the course of all of the shooting, but also because the sequins are actually stitched on in slightly different angles that would reflect the stage lights in any given scene differently. And so they were used at different times in different sets in the filming of the movie. And so our pair had been on display almost constantly since 1979, and they were being meticulously cleaned by our amazing conservation staff

And at the same time that that was happening, sort of 2016 to 2018, a pair that had been stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 2005 surfaced. And the FBI brought those ruby slippers to the museum because our conservators were now so familiar with the intricate construction of the ones at our museum that they could essentially authenticate the pair that had just surfaced.

Now, in examining the pair that had just surfaced, the conservators discovered that, in fact, not only were the recently resurfaced ones authentic, but that our pair wasn't actually a pair. The right shoe at the Smithsonian and the resurfaced pair's left shoe were actually an original pair together, and then our left and the other pair's right. Conservators identified this by examining super small similarities in the cut

style and what we call the wear, the patterns of distress caused by wearing the shoes on the sequins and on the heel of these ruby slippers. So this was a case of our collection being used to help safeguard another of these rare and super popular shoes that many Americans have really close connections to.

So you have one of the original Superman costumes from the old TV series with George Reeves from the 1950s that many, many people watched, not just then, but in reruns over the years. And what's interesting, I found interesting, is that the costumes today that superheroes wear, I mean,

Typically, they're pretty tight and they're made of probably, you know, spandex or whatever that material is. I don't know. But but that material didn't really exist back in the 50s. And so so talk about that. The Superman costume you have.

Yeah, so you know, it's interesting when people see our pop culture materials, they often say, oh, you have the, as if there's only one. And of course, in many of these cases, with the Ruby slippers, with Superman costumes, with all sorts of other things, especially costume items, there's often multiples. Sometimes they're exact copies, and sometimes they're slightly different. The Superman costumes were stitched differently for different positions that Superman might be in so that the suit looked skin tight, no matter what

position he was in. So there was a quote unquote flying suit for when he was posted horizontally that would look skin tight. But if he stood up and walked in that suit, it would wrinkle and crinkle in certain ways that were unflatteringly visible on television. And so they had a walking suit and ours is the walking suit. So used by George Reeves when he was walking around in character.

Is there any sense, or maybe you don't care, but is there any sense of the value of something like that? We don't care about that. So yeah, I mean, lots of people send us messages about items that they have or asking us about items that we have. And we don't value our collections in that way. And so we don't really consider our collections from a monetary point of view. We're trying to take care of these things

in perpetuity. You have a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth, which probably has a lot of value, but I imagine there are a lot of baseballs floating around that were autographed by Babe Ruth. So talk about yours.

Yeah, so the Babe Ruth baseball, some things in our collection we don't have great documentation on. They come to us, we know they're important, but it's hard to sort of pin down precise details. So that baseball is, the signature is authenticated. It's certainly Babe Ruth. And it was either from 1918 or from 1921. And we know that because the ball came to us

from somebody who grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania and told us that Babe Ruth signed it when he came through Scranton, Pennsylvania. And he was really only in Scranton, Pennsylvania playing baseball twice.

And so once was after the 1918 season when baseball players, Babe Ruth had just won the World Series with the Red Sox right before he would be traded to the New York Yankees and the Red Sox would go a very long time before they went again. And all baseball players after the end of the season were told they had to find essential work because World War I was still going on. The country was actually recovering from a flu pandemic in that year. And so many baseball players signed players

to play for factory baseball teams and claimed that they were doing factory work as part of their essential work. Babe Ruth signed with Bethlehem Steel, which was run by a guy named Charles Schwab, whose name is familiar for all sorts of other reasons now. And so he played baseball for a factory team in a 16 league where each team represented a Bethlehem Steel owned factory.

the factory workers at the time complained right about ruth showing up at the factory in patent leather shoes dress pants and a silk shirt but when he toured

the region with a team, kids came running out as they still do not necessarily aware of the sort of politics behind their heroes actions. And one youngster in Scranton, PA got this baseball and he could have gotten it at that time, or he could have gotten it in 1921 when Babe Ruth against Major League Baseball rules, organized a barnstorming tour of Major League Baseball players who played little town teams all across the Eastern half of the United States in an early assertion of player rights

at a time when baseball players were in a system that gave them very little in terms of rights to negotiate their contracts, ask for trades, there was no such thing as free agency. And so either way, whether this was in 1919 or 1921, this ball captures a really important moment, certainly in the life of the child who had this signed by their hero, but also in Babe Ruth's relevance to American history more broadly.

You know, I wanted to ask, not only the pop culture stuff, but anything in the Smithsonian. When people donate it, when it makes its way there, is it truly a donation? Do you pay for things, or people just give it because, isn't it cool, my baseball's in the Smithsonian?

So the answer is it can be either. Most of our items come from a donation where we do not pay. People think the Smithsonian is sort of loaded, but we're not. And so on the open market, especially today when you're talking about pop culture materials and the collecting market and the auction market is huge.

like a runaway train, very few museums and cultural institutions can afford to pay open market prices for these items. So, you know, we try to get in touch with people before things hit the market and talk to them about our ability to preserve items and hold them for the American public, you know, in perpetuity for the future. And so most of our items are donated and then on occasion we are able to purchase things on the market.

So in your collection, you have Prince's yellow cloud guitar. And there has to be a story, an interesting story about how it made its way to you or where it came from or something. Oh, man. So that was, you know, before my time at the museum. It was donated in 1993. The guitar first appears in Purple Rain in the movie. And only after Prince's death, when the curatorial staff at Paisley Park, his home,

came to the Smithsonian and wanted to determine the history of the example in our collection because there are other cloud guitars. We took that guitar, we actually CAT scanned that guitar to look beneath the top layer of it and discovered that there are six layers of paint and that the guitar's body and neck were built by repurposing other smaller parts, some of which reflect the curves and lines of much older violins, like sort of 18th, 19th century violins.

And so the guitar, I think, symbolizes Prince's ability to combine and repurpose styles to express his own unique individual identity. You think about his costumes that sometimes pull elements from the Edwardian era around 1900, right, with high collars and ruffled shirts that were popular actually even in earlier periods.

And then he couples that with this electric guitar that keeps changing color and evokes late 20th century pop music, but also violin scrolls from 200 years earlier. The guitar, I think, is a statement about how we all pull from the past when we present ourselves today. It's almost like the yellow cloud guitar is Prince's way, way more innovative response to retro fashion. You know, it's you want to bring back bell bottoms or high waisted jeans? Come on, here's how you make yourself timeless, really.

I'm sure just about everybody knows Kermit the Frog, but the Kermit the Frog that you have in your collection looks very different than what I think of as Kermit the Frog, because yours is one of the very first.

Our Kermit the Frog is certainly one of the first ones, if not the first. Kermit the Frog sort of premieres in 1955 on a very short program called Sam and Friends that Jim Henson led. It was a five-minute show on Washington, D.C.'s NBC affiliate station that ran in the evenings. There were all kinds of crazy characters in there. There was a snake named Icy Gunk. There was a French rat, spoken a French accent, named Pierre.

You know, and so there were these little short segments of these guys sort of doing wacky things or having wacky conversations. The original Kermit has a split ping pong ball for eyes. The green comes from one of his mother's discarded jackets. And there's a sleeve because sort of operated the early Kermit like a sock puppet. And the sleeve is made from a leg of Jim Henson's jeans.

The Muppets, which evolved from Sam and Friends, these are a group of oddballs. And over time, Henson really became very conscious and intentional in embracing that characterization. His shows become a lot about being accepted for who you are, no matter what you look like. You started out by talking about MASH and how you had a whole exhibit on MASH. And then, you know, a couple decades later,

certainly one of the most popular shows on television was Seinfeld. And the item that you have in your book anyway, maybe you have other items in the museum, but the item you talk about and show in the book is

the puffy shirt from one of the episodes which you know was a was a good episode but why the puffy shirt I mean it seems like you know you would have there's so many more things from Seinfeld that you could shine a spotlight on why the puffy shirt it's a great question because you know I think the way entertainment museums have evolved they often get viewed as sort of halls of fame where

where really what you're enshrining is the celebrity or the accomplishments of the performer, whether it's an athlete or a musician or an actor. And that's not how we go about building the collection at the Smithsonian. We are looking for things that sort of reflect broader American history. Now, that might be an amazing accomplishment or achievement,

We also have a soccer jersey from the US Olympic soccer team in 1948 that lost by a larger margin than any other Olympic soccer team ever.

because that item sort of tells a story about American history and the place of soccer in American culture in a particular point of time. And so the same sort of rules can be applied to the puffy shirt. I mean, Seinfeld, the show, often gets famously tagged as being a show about nothing, right? Have you ever, have you heard that? In fact, that comes from a line in the first episode

The show actually, it's a misnomer because the show actually mined human foibles and frailty for like comic gold. You think about the puffy shirt for an example, it's about Jerry's hubris that episode really. He's trying to look the part of somebody famous when he goes on the Today Show. He's trying to be a big shot, right? And trying to make a statement. And the show was about people who make something out of nothing. The show wasn't about nothing. It was about people who make something out of nothing.

The puffy shirt is a kind of way to say, stop taking yourself so seriously. And that's not nothing, right? Especially in the context of 1990s US history, the explosion of celebrity culture. The whole show Seinfeld, I think, is really about striving so hard that you become a little self-centered and petty in really ridiculous ways that backfire in your face. You have some rather iconic Indiana Jones memorabilia in your collection, yes? Yes.

Yes, we have one jacket, hat, and one of the bull whips. And you know, it's funny, Smithsonian folks actually don't like Indiana Jones that much. People always think our storage room looks like the one at the end of the first movie where the Ark of the Covenant sort of disappears forever. I assure you, we are much better organized than that. But Indiana Jones, like actually like the Star Wars droid costumes in our collections from the Return of the Jedi, they're not.

They're both really modern riffs on the old Western. Harrison Ford was great at those roles, whether as like the blaster gunslinging Han Solo or as Indiana Jones. The Western in these stories are about individuals who fight evil, but they often usually have to overcome their own shortcomings in order to do that successfully. In the 1980s, that story gets projected in new ways as the United States emerges from the Vietnam era, the economic contraction of the 1970s.

So in Star Wars, right, it's about Luke Skywalker and to a lesser extent Han Solo's journey of self-discovery, helping them in their fight against the Empire. In Indiana Jones, right, it's about, you know, sort of recalling the World War II era in which the line between good and evil was drawn much more clearly between Nazis and allied powers. So in

In both cases, Indiana Jones and Star Wars reflect this conversation, actually that George Lucas was having very consciously in his notebooks. He has notes about this conversation, very conscious conversation he was having with himself about sort of what the US could and should be as a nation.

Well, I must tell you, I love pop culture. I've been to the Smithsonian and seen many of the items there. And, you know, to me, there's just something about seeing a costume or a baseball or a piece of art or something. It represents a moment in time, an important moment in time,

An important moment in my time, typically. Something that happened while I was alive and that I remember in time. And there it is right in front of your face. And I just find that so satisfying to be able to see it that close up and reflect on what it means.

I've been speaking with Kenneth Cohen. He is a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and editor of the book, Entertainment Nation, How Music, Television, Film, Sports, and Theater Shaped the United States. And there's a link to that book. It's a beautiful book. There's a link to the book at Amazon in the show notes. And thank you for being here, Ken. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for having us, Mike. ♪

Here is some great advice. It's one etiquette rule everybody should follow, and it goes like this. When in doubt, don't.

It applies to what you wear, what you do, and what you say. If you have any doubt at all, you won't regret not doing it. That's according to Valerie Sokoloski, author of a book called Do It Right. And here are a few more important etiquette rules to consider. In the workplace, resist the temptation to say, you guys, or dude, or other informal high school language. It does more to damage your image than you can imagine.

And if you're playing telephone tag with someone, stop leaving vague messages and instead ask to make a specific phone appointment at an exact time and be clear on who is calling who. And that is something you should know.

Lots of people leave ratings and reviews for this podcast, and I would really appreciate it if you would add your name to the list of people who do. So please, whatever platform you listen to Something You Should Know on, go and leave a rating and review. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

What if we could disagree in a way that encouraged empathy even during an election year? With a new episode of Thread the Needle, a better way to disagree. I'm your host, Donna Shill Dugan. I use my background in journalism and draw from my life experiences to explore topics that matter to fellow feminists like you. In this episode, activist and professor Loretta Ross charges us to try her calling-in technique.

I'm always going to hold people accountable for the harm that they do. The question is, am I going to do it with anger or am I going to do it with love and grace? And I choose love and grace because it makes me feel better about myself when I walk through the world that way. You can listen to Thread the Needle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Laura Cathcart-Robbins, and I am the host and creator of the podcast Only One in the Room. Every week, my co-host Scott Slaughter and I invite you to join us and lose yourself in someone's incredible only one story. We talk to real people dealing with issues like infertility, the death of a loved one, human trafficking, and women who, um, fake it. Oh, and we want to be fair, so we talk to celebrities too.

Emmy winners like actor John Cryer, supermodels like Amber Valletta, and rock stars like Ryan Dusick. Everyone is invited to share their Only One story with our listeners. With 21 seasons and counting, we guarantee you that Only One in the Room has a story that you'll connect with. This podcast is for anyone who has ever felt alone in a room full of people, which is to say that this podcast is for everyone. Download Only One in the Room on Apple or Spotify today.