Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On A Carlin Home Companion 20160817

Did he feel that the community had not done a good job and i think he was relieved that i didnt turn out to be a criminal or a drug addict. I wanted to tell you its been wonderful having you here in austin. Stories i tell myself makes a Great Fathers day gift. Also, we appreciate you opening up your heart and sharing the stories and the kind of candor that you bring to it and its been a wonderful experience doing this with you. Thank you. [applause] a few of you have other questions so he will be doing the book signing so come up and get a copy. Thank you book tv for hosting us. [inaudible conversation] book tv is in private time every night in august with a series of programs focusing on a new subject. Wednesday evening a focus on 20th century u. S. History. Throughout this month we are showing book tv programs in prime time. In case you are not familiar, book to be on cspan2 takes our Public Affairs programming and focuses on the latest Nonfiction Book releases through author interviews and book discussions. Our signature programs are indepth, its a life three audit were look at and authors look. Indepth errors the first sunday of every month at noon eastern. After words is a oneonone conversation between an author of a newly released Nonfiction Book in the interviewer who is either a german list, Public Policy maker our legislature familiar with the topic. We will take you across the country where authors talk about their latest books. Book tv is the only National Network devoted to Nonfiction Books. Television for serious readers. Our focus on memoirs continues on book tv. Now look into the private life of comedian George Carlin. This is about an hour 20 minutes house the Water Quality . Should we first discussed this . It seems to be a big topic here in the country. We are waiting on our queue. I dont know what that means. We will go ahead and get started. The morning. Thank you all for coming. Today i think you will enjoy this very much. My name is josh wheeler and i am the director of the Thomas Jefferson center. We are the host of this program tonight. Its a source of great pride for us at the center that this is the 22nd virginia festival of the book. The center has been involved in one way or another with all 22 festivals. This is something that we hope to continue to do for many years to come because i think one of the best ways to combat censorship or the desire to censor a speech we dont like is to remind people of the many benefits that we received from free speech. By having this kind of festival celebrating the right of free speech, it is the way to remind folks that its a small price to pay when we sometimes hear something we might not want to hear. All the benefits of being able to explore any concept without any fear of government reprisal. Hooray for the First Amendment. I know 22 years ago it was in this room i discovered i needed to wear glasses because at some point i found myself doing this number where they would asked me to read some housekeeping details so i would bring this up and i asked that you be patient with me with my glasses on. I do want to tell you that this is the virginia festival of the book which is the product of the Virginia Foundation for the humanities. Ive been asked to ask everyone in the audience to please silence their cell phones, not just for us but this is going to be reported and if you would like to tweet about this event, you can do so at va book 2016 and i say that as if i have any idea what that means. If youre going to tweet about this event, include me at kelly, underscore carlin. She could be speaking a foreign language. I have no idea. Kelly is a very proficient tweeter. How many followers do you have now . Almost 30,000. Supporting the festival. Its free of charge, not free of cost. Please remember to go online and give back or pick up a giving envelope from the information desk and support your festival so we can sustain it for many years to come. Please fill out program evaluations. This is useful information to help keep the festival free and open to the public. After this event, at the end of this program we will have books available for sale right down here and we will have our author sign a copy if you would like. We are here today to talk about this book. A carlin home companion, growing growing up with george. Well talk a little bit about that in the future. The center has been involved in many of these programs. Ive had the great leisure to moderate them, a number of them. I realize though, probably the third or fourth time that people werent here to hear me. They were actually more interested in hearing about the book or the author and so i have learned that the best questions actually come from the audience themselves. I am going to very early on stop asking the questions and make the envelope, make the microphone available to you folks and we will bring the microphone around to anybody who has a question. I told kelly that i can ask questions that if this audience doesnt have any but i have never found that to be a problem. And i can blah blah blah for anyone. Me tell you a little bit about our author today. Kelly carlin has written for film, tv and most recently the stage. Her critically acclaimed solo show, her masters degree in counseling psychology from the graduate institute informs her work as an author, speaker, workshop leader and citizen. She lives in l. A. With her husband and their jack russell terrier stella. The dreams of living somewhere with a lot fewer cars someday. As long as you avoid 29 north i think charlottesville will be perfect. We you join me in welcoming kelly carlin. [applause] i should also say, im very proud of the fact that she has on the Thomas Jefferson ctr. Board of trustees peerage she is a strong believer in free speech and we are thrilled to have her to help direct the centers efforts. But, first question, what compels you to write your book . Well its interesting, ive been wanting to write and tell my story for about 15, well now that would be 17 years. Its funny how the time does that. My mom died in 97 and after she died pretty suddenly and pretty quickly she was diagnosed with liver cancer and dead five weeks later. It was a huge shock and wakeup call for me as a human and an artist. I had this wild and crazy life. I was 3435 at the time and i had already felt like i have lived seven lives. I wanted to tell my story, my survivor story because at 35 i was a very different person than i was at 25 or at 20 or a 15 or at ten. Theres just so many different iterations of my life with my family and my life as an adult or what i was pretending to be an adult at least. I wanted to tell my survivor story and i knew yes, okay, its a little interesting, i happened to be George Carlins daughter and part of my story is quite fun with my dad and my mom in the 60s and 70s and in the 80s and all the way through until my dads death, but my parents had drug and alcohol issues when i was a child until i was 12 my mother was an alcoholic and almost died, she got sober. There was a lot of money and cocaine and fame in my house and all the weird stuff that comes along with that and some Great Stories along with that that maybe ill share today. I have lived through that, our family lived through that, my mothers Breast Cancer my fathers heart disease, i had gotten involved in abusive relationships, my own drug addiction, panic attacks and i have been through a lot of stuff. I felt that because i had gotten through it and found a way to get my feet back on the ground and find my center that i really wanted to share that with the world. I wanted to pay it forward in some way. I was so lucky to grow up in the family i grew up in even though it was chaotic for many years but i understood my privilege. I wanted to share that. I wanted to share my experience, strength and hope. Thats part of the reason why i wanted wanted to write the book. Now that ive written it and ive been sitting with it and looking back on it and talking a lot about it, i also see that being an only child, growing up in the shadow of fame, growing up in a family where the adults chaos was in charge of my life until i was 12 years old, he didnt feel like i had a real voice or place in the worlds and i see now that telling my story is away for me to heal that and say i exist, im here, i matter like we all do. Every single one of us has a story to tell so i can see on some level thats one of the themes in the book, invisibility, visibility is one of the themes i talk about. I see now thats part of it, something about being seen and heard which all children want ultimately. Here i am being seen and heard big time. I want this program to be very much about your books because its a fascinating book as you say, its a survivors tail but a big part of that is your parents. Youre a writer and youve written for stage and screen and publications and i can only assume that you inherited that in some part from your father who loved the written word. I actually inherited it from the carlin family itself. Thats what i was going to ask. Did it start with your father . Theres a great story in the book about perhaps where he got his love. Yes, i have to to find out where that story is. The carlin family were irish, gift of the gap and all that stuff. My dads father, my dad didnt really know his father, his father couldnt metabolize ethanol very well as my father used to say and when he wasnt drinking he was a brilliant man. He was a bring big advertising guy in new york city and sold advertising for all the big papers, Like National level salesman, brilliant salesman and also one speaking contest, Dale Carnegie carnegie and stuff like that. National speaking awards, he had a real gift for it. My dad never knew him because my dads mother mary, when my dad was about three months old took my father and his older brother patrick and snuck down the fire escape because she was tired of being battered around by patrick senior and patrick senior had started beating around Young Patrick and she wanted to protect my father from that. So mary was also an amazing storyteller. She was someone who would take a bus ride downtown and back uptown and have a full story about who was on the bus, beginning, middle and and, punchline and the whole story. She was a very funny and witty woman. Theres a story here of my dad, here, ill just read a little bit. On may 12, 1937, George Dennis Patrick Carlin was born. Eight weeks later after months of trying to make the marriage work, mary sneaked out of the fire escape in the middle of the night with her two young boys leaving Patrick Carlin senior and his rage for good. She had seen the damage that her husband had already done to little patrick and she was not going to let sweet george be another victim. This time it stuck. She tried to leave him a few times before. Even though patrick tried to woo her back, she held strong. George never saw his dad again. In 1945 his father died of a massive heart attack at the age of 57. My dad was eight years old. Without a man around to keep my dad out of trouble on the streets of the Upper West Side of manhattan, or what he and his friends like to call irish harlem, mary took her job as both mother and father very seriously. She looked for ways to shape and control Young Georges mind in life. She succeeded in only one area, a love of language and words. Mary encouraged my dad to look at words he didnt know in the dictionary and use them in conversation. One morning young george, wanting to show off a new word he had learned excitedly asked his mother if she had perused the paper that morning. Anticipated her approval. Slowly she turned, sharpened her gaze onto him and said i have not. Actually ive only given it a cursory glance. George sure grand, turned around and marched right back to the dictionary to learn the new word should cursory. She loved to have the upper hand in every situation but she did. She encouraged my dads love of of language big time. My dad encouraged me as well with the love of language. He used to do this thing well into my 30s which was very irritating, if i was with him and we were with people in conversation and i would pronounce a word wrong he would slip me a piece of paper later with the correct pronunciation written out like it does in the dictionary. I get it, dad was trying to protect me and make sure i sounded smart but in your 30s, at some point youre like dad, im just feeling a little, not so great about that. Id love to read a little bit of the beginning of my book to jump back a little bit. Theres something about my life that has always felt faded in some way and i just want to read a little bit about that. Carlin legend holds that all it took for me to come in to the world was a little sperm, little egg, little scotch, a little weed and something called the limbo. Weve been trying to get pregnant for months with no luck explained my mom to me, 7yearold kelly waiting for my dad to pack. Ill get a postcard from the hotel you were conceived in and send it to you. By the word conceived, i looked at my mom and she quickly filled in the details. You see, we were down in new orleans, it mustve been october 62. We were at a club hanging out with some musicians we met when someone announced the limbo contest. It sounded like fun and so i did it. Next thing i knew i was pregnant mom didnt mention the weed or the scotch in her telling of my fateful beginning because she didnt need to. They were given. Dad had been smoking weed and drinking beer since he was 14 and mom started sneaking sips of her daddys drink around the same age. As far as the limbo go, im not sure about the mechanics of it all but it didnt matter. It clearly worked and i am here. For the two years leading up to the night of limbo, my mom mom and my dad had been constant companions, starving artists and comrades in arms chasing my dads comedy dreams. They did held gigs, packed and unpack their suitcases hundreds of times and traveled to almost every state in the country in their 57 dodge dart. My mom loved playing the role of on the road partner in crime to my dads rebel artist on a mission mission. She was dads lover, party girl and press agent all rolled into one. His full partner in life and always his best audience. You could always hear her great laugh above the den of clinking glasses and mumbling patrons in every club they visited. Because dad was a complete unknown, on on some nights she was the only person in the audience. One night in baltimore no one was in the audience. Not even my mom. My dad asked the club owner, exactly why am i going on and he said because you know, if people come in i want them them to know we have some entertainment. I hear dad killed that night. During those lean years, dad paid his dues but also got lucky. One night lenny bruce caught his act in chicago, loved what he saw and introduced him to his manager, marie becker. This was huge. My dad worshiped lenny. Taking every opportunity to soak up lennys presence, my, my mom and dad would drive from new york to the horn club in chicago just to see him perform. One night while they were there, lenny got arrested halfway through his set. This had become the norm. That night the cops did not like the use of his word, ill not say that because were doing tv here. Lets say a very descriptive word. Looking to hassle the club, the cops began to ask everyone for their ids. When they they got to my dad he defiantly told them yeah, i dont believe in identification. In the cops promptly threw him into the back of the paddy wagon with lenny. When my dad proudly told lenny what he had done lenny looked at him and said what are you mark . My mom chased that paddy wagon by foot all the way to the Police Station that night and bailed them out of jail. Growing up surrounded by stories like these and living through many others myself, ive always felt that my familys journey has unfolded like some kind of mythological legend. Our lives together have felt shaped by a forge or maybe even what my dad calls the big electron. Something was calling us fourth and interweaving exactly the right People Places and things to form one amazing life together. It just always seemed so dustin. So maybe we should talk a little bit about the First Amendment. What . I do want to do that and we can talk about that now or id like to talk about the next phase after your conception, one of the things i love about, so i will definitely talk about how we met and i want to share that anecdote but one of the things i love about your book is, did you spend some time on the chapters . Of course, i think one of the enlightening terms is the three mex musketeers. That chapter. That part of your life. I thought maybe you could share a little bit about that. Absolutely. I was in only child so there only three of us and early on, at some point, my, my dad began calling us the three musketeers. All for one, one for all and that became a real theme well, when youre an only child of a tightknit family, you feel like it sometimes the three of you against the world and it fell like that sometimes in our own lives, especially in the 70s when my dad was considered a hippie freak and it felt like the whole world was against us on some level but this also became a theme in our life in a sense that if you grow up in a dysfunctional family, and im sure none of you here can understand what im talking about, theres a sense of loyalty to your family that happens and theres a willingness to keep your family secrets for your family and keep them protected because you love them and its the right thing to do in the moment because you want to protect your families reputation and you dont want to tell strangers whats going on at your house. Theres this sense of that in my family and there was some crazy stuff going on in our household, im just looking here for a little bit of this. It was a great sense of belonging in that way. It also kept our alcoholic family secret and i dont think helped us in the long run. A lot of crazy stuff went on in my house around that but theres a warmth to it that i do love and adore and actually i went to my book launch in l. A. , someone came to me and gave me a little hot wheels car that had the three musketeers on it. Its on my little altar. I covered it so much. I like to give a little read about kind of what we carlins were doing doing in the summer of 1972, to give you an idea of how important it was to be the three musketeers. In the summer of 1972, mom and i went on the road with dad. The road was always a fun adventure. Some of my earliest memories from the road are waking up in a hotel room with both my parents dead to the world and spending the next few hours coloring and watching cartoons and staring out the window at the city below. Finally when i was starving i would nudge my parents awake. Dad would run down to a local diner or store or as he got more successful, room service and buy a bunch of those mini boxes of race crispies and a quart of milk. He then would carefully take out his pocket knife, cut open those teeny boxes and magically transform them into an instant bowl, abracadabra breakfast was served. Although i had never heard it, im absolutely sure that it was one of those mornings that my dad heard that famous nap crackle you. Our first stop that summer was kent state. My dad took me to the memorial for the four college kids that have been shot by the National Guard a few years before. He explained they had been protesting against the war, standing up for what they believed in and that the government had silenced them by shooting them. This was one of those daddys big teaching moments. He wanted me to understand the importance of people standing up for what they believed in especially those who are willing to stand up to their government to make their point. He explained how the government had always silenced those who did not have a voice to begin with, blacks, late native americans especially and how young White American girls and boys were in that category too. I felt there was no safe place for anyone. Being a nineyearold only child and one who felt a need to be more mature than my years, i, i acted as calm and cool and collected as i could. I tried to show my dad i understood the lessons of civics and morality that he was trying to teach me and it struggle struggled to dow material while connecting with the enormous audience of over 10,000 people. She began to do his new routine, the seven were you can never say on television, which he just recorded on his third album class clown. The album wouldnt be released for another few months, so im pretty sure he didnt know what he had signed up for. Its both hilarious and an intellectual examination of the usage of language and culture. However ithe culture. However it consisted of words according to my dad that they will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from the winning the war. And the seven dirty words, you know what they are. [applause] some poor woman outside of charlottesville watching this live just a stroke. I apologize to her famil apolog. Okay, good. Because summerfest was a meeting venue it could be heard throughout the fairgrounds. Meaning it could be heard by lots of moms and dads and little kids. So there was my dad on stage. Most of the audience was loving it. Thats when the promoter said the cops are here complaining about the language and they are going to arrest george the minute he gets offstage. I guess when my dad said that he would like to everyone in the audience come at a nice midwestern police and took some offense at that knowing he was carrying drugs in his pockets both grass and coke my mom knew she had to think fast. She grabbed a glass of water and walked onto the stage. Dad was very confused but took the water and mom whispered to him exit stage left. He exited and we all quickly hustled to addressing romantic locked the door. I watched as mom removed a rather large bag of cocaine from her purse and her dad took out the joint from his pocket and handed them to the promoter. The promoter was trying to keep things calm when all of a sudden it sounded as if a gun had gone off. I let into my mothers arms and began crying hysterically. As she combed me down someone said it was probably just a balloon. Someone had popped the balloon. Mom and dad, dad, the promoter a nervous laugh, but i was unhinged, terror through my body i couldnt breathe. I felt like i was going to die. Within a few seconds the police man cuffed him and ice cream. I was assured that i would never see him again. I didnt know how long it took that she finallfor she finally n enough that she could get my dad out of jail. Luckily my mom knew what to do because of the arrest in chicago in 1961. I spent the rest of the weekend distracting myself in something that as a Southern California girl i had never seen before in aboveground pool. I almost didnt know what to do with it when the show gets broadcast and the irony of course is the protection of the free expressions in the program and then it will be a nice education moment. There are seven words you cant say on television. Thats the choice that can be made because technically, and this is the focus of the First Amendment case in which your fathers routine was the focus. For those of you who dont know, theres a very important First Amendment case involving this routine which was played on the radio. Basically, it is the Supreme Court came up with a new exception to free speech. If its on broadcast spectrum saying the government has greater control, has a greater discretion to regulate the content if its something thats broadcast over the broadcast spectrum i won wont go into te details of what that reasoning is. But this routine in terms of showing the arbitrary of being able to regulate the indecent speech it wasnt obscene. That was the new category of speech, this indecent speech he was proud of that. [laughter] its good to ask about that. How do you feel about his routine and technically i guess in some ways you could say another way to he always called it an accident of history that he was involved in the case. He didnt play the album. They played in the middle of the afternoon and the way my dad describes the moment is a professional moralist in a car with his 14yearold son when they played the seven dirty words. Of course my dads argument was there were two buttons on the radio, the off switch and the one that changes the station. If you dont like the speech, choose a different speech. But this gentle man decided to go and complain and it ended up all the way in the Supreme Court. My dads biggest joy around the case was that all nine justices had to listen. [laughter] to the album, t album, to the pt was played, and that the actual routine is in the books of the Supreme Court. Right now you can go to your local library and look up the case and the routine is typed up for everyone to see forever. He took a great pride in that. But he also did feel and 25 i went back to ucla and became a Communications Major and one of the classes we were required to take with the First Amendment class. Almost became a First Amendment lawyer. Then i thought wall school. But my professor, im in a classroom with about 150, maybe a little bigger than this in a science classroom and my professor a the first day of cls talking about how he loved teaching an and he ran the Annenberg School and a big First Amendment guide he said we will study the ftc case and get to do George Carlin seven dirty words for you. This became a regular presence in my life where suddenly it isnt minding my own business and my father intrudes on my wife. And it was one of those moments where i saw the it was about 90 and my dad had this incredible impact on the culture at large. The fun part was getting to go to the professor afterwards. Saying i just want to let you know and of course the professor said to me your dad come and do the seven dirty words for us, so i went to my dad and i said im taking this class and i had to explain the whole thing to him and we are setting up the case and i would love for you to come and my dad was so cute and interesting. His reaction to that was no, i couldnt do that. I didnt have anything about the case. He was going on and on and on about it. I dont think they are asking you to know the law. I think they want you to come meet George Carlin and save the seven dirty words that h but heo darling about it. I father had a lot of humility about his place in the culture and what it did. He really walked the walk through time. It was a few years before he died even was acknowledging that he was kind of an elder statesman in the world of comedy. He would say things like that when they talk about comedy in the second half of the 20th century they will have to mention me and im like really, you think so. Its another reason i wrote this book might offer everyone knows the version of my father on the stage and if you follow his career over 40 some odd years is all very differensaw very diffef him on the stage. They showed the sergeant guy and then all of a sudden he dropped acid and has a beard and long hair and is saying the seven dirty words and then kind of in the 80s and then delete 80s, early 90s he comes out in new york and has a whole other level of the political point of view and outrage about the planet and which came from him being a brokenhearted idealist. When mcgovern lost he never voted again and believe that the system was broken. I dont go that way. I have a right to complain. I encourage people to vote. I forgot my train of thought. Middle age. Its interesting that your father was so humble about this. Every time i guess they could qualify it but every time a year the comedians that i enjoy being interviewed themselves and talking about their influence, your father is always up there yoto be him and richard are the big ones. And people like jon stewart, all these folks. Your father lived long enough to know that he had been awarded the prize by the Kennedy Center but didnt live long enough to see or attend the ceremony. They take stoc stock into wordsd things like that but he was happy about that and i had been secretly nominating him for years. Come on, people. If theres not a mark twain in our culture, and they pick some other people who i get it, its a tv show and the Kennedy Center and stuff like that. I am a big fan of Billy Crystal that youre picking him before George Carlin for the prize packs he did note that and he did appreciate it. He was so associated in the amendment because this case and in anumber of other routines the had done. They posted on the Thomas Jefferson website attributed to George Carlin. There were two organizations that were suggested that you might want to donate to these organizations. One was the American Heart Association which makes sense, but the other was for the freedom of expression which i had no idea that George Carlin hears whats behind the scene, but i got a phone call and the Administrative Assistant put it through and said kelly karlin is on the phone. You pick up the phone and introduced yourself as George Carlins daughter. I decided that you are the Organization Im going to tell people to donate to. Your father was a big believer in the underdog. We could have picked all great organizations but my dad was always he loved the underdog and i thought heres a nice little organization. You told me you looked at upcominupcoming youre looking t organizations and thought because we just posted it, there was a photograph of your dad. Once they realized it wasnt a friend putting me on i was so excited and thrilled and honored and been typical of me going too far and putting my foot in my mouth i said i cant tell you what a great day this is. [laughter] two days after her father passed away but then i knew when i realized i just said an what i i heard this laughter on the other end. You share your fathers dark humor. Thats also. But youre concerned about censorship and people in the government telling you what you can and cant say. It taught me a great understanding about the constitutional law in general. They are interested in the language and censorship. The thing that is most important that is a little hint right there. In the First Amendment cases in the class i learned that i dont agree with your speech as is like the kkk and illinois as a famous case. They talk about speech. It is an essential conversation that we need to be having and the citizenship really understands the constitution and all the arguments. This is later in my dads wife in 2006 a few years before he died and then we will play this clip. Bob is the name of my husband. In 2005, we flew to new york to see my dad to shoot his 13th special life is worth losing. My dad rarely let me glimpse his show. It was always a thrill for me to sit in the audience not knowing what was coming. This year i was especially looking forward to seeing him. We havent seen each other in about three months. After walking up the stairs i walked into the dressing room and i saw a short whitehaired man with his back next to me. I was stunned. Who took my father and left this man in hi and his place . My dads face was puffy and he looked like he was fighting to believe. I noticed the last few times he had been a bit scatterbrained very unlike my dad. He forgot the name of his assistant ones and one day he didnt show up at a breakfast we planned. I thought it must be his age but seeing him now backstage i knew something was wrong. People dont age this quickly. I didnt say anything to him not wanting to distract him from the task ahead of that night as i walked to my seat in the audience i worried if they would be able to make it to the show. Would he be okay, but the audience respond, might be even collapse but when he took the stage that night, he came alive and all i could think was if he could just stay there he might live forever. This explains George Carlins love of language that he passed on. [inaudible] a diversified multicultural deconstruction is anatomically incorrect. The cuttingedge stateoftheart i can give you a gigabyte in a nano second. It was voiceactivated and biodegradable. The database was in cyberspace, so interactive and from time to time radioactive. [laughter] ahead of the curve riding the wave dodging the bullet pushing the envelope the point on the messaging there was no need for code and the speed, no urge to binge and purge them over the top but under the radar. The ballistic streetwise smart bomb and bottom feeder they take towarone absent from victory la. A bigfoot slam dunk with an outreach raging workaholic working rage come out of rehab and in denial. [applause] [cheering] you cant show me up or dumb me down. I am tiger woods and an alpha male on beta blockers. Im a hands on this lucid case prematurely posttraumatic and i have a love child who sends me hate mail but im feeling a caring, healing and sharing. Supported bonding nurturing primary caregiver. My income is up until the short position in th in a long bondiny revenue stream has its own cash flow every junk mail, junk food, gender specific, capitalintensive userfriendly lactose intolerant. [cheering] i like rough sex, tough love. I use the f. Word in my email and the door on my hard drive is i eat fast food and the sloww lane, tollfree bite sized readytowear and they come in all sizes. A hospital text scientifically proven, prewashed, pre heated, preapproved, double wrap, vacuum packed and an unlimited broadband capacity. [cheering] rough, tough and hard to pull off, take it slow. The driving and moving and jiving and grouping, snooze so i dont lose, pedal to the metal and rubber on the road, party hard and lunchtime is crunch time. Hanging in there is no doubt in hanging tough over and out. [applause] i want to read what comes after this. A month after this, he really couldnt breathe. They said george is in the emergency room. We went north and found the sally in the waiting room, shaken up. They stabilized him. Hes doing better. About 20 minutes later the doctor came out. Hes doing much better than when he came in. We gave him some medicine to help remove some of the fluid from his lungs and stabilize the heart failure. Thats what had been going on with him in new york, heart failure. Its a condition that could stabilize the medicine for a few years eventually only a heart transplant would fix it permanently. As i sat with him in the emergency room he admitted he had symptoms and ignored them. I wanted to kill him but on the other hand i got it, it was a great show. I sat at the end with as much life force as i could. Ive never felt so peaceful in his presence before. They released him from the hospital but he had a device implanted in his chest and it is a combination pacemaker. Dad was proud of this device. Its the same device they put in dick cheney. My dad died a few years later and the ending of the book i dont want to give it away but we had a chance to heal and come together. There was one that fits well its like a mythological legend in some ways so i feel very lucky and full of a lot of gratitude we got to love and laugh with each other through the insanity and roller coaster ride of our lives. Im honored to be able to tell my story to everyone and share pieces of my bad people dont get otherwise. Thats the point i wanted to make the reason i wanted to write the book is the see one version of my dad on stage but they dont know the husband and the father and the man. Its a privilege to be able to share that. [inaudible] one of the things i enjoy about the book is learning more about George Carlin. This is a wonderful book to read for the other aspects of your story. Its always fun to learn and see from a different perspective somebody you think you know. There is a story of this unique story and its a very enlightening and very entertaining read. I leave little cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. [laughter] i will tell you when he said one hell of a ride. I strongly encourage everybody to buy a copy if they like. Ive always been a big influence in terms of what People Choose to buy and read. If you take the advice of complete strangers, i highly recommend this book. We have a question. What do you think your father would make of todays political situation . Shocking i got that question. I get that question ten times a day on twitter. He wouldve loved it. It feels lik like just a day ane we are all in the vip section july 22, 2008 he didnt get to see obama become president and he was excited about hillary, the possibility of a female president and then obama started getting traction around them. My husband and i went to the Lincoln Memorial standing on the steps and the president ial helicopter went over our head and it was obama visiting for the first time and i just cried tears for my father because my father was a huge advocate having grown up in harlem. Blacblack culture and black musf you hear class clown, they talk about it a lot it was a huge influence on him and he was absolutely trust to have he would have been thrilled. Nowadays the spectacle of it a all. He would have a unique take on it that no one else comes up with. Theres a lot out there do political work and if you havent seen the new full frontal shot of the highly recommended. She is my frontrunner right n now. I have learned a new expression this week, posttraumatic thriving. We are lucky with our genetics and we get some thriving jeans and i come from really good stock. Theres something about love. I was lucky to know that no matter all the chaos in my life in my childhood especially from age five to 12 i knew i was loved. There was the early theory that is real so i knew i was ultimately safe. It took me a while to ultimately figure that out as an adult. There is something about that in the healing process you need to move from the place of victimhood that you are so okay now what. Thats a really important shift in life and healing. Because ultimately it is our life and we ar are adults and he to take responsibility from it and i learned from my depression and my life and what i was going to do with it. When it comes to dads especially in your teenage years say it to me again where would that be . That would be the correcting my dad was the coolest dad ever. When i was in high school, we shared need. Its hard to roll your eyes at that kind of dad. They didnt buy into the just say no campaign. They could put their foot down and say do i wish they had a little bit more, yeah i wish they had created more rules that would have saved me ten years of my life in my 20s. Once again they didnt and i had to learn from that. But yes my dad was a god to me and still is to a lot of people. I had to learn to take them off the pedestal and realize he is humid and for the most part it was that kind of. Sure, right here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for writing this book and sharing insight that i know many of us miss desperately. There was a blurb on this particular section and there was a comment about the commitment to truth in everything he said. And one of my earliest memories was his description of a tomato, which i thought was just so dead on and truthful. Can you talk about that aspect of the truth and honesty . Its something we didnt get a chance to talk about here. Its another big theme of my book. The description if you dont know my dad considered it a food that was not finished. They hadnt finished developing. My other favorite was you never ate anything he had to break into his house to eat like a clam or Something Like that. [laughter] i dont eat clams or oysters because of that. He was very influential in my life. One of the ironies of household and themes in the book is truth telling. And my father was the truth teller to quite a few generations. Growing up in an alcoholic drug addicted functional household, truth is a slippery slope and it was confusing to me as a kid because with dysfunction comes denial, and denial is about ignoring the truth, the big elephant in the room and so the same things would go on in my life. A famous story that i tell us my father waking me up one morning in the mid70s and my dad came to the room and woke me up and said i need you to wake up. I think the sun has exploded and we have seven minutes to live. My father had been up for about five days and he was hallucinating and he was screwed up. We went outside and anyway, my point is i couldnt go to school on monday and when i was asked about easter vacation, i couldnt say my dad is freaking out on drugs and my mom and dad tried to kill each other with knives. I couldnt speak truth. So, i had this very difficult relationship learning my truth and how to express myself and my emotions and reality. There wasnt a lot of reality going on. I was living a parallel life. Thats when i started living a parallel life which is my persona and my private life and that got me into a lot of trouble when i got into the abusive relationships but didnt salute to anyone. When i was doing way too much cocaine and got in trouble and i couldnt get in my car and drive around and couldnt explain to people why i was no longer leaving my house comes with a delicate thing and one of the things that happened with my dad and i in 99 i have written the show and i wanted to talk about her death and how it affected ad and transformed me and my childhood shaping me and how difficult that was for my dad when i said i want to do this show and he, part of it was difficult because i talked about things in the shows i never talked to my dad about before, feelings i had about things that have gone on and he said why did i have to read the script to find out about this. I said maybe i felt like i needed to be on your stage for you to finally hear me. So it was a healing my bad habits we got to talk to each other and share the scary things all of us go through. But it is relative at times. It was difficult to see in los angeles and it is a parall parallel. This book is more indepth. How do you think your father would feel about that because that was written after his passing. I think that part of my role in the family is to if he was alive, first i dont know if that would be possible because a lot of what i say in the book i talk about how i back away from telling the story but i can see now my role in the world as a truth teller because my dad did teach me to be a truth teller and speak the truth and talk about shared humanity and that we are all broken and messed up and trying to figure it out. I think in the end my father would be very proud of me because i figured out my role as a truth teller. There is nothing daddy dearest in the book at all. Im like really do you know the book or anything about it, theres so much love in this book theres not a moment of complaining or victimhood. And i think my dad would get one thing i say in the show when people come to see the show or read my book they love my dad more than they used to just know hes a whole person to them. Now that i know he couldnt function that as a human that says a lot more. It says so much. I was thinking i wonder how they are going to subtitle that. But then that led me to thinking about the publications to where they take the seven letters, seven words and they will put the first letter. Its shocking the world. If he were here, i have the former dean of the law school the board of Trustees Professor blanchard that question, so. In the education that is a question of choice by the publication. It would be very difficult in First Amendment law to get trouble if they are talking about it in this context. The indecency provision only applies to broadcasting, the protecting of speech. So thats basically not the actual content in and a big paf the definition is where and in fact i think im right the words that we said here when you see the daily show with jon stewart and the bleep those words out on television or satellite, that is a question of choice, the people producing the show. It isnt a requirement brought to you by the broadcast spectr spectrum. Its an Interesting Development because i dont think any of us today think about this is a Cable Access Television show as opposed to nbc access. But therein lies the difference as to why the government can have a greater control over broadcast spectrum and that indecency provision only as a matter of law applies. The word is being said in your head, so its not like i wonder what that word is a. There is those in the universe and the way they got around this is they created their own curse words and indecent words. Now just imagine imagine a word that begins as many of us might be offended by. In Virginia Beach there is an ordinance that i think is unconstitutional. The street signs in virginia that is exactly the kind of thing that you see the little and, only they are all put up there and then theres the red circle with a line through it and its posted to go walk down the Virginia Beach and you will see the signs there. Fascinating. Next question. Hello, kelly. Im glad you are here. Im curious, because i actually dont have the answers. Back in the day before paparazzi as big as it is today, whats your family unit ever know, we were so lucky we never were i think because my dad was a part of the popculture, the sickest thing about tabloid stuff is the one time that we showed up there is when my mother was dying of liver cancer and we were in the National Enquirer for that and i just thought you have got to be kidding me. It was just horrific. But now, very lucky that in my teenage years there was nothing like that around yet. I went to school in la with all kinds of kids and we were doing a lot of illegal things. Just crazy teenage stuff and think god. It felt at the cardassians. But we were always very protected and ar really back ine day we lived there in the early 70s and during that time what was really dangerous was the cop because usually he was going to be but im glad there wasnt. They came along and discussed a lot of things here. One of the things that fascinated me the most for his fans after his death to you and the disparate responses as well as the Comedy Community which you have not been a part. Before my dad died, i would watch a little bit of comedy. It was my dads job and he was in theater but it wasnt a thi thing. So i didnt know a lot of comedians come up one or two maybe. And when they started calling me immediately the next day and i found myself sitting on the floor one morning at