Friendsome and Then Some

Friendsome and Then Some is a panel of three: Mindy Stearns, Michelle Orrego and JD Cargill, who met in the Los Angeles local news scene more than two decades ago. Their shared subject is midlife, and more exactly what a good friend does for someone living through it. The cold opens set the terms fast. The three say their names, somebody declares this the best podcast in the world, and they promise tips and hacks for midlife along with a good time. One opening states the house ethic plainly: the truth sometimes hurts, but coming from a friend, the sword isn't as sharp. The conversation that follows is crowded and quick, full of handed-off sentences, mock corrections and stacked affirmations. It can also go somewhere hard with almost no warning. 'Michelle's Life-Changing Friendship with Kim Rouggie O’Rourke' shows both sides. Talk of feeling like a failure over not being able to have a baby gives way to what Kim calls 'a decade of death', a stretch of nine or ten years in which around six people close to her died, starting with her mother a month and a half after Kim's wedding. Kim credits her friends, and Michelle above all, with carrying her through the isolation of it. The same episode signs off with a list of invented podcast apps and a cheeky 'favorite threesome' line, which is roughly the show in miniature. Mindy's conversation with Linda Wolf is quieter and more reflective. Linda recalls the hard questions she put to Mindy early in their friendship, 'What does your gut say?' among them, and suggests that people, young women especially, tend to consult their heads, then society, then their culture's values before listening to themselves. In her telling, the midlife crisis comes from never having had the chance to do that. A line the speaker attributes to Joseph Campbell, about the privilege of a lifetime being yourself, draws warm approval, The Road Less Traveled gets called a classic, and the episode closes by urging listeners to pick up the phone and call a friend. The lighter episodes carry their own detail. A long-married couple, thanked at the end as Mom and Dad, are described as always laughing, and the mom is outed as a prankster who likes to hide and scare the dad. Someone's grandmother gets quoted on lost things: if it were a snake, it would have bitten you by now. An episode that ends on happy-50th wishes and the verdict that nothing about 50 is scary includes a confession about claiming to be 29 into the late thirties, until a friend named Patrick said it sounded ridiculous. The only person who never heard the fib turned out to be the future husband, which proved handy when passports came out for a trip to Australia. For a first listen, the Kim Rouggie O’Rourke episode shows the show at its most open; what any episode offers is the sound of old friendship practiced out loud, messy and generous.