From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I'm honored to have sitting before me.

Actress and now author, Angelica Houston.

Her memoir is a story lately told.

First of all, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Elvis. It's a pleasure.

First of all, tell the audience about that poem, that line comes from.

Well, in Ireland, before television and, you know, back in the olden days, and also, you know, in the early days, I guess, of radio in the west of Ireland, because sometimes it would go completely dead, and then as a child, you'd be in the back of the car.

What would you do? There were no other cars on the road, but you'd spot magpies in the fields.

And magpies, for anyone who doesn't know, are kind of two-tone birds.

They're black and white birds.

They're like crows.

They eat worms in the potato fields.

And the poem goes, one for sorrow, two for joy.

Three for a wedding, four for a boy.

Five for silver, six for gold wedding four for a boy five for silver six for gold seven for a story lately told and that's the title of my book and it's such it's such an evocative title too because that incredible household you grew up in well just

i just found myself kind of struck by that kind of

sense of competition in the house. I mean, at one point you talk about how with your dad, John

Houston, that either if you didn't have an anecdote, then you'd get kind of a lecture. Yeah. Well,

it wasn't really so much competition as upping your game. I think he had big expectations of my brother and I. He wanted us to be interesting people. I think he wanted us to have a purpose in life. One of his lectures had to do with dilettantism, which was a

word that I didn't even understand at the time. But to me, you know, it sounded like this was,

you know, worse than lying or thievery or, you know, any number of sins. Dilettantism, you know, is somebody who basically

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