CW’s hit show Beauty & the Beast is far from the Disney animation film you might remember as a child, rather it’s a fantasy, sci-fi, action series with super-soldiers from an experiment gone dreadfully wrong, as they turn into uncontrollable beasts.
Every beast needs a close confidant and that is J.T. Forbes a loyal childhood friend and scientist, played by Austin Basis. Basis is also a spokesperson for JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation). ABILITY Magazine’s Lia Martirosyan caught up with Basis via Skype while shooting in Canada.
Lia Martirosyan: How’s it going out there?
Austin Basis: It’s good. The past couple of days it’s been on and off where there’s been some sunny cold days and then the muggy cold days, the kind of overcast which is not that much fun. [laughs]
Martirosyan: What part of Canada are you in?
Basis: We’re in Toronto.
Martirosyan: And where are you from originally?
Basis: Originally from Brooklyn, New York, but been living in Los Angeles since 2005.
Martirosyan: Nice. Tell us about yourself and the acting bug.
Basis: Well, I think I have a very entertaining family, so there is a little of it in my genes, or a lot of it. Everyone loves telling stories and jokes, being the center of attention. When I was a kid, I used to love Halloween, to the point where I extended it to having Halloween pretty much every day, especially when friends came over. I’d collect all the Halloween costumes in a crate, then it became two, the most was three and then some in the closet, because I just love dressing up. At that time, I liked Dracula and the horror-type stuff. There was a period of time when I was younger when 3D horror films were on your TV, so you’d get the 3D glasses and watch.
I was fairly athletic growing up and had dreams of playing professional baseball until I realized that you have to not only be skilled but biologically gifted, you know. It’s one thing to have skills and agility, but it’s a whole other thing to have the body to do it. I was smaller than everyone, I had a late growth spurt, so that put me behind the pack. Throughout school I always did theater, as I went to high school and college, the baseball dreams dwindled away. Medical school dreams popped in for a little bit, but theater and performing dreams were always there, they just took on different forms. Finally, in college at some point I said, ‘I’ve just got to give this a shot.’
It’s always been there. It’s always stayed there. Everything else has come and gone, whether it’s sports, athletics, being a doctor. And now all that’s left is being an actor. I told my wife the other day that I was really good at a lot of things, I could draw, I could write, I could act, I could play sports. But I made the decision to try to be great in one thing, because I felt like I was spreading myself too thin—to really try to make it as an actor. My professors in college were like, “You’ve really got to commit fully, because there are about 10 to 20 people who look exactly like you, who have just as much talent, who are willing to work twice as hard as you. And so if you really want to succeed, you have to go all in.” That’s when I became a theater major and then went on to grad school for acting.
Martirosyan: You’re not Italian, are you?
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Basis: No, I’m Jewish, Brooklyn Russian Romanian, Eastern European Jewish.
Martirosyan: Do you speak Russian, by any chance?
Basis: Niet.
(laughter)
Basis: I did grow up close to Brighton Beach, which is a very Russian area in Brooklyn. The people who lived in Brighton Beach were kind of, as we said, as most people say, “off the boat.” Most of the signs are in Russian. It’s like a Chinatown for Chinese, it’s Russiantown, Little Odessa, they used to call it.
Martirosyan: That’s great. Tell me how you became the celebrity ambassador for JDRF.
Basis: Well, I wouldn’t say I’m the celebrity ambassador. I am a celebrity ambassador. I had reached out unsuccessfully on the previous show that I was doing, Life Unexpected. I think I sent an email that probably got lost in the shuffle to the local JDRF chapter on the West Coast trying to make contact. It was kind of late and the show ended, so I had to worry about making a living and getting my next job. Once I got this Beauty and the Beast role and I knew that I was going to be working, I knew that I’d have time to devote to JDRF. I wanted to do interviews and talk about it, because I never felt like when I was growing up that there were examples of successful adults who had had juvenile diabetes or type 1 diabetes. I wanted to put myself out there as someone like that, a role model for kids who are going through the same thing I went through, 25 years ago.
I try to talk about it in all my interviews, and through JDRF became active in fundraisers and also in the JDRF Canada. Last year we went to Ottawa, because it was JDRF Kids for a Cure Lobby Day. They took kids from all the provinces of Canada and representatives of each of the provinces’ cities. There were 50 or 100 kids who had won these applications representing the kids who have diabetes in Canada, type 1 diabetes, made these books and went to their representatives to basically lobby for more government funding for the different projects that Canadian—there’s a Canadian diabetes project that will fund more of the provinces to have access to the insulin pump. Because of the provincial laws and the way it works, certain provinces weren’t allowed, funded or included in projects that provide state-of-the-art technology for kids to function and live with diabetes in the most healthy and balanced way. That’s why we participated in that, and I went back again to these meetings with the kids—spoke to them about what I went through in my adult life of being an actor and being on set; trying to balance having diabetes and my blood sugar level—doing the best job I can and not letting it get in my way.
That was a great experience for me and my wife. I try to talk about it, just so people know that it’s not something that’s debilitating or people should be embarrassed about, ‘cause that’s the thing, when I was younger. Being embarrassed that I had to be cared for like a baby because my blood sugar’s low or because I need that special snack at a certain time of day. I wasn’t getting a snack because I was special, I was getting a snack because I needed it for my health.
Martirosyan: How old were you when you found out?
Basis: Maybe a week and a half, two weeks before my ninth birthday.
Martirosyan: And what were the symptoms leading to the diagnosis?
Basis: I was eight, and had lost about 10 pounds over the summer. That’s one of the warning signs, weight loss, but that comes from the fact that your blood sugar level is high, you’re hyperglycemic, so it dehydrates you. When you’re hyperglycemic, there’s more blood in your sugar that’s not being used for energy, thickening your blood and affecting every other function that your body has. So your mouth is dry, you feel tired all the time, you want to drink a lot, go to the bathroom a lot, and in turn, you lose weight.
You’re always a little bloated and feverish because, again, your body’s not functioning properly. You need a certain blood sugar level to make sure everything’s working properly. And so for the summer, that wasn’t happening for me, when I got back home, I went straight to the doctor for my school medical exam, and they said I have a urinary infection, a bladder infection, or diabetes. And it was type 1 diabetes.
Martirosyan: Anyone else in the family have it?
Basis: No. Actually, my dad owned a candy store at the time. It was kind of an early lesson to take it with a grain of salt and accept the ironies in life. But the only person who had it in my family was my dad’s mother, who had gotten it as an adult, it was adult-onset or type 2 diabetes—she wasn’t insulin-dependent right away. Older people get it. Some type 2 diabetes is caused by obesity. If you lose the weight and eat healthy, you can get rid of type 2 diabetes, but type 1 diabetes is incurable and genetically predisposed. If you get type 1 symptoms, it was always in your system. The only question is when it was going to rear its ugly head. I recently went to a fundraiser where a woman spoke who had been diagnosed in her sixties with type 1. What that means is that for 60 years, she had it in her system, and it just never rose to the surface. For some reason at 65 or however old she was, it decided to come out and take over. They would use her to study how her body held it off for 60 years or what was going on with her that allowed the diabetes to stay dormant.
Martirosyan: Has it changed, has it progressed in any way as you’ve gotten older? Maybe easier to maintain?
Basis: I’ve had the pump for almost 15 years, and the pump makes it easier to manage on a daily basis because you don’t have to keep injecting yourself. The insulin is constantly flowing. There’s a rate that goes all day, so if you don’t eat anything, ideally your blood sugar level will stay the same. And then when you eat, you do a calculation of the carbohydrates, you count the carbs that you’re eating, and there’s an equation that allows you to understand how much, how many units you need. It’s different for everyone. You work with your nurse or doctor in the beginning. It’s a learning curve. It definitely has gotten easier, which is never to say that it’s easy. It’s based on your metabolism and your age and your circumstances. Like, when I’m working my routine and system are based on a different schedule and it affects my blood sugar levels differently, as opposed to when I’m not working, there’s a lot of things that change. So you have to roll with that. You have to just know that’s what’s going to happen.
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It gets easier to understand but there’s moments that I have that it’s annoying and a struggle. Even when I think I’m in total control, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I am in total control. But I try my best. I try to eat as healthy as possible, try to keep the white sugars, refined sugars and white bread and pasta and stuff like that to a minimum. You lean towards the complex carbohydrates, the only pasta that I would eat is brown rice. Quinoa is not really pasta, but brown rice or whole wheat pasta. But the only other carbohydrates I really eat are whole wheat bread, fruit and vegetable carbohydrates. Proteins are not carbohydrates. But they do help control your blood sugar. Everything’s important. A well-balanced diet is definitely important, and exercise.
It was a struggle in the beginning, but the curve—before, I was taking three shots a day, and it changed to two shots a day and then back to three. It went back and forth based on the doctor and the new information they had. I changed insulins over and over. There’s different brands or types of insulin that people use. There’s insulin that works right away, there’s certain insulin that works throughout the day, and other insulin that has a delayed response, so you could take it now and it’s not going to work for two hours, and then it’ll work for three hours after that, in five hours it’s done, and then you have to take more.
So luckily the pump is fast-acting. It’s Humalog. It’s a content flow. I can be on top of it as best I could without having a machine or a pancreas to do it for me.
Martirosyan: So you must have great organizational skills.
Basis: I had to from an early age. My parents were very organized and good at it. My mom was a teacher. My dad was an accountant, but he always did the money and the bills, and so he was always extremely organized. The transition for me to live a life where every day I had to keep track of where my blood sugars were, write them down, when time I was taking them, just to keep track of them when I went to my doctor, we had something to talk about, they were good about all that stuff. So from age nine, 10, 11, when I started getting the hang of it, you have to grow up a little quicker, which is not to say I wasn’t able to have a childhood, my parents were able to allow that for me, but you still have to learn a little more responsibility. You can’t get ice cream every day at the candy store. You can’t go and get—my brother used to love Skittles and Starbursts and certain pure sugar candies, Sour Patch Kids, that type of stuff. That’s pure sugar.
I always preferred chocolate, which was a little better, but milk chocolate is pretty sweet and not good for you. I kind of weaned myself off of milk chocolate and only had dark chocolate because of the antioxidants, but I also—you don’t want to deprive yourself to the point of binging when you can’t take it any more and stuffing your face and doing your body harm, so the way I’ve balanced it out is because I have a pump, it’s a little more flexible than my previous existence on shots and needles and finger pricks.
So I have everything in moderation, and when I do have it, I know that I have to give myself insulin or balance it out with exercise.
Martirosyan: Do you do the injections yourself?
Basis: The pump lasts—I usually do it ideally two or three or four days. It’s really only one injection, and then every three or four days, so mine is in my arm right now, and I did it not yesterday but the day before, I injected it. It’s basically a catheter, the system I used is a soft plastic catheter, so I inject it with a needle and then take the needle out and there’s still a little plastic tube in there, and it pumps the insulin. It’s a constant flow, so that’s the best part of the pump. If my blood sugar is off, if it’s low, I can just pump up insulin right away, and within 15 minutes, a half hour at most, my blood sugar is down or is starting to come down if it’s high.
Martirosyan: Do you experience mood swings when that happens?
Basis: Ask my wife!
(laughter)
Basis: It’s more like there’s a disconnect. What I feel from the inside and from accounts of my experiences with, whether it’s my wife, brother or my parents, there’s a glazed-over eye thing that I’m just not connecting all the dots and definitely there’s a disorientation because low blood sugar is lack of oxygen to the brain. When it’s high, there’s just a sick feeling, I’m all kind of—nothing affects me mentally when I’m high. But when I’m low, the lack of sugar in my system again affects how everything functions. I think it’s a lack of oxygen to the brain, so anyone gets really tired and hungry or faint, they get disoriented. Imagine that but for a little more prolonged period because most people’s bodies right their wrong automatically, whereas with our bodies, type 1 diabetics, we have to inject insulin or get sugar into our system to right it with some help.
So yeah, disoriented. There’s been times when I’ve come out of low blood sugar attacks and I thought what just happened was a dream, but it wasn’t, it actually happened. Luckily it’s not happened in any dangerous situations like cars. I usually check before—two things that are the most dangerous, I think, are going to sleep with low blood sugar and going into a car or being in a situation where you could hurt other people, like lose control or something.
So just as you’re not going to drink when you drive, I try to make sure that when I’ve worked a long day, 12, 14 hours on set, I make sure my blood sugar’s okay, so that when I drive home, everything’s cool. You have to be extra careful, that’s the only thing.
Martirosyan: Good for you. You mentioned exercising. Is there a routine you follow?
Basis: I try to. There’s days, especially after working a full day, that I’ll want to rest. If I’m going to work the full week, I want to rest on the weekends. But I alternate between taking long walks. Because we’re in Toronto, I get to walk in the city. I try not to drive anywhere within downtown. So long walks. We just took a walk in the park the other day. I feel like sometimes I walk—in LA, you drive everywhere, so when you’re here and we’re living here for the show, I get to walk places. As long as the weather’s all right, which, it’s starting to get cold, we try to walk as much as possible.
The other things I do, there’s a gym in the building, so whether it’s elliptical or the treadmill, some sort of aerobic activity for usually 45 minutes to an hour. I had taken a boxing kind of boot camp class, where it’s aerobic activities, but you use gloves and you punch a bag, you do push-ups and jump rope and mountain climbers and all these different—calisthenics, but you also get to do boxing technique and spar with the bag. You’re not punching with anyone else, it’s just you punching a heavy bag.
I’ve done a class where you have the guy who has the pads and you punch the pads. That’s a lot harder.
Martirosyan: That takes a lot out of you.
Basis: Yes! And then we did a class before that for a couple years called cage fitness that was awesome. It’s based on cage fighting, but it’s an aerobic workout, but instead of the bag being—in boxing, the bag’s hanging from the ceiling. Instead of that, you have the bag laying on the floor and it’s shaped like a person, and there’s handlebars, handles all over the bag, it’s about 42 pounds, and you pull the bag, you lift the bag, you do push-ups, you ground and pound the bag, and it’s set up like a five-round cage fight. It’s a half an hour class. The best part of it, it’s only half an hour. Each round is five minutes. The first round is a warm-up round, the second round is upper body, third round is lower body, fourth round is cage cardio combo, where you do a lot of different things, and the last round you chose between two. But there’s only a minute break in between. So technically it’s a 29-minute class, because you have five-minute rounds with a minute in between.
Martirosyan: It sounds pretty intense.
Basis: Yeah, it’s definitely intense. It burns a lot of calories. It’s full contact. I used to play competitive sports, so I don’t really—it’s hard for me to run on a treadmill unless I’m listening to music. If I’m listening to music, it doesn’t make it easy, it makes it easier. But I kind of like competitive stuff, and when there’s tasks at hand, whether it’s punching a bag or speed to try to do it quickly or to try to do a certain amount of push-ups or work out, I kind of like that challenge more as opposed to sitting at a—running on a treadmill or at a machine where I’m doing reps of blah-blah-blah. Doing bench presses is kind of boring to me.
Martirosyan: Let’s talk about Beauty and the Beast. Can you describe your role?
Basis: I play J.T. Forbes, who’s the best friend and confidant to Vincent Keller, who is a beast. [laughs] Or he turns into a beast when provoked. They’ve been friends for a long time, but J.T. is not only a supportive confidant, but he’s also a biochemistry professor. He also knows a thing or two about computer hacking. He’s built bombs in the past. He knows how to shoot and aim a tranq gun pretty well. He’s a multifaceted character. And he also has a good sense of humor and is able to deliver the timely punch line. When the pressure in the show gets too dark or too serious, J.T. Forbes is the character who lightens it up a little.
Martirosyan: Would you consider yourself a computer nerd in reality?
Basis: I’m not a computer nerd at all. I do spend a lot of time on the computer, that’s for sure, but it’s probably more social media than any analyzing or—I don’t even know what it’s called. Computer terms, I usually learn them five years after everyone else knows them.
(laughter)
Basis: Thank God for Apple and the MacBook Pro, they’ve made it so simple to do, they make it as simple as possible, to the point where they don’t even write words any more, it’s just symbols that tell you how to do stuff.
(laughter)
Martirosyan: No hacking in your near future.
Basis: Had it not been for that, I’d be screwed. No hacking. J.T. knows. I know the basics. I wouldn’t be able to hack anything. I can barely hack into my computer when it freezes. I just shut it off and wait 10 seconds and then turn it back on. My computer skills are minimal. I usually ask my wife to do it, she’s a little better at that stuff. But I was good at math and science, which comes into play every now and again on the show. When I get a situation or words or some sort of reference that J.T. has to make of—he obviously went to school for this and teaches it, so he knows it pretty well, so I, Austin, have to make believe that I am totally confident about this information. I have to do some research to make sure I know, not only what the word means or what I’m saying, but some information around it so that it’s more layered and not just me saying a very technical term in the proper way.
Sometimes I have to say a lot of words, and there’s a punch line at the end of it, it gets a little hairy, so when I go to work, I have to be prepared and knowing what I say so I can actually say it without bumbling over it.
Martirosyan: How much time do you usually get before the scene to learn these terms?
Basis: Before we shoot? We probably get the scripts—let’s say we started the episode on Thursday, and we get the scripts I Saturday night, and then the script changes, there’s different drafts that come out almost every day. Usually we get the first script, the network draft, and then there’s the production draft. The production draft is the most definitive one, and then based off that, sometimes scenes get cut, sometimes lines get changed a little, and so you just keep memorizing it and you just keep working on it, and as you go, you get adjustments here and there and sometimes you’re lucky and the scenes don’t get changed, or they get totally changed and the lines get cut is even luckier—
(laughter)
Basis: —or the worst part is that the scene keeps changing and you keep getting more lines added. Because once you’ve memorized a line, you could forget to say it. It’s easier to cut lines than it is to add lines into a scene that you’ve already memorize, because you’re so in the rhythm of the old lines.
Martirosyan: I would think having to learn all those lines, those scientific terms and then, snip.
Basis: Oh, yeah. They usually don’t cut the scientific stuff, because that usually has to do with the plot. There’s been a couple times, more last year, this year has been all right, but last year, that I saw a term and I was trying to—I did the research and I figured out one of the terms was, like, my line was like, “He can’t live without this system in his body,” like it was a biological system, not the nervous system, I think it was the lymphatic system. “He can’t live without his lymphatic system.” I wrote the writers and I was like, “I researched this, and you kind of can live without your lymphatic system, so could we change that line or change the function I’m referring to?” and they did. We try to be as accurate as possible. We’re talking about a supernatural, a guy who’s been turned into a beast by the government or a black ops organization and is hiding and trying to not get killed by that same government organization, and so to give it a little realism, you want to be accurate when you refer to real things. It’s not sci-fi, it’s real things, based in reality, with some alterations, like DNA modification and cross-DNA stuff. His DNA has been crossed with that of nine species, or something like that, so that he has animal traits and qualities that allow—his hearing, his sight, his sense of smell to be heightened like an animal’s would.
Martirosyan: They’re lucky that you’re interested in the topic, so you can catch these things.
Basis: Yeah, lucky I do my research. But sometimes you don’t have time. You just have to trust that they’re right, because there’s been times when we’ve gotten the script a day before. And I’ve been working, you have to work, you’re working on scenes from one episode and you start the next episode the next day, and you’re in the middle of shooting one scene and you’re working on lines for the scene the next day or later that afternoon.
Martirosyan: Do you ever find yourself during a scene needing to stop and pay a little more attention to your sugar intake? Does that ever happen?
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Basis: Yeah. Usually, I don’t go to a set and make an announcement, “I’m a type 1 diabetic, everyone, so if I act a little weird, get me some sugar.” I just usually tell a certain few people, usually the director or producers. There’s assistant directors. The crew works where the first assistant director is the guy who runs the crew, and then he has a second assistant and a third assistant, so I tell all those people, because those are the people who deal with—they’re the liaisons between the actors and the rest of the crew. I tell those people so that if there’s a situation where I feel my blood sugar dropping, I will just have apple juice handy, because it’s the quickest thing for me to drink. Liquids like milk or orange juice gets in the way of you speaking, it causes mucus and phlegm. You have to think about those things as an actor. Apple juice is the quickest, clearest thing. If I eat something, it might get in my teeth. There’s a whole thing that you have to think about while being on camera.
Also, I take my blood sugar testing supplies, especially if I’m on location, with me at my chair, so that in between, I’ll test my blood sugar so that I know where it’s at and I can balance it a little more.
It’s easier to manage for me, but I’ve heard for a professional athlete who has type 1 diabetes, like Jay Cutler, and there was a basketball player a couple years ago, every time they had a time out or in between quarters, he would test his blood sugar level. I think Jay Cutler does it at the quarters, or, like, when he feels it. You’re in the game, you know your body. The only thing with athletics, it’s similar with acting, but with athletics, you really need your full energy and full awareness for you to compete properly in that sport, whether it’s basketball, football, baseball, hockey.
With acting, as long as you’re level-headed, if you’re sitting down, it’s not like I’m running a marathon and I need all the energy I have. Yes, I would like to perform always at my peak performance level, but it’s not like I’m doing chin-ups the whole scene. That’s for Jay. Jay works out on camera.
Martirosyan: Have you met him?
Basis: Oh, no.
Martirosyan: Just a big fan.
Basis: Again, when I was growing up, there weren’t many people who were out there who were like that. I think he only got it a couple years ago, but it’s just, you kind of know of, I know other people for JDRF who are out there who are advocates, ambassadors, whatever term you want to use, people who are in the public eye, whether it’s music, acting, sports, who are not shying away from the platform of being a representative of the organization.
Martirosyan: It’s good too see people like him and you out there, being vocal and doing what you do. Have you met Mary Tyler Moore?
Basis: I did once.
Martirosyan: Tell me about it.
Basis: I went to the Actors Studio drama school which is the school, you know, Inside the Actors Studio hosted by James Lipton, it’s an acting—I think it was on Bravo. They do interviews of famous actors. Started out mainly as Actors Studio members, and I think they’ve interviewed, like, 250 people. When I went to school there as a student at the school, you get to go to all these interviews. So while I was there, I went to Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, all these amazing actors and actresses, and one of the people who was being interviewed my first year in the school was Mary Tyler Moore, because she was on TV for 40 years, one of the biggest sitcoms, the Dick Van Dyke Show and then her own sitcoms. I knew she had—when I was younger and went to Walk for a Cure, JDRF walks, I keep saying “juvenile diabetes,” because that’s what it used to be called when I was a juvenile, but it’s statistically incorrect, because most people with type 1 diabetes are not juveniles any more, they’re adults. So they changed the reference from what it was to type 1 diabetes, as opposed to “juvenile diabetes.”
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Anyway, when I went to these walks, I would get the magazines for the JDRF, it was always, she was on the cover. She was the spokesperson for JDRF. So when she came to the school, I was like, “I’ve got to ask her a question about diabetes and being an actor and all this stuff.” So my sneaky trick was, I used to usher the shows, and what that meant was, we basically went and got to pick out our seats and put our bags down and we could go out and help file everyone into the audience and check them off on the checklists for the students, the guests, etc. There would be different jobs. The trick was that we would get to sit where we wanted, in the front row. If it was someone you really wanted to talk to, you would get the front row.
So I got front row center, and I think actually my mom came to that one, I was sitting next to my mom. First off, in the interview, James Lipton starts talking about me and that I grew up in Brooklyn and she grew up in Brooklyn for a couple years close to where I grew up, and so he points me out, and I’m like, “What the hell’s going on?” I was planning to ask a question, and already he’s pointing me out at the beginning of the interview.
Martirosyan: A lovely surprise for you.
Basis: Like, five minutes into talking with her. And then for the rest of the time I’m nervous thinking about how I’m going to ask the question. So I asked the first question, I asked her about any advice she had as a type 1 diabetic in the industry, how has she managing it? How had it affected her? Because I’d done plays where I’d had to be on stage for an hour and a half to two hours where I don’t leave the stage. And especially if it’s a classical play, there’s not really a slick way you could test your blood sugar.
I asked her, “How do you manage it? How do you not let it get in the way of you giving the best performance you can?”
Martirosyan: You had a lot of questions for her.
It was a nice conversation. She was like, “You know yourself. You have to make sure before you go onstage and when you get off, just have the juice handy so that you could get your blood sugar up if you needed to.” So it was nice exchange we had. She said, “You’ll be fine.” It was nice, I took a picture with her afterwards and thanked her for coming and her answers, which was cool. And now, who knows? Maybe I’ll run into her one of these JDRF events. That would be funny.
Martirosyan: Full circle.
Basis: Yeah. I guess it’s an even smaller circle when you talk about TV actors or actors and musicians who are diabetics working for the JDRF.
Martirosyan: Minimizing your full circle search.
Basis: Concentric circles.
Martirosyan: Got any bad habits you’re trying to kick?
Basis: (laughs) Hmm.
Martirosyan: Maybe you can channel your wife on this.
Basis: That annoys her, you mean? One of my failings is, I can’t leave grimy dishes in the sink just sitting there. Even if I don’t wash them, I have to—which, I don’t usually wash them right after dinner, I will have to rinse them out. There’s nothing I hate worse than trying to get off crusted-over food on a dish or a pan. That’s like one of my biggest pet peeves. If you put it in the sink and it has stuff on it, just rinse it off a little so that the water will get off the grime so that when you clean it eventually, it’ll be an easy clean, just a wipe, not like, “Argh!”
Martirosyan: You’re thinking ahead.
Basis: Yup. That’s definitely a pet peeve.
