#or about tradition or about anything and that they didn't raise kids the righteous way so basically i'm gonna have to hide my tattoos

[missshame]

my religious/conservative uncle is coming at our place for a bit more than a week so I guess I'm gonna avoid this apartment again

[forbelobog]

gepard's relationship with his parents is...not the best. and by parents i mean his father. the landau name has a lot of prestige in belobog, there was a lot already on gepard's shoulders before he was even a toddler, being the first born son. his military training started early - much earlier than should have been allowed - and nothing less than exceptional was acceptable by his father. the abuse was sometimes physical, but the vast majority of it was verbal and mental. their father would berate his children if they didn't meet his absurdly high expectations.

his mother, while kind and nurturing, did little to interfere if his father got a little too rowdy, a little too harsh, a little too mean which, in my book, makes her guilty by association. still, he would have much rather had her in his life than not, and he loves her dearly. where his father was cold and efficient, his mother was warm and doting. she babied gepard whenever she got the chance, him being her only son.

to gepard, his father is a righteous man of dignity and respect, but deep down even he knows the way he was raised - the way serval was raised - was harsh. there were many times serval put herself between gepard and their father just to save gepard from their father's ire. her desire to protect him resonated with him a lot, and he took it to heart. his desire to protect not just her, but the people of belobog, is largely her influence. he does something similar to this for their younger sister whenever he can. when serval "left" the family name, or stopped speaking to their father, he felt a little...betrayed? it felt like she turned her back on gepard specifically, but with time and discussion he's come to realize she had to do what she felt was best for herself, and gepard supports her now as best he can. but their father really planted a lot of seeds in his brain that almost kept him from seeing why serval did what she did in the first place.

gepard's feelings toward his father are difficult to say the least. on the one hand, he believes the man was just trying to instill values in his children, and make them achieve their best, even when it was difficult. on the other, gepard still tenses whenever his father is around, and he knows that's not how a parent should make their child feel. his biggest fear, for a long time, wasn't death or pain or the dark or anything like that - it was disappointing his father. in fact, death was something he was expected to observe. since he was old enough to understand, he was told about the glory of dying on the battlefield, the honor of giving your life for belobog and the supreme guardian. his own self worth suffered because of this.

landau senior is...traditional. gepard is expected to carry on the landau name, meet a woman, have children, the whole nine yards. gepard has yet to tell his father that he's gay, and considers the idea of never telling him at all. it's hard to predict what the man's response will be.

in short, gepard's father was and still is a big ol' swinging dick, and his mother - while caring and supportive - made excuses for the way her kids were raised.

[4evamc]

Misha Tweets

Transcript

Ed Levine: Welcome to Special Sauce 2.0. Serious Eats podcast about food and life. Every week on Special Sauce we begin with Ask Kenji, where Kenji Lopez-Alt, Serious Eats Chief Culinary Consultant, gives the definitive answer to the question of the week that a serious eater like you has sent us.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt: Generally, sort of like delicate leafy herbs like cilantro, parsley, basil, they tend to not be very good in their dried counterparts. Thyme, rosemary, oregano, they actually work pretty well in their dried forms.

EL: After Ask Kenji, a conversation with our guest, today in house, Misha Collins. He is, of course, an actor best known for his role as the angel, Castiel. Did I pronounce that right?

Misha Collins: Castiel.

EL: On the CW television series Supernatural, and has now written with his wife Vicki Collins, The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time.

EL: Now it's time to meet Misha Collins. He's, of course, an actor best known for his role as the angel, Castiel?

Misha Collins: Castiel.

EL: On the CW television series Supernatural, which has had an insane run, right? It's like 2008 to 2019.

MC: Yeah, we're in our 15th season right now.

EL: That never happens.

MC: No, it doesn't. I don't know why they kept us on the air.

EL: Collins is also the co-founder and board president of Random Acts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding and inspiring acts of kindness around the world. He's also a published poet. Very impressive dude.

MC: Thank you.

EL: And has now written with his wife Vicky Collins, The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time. So welcome to Special Sauce, Misha.

MC: I'm very happy to be here.

EL: So the first question I always ask, in your case it's particularly relevant, is tell us about life at your family table growing up. Your family table was not exactly traditional.

MC: That is true. I was raised by a single mom. My parents separated when I was three years old and I visited my father on every other weekend for most of my childhood, but he wasn't really a cornerstone of my upbringing. But my mother and my brother and our dog were a very tight family unit, and we lived in Western Massachusetts primarily growing up and moved a lot. We were in a new home I would say on average once every nine months or so. I think I lived in 15 places by the time I was 15.

EL: So you were like an Army brat, only you were a different kind of brat.

MC: Right. An Army brat without the parents building up a pension plan.

EL: Right.

MC: Another thing I think that an Army brat family has is a cadre possibly, of other kids that are going through the same experience, and I was generally going to a new school every year and meeting kids that were in fairly stable childhoods and who knew one another and who were familiar with the school, so I was always approaching schools and new towns-

EL: You were the permanent new kid.

MC: Yeah, with a little bit of trepidation, and trying to figure out how I could ingratiate myself to the new communities and the new schools. My mother was very eccentric and iconoclastic. She talked about the revolution a lot. I was born in 1974, and we lived through a tumultuous political time in our country, and she didn't want to have us grow up being conventional young men, so she would do things like dress me up in pink tights and paint my nails and send me off to Cub Scouts. Which I think in 2020 might actually fly, but in a working class community in Massachusetts, when you show up at Cub Scouts in the boys' locker room with nail polish and long hair-

EL: Not so much.

MC: And pink tights, you're ostracized. So, I kind of had to find a way to blend in and disappear a little bit as a kid in new schools, and I think that it built a lot of character in a lot of ways, and made me more resilient and adaptable and independent than I otherwise would have been. But at the same time, there's a certain lack of stable foundation that was challenging.

EL: I had not the same kinds of travails in my own childhood, but you do become resilient and eminently adaptable, but it also has a cost. It exacts a cost that you can't deal with as you're going through it, but you almost have to deal with it at some point in order to really resolve some of the issues that came out of it, I assume.

MC: Yeah. I'm sure you've found the same thing, but I feel like I'm a 45-year-old man and I'm still discovering things and unpacking them and repairing them, I think. There are definitely things that you take away from a childhood like that that give you real strength.

One of the things that I love about my childhood is that I know that you don't need money to be happy and you can get by on just about nothing, and that gives you, I think, quite a bit of power going into the world because you don't feel beholden to the comforts of ... I don't feel beholden to the comforts of money. I'm okay with scarcity. At the same time, I don't know that I was really terribly good at connecting with people or making friends, and I probably still struggle with that.

EL: Yeah. So, you wrote this amazing piece in The Times, and you wrote that “times were often lean, but one luxury we always had an abundance was food, even if it came by the five finger discount. My mother taught me how to steal peaches from the Stop and Shop grocery store when I was four. We were stealing from the man. It was a justified rebellion against an unjust system.”

EL: So, whoa. Okay, those sentences made me stop in my tracks. That's pretty intense. I was actually thinking about this movie, Shoplifters. I don't if you've ever seen it.

MC: Oh yeah. Yeah.

EL: Because in there the father figure, who turns out not to be the father, teaches the kids how to steal so they can eat. And so, wow. I mean, talk about that. Talk about getting conflicting messages from your mother. It's like, whoa.

MC: It's funny, because now hearing you read that, it paints a portrait of a parent who was raising children without a moral compass, and I think that was not at all the case. This was righteous rebellion. We were stealing ... We would never have stolen from the local co-op, but this was from a corporate entity, and these corporations were out to exploit the proletariat. I actually felt the exhilaration of feeling like I was part of a rebellion at that point, and frankly indoctrinated into that at a really young age. At the age of four, I was aware that it was us against them. We were the little guys and that we had a justice on our side. At the same time, it's a complicated thing to be training a little four year old how to steal.

MC: I have a very distinct memory of the fruit island in the Stop and Shop, and me grabbing a peach. This was the first time that I remember ever shoplifting anything. I grabbed the peach and then I ducked down behind the island, and my mother said, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't do it like that. You have to take it. You have to be very calm. You have to not look around. You can't show that you're distressed at all or that you're nervous, and then you put it in your backpack." Then we would go up to the cash register and we would pay for some of the groceries, so that we were distracting them, and then scoot out the door.

EL: And you just, I assume, felt that there was nothing particularly abnormal about this because you had nothing to compare it to.

MC: Right. Yeah, this was my normal.

EL: Yeah. You weren't stealing from somebody or something that needed the money, you were stealing as part of an ethos. Right?

MC: Right.

EL: As part of like, this is the way we work the system to fight the man.

MC: Right, precisely. Yeah.

EL: You also wrote, and I'm going to quote a couple of more sentences from the piece because it was so beautiful, "My upbringing taught me you didn't need money to be happy, that you didn't have to play by the rules, that the whole world was just begging to be explored. But now by the hindsight of fatherhood and from the comfort of a therapist's couch, I see that while my childhood had been rife with adventure, it also had been lonely and frightening and wanting." So you were always reconciling those two things, weren't you?

MC: I wouldn't say I was always reconciling them, because as a child I struggled at times. I felt sad and lonely, but I didn't think that it was because of my childhood.

EL: Got it.

MC: I thought my childhood was full of adventure, and I was proud of my childhood. Up until when I was 25 I don't think I looked back on it and thought that there had been any damage done by that.

EL: Right, and that there was anything dysfunctional about it.

MC: Right. And on balance, my childhood was incredibly ... I think I had a secure attachment with my mother. My mother was there. She was loving. She never failed to convey that love to me and my brother. So she served as my anchor emotionally, and that was unfailing. But because the rest of our life was so fractured and so nomadic, she was my only anchor.

EL: Yeah, because as you said, how do you establish connections with any kids when you're moving every few months?

MC: Right, and when you're showing up at school in pink tights at a working class school you're also getting alienated by your peers, and so the other kids actually ended up being kind of frightening to me.

EL: I read your Wikipedia page, and somehow you escaped and you ended up at a prep school, Northfield Mount Hermon, and then the University of Chicago. What a narrative your life has been. How did that happen?

MC: Now that you're asking the question, I'm reflecting on it possibly for the first time. But one thing that I know happened as a result of my childhood and and partly as a result of feeling like I wasn't fitting in with other kids, is that I was a smart kid and I could win the favor of my teachers. So when I was in school, I did very well in school. It was like the thing I could throw myself into and be safe and get some accolades.

EL: Some positive feedback.

MC: And some positive reinforcement. So I did well in school, and we lived in the town of Northfield for a little while, which was where Northfield Mount Hermon is. They had a program that had been implemented from the inception of the school where local day students could get pretty much a full ride if they were in need, and we were in need, so I could go to a fancy high school for free as a day student. Then I ended up basically getting the same deal at the University of Chicago.

EL: Amazing.

MC: Yeah. At the time, I thought I was going to go into politics, so I was sort of on a very clear path. And that wanting to go into politics was also born of my childhood and of my mother talking about politics all the time, and making me and my brother very aware of the plight of people in need in our country and around the world. It felt like that was the right place for me.

EL: Yeah. Again, and this is the final sentences I'm going to read from the Times piece, because it gets us back to food. Which is, "I recently found an old journal in a box in the back of my closet, and on the page from a decade ago where I had taken inventory of the good and bad of my upbringing the word cooking is circled and underlined with urgency in the plus column, as if I was thinking that food had been the cornerstone of happiness in my youth." Elaborate on that. I mean, that's an amazing statement.

MC: I think as a nomadic family, we moved around and we brought with us what we could, and in terms of material objects, there was very little that was a through line. But we did bring with us from place to place the tradition of sitting down for family meals every night.

EL: Even if you were in a teepee or in a park.

MC: Right. Even if we were sitting on a log in the woods in the rain, we would be sitting down and eating together. There were no distractions. There was never a television on, and there was no coercion in getting to the dinner table. There was no question about it. Not because it was an edict from an authority figure, but because we all just coalesced around dinner and loved it.

EL: You needed it.

MC: Yeah.

EL: It was a permanent form of glue for the family, right?

MC: Yeah. It really was important to us. We would go spend Christmas with my mother's mother, my grandmother, and she was a cook as well, and food was a centerpiece of that family interaction. And for me now that I have kids, I notice that when I'm feeling like a guilty or absent father, the way that I most quickly show my affection and love for my kids is I just make them food. It's like the way that I know to convey to a child everything's safe, everything's okay, and I love you.

EL: Yeah. But in 21st century America, and maybe all around the world, it's hard to do that, right? There are lots of pressures that are forcing people not to eat together.

MC: Right.

EL: Both parents are working, kids are all over the place. But you obviously, I think as a result of your upbringing, it was important when you had a family and a wife that you made that same time for dinner.

MC: Yeah. It feels very important to me. I think sometimes I'm actually kind of maybe forcing my agenda of cooking on my kids. Like, "Come on guys, let's make something in the kitchen." A lot of times they want to go outside and I want to work in the kitchen, and I have to check myself and say, "Okay, we'll go play a little bit of soccer first before we get to canning the pears."

EL: Right. Because the act of eating a meal and preparing it is imbued with so much more meaning for you than it is for them.

MC: Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah.

EL: So you end up being an actor, and I'm just assuming that like all actors, you struggled for many years before you found yourself on the set of Supernatural. So, tell us in a few sentences the arc of your acting career.

MC: Well as I mentioned earlier, my intention after college was to go into politics. I interned at the White House and I got a job at NPR in Washington, DC, and I was really disappointed with what I saw at the White House, and I thought, "Oh God, I have to come up with a whole new plan here." I thought it was going to be the best and the brightest minds under one roof. This was the Clinton administration. And instead what I found was the halls were filled with people who were sycophants, whose parents had donated money to the campaign. They were all yaysayers. There was no real discourse about political ideas, which of course is actually what you need in an administration. You need people who are going to be in lock step and are going to support your decisions, but I was too young and naive to know that.

So when I saw it, I thought, "This is not for me." I thought, "I will try to find another way that I can have an impact." I think there's a lot of hubris in this, but I thought, "I know what I'll do. I'll become an actor. I'll get famous and then I'll parlay my celebrity into some sort of political influence."

EL: Oh, because that happens all the time.

MC: Right. I mean really, really completely naive, and totally full of myself. Then I moved to LA and I thought it was going to take a couple of years to attain a certain level-

EL: To become rich and famous.

MC: To be rich and famous. And it took a long time to become-

EL: It took a decade, probably.

MC: To become moderately comfortable and a C-list celebrity. But somewhere along the line I stopped thinking about that end goal of I'm on this path so that I can have influence, blah blah blah, and I just started becoming an actor, and I was just acting for the sake of acting and not for this aspirational, high-minded goal.

Then a couple of years ago we got a new president, and that lit a fire under me. It was actually during the campaign when I started to think, "Oh, Trump might get elected. Oh, this is serious," and then my C-list celebrity started to come into play and I thought, "All right, well I can use the platform that I have."

EL: By the way, I think it's at least B-minus, okay?

MC: Well you, as everyone knows, grade on a curve, so thank you for your charity. In a strange way it feels to me a little bit like it's come full circle, and now that the show's ending and after 15 seasons I'm asking the question, "Okay, how can I be of use in the world?" I don't know what's next for me. I don't know if I spend a lot of time on television sets after this or not. I'm trying to do some soul searching and figure out what I really want to be when I grow up. But that's, in a nutshell, my path.

EL: It's an amazing path, and you accomplished much more as an actor than almost any actor I know. To be a working actor and to have made some money doing it is actually an incredible accomplishment, and maybe it's to the resilience you discovered you had in your childhood.

MC: Yeah, I think possibly. I think obviously there's a lot of dumb luck that comes into play. It's not my fault that the show that I'm on has been on for 15 seasons or has the devoted fan base that it has.

EL: There are conventions for Supernatural. I notice this-

MC: We have conventions. There are tattoos with face on them. I mean, it's hard not to be full of yourself in this context. But yeah, we have a really, really devoted fan base, and it's quite remarkable to be a part of.

What was it? I think it was Freakonomics at one point. Maybe it was in the book Freakonomics, but they said that pursuing a career in acting is like pursuing a career as a drug dealer. It's very, very difficult to be one of the kingpins, to be successful in the field.

EL: Right.

MC: The odds are so bad that it takes a certain personality that's defective that wants to even pursue that in the first place, because 99 out of 100 people are going to fail at that and then you're just going to be a low level street corner drug dealer, or barely getting food on your table as a background actor.

EL: Yeah. Well Misha, we have to leave it right here for this episode of Special Sauce, but you're going to stick around and tell us all about your two terrific kids, West and Maison.

MC: We just say Mason.

EL: West and Mason.

MC: Yes, we anglicize the French spelling.

EL: And your wife Vicki, and your family collaboration on The Adventurous Eaters Club. Thank you for spending so much time with us on Special Sauce.

MC: Thank you so much for having me, and I can't wait to talk about the book.

Listen to the podcast here