You're listening ad-free on Amazon music.

Just a reminder that Big M. Little Mood with Daniel M. Lavery happens twice a week.

Slate Plus members get an additional mini-episode or Little Big Mood every Friday.

Sign up now to listen at slate.com slash mood. Hello and welcome back to Big Mood, Little Mood with Danny Lavery. I am Danny Lavery and with me in the studio this week is a guest. I'm very excited about Mara Wilson, a writer and actor living in Los Angeles with several very noisy cats. Mara, welcome with the show. How are you doing? Good, good. Thank you so much for having me. And yes,

the cats have been causing chaos around the house just as I sit down to record, which happens.

It's beautiful. The only bit of chaos that I ran into before I recorded was I had one of those

great occasional moments that one gets when one has to like check into hotels or use TSA and your legal name doesn't match up with your whole deal, or you have to say, like, because hotels, I feel like I've gotten more finicky about that over the last few years, where I've oftentimes had, like, the name on my credit card and the name on my ID doesn't match up. And it used to be you could just explain and they'd be like, got it.

And sometimes now they're like, I don't know what to tell you. You got to have one name.

It's very strong. One thing that I have a problem with almost every time I fly for a job is they will ask me for my credit card. And I will be like, okay, but I didn't, or not when I fly, but when I get into a, I get into a hotel, they'll ask me for my credit card and I'll be like, okay, but I didn't book the room. If I were booking my own hotel room, I would not book a hotel room as nice as this. I'm, I'm fine with just like anywhere that, like, has a, has a bed and they wash the sheets.

And they're like, and they're like, okay, but you have to put this down. And so multiple times I have been charged for the room, even though people were like, oh, no, the room is, the room is, you know, we're paying for the room. We're doing this for you. And so I kind of don't know. And I remember one time I told somebody, like I told, I told someone who's working in London, I was like, oh, I didn't book the room. I'm sorry. The organization did. And she didn't quite understand. And she said, oh, your mom booked the room for you. That's the only other thing she could think of was just. Yeah. And I don't know if like maybe I was wearing a backpack and I looked younger or something, but like, I think she was like new to working

there. And she like looked at me and my publicist and maybe thought we were sisters or something and thought we were like teen backpackers or something. Love it. Whose mom had booked a fancy hotel for them. Like the story that she created in her head, I was like, wow, this is like, this is way more

interesting. Yeah. So it was, it was neither like a hotel clerk nor TSA, but it was something along those lines. And we'd had a couple of like perfectly pleasant, fun interactions. Yeah. I thought I had done the job of explaining like, I'm booking with this name. I go by this name. Thanks for bearing with me. And like we'd had the nice interactions. And then he had this total, like, well-intended meltdown, which is I walked past him.

And he started just like flailing his arms. He's like, hang on, hang on. I need to, what do I, what do I, what do I call you?

Like it was, and I knew I was like, I know you're flailing. I know your question has something to do with like, what's the deal with your many names or like, you have a beard now. But I didn't know exactly what it was. So there was no way that I could like speed it up. I just had to watch him like have a meltdown in real time of just like, what's what what's going on? Am I doing something wrong? And I was just like, you're fine, man. This is a true, this is a true capital, two capital M's Midwestern moment, I would say. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the, yeah. I mean, I would maybe be slightly more inclined to call it like you've changed your face but not yet your name

legally on all fronts kind of a moment because it does happen in other locations.

Just the like, what do I call you? What do I do? And the desperation to not be wrong. Although, I mean,

you would think in Minneapolis. And having come after a series of really pleasant,

innocuous interactions. Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. I think they're just so afraid of being wrong and so afraid of being of like, yeah, there's so much of that Minneapolis like niceness. Although like, half the trans people I know live in Minneapolis. I want to be like, man, I promise you, I'm going to help you out. Like I want good things for you. I want to help you. But you do have to ask me some kind of a question because I can't just like watch you babble and then say something like, yeah, I'm a, I'm a trans person. How can I help you with that? There's a lot of, I mean, and I know that like in the past I've done this, there's that thing where somebody makes a mistake or like

somebody and then somebody or says something that could potentially make you feel about or something.

And then they apologize so much for it and are so far gone and are so obsessed about it that

you kind of end up comforting them.

Oh yeah.

...