Rachel Belle: I'm Rachel Belle and this is Your Last Meal. The show where celebrities share stories about the foods they love most and we dig into the history, culture or science of those meals with experts from around the world. Today on the program, singer, songwriter and pianist Regina Spektor. 

[MUSIC - "Hotel Song"]

RB: Regina is on tour right now through the end of August and you should probably get your tickets. Shows are selling out fast. Today's episode is dedicated to soup, a food that Regina has been in love with for most of her life. 

RS: It's funny because as a teenager, I totally rebelled against soup. 

RB: Can you imagine her poor parents with a teenage nightmare? And later in the show, they say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. But when my friend Carolyn Wright was given a year to live, she made a soup business. We'll get into that in the second act of the show, but first, my conversation with Regina Spektor. 

[MUSIC - "Hotel Song"]

RB: I am a longtime fan of Regina Spektor's music. I've told friends that if I could press a magic button and poof, instantly have a beautiful singing voice, I'd steal Regina's like Ursula stole Ariel's in The Little Mermaid. Her lyrics are whimsical, thoughtful, playful, curious, imaginative and vivid. And after spending a very short amount of time with Regina, I can confirm that she also embodies those adjectives. You said, I love crying while chopping onions. 

RS: [laughs] So I cook a lot and I love onions and garlic, but obviously, you know, garlic doesn't make you cry. But every kind of onion I love, I love shallots. I love, scallions don't make you cry, leeks don't make you cry, but like everything in that kind of family. Something about when you're just chopping a lot of onions and the tears are just flowing, something about it feels very, very purifying to me. You know, I guess maybe it works like the same way that people say that if you're smiling, you could smile when you don't feel good and then it just kind of works from the outside in. There's something really nice about crying when it's not coming from the inside out, but when it's coming from the outside in, it's like a different kind of crying. 

And yet it still does the action. I always thought about that with the fairy tales. A lot of cultures, they have this thing where at the end of the fairy tale, just when you think everything is gone horribly wrong and the hero is dead, somebody bends over him and cries and the tear drop falls on him and he kind of comes alive where like the poison leaves his body or something about tears is so mystical to us and like healing in some way. So I don't know. Instead of trying to fight it, I'm just like fully embraced. I'm just like, yes. [laughs]

RB: Regina Spektor grew up in Soviet Russia. When she was nine and a half, her family moved to the Bronx to escape dangerous antisemitism targeted at Russian Jews. Regina had been playing the piano since she was six years old and her parents seriously considered staying in Russia when they learned they couldn't bring along the family piano. 

RS: I know, I'm really glad that they didn't. [laughs] You know, when you see your child loving something so, so much and then you know that it's going to end and very permanently in Russia, at least in Soviet Russia, like all of the education was free. So we didn't have to pay for music lessons or anything like that. 

And we did know that in America, we'd have to. It was the piano that my grandfather bought my mom when she was entering conservatory when she was 16. It was just a very special piano and it was a little upright Petrov and it was a little light brown color and it has this specific chip in it. When my dad and I were cleaning one Sunday, we like dropped the vase and caught it into the piano. So it didn't smash, but it made this little chip. 

And so I always had these fantasies that someday I would be somewhere and I would see a little upright Petrov and I would know it was mine because of that little chip, you know, but of course that would be a Hollywood film. 

RB: I want to talk about when your family did get to the Bronx. What was your impression, your family's impression of American food? 

RS: Well, first of all, just the abundance, you know, the abundance is crazy because we basically had what we had and there was not a lot of choice and everything was seasonal, what they call seasonal here, which is like from the fall until the spring, you never ate a tomato unless you had picked it yourself and canned it yourself, like pickled it or something. 

You never had a cucumber in the winter. It was very, very like this is what's growing right now, so you get to eat it right now. The fact that in America you could just have anything, any time was kind of crazy. But there were just so many new things. Like we did not have fruit yogurts. We did not have cereal, we did not have boxes of orange juice or even oranges. 

Like all those things kind of blew our mind. And I remember just eating cereal around the clock, but also like not understanding that you're just eating sugar. Cocoa puffs with Hershey's chocolate milk, poured over it, which would make it double chocolate. There was just a lot of craziness like that going on or like my parents, they'd go to like the dairy aisle and they would buy yogurts and right next to them were the Swiss Miss puddings. And so my parents would buy the chocolate vanilla puddings were like so sugary, but they thought that they were the same as the yogurts. So every morning before I had to get on the yellow school bus, they made me eat two Swiss Miss puddings. And they thought it was good for me. We had kefir and we had a lot of like, you know, farmer's cheese and all these like sour milk products and sour cream. And so that was like a big part of life. 

So I think they just assumed it was like that, but more and all healthy. It took a minute to figure out we were Russian Jews, like everybody from that immigration wave that came to America in the 90s, they were like really scared of the cold, like drinking cold things from the refrigerator was not a thing that Russian people did. We had tea. So before my parents would give me cereal, they would microwave the milk. 

RB: No. 

RS: And the same thing with orange juice. If they took out orange juice and poured it into a cup, they would add some boiling water to it so that it came tepid or hot. Oh, and they sometimes thought that you could put cereal into orange juice and that those were interchangeable. 

So then I would be eating like Cheerios in hot orange juice for breakfast. [laughs]

RB: How was it? 

RS: Actually delicious, just, you know, just some like backwards culture stuff. But anyway, just shows you that all food is imaginary. And I guess you could do anything. 

RB: Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Food is a construct in that way. You know, we're just used to eating it a certain way because we were told by the cereal companies who invented it, how to eat it. So why not like hot milk and cereal is basically oatmeal. 

RS: Right. And in Moscow for breakfast, a lot of the time people would just eat a bowl of soup and like some kind of meat for breakfast. They basically would eat what you would eat for lunch or dinner for breakfast. 

And it kind of makes sense because they wouldn't have like a crazy sugar spike and they were just fine for a while. But here it's like, oh, that's not a breakfast food. How can you eat that? 

RB: Yeah, like Japanese breakfast too, which I love. Like the miso soup and the fish and the rice and the pickles. Like that's kind of perfect. 

RS: Yes, that's my happy place, especially like when I would go to Australia or go to like Hawaii, like, yes, why can't they have this everywhere in every hotel? 

RB: I know, I know. 

RS: This is a crazy thing. So there was no single use cups or plates or things like that in Soviet Russia. So in train stations, they would actually sell kvass, which is basically best described as bread soda. It's delicious. It's basically fermented brown bread somehow. And it's a drink. 

It's like a Coca-Cola, but it's made out of bread. 

RB: I've always wanted to try that actually. 

RS: It's really good. It's really, really good. Almost like a kombucha. You know those soda machines in fast food store where you could put your cup and you pour yourself Sprite or Coke or whatever. Well, they would have kvass and you could pour it, but it was a communal glass cup and people would put in the money, stick the glass cup, drink from it, put it down onto like some kind of like a little sprinkler water thing that would just weakly sort of like almost like the idea of a rinse. 

RB: Yeah, two drops of water. 

RS: Yeah. And then the next person would just drink it. 

RB: Wow.

RS: And it was, it definitely like put certain things into perspective. 

RB: To be honest, I kind of like things like that because I feel like we're just so sterile in America and maybe for better or for worse. I don't know. Maybe everyone was getting a cold drinking from the community glass. This happens in other countries too. Like in Vietnam, when I went to this pho restaurant, you know, they would just have this basket on the table with these fried donuts, like fried savory donuts you would eat. And then they would come at the end and they would just count them. And if they saw some were missing, they would charge you. But they were always just sitting there. I think I just grew up not caring about germs as much as the average person. I'll eat something off the floor. 

RS: I'll eat off the floor, but weirdly, like I actually really had it, even as I was little, I was really freaked out by if somebody drank from my cup or something to me, it was like a horrifying thing. I was really grossed out by that. 

RB: I might have to try the warm orange juice and Cheerios. Things like that make me very curious. And there are a lot of foods that I've tried because of the show that sound strange that I have ended up liking. When I was trying to think about what they all seem to have peanut butter in common. So I tried a peanut butter and pickle sandwich because of the show, which, you know, I think a lot of people have heard of that is very good. And then because of the Kevin Morby episode several months ago, I dipped a PB and J into top ramen with hot dogs floating in it, along with frozen vegetables. If you want to see me eating a peanut butter and jelly dipped in a top ramen with hot dogs floating in it, that video is up on Instagram. After the break, Regina comes clean about her soup obsession. Is there a soup she doesn't like? You'll have to come back after the break. 

RB: What would your last meal be? 

RS: Oh my God. Okay, so I want to preface this by saying that I am absolutely inconsistent. And so there is no way that I could actually tell you something that I would know I would want my last meal to be. Because even my handwriting changes from day to day. And that's kind of weird. It really does. 

It literally looks different on different days. But I was trying to imagine it and I was imagining myself really, really, really old. And so it would probably be some kind of a broth or some kind of a, like, really, really liquidy soup. [laughs] Because I think that I would just be too old really to digest anything else. 

It would probably be something like, okay, so in my sort of imagination, I would just be really, really old, but somehow still sometimes play shows. And usually like on a show day, I really can't eat for about like four hours before I go on stage at least maybe longer. And I don't have like big dinners. Yeah, would just be like some kind of a simple, like chicken broth with dill in it. That hopefully my great, great grandchild would make for me before I got, you know, escorted, lifted onto a stage to sing like the last few songs before I left the earth. That would be nice. 

RB: For her last meal, Regina Spektor wants a simple chicken broth. You are a soup lady. You love soup in general. 

RS: [laughs] Yes. It's funny because as a teenager, I totally rebelled against soup. Like soup is one of those things that in my family and a lot of families from Soviet Russia and in all Jewish families that I know, soup is like a thing. In Russia, you ate soup every day. It was not a day that you would go without having soup. 

RB: Do you eat it like as a part of the meal or would it be the meal sometimes? 

RS: Actually, it's a part of the meal and the actual name for it was oftentimes pervoye, which literally means first, the first course. Yeah. And I ate it all through my childhood. And then when we were in America and had been here a few years, like all my friends were eating like frozen pizza bagels and, you know, things like all the American hot dogs and, you know, every kind of pizza, pasta, all the stuff that my family didn't have. So my mom would be making all this amazing food that I was totally taking for granted. And I'd be like, oh no, like you made like homemade soup again and like soup and that. 

And so I kind of rebelled. And then when I went to college, I craved my mom's cooking and my grandparents' cooking so much. And everything was like dry sandwiches. I had my opportunity to eat an all American diet. And I just was like, oh, I feel terrible. As soon as I could, I just started making soups for myself. And that was the thing that as soon as I even lived in an apartment on campus, I was, I was always making soup. 

Even on the first website that I made, there was like a message board, the shows that I was playing wherever cafes. And then there was like a thing about like and soup. 

RB: And it was just like soup corner. 

RS: Yeah. And people would post recipes. And I've even had people bring me soup and thermoses to shows. It really got going. Still like at the end of the day, if I have to choose like one meal, I will always ask like, what's your soup of the day? I don't know. It just feels like a hug. 

RB: There's lots of opportunity for food to not be that great, you know, when you go out to eat. And I actually can't think of that many times when the soup wasn't good. Like sometimes it's a little too salty or maybe it's not exactly right. But I don't know how often I've had bad soup. 

RS: I don't think there are many and and and every culture has it's like amazing nourishing soup. When we're having a hard time, our bodies scream what they want. And like when you're sick, there's nothing really that feels better than just like hot soup, except maybe also hot tea. It's like tea and soup. It's like all you want. 

RB: Yes. And I will still make myself soup. Even if I'm sick, I'll ask someone to go get me everything. And probably because I'm Jewish, it has to be chicken soup. And I always have like the man of Shevitz, matzobal mix, no matter what. So sometimes I do that. 

RS: Yes, it's so perfect. Like I always feel that kind of guilt where people are like, this is these matzo balls are amazing. And you're just thank you. 

RB: I know. Yes, because I make a lot of stuff, most stuff from scratch. And even I've gotten to the point with Passover where I make my own gefelta fish. But I have never made my own matzo balls. And I am afraid to because the ones from the box are so good. I feel like why mess with it? I don't want to make my own. And then they're going to sink or they're dense. Like they're perfect every time. 

RS: They really are. I feel like Manichevitz has it figured out. 

RB: So what were some of the soups that you ate growing up that you missed when you went to college? And what are a couple of your favorites now? 

RS: So first of all, like whenever I'm with my mama, I'm always like, make me veggie soup. She just makes this, I don't know, I make veggie soup and it just doesn't taste like hers. And I use all the same stuff. 

I don't know why it's she's just got like some kind of magic. But basically, it's a very basic veggie soup that is like my favorite, but it has to be, I guess, made by my mom. So that's the caveat. I cook them all the time too. Chicken soup with matzabals, definitely a big one. And without matzabals, we only made matzabals for Passover, but she would make chicken soup all the time. And it would have like carrots and parsnips and we'd put fresh dill and it was just so good. 

RB: That's, my mom puts parsnips too. And that's kind of my secret. I make that recipe now and people go crazy about this soup. And that's the the dill and the parsnips. 

RS: Yeah, parsnips are so key and they're so awesome. And I love borscht. I love vegetarian borscht or cold borscht. The cold borscht is amazing in summers when you do it, like with sour cream and you press fresh garlic into it and you cut up hard boiled eggs and cucumbers and all this like deliciousness. And of course, still, I really love this soup that's, I guess you would call it a sourkraut soup and you put carrots and all these other veggies into it. 

And there's also this soup. I actually haven't really eaten it here because I think it's just got a lot of stuff that maybe I wouldn't feel like a great health wise about, but it was called solyanka. It definitely had like lamb pieces in it, but it also had like tons of like hot dogs and sausages and like olives and, and all this crazy stuff. Basically it was like salty kind of meat soup. I remember it from my childhood and that was definitely a favorite. 

RB: You'd have to rebrand it. Salty meat soup. Maybe we'll find a better name.

RS: Yeah. What else? Like miso soup. I think at every meal that I've ever gone out, I start the meal with miso soup and I end it with miso soup. Oh. A meal to me doesn't feel finished unless after the meal, I have a cup of tea or something hot. It just feels kind of crazy. People are like, okay, bye. You're like, where's the tea? 

Where's the like something just feels like there was never a closure sort of. And I think that so a lot of the time, like if we're even in a Japanese restaurant or something, I'll just get a miso soup and it sort of fulfills that that thing of like, I just...

RB: Hot, soothing. 
***
RS: I find miso soup so comforting. Like everything in my body just screams, thank you. Like when I drink it. 

RB: I agree. I find the same thing. I think like if I, I don't really get hangovers anymore, I don't get to that point. But when I used to be so stupid, make me feel better. I love miso soup also when I'm hiking, I'll bring in a thermos. Like there's something that feels a little bit healing about it. 

RS: Yeah, it's probably actually like a lot of the salts and the fermented. It probably has healing in it for real. The other thing that I just super, super, super love that I did not know about when I was a little kid was bone broth. With every sip, it just feels like your body's like, thank you so much. 

RB: But it's become this thing that's very, you know, goop, Gwyneth Paltrow and the wellness kind of movement where I feel like sometimes I don't want to say. Bone broth, because it's more than just this broth. It's kind of like the person you are in this modern world, drinking bone broth and going to Pilates. 

RS: Your lifestyle. 

RB: Yeah, bone broth lifestyle.

RS: You know, I get migraines really bad. My acupuncture doctor was like, you should try bone broth. And when I started drinking bone broth, like my life depended on it, it just sort of changed everything. Maybe we should be drinking bone broth and doing Pilates. [laughs]

RB: I know it's true. It's true. Those are all good things. 

RS: Like, I'm like, maybe, you know, maybe I shouldn't roll my eyes at this stuff because maybe they're like onto something. 

RB: Regina loves soup so much, you may be tempted to call her a soup lady. But unfortunately, that title is already taken. 

Caroline Wright: I'm Caroline Wright. I am the soup lady here in Seattle. I run a soup business called Soup Club. 

RB: Caroline Wright did not set out to be a soup lady. She never intended to have an entire career focus on soup. She went to culinary school in France, worked for Martha Stewart, wrote cookbooks and liked soup as much as the average soup liking person. But all of that changed nine years ago. Shortly after she moved to Seattle, when she was given a grim diagnosis. 

CW: I was busy working on my third cookbook that was taking me to Spain. And I had a two week old baby and like life was very crazy. So when I started getting headaches, I was just like, oh, well, man, I'm just like really stressed out. I don't I don't know. I went to the doctor and they found a brain tumor. I was diagnosed with the most aggressive cancer possible. A brain cancer called glioblastoma. I was 32 when I was diagnosed with the most aggressive cancer possible. I was diagnosed and the typical person who is diagnosed with a glioblastoma is like an old white guy. We hadn't lived here long and we hadn't had any friends because again, we were in the process of like finding our house, hanging on to my two week old baby. So we didn't really know many people. 

RB: Caroline started writing about her experience on CaringBridge, a nonprofit website that helps people communicate with their loved ones during a health crisis. 

CW: I used that space to kind of write my last words like a journal to my children, sort of predicting the questions that they would ask and use it as like a diary and a journal. And the fact that people were reading it was a little bit inconsequential. I was just like using it as a platform on the CaringBridge site. 

You can ask for practical things, you know, like rides to the hospital or whatever. And I was the cook of the house because like, you know, it's my job. I'm a cookbook author. And so we were eating a lot of like Thai food and pizza and stuff. And so I decided that, oh, one way that people can help me is like making homemade food. And I was trying to think just like from my food editor experience, like what is something that would be like inherently kind of healthy and not come from a box, take into account a wide range of cooking skills. And I came up with soup. 

And so that's how I sounded a call for soup on this like a non, I don't know, like I didn't know who I was writing this to. But apparently 10,000 people a day were coming to this site. And I don't even know actually who all those people were. 

RB: Those people wanted to bring Caroline's soup. So a friend helped coordinate the deliveries. 

CW: We put a cooler out front of my house and it filled up three times a day for like five months until I decided to stop the flow. 

RB: What kind of soup were people bringing you? 

CW: Well, I learned that Seattleites really love a lentil soup. Well, it's so funny. It was like mostly lentil soup, which I am here for. Like I really love it. But definitely after like five months of literally filling my freezer with other people's lentil soup, I was like, OK, I'm ready to make food now. I get it. Yes, I get it. I love you too. 

RB: I'm good with lentils. But she developed an emotional connection with the people who were dropping off the soup 

CW: and imagine the person like making it for me. And it was just this really like beautiful healing thing. And then what's crazy is I started getting better. Like my doctors couldn't really figure it out. But I was like, you know, eating a lot of that soup and feeling really buoyed by people's love and support. And it really did like change me. 

So when I survived the year I was given to live, I just was like trying to think of something that I could do. And I just decided that I wanted to make soup for people who made soup for me. And that's how I started my soup club. 

RB: When soup club started, it was just Caroline making soup to thank the people who made soup for her. But those people loved her soup and they shared it with their friends. And then those people wanted Caroline's soup. So eventually she turned it into a business with a subscription model. 

CW: I make 120 quarts of soup a week. I serve 75 or so members at a time. I also make homemade chocolate chip cookies. And I use really, really awesome bread from a local bakery called Seawolf. And it's delivered to you or you can pick up. I wake up at four 15 in the morning and I finish about like one o'clock. 

RB: All of Caroline's soups are vegan and gluten free for an anti-inflammatory diet. But speaking from firsthand experience, they have a ton of flavor. 

CW: I just was like, how do I make vegan soup really surprising? Like, what is the expectation if you were going to be in a vegan soup club? You probably like be like, oh, I expect this to be like veggie tea. I don't know. And not filling and not hearty. And I want to just blow people's socks off and like, you know, make it a real meal. 

RB: I have eaten a lot of Caroline's soups. She is my friend and I tested a lot of recipes for her vegan soup cookbooks. Her first book, Soup Club and her second called Seconds. And Caroline's not just doing vegan versions of commonly known soups. 

Her soups are extremely creative and she builds flavor using methods I had never heard of before. You make a puree of the aromatic. So like in the blender, onions, garlic and water. And it becomes this puree that you then put in the pan and cook. 

CW: Yeah, I actually stole that from it's a typical Indian like curry base. And what I noticed in that setting is that it creates kind of like a gravy and a viscosity for the the broth. It gives it body. 

Yeah. Like in the way that like a bone tossed into a soup pot, the gelatin kind of like creates that sort of mouth feel. That's sort of what the blended aromatics do. 

RB: I always tease Caroline about how wacky some of her recipes are. But the ones with the most unexpected ingredient pairings often become my favorites. 

CW: She just pulled out a copy of Seconds, which is like stained from her cooking. Covered in soup, which I love. And the warped pages. 

RB: The recipe I've made the most is very warped. Yeah, I want to talk about some specific soups. And let's just start with the one that is my favorite that I think is the most bizarre soup I've ever encountered. It's called Roman noodle. Will you go through all the ingredients? 

CW: So I also have to say that this is from my second soup book. So once you've come up with like, I think I had like 80 recipes in my first book, all vegan. So once you come up with 80 soup recipes, it's like, how the hell am I going to have anything to say for a second book? 

So I just got like braver and weirder for my second book. This recipe is my Roman noodle. It starts with a mix of seshwain and black peppercorns. 

We use coconut oil, four bunches of scallions, both the whites and greens, ton of garlic cloves, 10 chopped and a tablespoon of arrowroot or cornstarch. That's just used in there for like a thickener. And then you make a slurry of that with tamari, nutritional yeast, which I really, really love and is an ingredient I lean on throughout all of my soups, not all of them, but many because it's kind of a shortcut stock flavor. And lemon juice, like a hearty amount from one to two lemons, like quarter cup. And you make a slurry and then you add that to all the cook scallions. And then it's a medium head of escarole, lots of spaghetti, frozen peas and finished with coconut cream. 

RB: I don't know where she comes up with recipes like that. Despite the seshwain peppercorns, it's not spicy. Despite the coconut milk and tamari and peppercorns, it doesn't really taste Asian. 

The spaghetti doesn't make it taste Italian. It is truly an original, tangy and creamy and comforting and delicious. Caroline's soups have a lot of hallmarks. One big one is she doesn't use stock. She's not a fan of box stock and making homemade stock is basically making a soup. She says she doesn't want to spend time making one soup just to put it into another soup. So she builds flavors and creative ways for a French onion soup. Ask recipe where she wanted to emulate beef broth. She blends raisins with nutritional yeast, onion powder, arrowroot powder and nutmeg. 

CW: Because I think nutmeg is one of those also secret spices that can just make something taste really familiar and warm without necessarily nailing it to nutmeg. 

RB: It sounds weird, but it works. 

CW: I finish all of my soups with acid of some sort, lemon juice or mostly cider vinegar. You shouldn't taste the vinegar. That's like not what that's about. 

RB: Yeah, it's kind of like salt. It makes all the other flavors become more vivid. Yeah. One of the hallmarks that I always think of, which I always bring up with you, is that chonkiness of the vegetables. 

CW: Oh, yeah. My vegetable cuts, I keep large because in a stew, one that has like meat in it, you know, you get to sink your fork into something. And I think that there's something to that experience of eating the soup. When you do it with large chunks of vegetables, it kind of takes that place. And I just love them. Once you go for it, you can't go the other direction. 

RB: No, it's true. Caroline regularly delivers her soup to cancer patients at local hospitals and sells cups of soup outside of Seattle's cookbook store, Book Larder. Then she donates all of that money to cancer research. 

Caroline is an anomaly. It is very rare for a person to outrun the most aggressive type of brain cancer that she was diagnosed with. How long have you had clean scans now? 

CW: I've been cancer free for eight years. 

RB: After the break, Regina and I learned that we are both Luddites and we learn one more detail about her last meal.

RB: Regina says she is a meditation wannabe. She tries, but it's really hard to sit on that cushion. So she takes her metitation into the kitchen.

RS: Like mindful cooking, where you just really pay attention to, OK, this is how the water feels on your hands when you wash them off. And then you're looking at the colors of every and you really, really go super, super, micro and it feels really good.

RB: Yeah, it's amazing how the senses turn on so quickly. I started doing that when I hike. If I'm hiking by myself, which I really like to do, I start thinking about something I don't like thinking about like work, and I can just tell myself, just do a walking meditation. And suddenly, I can hear the birds louder, I can feel the wind on my skin, I can feel the sun, I can smell. Like it all comes in immediately when you kind of ask it to and let everything else leave. 

RS: Wow, isn't that incredible? It just shows you how much the world really wants to be noticed and observed and how little time there is for that. I really do miss very deeply this kind of sort of mandatory boredom that I had growing up and in my early 20s, it couldn't even be reached. I feel like something has been stolen through this constant ability to just always tap in and always have entertainment or news or connection. 

I really do think maybe more was lost than gained, even though maybe, yeah, there would be a little bit less of that, oh, I'll be there in 20 minutes, just wait for me kind of a moment that you could now have with texting or I think that what we've lost is this incredible ability to just observe and be with our own thoughts and look at everybody's faces. I mean, a lot of the time I'll walk around and I can't even catch anybody's eyes to like peek into them because they're just looking at their thing. And then I'm sure lots of times when I am, they can't catch mine. So it's just for constantly missing these moments. I would say that it's just in general, doing meditations of trying to be mindful always sends me into creating. I start to write lyrics or think of ideas when I clear my mind. If I'm trying to do a simple cooking meditation, all of a sudden, I might start to become something or I start to, if I'm walking, I try to do a mindful walking, but then I just start writing a song. 

These are not necessarily problems if your life is trying to make art, but if you're trying to also sort of have these moments of when you're not doing or thinking or planning, it is really hard to just be present and pull yourself back in. 

RB: I agree with you. 100%. I think we're in such the minority. I say this to my friends too. I'm like, I would give it all back. The only thing that I want is maps. That's the thing that helps me the most. 

RS: Yes, yes, because I would just be fully lost and I would not be able to find anywhere. 

RB: Let's go back to Regina's last meal. She had mentioned that she'd like to play one last show before she goes. What would be the last song that you would like to sing? 

RS: Oh, I don't know. Hopefully something I haven't written yet. 

RB: Okay. 

RS: Something maybe new. Something I wrote like three days before then that I'm still shaky on, but I'm going to do it because I'll be brave. 

RB: And that was Regina Spektor's last meal. 

RB: Regina is on tour now through the end of August. If you want one of her albums on vinyl, limited vinyl reissues are on sale now on her website. I will also put a link in the show notes. Thanks to Carolyn Wright. 

Her soup books are called Soup Club and Seconds, and she has many more books, including a children's book she wrote about how to deal with the parent dying. Your last meal is a product of Seattle's Cascade PBS. Go to cascadepbs.org to become a member and get on-demand access to all PBS programming, including all the fun food shows. 

Membership starts at just $5 a month. This episode was produced by me with editing assistants from Serene Abu Yazid and mixed and mastered by senior producer Sarah Bernard. Original theme music by Prom Queen. If you're not already signed up for my bi-weekly newsletter, The Gnosh, you can find a link in the show notes. If you haven't seen both seasons of The Gnosh, my TV show, you can watch on YouTube at cascadepbs.org or on Alaska Airlines. It's in the in-flight entertainment. I'm Rachel Belle, and this is your last meal. 

RB: I can tell that you're a huge food lover. You sent like the best page of prompts ever. I was like, this is going to be so good. 

RS: After I said that, I was like, I bet she's, this is too much. 

RB: No! This is what we love.