May Linstrom: I had a really big mission, I needed to bring these formulas that I knew really worked and were creating physical change to the table and I needed to bottle it up in this way that felt so beautiful and celebratory and loving that it could be a catalyst to get you back to that relationship with yourself.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the MILF Podcast. This is the show where we talk about motherhood and sexuality with amazing women with fascinating stories to share on the joys of being a milf. Now here's your host, the milfiest milf I know, Jennifer Tracy.
Jennifer Tracy: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. This is MILF Podcast, the show where we talk about motherhood, sexuality, entrepreneurship and everything in between. I'm Jennifer Tracy, your host. I really hope you guys enjoyed my conversation with Kimberly Muller last week. And now we are in the middle of January 2019, I can't believe it. And today on the show we have May Lindstrom. May Lindstrom is a genius and I was a little bit star ... I was very starstruck when she came to my home for our interview.
Jennifer Tracy: I use May's skincare line and I've been a big fan of her skincare line for over a year now and she's just this ethereal being that has just really always fascinated me. And so when she agreed to be on the show, I felt like I won a huge price, which I did. And then when she came and I learned her personal story, I was just so amazed at where she came from, what happened, what she chose, the path that she walked and how she got to where she is today. It's fascinating. And this is the exact reason that I do this show because it's just so interesting to me. I mean, I can and hopefully will do this forever. I just love listening to women stories. So I really hope you enjoy the episode.
Jennifer Tracy: A couple quick items of business, so the month of January is ... The January give for MILF podcast is an organization called Harvest Home LA. They can be found at harvesthomela.org. If you want to donate directly to them, please do that. It is an organization that provides housing and a programming for homeless women and their children. So if they're pregnant and about to deliver or if they have their babies, they can go live there in a safe and clean environment and also gain the skills that they need to become independent again. It's beautiful. So go check out the website. I'm really supportive of this program and what they're doing for homeless women and children. So that's for January.
Jennifer Tracy: And then just a quick reminder, we recently changed our rating to explicit. There are only two ratings on iTunes so you can either be totally clean or explicit. And so even though this show is really ... We don't drop F bombs every other word, it depends on the guest. Some people curse more than others but I don't like to censor people so if they need to curse that's fine. Sometimes I curse but just so that you guys are aware that sometimes that happens. Sometimes we talk about sex, sometimes we talk about sexuality, so that's why the rating is now explicit.
Jennifer Tracy: Without further ado, I would just like to introduce this episode of May Lindstrom. I'm just so proud of this conversation with her. She is just a fascinating woman and a beautiful spirit and I feel so lucky that I got to spend this time with her. So I hope you enjoy.
Jennifer Tracy: Hi May.
May Linstrom: Hi.
Jennifer Tracy: Thank you so much for being on the show.
May Linstrom: It's so good to be here after how much time we've tried to find this day.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my gosh, but listen, that happens when ... I mean, I'm asking what I like to call baller milfs onto the show because every woman I've had on the show is doing something amazing like you are and 10 other amazing things and they're also raising human beings and probably have a partner at home. So it always gets rescheduled and I just thank you so much for making the time. It's a holiday time and you're here and you showed up so gorgeous and glowing and I literally ran out of my front door like a total nerd, like a 14-year-old fan girl. But I'm very excited.
May Linstrom: No, I needed that. I had this pretty major wisdom tooth surgery 11 days ago and this is the first time I've left my house, like really left my house. I'm still on weeds. And until two days ago, my face was giant and green. So to get a little fan girl out of you and feel like a human being was actually kind of a win.
Jennifer Tracy: Good. I'm so glad, I'm so glad.
May Linstrom: I'll take it.
Jennifer Tracy: So I kind of want to start from the beginning because I want to know more about where you are from and your upbringing. So where did you grow up?
May Linstrom: I grew up an hour outside of a town of 800 people in Northern Minnesota.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow.
May Linstrom: So I was literally born in a barn on 80 acres surrounded by forests and daisies and wildness. Yeah, it was like Laura Ingalls in the '80s.
Jennifer Tracy: And did you have siblings?
May Linstrom: I did. My dad and my mom had myself and my brother who's 15 months older and then they divorced when I was four and my mother remarried a man that had three children already. So when they got together, he had an eight month old little girl, a three-year-old boy and a six-year-old boy. So I grew up with them so we were an eight month old girl, a three-year-old boy, myself and then my two brothers were a year apart older than me. So as teenagers we were 10, 13, 14, 15 and 16. So I grew up with five kids half the time. My parents had two weeks split custody. So it'd be two weeks of my mom and the giant family of crazy people and then two weeks with my dad who's like a sloth, like a very silent sloth. So it was very quiet half the time and very, very chaotic half the time.
Jennifer Tracy: What was that like?
May Linstrom: It was wild.
Jennifer Tracy: Was it ... And they both lived in the same town still?
May Linstrom: Yeah. They made an agreement very early on when they split to stay in the same town until we graduated which was a big promise to make to each other when they split, when I was that young. They had a 14 year promise ahead of them but I think it was also a really, really awesome move to make as parents. And they lived in the middle of nowhere. I mean, our town was 800 people. There was nothing there and so the agreement to stay-
Jennifer Tracy: I mean, how big was your school? Your school must have been some tiny little school.
May Linstrom: Tiny, yeah. It's so funny 'cause my daughter just went officially, officially into school and so we had to do the whole LA school thing. And I'm like, when I grew up, there was just one school and three towns had to come together to make that one school. And you either went to that school or you didn't go to school. There was no private school, public school, charter school-
Jennifer Tracy: Magnet, yeah.
May Linstrom: No. I didn't even know what that stuff was. So yeah, interesting process. It was good except we lived so far in the middle of nowhere. I was in the school bus every morning for an hour just to get to that school.
Jennifer Tracy: And it was freezing cold and snowing.
May Linstrom: Freezing cold. I grew up with 60 below winters, the kind where, for fun, we'd go outside with a pot of boiling water and throw it in the air and it would snow. For fun.
Jennifer Tracy: No way.
May Linstrom: Yes way. Yeah, it was wild. You'd go outside and your nose would freeze. Like you'd breath in and it would solidify like a lake inside your head.
Jennifer Tracy: That's crazy.
May Linstrom: And I couldn't go out to the school bus with wet hair 'cause it would just be all crispy.
Jennifer Tracy: And you have a lot of hair. I mean, it takes a long time to dry.
May Linstrom: Yeah, it takes hours to dry.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh yeah.
May Linstrom: Like I'm sitting on your couch, it's noon.
Jennifer Tracy: It's not quite dry.
May Linstrom: Yeah, it's still wet.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. So growing up in that environment, I mean, I'm already piecing together like throwing the boiling water and like you had a fascination with nature and science.
May Linstrom: Definitely.
Jennifer Tracy: And being in the '80s, as it was when I grew up, we didn't have ... I mean, we had just gotten cable like in the late '80s or something, I don't know.
May Linstrom: Yeah, we had none of that. I grew up with a record player. I had an outhouse until I was 14 years old, like a actual outhouse with the star and the moon in the window. We didn't have running water. We had 60 below winters and no running water. My dad had dug this well and they would pump water and then we would bring inside and we had a wood burning stove and we would boil the water at the wood burning stove after pumping it and after cutting up all the wood. It was insane. They made a very intentional choice but I had a very odd childhood.
Jennifer Tracy: It's so fascinating. Oh my gosh, so that's how you had water and that's how you stayed warm. And what did you do to occupy yourself other than throw boiling water in the freezing year?
May Linstrom: Well, you know, that takes a lot of time. Well, we chopped wood. We chopped wood and we boiled water, we cleaned, we did all this stuff. To wash laundry, we had to do all of that. We'd have to get the water and boil it and we had ... Oh man, my brain is so fried. The wash buckets.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh yeah.
May Linstrom: We had those. There's this picture that my husband keeps around 'cause he just thinks it's hilarious. It's me as like an eight or nine year old doing the laundry. One, I'm an eight or nine year old doing the laundry which is funny enough 'cause I just feel like kids just don't do shit.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh God. Oh my-
May Linstrom: I know.
Jennifer Tracy: My child will not make his bed. He does it at his dad's house, I think 'cause he's a little afraid of his dad but here he's like ... I'm like, "Don't you want to make your bed?" He's like-
May Linstrom: No, I'm on vacation.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: Yeah. So there's this picture of me doing laundry and I'm in the yard with this two wash buckets doing the laundry. Like really doing the laundry by hand and it's like 1990.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, that's crazy.
May Linstrom: Or something.
Jennifer Tracy: Crazy. So you grow up, you graduate high school in this small town.
May Linstrom: I left early. I left home at 15.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay.
May Linstrom: Which everything kind of just fast-tracked for me. Because in my town, you either stay forever and have five kids by the time you're 20 or you have a meth habit or both. It's a tough place. It was a really beautiful place to grow up, so beautiful. It's the prettiest place in the world and everybody is so friendly. The Minnesota nice thing it's a thing.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: And so there's aspects that are really good but it's also incredibly conservative and I'm not and my family wasn't either. We were the weird hippy family and this little farm town. And I was really, really shy, just brutally shy. Like very smart but terrified and so if I'd even get called on in class, I just couldn't even answer, I couldn't even talk, and I wasn't cool. Like we were super poor and had all these brothers and so I wore all their hand me downs. And so I was just this awkward shy girl who never talked and wore boy clothes and had a mullet and it was just sort of awful. I was not set up to be successful as a cool kid.
May Linstrom: And then at one point I was just like, "Well, you know, fuck this. I have a voice and I have something to say and I don't have to just deteriorate here." And I had found this art school online that functioned like a college but was still for high school. It was a two-year program for junior and senior kids outside Minneapolis, which was like three hours away. And so I applied and I got in and I left.
Jennifer Tracy: At 15.
May Linstrom: At 15.
Jennifer Tracy: Now, I mean, that takes balls.
May Linstrom: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: Or ovaries I should say.
May Linstrom: It definitely takes ovaries.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, it takes ovaries.
May Linstrom: It takes ovaries for sure.
Jennifer Tracy: So that is amazing.
May Linstrom: So I left home at 15. Yeah. And then-
Jennifer Tracy: And you lived in a big city.
May Linstrom: And I lived in a big city by myself. So I went from my town of 800 people to Minneapolis living on my own.
Jennifer Tracy: What was your living situation in Minneapolis?
May Linstrom: So the first year ... So it was a two-year program and the first year I lived at the dorm, so I had a dorm. It really functioned exactly like a college. You had your major and I majored in theater which was hilarious 'cause I was such an introvert but that was the choice. I was making the choice and I'm, "You're just going to do this, and that's it. That's what you're going to do."
May Linstrom: And then the second year, I was like, "I'm free." And I found this friend of my mine who was in my class. Her step dad was a long-haul truck driver and he had this beautiful home in Minneapolis and he was gone almost all the time. But it was full of plan, it was like a jungle house. It was amazing and he had a cat and he had all these plants and he was a long-haul truck driver. And so he needed someone to be at the house.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow, that's perfect.
May Linstrom: So at 16, 17, suddenly I had this big beautiful house in Minneapolis by myself filled with plants and this cat and this truck driver who would just be gone forever and then he would come back and it was funny, we had this great routine, he'd come back from being out of town and he would sit down with me at the table and he would pull out all the maps. And this was before there was really like the internet.
Jennifer Tracy: Navigation or whatever, yeah.
May Linstrom: So they were physical maps and he would show me all these routes across the U.S. of where he would go. And it was the coolest thing. Like there's so many amazing places in this country that are invisible to anyone but truck drivers. And so there was all these routes, like there's this route across, I believe it was in South Dakota and you'd drive for hours and hours and hours and suddenly there's these gigantic metal birds. Like these metal bird sculptures in the middle of nowhere, just in this field. And they're beautiful, they're just extraordinary but they're as big as buildings and just a bunch of them, so bizarre.
Jennifer Tracy: Just an art.
May Linstrom: Yeah, in the middle of nowhere, like nothing around for hours. Like you'd have to time your drive because you'd run out of gas before the next town because there was so much time in between. And I actually did run out of gas, I had to stop at somebody's house and get gas one time. But he would come home and he would do that and then he would make hummus. And so, when he would leave town, he would leave me with ... You remember those like gallon pails of ice cream?
Jennifer Tracy: Yes.
May Linstrom: So he would leave town with this, he would leave me with a gallon of hummus and cheese and pickles and I lived on hummus and cheese and pickles.
Jennifer Tracy: Sounds good to me. Sounds similar to my diet now actually.
May Linstrom: Yeah, so that's what I did. I went from my small town to there and then the second I turned 18, I got in my car and I came here. And so I moved to LA as an 18 year old and was homeless and living in my car for months and-
Jennifer Tracy: Pursuing acting? I mean, was that the impetus for you to come out here or-
May Linstrom: Not really. I actually didn't pursue acting at all funny enough. I mean, really it was such a practice of I just needed to know that I could speak and that it was okay and just to get comfortable in my skin. And I think also growing up where I grew up, the people that I went into kindergarten with would have been the same people that I would have graduated with. There's no chance in there to shift your identity at all. Who you are projected as, as a five year old, that's who you stay and I'm not the same person as I was as a five year old. Parts of me are but I would have been always small in my town. And there's nothing wrong with a small town but I am not a small woman. And so I needed to be able to have the permission to be whoever I was. And to find out who I was and in that space, I couldn't even explore who I was. It wasn't safe too.
Jennifer Tracy: Right. Well yeah, in a very conservative place like that I mean, Lord knows. When something you said earlier that was so profound and struck me was that you said when you were 15 and realized you needed to do this for yourself. That you said, "Fuck this, I have a voice." I think that is ... I want a T-shirt that says that. Fuck this, I have a voice. Because I think that's something that as women ... I have a son who's very sensitive cancer, we've already covered that. And he's very comfortable with his voice and his feelings and owning things and I'm proud of that because I want to raise who ... He will be a man who is sensitive to that and can honor that in other human beings as well. But I'd always thought if I have a daughter, it's even more important because that's something that in general in our culture and in other cultures that has been ... It's changing now a lot, obviously but ... So I think that's so great.
May Linstrom: It just gets squashed out of you so quickly.
Jennifer Tracy: It really does, yeah.
May Linstrom: My daughter is six so I have a six-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy and my daughter, it's been really interesting to watch her find and hide her voice even at six. And she is a thousand times more social than I ever was or ever will be. She's a totally different human being. So at her preschool the girls were like very into princess stuff which I get and like everybody goes through that. No matter how gender neutral you can try and raise your kids, they are what they are.
Jennifer Tracy: I mean, my son, he just woke up one day and was like, "Guns." I'm like, "What? How do you know what that is?"
May Linstrom: I remember listening to you talk about that before. It's so funny. And yeah, my son too. He's obsessed with balls and trucks. And when the garbage truck comes out and it's like Christmas and my daughter just didn't even realize that garbage trucks existed. Yeah, so I get that. But in her preschool, her little group of friends were like very into princess stuff and I watched her ... Before she went into preschool she was like obsessed with bugs and dirt and gardening and being out and stuff. And then she went there and then she came home one day and she was acting afraid of a bee. I'm like, "Talia, I literally have a picture of you holding a bee like it's your pet and petting it from a month ago. And you're not scared of bees." and she's like, "I know." But it was just something she had picked up like girls are supposed to run when they see a bee and squeal. And so she picked that up and she picked up a lot of other things there.
May Linstrom: And this fall she just started at a new school and it's a totally different group of friends and it's a totally different kind of education and so much more liberal and they actually garden and go outside and they're in their dirt and there's kind of a different thing. But she does this thing with her voice where I speak softly just by nature and that's something I've just gotten more comfortable with. That's who I am and that's fine. But she will make her voice so tiny and she adopts it as like character and you can't understand her at all. She's like gibberish, you can't understand her. And she'll be saying the most beautiful things and she's so smart and she's so on it but she will make her voice invisible, she'll make herself so tiny. And it's totally a phase, it's not real.
May Linstrom: And so we talk about that all the time, "Talia, use your full voice. I want to be able to hear you. Use your full voice." And so it's this constant thing in my house right now, is helping her to remember that her full voice is good. And she's so into this character voice that it's actually really hard for her to drop. Like she'll know that she's doing it and she can't get out of it. It's like if you fake an accent too long, it's like, "Wait, how do I talk normal? I forgot what I sound like."
Jennifer Tracy: Totally. I used to go down to visit, when my husband and I were married, he's for Louisiana. We'd go down to visit his family and I would start saying, "Y'all this." Just 'cause you're immersed in it and I think ... Yeah, that's interesting. Wow, that's so fascinating.
May Linstrom: So she's in that and so I watch that and I go, "Okay, all right." I mean, she's got the natural innate personality that I know she'll get there and she'll own it and she's so strong in herself in that way. It's just the voice. But I think because I had to work so hard to claim mine that I'm projecting. So I'm like, "All right, back off. She's not me."
Jennifer Tracy: Well, it makes sense. You have that sensitivity to that.
May Linstrom: I do.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: Just I want her to know that she can be all she is, yeah. She doesn't have to turn it down for anybody.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes. So you're 18, you're in LA, you're living in your car and what happens?
May Linstrom: If I tell you all the things, it'll sound totally made up. Yeah, I lived in my car and random places that I could crash. So I had a girlfriend with me for one, like a girlfriend, girlfriend. So I dated women at that time also so we'll just go there. And I had met her ... So that was another thing in my small town. There was no gay people.
Jennifer Tracy: I was just going to ask you. I'm sure like-
May Linstrom: Where I grew up. I didn't even know that was a thing, I didn't even know that was an option. So we'll skip forward [inaudible 00:22:14]. I'm married to a man currently and so we'll come back to that. But growing up, I didn't even know gay people were a thing. I didn't know that that was ... I also didn't know that there was people that weren't white and not from any kind of small minded way, just literally no exposure. So when I moved out of my town and moved to Minneapolis to an art school, everybody was gay or trying to be gay or figuring out if they were gay or certainly playing with all colors of the spectrum there. And there was people from all over the state and from all different cultural backgrounds, and it was so cool. It was so cool, it was so much fun and-
Jennifer Tracy: I'm sure it was like an oasis in the desert.
May Linstrom: Yeah, I mean, the whole idea was that I can be whoever I want to be and I can figure out who I was. And that was such a wild thing because I had been stuck in this, "Well, she's kind of like the weird quiet outcast girl." And I'd been that for 15 years in my small town. And to suddenly be somewhere where nobody knew I wasn't cool. And so, I remember the first couple of weeks of school ... So it was a two-year program and so there'd be like the second year kids and the first year kids. And so the second year kids would talk about the first year kids who were coming in. And I started hearing that there was a name that they were using to describe me and I was the girl with the fuck me eyes. And then I first-
Jennifer Tracy: What did you think when you heard that?
May Linstrom: Oh my God, my brain about exploded because I was like untouchable. I was totally untouchable. I was such an outcast. Like even if you had had any interest in me, you wouldn't have been allowed to express it 'cause I was not cool. And so I was the girl who in fourth and fifth grade, six grade, when people started holding hands and experimenting with dating and crushes and whatever, the popular boys would talk to me as a joke. They would say that they were going out with me as a joke and I'd get excited for a day and they'd call me and be like, "Do you want to go out with me?" And I'd say yes and then I'd find out it was a joke.
Jennifer Tracy: That's so cruel.
May Linstrom: Yeah, they're were really mean.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh those little fuckers.
May Linstrom: Total little fuckers. But I also on my hour long school bus ride, not, those were the worst, the older kids would throw maggots in my hairs.
Jennifer Tracy: What?
May Linstrom: Maggots.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my God, that is so horrifying honey.
May Linstrom: Is that not the most horrific thing?
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my God.
May Linstrom: I think about that now, I imagine someone doing that to my daughter and like-
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, you'd kill them.
May Linstrom: I'd kill them.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. Oh my God.
May Linstrom: Yes, and they were just awful. So I'd come from that and suddenly I'm in this school and I'm just kind of finding my way and like, "Oh, wow, this is such a different territory."
Jennifer Tracy: The people respected you. It sounds like you felt respect.
May Linstrom: Well, and they're just so different. I mean, just the idea. And even again, I mean, it's funny.
Jennifer Tracy: Not that saying fuck me eyes is respectful but it's cool at that age. It's like kind of-
May Linstrom: At that age it was like, "Wait, what do you mean? Like if someone sees me at all-
Jennifer Tracy: Sexually attracted to me or sees me as a sexual being.
May Linstrom: Or just sees me at all.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: Just period sees me.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow.
May Linstrom: 'Cause even in my little town where I was clearly not invisible because nobody can be invisible when there's that few people, I was still totally invisible. And to be somewhere where in the first handful of days I'm even there, there's like a nickname for who I am. Anyway, I just thought that it was funny. And they didn't know. And so like, "Okay, well ..." And so right after that, I was dating people and that was just such a different thing. But it really was like a playground and there was boys interested in me for the first time and there were girls interested in me and I was cool because I had liked both and couldn't do anything about either. And so suddenly it was like, "I'm free in a candy store." And so it was a wild little chapter, funny, but a really, really important one.
May Linstrom: Yeah, anyway, going back to being homeless in my car.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes, with your girlfriend.
May Linstrom: With my girlfriend.
Jennifer Tracy: At least you weren't alone, that's good. Yeah.
May Linstrom: I wasn't alone. And so actually the day that I graduated from that school, I met her at a graduation party and-
Jennifer Tracy: Had she been a student there as well?
May Linstrom: She hadn't but she had had friends that were.
Jennifer Tracy: Got it. Okay.
May Linstrom: And so, anyone who grew up in the Midwest can probably identify with these kinds of parties where there would just be a field with a bonfire in the middle of it somewhere and everybody would drive through the field in a truck to the fire. And all these underage kids would be drinking and making out.
Jennifer Tracy: That sounds amazing. That sounds so fun.
May Linstrom: That's what happens when you grow up in a small town, Midwest, the highlights. And so this is one of those parties and I got there and she was sitting across the fire and I saw her from across the fire and I was like, "Oh, that one."
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: And by the end of the night, I had told her the second I turn 18, which was in a day or two, that I was getting in my car and I was just heading west and I was just going to go until I ran out of money or hit the ocean or whichever happened first.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow. So you didn't have a plan. You just-
May Linstrom: There was no plan. It was just get the fuck out.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: 'Cause even though that school had been great and was really, really powerful for me, I barely went my second year. I was just so done. I was just ready to go do something else. And so when I asked her if she would go home with me that night and she was like, "Are you taking me with you?"
Jennifer Tracy: On your trip.
May Linstrom: I'm like, "Wait, you'd go, go?" And was like, "Yeah." And she's like, "Well then yeah." And so I picked her up from her parents house like two days later with all of her things and we took off. And she was with me on that adventure for a couple years. It was great.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow. May I ask, was that your first love?
May Linstrom: No.
Jennifer Tracy: There were ... Okay.
May Linstrom: My first love was a man who I met when I was 14 actually and who wasn't in my town. So it was before I went to that school. But also, he didn't know who I was. We met at a concert.
Jennifer Tracy: Right.
May Linstrom: So same kind of thing. When I was able to just be who I was, such a different place. And so, he was my first love. I've known him for 20 years now. We still stay in touch.
Jennifer Tracy: Aw, that's nice.
May Linstrom: He's very special. And this woman who went on this adventure with me, she was not my first girlfriend but she was the first one who really was fully onboard with me.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. So what happened on this adventure? You guys made it out here.
May Linstrom: We made it out here in a very half hazard kind of way. We started on the trip, we didn't know each other at all, we'd known each other for like a week and-
Jennifer Tracy: Crush course.
May Linstrom: Total crush course. So like a day into the drive, it came up that she'd never actually left the country before. And it was like, "Oh okay." So I took a right and we went to Canada first.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, I love it.
May Linstrom: And you didn't need a passport anyway or anything then. So it was really helpful. So we went to Canada and then the car broke down and we got stuck in this small town in Canada for a couple of weeks waiting on a radiator or something, something vital that we didn't have that they didn't have in the town. And so we had an adventure there and then ultimately landed in LA and didn't have any money. And then realized that as 18 year olds with no instate connections it was impossible to get somewhere to live. I had just enough money where I could have paid a deposit on an apartment if somebody would have given one to us but nobody would give one to us because we didn't have anyone in state or an instate job. And then I couldn't get a job without an address and I couldn't get an address without a job. So we just found ourselves in this like cycle.
May Linstrom: And also, we found ... Well, when we didn't have any money and so we were looking in really low income places. And when me and my girlfriend would walk in and were two super young white girls that are clearly a couple and we just had people over and over say straight to us like, "You wouldn't be safe here. You can't live here." And sometimes they wouldn't say you wouldn't be safe here but we knew that's what they meant. And they also wouldn't say directly you're not welcome here but that was also very clear.
May Linstrom: And so we were just forced to live in our car. And so we would just sleep in the car and we would pack in hospital parking lots and then we'd get kicked out of hospital parking lots and then we'd park in neighborhoods then there'd be neighborhood watch, and it was sort of awful. And that went on for a really long time and every once in a while we'd meet somebody who would take us in and let us sleep on a couch for a little bit or something but by then, we had gone through all of our money, we had nothing left. And at the time, I don't know if this is still true but there wasn't overnight women shelters, there was overnight men shelters but there wasn't overnight women shelters and they didn't want the liability.
May Linstrom: So there was no option for us outside of that and we were trying so hard. Like everyday, all day we'd be out trying to get jobs and nobody would hire us for anything. And finally there was a resource that was really helpful which was a place for women and women with children to go where they could just eat and use computers and take a shower. And so we would go there and they would give us these grocery bags of food. They'd give us two grocery bags of food twice a week. And so we mostly lived off that and it would be like, "Here's a can of potatoes and we're going to mix it with a can of corn and that's going to be a meal." And that was how we ate for a long time.
May Linstrom: I have this soft spot for butterfingers because in the bottom of each of those bags, there'd be a butterfinger and so it was like gold. Yeah, it was a really interesting time. But through that service, I met a woman who got me an interview to be a music theater teacher and instructor at a center for adults with disabilities. And I had grown up, my little brother was developmentally disabled and so I had been a caregiver for him and I had trained in that and been a part of his education. As a young person, that was one of my teenage jobs. And so I had a little bit of history and a lot of heart and passion about it. And so I got an interview and they hired me. It's also incredibly low minimum wage job.
Jennifer Tracy: I can imagine, and especially back then. It was probably-
May Linstrom: I think it was like 750 [crosstalk 00:33:19], something insane for a really hard, really, really difficult job. So I had a classroom of 20 something adults from 21 years old to 92 years old was my spectrum, with all types of developmental disabilities.
Jennifer Tracy: And just you? You do have an assistant.
May Linstrom: In my classroom.
Jennifer Tracy: Just your own.
May Linstrom: There was multiple classrooms but that was class.
Jennifer Tracy: But I mean, that was ... Wow. I mean, that just to me, that seems like a lot.
May Linstrom: It was a lot, yeah. And probably half of my class didn't speak English at all or very well. And I didn't really speak Spanish, such a practice but really important. And it gave me a job. While working there, one of the other instructors there, he was living in a garage and he let my girlfriend and I share his garage. And he was illegal so it was always this like really nerveracking thing, it's like, "Well now we're sharing half of a garage with this man who's illegal but such a beautiful soul." And there were just so many stories like that. And then at one point I had this brilliant idea what if we just sleep on a sailboat? Because the, I don't know what the word is, but the rent basically for where to post your sailboat is only like a couple hundred dollars a month or something. And I'm like, "I have a couple of hundred dollars a month. Now I have a job, I can afford that."
May Linstrom: And I had found this sailboat on Craigslist for like $800 or something and it was like, "I can ..." It was tiny, it was a 12 foot sailboat. It was ... And [crosstalk 00:35:07]
Jennifer Tracy: That's all you need just for two of you to sleep.
May Linstrom: All I needed was ... 'Cause I was like, "It's the perfect solution because then there's showers at the dock, you can get a mail slot so we could have an address. We'd just sleep on the water in this little 12 foot boat. Like it's funny but it's kind of romantic. So I just thought I was brilliant so I took all of our money and bought this sailboat and got the slip. And the month later, they changed the law and said you can't sleep on your boats in the marina anymore. And so then I had this bought and I had this ... And then I tried to sell the boat on Craigslist and this guy fucked me and took the boat and never paid and it was just this series of these things. So that went on. There was more iterations of that than I could probably go into.
May Linstrom: And then we went to Mexico. As we went being poor and next to homeless in LA is actually really rough and maybe it'll be better in Mexico. My 18-year-old brain. Yeah, so one day after saving up for a little bit, we packed up just a backpack, just one backpack and got on a bus and went to Mexico and we spent the next several months doing that. We went all down one coast and all on the Guatemala border and all the way up the other side. And it actually was much better to be homeless in Mexico. It turns out there's a lot more people who would take you in and clearly much less expensive to feed yourself. We could go to the market and just get a piece of bread and some tomatoes and avocado and that was a meal. And it was a better meal than we'd been having. Yeah, so those adventures continued for a while.
May Linstrom: And then we just kind of ran out of steam and went, "All right, what's next?" And we'd made our way, all the way back up the other coast of Mexico and the next bus out went to New Orleans so like, "Well, cool." We've never been to New Orleans." So we got on the bus and we went to New Orleans and both ended up getting a job at a restaurant. And I had previously worked in restaurants. I'd been working in restaurants since I was 13 so I started working really young. I had a couple of my own little side businesses before that at like eight, nine but that's a whole different-
Jennifer Tracy: You did? Well, give me at least one. I need a taste.
May Linstrom: Okay, there's a couple. So my first one was I started a greeting card company when I was eight or nine. My dad, he's so cute. He still makes these greeting cards that are just made of other people's greeting cards. So anyone who sends cards to my dad and to me at the time, we just would save them all in this box. And then when it was the time for someone's birthday or graduation or Christmas or whatever, you'd go into the box and you'd cut it up and you'd piece it together with something else and you'd staple the things together and you'd put it on construction paper and then you'd paint it and whatever. And so I made a company, Smile Five Cards.
Jennifer Tracy: That is amazing. That is amazing.
May Linstrom: And I had a little suitcase and I would put my cards in it and I would go door to door and I would sell these little greeting cards.
Jennifer Tracy: That's incredible. You were full an entrepreneur at eight years old.
May Linstrom: Oh yeah, that was my thing. And I mentioned that I'd grown up in this field of daisies and so my brothers played baseball and so I'd go and I'd pick daisies and I'd bring this bucket of daisies to the baseball games and I'd sell daisies. And then when I was 12, I started a stepping stone company. You know those cement things that you walk on in a garden, like the garden path?
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: So I made those. So I'd have a big thing of cement in a wheelbarrow and I'd start ... I was insane. It was so heavy-
Jennifer Tracy: That's incredible. That's incredible.
May Linstrom: ... and nuts. And then I would make-
Jennifer Tracy: But you were determined and you had the strength to do it.
May Linstrom: I was super determined, yeah. And both were parents were entrepreneurs and so it never occurred to me to work for someone else and it always occurred to me to work. And so I just had these things. And then I would build these frames and then I'd pour the cement into it. I hurt myself so many times. And then-
Jennifer Tracy: I bet ;'cause it's heavy.
May Linstrom: It's so heavy. Cement is crazy heavy, especially when it's wet. My mom and stepdad's house, there was a river going through our yard and so I'd pull these river rocks out of the river and then I would make these patterns in the cement that were like lizards and things.
Jennifer Tracy: I can't even. This is so amazing. That is amazing, oh my gosh. It all makes sense though, now. But wow, that's amazing.
May Linstrom: Why was I talking about that?
Jennifer Tracy: Well, because ...
May Linstrom: Oh yeah. And then I was working in restaurants. So when I was actually somewhat legitimate old enough to work ... You can work in a family restaurant I think when you're 13 or 14, I think. And I think the first year I wasn't actually allowed to and so they would pay me in ice cream and I didn't really care 'cause I just wanted to work. So I started working in restaurants when I was 13 or 14 and did that all through high school and then came back to it when I got into New Orleans.
Jennifer Tracy: Were you guys in the french quarter? Where were you living?
May Linstrom: Yeah. Well, once we had a home. When we first landed there, it was real rough. We lived actually in a hotel. It's the hotel where all the street performers in New Orleans paint themselves silver.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: Where they stay. And no one will let them stay anywhere 'cause they'd leave silver tracks everywhere they go. This is a funny thing. You don't think about these, like dog hazards.
Jennifer Tracy: That's hysterical.
May Linstrom: Yeah, 'cause they're just like covered in silver paint.
Jennifer Tracy: Sure. It's everywhere, it's on the sheets, yeah.
May Linstrom: They're a mess. And so the only hotel that would let them stay was this hotel on this street in New Orleans. This is the highest crime street in the country.
Jennifer Tracy: Which street is it?
May Linstrom: My mind is so blanking right now but it's-
Jennifer Tracy: I think I can think of it too but it's-
May Linstrom: It's not nice.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: It's not nice.
Jennifer Tracy: I know the quarter a little bit.
May Linstrom: It's not New Orleans that you want to imagine. It's not.
Jennifer Tracy: No. It's ... Yeah.
May Linstrom: It's real city. And they let us stay there for very cheap. And we didn't have any money and so we had to kind of talk 'em into it and so that felt really shady too. And it was like, "But I got a job. I got a job and as soon as I have a paycheck I'll pay." And I'm sure that that's what they heard from every street performer too. And so we just kind of followed what other homeless people did. It's kind of how we'd been for a couple of years, part of that. And what's interesting is homeless people come together in community in a way that you don't know. Like they share resources. "Oh, there's a meal happening over here and there's a shower over here." And yeah, that was a world that for a moment I got plugged into.
Jennifer Tracy: That's interesting because not having that, just for me, and living where I live and seeing the amount of homeless and I know I've talked about this before, in LA, since I've lived in LA 20 years. Yeah, 20 years, gosh, 20 years. And I've watched it get worse and worse in the last several years and it's just heartbreaking in the tents and this. And normally, previously I've thought that, "Oh gosh, it feels being on the outside in my totally privileged life, my very white privileged life, that it's just every man for himself or herself. Every woman or man for himself or herself. But I do see that a little bit with these tenting communities. Like I can see even just the community. I mean, yeah, I just ... Anyway, that's interesting that you had that very personal journey and that personal insight into ...
May Linstrom: And I forget sometimes because now I am on the privileged side of things and I forget.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: And even then, we were still weirdo outcasts. I was still like this weird girl couple, like we had shaved heads. We had all the things going for us. So we were staying at this hotel and it was awful and apparently our room had been where you go to get drugs for a long time or something. And so all night long people would just be banging on the door, just like banging on the door like with all their force trying to get in to our room. And the room was so awful. Like we would come in at night and we'd turn on the lights and you would just see thousands of cockroaches just scatter. It was so gnarly, it was really, really, really gross and so scary and-
Jennifer Tracy: How long did you stay there?
May Linstrom: We were probably in the hotel for a few months and then one night at a bar, we ... All these stories are going to sound totally made up. One night at a bar we met this guy who was like, "Well, that sounds awful. You should come stay at this house that we have where there's a bunch of random people staying. And it's still weird but it's probably safer than where you are."
Jennifer Tracy: It's still weird.
May Linstrom: Oh yeah. Yeah, still weird. It was so much weirder than where we were. It was a house of vampires.
Jennifer Tracy: No.
May Linstrom: Yeah. So New Orleans you hear these things and it's like, "That can't be real. That can't be real." We ended up staying in this house with people who identified as vampires. It was the craziest-
Jennifer Tracy: Okay wait, I need to know so much about this. So what ...
May Linstrom: It was so crazy.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay, I have so many questions. Did they ... Were you ...
May Linstrom: What did you think we were going to talk about today by the way?
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my God, not this. This is like so juicy and amazing. But that's why I love this show 'cause I have no agenda whenever I'm meeting a woman. I'm just like, "Whatever comes." It always the most beautiful gift because I don't know what it is supposed to be. Did you have to identify as any certain thing? Like a vampire or non vampire to live there?
May Linstrom: No.
Jennifer Tracy: Or they just let you stay there but they were ...
May Linstrom: So there was like the woman of the house who was like ...
Jennifer Tracy: Was there prostitution involved in that ...
May Linstrom: No.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay.
May Linstrom: But-
Jennifer Tracy: Just because you said the woman of the house, that made me feel like ... Okay.
May Linstrom: She was ... Yeah, I don't know. She was the woman of the house and I think she really wanted my girlfriend I think is what it was. I think she ... My girlfriend was candy and whether she actually wanted to eat her, I'm not sure. I don't know what was the dynamic.
Jennifer Tracy: Both. Eat her and have sex with her.
May Linstrom: And so I was like well ... Yeah, whatever it was.
Jennifer Tracy: All the things.
May Linstrom: But you're allowed to stay here 'cause you've got her and I was like, "All right. Well, okay. It's closer to work."
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my God, closer to work.
May Linstrom: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: Well, less commute time. I mean, I have to give a pine of blood a day.
May Linstrom: And very practical. And it was awful. I mean, everything was so awful.
Jennifer Tracy: Like were there meals served at this house or they just drink blood?
May Linstrom: No, I mean, they would just go out sometimes and be like, "All right, well, we're going to go get some blood." And we'd be like, "You can't be serious. Like are you to just fucking with that? Like I don't actually understand." And so I would have just thought it was completely crazy except that house was insane. Like there would be ... Like plates would go flying across the room.
Jennifer Tracy: So wait, it was haunted?
May Linstrom: I don't know. I don't know what was happening but there was-
Jennifer Tracy: Or they had a special effects technician underneath.
May Linstrom: They either had a special effects technician or there was some crazy shit going on. But they would disappear. They would disappear for days and then-
Jennifer Tracy: Did they sleep in coffins?
May Linstrom: I don't think so. I mean, they looked like normal messed up white people living in a super poor black neighborhood. It didn't make any sense. It was ...
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my God.
May Linstrom: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: That's amazing.
May Linstrom: It was something. And the taxi drivers wouldn't take you there. Like we would finish work late at night and that part of the city wasn't even safe for taxi drivers to go to. And so we'd tell them where we wanted to go 'cause we'd be working the french quarter and then we'd be like, "We need to go over to this district." And they'd be like, "No."
Jennifer Tracy: Wow.
May Linstrom: And so we'd walk home. We'd walk like an hour.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my God.
May Linstrom: So she worked in the same ... We worked in the same restaurant for a while and then at some point we broke up. And then I moved out and left her alone with the vampires for a minute which is like, "Oh God I'm the worst."
Jennifer Tracy: You were 19, 20, whatever.
May Linstrom: Yeah. And then I fell in love with my boss who was our boss and moved in with him. So I'm sure it was great for her. It all ended up working out. Then through being with him, during that relationship, I started doing other things, I started working as in ... I was still cooking and I was still working in restaurants 'cause that was really my heart but I moved out of that restaurant into a better restaurant so I could really cook because-
Jennifer Tracy: So you were cooking in this restaurant or you were waitressing?
May Linstrom: So the first restaurant I was waitressing and I really didn't want to do that, I wanted to cook. But that industry is so funny, funny is not accurate. It's aggressive and it's very male and I was a young pretty white girl. And so I would interview at these places and they'd be like, "Well, you can host. You can wipe tables. We like what you look like out here." And I was like, "No, I want to cook. I really want to cook." And I was out to dinner at one of Emeril Lagasse's restaurants with my boyfriend one night and we just had the most fabulous meal and I told the waiter, I was like, "Can you please have the chef come talk to us 'cause I just want to say thank you for this meal?" And the chef came out and I was just kind of gashing at him about the meal and I was like, "Look, I've been trying to cook and like I've been cooking since I could walk. Like food is what I do and I really just want to cook." And he's like, "Cool. You want to come cook? Be here Monday." I was like, "Really?" And so I started cooking.
Jennifer Tracy: And that's a nice restaurant.
May Linstrom: It was a nice restaurant but it was an all black male kitchen.
Jennifer Tracy: Interesting.
May Linstrom: And me.
Jennifer Tracy: So how were you received in that element?
May Linstrom: Like a girl.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: So they had me on the end. Like it was an open kitchen and so I'd be making desserts and making the desserts beautiful. So I took a lot of pride in it, I made the most beautiful desserts you could ever make and it was like, "Fine, you're going to put me with the flowers and the fruit sauces, I will make art out of these flowers and fruit sauces." But then it was obnoxious because when the kitchen wasn't open to the public, then they'd have me cook. They knew I could cook and so when the public wasn't there, I'd me making sauces and I'd be coming up with things and I'd be coming up with like ... I don't know, I'd be cooking. And then when the doors would open, it was like, "All right, back to the dessert station."
Jennifer Tracy: And do you think that was because there was a hierarchy in the kitchen and that-
May Linstrom: No, because I eventually at one point when I left, when I ultimately left that kitchen, I looked down the line and I had trained every person on it. They had all passed through my station and I had worked all of those stations. And I looked down the line and it was like, "Yeah, I'm just going to forever be this just this woman." And that's problematic for me. I'm quiet but I have my own ideas.
Jennifer Tracy: I was just going to say, you are but you-
May Linstrom: I'm a certain kind of quiet.
Jennifer Tracy: .. you're not. You're also very explosive in your creativity. Just having sat with you for however long we've been sitting here and then knowing what your business is and how you lead your life and stuff, that's a very Gemini. That's interesting.
May Linstrom: Yes, I've got split personality. So while I had been working there ... I was also working crazy hours. I was working like eight hours a week because I would work the morning shift. I'd be there before sunrise and then I would ride my bike home and take my dog for a walk and ride my bike back into a second shift.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow.
May Linstrom: So I was hardly sleeping. I was working all the time and I just thought, "If I just show up enough, I will prove myself and I'll be taken seriously and then I'll really, really be able to do this." And this is such a great opportunity and we made such excellent food and it was a place with a great reputation and there was various restaurants in that family so there was opportunity for growth. And being a cook in New Orleans is always taken pretty seriously. I could go anywhere. So I knew that there was a lot of opportunity there but it was also really soul crashing in a lot of ways to just know so clearly that I wasn't held back by anything except that I'm woman and I'm white and I'm female.
May Linstrom: And I had to take on such a kind of masculine kind of persona. I had to much more outwardly aggressive and I am as a person. And to balance that, I had started working as an art model for artists in New Orleans and I had just kind of come up. And part of that was my own kind of growth and my own identity too and being comfortable with being seen still was a thing like, "I'm still here. I still like this." And not feeling attractive necessarily but just seeing and the ability to be female. And in art, that was so celebrated and so I could go sit with the painter and be literally just in my skin. And I was a nude model for the most part and so I'd be working with these artists and they just saw my beauty and they just saw my energy and they didn't need anything from me except for me to just be in presence with them.
May Linstrom: I had started doing that just as kind of an outlet just to balance this very male force that was my everyday. And I would go sit with these artists and I would be completely in my feminine. And I was a painter too and I love that part and I loved to paint. I'm also totally allergic to paints which we'll get into the skin story eventually. And so I had to stop painting 'cause I would get these blisters and rushes and just didn't work for me, for ... It doesn't work for me. So it's just a part of me.
Jennifer Tracy: You have to paint with the organic substances.
May Linstrom: Exactly. And I tried doing that on paper. It didn't really pen out. So it was just this outlet and I had worked with a number of artists in that way and then I started working with photographers in that way. And then these photographers and different artists that would do this really fine art work with me some of them also worked in fashion. And so at a certain point, some of them would be like, "Oh, you'd actually be perfect for this totally mainstream thing." And it was like, "Oh, that's weird. That never occurred to me as a thing that I could do."
Jennifer Tracy: How old were you at this point?
May Linstrom: I was 20.
Jennifer Tracy: And still living in New Orleans?
May Linstrom: Yeah. And so also there wasn't like a big fashion record there or something. But there was a number of photographers who had second homes in New Orleans who would be there doing their art and they were actually like really great. Like a fashion or beauty photographers who also lived in New York or in London or wherever they were. And so they started using me on real projects. And it was like, "Oh, this is interesting." And then I wasn't very available 'cause I was working all the time in these kitchens and then they'd want me for like a job and I'd be like, "Well, I can't. I'm working." And they were like, "Well, it pays x." I be like, "Oh. Fuck, that's a lot more than ..."
Jennifer Tracy: You make in a month probably, yeah.
May Linstrom: Than what I'm making in a month. And so, I started saying yes sometimes to things like that and not with any aspiration of like, "Oh, I really want to be a model." But again, it was kind of a practical thing. It was like, "Well, I'm already doing this for free, just as an outlet. And if they want to pay me and pay me more and I'm not really being like fulfilled in what I want to do with cooking anyway, sure let's try it." And during that chapter of just sort of filling out what it looked like to have both of those worlds in action at the same time, my boyfriend at the time, both of his parents within two weeks of each other, were diagnosed with cancer. And they lived in New York and so we made the decision to leave to go to New York to be with them.
May Linstrom: So suddenly it was like, "Oh okay, well now I'm leaving this job anyway that I probably wouldn't have left because I really was just trying so hard to just make it work there. But now I was going to leave anyway and so there was no risk. So the idea was, "All right, well let's try saying yes a little bit more to these opportunities that are coming up, both in the art world and in the mainstream modeling world and see what it looks like to do this in a city where this actually exists." When I need to, I'll just go get another cooking job. And I have been here long enough that I should be able to get hired somewhere decent. And what happened was I never went back to the kitchen.
May Linstrom: Modeling turned into this kind of weird accidental career. It wasn't something I tried to do, it was something that just kind of kept happening. And then I looked up one day and I've been doing it for five years and I realized this isn't what I want to do but now I don't know what else to do. And now I have this five year gap in my resume and as it was even before that, walking into a kitchen, being who I was, it was hard to be taken seriously. And I couldn't walk into a professional kitchen and-
Jennifer Tracy: Say that you'd been modeling.
May Linstrom: And say I'd been modeling for five years. There was just no way. And I had also really realized that the only way I was ever going to do food was going to be on my terms. And so if I was ever going to work in a restaurant again, I wasn't going to work in a restaurant and be treated the way that I had been. And I wasn't going to support that or just shut my mouth about it or be okay or-
Jennifer Tracy: And you're how old when realizing this? This is amazing.
May Linstrom: Early 20s.
Jennifer Tracy: I mean, that is incredible.
May Linstrom: Yeah, well ...
Jennifer Tracy: Really. I mean, that's just ... To know yourself that deeply at that level, I mean, obviously from between then and now, you've deepened that even further and you've become a mother but that's really profound at that age, I don't know. I didn't have that kind of knowing at that age.
May Linstrom: You should go live in a car for some days.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes, true.
May Linstrom: Maybe start out in a barn.
Jennifer Tracy: True, yes. Yeah.
May Linstrom: And there was a lot of things that fueled some pretty strong early independence.
Jennifer Tracy: I admire it. I think it's amazing. And I also just-
May Linstrom: I feel like I'm ancient. I've felt like I'm 100 since I was eight so that's my own stuff.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: Yeah, ended up ... It brought me to sort of like this funny thing where at 25 I was like, "What the fuck am I doing with myself?" Which I think every 25 year old does but it felt more like a midlife crisis to me.
Jennifer Tracy: Sure, 'cause you'd lived so much. You'd done so much and ... Yeah.
May Linstrom: And I'd out so much towards this career that wasn't going to go anywhere and then I'd put so much towards this other career that I didn't actually want but was still happening. And also, I was really allergic to being a model which is a funny thing. So besides it not really being a passion of mine ...
Jennifer Tracy: I was really allergic to being a model too. It was not for me.
May Linstrom: No. For so many reasons but physically allergic. I have crazy sensitive skin.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh okay, yes.
May Linstrom: And so I'd be sitting in the makeup chair and I was booked mostly for beauty so it's just straight up my face. And so I'd be sitting in this chair and they'd start putting makeup on my face and you could watch it happen. They'd apply the makeup and I would start getting these rashes and I would turn red and I'd get blisters and my skin would just freak out. It wasn't like breakouts, it wasn't pimples. It was rashes and redness. And so I had this weird career where when I was doing that, I could do one job and then I'd have to take a break and then I'd do another job and I'd have to take a break.
May Linstrom: And so I was in this constant recovery thing. So luckily when I worked, it was good but it also just made for this weird thing where it was like I'd sit in the chair and my skin would just crawl. And I'd leave and I'd be in this state of recovery by taking care of myself and ...
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: And so it physically didn't work for my body and it was still another place where it was still about what I looked like, and that had just always been a thing. And maybe that's just life, that's always a thing. Like when I was a kid, because there was this idea around who I was, like I'm never cool. And then when I was in art school, it was like, "Free for all, anything goes." And there was like this wildness and then I was like homeless and couldn't get out of that but we were not even like normal homeless people. We were like two girls with white skin and shaved heads and living in a car and then working in a kitchen. Looking like I look, I just was never taken seriously.
May Linstrom: And then that thing that was like a downside to everything else comes in and puts me in a positive ish place in a career that I didn't really want and wasn't really passionate about. But then I didn't know what else to do and I knew that I couldn't go cook in somebody else's kitchen and I didn't really have any other skills. I'd cooked forever, that was my world and I'd just been a model. Like what am I going to do with that? And so I started working as a makeup artist 'cause that's what you do when you've been a model and you don't want to model anymore. And then I was like, "What do I want to be as a makeup artist? Like what can I do different? How can I not be the person that's putting makeup on girls and making their skin crawl?" And so then I really made it my mission to really honor the girls that were in my chair to let that be a place of relationship building and connection.
May Linstrom: So then I tried to give them all the love and so whoever was in my chair, both in terms of really just honoring who they were and not just like, "Okay, next blonde." But also what I was putting on their skin. So at the time, this was the mid to late 2000s, there really wasn't much happening in green beauty. Green beauty was not a term, it wasn't something that people were talking about or doing. There was only a couple of makeup artists at the time who were working with natural products. And there was very few natural products, there wasn't great brands to choose from, there wasn't anything like what there is now.
May Linstrom: And so I had this weird mishmash kit where I would just make stuff and I would go to set and I would ... I looked like a painter, I'd have this paintbox of these random pigments mixed with oils and I would basically finger paint the models with these things that I had made. And then I'd talk to them with love and I was like this totally weird girl.
Jennifer Tracy: That sounds so amazing.
May Linstrom: So it was nice in a way and it was a beautiful little chapter but then the hair person would come over and douse us both in hairspray and still call for like, "All right boobie blonde, get over here." Like it was still that world and so even though I was doing all that I could to be like a little positive drop in the bucket, within it still was not where I wanted to be. But during that time where I was helpful, was there was a lot of people who had seen what I was doing in that little corner and they'd see these random little portions that I would bring and they would ... After doing that for a while, I had had enough people sit me down and tell me that if I didn't start bottling this and really doing that part for real that I was an idiot. And it took a while for that message to sink in because I was really opposed to doing anything to do with sales, anything to do with retail.
May Linstrom: Like growing up with my life and hippie parents, like they wouldn't even let me sell chocolates or whatever at Christmas to raise money for the choir. Like we don't sell things in our family. It's just not ... So I had this really big barrier around making money through selling a product which was interesting 'cause I'd also been a model where I was the product or something like that. But I had to get over it because I didn't know what else to do. I kept hitting these walls and I was really unhappy and I was just in like not great relationships and just kind of spinning out, just didn't know where I was supposed to be.
May Linstrom: And when it was finally like, "All right, well what if I just tried? What if I just took like a couple of these oils and masks and things that I'd been making?" And also, so on the side, outside of this, not as a career thing but just as a side thing, I have this crazy sensitive skin that I've had since I was a little girl. Like one of my very first memories was being, about my daughter's age, like five or six, and going to a friend's house for the first time. And washing my hands at their sink before dinner and burning my hands on the soap, on the actual soap itself. Just washing my hands with it.
Jennifer Tracy: What kind of soap was it?
May Linstrom: I don't know, just regular conventional soap but I'd grown up in this hippie household where, I don't know what my parents were using but it wasn't normal. And so-
Jennifer Tracy: Like Dr. Bronner's, which is now household but back then it wasn't [crosstalk 01:06:43]
May Linstrom: I had grown up green before green was green. So it was the first time that I'd ever used conventional soap 'cause I wasn't in school yet and so I hadn't been exposed to commercial detergents. And so I'm washing my hands and no big deal, washing my hands before dinner. It was my first night being at a friend's house without my parents there. And I'm washing my hands and I start screaming, just screaming. And I was so terrified. I was like, "What is happening? I'm just washing my hands and they're on fire." And my friend's parents came running into the room and my hands were all red and kind of welting from just this soap. And so thus became this kind of exploration within myself of what I'm able to use and the ingredients that I can use and products that I can use. So that was kind of the undercurrent that went through all of those years, which also contributed to a lot of discomfort in my body and my identity. And I was just scared of everything, I was scared to touch everything.
Jennifer Tracy: Of course, after that experience, my gosh, that's so traumatizing for a small child.
May Linstrom: And so just made this interesting thing. So growing up as a kid, my parents were great. My mom was like, "All right, well you can't use any of that stuff." Cool, we'll just make something or find the things that we can use. And so it started as this kind of form of play. My mom and I, we'd go to the river and we'd pull clay out of river now we've got a mask, fun. And there was little things like that, really, really simple thing. And then I would go to the library and I would find these books on how to make a lotion or something and so I would make stuff. And so that was part of my childhood play.
May Linstrom: And then as I grew into my teenage years, I really started to get more interested in it because my skin was really an issue. And it wasn't just my issue, my mom has my same skin, my grandfather has my same skin so it goes back in our family tree. So I wanted to not just know what to avoid but really how I could actually help to heal this and make this better. And so I'd started really studying plant medicine and the properties of plants and minerals and aromatherapy and eastern medicine and western medicine and all the different things. And just looking back through all of beauty anthropology, really looking back for thousands and thousands of years what have we been doing since forever and trying to learn from that and bring that forward.
May Linstrom: So that was sort of a side thing that I had always done since I was a child. And then through my teen years and through my 20s I started to take it a lot more seriously. When I first came out here to LA with my girlfriend and we were living in the car, my entire body freaked out, just totally freaked out. It was so awful, it was like I was covered head to toe in blisters. Like it looked like I had walked through a radioactive spiderweb. Like I was patterns, like my arms had this camouflage pattern going all the way down. And maybe at the grocery store and little kids would look at me like I was a monster and hold on to their parents. It was terrible and it was really painful.
May Linstrom: So for years that was the undercurrent of all the other things that were happening. But I was also taking that as an opportunity to just learn more and more and more all the time. So I was really determined to be a cook and that's what I was doing. And I was doing all these other things and just busy being a weird homeless girl, but also studying about this. And on the side, through my cooking and through my modeling and through everything else, I had started doing these bespoke formulations.
May Linstrom: Working with people like myself, someone would come to me and they'd have a condition even worse than mine and I would help them and we would sit down and talk about their skin and what they're eating and how they're living and look at the whole spectrum, and then I would design a protocol just for them. And I would find the plants that worked just for them. And I would create these formulas and it was cool because it was one-on-one. And so I learned so much. I had everyone coming to me from psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema, rosacea, post cancer, radiation therapy, acne, the whole spectrum.
May Linstrom: And so I learned an incredible amount about all these different skin types. And it was really just something that I just was doing for fun. And then doing that on the side of-
Jennifer Tracy: So you did ... I'm sorry to interrupt you, you didn't charge these people for this? You just did a service?
May Linstrom: Not at the time. It was just a service. Well, in the beginning. I did ultimately charge for them. But in the beginning it was just something that I wanted to do 'cause I didn't think that that was a career. And again, I felt so weird about charging people for stuff. I'm a little funny about money. I'm in my own way for sure. So I didn't want to charge them, I just wanted to help pick their brain, see their skin, have this like playground to work with and build these relationships. And to be trusted by somebody in that capacity was so valuable to me.
May Linstrom: So it started from there and I was trying to make money as a makeup artist and whatever, just thinking this at-
Jennifer Tracy: Still in New York?
May Linstrom: All over. I eventually left New York and moved a number of times from there. I was in Chicago for a while, I was in Vegas for a while and moved at LA three times before it stuck. So there was some transient ... There was just a few years I just didn't live anywhere, I just kind of moved from place to place, especially when I was modeling and working as a makeup artist. It just made sense, I just followed the job. So I didn't have one, it was handy.
May Linstrom: And I think that was part of it too. Is like how can you take me seriously as a formulator or as someone who can really help you? I don't even live anywhere. So it was just something that I was just doing. But around the time that I was really hitting my wall with being a makeup artist and starting to think about how could I do this differently is when I started charging for that service. And that actually really helped 'cause then people knew that they could actually hire me, which I didn't really realize that people needed that permission. It was like, "Oh, this is a service. Okay, I get it."
May Linstrom: And then word of mouth really just grew and there I had so many more clients. And so I was staying really busy doing that. And so when I started the thing, "All right, if I'm going to bottle something, what is that, what's that going to be, what's the point of that? Because there are a million beauty companies in the world, what do I have to bring to it? And what I have to bring to it is this, is this history, is really, really understanding these kinds of skin conditions, understanding my own skin condition. What is meant for me and my family? What is meant to these men and women that I'd had the opportunity to work with so personally for so many years? And the feeling part, I'm not a chemist, I'm not a traditionally trained formulator but I do know these stuff. And more important to me is actually what everything feels like.
May Linstrom: And I learned that through working for so many years with these people who they would come to me and they'd be so broken. And their relationship to their skin would be so broken and they'd be so sad and in physical pain and in emotional pain and had no relationship that was positive at all to their own touch. And so for me, there was the part that really wanted to address the physical symptom that was happening that was resulting in the inflammation or the pain or rashes or the blisters or whatever it was manifesting as. I wanted to address that and calm that obviously. But what I really wanted was to get them to a place where they could touch and love their skin. Because they would look in the mirror and they would just hate themselves. And they would look in the mirror and they would cry.
May Linstrom: And I knew what that was, I knew what it felt like to not want to leave your house. I knew what it felt to be scared to go to the grocery store and have those kids look at me, I knew what it felt like. So I had such empathy for that that I had a really big mission, I needed to bring these formulas that I knew worked and were creating physical change to the table and I needed to bottle it up in this way that felt so beautiful and celebratory and loving that it could be a catalyst to get you back to that relationship with yourself. And so it was really about that. And it was like, if I could do that through putting a note in a bottle, then cool, then that's enough. And if I can actually bring the real formula to it as well, then I win.
May Linstrom: And so, that became the mission and that was a pretty mighty mission in a time where green beauty wasn't really a thing. There wasn't luxury beauty on the market. There was nothing kinda. And the only person who was doing green beauty that was luxury, Kahina Beauty, had a couple of products but it was mostly just the argan oil I think at that time. Tata Harper had just launched pretty close to then, that was it. Everything else was what you'd find at wholefoods or Farmers' Markets. So there was natural products but it was like what I'd grown up with in my hippy dippy household. It wasn't anything that you would naturally gravitate towards.
May Linstrom: And then in terms of there being products and formulas that were good for addressing these kinds of conditions, none of those were natural. Literally it was tar and it was bleach and it was ...
Jennifer Tracy: Or Accutane or whatever. I've been on Accutane and it made me really depressed.
May Linstrom: And a lot of hormones and steroids and things and I'd been given all of that stuff. I'd taken everything under the sun for my own skin and everything was so aggressive. And so, how do I bring those worlds together? So I spent a few years really just working on refining those specific formulas that I knew would be effective for everybody, just a big challenge. And I didn't want to dumb it down too much, I wanted it to be powerful as what I was giving to my bespoke clients who would come to me with from these really trauma skin conditions. But I also needed somebody to be able to buy it blind off the internet or off a shelf with knowing nothing about it and not be too scared to use it.
May Linstrom: My formulas were all little weird. It wasn't like your traditional like, "Here's your foaming face wash and your lotion." That's not how I work, it's not how plants work. And then how to do that and package it in a way that that felt sexy, that felt fun, that you wanted to reach for. Because what I would have is I would have clients who their skin would be getting better using my formulas but then they'd still be using or maybe using what their doctor was still prescribing. They'd still have the steroid cream for their eczema, for their Accutane, for their acne or all these different things.
May Linstrom: And what I saw over and over was that whether it's a cream for rashes or it's a cream for breakouts, it was just a reminder of something that's broken. And so even the packaging, it would say on there like, "Eczema cream, acne and antiaging." And it was all these really, really negative messaging and also just a reminder. I don't need to be reminded every time I reach for something to help myself that I have eczema, I know I have eczema. I don't need to be told every time that I reach for a moisturizer, antiaging. I don't need to be told that. Do I want to age gracefully? Absolutely. Do I want to honor my skin as it ages? Absolutely. Do you need to tell me anti anything about myself in writing that I look at twice a day, everyday? Fuck you, that's so mean. It's mean, I think it's awful.
Jennifer Tracy: I never thought about it that way, that's so true.
May Linstrom: Yeah. So I just hate that. This is jut my biggest pet peeve. And it's everything from aging products to acne to eczema to psoriasis. They all just say the word on it and I get that 'cause you need to be able to identify what you're looking for for your concern, I get it, I do. But God there's just got to be a nice way. So my mission was to take that efficacy, bottle it up, wrap it up in a way that's beautiful, that has positive messaging and somehow hope that people can still find it and know it's for them.
May Linstrom: But my thought was, if I just put everything into it and I do it exactly the way that I think that it should be and cut no corners anywhere from the sourcing of the ingredients to literally from how they're grown to how they're harvested to how fresh they are when they arrive at my hands to what happens in my process. I was blending and filling every bottle myself and these are totally my formulas. And then I would pack every box and I would write every note and I would run to the post office and ...
May Linstrom: Were fast-forwarding sometimes here but when everything had finally come together and I had finally launched my website and then ultimately launched my first retailer, I launched my first retailer the day my daughter was born.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh wow, that's incredible.
May Linstrom: Yeah, the day she was born which is kind of insane but it happens that way. And we operated out of our ... So now my current husband, only husband and still current, he came into the picture nine years ago. Right at the beginning I had just hired my first packaging designer so I was finally like, "All right, I know what I'm going to do." I had refined it, I knew what the goal, I knew what the mission was, I need to upgrade packaging so that I could put these really transformative formulas into it and have it be taken seriously.
May Linstrom: So again, it was like, "I need to have the right packaging so that when people see it, they know that it's for them and get excited by it and they actually want to use it." 'Cause so many of my clients, they were like, "I don't actually want to use x product because it's just ugly. And it sits on my shelf and just like it doesn't feel good and I want to hide it when guests come over. I want to hide it from myself and it doesn't smell good. I don't want to get into bed with my husband, I don't want to get into bed with myself."
May Linstrom: So it became this thing where it was like, "All right, it's got to be really beautiful." So I found this packaging designer and he's amazing and I've been working with him for 10 years now. And I knew him before my husband, and now I have two kids so history there. And we just made the most beautiful thing that I could imagine and everything from like the weight of the paper to the gold foil printing to ... Well, we won't just sell over the top and it was like ... I was so scared. I was like, "Nobody's going to care, there's not even a market for this. No one's doing this, there's nothing like this. There's barely green beauty much less luxury green beauty and certainly not at this price point."
May Linstrom: And it had to be at this price point because it was damn expensive what I was doing and it was just me. And so it was this totally insane thing to do but my husband jokes like, "My goal ..." I had this little cardboard in this little studio that we'd set up in a bedroom in our house and it was like, "My goal is just to pay for that first round of ingredients and that first round of jars. 'Cause then I'll know that I did it, I put everything that I had into it with no compromises anywhere. I did it exactly the way that I believed it should be done.
May Linstrom: And if I do that and it fails, I can walk away going, 'All right, then this is just isn't my thing.' But if I cut a corner anywhere, even if it's just like slightly less heavyweight paper, I might go, 'Well, maybe if it had been better paper, it would have given a different impression. Or if I use the regular shea butter, you can just click a button on the internet and have land at your doorstep in two days, I'd save some money. But if people didn't buy it, would I go, 'Well, what if I had just gotten the really fucking mind-blowing super fresh good stuff that's just loaded with all the real things they really do something for you? Maybe then their skin would have loved it and they'd come back.'"
Jennifer Tracy: So you went all out and you never had to wonder about anything.
May Linstrom: And so I just went all out. It was like ... Yeah, I never had to wonder. And so if I just throw anything at it, then I can either walk away knowing that I had given it everything and it just wasn't a hit. And that's fine, I can make peace with that. Or it'll be a hit and that's something that I can stand behind. So luckily, it was a hit.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow.
May Linstrom: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: I mean, I have to just add so I got turned on to you by my friend Mercedes Marino, one of my pole dancing teachers.
May Linstrom: You have to tell me about your pole dancing.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh yes, you must come. She's obsessed with you, she's going to freak out when I tell her. She's in main right now with her family but she's going to freak out when I tell her that you were in my house.
May Linstrom: Is she here?
Jennifer Tracy: She's in LA.
May Linstrom: Oh, you have to introduce me.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, she loves you so much.
May Linstrom: I'm ready to meet my women.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay. Oh, you'll love her, she's amazing.
May Linstrom: This is my chapter.
Jennifer Tracy: You'll come and we'll do a class.
May Linstrom: Okay, that sounds terrifying.
Jennifer Tracy: But she went to see you ... She makes it so loving and amazing. It's very dark, there's no lights. It's like-
May Linstrom: Perfect.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, it's great, you'll love it. But she had gone to see you somewhere in Santa Monica do a talk a couple of years ago and she said, "I want to meet this woman. I want to work with her. I just want to ..." And so she brought the Blue Cocoon to class and she put it on me and I was like, "What is that? What is that?"
May Linstrom: That's my other child.
Jennifer Tracy: That was it. Ever since then, I order my stuff before I run out because I don't want to not have it. And I've never ... Just anyway, back to the experience that you described that you want to give ... My dog is trying to make out with me.
May Linstrom: That's okay. I mean, do it. I'm very into it.
Jennifer Tracy: The experience that you described that you want people to have, I have it and I just opened a package today before you came and it is this decadent ... Like I get the thing in the mail and I'm like, "Ooh, I'm going to wait to open it until ... I don't want to just cut open the box when I'm busy and my kid's home. It's like savoring like a beautiful bowl of fresh ice cream where I want to have that moment because it is. When I open it, it's a handwritten note and everything's packed beautifully, the weight of it in my hand. I haven't even gotten to the product, to the inside of the jar-
May Linstrom: But those other parts they matter. And that opening experience that you're talking about, you remember that. So when you go and then three months later when you open that same jar that you received three months ago and you're opening it for the 90th time in 90 days or whatever, you open it up and you have a ripple of that. And when you open that package, it should feel like Christmas and it should feel like that every time.
Jennifer Tracy: And it makes me feel ... I could get emotional saying this 'cause it's just a deeper underlying thing and that's why I do the podcast and that's why I love women. And I feel valued as a woman. Like from a woman to a woman, I feel valued. And I don't know, I just love what you're doing and I love now knowing the whole history behind it. It's just so fascinating. And so I want to ask you as kind of my last question before we dive into these others lightning room things, is what is on the horizon for you, for your company, for yourself? What's next for you?
May Linstrom: And this is it. This is the funny thing 'cause people always ask me and it's the business. This is part of the retail thing and people are like, "What's new? What are you making that's new?" And I'm funny 'cause I don't make new stuff all the time. There was three years between my last product launches when normally everything's coming out like every two months or certainly every season or at least every year. I just don't operate like that. Your skin doesn't need 60 products so I didn't make 60, I made seven. Seven, that's enough.
Jennifer Tracy: And I love that too 'cause it keeps me from being overwhelmed.
May Linstrom: Yeah. It's really straightforward. It checks all the boxes and there are so many ways to mix and match it up. And you have to listen to your own skin. It really forces you to have that relationship and to tune in. And it's like cooking kind of, it's like you have to have your salt and your spice and your sweet and your sour and you put it all together and you need different ratios of things on different days. And so really encouraging this culture of play and to not be scared of your skin, not be scared to really touch and to breath and to make an experience and to reach out and ask for help. Like our customer service so out of this world, I don't know if you've ever sent an e-mail, you should.
Jennifer Tracy: I did. They were so responsive and kind and amazing and also this loving. Like, "We're so sorry." So when you guys will start ordering hopefully as soon as you can because it's such a gift to yourself. Sorry about the dog barking in the backroom. May gives this amazing samples they're not like samples in little packets along with what she just described that goes with your whole philosophy. They're like full travel size samples.
May Linstrom: And they're glass.
Jennifer Tracy: They're glass. They're like just a miniature size of the actual product.
May Linstrom: And they're super cute.
Jennifer Tracy: They're super cute. Like I have in my purse, I carry the Blue Cocoon on my purse 'cause I put it on my wrist, I put it ... But anyway, there was a mess up or something and they said, "We've got it we've already got it handled." It was just so nice. But also to go back to the cooking thing, because Mercedes and I talk about, and our best friends who she had turned on to your products as well, it's like, "Oh my God, have you tried mixing the Pendulum Potion with The Honey Mud mask? And what if you did this?"
Jennifer Tracy: Well, I just wake up and put the Honey Mud mask on and just walk around and it's fun. There's just this feeling of play and it's this decadent thing. And you could eat a little bit. It just feels like a gift to myself.
May Linstrom: And that's what it's supposed to be. I mean, that's the entire point. We don't have enough moments of that and so I try to be really over the top with it 'cause sometimes you have to go so far the other direction to feel something, and so it is. And is the packaging is over the top and the formulas they're extraordinary and the textures and the colors and the scents, they're all magical. And there's so much heart and they're so much love. And if you really let yourself feel that, it's special. What we do is really special and I'm really proud of it. And so-
Jennifer Tracy: As you should be.
May Linstrom: What's next, this, we just keep doing what we're doing and trying to be better at it every day. Like I don't have a growth plan, I'm not trying to scale. Those words don't exist. We're entirely self funded. Our customers are it, you're our investors. I don't have to answer to anybody. There's no board of directors, there's no outside investments, it's mine. And so there so much freedom that comes with that to just show up and do what we do.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, I love that, I love that. And on top of it, you have two children. You're raising so I love that you posted, before we go into the question ... Recently it was Thanksgiving I think and you posted, "I'm signing off, really shutting down for time with my family." And there was this beautiful family photo of you and your children your husband and I thought, "Oh, that's yes, thank you and I need to be reminded of that." Because often times, and I've shared about this on the show too, my phone is partly my business. My business is on my phone and my son has said to me, "Mom, you need to put your phone down." And I'm like, "Thank you honey, thank you for reminding me." Yes, I need to put it away from my person.
May Linstrom: And good job to him for calling you out on it.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh yeah. He calls me out on a lot.
May Linstrom: Now listen to that.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, it's so great. And so it's great that you're able to live that and your philosophy for your business also ... Like you're walking the walk, you're doing it in all areas so I think that's amazing.
May Linstrom: Well, I try. And this year I had hit my edge, just was a tough year for me actually in a lot ways. And I was right in the middle of it. At Thanksgiving time I'd been having bad anxiety, which you talk about on your show a lot. I had a panic attack right before then which I'd never had before. I didn't even really know what that was. So that was a first time thing and it was kind of in the middle of ... I've gone through this twice. So with both kids, I nursed for two years with both of them which means I've been pregnant or nursing for six of the last eight years, which is a lot. And I stopped nursing my son in August and in September, it was like I fell off a cliff.
May Linstrom: And the same kind of thing happened with my daughter after I stopped nursing her. It's funny 'cause I had postpartum stuff with both of them but not really extreme. I actually had much more when I stopped nursing, and that's two years into it. And so I think you feel like you're not able to be in the shit that far in. It's like, "I should be over this. It's not like my babies are like ... I don't have newborns, I have a two year old. Like he's fine, I'm fine.
Jennifer Tracy: Which is actually worse.
May Linstrom: Oh God, so much worse. Give me all the babies, take my topper.
Jennifer Tracy: The babies are easy but you don't know that when it's your first.
May Linstrom: No you don't.
Jennifer Tracy: It's like, "Oh, this is so exhausting." But they're just ... Yeah.
May Linstrom: Yeah. So I went through this three to four-month just low, just super low. With my daughter who's now six, when I went through it with her, I just got stupid. I don't know what happened, I just like I lost my mind and turned into a teenager and I just didn't want to come home and I just wanted to be, I don't know, I wanted to be anywhere else-
Jennifer Tracy: Freedom, yeah.
May Linstrom: Yeah. I just kind of went crazy for a minute. And with my son it was the opposite. I just fell into this whole and just fell into the dark and I hadn't ever experienced that before. I've been through dark periods when dark things are going bad, when things are actually shitty I could register that they are. In this, there was nothing happening, there was nothing bad. The family was good, the marriage was really solid. Like I was feeling really good, business is going great.
Jennifer Tracy: I was just thinking 'cause I know your Instagram feed almost by heart, not really. I'm not that weird of a stalker. But I'm just remembering that you moved your business around that time.
May Linstrom: Around that time.
Jennifer Tracy: So that was a big transition.
May Linstrom: It was a big transition too. Yeah, there was a lot of things going on. And I'm not sure what it was but it was just like I just fell into this hole and there wasn't anything acute I could point to. And everyday I would just be like, "Oh, is this the day that I'm going to wake up and feel normal? No, not today." And that just kept going on and then somewhere in the middle of that I had a panic attack so things were just weird.
May Linstrom: And then normally during Thanksgiving and traditional in all businesses and beauty businesses, you do something for Black Friday, you do something for that time and we normally do. And so the last handful of Thanksgivings I'd worked. I'd worked from the second I'd wake up to the second I went to bed and I'd try and give my team as much time off as I could. And so that just meant that I was on the whole time and so I hadn't had a Thanksgiving in years. And it was like, "You know what, I really need this time. I really need this time with my kids." And so we just had it off, we just closed the company and closed it for everybody. We didn't ship, we didn't take orders, we didn't answer e-mails, we didn't do any of it.
May Linstrom: And it's like, there's not a skincare emergency, everyone can wait. It'll be fine. And there's going to be people that are disappointed that there's not some big promotion going on but-
Jennifer Tracy: Well, but again, you always, with every single order, you get these treats so-
May Linstrom: Yeah. I mean, I try and make every one so special. And we do do fun things throughout the year. And this year I just needed to claim it, this is mine. And I think it's easy to forget. If you look, like you said, you're on my Instagram all the time so you know it's all beautiful and shiny and perfect. It's not real, that's hardly real. And people don't realize how small we actually are. We're still a really small company, we're still a drop in the bucket in the world of beauty. And we're a really intimate team and it takes all of us. And so if one person goes on vacation, we all might as well go on vacation because we can't swim without all people on board.
May Linstrom: So we kind of have created a little bit of a precedent of doing that, where like if we all need to break, we just close. And if that needs to happen during Thanksgiving and we lose out on some big sales period, whatever. I'm so grateful that we're strong enough and sustainable enough business now that I can make a decision like that and I can wow and delight all of our clients in some other way, on some other day and still spend Thanksgiving cuddling my kids.
Jennifer Tracy: And that's the ultimate.
May Linstrom: That's the ultimate.
Jennifer Tracy: That is the ultimate. I mean-
May Linstrom: So I'm working on that. Yeah, the what's next, really we continue doing what we're doing and I need to take better care of myself 'cause I'm not in a position to go into a hole. So I'm feeling a lot better with the last few weeks but that was a weird scary period.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. I'm glad you're feeling better and I'm glad you're here. And I'm going to ask you the three questions I ask every guest and then we're going to a lightning round. What do you think about May when you hear the word milf and what do you think about that acronym?
May Linstrom: You know what, I'll take it. At 16, they called me the girl with the fuck me eyes so if you want to call me mother, I'd like to fuck now, I'm just going to say thank you.
Jennifer Tracy: Great.
May Linstrom: Except I know that's not actually what yours stands for.
Jennifer Tracy: Well, I always say it's both. I really do care if it's both. Like it's-
May Linstrom: You have to claim the original because-
Jennifer Tracy: It's both.
May Linstrom: Obviously that's the first thing that people think of when they hear that and I know that that was intentional. I'd like to pick your brain about that sometime.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes.
May Linstrom: Yeah, I think, I'm a mom, I am sexual, I am all of the things that are me. You can call it whatever you want.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. And we don't lose those things after we become mothers. In fact, in my experience and everyone I've interviewed, those things deepen and get more enriched through all of these things. What's something you've changed your mind about recently?
May Linstrom: I don't have to be in control of everything. I don't have to be in charge to be relevant.
Jennifer Tracy: Such a good one. How do you define success? We kind of already talked about that a little bit but ...
May Linstrom: I try not to think about success as being a destination because it makes it feel like everything else then isn't success which feels kind of negative. It's like, "Oh, you're either in success or you're not. And so if I haven't reached the thing that I define as success, then what is the other stuff. Yeah, it's sort of like ... I think all I really want is just to be able to be where I am when I'm there.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay, lightning round. Ocean or desert.
May Linstrom: Ocean.
Jennifer Tracy: Favorite junk food.
May Linstrom: Ben & Jerry's s'mores.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh yum. Movies or broadway shows.
May Linstrom: Movies.
Jennifer Tracy: Daytime sex or nighttime sex.
May Linstrom: I like the idea of daytime sex. I work a lot and have kids so nighttime sex.
Jennifer Tracy: Texting or talking.
May Linstrom: Both. I really love human interaction. I'm also a super introvert and it tires me out. Like I'm going to have to go home and take a nap. So I text a lot for practical reasons but I really crave human talk.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, me too. Cat person or dog person.
May Linstrom: Both, a dog.
Jennifer Tracy: Have you ever worn a unitard?
May Linstrom: That's the full body thing?
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: I've worn a snowsuit a lot, which is kind of like a fluffy version of that.
Jennifer Tracy: Love the unitard, that's amazing. Shower or bathtub.
May Linstrom: Both. Baths to really, really relax and shower is to energize. They have different functions.
Jennifer Tracy: Ice cream or chocolate.
May Linstrom: Ice cream. But very specific, only Ben &Jerry's s'mores.
Jennifer Tracy: Got it. Nothing else, not vanilla ice cream, not ...
May Linstrom: One flavor and I eat the whole pint.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh yum.
May Linstrom: And I can eat a whole pine every day if there.
Jennifer Tracy: On a scale of one to 10, how good are you at ping-pong?
May Linstrom: Zero. It's probably will go behind me.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay. Gosh, I almost hate to ask you this one but I have to. If you could push a button and it would create 10 years of world peace but it would also place 100-year ban on all beauty products, would you push it?
May Linstrom: Yeah. I give no shits about beauty products. That might be what I make but that's not what we do.
Jennifer Tracy: Super power choice. Invisibility, ability to fly or super strength.
May Linstrom: You added in ability to fly.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
May Linstrom: Well, I'm still going to go with super strength I think. I spent a lot of my life being invisible, I don't need to be invisible. Flying, yeah, I think anyone can really fly. That's a perception thing. Strength would be good. I don't like feeling physically weak in my body and I've been feeling pretty weak in my body super strength sounds useful.
Jennifer Tracy: Would you rather have a penis where your tailbone is or a third eye.
May Linstrom: Penis where the tailbone is.
Jennifer Tracy: She answered before I finished the questioned.
May Linstrom: Yeah. Well, okay, so I know this is supposed to be like speed round but that's not how I roll.
Jennifer Tracy: No, it doesn't.
May Linstrom: I think of it like, all right, third eye, why do I need a third eye? I don't really know what I would do with it. That doesn't sound that necessary. It's not somewhere useful. I already have two eyes right there so I don't need a third. If it was located somewhere else, I could see behind me maybe or something that might have more use for it. And everyone sees it so I look weird and it doesn't have a function. So there's nothing to that.
May Linstrom: The penis, nobody would know about necessarily unless I told them and if you had the right person, it could be fun.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes.
May Linstrom: So the whole world doesn't have to see it but it could be selectively-
Jennifer Tracy: You have a wonderful secret.
May Linstrom: But it could be selectively very interesting. And why not?
Jennifer Tracy: Yes. That's a well thought out response May.
May Linstrom: Also, seems more easily removable if I change my mind.
Jennifer Tracy: Right, true. What was the name of your first pet?
May Linstrom: Onions.
Jennifer Tracy: What was the name of the street you grew up on?
May Linstrom: So this is a hard one because I didn't grow up on a street, I grew up on a minimum maintenance road that didn't have a name.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh wow, okay.
May Linstrom: So I am really bad at this poor name thing 'cause I have a cat name Onions and a no name road so I don't know where you go with that.
Jennifer Tracy: I mean, I think it's Onions, no name. Onions, no name.
May Linstrom: Yeah, I'm not going to go very far in porn.
Jennifer Tracy: Which is why it's great that you have another career that seems to be going just fine.
May Linstrom: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my gosh May, so wonderful to chat with you. Thank you so much for being here.
May Linstrom: You are welcome. It was a pleasure.
Jennifer Tracy: Thanks so much for listening guys. I really hope you enjoyed my conversation with May. Next week on the show we have JoAnne Astrow who is Claudia Rapaport Lonow's mom and she blew me away. She absolutely blew me away and one of the most fascinating women I've ever met. Our conversation was hilarious and heartfelt and just had all the things you want when you go to an excellent movie and you have your fresh popcorn in your lap. I mean, not in your lap, like in a bag. Anyway, you know what I mean. I say um way too much, truly, truly. And [Derrick 01:43:18] edits it out so I don't sound like a total idiot but I say it a lot. Thank you so much for listening guys. I can't wait to come back to you next week with a fresh episode of MILF Podcast. Go ahead and go to my website, milfpodcast.com, to grab your copy of 7 Habits of Baller Milfs. Talk to you guys soon.