Corn Mazes with Chelsey Weber-Smith

Can you find your way out of the maize? The corn maze has become an enduring attraction of the American autumnal experience, seen at touristy family farms next to pumpkin patches and haunted houses. But what are the historical roots of this iconic living puzzle? Sarah guides the eternally-lost Chelsey Weber-Smith through the twists and turns of the corn’s corridors and reveals the hidden architects that walk behind the rows. More Chelsey Weber-Smith: www.americanhysteriapodcast.com Mr. Jeff's Labyrinth Typology Hand Out: https://www.labyrinthos.net/Labyrinth%20Typology.pdf The Labyrinthos Labyrinth and Maze Resource Photo Library and Archive: https://www.labyrinthos.net/index.html Listen to Magpie Cinema Club: linktr.ee/magpiecinemaclub Support You're Wrong About: Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merch Sarah's other show, You Are Good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  You see no cornucopias in adult life, and elementary school prepared us for so many cornucopias.

• 0:18Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we get lost in the maze. I'm Sarah Marshall, and with me this week is our dear friend Chelsea Weber-Smith, the host of American Hysteria and a maze enthusiast. I am not a maze enthusiast, but I am a corn enthusiast, and between our two worlds, we have brought you this episode on the history of the corn maze. What are they? Where did they come from? And why? And also, why are they so dang much fun? I love doing this episode with Chelsea. You can find their work over at American Hysteria. We also have done a bunch of episodes together over here. I've gone on that show

• 1:01Sarah Marshall?

  to talk about Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Babysitters, and Urban Legends, and so many more wonderful and sometimes scary things. And over in our bonus episodes on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions, you can find a new bonus that I had such a good time doing as well, talking about Bigfoot, the man, or is he, the myth, the legend, with the woman, the myth, the legend, Lulu Miller. And we had such a good time. I hope you listen. And if you don't, just enjoy the forest. You never know who you're gonna run into when you get lost.

• 1:44Sarah Marshall?

  And that's it for me. Enjoy this episode. Enjoy the maze. Thank you so much for being here.

• 1:57Sarah Marshall?

  Hello, Chelsea.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Hello, Sarah.

• 2:01Sarah Marshall?

  Chelsea Weber-Smith of American Hysteria, how do you feel about corn?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Well, I want to start with something you might remember.

• 2:09Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  It goes like this.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Every corn is a glamorous woman.

• 2:17Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, I had a different idea melodically how that went.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I know, you were good. No, no, no. It's, it's a...

• 2:23Sarah Marshall?

  Everything's gonna be alright. Rockabye.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  That's it. Yeah, well, that is...

• 2:30Sarah Marshall?

  But your version is better.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  That's literally what inspired it, was that rockabye song from the 90s. But what, what happened was Miranda and I were going through this corn maze last Halloween, and we noticed that every stalk of corn has that. And maybe you can add the scientific term, that like hair that flows out from the top. What is that?

• 2:53Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know the scientific term, but the farmer term is silk, the corn silk.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  The corn silk. If you look, if you examine each corn, you will notice they all have different hairdos that look very glamorous. And so when you walk through a corn maze, I encourage each of you to choose different corns and make up a backstory for each glamorous woman. All right? And sing the song.

• 3:15Sarah Marshall?

  I love that.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  You know, sing the song for yourself when Halloween comes around.

• 3:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. So you're pro-corn. You're a fan of corn.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, I'm so pro-corn.

• 3:24Sarah Marshall?

  We would say, yeah. Which is complicated, because in America, a lot of our corn that we hear about, anyway, goes into ethanol and corn syrup, which is added to all of our cereal bars and such, you know, to, to hold our, our economy together, I suppose. And so corn is this interesting thing where it feels like a very factory-farmed, very kind of symptomatic of modern capitalism thing. But also, corn, what a delight. I'm sitting somewhere in America right now, and I'm looking out the window at a beautiful field of corn.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  You are not. That's so...

• 4:00Sarah Marshall?

  I am too.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Wow, what kismet.

• 4:03Sarah Marshall?

  Winking in the sunlight. And...

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 4:06Sarah Marshall?

  Chelsea, as you know, I grew my own corn last year in my front yard. I grew like eight stalks of corn. Takes up a lot of room.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  It's the most charming thing about you last year.

• 4:19Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, now I have to find a new charming thing for this year? That's a lot to ask.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  I mean, you can double up and just get more corn.

• 4:25Sarah Marshall?

  Be like, hey, well, it's a bit late. Well, we'll see. Portland's growing season seems to have extended as far as Thanksgiving because of climate change. So who the heck knows about corn frontiers?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Who the heck knows?

• 4:38Sarah Marshall?

  All that's to say, like, even growing up in the world, there are so many details of it that you don't know about until you happen to look it up one day. And so I learned when I was growing corn. What I did know is that if you grow a small amount, you have to fertilize it yourself, or not fertilize it, but pollinate it. You have to pollinate it yourself. Fertilizing is another job. And you take the tassels, which, you know, look like, I don't know, a tassel on a slipcover.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Sarah, it looks like the women. It looks like the hair of a glamorous woman.

• 5:08Sarah Marshall?

  It looks like the hair. Thank you. The high ponytail of a glamorous woman. You take the tassel from the very top of your cornstalk, and then you pollinate the silks of each ear of corn with the pollen on it because each silk goes to a kernel of corn. And if you don't pollinate each silk, you're gonna have missing teeth on your corn.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So that's why that happens?

• 5:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:34Sarah Marshall?

  And then that's why you can't plant popcorn next to sweet corn, because you'll get them cross pollinated. You'll end up with a half sweet corn, half popcorn, and then you're gonna have a bad time.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Wow. That's kind of, I feel like that's kind of like a rare thing in nature where you can kind of cross pollinate, and then the thing becomes both things.

• 5:55Sarah Marshall?

  Both things at once.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Is that rare? That feels rare.

• 5:57Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  I don't know either.

• 5:58Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. That's the thing. We don't know. Isn't that great?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love not knowing.

• 6:03Sarah Marshall?

  There's so much to know and not know. And so...

• 6:05Speaker 01

  And still find things to not know about.

• 6:08Sarah Marshall?

  And so, so this episode is about corn mazes. Where are they from and why? And this was inspired by me learning a fact that kind of blew my mind about corn mazes, because my mind is capable of being blown re-corn mazes and wanting to dig deeper into it. And I'm not saying that this is like the Pentagon Papers or anything, but I had a really good time.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  I know nothing about this and I find that to be such a like blind spot in my personal canon, considering my love of haunted.

• 6:42Sarah Marshall?

  That is a blind spot. You're a complete person aside from this.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  That's it. That's my only.

• 6:47Sarah Marshall?

  And we're gonna, we're gonna fill you out.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so excited.

• 6:51Sarah Marshall?

  And you'll know a lot about, about the corn maze. Okay. So you've been in a corn maze. What is a corn maze for the uninitiated to start?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Okay. All right. Well, my personal experience with corn mazes has been pretty much relegated to the Halloween season.

• 7:05Sarah Marshall?

  Classic.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  And usually adjacent to a haunt that I have traveled far in line to visit and.

• 7:13Sarah Marshall?

  You love a haunt. You've done some great episodes about haunts and haunters, I guess, are the terms.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yes. Yep. Haunts and haunters.

• 7:21Sarah Marshall?

  Professional haunters.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  One of my most, one of, I like to have like a top 10 favorite things and haunted houses are one of my, in my top 10, just general favorite things. And the corn maze is usually either a separate thing, or sometimes it's a haunted corn maze, which is so fucking sick. Yeah. You just enter one end of the corn maze and it twists and turns and it goes in different directions. And sometimes you reach a stopping point and you gotta turn back around and you just gotta find your way out like any other maze, but this one's made out of tall corn.

• 7:57Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. And it's only getting taller.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  How tall is it?

• 8:05Sarah Marshall?

  Why as high as an elephant's eye by the 4th of July?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:09Sarah Marshall?

  Although that's actually, that's a bit early for it to be that tall, I would say, at least around here.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  It's for the rhyme.

• 8:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's true. You can't, you can't rhyme with August, you know?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 8:19Sarah Marshall?

  Uh, we are gonna stop in Broadway, by the way. So this is all gonna come together. But okay, so you've experienced a haunted corn maze. Have you found them to be difficult mazes to solve anecdotally? Are you good with mazes? How do you feel about mazes? Let's talk about that for a second. We talk about corn. What about mazes? I do not like being in a maze. I have a very bad sense of direction. I have gotten lost in my own museum. I like to know where I am. I will be on the outside of the maze waiting for you.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. So I too have a sense of direction that is so bad that it is shocking and frustrates many people in my life. Same is true within the corn, but I, I enjoy it. I like being lost. I like not knowing where I am and I, I just, I do. I love a maze. I did a lot of mazes on cereal boxes as a child, not to brag.

• 9:14Sarah Marshall?

  I would just start in the middle and work my way back like Peter Christmas.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Wow, that's, that's, that's really special. Yeah, it's, it's, uh, yeah, one of your charming qualities.

• 9:25Sarah Marshall?

  I like depriving myself of a challenge.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  But, uh, no, I mean, I enjoy, I do. I enjoy a corn maze. I'm run into it when I get the chance. And, uh, I also like entering the corn. I do it carefully and respectfully, but it is really fun to like run ahead of your friends and kind of like enter into the corn and then say something from within the corn or pop out.

• 9:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, I see what you mean.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And scare people from the corn. So I do like that.

• 9:52Sarah Marshall?

  Is this a good time to point out that, that we've watched Children of the Corn?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:57Sarah Marshall?

  Together.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:58Sarah Marshall?

  And that's like, it's not integral, but we have a Stephen King connection. Why not? What's Children of the Corn while we're doing corn topics?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Well, Children of the Corn is a story of a strange, Christian adjacent child cult that lives near the corn, among the corn, sometimes surrounded by corn.

• 10:21Sarah Marshall?

  Surrounded by corn. This like a, a small town in Nebraska that mysteriously has no adults in it.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  And they worship the, or they, it's not that they worship the corn, but a corn, the corn is a tool of their worship and he who walks behind the rows is their kind of god slash devil figure? I don't know. It's kind of a, it's kind of a confusing.

• 10:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, god monster. Actually, perhaps to go with our theme, a bit of a minotaur type figure, because sacrifices must be made to he who walks behind the rows and of course into the century, swabbling couple. So you know how that's gonna go.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, they mad at each other. They real mad.

• 11:03Sarah Marshall?

  But it's a really, it's a good early Stephen King story. It's a fun movie. It's got like a lot of corn imagery because it is like, it's like a Christian corn cult, basically.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:15Sarah Marshall?

  And on some level, I think Stephen King has always been good at, at writing for people on such a big scale because of kind of understanding on a very molecular level, like what are people's really scared by? And this idea that there's something sinister about corn, especially in the eighties. I want to come back to that later, actually.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Ooh, okay, okay. Yeah. And it's like making me think that, that something unique about corn as a crop is that it grows taller than a person, which feels not common. So it's like it is one of the only things that you can be like fully obscured by, which feels somehow important.

• 11:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, I think so. And also that like, I mean, I was struck by this just doing my like yard corn, but where like you plant like a little kernel of something, literally a kernel, and it gets like 10 feet high.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 12:08Sarah Marshall?

  And like it's, it feels strange to create something that big that isn't a menace in some way.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 12:13Sarah Marshall?

  It's like the blah, because gets, get bigger and bigger, but that just means you get more corn.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:17Sarah Marshall?

  And you do have to water it a lot. And then, and actually I left my corn up just to see when it would sort of disintegrate and it, it stuck around.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  That's so nice. You've got like this harvest party decoration. Cause like, do you remember in elementary school when they suddenly were like, we're not really doing Halloween parties anymore because maybe our Jehovah's Witness students or something. And so we started having.

• 12:43Sarah Marshall?

  We didn't do that because interestingly, I went to private schools who were like, we're private, we're Christian, we're doing Halloween.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  And that's great. I love that. But we had like harvest parties for a while. So it was like very like cornucopia coded.

• 12:56Sarah Marshall?

  You see no cornucopias in adult life and elementary school prepared us for so many cornucopias.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I thought I would have to deal with so many more cornucopias than I have.

• 13:09Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly. To paraphrase, put on the lady on quicksand.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 13:14Sarah Marshall?

  But have you ever felt any sense of like, oh crap, I'm lost in a corn maze? Have you felt like anxiety in a corn maze?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  I like to allow myself plenty of time when I go to a haunt, so I don't usually feel the pressure. You're often surrounded by children, which makes the whole thing feel less like less sinister.

• 13:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's true. Although also, don't you feel that sense of like, oh my God, a beautiful, bright summer's day, it'd be the last thing that anyone could imagine that I would get swallowed up by this corn maze?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  You know, I don't think that when I'm in a maze. I feel like I am home. I am supposed to be here and I will be lost for as long as it takes.

• 13:55Sarah Marshall?

  I might catastrophize a little bit.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Because at the end of the day, you can always just plow right through the corn and get out. That's what I say.

• 14:02Sarah Marshall?

  I guess that's true. I guess that's true. But what about, what will, what will he who walks behind the rose think then?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  The other horror movie that I watched recently, like after I knew we were doing this corn maze episode was Signs. Have you seen Signs?

• 14:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  I imagine you must have. Yeah.

• 14:20Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Right. Oh yeah. Cause it's crop circles, which I hadn't even thought about. But crop circles, let's just say that there are two phenomena in this story we're talking about today. And one of the questions is, how much can one random guy in England accomplish in creating a global meme? And it's like, quite a lot, actually, is the answer here. Because the story behind crop circles basically is just like, it started off with some guys in England faffing about as they do over there. And then everyone was like, my God, no two human beings could have. Knocked over corn this way, and then it just became a way to signify that aliens had stopped by, right?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the story I know.

• 15:02Sarah Marshall?

  Get some buzz going.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  I've, yeah, let's get some buzz going. I really, yeah, I've wanted to do a crop circle episode. I know it'll happen one day.

• 15:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you got it.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  But it's a very impressive prank hoax. Really took some skill. I mean, those are some pretty amazing mathematical designs. Like, I don't know how you would do that. That seems so hard to me. So I do kind of understand why people couldn't wrap their mind around it.

• 15:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I don't know. And I don't, I just don't know a lot about it. Yeah.

• 15:30Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay, so here's my big question to you.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:33Sarah Marshall?

  How old do you think corn mazes are?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Hmm. I would think like, pretty fucking old, like, some hundreds of years.

• 15:43Sarah Marshall?

  Tell me, give me like, just a guess for a year.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Um, okay, let's see. It's feeling, it's giving medieval for me. So let's go 1,500?

• 15:51Sarah Marshall?

  I love it.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:52Sarah Marshall?

  I think that's a very reasonable guess. And now let me read you something that I read in The New Yorker in 2021. This is from an article called "How the World's Foremost Maze Maker Leads People Astray" by Nicola Twilley.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:05Sarah Marshall?

  And it's about a maze designer named Adrian Fisher, who comes off as fairly unpleasant. And it dumps this little fact, sort of randomly, that made me go, what? Oh, my God.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:19Sarah Marshall?

  So let me read to you from this New Yorker article. "Yet today, maze observers agree that there are more mazes than ever before, and more are being built each year. Mazes, under Fisher's watch, have become part of the British heritage business. They reger at stately homes where, along with tea rooms and gift shops, they can raise money to pay for otherwise crippling repair and tax bills. They have also diversified."

• 16:44Sarah Marshall?

  Fisher helped invent the corn mazes that pop up alongside pumpkin patches on farms across America each fall and reintroduced mirror mazes to Pierce's theme parks and malls worldwide. Okay, who cares? So this guy helped invent corn mazes and I thought, what? And then I looked it up.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  What?

• 17:02Sarah Marshall?

  And according to everyone speaking with authority on the subject, the corn maze was invented by Don France and Adrian Fisher, but mainly Don France, in 1993.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  What?

• 17:16Sarah Marshall?

  In Pennsylvania.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I'm older than the corn maze.

• 17:20Sarah Marshall?

  Isn't that terrible?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Wow. I mean, it's like, kind of like terrible, but also kind of, I love it. Like that corn mazes were an invention of the 90s? Wow, that's shocking. That's so shocking to me.

• 17:36Sarah Marshall?

  Tell me why it's shocking to you.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  I don't know. It just feels like, you know, I'm like, I'm relating them in my mind to hedge mazes.

• 17:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Right? Which are probably fucking old, but like, right? I hope. They have to be. They have to be.

• 17:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Well, I mean, let me tell you about Adrian Fisher for a second. 1991 in England was the year of the maze because Adrian Fisher declared that it was and everyone was like, okay. And Adrian Fisher declared it that year, according to him, because 1991 was the 300th anniversary of the Hampton Court hedge maze being completed, which is kind of the best known hedge maze probably in England because it's at Hampton Court, which I've been to because it's a big, you know, cheesy tourist attraction castle and it has a big hedge maze and also guys pretending to joust. I was telling my mom about this and she was like, oh, do they hit each other? And I was like, no, they're just like trained to, I think, hit each other's little plywood

• 18:33Sarah Marshall?

  shields and then take it a little tumble sometimes, maybe.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  That's nice. I like that.

• 18:38Sarah Marshall?

  But they only die by accident.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Wow. Okay. All right. I'm wrapped.

• 18:45Sarah Marshall?

  But tell me of your of your hedge maze. Have you been in a hedge maze?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  I feel like I've been in a hedge maze. I don't have like a memory that's becoming available to me at this moment. But, you know, I mean, I've my family is English. We've been back to the the home country a number of times and I imagine.

• 19:04Sarah Marshall?

  You've got hedge mazes in your DNA.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  We've got, yes, yes, we've got hedge mazes. But I've also done like, what are those? No, never mind.

• 19:14Sarah Marshall?

  No, tell me.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Well, I was thinking about those like meditative.

• 19:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, labyrinth.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Mazes that you walk on, but there's not like walls.

• 19:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, well, those appear to be older because Shakespeare writes about a cut turf labyrinth in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:31Sarah Marshall?

  And those, of course, there's like an interesting kind of class thing at work, I think, potentially where a hedge maze, like often they're grown out of you, which I think in itself is kind of a status symbol. They're grown out of you trees, not you, Chelsea.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Okay. So confused. Got it.

• 19:48Sarah Marshall?

  And Y E W. And that's kind of a status symbol, I think, because they take so long to mature that you have to have them as an expression of like, I have all this room to turn into a hedge maze. I have to have someone design it. I have to maintain it. It's going to be expensive. Obviously, but also I have to be rich in time to allow these these fucking yous to get tall.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  It's a real long game. Yeah.

• 20:14Sarah Marshall?

  So it's like a kind of a wild status symbol when you think about it to be like, I'm going to build a hedge maze.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 20:21Sarah Marshall?

  And so at least some of these places that are creating these hedge mazes around the time of Hampton Court are kind of into the 18th century. I think are doing it with the understanding that as again, as you talked about in this Halloween episode, that like, if you're rich, you offer things to poor people because you don't want them to come after you. And so and that's just my read.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yes, no, that's.

• 20:42Sarah Marshall?

  But if you have a hedge maze that just the people who live in your village can like maybe come use on festival days and you like give them a little wine and some music and some hedge mazes, then like, you know, maybe they'll let you keep your hedge maze.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like Brad in circuses.

• 20:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, Brad and hedge mazes.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Does sound fun.

• 21:03Sarah Marshall?

  And

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I've been tricked.

• 21:06Sarah Marshall?

  And getting into the Stephen King of it all, I didn't plan it this way. It just happened. But like in The Shining, the book, there are these tokias that seem to come to life when you're not looking. And obviously, there's really no way to depict that in a movie you make in 1980 without it looking like Jason and the Argonauts. And so for that reason, and probably more reasons, in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, we got a hedges maze.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 21:30Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. Well, I was just thinking that maybe this is a good time for you as a poet and also as a regular person to talk about the most famous labyrinth that didn't have David Bowie in it, which is the one with Theseus and the Minotaur in it.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Oh, God. Okay, let's see.

• 21:48Sarah Marshall?

  Sorry to mythology you.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  No, I'm not. I'm not so good at mythology here, but okay, we've got

• 21:53Sarah Marshall?

  I can help you out.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  All right, let me do my best here. We've got a maze. We've got a Minotaur.

• 22:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yep.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  See, all chained up in the center of the maze.

• 22:03Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know if he's chained. I'm not sure about the strings. I mean, that's

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I made it minkier.

• 22:07Sarah Marshall?

  There's a lot of different versions. Yeah, he's all chained up.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Okay, sure. And then I guess

• 22:12Sarah Marshall?

  He's got to gag in too.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  He's got, yeah, exactly. He's got to get in there and he's got to stab the Minotaur and kill him for a reason I don't remember. That's about all I can say about the Minotaur.

• 22:25Sarah Marshall?

  That's really good.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  It's embarrassing.

• 22:27Sarah Marshall?

  Well, is there perhaps a ball of thread?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Maybe. Oh, okay, okay. So it's like a bit of a Hansel and Gretel scenario where he ties the thread at the end and then unravels it to get his way back. Yeah.

• 22:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, Theseus does because basically he's going to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, who I guess learned today. The Minotaur was conceived when a queen, I think a queen, got bored while her husband was away and saw a bull and was like, oh, I want to have sex with that bull and then got inside a big cow statue thing, like Ace Ventura. And and that's how the Minotaur was born, which it's, I mean, not to accuse anyone of a double standard, but I guess it's fine when Zeus does it.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it's completely fine when he does it. Yeah. Some things never change.

• 23:23Sarah Marshall?

  Cancel Zeus.

• 23:27Sarah Marshall?

  But so, and of course, the Minotaur who has the body, I guess, a tor- well, what's a Minotaur, Chelsea?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Is it like hot guy's body, big old bull head?

• 23:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I think it's because head of a bull body of a man. I feel so embarrassed for not having confirmed this. Hold on.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  We really need to go back to.

• 23:47Sarah Marshall?

  Minotaur school.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Minotaur school. Min- I say Minot- Tar, but it does seem to be Minotaur.

• 23:53Sarah Marshall?

  I could go either way.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:55Sarah Marshall?

  I think I'm partially saying it in homage to Julie Kearns, who's my favorite interview subject in Room 237, which is a documentary about fan theories about The Shining. And one of the things she talks about is that it feels like the movie becomes an homage to the labyrinth and the Minotaur at a certain point.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 24:14Sarah Marshall?

  And of course, we have Jack Nicholson, who looks like that anyway, but at the end of it, like, ending up looking very much like a bull charging around.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:23Sarah Marshall?

  You know, inside of a hedge maze, AKA labyrinth.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, very cool.

• 24:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, head and tail of a bull and the body of a man. That's fun. We gotta have a nice silhouette for your coins.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Definitely. Yeah, gotta have the tail.

• 24:37Sarah Marshall?

  Great quads in the Amish on Wikipedia.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, real, real beefcake. That's for sure.

• 24:45Sarah Marshall?

  So anyway, but the idea is that you have to take a ball of thread into this labyrinth, which was designed by Daedalus, by the way. Daedalus of Icarus and Daedalus fame.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 24:56Sarah Marshall?

  Um, that was the midquel.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  I know that guy.

• 25:00Sarah Marshall?

  And you have to unravel it, as you said, very Hansel and Gretel-like, as you get to the center of the labyrinth where the Minotaur is, who you then must slay. And then you can follow the thread back out to reunite with your lady fair.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 25:14Sarah Marshall?

  Although I think something else bad happened in that one. But I always really found this to be a resonant image and have always liked the idea of a labyrinth. And the thing is, so has basically everybody for thousands of years. And that was one of the things I found interesting.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:30Sarah Marshall?

  Researching this, because I think one of the reasons it feels weird to us that corn mazes are allegedly such a new concept is that mazes feel, if not eternal, then like extremely perennial and extremely sort of deeply felt and maybe even deeply craved for human beings.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I could totally see that. I don't know what I'm like, what's the underlying biological mechanism that's happening there? I don't know.

• 25:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right, like, why?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  I don't know. Maybe it's like something, something in us that like, you know, like the hunter in us that is twisting through the world, looking for prey. I don't know. That's the best I got right now, but maybe we'll come to it. Maybe we'll come to it at the end.

• 26:11Sarah Marshall?

  I think we will.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:13Sarah Marshall?

  We'll get somewhere. Because, okay, so here's another question for you. This, I think this is my only other big question for you. It's, I'm trying to not make it a big pop quiz, but what is the difference between a maze and a labyrinth?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Hmm. Oh, okay. I think I know. I think a labyrinth is totally enclosed, except for one entrance, and a maze has one entrance and one exit.

• 26:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's very interesting.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  No?

• 26:39Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I think you are close.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:41Sarah Marshall?

  At least, okay. So let me bring my, my hand out. So this is, um, this is a PDF.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Ooh, okay.

• 26:49Sarah Marshall?

  That's from a labyrinth enthusiast website. And this is by Jeff Saward, whose name I might be mispronouncing, S A W A R D, from the book Labyrinths and Mazes, The Definitive Guide to Ancient and Modern Traditions. Here's, here's my handout for this class.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I love a handout.

• 27:06Sarah Marshall?

  Mazes or labyrinths? What's the difference? And what types are they?

• 27:12Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, let me read this to you. "In the English-speaking world, it is often considered that to qualify as a maze, a design must have choices in the pathway. Clearly, this multi-cursor category will include many of the modern installations in entertainment parks and tourist attractions, which exist solely for the purpose of perplexing visitors, as well as the traditional haged mazes in public parks and private gardens around the world. Popular consensus also indicates that labyrinths have one pathway that leads inexorably from the entrance to the goal, albeit often by the most complex and winding of routes. These unicursory designs have been known as labyrinths for thousands of years, and

• 27:54Sarah Marshall?

  to qualify as a labyrinth, a design should have but one path."

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:00Sarah Marshall?

  Isn't that interesting?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  That's really interesting. Okay, yeah, so it's a labyrinth isn't actually meant to make you lost.

• 28:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Huh, all right.

• 28:10Sarah Marshall?

  In a nutshell, yeah, completely. And I'm going to send you an image here.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:14Sarah Marshall?

  From our lovely handout by Jeff.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Mr. Jeff. I had a teacher in school called Mr. Man. Isn't that hard? Yeah.

• 28:25Sarah Marshall?

  So I just sent you an image from the first page of this PDF. We'll have a link to this in the description. But a maze, which looks similar to the Hampton Court maze.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:36Sarah Marshall?

  And to the right, kind of a classic labyrinth.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. Interesting. Yeah, it's exactly what you described it as. The maze has different places that like end in a dead end, and then you'd have to go back around and, you know, you have to find the right way through and you gotta make, yeah.

• 28:56Sarah Marshall?

  Mm-hmm. Or you have to make choices, you have to go left or right or whatever. And so what I find interesting to kind of theorize about this mythological labyrinth is that you bring perhaps the threat in, not because it's difficult to find your way in, which seems to be not too hard to do, or else maybe the minotaur would get hungry. But perhaps it's finding your way out that is where the difficulty comes in.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  But why?

• 29:22Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:24Sarah Marshall?

  They're not following traditional labyrinth roles, but it's okay.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. Okay, all right.

• 29:29Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and then we get into, and again, I'm going off of our handout by Jeff.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 29:35Sarah Marshall?

  Um, we have classical labyrinth, which we can find, or that archaeologists have found going back to about 2000 BCE.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 29:45Sarah Marshall?

  Right?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 29:46Sarah Marshall?

  And then we also have Roman labyrinth dating from about the same period, and these are, we apparently encounter largely in the form of mosaics, if not entirely so.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:57Sarah Marshall?

  You know, so it's like what we think of now, where if you go to like, you know, like a Unitarian church or something, they're like, here's, I remember as a, as an adolescent, obviously, one who was like Jim Henson labyrinth pilled.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Mm, of course.

• 30:09Sarah Marshall?

  Very disappointed when there would be a church that was like, come see our labyrinth. And it was just like some swirls on the ground.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  I know it.

• 30:17Sarah Marshall?

  You're supposed to like, walk down very slowly while thinking about your life. And I was like, I would really more like to be rocked like a hurricane by Tony right about now with like real walls and

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 30:29Sarah Marshall?

  Owls and everything.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I need a little terror if I have to contemplate my life. All right.

• 30:35Sarah Marshall?

  Right. So like, yeah, when you say a corn maze is perhaps a more religious experience for you.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah, certainly, certainly. And you know, I respect the labyrinth of the Unitarian church, but it's not a, and I've done it before and I've tried to, you know, do some mindfulness practice and everything, but uh, no, for me, beauty is terror. Donna Tartt.

• 30:58Sarah Marshall?

  Beautiful.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Secret history.

• 31:00Sarah Marshall?

  There you go.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  But uh, yeah, I gotta, gotta have the corn.

• 31:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and so what I found interesting about this research is that we can see the labyrinth and what you picture when you pictured, you know, like a, a Unitarian church labyrinth where there's one entrance, it kind of, you go to what feels like the center and then you go all the way back around and then you're at the center and you go all the way back around and you kind of meditatively walk around it until you got to the middle and then inexorably leave the way you came by only one path. Don't know what Theseus really needed that string for, except maybe as a precaution.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. It's a pageantry. Yeah.

• 31:41Sarah Marshall?

  But it's interesting to me that like, the contemporary idea of the labyrinth is a maze.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause I mean, I'm thinking of like, Again, we'll call it the Unitarian labyrinth is like more of like us. Well, no, because I was going to say it was like the cereal box because it's flat, but then it's not because the cereal box is the maze. And that's kind of the whole point. Whereas the labyrinth only has one way to go. So you wouldn't put that on a cereal box, except for little babies like you.

• 32:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 32:13Sarah Marshall?

  I can do it. I just don't want to do it, Chelsea. It's faster to not do it.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

• 32:22Sarah Marshall?

  But it's also interesting to me that this seems to be recurring and perhaps spreading a little bit like a meme, you know, which is any kind of like, to my understanding, any kind of replicable, repeatable kind of idea, like an image or a fashion or a phrase that can be copied and spread across people and across culture, basically.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:43Sarah Marshall?

  Because this idea, this kind of like swirling labyrinth that looks almost to me like the whorls on your fingerprints, spreads across Europe in the Middle Ages. We, you know, there's a apparently a beautiful medieval labyrinth at Chart Cathedral in Paris.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 33:01Sarah Marshall?

  And the labyrinth is kind of, it feels like it endures as a symbol that feels intuitively meaningful to people in a way that we don't necessarily understand, but want to keep reproducing. Or I don't understand it. Maybe somebody did.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. The swirls on the fingertips is really pretty.

• 33:17Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  As an image, because that also makes me think of like, God, did you ever read the book Ishmael?

• 33:23Sarah Marshall?

  No.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Okay, but you know what it is?

• 33:25Sarah Marshall?

  I know. It's like about a gorilla who talks.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like the gorilla is the guru of the story, kind of, and like, you know, delivers knowledge. It was a very high school book for me.

• 33:35Sarah Marshall?

  I, you know, I liked it when Michael Caine did it in Journey to the Jungle. So there you go.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just, just as good. But they talk about in that book, you know, how like, or maybe it wasn't that book. Fuck if I know. Story of B. There's like several, but you know, it's like how like the veins in your arm mimic the way that the streams look and the way that the patterns in the leaf look, you know, and whatever. And it's like.

• 33:57Sarah Marshall?

  Fractals of nature. Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's it. Fractals.

• 34:01Sarah Marshall?

  Could be that.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  That's an easy way to say what I'm trying to say. Fractals.

• 34:05Sarah Marshall?

  Is that, oh yeah, I see. So like the, the labyrinth is a fractal of the fingerprint in a way.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Something like that. That's what I was going for.

• 34:13Sarah Marshall?

  And then also, according to Jeff, there's a Snoopy labyrinth at the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. I don't know if it's still there. I sure hope it is.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Me too, me too.

• 34:23Sarah Marshall?

  But also crucially, in a labyrinth, there aren't walls around you. You know, there might be some amount of turf, but like you always know exactly where you are and also where you are in relation to other people.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Okay. So wait, I have a question. So a labyrinth.

• 34:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Kind of by definition has low walls.

• 34:40Sarah Marshall?

  I think today they do, you know, and then in terms of history, maybe we aren't all being as tidy as Jeff is. And people are referring to historic labyrinths, like in ancient Egypt, that probably did have dead ends or something.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 34:55Sarah Marshall?

  I, but I think generally, right? If you're talking about, again, like kind of, if Shakespeare refers to like a cut turf labyrinth that we know existed at the time, although they aren't really preserved typically because it's just, you know, too ephemeral.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 35:12Sarah Marshall?

  A lot of the time, it's just like some grass or some vegetation and pathways cut through it. And not the sort of like grand sort of heritagey maintained thing like a hedge maze would be.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:25Sarah Marshall?

  The mazes that then begin to be built for people who can afford to actually build something semi-permanent. There begins to be innovation, interestingly. Because for a long time, there's, and again, I'm using Jeff's handouts terminology. There's simply connected mazes where everything is the same wall of hedge. So you could theoretically just keep your hand on the hedge as you enter and stay with it. And eventually find the center just based on that.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember that like theory or whatever from being a kid where that was the way to solve it. I do remember that.

• 36:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And then I think late 18th, early 19th century, we solve the hand on wall maze problem. And people start commissioning mazes that have different areas of hedge where you can get turned around. You can get lost without there being a dead end, but where you think you're making progress and you're not. They sort of evolve as, I assume as more people get hired to do them and have more time to problem solve them and innovate and then share that information. And again, we're talking about. The time of the printing press and of ideas, you know, the kind of the birth of the bestseller as we know it in the 18th century.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 36:41Sarah Marshall?

  And ideas spreading faster and faster than ever before. So it's like, because rich people are paying to have them built, it's a time of maze innovation.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  And I wonder if like, it being kind of like the age of reason time would be like, it just feels sort of like a mathematical, more like.

• 36:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it was a great sanctuary for dorks.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, big dork time.

• 37:02Sarah Marshall?

  And maze enthusiasts.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  I'm surprised Ben Franklin didn't commission a maze. He probably did.

• 37:07Sarah Marshall?

  He could have. Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  A maze full of women around every corner.

• 37:11Sarah Marshall?

  He's an amazing man.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a real special guy. Our favorite.

• 37:17Sarah Marshall?

  So, but I guess, well, I don't know, I just want to read again, because I found this oddly poetic, this distinction on the first page, "To qualify as a maze, a design must have choices in the pathway. To qualify as a labyrinth, a design should have only one path."

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:31Sarah Marshall?

  It's like different concepts of fate.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. Ooh, I like that for sure.

• 37:36Sarah Marshall?

  And what I'll also say is that the corn mazes I've been in, which I really enjoyed, have not been hard, because I'm not good at mazes. And usually there's like a couple of little baby dead ends, but then you're like, oh, we have to go this way. And I would like to hazard that, of course, there's all types of corn mazes, but that a lot of corn mazes exist more as corn labyrinths, where the point is simply to be drawn inexorably into the corn and then gradually back out again.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  So, and you think that that's like, say that, okay, say that one more time for me. I want to make sure I'm getting it right.

• 38:11Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I think that so many corn mazes are just like so easy, that like they're technically mazes, but what if they function more as labyrinths?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, it's like a hybrid.

• 38:21Sarah Marshall?

  To draw us into the corn.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, just to draw us into the corn.

• 38:24Sarah Marshall?

  And into nature, in a sense, or at least into this, you know. Well, we'll get to it, but like into the scene that you're trying to be a part of by doing the sort of seasonal like pastoral farm visit, you know, pumpkin getting activities that people do.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:39Sarah Marshall?

  A little bit ritualistically, not in a bad way. We need our rituals.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Oh, we need our rituals so bad. We're drowning without our rituals. That makes sense. I've never been in a corn maze that I ever got stressed out about, right? Where I'm like, not even like scared, but just like, I'm ready to get out of this corn maze. It's usually like I'm in there for the right amount of time.

• 38:59Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, you know, a nice half hour to an hour of just meandering in the corn.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I never pay attention. I never know what the, what the hell I'm doing. You know, I'm not like, okay, I'm not like mind mapping the maze. I know a lot of people can do that. There is no chance for me to mind map anything, let alone a corn maze. So I just kind of wander around until I get out and I get out and I'm like, all right, that was fun. I liked that. I saw so many corns that were glamorous women, so.

• 39:29Sarah Marshall?

  They really were. And keep your hair out of the sun.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, come on, girls.

• 39:34Sarah Marshall?

  So where were we? Labyrinths are thousands of years old, but corn mazes are from 1993.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Oof, that's wild.

• 39:44Sarah Marshall?

  What do you think about this tyranny so far here at the center perhaps of the corn maze? But we still have to find our way out.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Ooh, ooh, okay. Um, I didn't know that labyrinths and mazes were different, so that was fun to learn about. And I think, I mean, I'm still just so surprised that it took so long to do it with corn. It just feels like, like a very obvious thing to do. And so this started in England, though, not because it feels so American to me, if we're like.

• 40:18Sarah Marshall?

  This started in Pennsylvania.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Oh, it did. It is American. Yeah, it's ours. Hands off.

• 40:23Sarah Marshall?

  So let me read to you the website, AmericanMaze.com, which is the website for the amazing maze maze, M A I Z E.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Clever.

• 40:32Sarah Marshall?

  M A Z E. The original and sold the best, getting people lost since 1993. About. The American Maze Company, led by Don France, pioneered bringing the art of the maze to America and to the cornfield. In 1993, we created and produced the first ever cornfield maze for private and public entertainment at Lebanon Valley College in Anvil, Pennsylvania. Until 1993, the maze was seen as a mostly passive art form. The largest maze was constructed in order to fit in the back lawn of an English manor. In the new American interpretation, the Amazing Maze Maze has been recognized and imitated throughout the world as a new and unique family entertainment alternative for the summer and harvest seasons.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Wow. We did it, Joe. We invented the maze.

• 41:19Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay, but here's what I did next.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:23Sarah Marshall?

  And let me give you a hint and involve newspapers.com.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Newspapers.com, where is our merch? We're waiting for our merch. Bring us our merch.

• 41:32Sarah Marshall?

  And I searched corn maze because I wanted to know if there were any corn mazes predating Don France and the American Maze Company.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Okay, and that's where you gotta go.

• 41:42Sarah Marshall?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  All right.

• 41:43Sarah Marshall?

  And I'm sending you some links.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 41:46Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, open up your email and when you get it scrolled on to where it says "articles" and then you can click on any of those links.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Okay. I'm doing a random click. Okay.

• 41:56Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, and read what comes up.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Ooh. Come to Wal Vadel's. Come to Wald Vagels for a hauntingly good time. Visit Pumpkinland. Hayrides to the Pumpkin Patch. Huge Pumpkin selection. Caramel Apples, Apples. Bring your camera. Visit the petting zoo. Tour the haunted granary. Find your way through the corn maze. New in 1991.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  This is frickin', this is a bombshell.

• 42:34Sarah Marshall?

  That's how I felt, to be honest.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, this is huge. Because you had said that the, they said the first corn maze was in 92.

• 42:43Sarah Marshall?

  93.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  93.

• 42:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Wow, liars.

• 42:48Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, it's not looking good, babe.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  No, it's not looking good, babe.

• 42:52Sarah Marshall?

  And so this is from the Daily Gleaner of New Brunswick.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:57Sarah Marshall?

  Corn maze, folks stopping by David Anderson's farm may be amazed by his corn fusion. And this is from 1991. A 45-year-old farmer has cut a maze in a 100-meter-square field of Elephant's Eye High grain corn. Even I got lost in it, Anderson says of the place he calls Corn Fusion. Anderson has put signs along the roadside to bring attention to the maze and lure people to his farm in Walsingham, Ontario, a hamlet near the north shore of Lake Erie. It's attracted quite a few folks, Anderson says. At various points in the maze, signs offer information about growing grain corn, a cash crop used in a range of products from livestock feed and junk food to spark plugs and disposable diapers.

• 43:40Sarah Marshall?

  What we're trying to do is our little bit to educate people who come here in some aspects of farming, says Anderson.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Wow, so wait, did we steal the corn maze from Canada?

• 43:52Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so I went looking for references to corn mazes. And the earliest one that I found on newspapers.com.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:02Sarah Marshall?

  So I have two from 1988.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 44:05Sarah Marshall?

  I have one from September 8th, 1988, from Muscatine, Iowa.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:10Sarah Marshall?

  And the other.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  By the way, that's one month after I was born, so I am still older than the corn maze.

• 44:15Sarah Marshall?

  Thank God.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:16Sarah Marshall?

  And the other is from October 7th, 1988, from The Times Advocate, reporting on a pumpkin patch in Escondido, which means that according to newspapers.com, the first confirmed incidence of a corn maze in these United States was in Muscatine, Iowa, in September 1988.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Wow. You've blown up this narrative.

• 44:39Sarah Marshall?

  And I will read you this ad. Fall on the farm. Mini hay rack rides through Mr. Corny's Mystic Meadow. Adults fund $50, children 3 to 12 $1. Includes mini hay rack rides, play barn, Iowa Proud Barn, and two acre corn maze. See how fast you can find your way out. Join us for Raise a Ruckus Saturday and Sunday evenings in the Country Barn Theater. Ticket price includes admission to all other activities on the farm. Open weekends 11 a.m. Duster October.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Wow. Wow. God. Okay, so it is American. That's what I'm really counting on here is that we can claim it as our own. Um, okay. So I really feel like this is a call out to the amazing maze.

• 45:24Sarah Marshall?

  That was how I was feeling too. But here's the thing, the last thing, the center of this maze for me, if you will.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:31Sarah Marshall?

  Cause all the sources I could find that are like the history of the corn maze were like Don France and Adrian Fisher invented the corn maze in 1993, but none of them say why. And from the New York article, you get the sense that Adrian Fisher was like good at PR and knew how to create the sense of demand for what he was doing. Cause like 1991 was the year of the Hagge maze. Cause he declared it that.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:55Sarah Marshall?

  And it really worked out for him. He's designed a lot of mazes that have done well. And like, you know, you can charge admission to them. So people can come to like your heritage home and like the article said, help pay for the upkeep because those things are, you know, drafty.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yep.

• 46:14Sarah Marshall?

  But also he's kind of a great 20th century example, I think of being like, I really want to make mazes. And so I'm going to sort of generate PR that creates the idea that people like mazes. And then people will be like, I guess I do like mazes.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:30Sarah Marshall?

  Because that's what PR is.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  That's what PR is. Yeah. You could call it corn propaganda.

• 46:35Sarah Marshall?

  It's creating a sense of demand kind of out of nowhere.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:38Sarah Marshall?

  So I was like, who is this man, Don France? And did he get involved in a highly cynical marketing maneuver with this English maze guy? What is the story here?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:49Sarah Marshall?

  But then I read this article. Actually, I'm going to send this to you to read.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:55Sarah Marshall?

  But this is from broadwaydirect.com.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Okay. This is called "The Amazing Maze Maze." "The Amazing Maze Maze is the brainchild of Don France, who has done most everything in show business. He's been a dancer in a Seiko commercial and the first marvelous magical Burger King in test ads." Wow. "In a producing capacity, he's worked on the Super Bowl, World Expo, and Liberty Weekend. France has also been a general manager of such Broadway shows as A Class Act and will soon co-produce a new off-Broadway musical called Disenchanted." "And while no parent is supposed to have a favorite child, France seems to speak most

• 47:39Speaker 01

  proudly of the Amazing Maze Maze. However, France is quick to proclaim the Walt Disney Company, for which he was a creative director in the early 1990s, as the maze's godfather." Goosebumps.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Okay, should I go on?

• 48:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, go on, go on.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Okay. This is crazy. Okay. "In June 1991, France, who'd been producing and directing such Disney World attractions as the Spectromagic Light Parade, saw some culture entertainment TV clips that Disney had been sent. One of them was a tourism promotion for European mazes. France had never encountered a maze, but the idea of maneuvering through one appealed to him. France's preference for a window seat while flying helped the idea, too. He would gaze outside and see field after field after field, all of which ostensibly seemed to have nothing happening in them."

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Quote, "I was also reminded of Field of Dreams," he says before quoting its most famous passage, quote, "If you build it, they will come." But could Don France build a multi-acre maze? What are your thoughts so far? I mean, I just feel like, how is Disney lurking in the background of everything? Is Disney he who walks behind the rose, actually? Yes. Walt Disney. All right. Okay. Or Mickey Mouse. I don't trust that guy. No, I fucking hate Mickey Mouse, and I'll say it forever. I think he's a bad person. Yeah. And Minnie Mouse is okay. Minnie's okay. Yeah, Mickey Mouse, I would believe that. Yeah. I do think she enables. Yeah, that's probably true. But she's not bad. We're more goofy people, I would say.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was always a Donald Duck person. Because he puts it all out there. It's like, he's a dick, but he's a dick to your face. That's true. Yeah, he is truthful. And he's got a little Salix suit on, so. Yeah, he's funny. Can't complain about that. He does a funny, funny voice. So, yeah, I just think, I was just shocked to see that Disney is involved in, in this, potentially. Right. You wouldn't think that Disney would be involved in corn mazes, but in a sense. I would think that they would become involved and then make it like a hyper-reality corn maze, right? Where it was like fake corn, but they're like way bigger. Yes, and they replace the corn with screens.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then the corn sings. Yeah, but no, I didn't expect it to be at such a ground floor level. Would you like to read us some more? Sure, absolutely. "While he was looking for solutions to build that multi-acre maze, Disney was trying to solve the problem of making Beauty and the Beast into a Broadway musical, which I saw when it was on the road in the early 90s, by the way." See, we love a spectacle. Americans understand spectacle. Absolutely. Okay. Quote, "So many people said it couldn't be done," says France, "that the idea was knocked down six times. But the resolve of Michael Eisner..." Wow. Legendary asshole. Then the company, yeah, just the worst.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Really saying something for Hollywood. Yeah, really. Then the company CEO inspired France to continue his impossible dream even as, to paraphrase an old Ira Gershwin lyric, quote, "They all laughed at Donnie and his notion when he planned an outdoor maze."

• 51:09Sarah Marshall?

  What lyric is that paraphrasing? I have to ask.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  I don't know. I have no idea.

• 51:15Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I like the reference.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Article continues. France's 20th class reunion at Lebanon Valley College in Anvil, Pennsylvania, proved vitally important. Quote, "When I mentioned to the school's president what I had in mind," France says, "he was soon taking me to farms." Yet even there, France was met with resistance. Quote, "The first farmer says, 'I spend a lot of time keeping kids out of there.'" That's not a Pennsylvania accent. I can't do that. He says, "Chuckling with understanding of the man's plight, the way the second said, 'I plant corn, I grow it, I harvest it,' made me see nothing would happen there, too."

• 51:59Sarah Marshall?

  If we're not careful, this is going to be made into a Matthew McConaughey movie.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I could see that. I would also see it.

• 52:07Sarah Marshall?

  Or actually Roger Bart.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:09Sarah Marshall?

  That's who I go with.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  So I guess what's happening here is farmers are like, "This is my corn. Why would I cut my corn into a maze? I hate children and they come in here."

• 52:20Sarah Marshall?

  Why would I do something so silly?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Mm hmm. Okay. Third time was the charm. A farmer who had three acres to spare told France that he'd been clearing $200 an acre in a year when the sun, rain, and insects had all cooperated. That was enough to start France negotiating. Quote, "I told him I'd even give half the corn back to him," he adds with a grin.

• 52:43Sarah Marshall?

  And the article says, "Indeed, you can't have a maze without getting rid of some of the corn." That's so true.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  It's so true. It's so true. France's calling his company, The Amazing Maze Maze, had its roots in Disney too, albeit in a roundabout way. It started when France was asked to guide the Broadway producing, directing legend Hal Prince of Phantom of the Opera fame and his family around Disney World.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Prince was so impressed with France's three day excursion that he recommended it to his most famous collaborator, Stephen Sondheim.

• 53:21Sarah Marshall?

  What?

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Of Into the Woods fame. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. So France gave Sondheim the deluxe tour as well. This, I cannot believe this all-star cast.

• 53:31Sarah Marshall?

  Right?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  This is crazy. Wow. Okay. They kept in touch and at dinner one night, Sondheim asked about France's immediate plans. Quote, "And when I told him," says France, "with wonder still in his voice, Steve immediately said without missing a beat," Steve, of course, it's like, so funny. "Steve immediately said without missing a beat, The Amazing Maze Maze." Fuck. No way. Wow. Yes. No less than Stephen Sondheim gave me the name and that convinced me that this was destiny.

• 54:06Sarah Marshall?

  Isn't that beautiful?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 54:08Sarah Marshall?

  And then he brings on Adrian Fisher to design it, yada, yada, yada.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  That is incredible.

• 54:13Sarah Marshall?

  And that leads me to the fact that in many parts of America, certainly around Portland, and certainly I'm sure still in Muscatine, Iowa and lots of other places, areas where there used to be family farms where that grew and sold crops now have farm attractions. And one of the biggest farm attractions, I think, that has spread across North America, I would say at this point, is the corn maze.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:41Sarah Marshall?

  And what's interesting is that I'm sure that The Amazing Maze Maze, if you look it up, like, it was on Good Morning America. You've got Adrian Fisher, who's good at PR for his mazes. You've got Don France, who is working at Disney. And like, I love him. Okay. Like, as far as I know, we are cut from the same cloth. We're like, you've got to a certain point in life, you've accomplished a certain amount artistically that you set out to, and one day you wake up and you think, corn. And people are like, what are you doing? And you're like, what, what are you excited about lately? And you're like, well, corn.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Corn. Yes.

• 55:18Sarah Marshall?

  And you know that it was um the first amazing maze maze built in nineteen ninety three was in the shape of a dinosaur. Some of the proceeds went to flood relief, you know, and it was built as the article talks about on a farmer's field where the economics of growing corn in that space meant that you could get about two hundred dollars. But if you charged admission for that amount of corn, you could get more hundred dollars.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes that makes perfect sense.

• 55:46Sarah Marshall?

  And can I float to you two theories about corn mazes and hedge mazes, one of which I feel more confident about?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Are these your theories?

• 55:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Okay, hit me.

• 55:57Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so in England, in a way that probably affects the spread of corn mazes in the early nineties, everyone is like newly excited about hedge mazes, partly because Adrian Fisher is good at creating work for himself, but also partly because there's something innate in people, I think we agree based on this conversation, that wants to be in a maze and that wants to be in a scary situation that isn't too scary.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 56:24Sarah Marshall?

  Or in your case, not scary, but at least a vexing situation.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:28Sarah Marshall?

  Or just to be forced to be exposed to nature for about an hour in a way that you can't abandon in the middle.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Hmm, hmm, hmm.

• 56:35Sarah Marshall?

  And I find it interesting that there is also enough hedge maze building to keep maze designers in business, at least to an extent.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:44Sarah Marshall?

  And why are people building all these hedge mazes at the time? And my theory is that it's because throughout the nineteen eighties, Margaret Thatcher and her pack helped destroy labor rights and the working class. And as in the United States, where something similar is going on in the eighties, when the working class and the concept of labor rights and union households are being Crushed by the executive office, then what remains or one of the demographics that remains are people who rather than identifying as pro labor and as working class now identify as aspiring middle class or aspiring upper middle class.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:26Sarah Marshall?

  As they continue up the ladder. And so I wonder if in hedge maze England of the late eighties and early nineties, there's this people want to buy more hedge mazes. Because if more people are buying property and if there's a sense of class mobility, perhaps happening underneath you, that makes you like what you have a little bit less. Maybe you need a giant status symbol like a hedge maze.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Hmm, okay.

• 57:52Sarah Marshall?

  Which says, not only am I here, but I'm going to be here for a really long time. And in fact, I've always been here and I'll always be here.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 58:01Sarah Marshall?

  And you are a gist temporary because you have no hedge maze.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Wow. And I'll let you into my hedge maze. So you could feel what it's like for an hour and then I'll cast you back out. It's the bread and circuses thing a little bit.

• 58:14Sarah Marshall?

  And then I'll feed you to my bull baby.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  My hot beefcake bull.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I think that's very interesting. That's like your, your sociology coming through there, right? I mean, it's like.

• 58:27Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  I think that makes sense. Like with you said, like what you said with the length of time it takes. It's like, it's exactly what you're saying is you're investing in an idea.

• 58:36Sarah Marshall?

  What status symbol like saying, I know exactly where I'm going to be in a decade and it's right here.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:42Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 58:43Sarah Marshall?

  And I mean, and on a less theoretical level, I think probably more seems less theory and just more materially real level. The 1980s are the decade of America's farm crisis where basically an unbelievable number of farmers go out of business for various factors, partly that many of them were very overextended with loans, had been encouraged to take out loans or to mortgage more land or more expensive equipment because United States agriculture in the 1970s was being used to feed the world.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 59:15Sarah Marshall?

  And then circumstances changed. Gas prices went up, interest rates went way up, banks started freaking out and deciding that they needed to collect what farmers owed on a loan immediately as opposed to over the course of many years. And there is just this chain reaction of, you know, really an entire livelihood collapsing in many places.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:39Sarah Marshall?

  And people, families losing farms and people losing livelihoods and their homes and their relationship to the land. But also, I think a huge milestone in the story of Americans' troubled relationship with the land and being sort of forced off of it by banks in this case.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Wow, and let me float something else. Okay, so like, everything you're saying is, I think, so right on. But then it's like, you have to do what the rest of America has done in the last, you know, few decades, is pivot toward entertainment as our export, right? So it's like, I wonder if the kind of farm as entertainment also is coming about at the same time.

• 1:00:22Sarah Marshall?

  The farm as Disneyland, really.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the little teensky Disneyland's you can go to. Yeah, yeah. Because it just, it wasn't cutting it otherwise.

• 1:00:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, because the way you endure is to evolve and become a little theme park.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Sarah Marshall?

  You know?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Sarah Marshall?

  Because, you know, the farm crisis happened because so much of the time, the amount of money that it costs to run a farm, you got less money back at the end of a season.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Sarah Marshall?

  So you have to make a corn maze to survive. So corn mazes are fun, but also I think they proliferated in the early 90s. And we, we see our first newspapers.com, incidence of a corn maze in Muscatine, Iowa, the epicenter of America's farm crisis.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Sarah Marshall?

  They're a sign of the American farmer surviving. And also, it makes total sense, based on what you're saying, that then the quote first, and like, the language of that website is weird. They're like, formally a passive form of entertainment. It's like, yeah, I guess it's fair to say that this is the first actively entertaining corn maze, because it's really, really big and it looks like a dinosaur. Like, it's the first one, maybe where you, I don't know. But also, according to newspapers.com, random American farms had corn mazes as early as 1988. And so I think we're looking at something where somebody didn't invent something, but they did help popularize it and spread it as a way for people to survive.

• 1:01:47Sarah Marshall?

  But also, the American farmer and the American farmer's cute little kids thought of it first.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you and good night.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Thank you and good night. Wow, wow.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Oh, what a journey.

• 1:02:02Sarah Marshall?

  What a journey through the maze. Let's go get a corn dog.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Let's get a corn dog and like, man, I just, I did not expect any of this. Yeah, I just, I loved doing this and I will never go through a corn maze the same way again. That's for damn sure.

• 1:02:19Sarah Marshall?

  I love doing this with you too. And like you say, love the corn, respect the corn. If you want to add something delicious to your summer salad, go get in your sweet corn for probably 50 cents and just put some fresh corn in your salad. Oh my gosh, corn.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:02:36Sarah Marshall?

  It's just the best.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Grill it up, leave it in the frigging, it's frigging little jacket. It's a green little jacket.

• 1:02:42Sarah Marshall?

  Husk.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Husk.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  And I'll just say, Sarah, thank you. This was so much fun.

• 1:02:51Sarah Marshall?

  Stay safe in the maze. There's corn to eat if you get lost.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  And I just want to reiterate one more thing, if that's okay.

• 1:02:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to the eternal explorer, Chelsea Weber Smith, for bringing us to the places that I certainly would be too scared to go to on my own. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing and producing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. And of course, make sure to check out American Hysteria and all the episodes Chelsea and I have worked on together over the years. We've had so much fun. Thank you also to Miranda Zickler and Magpie Cinema Club for their rendition of Every Corn is a Glamorous Woman, which in my opinion is the song of the summer. Thank you for being in the corn with us.

• 1:04:07Sarah Marshall?

  We'll see you next time.