Introducing Scattered with Chris Garcia

October 23, 2019·31 min·2 clips

Chris Garcia learned his father died during overtime of the greatest Super Bowl comeback in history, and now Tom Brady's face is permanently linked to his grief.

Chris Garcia borrows the room for a minute. He drops into the 2 Dope Queens feed, thanks Phoebe and Jessica, and points back to the stand-up set about his dad that eventually became Scattered. The bit had somewhere to go. It opened into a podcast about his father's life, family secrets, and the road from Cuban labor camps to Inglewood. It gets intimate fast. Garcia starts with his parents, immigrants from Cuba whose love story is funny, stubborn, and heavy in all the right places. His dad moved fast. After two years together, he made his feelings clear on New Year's Eve, proposed six weeks later on Valentine's Day, and married Garcia's mom in 1964. The timeline keeps doing odd little jumps. His sister arrived in 1965, then Garcia came 12 years later, a gap he jokes about without flattening what sits under it. Beneath the joke is a son trying to understand what love looked like before grief made the evidence harder to hold. His mother gets the sharpest detail. She wants people to know his dad liked her legs, and she has reminded Garcia to put that in the show. That pretty much tells you the temperature. This is a macho father who can hold his wife's purse, snap at a stranger, and keep walking with a teal handbag like the whole thing is normal. The tenderness is not subtle. Garcia remembers hand-holding, couch cuddling, and a marriage that lasted more than half a century without going cold. Then loss enters the room. His mother is a widow and an orphan, sorting through her parents' Florida house after losing her husband and both parents. The house turns into a kind of map. Dominoes, photographs, a rusty machete, and his grandfather's records make family history feel physical. The records open something up. Garcia and his mother find Cuban music and comedy, including Alvarez Guedes, the comedian he says he grew up on. Memory starts answering back. Spanish and English sit side by side as his mother mourns, jokes, remembers, and keeps making sure her husband comes through clearly. The episode ends with credits, but the real pull is already set: a son following scattered objects toward the father, marriage, country, and secrets that shaped him.

As heard by us

A stand-up set that opens into a warm, sharp family memoir.

Chris Garcia uses a Two Dope Queens spot to open Scattered, a family-history project built around his father’s trip from the labor camps of Cuba to Inglewood, California, and the secrets that came with that move.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a stand-up set that opens into a Cuban family story, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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