Today's dispatch from The Dinosaur Notebook:
It's my favorite scene in my favorite show.
In Apple TV+ fish-out-of-water comedy "Ted Lasso" Jason Sudeikis plays a college football coach from Wichita State who winds up coaching English soccer.
The character's marriage has fallen apart. His estranged wife needs some space, so the relentlessly positive and unfailingly empathetic Lasso gives her a whole ocean.
The team's owner, Rebecca Welton, a rich blonde with curves like the hull of a competition speedboat, initially hired him to fail in order to spite her ex-husband, Rupert. She won the club in a bitter divorce settlement after he cheated on her.
By episode 8 of the first season Rebecca has been won over by Lasso's optimism and innate decency and begins to soften toward him.
Their friendship leads to this climactic scene.
Sudeikis' monologue is perfect, a huge payoff for the show's legion of fans, who grow to see that Lasso's folksy charm isn't an act, because he's so consistent.
In life people often mistake kindness for weakness. They make assumptions. They're dismissive. They send out subtle digs or judgments.
I love my work, the actual physical task of loading the bread into racks and rolling it into the proofer. It's meditative and satisfying. There's something soothing about working in a unit, doing something as elemental as baking bread. I come home smelling like 21 Whole Grain. My wife buries her nose in my collarbone and sniffs deeply when she kisses me.
But there's an odd thing that happens in a blue collar workplace. It's as fiercely hierarchical as the streets of Mumbai. There's a caste system. Managers wear black shirts. Maintenance techs wear blue shirts. Office staff and administrators wear street clothes. Among the line employees, all wearing khaki pants and company tee shirts, Panners are the lowest of the low. There are people on the staff who don't acknowledge my presence, who will look right through me if I simply say, "Good morning, John."
That's weird to me. I truly don't understand that mentality.
A portion of our work force are ex-felons. Guys with neck tattoos and a thousand-yard stare.
People have been underestimating me all my life.
Every workplace has its rules and power structure. A man I know went to Stanford University and earned a degree in economics, built a successful career as a bond underwriter in Seattle. He raised three remarkable kids who went to prestigious schools, one a pediatrician, another a medical researcher, the third a fund raiser for a university in Alaska.
Once he told me, "I never liked my job. It wasn't my dream, I didn't have a passion for it. Every day I had to put on a suit and kiss ass, but I knew it what was I had to do to build a life for my family. So I did it."
He's retired now. This spring and summer he and his wife are hiking from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail.
Along the way I hope they find their two triple 20s and a bullseye, a moment of perfect clarity and peace. But I suspect the success and well-roundedness of their children has been the barbecue sauce, the thing that makes them smile deep in their souls. The people that underestimated them don't matter anymore.
That's the flip side of yesterday's childlike dreams. I have a lot of admiration for people who can recognize the bargain the world offers, choosing to stick to a course in a disciplined way because it's the right thing to do, even if they have to swallow a lot of bullshit.
Be curious. Ask questions. And don't let yourself be defined by others' assumptions. That's a waste of the precious days.
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