Immigration, Diane Ladd and Laura Dern, Juliet Lewis

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That's Cerebral.com slash Wondery for 50% off your first month. Good morning and Happy Mother's Day. I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The words of Emma Lazarus enshrined at the base of the Statue of Liberty. A noble sentiment that for more than a century has greeted millions to our nation of immigrants. But in truth, America has always struggled with newcomers to our shores. And for no small number of those newcomers, coming to America is a struggle like none other.

This morning we're on the border with correspondents Enrique Acevedo and Lee Cowan. Even before the Statue of Liberty raised her lamp, those coming to our doorstep have been both welcomed and turned away. It's never been an easy choice, but it has also never quite looked like this. We have a challenge in that in the United States, we live in a hemisphere that is really having a refugee crisis and we have not really been managing it as a refugee crisis. We've struggled being a beacon of freedom, trying to balance compassion with protection. It has been a long, long path.

Coming up on Sunday Morning. On this Mother's Day Sunday, Rita Braver will be talking with Diane Ladd and Laura Dern, mother and daughter performers celebrating their long journey together. A few years back, Oscar winner Laura Dern learned that walking was the only thing that might help her mother, famed actor Diane Ladd, overcome a possibly fatal lung disease. They didn't know what they could do except if we could get her to walk, it would help her expand her lungs.

Because we thought I was dying, we spilled the beans. Ahead on Sunday morning, talking and walking with Ladd and Dern. Ben Mankiewicz catches up with one of the success stories of the hit show Succession, actor Jeremy Strong.

Luke Burbank sits down with one of the stars of the hit series Yellow Jackets, Juliette Lewis. Plus a story from Steve Hartman, the mother-daughter team behind the popular cooking podcast, Table Manners. And a Mother's Day remembrance from Senator Amy Klobuchar. And more on this Sunday morning for the 14th of May, 2023.

We'll be back in a moment. Scammers are best known for living the high life, globetrotting on private jets, dining at five-star restaurants and driving six-figure sports cars. That is until their house of cards collapses and they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit. Scamfluencers is a podcast from Wondery hosted by Sarah Hagee and Sachie Cole that tells the unbelievable true stories behind some of the world's most infamous scams, swindlers and con artists. Scamfluencers has covered jaw-dropping scandals from Ponzi schemes to a fake Saudi prince to a sexual predator masquerading as a wholesome yoga guru. These scammers cost their victims hundreds of millions of dollars and a measurable emotional anguish.

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You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. On a cold night in 2010, a boy is stopped by the police while walking home from a party in the Bronx. He's only 16. He's been stopped by the police before, but this time is different. In a special four part series, the Generation Y podcast unravels the story of Kalief Browder, a young boy who was falsely accused of stealing a backpack and held without bail at Rikers Island for three years. He endured regular abuse by prison staff and inmates and was held in solitary confinement for more than 700 consecutive days. Three years later, Kalief was released, never having stood trial. This is a story that digs into the injustice of the justice system and a young life caught in the middle. We say innocent until proven guilty. But where do we draw the line between due process and cruelty? To hear this four part series, follow Generation Y wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. It seems like a crisis that's gone from bad to worse, to even worse, and still no end in sight. Lee Cowan begins our look at the chaos on the border. On the day we celebrate moms in this country, there are thousands of other mothers and children living like this on both sides of our border. The COVID era law that effectively allowed both the Trump and Biden administrations to expel migrants back into Mexico before they could ask for asylum is no more.

It expired. In its place, the Biden administration has imposed more restrictions on those seeking asylum. But that's really only a footnote to the larger border law that was really designed for the Cold War and in no way fits the misery of this moment. U.S. refugee policy in the 1950s and 1960s was for Europeans, because remember, this was a time when a refugee was primarily defined as somebody who was fleeing communism. Our immigration policies have almost always been tied to the times, if not behind them. Yael Shacker, a historian and director of Refugees International, says up until the Civil War, we didn't even have a federal immigration policy.

It was all left to the states. On the East Coast in New York and Massachusetts, there was actually quite a bit of anti-Irish sentiment. On the West Coast, starting in the 1850s and the 1860s, especially in California, you start to see the anti-Chinese sentiment. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was the first time we'd made any significant rule to exclude anyone.

That aside, though, we were still largely open. Only about 2% of those who began arriving at Ellis Island were turned away. But by the 1920s, Americans began to worry that those from Southern and Eastern Europe were putting a strain on social services, which led the U.S. to clamp down on the number of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. So they said, OK, we're going to give Germany and England very large quotas to come in, but from Italy, Poland, Greece, fewer numbers. They devised a quota system that discriminated based on nationality in that way.

The xenophobic quotas had an immediate impact. We rebuffed almost everyone trying to flee Nazi atrocities, for example. Fleeing from Nazi Germany into the border towns of Holland is a new kind of refugee, the victim of an intolerance and persecution unparalleled since the Dark Ages. It wasn't until refugees really started fleeing Vietnam in the late 70s, early 80s, that we arrived at a definition of just what kind of persecution qualified a refugee for asylum. Political persecution, religious persecution, being a member of a social group, just to name a few.

But critics say it was all still shortsighted. The United States did not think of Mexicans as people who would seek asylum. They did not think of Central Americans as really people who would be seeking asylum. Today we're the North Star for asylum seekers all across Latin America, creating a supernova that doesn't respond well to the laws of current border physics.

Cecilia Munoz was a senior advisor to President Obama and a first Latina to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council. What we're not doing is having the policy debate around what should our asylum system look like, who should we be admitting, what kind of dangers are we prepared to protect people from. The unprecedented number of migrants arriving at our southern border today, she says, are fleeing for reasons that don't always neatly fit that definition of refugee. If you're fleeing domestic violence, does that qualify you for asylum? If you're fleeing gang violence, should that qualify you for asylum? If you're fleeing because your village got destroyed because there was a hurricane, should that qualify you for asylum?

More than 2.1 million people are waiting for the answer to that very question. The backlog is so deep, the average asylum case now takes between four and five years to complete. You arrive to a country where you think they will help you based on the stories you heard, but it wasn't like that. Henry Rivas Cibrian began seeking asylum back in 2017, seeking refuge from street gangs and police in El Salvador, who he says brutalized him for being gay. What would have happened if you'd stayed?

A lot. There was an attempt against my life. I have a scar on my nose. They slit it.

They also pointed at me with a firearm to murder me. Ava Binash is Henry's attorney. Not everybody's going to qualify for asylum under our statute, but everybody should have a right to make their claim. After eight months in U.S. immigration detention, Henry was released pending a court date. Do you want regular coffee? For the last six years, he's been living in Washington, D.C. His new husband, from Honduras, is also seeking asylum.

You're never truly comfortable, you're never truly settled, and knowing that it can be ripped out from you at any point, that's a tough way to live. Last year, the government decided it didn't want to spend any more resources on his case and moved to dismiss it, and an immigration judge agreed. Do you want this sucker?

Yes. It's Henry in legal limbo. He's appealing and filing a new application for asylum, but all it really does is put him right back to where he was six years ago, at the back of the asylum-seeking line.

I believe that the light at the end of the tunnel was getting closer, and I see the light from very far away one more time. It's remarkable how the pictures and the narrative have changed very little since this report on immigration back in the mid-'80s. What you're seeing here is a trickle compared to today. The pressures of population, poverty, and politics, coupled with the promise of America, keep pushing the world to our borders. Our current policy is immigration anarchy, full of holes in hypocrisy.

The debate over how to fix what almost everyone agrees is broken is still at a standoff. Basically, Republicans want the border tightened before they address anything else. Moments ago, House Republicans passed the strongest border security bill this country has ever seen. Democrats generally agree the border should be secured, but want overall reform now. I'm lucky enough to say that I've lived the American dream.

I believe it's a dream that should be available for everybody. While Congress bickers back and forth, both the Trump and Biden administrations have turned to issuing executive orders. Recently, the White House opened a humanitarian back door for as many as 30,000 migrants a month to enter from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti. But, just like with Trump's executive orders, Biden's have also landed in court. Congress makes the laws. The executive branch doesn't.

Jonathan Scrimetti is Tennessee's attorney general. Ostensibly, the Biden administration says that this is a way to basically divert the flow away from the border, almost as a relief valve. Well, it's not legal. Congress was very clear in the law.

It's supposed to be for a small number of people on a case-by-case basis. He's joined 20 other red states in asking for an injunction to Biden's parole program, calling it a blatant end run around Congress. It's a tragedy when people are driven from their homes, and it's understandable that they want to come here for the opportunities that we offer. But if everybody comes here because of every bit of adversity they encounter, we're not going to be able to take care of them. We can't wish the problem away. It's going to take hard work and hard choices to figure this out. Putting them in prison isn't going to stop them.

Separating from their children isn't going to necessarily stop them, which is crazy. If we're willing to go to the extreme cruelty, it will work, but otherwise it won't. Our track record on immigration is imperfect at best, but the two sides need to keep trying.

Otherwise, the Statue of Liberty's lamp may continue to lack nothing but dysfunction and chaos. It's not about politics. It's not about ideology. It's about helping people in need at a time of crisis.

It's really what we do when we're at our best in this country. You ready? Actually, before we go into the black recesses of my soul, I just need a minute.

Of course. Oh, for God's sakes. She's a star with many talents and a growing list of callings. Luke Burbank talks with the always surprising Juliette Lewis.

So you're at this phase of your career, like you're still finding out things and interested in these characters? Look, as a leaf falls. What was that? The only predictable thing about interviewing Juliette Lewis... This is a Dodge Challenger. Man, I wish I could spout out all the facts about it. ...is that there's no predicting where things might go. What is the story on this car? It comes from the midlife thing of enjoying once what's at the fruits of their labor. This is your midlife crisis car?

Don't call it a crisis. So I'm not going to dump all my issues like driving through the rain, coming from the mountains and in between projects. No, I'm actually honored that you're picking me to do a profile on. That's cool. Cool and unpredictable. Two words that could accurately describe both Lewis and her Hollywood career over the years, where she's played characters who are menaced... I need you to follow me here. You know me pretty well, don't you, darling?

Yeah. You're going to get to know me a lot better, too. ...characters who are doing the menacing... Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, cancer redneck by his toe.

And just about everyone in between. It's really interesting that to this day, the handful of movies I did when I first started still resonate and are still being seen by new generations. Lewis grew up in L.A. watching her father, Jeffrey Lewis, act in countless movies and TV shows.

So I went into my meditation routine, you know? Often opposite Clint Eastwood. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I'm in a cowboy-ish movie, for lack of a better word.

It's a weird Western. But I feel like my dad because I'm like in the gear and the boots and I gotta ride horses. And my first sets are those kinds of sets. That was my first time on this playground. But Lewis says the acting bug didn't actually bite her until her teenage years, when with no formal training, she started going out on auditions. I did sitcoms, which they like.

Everything's straight and really high energy. Where I almost got fired from a sitcom early on. For what?

I think for behaving naturally. You're basically being too good at acting, essentially? I mean, Marty said so later, but they did not like my style. Marty is, of course, Martin Scorsese, who cast a teenage Juliette Lewis in the movie Cape Fear and changed the trajectory of her life. You're not the drama teacher, are you?

Maybe I'm the big bad wolf. The performance earned an 18-year-old Lewis an Oscar nomination and launched a run of memorable 90s films. Oh, look, to Frank Maness. You know how they made? Including What's Eating Gilbert Grape opposite Johnny Depp.

And then when they're done, she'll eat them. Strange Days and Oliver Stone's hyper-violent satire, Natural Born Killers with Woody Harrelson. I think I scared a lot of people who make business decisions. They can't keep me away from you. People didn't walk around thinking Woody was crazy, but they did of me.

Isn't that funny? The tabloids branded Lewis a wild child and breathlessly covered her high-profile relationships. Yeah, I'm wondering what it's been like for you to live such a public life. I mean, to be a celebrity, to have people kind of know who you are. Did you know what you were signing up for with that? No, I'm laughing because what if I just started weeping and fell apart?

That would make this a really good special. At 22, Lewis got sober, she says through the Church of Scientology, and then started pursuing a quieter life off-screen. I made a decision early on to reclaim my existence on my own terms.

I've taken time off from movie-making. I started my band when I was 30. Her punk band, Juliet and the Licks, toured extensively, giving her a chance to live out a different childhood fantasy. I had always wanted to be a singer when I was a kid. The things that inspired me were Rocky Horror Picture Show, Fame, Flashdance, the musical Hair. These were everything to me. They had all the things.

Drama, you'd weep, the music, dance. Five years ago, the band announced they were recording new music together once again. But any future projects with the band will have to split time with Lewis' busy acting schedule.

I mean, at least undo one. I am starving. Including starring as Natalie in the hit, Yellow Jackets. Natalie, time for group. Airing on Showtime, which is part of our parent company, Paramount Global.

The show is about a high school soccer team from New Jersey that gets stranded in the wilderness. After they rescued us, I lost my purpose. I love the idea of when you think someone's one thing and they're another. What you reveal and what you conceal, and that dance is what's interesting to play. And as we neared the end of the interview. Okay, now I start crying.

Something else I wouldn't have predicted. I'm not trying to have tears this interview. The moment. The one moment Juliette Lewis grew visibly emotional.

In a conversation spanning life, love, family, addiction, and acting. It was the mention of one of her very first movie roles in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Isn't it viewed, Audrey? She'll see it later, honey.

Her eyes are frozen. I'm curious if you had a sense what a cultural touchstone this would be. I mean, it's obviously required viewing around Christmas. It is so moving to me that to do something that when I was 15, no, I had no idea. That every year families talk to me, people who have lost their parents who tell me this is a tradition. That my little 15-year-old sarcastic self is in their lives every year. That's really remarkable and a blessing and just getting lucky. If luck is the residue of design, then Juliette Lewis' career appears to be the result of taking chances, staying true to yourself, and never, ever being predictable. Yeah, it's weird. Middle age is weird because what sustains you in your 20s is not necessarily what sustains you in midlife. However, I don't ever want to lose it, lose a certain kind of fire, seizing the day, you know, all that good stuff. But no, I'm not a maniac.

Like, meaning if we weren't doing this, I would just be a hoe, I would just look at the mountains and listen to the birds and throw a ball with my dogs, you know, stuff like that. Earlier, Lee Cowan showed us a glimpse of life on our border, which begs the question, why do they still come? We asked Enrique Acevedo, who anchors Mexico's highest-rated newscast, to tell us about the long, treacherous journey to America. From the Mexican border to Panama City, U.S. Army engineers are speeding a 1,500-mile highway through the heart of Central America. The Pan American Highway is the longest road in the world. Stretching from Alaska to Argentina, its construction was once the largest international development project ever attempted by the United States. But more than 100 years after the road was first proposed, one section remains unbuilt, the 66 miles of remote jungle known as the Darien Gap. It is the only stretch of the Americas where engineers could not build the Pan American Highway. This essentially created a barrier between South America and Central America.

Julie Turkowitz is the Andes bureau chief for the New York Times. Last fall, she and photographer Federico Rios followed and photographed a group of migrants on their nine-day journey through the Darien Gap. She found the route that was too treacherous to build the road has become a traffic jam. Just masses of people crossing the jungle.

It was like being in line at Statue of Liberty. Last year, 250,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, 20 times more than just a few years ago. You have a sort of vibrant economy of smugglers who are advertising the Darien Gap on TikTok and Facebook, which is where a lot of migrants are talking. What does that look like? They advertise their services or they are trying to tell people that this is a safe way to get to the US?

Both. They talk about how this trek is possible. They will answer people's questions. They spread a ton of misinformation about which nationalities are being allowed in. And when they arrive in the jungle, most migrants are not ready for what lies ahead. It can be absolutely harrowing. You don't know what's around the next bend. You don't know how deep the river is. You don't know how slippery the rock is. A lot of people are making this journey up. Not only are not physically prepared, but don't have the resources to buy boots or to buy proper food or to buy proper clothes. You know, some of them are children. And so the sort of level of vulnerability that people are subject to is kind of hard to describe.

Alejandro Marufo crossed the dairy end last year. I asked him if he saw families, children. He saw kids. Yes, I saw people who died. Imagine you hurt yourself in the middle of the jungle.

How do you get out? Marufo left Venezuela in 2018. He decided to venture north after struggling for years in neighboring Colombia to earn enough money to support his children back home. I've done all of this for my two daughters, he tells me.

They are the reason I have lasted five years on this journey. Runaway inflation, at times reaching as high as 10 million percent, has led to shortages of food and medicine in Venezuela. Since 2015, 7 million people have fled. That's a quarter of the country's population.

Most have settled in countries nearby, but hundreds of thousands have made their way to the United States. And trouble in the region isn't limited to Venezuela. COVID devastated economies across Latin America and the Caribbean, while authoritarian governments and climate change are driving millions of people to leave. Most people don't want to flee their homes and travel thousands and thousands of miles through seriously dangerous conditions to start over in a new country.

People do that because they are forced to. Tyler Matias is a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Mexico. He says the U.S. government needs to pay more attention to why people leave home in the first place. Do you think there's too much focus on the U.S.-Mexico border?

Absolutely, I do. The policy towards Latin America has really ignored serious and growing human rights crises in many countries across the region and focused almost exclusively on trying to stop migration coming north through any means possible. Those policies, first of all, don't work. The number of people who are fleeing their countries continues to grow because these crises continue to grow.

And it also has deadly consequences. In March, a fire at a Mexican migrant detention facility near the border killed 40 people. Mexico has seen a record number of asylum claims in recent years. More migrants are living on the streets and crowding shelters like this one in Mexico City.

A direct result, Matias says, of U.S. pressure to quiet the situation at the border. More than a month after crossing the Darien Gap, Alejandro Marufo made it to Mexico City. He's found a job at a local market and can even send some money back home. That's the goal, the U.S. He tells me his goal is to make it to the U.S. legally. I don't want to enter illegally. For me, that's not an option. But with border policies constantly changing, the road ahead for Alejandro Marufo and so many other migrants remains unclear.

Reporter Julie Turkowitz. Some people follow the rules and they get nowhere. Some follow the rules and they get in.

Some people don't follow the rules and they get in. And I think that arbitrary nature is one of the things that makes people feel the most frustrated, but it's also the thing that makes them risk the journey. It's that constant hope of something better and this idea that, you know, that their kids' lives can be better. I'm sure you guys hear this all the time. And it probably sounds like cheesy and cliche, but the American dream dies hard.

Even amid all of this, amid the deportations, amid all of the problems that one knows exist in the United States, the power of the American dream, it's powering that journey through the jungle. My dad wanted me to take over. Well, sometimes. You know that. He did.

Sometimes. He made me hate him and he died. That's Jeremy Strong as a tortured son in the hit HBO series Succession. Ben Mankiewicz speaks with a performer who's come to be known as an actor's actor.

I mean, everything has changed and nothing has changed. Nestled between a New York City church and a small Mediterranean restaurant, the Rattlestick Theatre conjures up powerful memories for Jeremy Strong. These weren't here.

They took these risers down. Back in 2011, Strong was a struggling actor, appearing as an Afghanistan war veteran in Paraffin, an off-Broadway play. This was like a 60-seat theater where the bathroom is on the stage. It is on the stage, yeah.

And you could smell the falafel stand downstairs, but it didn't matter. More than a decade later, Strong, now 44, is a success story, thanks to his role on HBO's hit series Succession, now winding down its fourth and final season. The show is fictional, but at times seems inspired by some real-life media dynasties. My father is a malignant presence, a bully and a liar, and he was fully personally aware of these events for many years. Strong's character is Kendall Roy, troubled and talented scion of his family's media empire, one of four siblings desperately seeking their father's approval. I mean, they're not the 1%, the 0.001%, but yet they're working-class families, people all over the spectrum who clearly relate.

I find that very moving because I think at the heart of it, it's a story about family and the need for love and the need for validation, so it's incredibly universal. I'm afraid I have to inform you, you are all dismissed. You're all dismissed?

Yeah, you're all fired. His character may have grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth and a sense of entitlement in his soul, but Jeremy Strong is not Kendall Roy. Born Christmas Day 1978, Strong spent the first decade of his life in Jamaica Plain, a working-class neighborhood in Boston. There's a crosswalk somewhere.

I think it's up there. Jeremy's father, David Strong, was everything Logan Roy isn't, caring, paternal, and heroic, once nearly sacrificing his own life as he walked with his son, then eight, to a neighborhood park, the Arnold Arboretum. There was a car coming like 40 miles an hour that wasn't slowing down for the traffic light, so he picked me up and he threw me out of the way. Oh, really? And he got hit by the car, broke all the bones in both of his legs. Your dad?

Saved my life, yeah. There are things you're able to do that I can't, maybe. Maybe. The intensity and resentment that we see from Kendall is not a product of Jeremy's childhood. None of that comes from your relationship with your dad? No, and I don't think I understand how I have access to that relationship. There's not some hidden trauma in my life or my background. In fact, he took us with him to visit his childhood home.

That's my house. The moments seem to catch him off guard. You haven't seen it in 20 years.

It just feels, big feelings coming back here. I don't want to monumentalize it, but in a way, these are like the waters of childhood. In 1955, Strong started acting in community theater. In high school, he got jobs on local movie sets. Learning from filmmakers, he grew up idolizing. I worked on The Crucible. I worked on Amistad. I remember Tony Hopkins, you know, giving his speech.

What are we to do with that embarrassing, annoying document? As John Quincy Adams and, you know, it was incredible. It was incredible. He even got to work with Daniel Day Lewis, an uncommonly committed actor who's had a lasting influence on Strong. I'm a student, you know. I think eternally, really, and you're trying to absorb visceral clues from anywhere you can. After earning a scholarship to Yale, Strong moved to New York where he started auditioning, barely scraping by.

I don't think I had anything in my fridge. You know, I worked a lot of jobs, waiting tables, room service, shredding paper, you know, anything. Most of his acting work came on the stage, off-Broadway. There's inherent value in just doing good work. The feeling of, you know, no one might see you do this play.

You're making 50 bucks a week, but you're swinging for the fences. Then came that play here at the Rattlestick. There was a casting director, she came to see me in this play. And that year I worked on Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty and Parkland after that. And it just, everything changed.

So you're offering us a chance to short this pile of blocks? More movie work followed before that big break in 2016, being cast as Kendall Roy, which has earned him an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor. Action then, but soft, no prints. The critical praise is due in part to his hyper-focused approach to finding his character's emotional reserves. I killed a kid. On Succession, he often isolated himself from the rest of the cast, which is exactly what Kendall would do. You're not a method actor, right? You would say no to that?

No. You know, everybody has a method, but I would say mine is always changing. And it's really just following the line of your intuition that is dictated by whatever you're working on. Is there a risk in that level of commitment to you personally? The fear I would have is that, you know, it'll burn out. I don't think so, because I find a tremendous amount of joy in doing this. A bit of that joy, however, has been tempered.

There's been criticism fueled by a 2021 headline-making profile in The New Yorker that Strong's process can go too far. Did it make you sad? Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

He'd prefer not to discuss the article, but to his credit, he answered every question we asked. It made me feel foolish to be presented in a certain light. Do I regret it? Here's the thing. Would I do anything differently?

Would I hedge or hold back answers or try and calibrate myself differently? No. Strong has found time recently for other projects.

A married father of three can't afford to be picky now. Next year, he'll return to a familiar place, the stage, in An Enemy of the People on Broadway. I said yes, and I just immediately said yes. But it's his work on succession that has defined Jeremy Strong for the past seven years. And now it's time to let go of Kendall Roy. Well, you're done now. Yeah. Put Kendall to rest. Yeah.

I did. I went home to Denmark, where my wife and I have a place, and I went out, sat on the beach, watched Kendall go down with the sunset. Adios.

But that was okay. I've been living with this character and carrying or trying to carry his struggle for so long, but I'm happy to be finished and relieved and released. Music Steve Hartman this morning has the story of a young hero. It was end of day for students at Carter Middle School in Warren, Michigan, but for those on bus 46 that April afternoon, it was the beginning of an unforgettable ordeal. All of a sudden, the brakes get slammed.

We all were just terrified and shocked. And that's when I looked up and saw him. Seventh grader Dylan Reeves had grabbed the steering wheel.

Soon after, police called the boy's father and stepmother, Steve and Iretta. Are you the parent of Dylan Reeves? And I said yes. And I go, what do you do? And he goes, no, this is a good phone call.

Your son's a hero. He stopped the bus. Stopped the bus? What?

What? The officer went on to explain, and security footage shows, how Dylan noticed the driver was having a medical emergency and immediately sprang from his seat. I just knew what to do in that moment. The bus was swerving off the road. So Dylan took the wheel, hit the brake, and gained control of the situation, saving driver and students. Someone call 911.

A true hero, no doubt. But we still had a question. Why didn't anyone else notice what was happening? Well, turns out... Had my AirPods in. Virtually every kid... Was looking at my phone. Was on a device. I was on my phone playing a little game. We hear a lot about the consequences of too much screen time. But one thing I never considered until now is the loss of situational awareness. What's happening around them? And yet somehow, at least one kid on that bus instantly recognized what was happening.

Any guesses as to why? I know why. Because my son does not have a cell phone. And Steve says that's the lesson here. What else are you going to do when you don't have a phone? You're going to look at people. You're going to notice stuff.

You're going to look out the window. It's a very powerful lesson. Maybe change world kind of lesson.

I don't know. At least a save the bus kind of lesson. And they say reason enough to hold off getting him a phone for another day. How do you feel about that? Whatever.

My parents are old school. But for good reason. I guess.

Sometimes, even heroes, have it hard. I don't want to talk to you about this kind of stuff, Mom. You're so nervous. You don't trust me. I mean, it'd be great if you could be happy for me, but it never works out that way.

Happy for you for what? It's Sunday morning, and here again is Jane Pauley. They share a profession and an especially deep bond. Rita Braver has a Mother's Day conversation with actors Diane Ladd and Laura Dern.

It is a moment that these famed actors have never forgotten. The one time during Laura Dern's childhood that her mother, Diane Ladd, slapped her. Because I guess I should have slapped her more. Oh my gosh. You just lost it from me. Yeah, she was being a little bitchy.

Oh my god. I had a horrible day, and it just was like, I'm doing all this. She was being sassy. Okay, she was being sassy.

Really sassy. Do you think you remember this so much because it was the only time this ever happened? It feels like such a betrayal because it's so shocking. It is these memories of humor, pain, and unquestionable love that fill the pages of Honey, Baby, Mine, their joint memoir named for an old folk song Ladd's father used to sing. You get a line and I'll get a pole, we'll go down to the crawdad hole, Honey, Baby, Mine. That's the song. Ladd, now 87, is renowned for roles like The Waitress Flo in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, one of three Oscar-nominated performances. You don't like me very much, do you?

Not very much, no. Honey, that's okay. I've been dumped on by kings in my time. So you have to be perfect. And 56-year-old Dern is an Oscar winner. You will always be held to a different, higher standard. But that is the way it is.

For playing a divorce lawyer representing the wife in Marriage Story. Is this where you guys walked in this general area? It is.

Every single morning. And the story of how their book came to be is worthy of a Hollywood film. The daily walks in Santa Monica began when Ladd developed a lung disease believed to be caused by exposure to pesticides. You were told that your mother only had six months to live.

Yeah. They didn't know what they could do, except if we could get her to walk, it would help her expand her lungs. So they walked and they talked, with Laura taping the conversations for herself and her children, the discussions newly recorded for an audiobook version. I'm going to pretend that this street is water, and I got Jesus' ability to walk on it, okay? Listen, that's what you need to cross the street. Why did you decide to make these very private conversations public?

I think we share the longing for the people we love and anyone to have the experience we had, which was to know each other better, more deeply, and more authentically, and therefore ourselves. They discussed everything, starting with Diane's marriage and divorce from Laura's father, actor Bruce Dern, to her efforts to discourage Laura from joining the family business. She was only like 11 years old. I said, don't be an actress, be a doctor, be a lawyer. Get a real job. No, nobody cares if you put on weight or your chin points when you cry. If you're a doctor, they just want you to be the best you can be.

But actors, they care, care, care, care, care. So Laura, you heard this, but you were not to be discouraged. There was no stopping you.

No, it is all I knew. And rumor has it you were conceived during the making of a movie. And conceived during the making of a Roger Corman biker picture called The Wild Angels.

So yes, you know, for me, a set felt like a second home. A home they often shared. You know who that was. Working together on a number of movies and TV shows. And I mean are not going to see him ever.

End of story. What was it like for you to suddenly realize, okay, I'm in this with my mother. I remember on the set of David Lynch's film Wild at Heart, and Nicolas Cage came up behind me and whispers in my ear, that's your mom. Like your real mom. In the 1991 film Rambling Rose, Dern plays a promiscuous young girl living with Lad's family. Oh, hello Rose dear. Wow.

Man, you're looking pretty. Both mother and daughter were nominated for Academy Awards. But Lad has a better memory. This was the picture that the late Princess Diana chose as her absolute favorite. And she flew Laura and I to London for a royal premiere and a party in our honor.

And she sat between us holding both our hands and crying watching us perform. Lad still agonizes over the times work took her away from her daughter. And the other challenges she along with so many single moms faced. How to pay the rent.

How to get my daughter what she needs. And worse because you got to go out for an interview and you got to hold your head up. You better not have a rip in that stocking. You better have those shoes not run down.

You've got to put on the image. And though Dern felt lucky, she was cared for by her grandmother, Lad's mom. She still grieved when her mother was on location. And I knew she loved me. But the loneliness was real.

One of the hardest things for me as a working mother in the same profession when I became a parent was that I held guilt that I still don't know what's my children's loneliness or my own. And Dern's love for her own children, Jaya and Ellery, with her former husband, musician Ben Harper, has made her understand even more the grief that Lad felt over losing a daughter before Dern was born. This was a baby who died in a swimming pool accident where a nanny hadn't paid enough attention. She fell into the pool. She hit her head and knocked herself out. And it all happened instantly.

And she died. And you will never get over that. I don't care what you say to yourself. I don't care who says what. The child is not supposed to die before the parent. You never talked about it.

Never. And I had not asked because I thought I was going to hurt you. And that was a lesson that I would want to share with everyone. That if we talk it out, there is healing of all kinds. In fact, Diane Lad has proved her doctors wrong. She continues to heal.

Just completed the film, in fact. And mother and daughter have a lot more to say and sing to each other. You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away.

That's it, folks. Our commentary this Mother's Day is from Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, author of The Joy of Politics. She talks about who else? Her mom.

On this Mother's Day, I'm thinking of my mom. She taught second grade in the Twin Cities suburbs until she was 70 years old. Her favorite unit to teach was the one on monarch butterflies. For days, she would teach her students the science of metamorphosis as they watched the caterpillar form its chrysalis. With the kids' wide-eyed excitement building every hour, it all culminated on the big release day, when my mom would take the class outside and, surrounded by 30 adoring second graders, released the glorious monarch to the skies. Fly, butterfly, fly, she would say. To this day, years after we lost her, her students, now with kids of their own, still come up to me on the street and tell me she was their favorite teacher.

And there are always so many great stories. At my mom's visitation, one mother, in between sobs, standing with her arm around her disabled son, told me how much her son loved having my mom as his second grade teacher and how the monarch butterfly unit was his best school memory. She recalled how every year, on the day she released the butterfly, my mom would dress up as a monarch in black tights, orange wings, antennas, and a sign that read, To Mexico or Bust. Then she would go grocery shopping after school in the same outfit. I had known about the shopping in the outfit story, but until that moment, I hadn't known why my mom went to that particular store. It was because the woman's son got a job at the store bagging groceries after he graduated. For years, my mom would go to that store in her monarch outfit, just to stand in his line and give him a big hug. That's why she went to the grocery store. That was my mom. So today I'm thinking of my mom and all of the moms out there who do so much for our families. Happy Mother's Day. They chat, they make music, and they cook. Seth Doan is In the Kitchen with Lenny and Jessie Ware. I've got some of these. Thank you.

Shove them in. This playful mother-daughter banter during meal prep Are you annoying me? Is entertaining.

Never, ever with Lenny. Didn't you know that? Hello, and welcome to Table Manners.

And millions have been streaming it, listening in. Say he eats anything. This is great. This is like your own episode of the podcast. Jessie and Lenny Ware's podcast, Table Manners, has become a hit.

Mom, he's coming over in 10 minutes. We need to queer eye this kitchen. They generally record in Lenny's South London kitchen. We have people over, and we cook them a meal, much like we're cooking for you. And they chat with celebrities in more than 200 episodes. Guests have included Sam Smith, Ed Sheeran, Paul McCartney, Pink, and Chef Yotam Ottolenghi. This tomato yogurt dish is one of his.

It can be anyone ranging from politicians to movie stars. Usually Lenny will cook them the meal. I'm pretty good at pulling in the talent. In pulling in the talent and developing a following, it helps that daughter, Jessie Ware, is a British singer-songwriter who's just released her fifth album. That feels good. How did this whole idea of a podcast even begin? I was making music. I was kind of a bit bored. I wanted another avenue. I felt like I had this pull to do something else, and I was sick of talking about myself.

And I wanted to ask the questions. Cooking mishaps add to the disarming charm. Anybody who's going to judge my cutting skills, this is not my kitchen.

That is a very big knife. This was an attempt at creme brulee. The unassuming vibe fosters conversation.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, let it slip that he'd run for another term. British diver Tom Daley opened up about body image issues. That was like a whole struggle and then I would feel guilty about what I'd eat and then I'd have spouts of bulimia. I think food gives you a different avenue to understanding people's background, their childhood, how things are involved for them, their lives really. Totally. Why did you decide to do this as a mother-daughter duo? You didn't. I did.

It just happened. I made you a star. No, Jessie wanted me to cook and she'd do the talking. I was going to be the background, like shuffling around and serve up. I can't really imagine you ever in the background.

No one puts Lenny in the corner. Come on. Whatever the ingredients, Jessie says it's helped in her music career, which has spanned a decade. She's opened for Harry Styles to a crowd of 20,000 in Chicago, but at times says she'd suffered from imposter syndrome. Having the podcast and showing my true colors and showing who I am regularly in a very normal setting was kind of the most freeing and emancipating thing for me and that kind of translated into the way that I approached music. Free yourself.

She has a new single about that very topic, Free Yourself. Turn it up, Seth. Come on. Let's get it going. See? You're tapping. You're like, come on. Let's go, Seth.

She debuted the song at Glastonbury, the UK's biggest music festival. It wasn't going to be like guys. I'm about to play an acoustic number about the struggles of motherhood. No, I wasn't going to do that.

So I did a big old banger. Together with her husband, Sam Burrows, she says she's navigated those struggles of motherhood. But I also think that my kids inspire me. They also allow me to not focus on this being the be-all and end-all. I work better in the studio because I'm like, right, I got to be out because I got to do bath time and bed time. So being a mom keeps you humble in a way? Yeah. Well, when your son is putting his hands over his ears, when you're playing your new single to him, yeah, it humbles you.

Did he do that? Make it stop, mommy. I'm like, no, we love this one, darling, and we need to get the streams up. Back at brunch with her mom, Jessie says she'd wanted their podcast to mimic the warmth and life of the Friday night dinners of her childhood.

Ooh, very nice. We have loads of fun, and I feel very lucky that we have all these, like, audible memories forever and ever, like howling, whether for the good and the bad, the accidents. But it's special. My parents live in another country, and I wish I could spend this kind of time with them.

I don't take it for granted for one second, and I love that the world knows about Lenny. Well, cheers to a dynamic mother-daughter duo. Thank you. Thank you, darling. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. Contact yourself by completing a short survey at wonder.com slash survey.