4.4 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
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0:00.0 | On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, conspiracy theories, and urban legends, |
0:14.5 | examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities |
0:24.0 | we don't. |
0:25.7 | I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria. |
0:32.6 | Cal officials say a pyrotechnic device from a gender reveal party sparked the El Dorado fighter. |
0:38.3 | A crock dusting plane dropping 350 gallons of pink water. |
0:43.3 | It's a girl. |
0:44.3 | And police say they are continuing with the investigation. |
0:47.3 | And in case you're wondering, by the way, it was a boy. |
0:50.3 | A Boy. |
1:02.2 | Chelsea Ray Weber was born on August 19, 1988, early on a Friday morning to a 26-year-old mother loudly pleading for the drugs it was too late for her to be given. |
1:17.7 | From the magical divination of the sonogram, she knew she was having a little girl and had originally chosen the daring name Charlie for her daughter, |
1:29.8 | but her friends convinced her that choosing such a masculine name would mark her as ridiculous |
1:36.2 | in the highly gendered 1980s. And so, seeking a more appropriate title, she went with Chelsea after being introduced to a character |
1:48.3 | on the popular soap opera The Guiding Light. But as the years passed, it was becoming obvious that |
1:57.9 | Chelsea was not like the other little girls. Her father noted that she would stop |
2:04.3 | dead in her tracks as she tottered through the toy store, stunned by the violent hot pink of the Barbie |
2:12.7 | aisle, backing out with her hands in front of her like a frightened cartoon. |
2:18.6 | In a backwards baseball cap, she instead headed to the abandoned lot to turn over wooden pallets, |
2:26.4 | looking for lizards sleeping in the shade and snakes in the tall grass of the field. |
2:32.8 | But still, well-meaning relatives and friends performed our American |
2:38.8 | custom. And thus, the cursed Barbies continued to catwalk their way into Chelsea's room, as if to |
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