In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers become extremely fixated on something very specific.

Part 1: After being diagnosed with breast cancer and opting for bilateral mastectomies, Jenna Dioguardi becomes beholden to her cancer to-do list.

Jenna Dioguardi is an Obie & Drama Desk-award winning performer. She made her Off-Broadway debut originating the role of #13 in Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves, and can now be seen storytelling in dimly lit venues throughout New York. Her solo show, Nipples for Christmas, is currently in development and had its debut in March. By day, Jenna works as a video producer and editor, creating the ads that target you on Instagram. She co-produced, starred in, and edited Smooch the Tucc, a web series chronicling Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy, and she was the co-creator and co-host of two live shows: The Best Storytelling Show (we promise) and The Mister Rogers Variety Hour. Follow her work on IG @jennadio3 & at jennadioguardi.com.

Part 2: As an 11-year-old kid, Luke Strathmann makes it his life mission to get rich off of Beanie Babies.

Luke Strathmann is an NYC-based writer and comedian, and currently leads the communications team at Yale’s Department of Economics. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s, and he is the proud host of ‘EconLOL,' the world’s first, best, and only economics-themed comedy variety show (at Caveat Theatre in NYC).

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PART 1

This is about three years ago. It's a Thursday afternoon, around 4:00 PM. I'm sitting at my desk and my phone rings. It is, I just forgot her name because I was thinking about Stanley Tucci. It's a woman named Amanda. Amanda is this very gentle, Irish nurse at Cedars‑Sinai.

I pick up and Amanda says, "Hi, Ms. Dioguardi. Are you alone right now?"

“I am.”

And she says, "Okay. I am just calling because we got the results back from your biopsy and it did come back as a cancer.”

I'll never forget the way she said it. She said ‘a cancer’. Not just cancer, but ‘a cancer’. She also said it in a very thick Irish accent that I'll spare you this evening.

Amanda says, "I'm so sorry, Jenna."

I don't say anything yet because I can't, but I'm just sitting with my legs tucked up onto my swivel chair and my phone is resting on my knees.

Jenna Dioguardi shares her story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in August 2024. Photo by William House.

And Amanda tells me that I'm going to be fine. I'm not going to die from this. And she says, “It'll be a shit year, but you will get through it.” That really comforts me, actually, because I love when doctors curse.

When we get off the phone, any sort of physical movement feels very dangerous. So I just take one really slow step at a time into my bathroom. I look in the mirror and I lift up my shirt. I look at my breasts to see if they look any different now that I know that there's cancer in there, and they don't. But right away, I do know that I won't have these breasts for much longer.

It's a very easy decision for me, actually. I'm an all‑or‑nothing type of girl, so I'm either going to have breasts that have cancer in them or I'm not going to have any breasts at all. No risks in the in between. Also, my mom had bilateral mastectomies 20 years ago and it saved her life.

My mom, by the way, we are very, very, very close. We talk almost every day, but she's not the first person that I tell. I have to kind of work my way up to that conversation. But after a few other phone calls to friends, I do call her and we do cry together for a few minutes.

But it is not very long before I shift right into game plan mode. I start making a to‑do list. The second step on that to‑do list is, “Have bilateral mastectomies.” The first step on that to‑do list is, “Get diagnosed with breast cancer,” because I like to start a to‑do list off with something that I've done already, just to sort of get the momentum going. Cross that off, write down a bunch of other steps and I get to the final step. I write, “Get new nipples.”

I have had cancer for roughly 45 minutes when I make this to‑do list, but now, it's just another list in my life. The to‑do list of it all makes the cancer feel very contained and something that I can conquer with a nice clean slate on the other side of it.

I look at this list and right away I get really, really attached to the idea of this new life that I'll have once my to‑do list is complete. A life that is worry free and where nothing really could possibly scare me because, look at that, I did cancer.

It's May when I get diagnosed and make this list. If my calculations are correct, it looks like I can wrap this whole thing up by December. So, people start asking me, “How long is your treatment going to be?” And I say, “Well, I'm getting nipples for Christmas and then I'm going to be done.”

Over the next couple of months, I cross each step off the list. I have bilateral mastectomies, I freeze my eggs, I start my treatment, and I make it to my breast reconstruction surgery. Once I heal from this, the next step is get new nipples, so I am starting to see the finish line.

Now, the man who is in charge of reconstructing my breasts and then the nipples that will adorn them is my plastic surgeon. I have to see him several times over these many months and, with each visit, I'm less and less impressed by him. I find him to have the emotional intelligence of a worm. But, he is the chair of the department at Memorial Sloan Kettering. According to his colleagues, the "Michelangelo of breast reconstruction," so I put up with him, understanding that I will come out of this experience with truly legendary breasts.

I get to September. I have my breast reconstruction surgery and I do come out of it with truly lopsided breasts. One of them, one of my breasts sits a couple of inches higher than the other one. It looks weird and it hurts.

So, at my post‑op appointment, I say to the doctor, I say, “You know, looks are one thing, but I'm actually in pretty regular pain. Is there anything that we can do about this?”

And Michelangelo himself takes a step back and looks at his work and just says, “Your chest cavity is crooked. There's nothing more that I can do,” and he leaves the room.

I'm insulted and I'm disappointed. These are my legendary lopsided breasts and I'm just supposed to live with them. And Cherelle, who is Michelangelo's nurse and saving grace, she very kindly says to me, "You know, Jenna, there's always the option of a revision surgery if you're unhappy with your results.”

I appreciate that but I really can't accept it, because I come from a very long line of deeply impatient people. Those genetics combined with my desire to just get my nipples for Christmas and step into my new life, that all comes together and it overrides my pain and my disappointment.

Somehow, I wind up convincing myself that it's fine. I'm fine. Really, it's okay. Look, Jenna, you had cancer and you're not dead. It's actually amazing. Maybe you're going to have lopsided breasts that tug at your skin and hurt when you breathe for the rest of your life, but, hey, you should really be grateful. You should be grateful.

So I just say to Cherelle, “Thank you, but I just want to keep moving forward and let's move on with the nipple reconstruction surgery.”

Cherelle asks me if I know what kind of nipples I want to get. I know what you're thinking, but fun shapes are not on the menu. You can't get lightning bolt nipples or nipples in the shape of your childhood dog. Believe me, if you could, I would have them. The type of nipples that I want are made from a skin graft so that the nipple itself will be three‑dimensional.

I finish this conversation with Cherelle and I march right up to the scheduling desk, and the whole way I'm like, “Nipples for Christmas, nipples for Christmas, nipples for Christmas.”

I get up there and, as it turns out, there's a whole long line of women ahead of me awaiting their new nipples too. The soonest I can get mine is March. So it's going to be nipples for Mardi Gras, which is less catchy but it is more thematically suitable.

But this really is a blow to my carefully written out to‑do list and plan. I double check with the receptionist. I say, “There is no availability before the end of the year?” And she says, "No, but I can put you on a wait list in case any earlier openings pop up.

I call this office every day for weeks to check on the status of this waitlist, until somebody suggests that my therapist step in. She suggests I explore a meditation practice instead.

With the wholehearted support of my family and friends, I do. I actually get really, really into it. I meditate my way all the way through Christmas and through the end of the year and through my original deadline right up to my nipples for Mardi Gras.

The time has finally come.

I go back and see Michelangelo. He takes a good amount of skin from my groin area and he makes me a new set of nipples out of it. And I set off into my long‑awaited post‑cancer sunset.

I make it two weeks into this sunset before I start having headaches, really, really bad ones. My first thought is the nipples. They're too powerful. But my second thought is brain cancer. It's all I can think.

So, I start knocking on wood anytime I even think the words ‘brain cancer’. I also knock on wood anytime one of those metastatic breast cancer commercial comes on. I stop eating meat and I stop eating sugar and I up my meditation practice to anytime I have so much as a tickle in my throat. I get every test I can possibly get for every mysterious lump and bump and crick in my neck. And all of these tests, every time yield the same result. There's nothing to worry about, Jenna. You're fine.

But I really just can't take that in. I can't get myself to believe that. Because even though this is supposed to be the start of my new nothing‑scares‑me‑because‑I‑survived‑cancer life, actually, everything scares me because I survived cancer. Every single ingrown hair or backache in the morning or dizzy spell from standing up too fast, all of it, all of it scares me and it's not going away.

I am experiencing remission a lot less as post‑cancer, this glory that I thought it would be, and a lot more as, “Remember, that could happen again.”

I don't really have a post‑cancer. It doesn't really exist for me. Kind of like my nipples don't really exist. They're a façade. They're made out of skin from my groin.

By the way, Christmas, also a facade, unless you want to get really religious about it.

There's no way that my nipples ever could possibly bear this responsibility of closing this chapter for me, because it doesn't really look like the chapter is closing. I'm thinking that maybe my nipples, what they can do instead is they can be a reminder that I did something really hard and that it's okay to be scared. If I do have to do it again, my nipples are just proof that I can.

Thank you.

PART 2

My name is Luke and I grew up on a donkey farm. For the most part, my best friend was a goat. His name was Webster. My little brother is in the back. He knows Webster.

This is a fourth‑generation family farm, so my grandma lived on the farm with us. She was a florist and she would deliver flowers every weekend. I would go with her on these flower deliveries. We'd go all over Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia area and, every now and then, she would pick up supplies for her flower deliveries. One day, she bought me a little stuffed animal goat named Goatee. This was my very first Beanie Baby.

Luke Strathmann shares his story at Hudson River Park Pier 57 in New York, NY in September 2024. Photo by William House.

So it was just me and Webster and Goatee, and we were just hanging out in the goat pen together. That was the friend group. And what we like to do, what I like to do with the goats was we'd turn the bales of hay over and then we'd have the goats battle each other on them and try to knock each other off.

Then me and Goatee, the Beanie Baby, would be like the refs of these battles. We decide who would win. We always made sure that Webster won, and that's how I earned loyalty from Webster.

My grandma, she noticed how much fun I was having with this little beanie animal, like with this little imaginative world up in the goat pen and so she bought me a few more of these things. Suddenly, I had this little Beanie Baby collection.

Then one day, I realized I was sitting on a goldmine, and that's not because goat milk took off in Brooklyn, but that certainly helped my family's finances. But it was because these little beanies that my grandma bought for $5 at a local store suddenly were worth thousands of dollars to some people. There was a Princess Diana Beanie Baby, this purple little Beanie Baby that sold on eBay for $900,000 at one point.

I found this out and suddenly wanted to become a Beanie Baby tycoon. I made Beanie Babies my whole personality and I made it my whole agenda to get rich off these Beanie Babies. It just became kind of an obsession, part of my identity, because I don't know.

Then, as some of you might know, the Beanie Baby market crashed spectacularly, like the bubble burst at some point. I had made my whole identity like I wanted to be this Beanie Baby tycoon. I thought I was going to be on the cover of Forbes magazine as the world's richest middle schooler. But, now, I was a candidate to be on Sad Emo Teen magazine. That would have been better.

And this moment or this period or era of my life did put me on this crazy trajectory where I wanted to figure out what happened. I went off to college and I studied economics and I tried to figure out the dismal science, we'll say, because this is a science event. Tried to figure out how do people get rich. Why are things valued the way they are?

I've spent most of my life working in economics departments, which, upon reflection, has honestly been not entirely what I'm passionate about or what I want to be doing, That's been an interesting realization for me is that I've spent most of my life working somewhere that hasn't really brought me a lot of joy and I blame Beanie Babies. Or capitalism, I don't know, but I want to focus on Beanie Babies.

Do you all know this craze? Okay. Cool.

So they started out as these little play things They were toys. They were like the main buyers were grandmas and children. Then all of a sudden, this fad took off and there were lines and lines of creepy, belligerent men that were dying to get their hands on a little stuffed animal so they could resell it at a mall.

Then I as an 11‑year‑old was like, “I want that. I want to be a creepy, belligerent man selling things at a mall.”

I remember the turning point too. I was at this school where my mom worked, a little friend's school, and I brought a Beanie Baby to school. There was a new kid named Adam and he looked at the Beanie Baby, and he was like, "Man, that thing is worth so much money. What are you doing with that in school? You need to put a tag protector on that. You need to put it in a glass case. You cannot bring that thing in the goat pen anymore."

And he was right. I shouldn't, like I know from an economic perspective. So I became obsessed with the idea of building this Beanie Baby empire. I did everything to do that.

Growing up on the farm, we had this chore chart system. You remember this? You open the snack cabinet and there is like a hand‑drawn thing and it had all the farm chores on it. It was tied to a mini allowance. So, if you take the trash out to the main road, we were kind of far from that, that was a nickel or a dime or something. And then to put the chicken feed out, that was like 25 cents or something.

But the activity that paid the most money, I'm talking dollars, was shoveling donkey poop. So I decided that I was going to spend my whole weekend shoveling donkey poop and trying to build up $7 or $11 or something. Then I begged my grandma to take me around to all the Hallmark stores in the area.

I had memorized the numbers of the Hallmark stores so I could call them about the shipments, like 353‑1235 is our local one. Add the area code 610‑353‑1235, you can call the Newtown Square Hallmark today. I think Linda is still working there. She's still slinging beanies. You can call them and that's what I would do.

I had their shipment times memorized. Like at 9:59 on Saturday morning, I would get in from shoveling donkey poop. And while my friends or my brother or whoever, or not really my friends, the other kids were watching cartoons and playing soccer or something, I was at the kitchen table with those big yellow phone books looking at the business section of Hallmark and calling them. I'd be like, “Linda, did the UPS truck arrive on time today? And do you have the new Flippy?” Or, “Do you have the new Quackers?” Flippy was a cat and Quackers was a duck, in case you were wondering.

And me and that guy, Adam, actually started a business together, which we called Luke and Adam's Beanies and Cards, LABC, for short. We had a GeoCities site. We sold these things on eBay. We were like little capitalist freaks. It turned into a real friendship too. Adam ended up being my first real friend, I think, in fifth grade. We would spend days after school making hand‑drawn spreadsheets and tracking all the deals and putting all the finances there, like what deals went well and what deals didn't go well.

We were interviewed on local news at one point as like a little 11‑year‑old's local business success story. By our own accounting metrics, again, we were millionaires.

My parents supported this delusion in part, and they still talk about this because they thought that I was going to put myself through college on this. Plus, they were getting a lot of donkey poop shoveled. During the Beanie Baby craze, I think we had the cleanest donkey pen in the world.

Then, as we already know, the world came crashing down spectacularly. It was like a stuffed animal apocalypse. I looked this up. There was $20 billion of wealth evaporated in a span of a month or two, which is obviously a very comprehensible number for an 11‑year‑old.

This left me pretty lost and pretty devastated. Like, my whole identity fell apart. My whole initiative as an 11‑year‑old fell apart. My friendship with Adam fell apart. We had this whole thing that we did together every day and then, all of a sudden, we weren't hanging out anymore because we didn't have a business. The lure of these Beanie Babies kind of fell off.

It did leave me with this sinking question that put me on it of like what gives things value or how as an 11‑year‑old did I get swindled by global economic forces?

And it did. It put me on a track to figure out why do people spend all this money on things that arguably don't do anything? This Beanie Baby or the version of this cost $900,000 at some point. It's just insane. It doesn't house you. It doesn't feed you. It's a $5 toy. But people decided that it had this value and they thought that it would keep going up and up and up and up. That is the story of economic bubbles.

And this isn't the first time this has happened. It has happened with tulips in the 1600s in Netherlands. There was a tulip mania. People were selling houses for tulips. In 2022, NFTs.

The Beanie Babies is part of a greater story of capitalism and pursuit of riches. That put me on a journey to try to figure that out and study that. I work at the Yale Economics Department now and I was talking to someone about this. I asked a guy who's an expert on the prices of things.

I was like, "Why would Beanie Babies be worth this much? What do you know?"

And he was like, "Well, it's what people are willing to pay for them."

I was like, “Okay, but why? Like, why?"

And he was like, "Well, it's actually like with fads and things like that, there's some bit of inexplicability with it."

I couldn't get an answer out of him and so I'm mostly here to tell you that this whole search has been meaningless, which sucks.

But I have learned a few things. I think of this story as a little bit of a warning. Well, not a warning. I think, first, I'll say is that this journey has come, and thinking about the story a bit too has put this into perspective, thinking I've been on this whole journey to find the value of things but at the expense of things that I really value.

Now, I'm pursuing a different career. I'm trying to get into creative writing and poetry and comedy, which are passions that arguably aren't valued by the global market in a lot of places. That people don't pay $900,000 for. But do, as we know, with a room full of people at a story‑telling show do value.

So, I hope this story is possibly a little bit of a warning for all of you to watch out for the next craze, because it is easy to get swept up in these things and I don't want you all to go bankrupt. I don't want you all to go to jail, like SBF did recently, or end up working at an economics department. But I think if you do catch on to the right craze, you might end up with a really solid dog toy. That is my advice.

Thank you all.