Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for May 3, 2018, the live in St. Louis edition.

We are... We're on stage at a jam-packed Sheldon Concert Hall

in downtown St. Louis along the banks of the Mississippi River.

We are here to bridge east and west to knit the country back together.

I am David Plotz of Atlas Obscura.

To my immediate left is Emily Bazlon of the New York Times Magazine.

And to her left is John Dickerson of CBS this morning.

And before we start, I just want to say I've never been to St. Louis, and so today was

the first chance.

But St. Louis is oddly a cradle of plots, which is that my grandmother, Helen Abrams, grew up

here.

She went to University City High School.

And where she sat next to,

she was, she sat next to in homeroom, Tennessee Williams was her home room, seatmate. Then known as Tom

Williams. Tom Williams, he was very quiet. David called his mom and found all the stuff.

Or re-acquainted himself with it today. And my great, great-grandfather was the chief rabbi of St. Louis, and there's a photo

in my parents have of his funeral where there are thousands of your ancestors flocking the

streets, which probably around, I don't know, in the teens, 19-teens. Anyway, so it's good

to come home. Thank you for having us.

On this week's GabFest, 49 questions.

We've got 49 answers.

We will dig into the latest drama in the Russia investigation,

...