Podcast appearances and mentions of eli keel

ELI KEEL is, in his own words, "a bi-polar, queer, non-binary playwright, interested in interdisciplinary theatre, burlesque, meta-theatricality, competitive air guitar, and creative placemaking. NOTE: Theatre is empathy, and people are made of stories." Eli is also a culture and arts writer, a dancer, and has been known to have strong opinions. This show covers nerd-dom, faith, social justice jedis, the role of art, and contains fast talking and strong language. Be advised! (NSFW)

After a four-day break, Rob and Loree return to recap "Christmas in Evergreen" with special guests Rachel Firkins and Eli Keel. The tiny Vermont of Evergreen is full of big surprises, including amazing reaction shots, incredibly awkward chuckling, and a magical snow globe that raises some troubling ethical concerns. Plus, Spencer's beautiful office view in D.C. 

Eli Keel talks with Kentucky Shakespeare actor/dramaturg Gregory Maupin, who is hosting "a combination geek session/book club/behind-the-scenes look" about the Kentucky Shakespeare series called "Shakespeare Off the Page: Discovering Richard II."

Don’t you hate it when you’re at the mall, and one of those survey takers bugs you about coming in to answer a few questions? What if the questions were from the Mainstream Media Accountability Survey released last week by the Republican Party? The GOP survey is insanely unscientific and rife with leading questions and a host of other polling-survey sins. It’s also comically hateful about mainstream media. No surprise there. It’s nearly impossible to imagine these questions existing anywhere except in Donald Trump’s personal anti-media fever dream, but we thought it would be fun to try, so we invited local comedian Kent Carney onto the podcast so he and writer Eli Keel could present a brief audio play and imagine what someone taking that survey live might sound like.

The Portland Poetry Series will focus on LGBTQ poets at their June event, in honor of Pride Month. Co-producer Eli Keel joins us this week, along with poet and writer Adriena Dame, who will read at the event. The series happens in the Tim Faulkner Gallery, once a month, and has been going strong since last December. While there's always a strong LGBTQ presence at the event, Keel says that this time, it will be more intentional than incidental. "We decided for Pride Month we wanted to really focus in on that, and not have it just be a thing that happened as we reached out to the poets that we know and love." We asked Adriena Dame whether her intersecting identities influence her work. She said that coming out changed her writing in ways she didn't expect. "I thought, ok well that just means that people will know that I'm queer," she remembers. But suddenly her poems and stories were populated with lesbians, bisexual, and transgender characters. "They became all of those other dynamics of an entire population that I sort of neglected in my writing, prior to coming out." Keel says the series wants to shake up old ideas of how poetry readings are structured, and even who poets are. ("They're not just old white guys," he says). This installment of the Portland Poetry Series is on June 8th at 7:30, and will have three or four open mic slots in addition to the featured readers - so get there when the doors open at 7 if you want to put your name in the hat! The event is free. In our Juicy Fruit segment this week, we talk about the biker gang shootout in Waco, Texas, and try to imagine how the media coverage would have been different had black urban gangs opened fire on each other in a public place. The bikers involved were largely white and middle aged, with the oldest being in his mid-60s. "Where are the headlines for that?" Jai wonders. "Where are the people asking what's wrong with middle aged and elderly white America, that y'all need to ride around on motorcycles and shoot each other with AK-47s?" We also talk about what Emmett Till (and his mother Mamie) meant to America and the Civil Rights movement. Till's murder will be the subject of a movie that's currently in development. Chaz Ebert will produce the film, which is based on the book "Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America." And R.I.P. "dancery." This week, Mary J. Blige revealed that the lyrics to her beloved dance floor masterpiece "Family Affair" might not be what we thought!