Roz Chast and Patty Marx’s ukulele band Ukelear Meltdown was a sensation in the 1960’s and 70’s. Specializing in rewriting public domain songs, the Melt played with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and even once, Alvin and the Chipmunks. Their first album, Duck and Cover, missed becoming a platinum by three sales. Only recently did Roz and Patty learn that much of their popularity had to do with fans playing U.M’s songs backwards to reveal winning lottery numbers and stock tips. They have been lauded for their fearlessness— their brave disregard for rhythm, their refusal to tune their instruments, and their unwillingness to remove their gloves when it’s cold. Their musical influences include the beep the microwave makes to signal the food is ready.
Since joining The New Yorker in 1978, Roz Chast has established herself as one of our greatest artistic chroniclers of the anxieties, superstitions, furies, insecurities, and surreal imaginings of modern life. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, has called her “the magazine’s only certifiable genius”. She lectures widely and has received numerous awards including honorary degrees from Pratt Institute and the Art Institute of Boston. In 2015, she received the Reuben Award from the National Cartoon Society. She also received the Heinz Award for her body of work which brings “wry humor and wit to some of our most profound everyday anxieties, brilliantly translating the mundane into rich, comical observations,” and in 2019, she was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. Her favorite color as a child was black. It still is.
Patricia Marx is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a former writer for Saturday Night Live and Rugrats. Her two novels (Him Her Him Again The End of Him and Starting From Happy) were Thurber Prize Finalists. She was the first woman on the Harvard Lampoon and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Stony Brook, and New York University, but mainly she does errands and looks things up on Wikipedia. She can take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hand.