Episode 2 - The One Where The Cracks Start To Show

In this episode, we swear a little and have very frank discussions about abuse and addiction,

but it's also honest and very real.

“You can find more information like specific content warnings in the show notes.”

Everybody knows what me is brought to you by Bigly Chu, specifically the Great Flavor, and Bigness Challenger, the only industry that loves an immature coward who's too afraid to take a risk. I'll show these recorded in front of a live studio audience. Mrs. Brown, I'm Dr. Olson, part of your husband's treatment team.

I just wanted to update you on Mark's care. My husband seems so peaceful. I wonder if you might be able to give me something to relax a little. Have a terrible back pain that makes it so hard to rest. You seem to pretty relax watching Casey Carson and I do everything.

Woo! Check me out, I'm Buzz Lightyear, who's infinity and the un... Oh my god, Carson, please put that wheelchair back. And what's on your head is that a... It's a bedpan. Okay, wow! Hey, folks, I know everyone processes in their own ways, and I'm sure this

is certainly not how you want to spend Christmas, but... Get a load of this guy.

He thinks it's the first holiday we spent in a cancer ward.

Well, I suppose you've probably had some experience with this kind of thing given the severity of your father's illness, but I do want to warn you that. I'm going to stop you right there, Doc. Let me guess. This is it.

The big number before the final curtain call. You're definitely not the first guy in a white coat to tell us dad's going to bite the big one. How many is it now, Casey? Five, six times they've said he's dying?

Seven, actually. That's who's counting. Maybe you should just see for yourself.

His new men's are causing a rather intense reaction.

Hey, Dad. How are you feeling? Holy Jesus mother of fuck, Casey. What is wrong with your face? What the hell, Dad?

Rude. Rude? Rude? Your sister approaches my deathbed, having replaced her human face with a cat's. And you call me rude.

Oh, rad. That's lost it. No, no, no, he hasn't lost it. This lady's ran a treatment just had a few unexpected, uh, psychoactive side effects. Interesting.

Doctor, very interesting. And would it be possible for me to have a small sample of whatever he's on, so I can have a better understanding of what he's going through.

“Now, Benjah, how's the fact, who brought the dog here to a hospital?”

Dad? Higgins got ran over by a car five years ago. nonsense. He's over in the corner. We're going to typewriter, where are those cool sunglasses?

I kind of like Dad more this way. He's so lucky. Definitely beats the version of him that's trying to out drink Andre the giant. Oh, okay. I'm just going to pretend I didn't hear that, but there's no need to worry.

This is all temporary. No reason to sound the alarm. Fire. Well, there's a fire in the bathroom, and it's right to you. On it, Dad.

I'll go grab a fire extinguisher, and it's an only water. Oh, please, no, no, no, no, no, I've got each of them.

“The doctor is, is there an over the counterversion of this new wonder truck?”

The person get back here, step, whoo, love the hospital lingo? I'll take 10 cc's of new parents, please. Holly, come here. You gotta get me out of here. And where would you even go?

Jail, I guess. Now that the fun police are here. Wait, are you faking all of this? Oh, no, I am definitely tripped by my balls off. But I can't do this right now.

I can't lay here and watch you guys waste another Christmas standing over me, staring at me like some pathetic wreck of the man I once was, I gotta get out of here. What? What are you talking about? We don't think less of you for being sick, and you're not wasting anything.

We love you. Really? Really? Besides, there's a whole lot of other reasons we could think less of you.

Oh, shucks, I guess I never.

Holy shit, did you bring shack with you, too? Dad.

“You know how every sitcom dad has those annoying quirks?”

Like maybe he's clueless to the chaos around him, or he relies on the mom to do the emotional labor, or constantly obsesses over his high school football glory days. My dad had his things too, but I wouldn't call them all quirky. Oftentimes, they were a little more intense. Mark Brown had a lot of sides to him.

You've heard about the life of the party version, the pretentious artist, the fun dad. But there was also a much darker side looking just outside the four three aspect ratio of those old tube TVs. Because that's the thing about the people we love, right? They can be your favorite person to be around, and also the one you find yourself hiding

from. Sometimes those flaws show up as a background noise, like your parents arguing in the kitchen over a credit card bill. And other times, they show up in ways no kid should ever have to witness, let alone survive. Long before the bombshell of my secret siblings dropped, we were already living inside the

kind of storylines that could never be wrapped up in a clean 30 minutes.

And if I want to understand how a secret like that gets kept from his own kids, and why everyone else in my family agreed to keep it, I have to sift through the other chaos and confusion that came before it. So why did my dad hide this part of his life? Why did everyone go along with it?

And if your life can be a sitcom, one of the laughs start to kick in if the very special episodes never end. From next chapter podcasts and companion arts, this is everybody knows but me episode two, the one where the cracks start to show. When my dad loved, he loved hard.

That's not unusual for artist types, passion kind of has to take the lead or you risk getting drowned out by reality, which I can relate to. I chose to be a stand up comedian, a notoriously lucrative field.

“Do you know what my fallback plan was if my dream of being a performer didn't pan out?”

Poetry. Yep, not a joke, just another way of making tons of fame and buckets of money in my right. But an artist's pattern of intensity doesn't take away from the impact of their actions. My dad, the longtime womanizer, fell for my mom and he fell hard.

Well, I was in shock because your dad was quite a womanizer. What? Did it a lot of people? No way. And he came home to Lampugra, I was home and he said, I am really in love.

How old was he at this point? I think he was in his early thirties and I'm like, right, who is a, no, this is different. And I could tell that his face is demeanor and he was so proud when he first brought your mom home and your mom must have been so nervous coming from her small family to have this chaotic family of ours.

And we all fell in love with her and it was just that part was kind of like a fairy tell for a while. Really? No. They were so in love and everybody was happy and then when she got pregnant with Casey,

oh my gosh, the world stopped for good. I have a baby. And I just remember the first time I went to visit them after Casey was born so they just seen them sitting there with that baby and just it was just too much love to even take it.

Then my dad always want to be a dad.

You know, he never talked about it but the minute he found out your mom was pregnant, he was reading books about fatherhood and he was going to be a good dad and he did say and I wish it had really come true all the way through that he was never going to be like our dad. He was going to be totally understanding of his kids.

“Let them speak their mind, which I think he did let you know you got more than we did.”

And he was never going to drink like my dad did.

And I do remember when you guys were little like he loved being in the pool with you, he loved taking you to the beach, he loved doing things with you, he loved being a dad. My aunt Cecilia, my dad's oldest sibling, had the closest relationship with my parents out of his family.

She loved my mom and always said the same thing.

Her kindness got you first and it's true. My mom was every bit as kind as she was beautiful and she was beautiful. My mom, Gale, had a model good looks that were impossible not to notice. Five, ten, long, thick blonde hair, someone always wanted to braid. I see blue eyes carrying a soft sadness and a sweetness that felt almost fragile.

“A dad wringer for Darrell Hannah and Splash, who, I think, Wayne and Garth might have described”

best as, "Shwing!" she's a babe. She was the woman who finally tamed my dad's blandering playboy ways. For a while, the relationship fit the classic mold. They got married after a few years in an intimate backyard ceremony at my great grandmother's house in Insino.

Had my sister and me soon after, and eventually bought their first home in the San Fernando

Valley. That's where we experienced a 6.7 magnitude earthquake in 1999. Our fireplace collapsed. The house was wrecked and the whole neighborhood ran into the street in a panic. I was too, so I don't remember it, but I'm not surprised that the first catastrophe hit

the literal foundation of our home before it started working its way inside. When my brother was born in 1997, we moved to a comfortable new house and flat, sunny, everything's a chain-northridge. Back when fixer uppers on half an acre cost about 50 bucks in a firm handshake. Side note, dear God, please take me back to pre-9/11 housing prices.

Please, please! The place was bright yellow, wildly outdated, and begging for a renovation. But it had everything a kid could dream of. Half a basketball court, a huge yard, and a pool with a diving board, and you get this. A slide. Hello, Chachink!

You the theme song, we made it! Cannonball! For a few years, life felt stupidly promising. We were this adorable little family of five who summers were all swimming, roller skating, and competing in unspoken neighborhood competitions for the most decorated house on Halloween

in Christmas. It looked down right full house opening credits picture-esque. And then, reality reminded me, this wasn't a sitcom. This was real life.

Hollywood might've been close enough to touch, but the magic never seemed to reach our house.

At that time, no, I don't think a lot of people knew what was going on behind-clothes doors with my dad and his drinking, and it was really bad. And he was hiding liquor bottles. Yeah. I found him in my mom and dad's garage when you guys came up for Christmas or something.

Yeah. I'm like, and this has got to stop.

“Would you think that was around the time that maybe things got tense at home?”

Oh, yeah. Yeah. He would go out drinking, basically go out to the bar with buddies after work, which a lot of the people in that industry do. Yeah.

They know they get off work. They go out, and he was avoiding going home to fight with your mom over money. And then it just kind of unrap open there. Dad started drinking. Your mom started taking anti-depressants.

Heavy drinking was already in the family. His dad struggled with it, so my dad had a front row seat to what he could look like. He knew what he didn't want to become, but he was wired for extremes.

“Remember, big personality, very big emotions, even bigger anger.”

My dad had a reputation, the good-time guy, the life of the party guy, but his life got heavier. And around the time I was nine, his drinking escalated to. With his kids, we learned pretty fast once the sun went down. You did not want to be around dad. At home, as my parents' marriage unraveled, we didn't see that fun version of him anymore.

The anger, volatility, and fear that replaced it became the norm. I knew he'd moved to Hollywood chasing a dream, and that this wasn't the life he had planned. But some nights, it felt like we weren't a life he wanted at all.

My mom sought refuge by numbing herself of medication.

And parenting, for both of my parents, became a thing of the past. And at this point, I wanted to disappear completely. So I did, into upbeat, low stakes, everything is going to be okay, comedies. I wasn't knowing, could one kid be. There were no streaming services or algorithms to endlessly scroll, just good old cable TV.

And sitcoms were on at all times. They became my safe, consistent, hand-to-haul. I found comfort and dozens of TV families, deeply envious of how quickly they could wrap up conflict with a moral and a hug. Oh, mercy. I wanted the Tanner family to reach their hands out and pull me into their happy life.

If they did, I swear, I wouldn't question how three-half Greek girls all have blonde hair and blue eyes. And I won't say a "pap" about how unrealistic the Tanner house is. I watched how sitcoms try to handle the harder stuff, too.

The storylines that usually involves one bad decision, a big lecture and a promise to never touch cigarettes or speed pills again.

All in one prime time slot on Friday night. I don't object to fun, in fact, I'm the grandfunk master of fun. But I don't need to take a drink to have a good time, and need to do you. But there is one episode that actually broke the mold, and ventured into darker territory that doesn't usually fit in a neat 30-minute timeslot.

I'd like to focus today on the life of the sir. Mr. Hunter, I don't want to. You don't want to want. Boring. It's boring.

“That's why the whole feudalism thing didn't work out. They got bored out of their freaking minds.”

What? It's too far. No, you don't just want. I would like to learn something somewhat relevant to our lives. Season 5, episode 18 of Boy Meads World, the drinking episode. Sean and Cory drink, but Sean can't seem to stop. I drink this stuff because I like it. It makes me feel good. Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

I have no problem. Sean shoves Angela against the door. Okay, maybe we don't have to talk about this in front of everybody. Let's just go out into the hall. Go. I don't like that you drink. Call me when you don't.

“See, my life is a sitcom. I thought, and this sitcom is telling me”

that what my dad is doing to me is not okay. My dad was favoring my six-year-old brother at this point. My sister was understandably avoiding him completely from dusk till dawn.

And I, well, I was fighting for some wild burning sense of justice that was either always in me

or forged right there. At night, I knew I was a target too. I would always stand up to him. Yes. And I remember there was specifically one memory I have is you really wanted to play with the rain stick? I was just sorry. It's like I was laughing about it. Like, so it's fighting over a flag of rain stick. It's what the started with. Why don't we love? I remember just being so enchanted. These goddamn Gen Z kids,

they don't know the luxury of a rain stick. Oh my god, this is so cool. Yeah. That was good stuff. But I remember really wanting to play with the rain stick. But dad kept taking it for me to give to you. And I very knew much knew he was drunk and I still pushed back anyway. I don't know. I'd go to help myself. And fully knowing where this is going to lead. But I pushed back to, you know, to be like, I'm playing with the rain stick. Like,

“stop taking away and giving it to Carson. And I think I too, some of the effects, like,”

called out what I felt like his favoritism was at that time to you, because you were the boy and younger. And, you know, I just remember dad dragging me down the hallway to mom's the room, which was a long hallway and taking and like dragging me to mom to like, say, like, our daughter is doing this, but he like grabbed me by the feet and dragged me and he was very drunk. And I was just hitting all over the hallway. And I remember feeling like

Listening to this is hard, because part of me is still blaming myself.

“As if I an 11-year-old child was supposed to stop him from harming me.”

As if not disagreeing with dad would have magically prevented him from shoving me into a coffee table so hard I showed up to school with a black eye and a creative explanation. I was a target. And so was my mom. And after a few years of this, she finally hit her limit and found the strength to kick him out. We were already a five-person one-income household in Los Angeles, living modestly, and this meant we now had two places we could barely afford. Our house and the apartment

my dad rented into Luka Lake. The deal was, we were supposed to visit him on weekends. My parents were officially on the road to divorce, which as far as I knew, wasn't really allowed in sitcoms. I don't know all of the behind-the-scenes conversations. If my mom thought about our safety

or whether we should stop seeing him entirely, but here's what I do know. My brother and sister

went to those weekend visits and I did not. I wanted nothing to do with him. I took stock of my options and decided my safer bed was staying home with my mom. My overly medicated totally checked out, but not angry mom. Overrolling the dice on my dad's unpredictable rage and alcoholism. A real head scratcher of a choice for a child whose biggest concern should have been whether she got shack or house in a game of mash, and if she ended up married to Devin Sawa or so helped

me God. Wow, you look incredible. Do you remember when dad did move out? I think the first place I moved out was to look like.

“Can I crazy? I really did not come around. I don't remember that.”

That's very, I always have so many memories with you in that place. I don't remember you all

ever going there. I think that's when my brain broke when I came to Mom and Dad. I was like, I don't trust these people. I really did not want to be around him. I was really scared of him. I just tried it. I didn't want to be around him at all. I literally, it's funny. I never remember you going in that place. I felt like, I don't know, sad. I felt like I missed out on a lot of stuff because of that. I felt a little mad, probably, at everybody. Why do I feel punished for this?

Eventually, I do have a few memories. I have a few memories of going to this week. I remember going he had that place in Santa Clarita. I don't remember that place. I was like, gosh, yeah. Whoa, I totally forgot about that place. You know what? I remember about the Santa Clarita place, like how they had no furniture. I'm looking back. I don't think I put those pieces together as a kid. It was a much satter image than what you'd normally see in a sitcom, but this is the part where

the audience goes a few years went by like that. My middle school years. My Dad was trying to quit drinking, but I was still terrified of him. My mom's own addiction was getting worse. Safety wasn't exactly a concept I was familiar with. I thought this was just how family's

“worked. Didn't everybody have to walk around on figurative egg shells and literal pill bottles?”

I never told anyone else what was actually happening because adults had proven themselves untrustworthy. And then when I was 12, Fraser ended, and my Dad started working on big blockbuster movies. Finally, the proximity to all the Hollywood glitz and glamour was going to pay off, but then my Dad was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. He was working on Spider-Man. Wow, I didn't know that. And he, they were so busy. And he, he started having some problems and

some issues, but he kept saying, as soon as we go on hiatus, I will go to the doctor. As soon as

we go on hiatus, I'll go to the doctor. As soon as we go on hiatus, and he never did. So when he finally

went to the doctor, he was in stage four cancer. At he knew, I screwed up. I should have gone earlier. And so when he told us, and if you look at there's some pictures, there's a picture of the five of us together and your dad doesn't look really. He doesn't look healthy. Yeah. And we should have all seen it. It was a very treatable cancer, but he ignored the signs. This man, I once

proud to belong to, who later became a screaming, violent, blackout drunk, was now going to die.

And I didn't know what I was supposed to feel. Was I sad? Was I relieved? When someone you love, someone who's hurt you gets the ultimate, karmic plot twist, what do you do next? Where's that? Very special episode. What would Corey Matthews do? I wanted so badly to be a Corey, but I kept finding myself in Sean Hunter's storylines. And right as all of this was happening, something else was unfolding behind the scenes. Something my siblings and I knew absolutely nothing

about. Because apparently the writer's room in charge of my life decided, this season for sweeps,

we're going big. We already had a broken home, two parents with addiction, three kids begging

the universe for one semi-functional parent. And now a stage four cancer diagnosis.

“And then, remember that bombshell from episode one? Around the exact same time as his”

terminal diagnosis, my dad found out he was having twins with someone else. Q the Emmy speeches because it turns out these very special episodes are now season long, arc, baby. After my parent's separation, my dad started seeing someone new. But the idea of bringing new life into this world right as he learned he was on his way out was more than the

relationship could handle. He had decisions to make. And he made interesting choices.

He decided he wasn't going to tell me Casey or Carson. He wasn't going to meet the twin boys, and he was going to ask his entire family to keep this secret for him. My dad, the golden boy, everybody's favorite, had an army in his corner. So he called my aunt K.J. The middle child of his five siblings with a plan. This is what's going to happen. It's moving to Texas because that's where her dad and her sister lived. And I told her that

you would help her. Wow. Yeah. So I said, okay, because she's going to have these twins.

“And I was just in shock. I was just in shock. I said, have you told Gail this?”

You know, and he said, no, I'm not going to tell Gail because if she finds out that I am going to have other children, then when we go to father divorce, she can um flame adultery. And wow. That was the reason he didn't say anything because he was going to go ahead and sign the divorce papers. And then he found out he was sick. I'm not sharing her name out of respect for my brothers, but their mother decided to move

from California to Texas to be closer to her family, which happened to be minutes away from my own, right down the road from my aunt K.J. What are the chances? My aunt Cheryl, dad's youngest sister, also lived in Texas, but a bit farther away. And she got the call. And of course, the oldest, my aunt Cecilia. It was, it was bad. He was sick, and he said, I can't, I can't help with these twins. I, I don't deserve to be their father. I can't even help support them.

Until now, I had no idea these life-changing events happened at the exact same time. What a mind-fuck. Maybe he really was scared, my mom would retaliate after the abuse and take everything from him. And who could really blame her? But, if he had stopped drinking, was genuinely trying to get his shit together, and suddenly finds himself dying, staring down

the barrel of losing it all again. I really can't say if his decision to hide this was slightly, and I mean slightly more understandable, or completely unhinged.

“All I know is, finding out years later that an entire wing of my family kept this enormous secret,”

snapped something in my brain. Nobody knows exactly how or when my mom found out. I don't know if it was before or after he moved back into our house. Yep, you heard that right? The man who once terrified me was moving back in. But this time, with a death sentence hanging over him.

But my parents weren't getting back together. We downsize into a rental, where they awkwardly

“lived in separate rooms. We lived off of my dad's disability, and the spotty checks my mom”

brought in between brief stretches between drug use. By then, my sister had gone off to college. Literally, as far away as she could go, I was gutted, devastated, obsessively messaging her on my space. I understood why she wanted to leave, but she wanted to leave us, alone, with them. The one glimmer of hope I had in all of this was that my dad really did stop drinking when he got diagnosed with cancer. It was like the universe handed him a couple of brutal wake-up calls

all at once, and for the first time, in a long time, he actually answered them. And I still

“hold such a weird, complicated gratitude to cancer for that. He was dying, but I got my dad back.”

His rage, which used to fill a room, softened. His humor came back sharper than ever. He shared stories, and even sometimes when he felt okay enough, pick up his guitar again. Every year, the doctors would tell us that this was his last year, and every year he kept living. But it wasn't really living. We watched him slowly shrink, while multiple rounds of chemo took his appetite and his body until he was skinned in bones. Even though this dad was too weak to work,

couldn't drive or really go anywhere but the hospital. He told me he loved me, and I could actually feel it. My old dad, underneath it, I could also feel guilt radiating off of him, and I knew I was A.O.K. with him feeling that. I just had no clue how many layers that guilt was actually holding. We spent so much time in hospitals over the years that they stopped feeling like emergencies and started feeling like after school activities. Unlike the fresh prints, who willingly

tried to bring holiday cheer to a hospital in season 1 episode 15, we had no choice but to spend so many holidays and birthdays, opening gifts under fluorescent hospital lights, and that sharp, sterile smell that burns itself into your memory forever. During one of those hospital visits, my dad did something he hadn't done before. He looked at me, just me, and said, "I'm so sorry." He didn't say what for, but I knew, and I accepted it. The trauma of what he did didn't magically

disappear, it still affects me to this day, but I knew I could love him. I knew who he was.

My dad had stage four colon cancer for three, four, five years. He was always dying, but never

actually did. Then one day, when I was 17, he sat us down in the living room and said he had something to tell us, and this time it felt different, heavier, scarier. Not the usual, the gang goes to the hospital script we were used to. He said he had twin boys, who were five years old. And suddenly he wasn't dying. Not right now, at least. Woo, what a relief! I'm not losing my only slightly stable parent, not yet, but also, wait, what, what do I do with this? If this were

TV, this is where I'd pause, turn to the camera and say, "All right, life." A few days, maybe weeks,

“go by after the day, life and death collided. I'm texting my cousin, telling her about my secret”

twin brothers as we all do, and she replies, "Oh my God, I'm so glad you finally know."

That's when it really hit me. I have two brothers. Everybody else in the entire family knew about them, some spent time with them, even lived minutes away from them. Everybody knew about these boys. Everybody except Casey, Carson, and me. I felt alone in a way I didn't know was even possible.

Truman Show or Ashton Kutcher was gonna pop out from behind a wall screaming, "You've been emotionally

pumped!" My dad is dying. My mom's on drugs. We are broke. My sister, who is my best friend, is across the country, and now you're telling me, "We are the last to know about this!" Can my nervous system catch a break? But then it dawned on me. If the world had already let all of this other stuff happen to me, and no one was stepping in, was I really surprised that

“a bunch of adults chose to keep my dad's secret without thinking about the impact it would have”

on his kids? I felt like a tipping point. Life was surreal, so build up your walls. If nothing feels real, then it can hurt you. You gaslight yourself into believing what's happening can't possibly be as crazy as it sounds. You just don't let it be real. Because growing up in survival mode made

my brain triage everything. Someone was always sick or spiraling or almost dying, so on the list

of things to emotionally tackle. This one got filed away. Very, very far away. Even though I knew it was not fair to them, my brothers. I told myself one day, I'll meet them. But I knew it wasn't going to be today. Today, we just had to survive. By the time I was 20, my dad had had stage 4, he could die any minute cancer for 7, nearly 8 years. At some point, we all started to feel like, yeah, right? My dad might look like skin and bones, but we knew he was and always had been

the strongest dad alive. Except for that long stretch involving neglect, violent outbursts, and other addiction related complications. So, good fucking luck cancer. And then one day, I got the news. My dad was going into hospice. You might think this is a groundbreaking moment, one I'd remember forever, but that's not really. I still didn't believe it would really happen.

“I thought we'd just live the rest of our lives exactly like this. I honestly don't even remember”

where I was when I found out. My dad's sister, KJ, and her husband, Tommy, came to visit for Christmas that year. We got into LA and found out he was in the hospital. We had just gone to the hospital that day. Oh, I know. I think I know you're going with this. And Cheryl told me yesterday, you were the one that, like, busted him out. Yeah. Yeah, because I didn't know that. Tommy walked in. We, you know, we walked in and he's like, I do not. And he knew he said, I don't want to spend my

last Christmas in the hospital. So, Tommy said, okay, you're not going to. And your uncle went to the nurse and said, he's gone. We're taken in. And she said, you can't. He said, what are you,

“what are you doing for him that we can't do at home? You're doing nothing for him that we can't do”

at home. So we do you take out his IVs or I take out his IVs. Really? So she took out his IVs. We got a wheelchair and we took him out of the hospital. I didn't know that. We took him out. And we had a pretty good Christmas. My dad died at home on January 2nd, 2013. My mom, my sister, my brother, my aunt Cecilia and my uncle Matt were all there when it happened. My aunt Cecilia had just gone through this with her own husband months earlier. So she told us the signs to look for the final

breath. The one that looks like they're suddenly coming back alert, aware, like maybe they're getting better. But really, it's the opposite. It's over. I learned a lot about death that night, not the poetic version, the mundane version, calling the morgue, scheduling someone to pick up the body, curling up and bed that night in the same house where someone you love just died. My dad was complicated to say the least. Messy, charismatic, selfish, a cult of personality,

the most incredible man I've ever known and sometimes a fucking monster. My heart ached all at once

for what was and what could have been. If so many things had been different. As if I ever had any say in the matter. If I did, you bet your ass I'd have Steve Erkel whip me up a time machine faster than you can say, Stefan Erkel. I couldn't change the past, but I still had the future.

into action mode, and in the process became sober for the first time in years. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I had a parent who was trying to take care of things of us. Maybe something good would come out of this overwhelming, complicated, devastating loss. Maybe hope was possible for the Browns. Then reality came back in, because there is so much

more to this story. Things I've never talked about, and things I didn't even know until now.

“The level of truth and sadness in our lives I think sometimes makes people really uncomfortable,”

and so you need, I mean you know more about common. I mean I think I didn't know why I'm comedian, because it's just my series of jokes. I mean it can't be too much, and I think having it without kind of kind of comedy on it wouldn't be true to who you are. Exactly. Here's a song, father, Christmas, the Lebanese are screwed. Rock the sound,

and Uncle Bill, a guy I'd never do. Everybody knows but me is a production of companion arts

“and next chapter podcasts. This episode was written by me, Holly Brown. The cold open scene you”

heard at the beginning of this episode is a fictionalized version of very real moments from my life. Scripted by our lead producer, editor, music supervisor, and sound designer, Pete Musto. It featured Danny Ross playing my dad, Valerie Tossie playing my mom, Maddie Worth as my

sister Casey, Garrett West Camp as my brother Carson, Casey Rose as me, Kevin Titt as the doctor,

and Pete Musto as our show's announcer. Our associate producer is Elana Nevens, original theme music by Kyle Murdock. Our show artwork was created by Erin Hill. Our video producer is Emily Reeves. Our videographer is Dalton Polivka. Our animator is Justin Cortese. Our marketing team is Tink Media and our executive producers are Jeremiah Tittle and also me, Holly Brown. New episodes of everybody knows but me come out every Wednesday. Follow the show on

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, youtube.com/everybodynosepodcast or wherever you get great content like ours.

“Do you have a story of family secrets or darkly funny drama that you want to share?”

We want to hear it. Email us at [email protected]. Follow me at Holly Brown comedy and the show on social media at everybodyknows.com. And come back next week to find out what crazy hijinks the brown family is in for, and hear more of the stories we tell ourselves to survive. I know you. But this year I ask a special gift. The only one that's on my list please send it. Don't forsake your work. And the people that you've blessed. I need you more than ever.

And they're sitting on your knee. Every set of falls don't fly yourself away. From me. It's set of falls don't fly yourself away from me. You're much too young for that. Look around and see. I just wrote to let you know. It'd be sad to see you go. At this set of falls don't fly yourself away. But this set of falls don't fly yourself away. Next chapter podcast.