Podcast appearances and mentions of dawson street

Bio   Brian McDonald, an award-winning author, filmmaker, graphic novelist, and podcaster, is a sought-after instructor and consultant. He has taught his story seminar and consulted for various companies, including Pixar, Microsoft, and Cirque du Soleil.   Interview Highlights   02:45 The gift of writing 04:00 Rejected by Disney 05:35 Defining a story 07:25 Conclusions 10:30 Why do we tell stories? 13:40 Survival stories 17:00 Finding the common thread 19:00 The Golden Theme  20:45 Neuroscience   Connect   Brian McDonald (writeinvisibleink.com) @BeeMacDee1950 on X @beemacdee on Instagram Brian McDonald on LinkedIn  Books and references   Land of the Dead: Lessons from the Underworld on Storytelling and Living, Brian McDonald Invisible Ink: Building Stories from the Inside Out, Brian McDonald The Golden Theme: How to Make Your Writing Appeal to the Highest Common Denominator, Brian McDonald Old Souls, Brian McDonald Ink Spots: Collected Writings on Story Structure, Filmmaking and Craftmanship, Brian McDonald Brian's podcast 'You are a Storyteller' Episode Transcript   Ula Ojiaku   Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Very honoured to introduce my guest for this episode, Brian McDonald,. He's an award-winning author, filmmaker, graphic novelist and podcaster. Brian is a sought-after speaker, instructor and consultant who has taught his story seminar and consulted for companies like Pixar, Microsoft, and Cirque du Soleil. In this first part of our two-part episode, we discuss the gift of writing, his experience being rejected by Disney, his book Invisible Ink, that book is lifechanging. We also discuss defining a story, conclusions, and why we tell stories. Stay tuned for an insightful conversation!  Brian, it's a pleasure to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast and an honour. Thank you for making the time for this conversation.   Brian McDonald Thank you. Thanks for having me.  Ula Ojiaku  Awesome. So could you tell us a bit about yourself? What are the things that have led you to being the Brian McDonald we know today? Brian McDonald  How I got to be, I guess, a story expert or whatever it is I am, the memory I have is of being in kindergarten and seeing an animated film about King Midas, and I was obsessed with it. It was stop motion animation, so it was frightening, it scared me, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I got obsessed with stop motion animation and I got obsessed with the story of King Midas and I thought about stories a lot. We lived not very far away from a drive-in movie theatre, and so we would, as a family, watch movies from our porch, and I remember, because we couldn't hear them, I remember piecing together the stories that we couldn't hear, and I would tell my younger brother and my sister what I assumed was happening. So it was an early, early thing for me. I didn't know necessarily that I was studying it, I was just obsessed with it. What made it work and what made people laugh and what made them scared and what made them lean forward, that was fascinating to me, but I didn't know I had any particular gift for it, until I guess I was in the seventh or eighth grade when a friend of mine did a drawing and he said to me, Brian, come up with a story for this drawing because you're good at that. I didn't know I was good at it, right. It was so natural to me, and so I just pursued that path. I wanted to be a director. Before that, before the 70s, not every director was a writer, but in the 70s, it seemed like every director was a writer. So Francis Ford Coppola was a writer, Steven Spielberg was a writer, George Lucas was a writer. So I thought that's what you had to do. And I had dyslexia, so writing scared me, it was difficult for me, but wanting to tell stories overrode that, and I just thought that's what I had to do, so I just kept doing it and pretty soon, accidentally became an expert at it, where people would start asking me for advice and the people who started asking me for advice were higher and higher up the food chain. I remember I was on a plane next to some award winning writer and I happened to be sitting next to him and I was star struck that I got to sit next to him on this plane and we were talking and I thought we were just talking about story stuff and then he said, do you mind if I take notes? So I thought, okay, maybe I've got something, but I didn't think anything I was saying was worthy of taking notes, but he did. Yeah, and then I wrote the book for two reasons. I submitted a screenplay to Disney for their fellowship program, and it was rejected in the first round, and I didn't think that was right, and they also gave me a list of books I could read about screenwriting, and I was so angry and I thought, have you read these books, because I could write one of these books, and so I did. So then I had a student, the first class I ever taught, I didn't mean to be a teacher, it happened accidentally. I needed some money and somebody needed a screenwriting teacher and so, I said, well, sure, I'll try it. It turns out I had a talent for it that I didn't know I had. So a woman in my class said to me, oh, you should write a book, and I said yeah, people say that, and she looked me dead in the eye and she said, no, you're good at this, you're good at communicating it, you have a responsibility to write a book. So those two things made me write the book.  Ula Ojiaku  I'm thankful, because when you experienced those things and sometimes they seem negative in the moment. So who would have thought that being rejected for a fellowship with Disney would lead to better things in my view, of bigger, better things. It's really amazing. I'm glad you did because we wouldn't be having this conversation if you didn't. Thank you again. Your work is affecting even other generations. I know my children definitely are big fans already. You being a storyteller and I don't want to read your book out to the audience, how would you define storytelling?  Brian McDonald First you have to define story. I noticed that most people who teach writing, who teach anything about story, just start talking about it without defining it, and it has a definition, story has a definition, and I find that people are using the word story, it's become a very hip word at this moment and I'll tell you what made me look it up. I heard an interview with a jazz bassist on the radio and this jazz bassist, I wish I could remember who it was, but apparently if you play jazz, this is the bassist you want, and the interviewer said, well, how did you become that guy? How did you become the guy everybody wants? And he said, well, I was a bassist for a long time and I was pretty good, and he said, one day I decided to look up bass in the dictionary, and he said, a bass is a foundation. Everything is built on the bass, and he said, once I understood that, I knew what my job was, and I became a better bassist. So, I'm like, I should probably look up the definition of what I do. So, I looked up the word story, and one of the definitions, now I've altered the definition and I'll tell you why, but I've altered it slightly. So a story is the telling or retelling of a series of events leading to a conclusion, meaning having a point. So one of the first questions I asked my classes is ‘what a story is', and I let them struggle with it for a while because, once you hear it, it sounds like, of course, that's what it is. So I let them struggle for minutes, uncomfortable minutes coming up with all these things, because then they know they didn't know. Before they would say nothing. Now I think they've heard some of what I say or read it somewhere and they come back like they're repeating something I said, but without understanding it. So they'll say a series of events and I'll be like, no, it's not a series of events. It's the telling or retelling of a series of events. Right. That's a huge part of it. Right. So also leading to a conclusion, which I think is a huge part of it, and that's the part I added. Now, here's the thing, I don't know if you know how they write dictionaries, but how they write dictionaries is they go around and they ask people they think are smart, what words mean. That's what they do. That's how they do it. What do you think this word means? And then they get a consensus. And so this many people thought this, that's why you have a number one and number two and number three. Well, people who know that stuff are word people. I'm not a word person. I'm a story person. These are different things. We conflate the two things. We think they're the same, but they're not the same. You don't need words at all to tell a story. The first 30 years of movies were silent, ask any choreographer or dancer or pantomimist, you don't need it, right? We put them together, but they don't necessarily go together. The people who define story as the telling or retelling of a series of events are word people, but as a storyteller, I know that stories have a function. So they are leading to a conclusion. So that's the part I added, because they were word people, not story people, and for a story person, that was not a definition for me that worked, but I think that my definition helps people write stories, whereas the other definition does not. Ula Ojiaku Can I ask you a question about your definition of a story, because you said it's leading to a conclusion. Would you say that the storyteller has to tell that conclusion, or is this something that the people being told the story would infer or a mixture? Brian McDonald Oh that depends. So a lot of times people will talk about resolution, that a story needs to resolve, happily ever after, but if you look in the east, they don't necessarily resolve, but they do conclude, they do allow you to draw a conclusion. A lot of Zen parables are like that, where it's almost as if it's left hanging, but it isn't exactly left hanging. I talk about this in my book, Land of the Dead, but there's a story about a monk and he's walking through the jungle, he sees a tiger, and the tiger starts to chase him, so he's running from this tiger, and he gets to the edge of a cliff, and so he's got the tiger behind him, and he's got the cliff in front of him, and he doesn't know what to do, he jumps, but he catches himself on a branch, a little branch, and the branch is starting to give way and there are these jagged rocks below. So if he falls, that's it. On the end of the branch, there are three strawberries growing, and he reaches out and he grabs strawberries and he eats them, and they're the best strawberries he's ever had. That's the end of that story, because the conclusion is all about how precious life becomes when we know it's near the end, and we could take that into our lives because we never know when it's going to be over, right, so that's a conclusion to be drawn from the story. It doesn't resolve - does he get out of it? How does he get out of it? What happens when… it doesn't resolve, but it concludes. So I like the word conclusion more than I like the word resolution. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Brian. So now that you've laid the foundation for us on what a story is, what's storytelling then? Brian McDonald Well, you have to then ask what stories are for. Why do people tell stories? All around the world, in every culture, in every time, human beings have been storytellers. Why? Now people will come back and they'll say entertainment. That's not why you. You don't need stories to entertain. There's lots of things you could do. Think about it for a second. We tell stories all the time. We think we're just talking, but we tell stories all the time when we're having conversations. We don't even know we're telling stories, but we do it all the time. Then we tell ourselves stories. You have an imaginary conversation with somebody, right? Well, then he'll say this and then I'll say this and then he'll say that, and then I'll say…so you're telling yourself the story. You do it all the time, right? And then when you come home and you want to relax, you'll find a story either on your television or your phone or a book, that's the way we relax, so we do it all day long, right? And then we want to relax and we find a story to relax too. Then we go to sleep and we tell ourselves stories when we sleep. Well, that's a lot of energy for one thing, and the only conclusion I can draw is that it's a survival mechanism, because that's just the way evolution works. It had to have been selected for. The people who didn't tell stories are not here, so it has to be selected for, and anything that's selected for has an evolutionary advantage. There's no other animal that would spend that much time doing anything if it wasn't related to their survival, it doesn't make sense. And there are clues to this. So, some of the clues are, first of all, you'll notice with children. If you tell children it's story time, they lose their mind, and I think the reason they do that is because they are new to the world and they need to know how it works, and stories tell them how it works. So they are feeding in a way. I think story stories and food are very close together in terms of how important they are to us. As a matter of fact, if you found yourself in some place or something without food, you would start to immediately think of stories about people in that situation and how they got out of it. So that's one clue. The other clue is that any writing teacher will tell you that stories need conflict, that you have to have conflict in the story, and they would always say to me when I would ask as a kid, well, why, and they'd say, it's more interesting, for me, that's not really an answer. I think because I'm dyslexic, I have to go to the very basic part of it. Like, no, that's not an answer. There's an answer, and it's that conflict is the thing that we're trying to survive. Stories aren't necessarily entertaining, but they are engaging. Sometimes entertaining, sometimes they're just engaging, take Schindler's List. Is that entertaining? No, but it's engaging, so I think that the reason that we find stories engaging, and sometimes entertaining is because nature wants us to engage in that activity. It's why food tastes good. It wants us to engage in that activity. So it's a by-product, entertainment is a by-product of good storytelling. Ula Ojiaku It makes perfect sense, and I've watched a few of your episodes on the You Are A Storyteller podcast on your website writeinvisibleink.com and you said something about that stories can heal, can save lives. So it's not just about the entertainment factor. Can you expand on that, please? Brian McDonald Now, it's funny, I talk about survival and a lot of times people go immediately to physical survival, but there's all kinds of survival, so there's cultural survival, there is social survival, don't act this way, act that way. There is emotional or spiritual survival, and you'll see that with support groups, 12 step programmes, anything like that, where stories are medicinal, both the sharing of the story and the taking in of the story. Again, nature wants us to engage in that activity, and so we don't even know we're doing it. When I was a kid, we moved from one neighbourhood to another and it snowed one day and a friend of mine said, a new friend of mine, he said he came to the house and he said, hey, we're going to Dawson Hill. I didn't know what it was. What's Dawson Hill? Well, it's a big hill. There's a Dawson Street was the street. It's a big hill, and everybody goes sledding down this hill when it snows. Okay, so I go up there, and when I get up there, I hear this story. I probably told this story later, I don't remember, but I'm sure I did, I heard it retold to new kids all the time. So when you were a new kid in the neighbourhood, you would hear this story. There was a kid about a generation older than us. I actually worked with a woman years later who was from the same neighbourhood, and said she knew that story. She knew the story. She's a generation older than me, she knew the story. So anyway, a kid was going on an inner tube down the hill and he hit a utility pole and he got the wind knocked out of him and everybody gathered around, you know, are you okay, and it took him a minute to sort of recover, and he said, I'm fine, I'm okay, I'm fine, and he stayed for a little while, but after a while said he wasn't feeling well and he went home and took a nap and he never woke up because he had broken a rib and punctured an organ and was bleeding internally and didn't know it. Now, kids tell that story because that's the kind of story kids tell, right, but what were they saying to me? They were giving me survival information. Look, be careful going down this hill. They could have said that, that doesn't stick. The stories are what we've evolved to take in. So that doesn't stick. So, they don't even know they're doing it. This is how natural it is, they're just telling a story they think is creepy or interesting, whatever they think, but what they're saying is, be careful going down that hill, and if you do get hurt, you may not know how hurt you are, so get yourself checked out or let your parents know or something like that. There's two bits of survival information in that story. That's how natural it is. We do it all the time. And we navigate the world that way all the time, we just don't know we're doing it, and that's another thing, it's so natural. It's like breathing, there are people who study breath and how you breathe, but that's a whole field of study because we ignore it, and I think story is one of those things, as far as I know, you can go to school and you can study journalism and you can study medieval literature and you can study French poetry from whenever, you can study all of these things about writing, but I don't know if you can get a degree anywhere on story itself, which I find fascinating. Ula Ojiaku Unless you want to change that. Brian McDonald Maybe I will. I knew a woman who was a playwright and she would come to me for advice about storytelling, and she had a degree in playwriting. And I said, well, what did they teach you when you were in school? She said, it never came up. So it's interesting to me that we don't study that, which is the common denominator across all those other things. All those other disciplines have story at their core. Ula Ojiaku And that's what you were saying, the common denominator in The Golden Theme, I have digital copies of the other books, but The Golden Theme, that was what you were saying, that storytelling is the common denominator, if I remember correctly, but it's like something that runs through all of us as human beings. Brian McDonald Well, the thing is this, that stories have a point, they have a reason to be told, and I was looking for the thing that all stories had in common. One of the things, and again, this goes back to being dyslexic, but one of the things dyslexics do well, is see connections that other people miss. I'm bad with details, but I can see the big picture of things. Let's take the movie Seven Samurai was made into the movie Magnificent Seven. So it takes a samurai movie, they make it into a Western. What I see when I see those things is I say, this is about people learning how to stand up for themselves, this is about all these other things, and that doesn't matter if it's a Western or if it's, so I just see that how they're the same. The differences are superficial to me, I don't see those. So when people say what genre, if I'm writing something with genre, I'm like, I know what you mean, I don't know why it matters. I don't say that part, but I don't, because what matters is, is it compelling? Is it true about being a human being? Does it get to a truth? That's the important thing for me, and so I was looking for the common thread. Every story will have what I call an armature and I can explain what that is, but I thought, there's a common armature, there's got to be, that links all stories, and I thought about it for a long time. As a matter of fact, one of the things that got me started thinking about it was, I was walking through a cemetery with a friend of mine, we were working on a project, and it was a cemetery near where I lived, it's actually the cemetery where Bruce Lee is buried, and my mum is there now, which would have thrilled her to be close to Bruce Lee, but I was walking through that cemetery with a friend of mine and I said, you know, if these people could talk, I bet they would just have one thing to tell us. And he said, what? I go, I don't know, but I bet they'd have one thing to say that they would think this is the most, and I thought about that for a long time, so both The Golden Theme and Land of the Dead came out of that walk through the cemetery. So I thought about it for years, and in fact, it's a strange thing, I didn't even know it was happening. You know that sound of a chalkboard and the chalk, that sound, that was in my head constantly like I was working out some kind of equation, and I don't know if I'm synesthetic or something, but I could hear it, and then one day it stopped, and it was quiet, and what I call now The Golden Theme came to me. The one thing that the cemetery said and the thing that stories have in common is that we are all the same. That's what the cemetery tells you. We're all the same. We're all going to die one day. We all worry about the same stuff. We all care about the same things, and the closer you get to that in a story, because that's the underlying baseline, the more that story resonates with people, the more they see themselves in somebody they don't expect to see themselves in, the more it resonates. Wait, that person's nothing like me and yet they're everything like me, right? So that I think is what's underneath. That's what The Golden Theme is, is that recognition, because stories wouldn't work if that weren't true. For instance, if I say to you, I was walking on the beach and I was barefoot and there was hot sand between my toes. If I say that to you, the only way that you understand it is to put yourself there. Ula Ojiaku In your book, Invisible Ink, you also delved a little bit into the neuroscience, how our brains work and that our brains are wired for storytelling. When someone is telling a story and we're relating to it, the same parts of our brain are being kind of lit up and active, as if we were the people. Brian McDonald Because of the mirror neurons that we have. If you see somebody doing something, your brain does not know the difference between you doing it and them doing it, it doesn't recognise the difference and so the same part of your brain lights up. They'll show people smiling in a picture and have people in an MRI and the smile part of the brain lights up when that happens, and the frowns and all of that stuff. So that's a further proof of The Golden Theme, but also that's how we get the lesson from the story, because we put ourselves there, if we couldn't put ourselves there, we wouldn't get the lesson from the story and we wouldn't get the survival information. We would basically say, well, that happened to them and it would have nothing to do with you. And in fact, there are people like that, and we call those people, we will say, well, that guy, he's got to learn things the hard way. What does that mean? That means they don't listen to other people's stories, that's all it could mean. If there's a hard way, there's got to be an easy way, right? Ula Ojiaku The easy way is listening to people's stories and learning from them instead of you going through the experience. Brian McDonald Yeah, there's a saying that where there is an old person, nothing need go wrong. What that means is they have all the stories, so when there's a drought, go to them, they've been through five droughts. I think as we get older and our bodies fail and all of that, what we become is a collection of stories, and this is where we get the idea of that's where the wisdom is because that is what, before the internet, old people were the internet. That's the natural internet, the old people who have been through a lot and know things and have seen more patterns as you get older, you see more patterns, you're like, oh, I see where this is going to go. Ula Ojiaku And to be honest, you're not by any stretch old or anything, but one of the reasons I have this podcast is to hear people's stories and gather as much from people's experiences, to learn. So it's not really about posting it to the world, it's selfish, it's for me to ask questions of the people. So, like you said, people are a collection of stories, not necessarily just about the age, but just saying that's one of the reasons I want to hear your story. What happened? What made you do this? What made you do that? And I find myself, maybe let's see, tomorrow, a few weeks from now, I'll be like, oh, Brian said he went through this and I'm seeing something, I'm playing out and I'm instinctively knowing how it's going to play out, and then, oh, he said he did XYZ and okay, maybe I should try that and it works. Sorry, it's not about me, but I'm just saying I resonate with what you're saying. Brian McDonald It's just a very normal, natural thing, and I think it usually goes, it can go older to younger, but it can often go more experienced to less experienced, which is really the bigger thing. So I used to work with combat veterans that had PTSD, and I used to help them tell their stories to help with their healing, and I would ask them about storytelling in their work, and I'd say, okay, so you get deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or something, are there stories before you go? And they were like, yes, there's lots of stories, because that's a highly dangerous situation, so people have a lot of stories about that. People who have been before say, make sure this happens, make sure you don't do this, make sure you do that. They said there's stories when you're going, there's stories when you get there, and there's stories about when you're about to leave, because what I was told was, there are lots of incidents where people are on their last few days of deployment and that's when they get hurt or killed, because they get careless. So the stories are saying, be as careful on your last day as your first day, and that's just naturally happening. I think if people start paying attention now, often they're getting that kind of information, it changes how you hear stories, it changes how you listen to stories. There is this idea, this cliche, particularly in this culture, I don't know how many cultures have it, but in the United States, it's big and it's, oh, grandpa and his stories, or grandma and her stories, on and on and on, and blah, blah, blah with their stories. Here's the thing about that, they're just trying to help you survive. That's all that's happening, and if you listen, because you know, those people aren't going to be around forever and then you'll later, you go, why didn't I ask about this? Why didn't I ask about that? That's what happens. So just listen over and over again, even if you heard it 50 times, because there's going to be a time when you're going to want all those details, I guarantee you. If you listen that way, you listen differently. You start listening for how are they trying to help you survive, and it may not be apparent immediately. So I was in an improv class once and there was a woman in the improv class, Melissa was her name, and we're taking a break and we're having a talk and she used to be a flight attendant, and I said to her during this break, well, what was that like, and did anything weird ever happen on a plane or, you know, I was hoping she'd tell me about a UFO or something, but what she said was, well, she said a couple people died on flights I was on. She goes, that was a weird experience, but then she remembered something, and she said, oh, there was this one time there was a kid who kept getting up and running to the bathroom. She didn't say how old this kid was, but a young kid kept getting up, running to the bathroom and then coming back to his seat and then kept doing this, and he was annoying all the flight attendants, but Melissa said I was concerned. So I went up to the mother and I said, is your son okay, and the woman said, I think so, and she goes, well, I'm just concerned, he keeps getting up and going to the bathroom. And then she said, I noticed that his lips were a little swollen, and she said, I remembered a story that my parents had told me about my father having a fish allergy, where his lips swelled like that, his throat closed up, and he almost died. She said to the mother, is your son allergic to anything? And the mother said, I don't know. Melissa said, I think he might be having an allergic reaction. She checked the menu. They had served a salad that had shrimp in it. She said, I think this is what's happening. She's able to get on the phone from the plane to a clinic, they told her what to do, there was a doctor on the flight and when the plane landed, there was a team ready to help this kid. Now, when Melissa heard that story about her father, she did not think, here's information. She was just concerned about her father, but when she needed that information, that story was right there. We do that all the time. We just don't know we do it. It was right there. So even if you think this story is irrelevant, that this old person is telling me, you don't know that yet, it could be really relevant later on. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for listening to Part 1 of our conversation with Brian McDonald. Be sure to tune in for Part 2, coming up soon. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless.    

Watchers        Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn't used to afternoon drinking. They can't hear Zany over the Krebbs' crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany's little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.        The fingertips on Zany's bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.        There's nothing wrong with Zany's arm, but that isn't the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she's up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I'll take you across my knee. I don't care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.        Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom's salvaged lamps. “Why don't you do that in your room?”  Dad didn't like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones.  She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn't the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?        Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It's hard to budge through Mom's junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don't own a cat.  Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.        “You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.        Zany hates Mom's manly haircut and has said so. “It's Gig's turn!”        Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany's attic where Mom's hoard had been disallowed, but it's begun trickling up. “No, it's not!” Gig's transistor blares louder.        “Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”        Mom can't stand looking at the neighbor's wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she'll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won't be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol's mother did for chump change.        Zany's legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she's running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It's a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.”       A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom's, and Vi wears an apron and dime store lipstick while she does it. Fresh peas instead of canned. Real mashed potatoes instead of instant. Vi is a better housekeeper, too, organizing Mom's trash into four-foot piles that line the walls. Every day Mom trolls back alleys and neighbors' garbage in dingy clothes that make her look like a hobo. That's what the kids say:  Your mom looks like a hobo. She pulls a rickety cart and loads it with moldy linens, rolled-up rugs, dented wastebaskets. Zany wonders if Dad regrets marrying the wrong sister. She knows he regrets not having a son, a boy who could have been Lester if Dad had a different heart. Instead, Dad got Lester on at the blast furnace, because “No one sleeps under my roof for free.” Who needs a high school diploma?        In the kitchen, Aunt Vi lets out one of her sobs. She only does that in private after Mom's third scolding: “He's dead, Vi. Crying won't bring him back.”        Zany misses Uncle Mo, too. His pocketful of peppermints. The trick coin he always plucked from Zany's ear. The last time Zany's family visited, she walked through their decrepit Franklin Arms apartment with its spongy floors and clanking pipes, but no maze of debris to negotiate. No cat piss smell or sister blaring the radio. She found Lester in his room at a child's desk he'd outgrown, doughy boy that he then was, doing homework without being nagged.  Astounding. His room was spartan, plenty of space for a second bed if Zany asked Aunt Vi sweetly enough. But no. Zany couldn't abandon Andy in his Dawson Street sickbed. Lester's only wall decoration was a world map strung with red yarn radiating from Pittsburgh to France, China, the South Pole. She wanted to ask why those destinations, but didn't, entranced as she was by all that fresh-aired openness, plus his feverishly scribbling hand.       Now, Aunt Vi leans in the dining room dabbing her face with a dishtowel. She's aged a decade since moving here and it isn't all due to grief. She targets Zany on the floor. “Everything all right in here?”        Zany has stopped breathing. Her eyes are glazed and her tongue lolls from her mouth.  She's getting better at playing dead.        “All right then.” Aunt Vi is getting better at not reacting. The screen door slams behind her.        Zany pulls in her tongue and inhales. She starts counting bricks again until Aunt Vi calls: “There they are!” as she does every workday.        Zany pictures Dad and Lester padding up Dawson. Wet hair slicked back because they shower off the stench before coming home. Zany appreciates that. Their boots scrape the steps to the porch where Aunt Vi will take their lunchpails. And there she is coming through the door and dashing to rinse their thermoses at the kitchen sink. Mom will stay put and pour Dad a finger of scotch.        Lester bangs inside and pauses in the dining room entryway. He's leaner now on account of the physical labor. Taller too. He eyes Zany's bandaged arm, not with Aunt Vi's alarm, but with the kind of baffled wonder Zany has always been after. Their eyes meet and it's the same look he gave her the day she walked backward all the way to the Eliza Number Two—not  because Dad and Lester worked there, but because it was lunchtime, and a gaggle of men would  be eating beneath that pin oak by the furnace entrance. And there they were, her father among them, not easy to see having to crane her neck as Zany picked her way over the railroad tracks.        “What the hell is she doing?” said Tom Folsom. Zany recognized her neighbor's voice.  “She's off her nut,” said another worker.       Zany twisted fully around to see if her father would defend her, but he was already hustling back to the furnace.        “Something's not right with that girl,” said Folsom.        “Nothing wrong with her,” said Lester from beneath a different tree where he ate his cheese sandwich alone.        Folsom spit in the grass. “Shut up, fairy boy.”        Lester wasn't a fairy boy, Zany knew.        Today, leaning in the dining room, Lester looks as if he can see inside Zany's skull to the conjured Factory room she and Andy will one day share: walls scrubbed clean and painted white.  Her drawings or paintings lining the walls in tidy rows. Maybe sculptures aligned on shelves. Or mobiles overhead spinning in the breeze. Lester nods at her fantasy as if it's a good one. He has his own escapism. Zany knows that too, and she looks away first so her eyes won't let him know that she knows.        Lester heads to the cellar where he spends most of his time. Mom partitioned off the back corner for him with clothesline and a bed sheet. Installed an army cot and gooseneck lamp on a crate. Andy Warhol holed up in the cellar when he was a kid developing film in a jerry-rigged darkroom. Zany constructed one from an oversized cardboard box she wedged into that shadowy space beneath the stairs. She cut a closable door in the box and regularly folds herself inside to catalogue her achievements in a notebook. Stood barefoot on a hot tar patch on Frazier Street for seventy-two seconds. Mr. Braddock called me a dolt, but I said: You're the dolt!        From below, the sound of Lester falling onto his cot followed by a sigh so deep Zany's lungs exhale, too. Whatever dreams he had got buried under apartment rubble along with Uncle Mo.       Outside, Dad has taken Aunt Vi's creaky rocker. “He's a strange one,” he says about Lester. “What's he up to down there?”        Mom says, “Who the hell knows?”        Zany clamps her unbandaged hand over her mouth to keep that knowledge from spilling.  She saw what he was up to the day she was tucked in her box and forgot time until footsteps pounded the stairs above her. She peeked through the peephole she'd punched into her cardboard door as Lester peeled off his shirt, his pants. He left on his boxers and socks. Didn't bother to draw his sheet curtain, just plopped on the cot and lit a cigarette. His smoking still surprised her. The boy he once was was also buried under rubble. Zany regretted not making her presence known, but then it was too late with Lester in his underwear, and all. Plus, she was captivated by his fingers pulling the cigarette to his lips. The little smoke rings he sent up to the floor joists. She wondered if he was dreaming of China or the South Pole, or just sitting quietly at his too-small desk back in his apartment inhaling all that fresh air. Finally, he snubbed out the cigarette in an empty tuna can. Zany hoped he would roll over for sleep, but he slid a much-abused magazine from beneath his pillow and turned pages. Even in the scant light Zany made out the naked lady on the cover. Zany's heart thudded, even more so when Lester's hand slipped beneath his waistband and started moving up and down, up and down. She told her eyes to close but they wouldn't, both entranced and nauseated by what she shouldn't be seeing. She knew what he was up to, having done her own exploring when she had her own room. She'd conjure Andy Warhol's face and mouth and delicate hands—because those rumors weren't true. They just weren't. Harder to explore in the bed she now shared with Gig. Stupid Aunt Vi, and stupid collapsed Franklin Arms.       What Lester was up to looked angry. Violent, even. A jittery burn galloped beneath Zany's skin and she bit her lip, drawing blood. But she couldn't look away from Lester's furious hand, his eyes ogling that magazine until they squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a grimace that did not look like joy. The magazine collapsed onto his chest and his belly shuddered. Only then did Zany close her eyes as the burn leaked through her skin. When Lester's snores came, she tiptoed upstairs to collapse on Andy's echo. She caught Lester seven more times, if caught is the right word, lying in wait as she was, hoping to see, hoping not to.  “You better be setting the table!” Mom yells now from the porch.        Zany grunts and makes her way to the kitchen where Aunt Vi pulls a roast from the oven.  Zany heaves a stack of plates to the dining room and deals them out like playing cards.  “Don't break my dishes!” Mom calls. I hate your hair, Zany wants to say.  There is a crash, but it's not dishes. It comes from overhead where Gig screams.  Thumping on the stairs as she thunders down, transistor in hand. “Zany!”  Gig rushes into the dining room, ponytail swaying, eyes landing on her sister. “He's been shot!”        Zany's mind hurtles back two months to when Martin Luther King was killed. Riots erupted in Pittsburgh's Black neighborhoods: The Hill District and Homewood and Manchester.  “Who?” Zany says, conjuring possibilities: LBJ, Sidney Portier. But to Zany, it's much worse.        “Andy Warhol!”        Zany counts this as the meanest lie Gig's ever told. “He was not.”        “Yes, he was!” Gig turns up the radio and the announcer confirms it: a crazed woman shot Warhol in his Factory.       Aunt Vi comes at Zany with her arms wide, because she understands loss. “Oh, honey.”  Zany bats her hands away. “It's not true.”        Vi backs into Mom's hoard. “Is he dead?”        Gig says: “They don't know.”        Zany can't stomach the smug look on Gig's face, as if she holds Andy's life or death between her teeth. Zany wants to slap that look off, so she does.        Gig screams.        “What the hell's going on in there?” Mom calls.        “Zany hit me!” Gig says at the very moment Aunt Vi says: “Andy Warhol's been shot!”  “No he wasn't!” Zany says again, wanting to slap them both.        Mom and Dad hustle inside where Gig cups her reddening cheek and bawls louder.  “It's nothing,” Mom says at the sight of her sniveling daughter, but Dad enfolds Gig in his arms. “There, there.”        “Don't coddle that child,” says Mom, and for once Zany agrees.        “Now, Mae.” Dad cups the back of Gig's head and there's a different look on her face.  Triumph, maybe.        Pounding on the shared duplex wall, Evie Krebbs, who never could shush that wailing baby. “Andy Warhol's been shot!” she calls to them. “Did you all hear?”        “We heard,” Mom answers as the baby cries louder, and so does Gig, who won't be upstaged. Mom says: “That's the price of fame I guess.”        “Being shot?” says Aunt Vi.        “Put yourself in the public eye and anything's liable to happen. Lotta kooks in this world.”       The neighbor kids' chant sounds in Zany's head: Your mother's a hobo.        “I'd rather be shot than a hobo,” says Zany.        Mom's head snaps back. “What the hell's that supposed to mean?”        Zany doesn't fully know what she means, or maybe she does.        Dad says, “Turn up the radio and see if he's dead.”        Zany doesn't want to know the answer, and to keep him alive she runs to the basement where Andy will always be a sickly boy developing film. Never mind Lester in his bed sending smoke rings up to the floor joists. Never mind her family still jabbering overhead.       Zany dashes to her cardboard box and closes the door, her body shaking, but not from any disease. Andy can't be dead. He just can't, because if he is Zany will never make it to New York. Will never pound on his Factory door. She will never be famous enough for someone to shoot.        She doesn't know she's sobbing until Lester's voice drifts over. “Zany?”        It's hard to speak with that hand gripping her throat and her father overhead still babbling: “Turn it up, Gig.” All Zany eeks out is a sob.        Lester's skinny voice slips through that slit in her door. “Zany?”        The grip loosens and Zany puts her eye to the peephole.        There he is, Lester, on his narrow cot in the windowless cellar where he now lives. He slides his hand into his waistband and he tilts his head toward her. “Are you watching?”  Zany's breathing settles, and the overhead voices disappear taking with them the possibility of Andy's death. Her eyes widens so she can take it all in, the violent strokes, his contorting face, because she won't look away from Lester's pain, or hers.  Finally, she answers him: “Yes.” 

Well, this could be awkward: when we last featured a story on the podcast a year ago, it also focused on parasocial relationships and included masturbation! This time around, we are again in deft hands. Marie Manilla's short story “Watchers”, set in 1968 Pittsburgh with both the steel mills and Andy Warhol as vital elements, is replete with narrative and thematic echoes that satisfy and leave us wanting more at the same time. Tune in for this lively discussion which touches on budding creative and identity-based aspirations, celebrity, performance art, pain in public and private, and much more. Give it a listen -- you know you want to! (Remember you can read or listen to the full story first, as there are spoilers! Just scroll down the page for the episode on our website.)   (We also welcome editor Lisa Zerkle to the table for her first show!) At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest   Listen to the story Watchers in its entirety (separate from podcast reading)   Parasocial relationships https://mashable.com/article/parasocial-relationships-definition-meaning   Andy Warhol's childhood home in Pittsburgh (the setting of this story) http://www.warhola.com/warholahouse.html   “History” article about Andy Warhol's shooting by Valerie Solanas https://www.history.com/news/andy-warhol-shot-valerie-solanas-the-factory    I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996 film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Shot_Andy_Warhol      ** Fun Fact 1: the original poster for the 1996 film hangs in Jason's apartment.   ** Fun Fact 2: the actor who portrayed Valerie Solanas in “I Shot Andy Warhol”, Lili Taylor, is married to three-time PBQ-published author Nick Flynn.   Nick Flynn's author page on PBQ http://pbqmag.org/tag/nick-flynn/   Dangerous Art: The Weapons of Performance Artist Chris Burden https://www.theartstory.org/blog/dangerous-art-the-weapons-of-performance-artist-chris-burden/ In her fiction and essays, West Virginia writer Marie Manilla delights in presenting fuller, perhaps unexpected, portraits of Appalachians, especially those who live in urban areas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Marie's books include The Patron Saint of Ugly, Shrapnel, and Still Life with Plums: Short Stories. She lives in Huntington, her hometown, with her Pittsburgh-born husband, Don.   Instagram and Facebook: @MarieManilla, Author website    Watchers        Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn't used to afternoon drinking. They can't hear Zany over the Krebbs' crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany's little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.        The fingertips on Zany's bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.        There's nothing wrong with Zany's arm, but that isn't the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she's up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I'll take you across my knee. I don't care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.        Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom's salvaged lamps. “Why don't you do that in your room?”  Dad didn't like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones.  She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn't the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?        Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It's hard to budge through Mom's junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don't own a cat.  Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.        “You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.        Zany hates Mom's manly haircut and has said so. “It's Gig's turn!”        Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany's attic where Mom's hoard had been disallowed, but it's begun trickling up. “No, it's not!” Gig's transistor blares louder.        “Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”        Mom can't stand looking at the neighbor's wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she'll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won't be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol's mother did for chump change.        Zany's legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she's running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It's a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.”       A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom's, and Vi wears an apron and dime store lipstick while she does it. Fresh peas instead of canned. Real mashed potatoes instead of instant. Vi is a better housekeeper, too, organizing Mom's trash into four-foot piles that line the walls. Every day Mom trolls back alleys and neighbors' garbage in dingy clothes that make her look like a hobo. That's what the kids say:  Your mom looks like a hobo. She pulls a rickety cart and loads it with moldy linens, rolled-up rugs, dented wastebaskets. Zany wonders if Dad regrets marrying the wrong sister. She knows he regrets not having a son, a boy who could have been Lester if Dad had a different heart. Instead, Dad got Lester on at the blast furnace, because “No one sleeps under my roof for free.” Who needs a high school diploma?        In the kitchen, Aunt Vi lets out one of her sobs. She only does that in private after Mom's third scolding: “He's dead, Vi. Crying won't bring him back.”        Zany misses Uncle Mo, too. His pocketful of peppermints. The trick coin he always plucked from Zany's ear. The last time Zany's family visited, she walked through their decrepit Franklin Arms apartment with its spongy floors and clanking pipes, but no maze of debris to negotiate. No cat piss smell or sister blaring the radio. She found Lester in his room at a child's desk he'd outgrown, doughy boy that he then was, doing homework without being nagged.  Astounding. His room was spartan, plenty of space for a second bed if Zany asked Aunt Vi sweetly enough. But no. Zany couldn't abandon Andy in his Dawson Street sickbed. Lester's only wall decoration was a world map strung with red yarn radiating from Pittsburgh to France, China, the South Pole. She wanted to ask why those destinations, but didn't, entranced as she was by all that fresh-aired openness, plus his feverishly scribbling hand.       Now, Aunt Vi leans in the dining room dabbing her face with a dishtowel. She's aged a decade since moving here and it isn't all due to grief. She targets Zany on the floor. “Everything all right in here?”        Zany has stopped breathing. Her eyes are glazed and her tongue lolls from her mouth.  She's getting better at playing dead.        “All right then.” Aunt Vi is getting better at not reacting. The screen door slams behind her.        Zany pulls in her tongue and inhales. She starts counting bricks again until Aunt Vi calls: “There they are!” as she does every workday.        Zany pictures Dad and Lester padding up Dawson. Wet hair slicked back because they shower off the stench before coming home. Zany appreciates that. Their boots scrape the steps to the porch where Aunt Vi will take their lunchpails. And there she is coming through the door and dashing to rinse their thermoses at the kitchen sink. Mom will stay put and pour Dad a finger of scotch.        Lester bangs inside and pauses in the dining room entryway. He's leaner now on account of the physical labor. Taller too. He eyes Zany's bandaged arm, not with Aunt Vi's alarm, but with the kind of baffled wonder Zany has always been after. Their eyes meet and it's the same look he gave her the day she walked backward all the way to the Eliza Number Two—not  because Dad and Lester worked there, but because it was lunchtime, and a gaggle of men would  be eating beneath that pin oak by the furnace entrance. And there they were, her father among them, not easy to see having to crane her neck as Zany picked her way over the railroad tracks.        “What the hell is she doing?” said Tom Folsom. Zany recognized her neighbor's voice.  “She's off her nut,” said another worker.       Zany twisted fully around to see if her father would defend her, but he was already hustling back to the furnace.        “Something's not right with that girl,” said Folsom.        “Nothing wrong with her,” said Lester from beneath a different tree where he ate his cheese sandwich alone.        Folsom spit in the grass. “Shut up, fairy boy.”        Lester wasn't a fairy boy, Zany knew.        Today, leaning in the dining room, Lester looks as if he can see inside Zany's skull to the conjured Factory room she and Andy will one day share: walls scrubbed clean and painted white.  Her drawings or paintings lining the walls in tidy rows. Maybe sculptures aligned on shelves. Or mobiles overhead spinning in the breeze. Lester nods at her fantasy as if it's a good one. He has his own escapism. Zany knows that too, and she looks away first so her eyes won't let him know that she knows.        Lester heads to the cellar where he spends most of his time. Mom partitioned off the back corner for him with clothesline and a bed sheet. Installed an army cot and gooseneck lamp on a crate. Andy Warhol holed up in the cellar when he was a kid developing film in a jerry-rigged darkroom. Zany constructed one from an oversized cardboard box she wedged into that shadowy space beneath the stairs. She cut a closable door in the box and regularly folds herself inside to catalogue her achievements in a notebook. Stood barefoot on a hot tar patch on Frazier Street for seventy-two seconds. Mr. Braddock called me a dolt, but I said: You're the dolt!        From below, the sound of Lester falling onto his cot followed by a sigh so deep Zany's lungs exhale, too. Whatever dreams he had got buried under apartment rubble along with Uncle Mo.       Outside, Dad has taken Aunt Vi's creaky rocker. “He's a strange one,” he says about Lester. “What's he up to down there?”        Mom says, “Who the hell knows?”        Zany clamps her unbandaged hand over her mouth to keep that knowledge from spilling.  She saw what he was up to the day she was tucked in her box and forgot time until footsteps pounded the stairs above her. She peeked through the peephole she'd punched into her cardboard door as Lester peeled off his shirt, his pants. He left on his boxers and socks. Didn't bother to draw his sheet curtain, just plopped on the cot and lit a cigarette. His smoking still surprised her. The boy he once was was also buried under rubble. Zany regretted not making her presence known, but then it was too late with Lester in his underwear, and all. Plus, she was captivated by his fingers pulling the cigarette to his lips. The little smoke rings he sent up to the floor joists. She wondered if he was dreaming of China or the South Pole, or just sitting quietly at his too-small desk back in his apartment inhaling all that fresh air. Finally, he snubbed out the cigarette in an empty tuna can. Zany hoped he would roll over for sleep, but he slid a much-abused magazine from beneath his pillow and turned pages. Even in the scant light Zany made out the naked lady on the cover. Zany's heart thudded, even more so when Lester's hand slipped beneath his waistband and started moving up and down, up and down. She told her eyes to close but they wouldn't, both entranced and nauseated by what she shouldn't be seeing. She knew what he was up to, having done her own exploring when she had her own room. She'd conjure Andy Warhol's face and mouth and delicate hands—because those rumors weren't true. They just weren't. Harder to explore in the bed she now shared with Gig. Stupid Aunt Vi, and stupid collapsed Franklin Arms.       What Lester was up to looked angry. Violent, even. A jittery burn galloped beneath Zany's skin and she bit her lip, drawing blood. But she couldn't look away from Lester's furious hand, his eyes ogling that magazine until they squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a grimace that did not look like joy. The magazine collapsed onto his chest and his belly shuddered. Only then did Zany close her eyes as the burn leaked through her skin. When Lester's snores came, she tiptoed upstairs to collapse on Andy's echo. She caught Lester seven more times, if caught is the right word, lying in wait as she was, hoping to see, hoping not to.  “You better be setting the table!” Mom yells now from the porch.        Zany grunts and makes her way to the kitchen where Aunt Vi pulls a roast from the oven.  Zany heaves a stack of plates to the dining room and deals them out like playing cards.  “Don't break my dishes!” Mom calls. I hate your hair, Zany wants to say.  There is a crash, but it's not dishes. It comes from overhead where Gig screams.  Thumping on the stairs as she thunders down, transistor in hand. “Zany!”  Gig rushes into the dining room, ponytail swaying, eyes landing on her sister. “He's been shot!”        Zany's mind hurtles back two months to when Martin Luther King was killed. Riots erupted in Pittsburgh's Black neighborhoods: The Hill District and Homewood and Manchester.  “Who?” Zany says, conjuring possibilities: LBJ, Sidney Portier. But to Zany, it's much worse.        “Andy Warhol!”        Zany counts this as the meanest lie Gig's ever told. “He was not.”        “Yes, he was!” Gig turns up the radio and the announcer confirms it: a crazed woman shot Warhol in his Factory.       Aunt Vi comes at Zany with her arms wide, because she understands loss. “Oh, honey.”  Zany bats her hands away. “It's not true.”        Vi backs into Mom's hoard. “Is he dead?”        Gig says: “They don't know.”        Zany can't stomach the smug look on Gig's face, as if she holds Andy's life or death between her teeth. Zany wants to slap that look off, so she does.        Gig screams.        “What the hell's going on in there?” Mom calls.        “Zany hit me!” Gig says at the very moment Aunt Vi says: “Andy Warhol's been shot!”  “No he wasn't!” Zany says again, wanting to slap them both.        Mom and Dad hustle inside where Gig cups her reddening cheek and bawls louder.  “It's nothing,” Mom says at the sight of her sniveling daughter, but Dad enfolds Gig in his arms. “There, there.”        “Don't coddle that child,” says Mom, and for once Zany agrees.        “Now, Mae.” Dad cups the back of Gig's head and there's a different look on her face.  Triumph, maybe.        Pounding on the shared duplex wall, Evie Krebbs, who never could shush that wailing baby. “Andy Warhol's been shot!” she calls to them. “Did you all hear?”        “We heard,” Mom answers as the baby cries louder, and so does Gig, who won't be upstaged. Mom says: “That's the price of fame I guess.”        “Being shot?” says Aunt Vi.        “Put yourself in the public eye and anything's liable to happen. Lotta kooks in this world.”       The neighbor kids' chant sounds in Zany's head: Your mother's a hobo.        “I'd rather be shot than a hobo,” says Zany.        Mom's head snaps back. “What the hell's that supposed to mean?”        Zany doesn't fully know what she means, or maybe she does.        Dad says, “Turn up the radio and see if he's dead.”        Zany doesn't want to know the answer, and to keep him alive she runs to the basement where Andy will always be a sickly boy developing film. Never mind Lester in his bed sending smoke rings up to the floor joists. Never mind her family still jabbering overhead.       Zany dashes to her cardboard box and closes the door, her body shaking, but not from any disease. Andy can't be dead. He just can't, because if he is Zany will never make it to New York. Will never pound on his Factory door. She will never be famous enough for someone to shoot.        She doesn't know she's sobbing until Lester's voice drifts over. “Zany?”        It's hard to speak with that hand gripping her throat and her father overhead still babbling: “Turn it up, Gig.” All Zany eeks out is a sob.        Lester's skinny voice slips through that slit in her door. “Zany?”        The grip loosens and Zany puts her eye to the peephole.        There he is, Lester, on his narrow cot in the windowless cellar where he now lives. He slides his hand into his waistband and he tilts his head toward her. “Are you watching?”  Zany's breathing settles, and the overhead voices disappear taking with them the possibility of Andy's death. Her eyes widens so she can take it all in, the violent strokes, his contorting face, because she won't look away from Lester's pain, or hers.  Finally, she answers him: “Yes.” 

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, today officially opened the doors to its new offices with four floors in the sought-after 60 Dawson Street in Dublin city centre. The relocation of the company's Irish headquarters will further support its growing business and employee base in the region. Mark Cockerill Senior Vice President, Legal for Corporate, M&A and International Development, @ServiceNow mentions organic growth is part of the ServiceNow story at the launch of their new Dublin office on Dawson St. @Irish_TechNews @agile_comms pic.twitter.com/c7kfi0s9rV The Tec Dr (@tecdr) April 9, 2024 The expansion of ServiceNow's Irish real estate footprint comes after the company announced its intention to create a further 400 new roles in June last year, effectively doubling its workforce in Ireland in the coming years. With half of those jobs already filled, the business is ahead of schedule in achieving that target. "We welcome ServiceNow's expanding presence in Ireland," said Neale Richmond TD, Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. "The move represents not only a boost to our robust tech sector but also a growing confidence in our local economy and the outstanding talent available. We look forward to a renewed promise of innovation, collaboration and shared prosperity." The new space will house more than 37 different global and regional teams across a range of core functions, including engineering, sales, global talent, digital technology, finance and legal. "Our move to a larger property is a result of our continued growth as the platform company of choice for digital business," said Mark Cockerill, Senior Vice President, Legal at ServiceNow. "Many of the roles that support our regional and global growth are increasingly being based in Ireland. These improved facilities will enhance the employee experience for our growing and diverse team and reflective of our continued investment in our people." Executive Director of IDA Ireland Mary Buckley said "As ServiceNow opens its new LEED Gold office in Dublin, it highlights Ireland's position as a premier destination for innovative companies seeking to expand their presence in Europe. This reinforces Ireland's standing as a dynamic, forward-thinking economy and is testament to the availability of talent." The state-of-the-art offices occupy almost 8,360 square metres across the top four floors of the prestigious premises. In addition to employee workspace, the offices feature dedicated training, collaboration and team-building spaces, as well as yoga and mothering rooms, meeting the needs of a modern and inclusive workspace. With a focus on quality, sustainability, and wellbeing, the smart infrastructure and open-air terraces are designed to enable workers to thrive. "ServiceNow has been present in Ireland since 2018 and it has been a key part of our rapid growth both globally and in EMEA, as corporations and governments across the world turn to the power of our platform to fulfil their digital needs and improve their speed and efficiency," added Cockerill. In the last five years, ServiceNow has grown from a handful of employees in Ireland to more than 600. The bolstered Irish office space is also testament to ServiceNow's strong employer brand, as recognised by Great Place to Work, firmly cementing its values of teamwork, belonging and customer-centricity in its company culture. Commenting on the opening, AmCham CEO Paul Sweetman said: "This investment by ServiceNow is a positive signal of the organisation's commitment to Ireland and speaks more broadly to the continued strength of US FDI and their investment in the country. To bolster this trajectory of growth, we must continue to provide at pace a future-proofed level of infrastructure, skills and competitiveness." See more stories here. More about Irish Tech News Irish Tech News are Ireland's No. 1 Online Tech Publication and of...

Going barefoot might be the latest trend in Hollywood but you won't catch Nessa slipping her shoes off for a walk around Dublin anytime soon. The supposed health benefits could be enough to convince Niamh to join the barefoot brigade, and she already has experience kicking off her heels at the end of a night out as she waited for a taxi on Dawson Street. The girls also chat about the importance of the right shoes for a marathon, despite Nessa's absolute refusal to run any long distance.

This podcast looks at forgotten story of the tsunami that hit Cork in 1755, the volcanic winter of 1816 and a meteor that was way to close for comfort in 1908. Although they dont feature prominently in history, they had huge impact at the time.Articles referenced in the show A seismic tsunami in the Irish annals, recorded at Iona in October 720 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.05224Folklore about the Cork tsunami http://www.deepmapscork.ie/past-to-present/climate/1755-lisbon-earthquake-tsunami-west-cork-coast/The Tunguska impact event and beyond https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/50/1/1.18/201316Narrations - Aidan CroweSound - Kate Dunlea. 
My new book a book a lethal legacy is out this Thursday. You can still pre-order and get 10% off when you use the discount code FD10 at Eason.*The launch takes place Thursday September 14th in Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street in Dublin at 6pm*. If you are in Dublin drop in if you are around. It would be lovely to put a face to a listener!  Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/irishhistory. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A new Pret A Manger is set to open on Dawson Street in Dublin. It adds to the Starbucks, McDonalds, Subways and countless other chain stores that are operating in our capital and throughout the country. Andrea was joined by listeners and business owners to discuss if chain stores add or take away from a city.

Bobby stopped into the Celtic Whisky Shop on Dublin's Dawson Street to see how trade is going and to chat with Katie Gibson, Marketing Manager, Store Manager, Darren Maher, and Wholesale Manager, Colm O'Connor.

On this weeks winter solstice show, Chris interviews Cr James Conlan, Moreland Council and Cr Rohan Leppert, City of Melbourne. Bicycle-themed news includes the impact of last fortnights horrific wind storms (Parks Victoria: Changed conditions and closures and Cycling Tips: Melbournes cycling paradise devastated by storm damage), Le Tour commencing this weekend, another attempt for a Womens Tour de France in 2022 and Yarra Councils long running Bicycle Advisory Committee changing its title and focus to either Sustainable Transport and/or Active Transport Advisory Committee.Cr James Conlan discusses Moreland Councils commitment to active transport, including future changes to De Carle Street, Coburg, making the area safer near a school, Albion Street lane work, pop up bike lanes on Dawson Street between the Upfield bike path and Brunswick Shimmy with Moreland councillors unanimously supporting these projects. Cr Conlan mentions that Moreland wants to have a proactive relationship with Department of Transport similar to that with City of Melbourne. Go to Conversations Moreland: Making walking and cycling safer in Moreland for more details and to make feedback supporting these initiatives.Cr Rohan Leppert discusses a independent review to be commissioned into researching data on changing transport patterns as in the last 12 months, as Melbourne has built protected bicycle lanes in line with Melbourne's Transport Strategy 2030, alongside a rapid mode shift in the CBD.  Rohan talks about micromobility, massive changes to food delivery, riding for transport, a reactionary backlash against bicycle infrastructure, Alice Clarkes excellent article 'Riding a bike is sweet freedom, even if it might kill me', four years of capital works included in the next budget meeting on 29 June 2021 and City of Melbournes offer to delivery the long awaited St Kilda separated bicycle lanes.Another reminder - it's 3CR Radiothon time: celebrate everything you love about riding your bike by making a donation to keep 3CR Community Radio and the Yarra BUG Radio Show on the air for another year and all donations over $2 are tax-deductible! 

In 1901 John Pearson and Joseph Smith began to manufacture gates and fencing.  Their showrooms and offices were situated at 47 Dawson Street, Dublin.The company exported high quality ironwork to the British colonies and to South America, and their business expanded to manufacture structural steelwork.This podcast explores the challenges and successes experienced by the company before it fell into receivership in the 1970s.  The voice of Irwin Pearson, son of John Pearson, may be heard as he recalls earlier times in the business.  He was recorded at the premises of the Irish Architectural Archive at Merrion Square, Dublin

The Strathalbyn community has come together to commemorate veterans and fallen soldiers and animals this Remembrance Day. Founder of STRATHlocal (https://www.facebook.com/strathlocalhome/) , Lynda Mundy, put a call-out to the community to help stitch 200 poppies as part of her initiative to brighten up empty shop windows in the town in the lead-up to Christmas. The local RSL has also lent a hand, providing interesting memorabilia for the Dawson Street shop display. Linda joins Jennie Lenman in this podcast for a chat about it.

In this episode, Roisin Ingle talked to Green Party Councillor Hazel Chu who has just been elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, only the 9th woman in the city's history to take the role. On a Zoom call from her new home the Mansion House in Dawson Street, Chu told Ingle why being the first person of colour to hold the role was important and what it would mean in terms of reflecting the diversity of the capital. She spoke about the racism she has experienced and explained why she wants her small daughter Alex to grow up being proud of her Chinese heritage. Chu also discussed the ongoing challenge to the leadership of the Green Party and explained why she thinks it is time for change.

A moment that lamented Shane Horgan as a hero of Irish rugby was his 2007 try against England in Croke Park. It was the first time Ireland played England in Croke Park and an emotional day for all. Ronan O'Gara's pinpoint kick saw Horgan use his GAA skills to reach high and catch to slam the ball over the try line, a turning point in the game that secured a historic day in sport. Shane joined Alison on Weekend Breakfast and chatted about this moment and how it felt. He also shared his predictions for this year's Guinness Six Nations, how the squad can shake off the World Cup and his hopes for new coach Andy Farrell. Performance Nutritionist for the IRFU Marcus Shortall also joined in to chat about how the players fuel their bodies for best performance and all the carbs they get to eat on match days. Shane Horgan is an ambassador for Glenisk, the official yogurt of Irish Rugby. Glenisk have an open one-day pop-up restaurant on Monday February 3rd in ‘Tang’ on Dawson Street with all proceeds from the day being donated to Peter McVerry Trust. Glenisk have developed a menu of 15 ‘scrum’-ptious high-protein dishes using the Glenisk range in collaboration with the IRFU Performance Nutrition team. With dishes like Protein Pancakes, slow-cooked Marinated Irish Beef and Vegetarian Falafel, we're drooling already! Listen back to their chat by pressing the play button at the top of the screen. Weekend Breakfast with Alison Curtis, Saturdays and Sundays from 8am.

There is nothing quite like a new venue for a Wine Fair. Loads of Light, Began Early, Great Wines.   Last month the WinePod dropped in on the Classic Drinks' Summer Wine Fair here in Dublin. It was aptly and imaginatively titled, 'New, Pink, Bubbles' and held at the really must see revamped Cafe en Seine on Dawson Street.  We recorded a number of the wineries that were present. First up we asked Hugh Murray, Classic Drinks' Sales Director, what the Fair was all about.  Hugh was followed by Champagne Pannier, Stonewell Cider from Cork, Domaine Montrose from the Languedoc, Prado Rey from Ribera del Duero and finally by the wonderful Bisol from Prosecco. Wonderful properties producing wonderful wines. Something for everyone in this podcast!

When a child experiences the death of a parent, the emotional trauma can be devastating. On this week’s episode of Grief Encounters, Sasha & Venetia look at this extremely personal issue, and what effect that it can have in later life. The episode takes an extremely rounded look at the theme at hand, as it discovers it from a psychological perspective and a personal perspective over the course of two compelling interviews, with experts in their own rights.Owen Connolly is a consultant psychologist, family therapist and co-author of the book “Parenting for the Millennium”. Owen is also the founder of of The Connolly Counseling Center in Dublin, which works closely with bereaved children. In the first part of this podcast, he gives his opinion on what the correct way to explain death to children is, and how often it is best to be upfront about the loss to the child. It is widely accepted that men and women often grieve differently, and this can also occur when children grieve. This is discussed in detail as he speaks about the importance of exercising and encouraging kids to be more emotive, particularly around the subject of grief.In the second half of the podcast, Sasha & Venetia had the pleasure in speaking to one of the world's most revered and decorated chefs Marco Pierre White, about the most deeply personal moment of his life, the death of his mother. In 1994 Marco rose to world fame as the youngest chef to win three coveted Michelin stars, but in most circles is just as well known for his temperament in the kitchen. In his appearance on Grief Encounters, he opens up about the devastation that this loss cost, shaping him in to the global figure that we all know on our bookshelves and TV screens. He paints a vivid picture of his childhood before and after his mother's death, speaking about many symptoms that Owen described in the preceding interview.Marco Pierre White is currently the owner of two Irish restaurants situated in Dublin’s Ballsbridge and Dawson Street areas. You can find more information on them here: http://marcopierrewhite.ie/If you're looking for a safe haven to express how you feel, Share articles, photos ,memories and more,Join the Grief Encounters Facebook Group,A place for support, compassion and empathy for those grievinghttps://www.facebook.com/groups/GriefEncounters/Music by: Nctrnm See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“I’ve been a professional Muay Thai fighter for three years now”. In this episode we meet Spring Sia from Brunswick, who migrated from Malaysia, at her business Martial Spirit, on busy Dawson Street in Brunswick. Here is a link to the interview. To see more of Spring in action, visit the Martial Spirit website and … Continue reading Se 02 Ep 05 Spring Sia, Brunswick