A Nice Lady, a Gambling Addict, and a Click-Off
- Middle Aged Hottie
- Jan 5
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 30
Chances are that if you went to school with me in the 70s and 80s, your parents were Lois and David adjacent.
Full Disclosure:
I got so excited about writing my first content blog, that I watched I'm Not a Monster Part I three more times to make sure that I did not miss anything. Through the tedium, I realized I gained more insight from not trying so hard as to not miss one single detail. Lois and David could have been a number of people in my life growing up that, a fact I realized when not trying so hard.
A Nice Lady, a Gambling Addict, and a Click-Off
Cast of Characters:
Lois Riess - our eponymous main character
David Riess - the silent witness, the murdered husband
Kay Fate - Reporter, Steele County Times
- Kay looks like a mom that I would have thought was way cooler than my mom, but she would have ironically found my mom to be cool.
Scott Carlsen- David's BFF, coiner of the nickname 'click-off'
Tess Koster - buddy from the Servicemen's Club who plays a huge an incidental major role in the story
Samantha Roadway - friend, went to Lois' daycare. I am personally jealous of her ability to pull-off eyeliner.
Lindsey Riess-Wilson - niece, huge fan of as well as attendee at Lois' daycare. She made 'Hot Dish' sound comforting and I had to look it up.
John Rosengren - journalist
Brian Smith - Deputy US Marshal, did what the bumbling local sheriff couldn't/wouldn't do
Kari - Lois' very good friend since junior high
Dawn - Kari's sister, player of Dreamboat Annie. If you made mixed cassette tapes or had piles of albums, you will understand Dawn
The mind is a crazy thing. All I know is it happened. I wish I could change it but I can't. - Lois Riess
We don't start at the beginning...
Erin Lee Carr is the genius who will tell you who committed the crime straight away, and then she helps you dig through the layers. Fancy people might say she buries the lede. But if you are a fan, then you know what you are getting into. You also know that you are not going to be disappointed. This story is so fettered with layers, it's like one of those 2-box cakes we used to make with canned frosting and the crunchy pre-made birthday greetings that came glued onto a piece of cardboard. If that is the case, the watching Lois get booked into jail is like blowing out and licking the bottoms of those fast-burning candles that came in a box of 20.
The crunchy happy birthday candy letters aka the introduction of our cast...
My good friend, Kay 'cool mom' Fate, explains to us that the affect of David Riess' murder on their small prairie town is akin to how older people, Gen X'ers, recollect where they were when the Shuttle Disaster occurred. For the younger folks, in 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on live tv for the whole world to see. It's hard to explain the exact magnitude because we didn't have the internet and school shootings when I was in the 8th Grade.
Then onto crunch, crunch, crunch...happy couple...crunch...David loved fishing....crunch, crunch...wax worm business...happy couple, big hugs...crunch, crunch, crunch...enviable and super fun. As we run out of the candy letters because your mom made you share with your cousins, the sadness hits with reluctant tears when BFF Scott is scrolling through memories. At this point we're deep into the top layer of Duncan Hines frosting.
I'm a man. I'm not suppose-ta be emotional, you know?
-Scott Carlson
White frosting with two drops of red food coloring to make pink...
"David is sick" is the proclamation. Deep into this first layer of 'palm oil and toxic chemical' frosting, it gets weird. Before you are super creeped out, there are some parts I completely understand and some explanations you're not going to get until later. To cover up that she has shot David and lived with his corpse in the house for 12 days, Lois keeps up a questionable facade. I mean, she did open a window to let the winter air help with the smell. I have become more comfortable sharing about my own Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and there are just ways your mind will bamboozle you into thinking things are just a small burden to bear when they would sicken a reasonable person. However, I'm not that comfortable yet. Hopefully in the future catharsis of blogging, I will get there and maybe we'll all be a little better off. That being said, Lois just sucks at covering up murder.
I'm not a monster, you know. Nobody knows what I've been through, you know? So, I'm grateful that I'm going to be able to...uh...say something.
-Lois Riess
You need kool-aid or milk to choke down that dry top layer...
This section is probably the most familiar for my Gen X friends; especially if you grew up in a very cold, isolated part of the Northern United States. There was no internet, cable tv, or the free-flow of your parents' money. You had to babysit your ass off to make spending money and very few places to spend it. Here are some things I think will pull on some Gen X core memories:
One giant employer that had its own caste system
One great friend and their sibling(s)
'hoarder house' was common and may have been your own house
The strange juxtaposition of not acknowledging mental illness in your family and normalizing it all at the same time
The expectation of taking care of sick family and the scandal of unmarried pregnancy.
Getting married at 25 was considered old.
Like I tell my middle schoolers when we are tackling a new or difficult concept. We are getting to the meat; specifically we are getting to the meat of Lois' story. The background, if you will. It seems to me that Lois went directly from a household driven by untreated mental illness to a married household where partners were not equal by design.
You hope the spackle holding the cake layers together is a delicious filling but is likely more faux pink goo...
The description of Lois' post-Navy daycare sounds so wonderful I had to look up the term Hot Dish because it sounded comforting and delicious. Lindsey and Samantha wax poetically about this wonderful early childhood, loving experience. Yet, like the spackle layer on that double-layer box cake, it has a quick end into that second dry layer of cake. It seems that Lois dared to be good at something and made a boatload of cash doing it.
2nd Layer = wax worm farm - 2(loss of business + loss of financial independence)
My goal is truly for you to watching Part I and say a lot of what the *ucks to yourself, I really do, but I also really want to follow through with this cake metaphor. It seems to me like the years following the move to Blooming Prairie, starting he wax worm farm, alleged daily verbal and sometimes physical abuse, and the many expectations of family members to take care of them in their ill health had a clear trajectory to a gambling addiction. She says it herself. When she walks into Diamond Jo's they are happy to see her, they tell her how nice she looks, they provide her with the instant gratification of the sounds, smells, and payouts of the slots. We get to the bottom of this dry layer and what we have left is the knowledge that Lois has a gambling addiction, poor self worth, and money from robbing her sibling. Alas, we end at the Strawberry Shortcake paper plate.
The melting ice cream on the Strawberry Shortcake paper plate is Neapolitan.
Neapolitan is the party disappointment of the 70s and 80s. While it's advertised as having something for everyone, eventually the strawberry gets mixed in with everything and it's just gross. What else is gross? Being handed a gun and asked not to *uck up your second suicide attempt, and according to Lois, that's when David's life ended unceremoniously on the bathroom floor.
WAIT!!!! There's a Part II. Yes! Did you not hear Tess' crazy-*ss story?
There's more Kool-Aid left!
Spoiler-alert! Lois fled to Florida. She pulled up to Tess' house from the Servicemen's Club. Holy **it. Call 911.
There's another dead body.
Thanks for joining me on my first attempt at doc-driven content.
*** Cue Heart's Dreamboat Annie***
Disclaimer: All contents of this blog are the result of watching this amazing documentary one million times, my own opinions, and my memories of birthday parties in the late 70s and early 80s.
The length of this blog was...
Too much.
Not enough.
Just right.
Totally sucked.
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