That's It.

March 7, 2024

One of my family's favorite podcasts is Criminal, a true-crime story podcast hosted by Phoebe Judge. The podcast is mostly family-friendly; episodes discussing topics not suitable for kids include a warning at the top of the show. For their 10-year anniversary, Criminal recently went on a several-week tour of North America, and my family got to see it in Philadelphia.

To me, the best part of the evening was not a specific story, but a tour anecdote: Phoebe mentioned that a writer who had seen the show in Los Angeles wrote a review that criticized the way she ended the stories she was telling from the stage: "[D]espite her decades of experience as a media figure, Judge awkwardly approaches the closing of each story. At first, she allows the final line to fizzle for a moment and then whispers “that’s it” sheepishly into the microphone."

Phoebe let that land with us, then moved along. At the end of the next story, she paused, looked out to the audience, and said gently, with a smile not on her face but in her voice, "That's it." The audience applauded wildly. She ended each subsequent story the same way, and it got funnier each time.

I was glad that my daughter Ella was sitting next to me, because no matter how many times you tell your kids not to be deterred by someone else's random opinion, and that they need to be emphatically themselves as they do creative work through their lives, it's hard for them to take that to heart. Criticism can hurt! Yet there was a creator Ella admires, leaning right in to who she was and how she chose to do things, Broadway World reviewers be damned.

"You be YOU, Ella," I said. But only in my head. Because if there's one thing I've learned as a parent, it's that it's way more effective for someone else to tell the stories you most want your kids to hear.

—Deb