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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. Time down for a segment we call the craziest day of my entire career.

I mean, I think explanation wise, the name of the segment does a lot of the heavy lifting, but it's when we talk with people in the biz as we like to call it and get them to dish on the craziest day in their careers.

Next up is Kate Willett. Kate is a stand up comic, a very funny one. Her 2017 debut GlassGutter was one of our favorite albums in the last few years here at MaxFon.

She's followed that album up with an audible original series called Dirtbag Anthropology. It's a deeply personal and very funny show where Kate talks plainly about her life story,

losing partners to divorce to death, about what it's like to be a queer comic. It features interviews with folks like Margaret Cho, W. Kamau Bell and her own father.

And like the rest of Kate's work, it is very, very funny. When we asked Kate Willett about the craziest day in her entire career, she came prepared with one that was absolutely bonkers.

I'll let Kate take it from here.

I'm Kate Willett and this is the craziest f*** day of my entire career.

So I need to start this story a little bit before it starts and by a little bit before it starts, I mean all the way back when I was three years old.

And I grew up in the North Ridge area, which is right outside of LA in the San Fernando Valley. And I went to a super tiny Christian preschool. And I had a best friend in preschool who I'm going to call for this segment Nora.

Nora was like the love of my preschool life. We were inseparable and then her family moved to Florida.

I was absolutely devastated and this was like the first time in my life as a small child that I ever experienced like grief, loss.

I was so sad that Nora was not going to be in my kindergarten class.

You know, my parents were trying to reassure me that we could keep it touch with letters. And we did. Nora and I wrote back and forth like pen pals, you know, even with our little three-year-old handwriting.

And her family sent newsletters and my family sent newsletters. And we did this till we were about eight. After a while, it just kind of felt like, you know, there wasn't really a friendship anymore.

But I still really missed her because there was just something about that connection even though we were so, so tiny that it felt like we were sisters or something.

And my whole life, I wondered what happened to her. It was a thing that kind of continued to weigh on me for some weird reason because I know these people who had, you know, their best friends since they were little kids and I felt like that was the person that she was supposed to be for me.

Fast forward, like years and years later, I ended up leaving the LA area and I went up to college at UC Berkeley, stayed in the Bay Area after that. And eventually a couple years after graduation, I started trying stand-up comedy.

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