Summer Shames - The Big Shvitz

We’re in the middle of summer down here in Australia and that means it’s beach time, it’s pool time, it’s….shvitz time. Whether you’re willing to admit it or not, everyone has a shvitz story.  This week, Tami and Dash’s shame is your entertainment as they recount their most embarrassing Shvitzy Stories of summers past. 

If you like this episode, you might like: 

https://thejewishindependent.com.au/what-you-missed-while-you-were-at-the-beach

https://thejewishindependent.com.au/alcohol-sex-campfires-world-adult-jewish-summer-camp 

https://thejewishindependent.com.au/books-family-angst-a-synagogue-murder-and-learning-to-be-alone

Email your feedback and voice memos here: ashamed@thejewishindependent.com.au

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:02

It's Summer Shames, it's Summer Shames, it's Summer Shames.

Speaker 2 0:07

Hmm, he says he's not ashamed.

Speaker 1 0:10

I'm ashamed, you're ashamed, they should be ashamed. We call that repressed shame.

Speaker 2 0:16

Well, she needs to tame the shame and move on.

Speaker 1 0:19

Is it a Jewish thing, maybe?

Speaker 2 0:21

You tell me.

Speaker 1 0:25

I'm Tammy Sussman and in this special series of A Shame to Admit, I'm going to squeeze some of the chewiest shames out of TJI's Executive Director, dr Dachshund Lawrence.

Speaker 2 0:37

While your third cousin over shares her chewiest faux pas.

Speaker 1 0:41

Welcome to your weekly dose of Summer Shames Dash. Before we start, I just want to say I'm sorry if you can hear a bit of background noise in today's recording. I'm recording on an upstairs level of my apartment. It gets really hot up here. I had to turn the air conditioning on.

Speaker 2 1:09

Oh, me too, I got it cranked today.

Speaker 1 1:11

Oh really, Even in Melbourne.

Speaker 2 1:13

Yeah, it's a hot one today. It's like 31, 32 degrees, you know peak summer Schvitzfest. Total schvitzfest.

Speaker 1 1:22

He's checking the armpits. I'm okay, Do you just do you give him a bit of a dab just to check for moistness, he's sniffing his fingers. That's what he's doing.

Speaker 2 1:31

You would do that right.

Speaker 1 1:33

I don't sniff my fingers.

Speaker 2 1:35

What do you do? Do you then get the nose to the I?

Speaker 1 1:37

just raise the armpit and just subtly look at the artwork behind myself.

Speaker 2 1:43

Okay, how are you going in the schvitzflint today?

Speaker 1 1:46

Fine, I love deodorant marketed towards men. I prefer the smell, ooh.

Speaker 2 1:52

Any particular variety. You arexone a gal.

Speaker 1 1:56

A length Africa carna gal.

Speaker 2 1:59

Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:59

No, I really like this old school. One in a green stick, oh my God. It's called Brut or something.

Speaker 2 2:05

Brut.

Speaker 1 2:06

Yes, that's so I like it.

Speaker 2 2:08

Wow, okay, yeah, cool, yeah, it's very. Does your dad wear it? I don't think so, but it's very timeless, very, very much a baby boomer energy yeah.

Speaker 1 2:20

Yeah, and that's me in a nutshell. Yeah, yeah, and that's me in a nutshell.

Speaker 2 2:23

Yeah, you've got a birthday coming up, just saying.

Speaker 1 2:25

So keep that in mind, bestie.

Speaker 2 2:28

There's nothing better than smelling good, right.

Speaker 1 2:31

I agree.

Speaker 2 2:34

I don't have a whole lot of colognes, just a few bottles to choose from. I've got something for summer, something for winter. Do you? Yeah, yeah, I do. I like to start the day with a particular fragrance or smell that's going to, you know, lift me and get me feeling good for the day.

Speaker 1 2:51

Interesting. I also don't want to smell someone else's cologne or perfume. I want to smell people's pheromones to see if I can trust them.

Speaker 2 3:00

Really.

Speaker 1 3:01

Yeah, can't stand a strong smell on someone else, like an artificial smell.

Speaker 2 3:06

Even if it's a nice cologne or nice-.

Speaker 1 3:09

Well, that's so subjective, so it might be nice to you, but it might be offensive to someone else. Okay Dash, it's a schvitz-y time of year If you don't speak Yiddish. Schvitz-y, of course, means sweaty. It's a sweaty time of year and I wanted to know if you had any shameful Shvitsi stories.

Speaker 2 3:30

Funny, you should ask, tammy. So I was in Japan a few years back on a multi-day hike on my own in the height of the Japanese summer.

Speaker 1 3:42

Can't relate yeah.

Speaker 2 3:44

It was obscenely hot, like we have hot summers here in Australia, of course, and I've hiked in some very hot days in parts of Tasmania and Victoria. Nothing came close to how hot this was, because it was also quite, you know, quite sticky. It was very, very humid, and I'm hiking in a part of Japan called the Kimono Kodo and konnichiwa to our Japanese listener.

Speaker 1 4:13

Listeners. I think we've got two and they're in two different parts of Japan.

Speaker 2 4:16

Yeah, that's right, oh, that's right. Our two Japanese listeners. You'll know where I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 4:22

So I'm hiking in Kimonokoto and because it's the height of summer, like no one else is out there doing it, because everyone knows you don't go there and hike during. It's just unpleasant. And so I didn't see anyone on the trail for really for a few days. Because it was so hot, because I could get I could kind of, you know, wash down and clean down at the end of every day. Where I was staying, I just travelled very light and I basically just wore the same pair of shorts and shirt all the way through. But I'm like hiking along and I haven't seen anyone for days on end. I mean, I'm seeing people at the end of the days when I pull into villages, but I'm not seeing other hikers. And then, like, these two Swiss girls who were hiking together come along, very attractive, and I'm sort of struck by how sort of fortuitous this encounter is. Here I am an Australian hiking on my own, haven't seen in a lot of days, and I just happened to come across these two beautiful Swiss girls and we're chatting away and the conversations.

Speaker 1 5:26

Who seem very smart, really intelligent, who seem to have wonderful personalities.

Speaker 2 5:30

Yeah, yeah, all that too. Thank you for filling in the most important part of the detail there with regard to my new travel companions. Anyway, as the hike progressed, I kind of noticed more intervals emerging in our conversation, which is, you know, a natural thing, but sort of wondering why there was a shift in the dynamic. There was just a bit of a distance that was forming between us by the end of the afternoon, like we're going to the same village. So it was sort of unusual that by the end, like we weren't talking anymore, they were sort of talking to each other. But it was very odd because previously, you know, we've sort of been locked in conversation. Anyway, I'd booked my accommodation they hadn't, but they decided they were going to go to somewhere else. So I bid them farewell, knowing that I was probably going to see them on the trail the next day, and sort of still wondering why did that conversation just sort of cease and-.

Speaker 1 6:24

Why did it fizzle?

Speaker 2 6:25

Yeah, why did it fizzle? That's right. Anyway, get to this beautiful schoolhouse that's been converted into a guest house and the owner of the guest house comes out and obviously he's been waiting for me and he can't speak English, but he gets within shot of me and in like a very hurried, very like frenzied way, sort of like grabs a towel and grabs a block of soap and a scrubber and leads me very quickly off to like an outdoor shower and he's sort of like there's an urgency about him. He's just like shower shower, shower shower, shower.

Speaker 1 7:06

Oh my God, had you shat yourself.

Speaker 2 7:08

No, I hadn't shat myself, I was just-. Did you just smell like you had? I just smelled terrible because I was with only this one set of clothes for the four or five days and it was ridiculously hot and there was quite a lot of shame attached to that incident. On reflection Not now, I mean, obviously I'm laughing about it now- Did you not know?

Speaker 1 7:30

Could you not smell yourself?

Speaker 2 7:31

Like it wasn't, like I had no idea. I think I knew that obviously there was, you know, a bit of bloody odour emanating, but I didn't really quite appreciate just how bad it was.

Speaker 1 7:43

Is it kind of like you always enjoy the smell of your own farts a little bit more than you should?

Speaker 2 7:49

I don't think it's quite like that with sweat. I don't know, because you don't you can't really fully grasp the sweat like the smell of sweat. I don't know, because you can't really fully grasp the sweat like the smell of sweat, I don't think I can.

Speaker 1 7:59

I have a very sharp sense of smell, so I think I could Thank you for sharing that shame. That's actually a very good story and very appropriate for summer and summer shames. Some members of the general population do struggle with body odour. Are you someone who will tell a friend that they smell, or do you just let someone else do that?

Speaker 2 8:22

I don't think I ever have.

Speaker 1 8:27

Can you guess who gets allocated the task of being the one to tell someone that they smell?

Speaker 2 8:33

Is it you?

Speaker 1 8:34

Of course it's me Right, right, okay. When I was in drama school we were a group of 24 people who spent three years together and very early on in the three-year program it became clear that we would be working very closely together. So we would have like two hours of movement classes every day where we'd get quite schvitzy and we'd have to pair up and there were a few people with some body odour. There was one in particular. His was terrible, lovely, some questionable accidentally antisemitic incidents, but overall lovely. Guy had a really bad BO issue and no one was saying anything.

Speaker 2 9:18

Yeah, and you can't not right, Tammy, once you smell that and once you get into your little head that someone's got to tell him.

Stinky Friends and Sweat Mishaps

Speaker 1 9:26

But the thing is, it's not like a work environment where your desk is on the other side of the room to theirs. You don't have to come into contact with them Like everyone had to come into contact with him and I drew the short straw.

Speaker 1 9:42

I was given the task of being the one to talk to him because he and I kind of vibrated on a similar wavelength in a lot of other ways. I kind of got his neuro spiciness in a way that other people didn't. So one day I pulled him aside and I said look, I need to talk to you about something. This is really serious. Do you know that you have very strong body odour? And he looked at me and he said no, I don't. And I said you do. I'm sorry to be the one to break the news to you. I hate it when I give someone feedback and you have to say this person is so that they know that we've kind of conspired.

Speaker 1 10:18

And I said the general consensus is that you have body odour.

Speaker 2 10:23

Yeah, we've reviewed the evidence We've gathered together and the consensus is you stink and you need to do something about it, yeah, and I said you know, do you want some help? Do you want some links Africa? We can get you a gift pack.

Speaker 1 10:38

He needed more than links Africa. In fact, one day I went over to his house and actually I ran a bath for him.

Speaker 2 10:44

You didn't.

Speaker 1 10:45

I did.

Speaker 2 10:46

Oh God.

Speaker 1 10:48

He got in.

Speaker 2 10:49

Times were seriously desperate. Hang on, he got in. What is this, what?

Speaker 1 10:56

No, yeah, and I offered to do a load of washing for him.

Speaker 2 11:00

No.

Speaker 1 11:01

Their house was in shambles and I felt empathy towards him and so I said would you like me to do some washing for you? Yeah, he got in the bath and then, years later, Did you do a scrub down?

Speaker 2 11:15

Did you sort of?

Speaker 1 11:16

Scrub him down. I offered to, but he wouldn't let me, so I respected those boundaries.

Speaker 2 11:21

The boundaries. Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 1 11:22

Years later he gave me a little piece of paper folded up in class and I opened it up and it was a swastika with the words join us on it. And when I confronted him about it, he said no, it's not a swastika, it's the buddha symbol that the flipped swastika. And I said yeah, but when you give a jewish person a flipped swastika with the words join us on top, the general vibe that a Jew might get is that you're making an insensitive joke about the Holocaust.

Speaker 2 11:59

Oh God.

Speaker 1 12:01

So yeah.

Speaker 2 12:02

That was the end of that.

Speaker 1 12:04

That was the end of that friendship.

Speaker 2 12:06

Did you ever get to the bottom of the upside-down swastika?

Speaker 1 12:09

He maintains that he was just making a light-hearted joke. But there were also a few other incidents, like in a park where we were throwing a ball to each other and he said stop being such a Jew and give me the ball. And then after we graduated and there was an intifada in Israel, I did notice on his father's Facebook page that he'd written something about those people, meaning the Jews, anyway.

Speaker 2 12:36

Somehow it comes back to anti-Semitism every time.

Speaker 1 12:38

It always does, and it just goes to show that the stinkiest people on earth are also the ones who hate the Jews the most. There I said it.

Speaker 2 12:51

What about me, though, because maybe I actually could be one of the stinky ones?

Speaker 1 12:56

I really don't think you are. I think what happened in your case is that you just made a really bad decision to not bring a change of clothes on a shitsy hike for three days.

Speaker 2 13:06

And I was also getting a bit delirious because I'd been out in the Japanese wilderness.

Speaker 1 13:11

You were dehydrated.

Speaker 2 13:12

I was dehydrated.

Speaker 1 13:14

Maybe those Swiss twins weren't Swiss twins at all.

Speaker 2 13:17

It's quite possible that it was just me the whole time and there was no one out there. I just imagined them, oh my God. So I have just shared with you my schvitzy, shameful story. What about you? What you got?

Speaker 1 13:32

Okay, In 2005, I traveled to China. The idea was to teach English as a second language, which is what I did. I went with a friend. We were there in peak Chinese summer. It was boiling hot. There was no getting around it. It was like 24-7 schvitz. Now, on this trip we met a group of French people and I quite fancied one of the people in the French group and one night we went disco bowling together. It was a 24-hour disco bowling club. We had a great time. My friend took lots of pictures on his old digital camera. We get home he uploads it onto the laptop, as he used to do back in 2005. And we're flipping through some of the photos and I noticed that there is a humongous sweat patch on my ass.

Speaker 2 14:33

Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 14:35

And my crush has been there the whole night. So I don't know, I don't know. It was quite dim inside the disco bowling club. I don't know if he saw it or not, but the friend that I went travelling with thought it would be funny to make sure that my crush saw this sweat patch and he emailed him a picture of it, of me.

Speaker 1 14:59

Some friend and my sweaty bum Some friend, and for the rest of the trip he called me a number of names, but included in that list of names was sweaty bum, sweaty bumum Bush Pig Miss McDonald's 2005. That was my full nickname. So that's my shameful bum sweat story. But it has a happy ending.

Speaker 2 15:23

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 15:23

And I'm sharing this ending because I want to instill hope in all the 18-year-olds who may have-.

Speaker 2 15:30

Sweaty bums.

Speaker 1 15:32

Sweaty bums or any kind of stain on the bum. That's not ideal you know, Maybe it's a period stain, Maybe you sat on something that's questionable Is it chocolate or is it a bit of poo? So the happy ending is that I still managed to bag the French guy even after he saw my sweaty bum.

Speaker 2 15:55

Could you come back from sharting? Do you think Like if the liquid had actually been because you had sharted, could you have come back from that one?

Speaker 1 16:09

Yeah.

Speaker 2 16:10

I don't think so, Probably not no yeah, I, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 16:11

No, look, I think it's a bit discriminatory to actually say you can't recover from a shart, because as an ashkenazi jew, the chances of sharting on a daily basis quite high. So I think if you were to say, look, if there's a shart, it's not going to happen, I think that's anti-semitic and it's specifically racist against Ashkenazi Jews who are quite partial to a bit of a shart. Okay, there's a lot of inflammatory bowel, a lot of irritable bowel.

Speaker 2 16:39

I didn't realize that.

Speaker 1 16:41

Yeah, it's never happened to me, surprisingly.

Speaker 2 16:43

Okay. Is there a shart clinic in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, a place you can go to work through your sharting issues?

Speaker 1 16:54

I'm going to send an email to-.

Speaker 2 16:57

Your gastroenterologist friend.

Speaker 1 16:59

Mark Mullman, colorectal surgeon, who practices out of Sydney Colorectal Associates, randwick, and I'm going to say Mark, I've had some experience in branding and have you considered changing the name of your practice to the Shart Clinic.

Speaker 2 17:17

They would come from far and wide, from Sydney's east.

Sharting Support Appeal

Speaker 1 17:20

They already do Wow.

Speaker 2 17:22

I didn't realise that it's a thing you didn't? No, I mean, I knew that sharting was a thing, I just didn't realise it was big in the JCOM, realise it was big in the JCOM. There needs to be like a JCA appeal devoted to addressing sharting, like it's an annual appeal where they you know, they seek out funds to To provide assistance. Financial assistance, yeah, financial assistance to support members of the community that are living with sharting.

Speaker 1 17:51

Are we both going to get fired from this?

Speaker 2 17:54

Everyone sharts from time to time.

Speaker 1 17:57

Everybody sharts sometimes Sometimes. You've been listening to Summer Shames, the Shvitsi Shvesta podcast of A Shame to Admit.

Speaker 2 18:15

Presented by the Jewish Independent and hosted by me, dash Lawrence and Tammy Sussman.

Speaker 1 18:20

These episodes are edited by Nick King.

Speaker 2 18:23

If you like what we're doing, it's time to wipe the sunscreen off your hands and leave a review.

Speaker 1 18:29

Or if you're in a different hemisphere, dash, because we forgot that some of our listeners live overseas and it's not summer there. Remove your mittens and give us some stars. We'll take five of them, thanks.

Speaker 2 18:43

As always. Thanks for the support and we look forward to Kitzel your ears next week.

Speaker 1 18:48

You chose Yiddish. That's very racist. What about koses in Ladino? Or dig dug in Hebrew? Tickle, give your ears a little tickle, or zug zug.

Speaker 2 18:57

I only know Kitzel. I've got a book about Kitzel. Okay, everybody hurts.