Now, I also recognize that a lot of people who listen to this show are 10 years younger than me or more. So I was born in 1984, and I grew up in Vancouver, Washington, which is just across the river from Portland, Oregon, so I could get on the bus and go into Portland and hang out in Portland any time I wanted. It was clean and safe back then.

And when I was in high school, I visited Seattle, and I knew I wanted to live there, and I wanted to live there so badly that I only applied to colleges in Seattle. And I think I applied to many, but I just remember it coming down in my mind to going to the University of Washington, which was really big, a big state school, and Seattle University, which is a Jesuit school, a private Catholic school.

Catholic, asterisk. I’m not sure we call the Jesuit schools super Catholic, and certainly this one was not. But I was not Catholic at the time, and I knew I wanted to study business, and I remember having this thought that a smaller school would be better for networking for business.

Anyway, put a pin in that. I did move to Seattle, I wanna say 2004 to 2009. I feel like those are the years that I lived there. For those of you who know Seattle, I lived in Capitol Hill when I went to school, and then I moved to Green Lake, which is the most beautiful, amazing place, and rented a house there, and that’s where I did the dog training business.

So I’d take my puppies to Green Lake and walk them. It was magical. I love Seattle. It also was clean and safe back then. I don’t think either of those cities are that way now, so I have no recommendations for you if you’re going to either of those places.

But back to the show. I don’t really watch TV, okay? I’m not joking. I mostly listen to coaching and sometimes listen to fantasy audiobooks, and I think I’ve made some book recommendations, just so you know kind of what I like to read, on this podcast before.

So I’m with the kids all day. I had, like, an amazing mom with the kids all day, and then my husband, who helped bale hay for someone we know, which is not something he normally does, he did that all day.

And so then when he came home, he wanted to go to the beach, but I was like, “Look, I’m kidded out. I’m gonna stay home.” So he takes the kids to the beach. I open up Amazon Prime because I’m like, “I want to watch something.” And there’s this giant banner about Elle Woods, and I’m like, “Oh yeah, that movie was cute.” I clicked on it.

And so it starts. This is so brilliant of them, okay? I really appreciate that the people who wrote this show completely understood who they were writing it for. They were writing it for 40-year-old women who grew up in the ’90s and watched that movie with Reese Witherspoon. Oh my gosh, I’m totally blanking on the name of it. Legally Blonde. There it is. Okay.

And I liked that movie. I wouldn’t say I loved that movie or I was obsessed with it, but I’ve seen it a few times and it’s cute. So I start watching it, okay? And immediately the jokes are so good. It’s set in 1995, all the outfits, all the cars, all the music, you guys, all the music.

And in the very beginning she’s like, “This year I wanna have my first kiss with,” you know, a Bryan Adams song in the background, and then later a Bryan Adams song comes on while she’s talking to this guy. It is delicious. It is so fun. The beginning when she’s in LA, so cute.

And then the plot line is that her dad has to relocate to Seattle, so she gets picked out of LA and sent to Seattle. And it is so fabulous the way they’ve captured ’90s Seattle grunge. Like, everyone’s wearing plaid, or hoodies. She talks about how everyone’s wearing a hoodie, which totally is the uniform in the Pacific Northwest.

She’s the only one with an umbrella, which is hilarious, because I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s true, it just rains all the time, and so you just adapt. Nobody has umbrellas. You just walk around. They shoot the show in such an interesting way where everything is kind of really dark and gray in Seattle, and then she’s always wearing bright pink. So it’s really interesting the way they shot the show.

And just what the kids are talking about is just exactly what kids were talking about in the ’90s. They did such a wonderful job. She goes to this high school and sports aren’t really that big of a deal. I only watched episode one, and then I just wanted to talk to someone about it, so I’m just talking to all of you about it.

Sports aren’t really big at the school, and the cheerleading team isn’t really much of a cheerleading team. She tries out, but it turns out, I think, that they just accept everyone. And I was thinking about that from my high school. I think we definitely had a football team and sports, and I think there were sports kids.

And maybe some of the sports kids were cool. Like, I feel like there were sports kids, and they were cool amongst themselves. But to me, the most popular kids at my school were really the drama kids, and I remember thinking that was unusual, that the drama kids were the coolest and not the nerdiest.

But that kind of tracks with this, which is just in that time there was a real kind of anti-establishment, rebellious, you know, grunge, punk, like that was the cool kids scene. And so then the drama club were the cool kids. So that was just, I thought, pretty true, the way that they portrayed that.

I love how positive she is. I love how positive her parents are. I love that they’re not dumb. And that was kind of the fun thing about Elle Woods too, is that she said some ridiculous things, but the movie really was about how she wasn’t dumb, and she really cared about people, and she was willing to work really hard. And I’m glad that they’ve continued that in this show. Her parents just seem really nice and positive.

And now that I’m a parent, I’m watching the show thinking, “Yeah, that’s how I wanna be for my kids.” I want to teach them how to work hard, and to adapt, and to learn how to make friends, and to be positive. I’m not covering their rooms in pink ’cause that’s not my girls’ favorite color.

But I really appreciate the vibe of the show. And her friends are really nice too. Like, her friends aren’t mean girls, and I appreciate that too because I think that had you taken an Elle Woods and put her in my high school when I was in high school, I think I would’ve been really, like, kind of snobby and mean. Or judgy at the very least. I would’ve been like, “Oh, she’s such a Californico. Oh, look at what she’s wearing. Look at what she’s into.”

And now as I’m thinking about that, I’m like, “Oh, that’s not very nice.” It’s not very nice that everybody kind of drops into cliques and then judges all the other cliques, and I’m so glad that adulthood isn’t really like that. There might be small versions of that.

But in general, I would like to believe that we are not grouped like that and then judgy of each other’s groups. At least where I live, you know, I mean, people are into different things. There’s some, like, really athletic moms and some gardening moms and am I holding on the dog mom fort? I don’t know. Maybe that’s me.

And there are, like, professional moms who are, like, CPAs or doctors, and then homeschooling moms. But I just feel like we all, for the most part, get along or are nice to each other or respect what each other’s doing. We’re not looking at someone else and being like, “Oh, they’re the athletic moms.”

So I hope that we can all perpetuate that where we live, in our friendships, and take away from Elle Woods that we can be nice to people and we can bring people together and we can look for things that we share in common, and we can take care of each other. You know, she was always really good at that, like spotting people that needed help and helping them, and I really love that about her. And then her 16-year-old self does the same thing.

So the soundtrack, you guys, was so good. The popular girls talking about going to a Bikini Kill concert just, oh my goodness. And I realize that not all of you were punk girls in the ’90s, but all of it was just so on point.

So if you were a punk rock girl in the ’90s, if you were a Seattle girl, I just feel like you should watch this, and what a surprise. I just didn’t expect that. I didn’t know any of that. I just thought, “Oh, this might be cute. Let me watch it.”

I don’t know if I’m gonna watch all of it. I feel like this is the kind of thing where I will watch an episode every four to six weeks, and then over a year I will finish it. Maybe. I haven’t decided. I don’t love to spend my time watching television. I really love doing puzzles and listening to audiobooks, so that’s what I like to spend my free time doing.

But this was so delightful. It was so nostalgic. It was so fun. And I don’t know that you guys know that part of me, right? That’s how I grew up, and those are my favorite things. I just went to concerts all the time. My concert T-shirts were such a big deal.

My green Doc Martens were such a big deal. I would, like, dye a strip in my hair, which I thought was so cool. It was not cool. It was very cool to me. Music was such a big part of my life. But of course at the same time, you know, I started that web design company when I was 17.

Even from a young age, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew I wanted to make money because – even then I was like, “I’m gonna make enough money to take care of my parents.” Isn’t that so interesting? I knew that even when I was in high school.

And my college experience, I don’t have almost any nostalgia for college in the same way that I had about my high school years, because by that time, I feel like I was just working, and. Yeah, I mean, I had some friends, but I had three jobs.

And I really still talk to my high school friends. A lot of my high school friends ended up in Seattle too, so I feel like I just kind of continued those relationships, and then I worked, and then right after college, I started that dog training company. Which is so fun.

I’ve been really enjoying training this puppy. We had another dog come over today to play with her. It was so cute. It was so fun, and I got to do my how puppies play spiel in front of my kids and this other dog’s parents and like, “Here’s what’s going on,” and, “This is so great,” and it was really fun. I really love dog training.

So I don’t know. I just. I didn’t have anyone to call to say all of that to ’cause actually now I’m not really friends with any of my high school friends. I like them and I think fondly of them, but I mean, most of them live very, very different lives. I don’t think any of them are religious, and almost none of them have kids, which is so interesting.

So I definitely think Pacific Northwest feminism and programming really created a significant number of women that didn’t get married, didn’t have kids, and I’m really interested to see, as a culture, how that shakes out. Like, what does that mean? I don’t know. We’re all gonna find out, you know, in the next 40 years with birth rates and things like that.

So if you want a great soundtrack and a silly show, you can go watch episode one of Elle. I don’t have any thoughts about the other episodes ’cause I haven’t watched them, but it’s Friday night, and I just wanted to connect with all of you and share all of that, and I’m sure I will share something much more deep and interesting and coachy in next week’s podcast.

All right. Thank you so much for listening. I am praying for you. Please pray for me, and have a blessed day.