POPULARITY
Hosted by lee lee
15 episodes with lee lee
21 episodes with lee lee
113 episodes with lee lee
4 episodes with lee lee
4 episodes with lee lee
3 episodes with lee lee
5 episodes with lee lee
2 episodes with lee lee
We’re looking at a slice of history this week in the shape of Lee Lee’s Baked Goods, which has been serving New Yorkers for nearly 40 years. It’s the story of Alvin Lee Smalls, known as Lee Lee, and the changing face of the iconic Harlem neighbourhood. Lee Lee joins Charlie Bell to speak about his life’s work.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We know women have hundreds of icks when it comes to men, but what are some icks men have concerning women? Do women prefer worldly men over Christian men because most Christian men are corny? J. Crown and Ms. LeeLee return as the fellas DARE to explain why men are better than...women. Let's Pod!!
Who could do the most damage, men or women? In these modern times, is it better for men to shoot their shot, or to just wait for choosing signals? New guest Ms. LeeLee and returning resident J. Crown help the fellas determine who's the more draining sex and debate the many lies men have been told about the xx chromosomes...Let's Pod!
Lee-Lee and RoLo are back together! Comedian Bobby Lee joins Rob Lowe for a rollicking conversation, covering everything from sobriety and spirituality to Family Feud and Bobby's "stickiness." You can watch the full episode on YouTube at YouTube.com/@LiterallyWithRobLowe!Got a question for Rob? Call our voicemail at 323-570-4551. Your question could get featured on the show!
On today's Bible Answer Man broadcast (11/25/24), Hank discusses what it means to say, “God is in my life,” “Jesus is in my heart,” or “the Holy Spirit is in me.”Hank also answers the following questions:Can you clarify your view of souls after death in relation to the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16? Paul - Fulton, MO (3:31)My son-in-law is a physics professor who believes God used evolution to create the world. How should I respond to this? Joyce - Spokane, WA (7:55)What is the significance of God numbering the hairs on our head? Joyce - Spokane, WA (10:01)Can you expound on Revelation 6:13 and the stars falling from heaven? Lee - Lee's Summit, MO (15:11)
A very special episode with our dear friend and third mic from Shingle Springs, California, Scout Dixon West. Scout, as you well know by now, has released three of the most talked about perfumes this year and we were so excited to talk about the process of creating them. Get your cowboy boots ready and pour a tall one as we discuss all three fragrances, how they came to be, and which are most popular amongst delivery folks and HVAC repair people. We also ramble as expected on what we've been wearing, Scout's current want list, and why Jeff's teenage perfume choices were really cool and didn't lead to swirlies. Oh, and of course, The Game.Follow Scout on TikTok and Instagram - @scoutdixonwest / @scoutdixonwestBuy her perfumes at her Scout Dixon West, Ministry of Scent, Luckyscent, and Arielle Shoshana(00:00) - - Intro and Hello Scout (10:04) - - Scents of the Week with SDW Reviews (55:05) - - The Game Perfumes Mentioned In This Episode:Incarnate, Coney Island Baby, and El Dorado by Scout Dixon West / Erba Pura by Xerjoff / Of True Minds by Liis / Nudiflorum by Nasomatto / Terroni by Orto Parisi / Baccarat by MFK / Duro, China White, and Narcotic Venus by Nasomatto / Fiore d'Ambra and Rosea Mundi by Profumom Roma / Le Lion by Chanel / Babycat by YSL / L'Air de Rien by Miller Harris / Benjoin Bohème by Diptyque / Ambre Sultan by Serge Lutens / Ambre Precieux by Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier / Rose de Nuit by Serge Lutens / Tabac Tabou and Ambre Russe by Parfum d'Empire / Boudoir by Vivienne Westwood / Anubis, Dryad, Epona, and Salome by Papillon Artisan Perfumes / Grove By The Sea and Almond Suede by Arquiste / Borneo 1834, Muscs Koublai Khan, and Iris Silver Mist by Serge Lutens / Lagerfeld for Men / Gucci Nobile by Gucci / Invasion Barbare by MDCI Parfums / Comète by Chanel / Belle Ame by Les Abstraits / Patchouli Paris by Guerlain / French Affair, Citizen X, Jasmin Fauve by Ex Nihilo / Ginger Essence by Origins / My place or yours Gina, Always In The Mood Miss Gina, and Laugh with me Lee Lee by BenefitThe Game:Fumerie Turque by Serge Lutens / Musc EDP by Bruno Acampora / Claiborne for Men by Liz Claiborne / Iris Celadon by Giorgio Armani / Midnight Special by Ex Nihilo / Spell 125 by Papillon Artisan PerfumesPlease feel free to email us at hello@fragraphilia.com - Send us questions, comments, or recommendations. We can be found on TikTok and Instagram @fragraphilia
Are you looking to optimise your property investments and minimise taxes? Join host Nathan Battishall as he welcomes Tony Lee from Lee & Lee Accountants, a specialist in property tax, business strategy, and SMSF. In this episode, Tony shares his expert insights on investment development, focusing on long-term wealth generation and smart structuring to reduce tax liabilities. Tony provides practical advice for property investors and developers, discussing the importance of having the right structure and asking the right questions to achieve financial freedom. Don't miss this episode designed to help you build and protect your wealth through property development!Topics: ✅ Key Questions for Your Accountant ✅ The Importance of Proper Property Investment Structure✅ Smart Strategies for Maximising Returns✅ Tax Efficiency in Property Development✅ Choosing the Right Ownership Structure✅ Using SMSFs✅ Minimising Tax Liability✅ Building Long-Term Wealth✅ GST and Income Tax for Developers✅ Developing a Successful Property Investment PlanConnect with Tony:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leeandlee/Website: https://www.leeandlee.com.au/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Actor Rob Lowe joins us for the first time. He calls Double D and sends Bobby into a panic. And we've got a special deal for our listeners: Try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code BELLY at checkout--just pay $5 shipping. That's www.bluechew.com , promo code BELLY to receive your first month FREE. Visit www.bluechew.com for more details and important safety information, and we thank BlueChew for sponsoring the podcast. Earn points by paying rent right now when you go to www.joinbilt.com/belly That's www.joinbilt.com/belly
Summary In this Quickfire Questions episode, James Doran asks Lee Lee about her favorite place she's ever lived, her favorite international food, her favorite international tradition, her favorite thing about living abroad, her best homesickness remedy, the hardest thing about living abroad, the best phrase she's learned while living abroad, the best way she's made new friends, the best thing to do in her new hometown, and her best expat life advice. Takeaways Living in Japan provides a serene and safe environment, with beautiful hiking opportunities. Nabe, a hot pot dish, is Lee Lee's favorite international food. The Daruma burning ceremony in Japan is Lili's favorite international tradition. The ability to embrace change and gain different perspectives is Lee Lee's favorite thing about living abroad. Having pictures and staying connected with loved ones helps with homesickness. Getting used to the discomfort of unfamiliar situations is the hardest thing about living abroad. Doing things you enjoy is the best way to make new friends. Exploring and taking different routes in your new hometown is recommended. Embracing the struggle and finding strength in it is important for living your best ex-pat life. Sound Bites "Surrounded by a lot of people but feeling calm and safe" "Nabe: A comforting soup that brings back memories" Connect with Us: Website: https://www.tallmantravels.co.uk/the-expat-pod Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089327439022 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.expat.pod/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ExpatPod LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-expat-pod/ Subscribe, Rate, and Review: If you enjoyed this episode of The Expat Pod, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform. Your support helps us reach more listeners like you and continue to deliver valuable content on life as an expat. Chapters 00:00 Quickfire Questions: A Trailer to Living Abroad 01:31 Nabe: A Comforting International Food 03:29 Embracing Change and Gaining Perspectives 04:50 Staying Connected and Finding Comfort in Familiarity 06:46 Getting Used to the Discomfort of the Unknown 08:14 Mantras for Living Abroad: Kisarasa, Seila-vi, and Shogunai 09:10 Making Friends by Doing What You Enjoy 10:05 Exploring and Discovering in Your New Hometown 11:03 Embracing the Struggle and Finding Strength --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theexpatpod/message
Summary Lee Lee shares her experiences of living in different countries as an expat and the challenges she faced in adapting to new environments. She discusses her first move to Belgium through a Rotary exchange program and the initial culture shock she experienced. Lee Lee also talks about her time in France as a student and later as an English teacher for the French Ministry of Education. She highlights the importance of language learning and finding ways to connect with people in a new country. Lee Lee emphasizes the value of documenting and reflecting on the expat experience through vlogs or blogs. She encourages individuals to create their own opportunities for connection and friendship while living abroad. In this conversation, James and Neelie discuss their experiences living abroad in different countries, including Sweden, France, Japan, and the US. They talk about the challenges and rewards of immersing oneself in a new culture, making friends, and learning the language. They emphasize the importance of being curious, trying new things, and embracing the uncertainty that comes with living abroad. They also discuss the cultural differences they encountered and the need to be open-minded and respectful. Overall, the conversation highlights the transformative power of living abroad and the personal growth that comes with it. Takeaways Living abroad as an expat can be both exciting and challenging Language learning is crucial for adapting to a new country Documenting and reflecting on the expat experience can be helpful Creating opportunities for connection and friendship is important while living abroad Living abroad offers unique opportunities for personal growth and self-discovery. Being curious and open-minded is essential for embracing a new culture and making the most of the experience. Trying new things and stepping out of your comfort zone can lead to unexpected friendships and experiences. Language learning is a valuable skill that can enhance your cultural immersion and connection with locals. Cultural differences should be respected and approached with empathy and understanding. Living abroad can be challenging at times, but the rewards and transformative impact make it worthwhile. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Background 01:15 Lili's Expat Journey Begins 05:55 The Visa Process and Preparation 06:50 Seeking Opportunities to Live Abroad 13:29 Lili's Experience in Senegal 14:53 Teaching English in Japan 24:57 First Impressions of Living Abroad 25:24 Living in Belgium and France 37:13 Studying in France 39:38 Making Friends as an Expat 42:03 Creating Opportunities for Connection 43:28 Parkrun and Sports Teams: Connecting with People Abroad 44:55 Using BlaBlaCar and Transportation Experiences 47:20 First Impressions of Senegal: Welcoming People and Cultural Adjustments 52:58 Returning to France: Living with a Flatmate and Teaching 53:53 School Schedules and Cultural Differences in France 55:47 Living in Sweden: Saunas, Wild Swimming, and Cultural Norms 58:36 Moving to Japan: Language Learning and Cultural Differences 01:01:55 Meeting a Partner Online and Building a Life in Japan 01:03:17 Navigating the Green Card Process and Living in the US 01:04:16 Discovering Jiu-Jitsu and Trying New Things Abroad 01:05:14 Interacting with Locals and Expanding Cultural Immersion 01:06:12 Balancing Integration with Foreign Friendships 01:07:10 Reflecting on the Journey of Living Abroad 01:10:40 Advice for Living Abroad: Embracing the Adventure and Being Patient 01:18:14 Living Abroad: Overcoming Challenges and Celebrating Milestones Keywords expat, living abroad, culture shock, language learning, adapting, connection, friendship, living abroad, cultural immersion, making friends, language learning, challenges, rewards, curiosity, trying new things, cultural differences, personal growth --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theexpatpod/message
Whooping. Spanking. Beating. Whatever you want to call it, corporal punishment was a central part of Lee's upbringing. Growing up, he was made to believe that it was a Black custom but as an adult he began wondering if it ended up doing more harm than good. In this episode, Lee speaks with Dr. Andrew Garner, a pediatrician who has studied the effects of corporal punishment on children, and how the nervous system is altered by it. Later, Lee speaks with Geoff Ward, a Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home, and into schools.TranscriptWe wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.Hi - this is Lee Hawkins and we're about to dive into episode seven of What Happened in Alabama. This conversation is about corporal punishment in homes and schools. Beating, spanking, whooping, whatever you call it, that's what we'll be talking about. This is very personal to me because it's how I and so many of my peers were raised. We were taught that it was not only normal, but necessary. Today we're going to get into the short and long-term effects of corporal punishment on the physical, mental, and emotional development and well-being of children, often following them into adulthood. It's a heavy and important topic But you'll get a lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue - that'll give you some context for the series and this episode. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much. In February 2019, I had my final interview with my dad for this project. We talked for over 3 hrs. I had a deadline to hit, and because I had so many interviews already recorded I did one final interview with him, just to get specific questions answered without having to go back through all that tape. He did the final interview – and he answered some extremely difficult questions, with compassion, regret, and especially grace.Lee: And so how did you get into the whooping thing? Like you beating us with your belt? What made.. Like, where did you get that from?Lee Sr: That I can't say. I don't know, man. It was just a, some kind of a stress that I had, evidently. Lee Sr: it's hard to say how this shit went man.Asking my dad directly about this I realized that families often repeat certain patterns and cycles from generation to generation, without understanding why or where they come from. That four year process of interviewing my father about his upbringing in 1950-era Jim Crow Alabama shined a powerful light on why I was raised the way I was. But while I had gained a better understanding of some of the historical factors that shaped my upbringing, I still needed to understand the forces that prevented my father from breaking the cycle of belt whipping when we were kids. Lee: But what were the stresses that you were going through? Lee Sr: Things that I had seen my mom had to go through with people and shit and that was hard to push it. And so when I thought you guys did something, that was when I would, you know, get out of control like I did man, because that is out of control. I don't give a fuck how you put it. It was validating to hear Dad declare that hitting children with belts was wrong, and something that he profoundly regretted, and was genuinely sorry for, because I struggled for my whole life to understand the sentiment that Black children – especially – need to be beaten, even as I accepted it. I didn't need much more than to hear my dad acknowledge that no, we didn't deserve it – Black kids or not. Lee Sr: If it was up to me and the way I feel about things, I would've never done nothing like that. But I don't know how I got out of control like that. Something was back there in my life that did that and I know it.My mom told me that there were nights that my dad came to bed and cried after those interviews. Though I never saw those tears, it doesn't surprise me. Revisiting painful memories that led my father to try to whip us into perfection out of deep love and concern was obviously excruciating for him. Despite my belief in “honor thy mother and father” and occasionally unnecessary guilt, I didn't feel obligated to shield him from the pain he caused my sister Tiffany and me at times. I accepted that the burden of his actions was not mine to carry. Expecting a victim to accept the blame for a perpetrator's actions, fearing that a grown man might cry, just isn't fair.I was determined to lead my dad down the path to finally put these generational demons to rest, for both of us and for future generations of our family. If he cried, he cried. When I heard that dad cried, I saw it as a sign of empathy but not a reason to quit researching. As children, I wept, and Tiffany wept, through the hundreds of belt whippings we received. In fact, our mother would tell us: “Stop crying or I'll give you something to really cry about.” I now realize that perpetrators rarely recognize the extent of a victim's pain because they aren't the ones being beaten.My father's tears didn't change the reality of what they had done to us. His crying may have meant he finally grasped that his childhood impacted mine more profoundly than my parents had ever acknowledged. Our pain stung so much more than the feeling of a belt to the behind.Social justice activists talk so often about how violence impacts Black bodies, but my research, and my memories of my own childhood, have shown me that violence–including within the Black family and community– can also have potentially devastating effects on Black minds—especially the minds of children.With my mental health journalism training, I now understand why I was always on edge, like my parents. They feared the world, and I feared them. Sometimes I'd go to bed fully clothed, with three layers of clothing on for extra padding, preparing for the possibility of being pulled out of bed for a forgotten chore. This made me high-strung and hard to stay calm. Around age eight, I started blinking excessively when nervous. One Sunday in the choir stand, I couldn't stop blinking. After church, one of my Dad's friends mentioned it, "I think Lee Lee's got some kind of nervous tic." Dad dismissed it as teasing, ranting to my mom about it the whole ride home.But his friend was right. My nervous system was firing like crazy. Though I excelled in spelling and reading, I struggled in math that year. My parents thought I was clowning in class and believed more beatings would improve my scores. They'd yell, "You're being the class clown for all those white friends of yours." They didn't realize I needed extra help from a teacher or tutor. Instead of focusing on math, I'd sit at my desk and worry about the belt whipping I could get for writing down a wrong answer, which made me blink even more.Neither my father nor I connected my nervousness to the beatings. We saw the belt as temporary pain. But it hijacked my entire system. As an adult, I've dealt with stress, but nothing compares to the constant stress I carried as a child. I don't know how I never developed an ulcer. Imagine an adult experiencing the unpredictability of being overpowered and whipped several times a month, then having to perform at their best the next day. That's what I went through… as an eight-year-old.What broke my heart as a child was that my mother told me that she gave my teacher permission to hit me if she wanted to. My teacher never did, but she clearly knew I was getting the belt at home. That trend of many schools failing to protect students from violence, or even exacting violence themselves, impacted me in so many ways. One clear way was the reality that my Dad rarely if ever got hit by his parents, but he did get hit plenty of times at school, which, I believed normalized the idea of child beating in his mind at a young age.And today, Alabama is one of seventeen states that still allow corporal punishment in K-12 public schools, with the schools mostly striking Black children and those with disabilities. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies reported that Black boys are nearly twice as likely to be hit compared to white boys, and Black girls are struck at over three times the rate of white girls. This, all despite the fact that Black students behave similarly to white ones. Today, hitting school children is legal and most prevalent in states where enslavement was legal. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas represent over 70% of all corporal punishment in U.S. public schools, according to the SPLC. Children at some schools are hit nearly twice a month. Notably, during the 2015–16 school year, one Mississippi school reported 871 instances affecting 57 students, averaging 15 times per student. Another school in the same state noted 60 instances for just four students, also averaging 15 times per student. A few years back, before my dad died, my Dad and his sister, Aunt Toopie, talked about the beatings they received at school while growing up in Jim Crow AlabamaLee: Did they whoop the kids in school, was it a strict thing?Lee Sr: Yeah, we got our ass kicked every time we were late, I know that. Aunt Toopie: And stand in the corner.Lee Sr: And when you did something in class you got your ass kicked.Aunt Toopie: They had belts in school in them days.Lee Sr: They had that board of education. If I was late for school, you'd go right to the principal's office, and he'd tell your ass up about three times with that paddle, with holes in it. That paddle was a piece of oak wood, and it had varnish on it and it had holes. They had drills holes in it. It was custom made. It said board of education and he'd have you bend over and man, that thing, them holes in that thing, would leave little dots on your ass.” Being hit at school burned a permanent memory in my dad's brain - he normalized it when he became a father, handing down the Alabama-born anxiety to another generation, to me. After the conversation with my dad where he apologized for whipping my sisters and me, I tried to have a similar one with my mom. But it went very differently. "We didn't beat you,” she said. “We spanked you."I was disappointed to hear her deny how severely she and my dad beat my sister Tiffany and me. But I also understood why she would say what she did. There's almost a collective agreement in society that so-called spanking is supposedly lighter than a beating…kinder and gentler and never abusive or harmful. It's much easier to stomach the narrative that there are acceptable forms of violence to use against children; even though that same violence would never be acceptable to use against an adult. Which is why I give my dad so much credit for being honest and not trying to minimize what they did.My dad finally understood the full spectrum of damage the American whip had caused generations of our family. We often think the worst of corporal punishment are the welts and physical pain. But through my own experience and my research, I know the real pain is from the belt's access to the victim's mind. My parents didn't know these beatings and the mental stress of having to constantly look out for danger all around me, made it harder for me to focus, triggering my nervous system into fight or flight, causing bouts of anxiety that followed me into adulthood. This led me to find experts on the effects of corporal punishment on the body and mind.Dr. Garner: The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. Their brain, their physiology is still under development. And so what happens in childhood doesn't stay in childhood. That's Doctor Andrew Garner. He's a primary care pediatrician in Ohio who has studied the effect of corporal punishment on children. I wanted to talk to Dr. Garner to understand the physiological changes that occur in children when they are hit. Whether you hit them with your hand, a belt, a paddle, regardless of how hard or how often you hit them, it's all corporal punishment. I'm someone who refuses to get nostalgic about the beatings of my childhood. I would never high-five my friends and say I needed it, I loved it, or credit it as the reason I stayed out of trouble or became a productive citizen. It's not funny to me, mainly because it took me years to rewire my system. But I don't want to unfairly judge people either, especially those who don't have the information. Once I delved into history, I gained a deeper and clearer understanding of why so many people I've known—especially Black and white people from the South—have often celebrated and even laughed fondly about the use of corporal punishment. Many have no idea that, when we really look closely at America's historical foundation, hitting children is akin to setting up a system of white supremacy or a mini plantation in their living room. Later in this episode, I speak with Professor Geoff Ward, a Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home into schools across the South, mainly the states and counties where slavery was legal and lynching was most prevalent. We talk about the institutionalized use of corporal punishment and how deeply ingrained it is in our history. But for now, let's get back to Dr. Garner.The conversation mentions violence and abuse against children, sensitive listeners please take care. [break]Lee: I think there are many people who believe, well, if I just hit the kid a few times on the butt with my hand, that's a spanking. If I hit a kid with a belt that's a beating, or if I don't if I hit a kid with a belt, but I don't hit them hard..as hard as the guy up the street who's hitting his kid with the extension cord, then that's not a beating. Dr. Garner: That's all violence. Right. So, you know, corporal punishment is a negative consequence, for unwanted behavior. But that negative consequence is the use of force and is intended to cause pain or discomfort. So that's violence. So, you know, whether or not you're trying to split hairs between, a spanking or a beating, it's still the use of violence to coerce, and control and modify another person's behavior. And we know that in order to continue changing that behavior, the violence needs to escalate over time. So it's a slippery slope. I can recognize this slippery slope in my own life. My parents started out with a few hits when I was little and over the years it escalated to something much more serious, to the point where getting hit with a leather belt for five minutes was normalized. In fact, their punishment increased to slaps across the face and attacks that were even more severe. And this was from two parents, who, like most of the parents we knew, felt like, if they truly loved their children, they needed to kick it into high gear and show us that life wasn't going to be fair and that nobody was coming to save us, especially because we were Black. I can see how this happens. Dr. Garner: You may think that in the short term, you're doing a good service to your child because you're trying to teach them something. But in the long run, we know the outcomes are worse. There's clear data, you know, increased risk of child abuse, because you have to eventually increase the negative stimuli to try and change the behavior. Part of the problem with corporal punishment, it's a double whammy. In addition to the anticipation, like you're saying what bad thing is going to happen to me? There's also the loss of safety, because one of the things that the the one of the ways that we buffer adversity is through relationships. And now there's, there can be a loss of trust, in the, in the relationship. And that to me is really interesting that, it's not just the, the, the fear of the pain as you were talking about. It's also the loss of trust that when is this going to happen. Where when am I safe? When am I safe? Lee: Well, never. I was never really 100% safe in my home or outside in the world. Never. There was never a time that I felt safe. And I also feel like my parents did that by design. I don't think they wanted me to ever feel safe, because I don't think they believed that a Black person in America is ever safe. So I believe that they wanted me to feel the hyper vigilance and the hyper cautiousness that they, in the generations before them, felt because they didn't believe enough in the system of America. Another thing is that when you said you have to increase the punishment if you're going to use this system, that's exactly what happened to me. And I know my dad. I know that he…lost control and did not know what he was doing. And I think at that time he got to a point where he realized, what have I done? What have I become? Dr. Garner: I think where we break down sometimes is trying to decide what's more important, you know, is it the connection or is it the structure? Well, they're both important. You need to have connection. So kids trust the instruction you're giving them. But the way I think about it is it's a lot easier to teach a kid what they should do than to keep from doing something you don't want them to do. Lee: But it's also forcing us to understand that children are multiple times smaller than adults. And so we if we apply some empathy here, we have to understand that even if you're hitting a child once or twice, you're still multiple times larger than the child, and the child may not have a bruise. Or the bruise may go away. But it's really this person who's supposed to be taking care of me, who is the only thing in this world I love, and this person who is providing meals and food and shelter for me is hitting me. Oh, he's going to hit me again. But for some reason, children have a different standing in society. They're the most vulnerable in the society, but they have the least protection. Dr. Garner: Yeah. It's crazy. The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. We know if there is significant adversity, and there aren't opportunities to turn off the body's stress response that can result in a thing called toxic stress. Right. So toxic stress is this inability to turn off the stress response. And it can literally change who we are at the behavioral, at the cellular, even at the molecular levels. We know that adversity can sort of become biologically embedded and and changing the way our genomes work. Lee: And this is just even with just hitting a child once or twice occasionally. Right? Dr. Garner: Absolutely. I mean, that's the point, is that we have to understand the way brains develop. Brain development is an experience driven event. It's the experiences that happen that drive brain development. And so the question is, what are those experiences in childhood, are they adverse in the sense that they're leading to expectancies of bad things and always being on edge, or are they nurturing to the extent that people get me? I have agency and things are going to be positive in the future. So those early experiences are truly foundational and they can influence the way we see ourselves and the way we see other people and the way we see our future.For me, belt whipping taught me not to ever trust anyone, including and especially my parents. I loved them, but I never fully trusted them and rarely confided in them. And that turned me into an adult who simply refused to trust another human being. Despite the active social life I've always had, my childhood groomed me to be a rugged individualist, putting all my trust in God and myself. I never put even an ounce of faith in the idea that another person would not be capable of betraying or letting me down. And in relationships with girlfriends -– especially if they wronged me in any way – I developed the very unfortunate ability to be able to walk away from them and never look back and never miss them. And I often wanted to be able to be vulnerable and feel some level of paralysis or regret, but I always could just keep going.The beatings also made me perfectionistic. My mantra became, “if you want something done right, do as much as you can by yourself, because most people will almost always fall short and disappoint.”At a very young age, I just adopted the posture that I was on my own, and that I should not count on anyone or expect anyone to come up with a net and try to catch me if I fell. And also I also believed that you should always keep people out of your personal business, because in most cases, they'll take your plans, your confiding in them about your most vulnerable feelings or moments, or the smallest mistakes and weaponize them to try and hurt you. And that's how my father was. And yes, he came from a family of Jim Crow survivors and had family members murdered, but I believe a lot of this view of the world I've seen in my family, especially in my case, came from being beaten as children. These beatings – and yes, I have finally given myself permission to call them abuse – just wreaked havoc on my capacity to receive love without skepticism. Even now, I mean, speaking this, I'm wondering if this revelation will somehow be used against me by somebody down the line. But at least I can recognize it now. My new mantra is, “I'm free and I'm safe.” And to be fair, I'm a lot better than I used to be, and I can't say that the skepticism hasn't helped me a great deal – especially in the media business – but I wouldn't wish that level of steel-heartedness on anyone. I asked Dr. Garner to break down what happens to a child's nervous system when they get hit or know there's a possibility they're about to get hit. He said there are three biological pathways. Dr. Garner: The most simplest and the most evolutionarily, primitive is freeze, right? So you may see that the deer in the headlights type thing. Right. And so the first temptation is to freeze, if I be small and don't move, maybe the threat will go away.The second, which you might recognize, is fight or flight. Dr. Garner: And that's where you have a release of all kinds of biological mediators. Cortisol and epinephrine, that basically make your blood pressure high, make you ready to fight or run away. Those hormones are very useful in the short term. So if you see a bear, you can run away fast. But if that if that stress response isn't turned off through the presence of safe, stable, nurturing relationships and that constant bathing in those physiologic mediators of stress is there that results in changes. Changes at the molecular level, changes at the cellular level changes the behavior that really can change who we are. And we call that toxic stress. The third response is to affiliate, that means our ability to collaborate with others, to seek help when there's a threat. It's part of the reason humans have existed so long as a species. But Tiffany and I didn't have that support. There was no escaping the belt. Dr. Garner: Where are my friends? Who's going to help me through this? The problem is, for a young child, the friend is the person who's beating you. So you've really sort of lost that that ability to turn off the stress response from an affiliate response. You're really stuck in flight or flight, and if you're constantly bed with those hormones, again, that's going to lead to a child who's going to be more defiant, more aggressive. Not be able to think things through, not be able to think about the broad perspective because you're. Constantly in fight or flight mode. You're constantly in survival mode instead of relational mode. Lee: Right? Yeah. And if you can think about this to bring some empathy in here for people to understand, if you were hitting a dog and a dog who depends on you for everything, is experiencing this toxicity in this toxic environment, you can actually see a lot of times when dogs are abused because you'll go to pet them and they kind of squirm. Sometimes they might bark, sometimes they might even try to bite you. And that's because they've been abused. Children are the same, right? I mean, children can have some of the same effects that we see, in dogs, that we empathize with. Children who are treated the same way in their home. Can have that same impact. Dr. Garner: But here's the good news. And this is the really fascinates me, is that the more we learn about the biology of adversity, the more we learn about toxic stress and how adverse experiences become biologically embedded and really affect life course trajectories. That same biology underlies how positive experiences get embedded. Right? And that that is the good news, right? So adversity is not destiny in any way, shape or form. In the last few years, there's been a really interesting thing called biobehavioral synchrony, which is a big phrase, but what it means is in those moments of magical connection that you have with another being in particularly between parent and child, there's literally an alignment of the brain waves of the autonomic functions of hormone levels and behavior. Right. And so we sort of know this intuitively that emotions can be contagious. Right? So, if a child's crying, the sibling mates are crying and specters may join an angry mob so it can go in the negative way, but can also go in a positive way, in a sense that engaged and trusted caregivers, they literally have the ability to hack in remotely and turn off the child stress response. Dr. Garner explained that you can see this in action if you look up the still face experiment on Youtube. It's a famous psychological study that was first conducted in 1975 by the psychologist Edward Tronick. Dr. Garner: Basically they take a young child about a year old, and usually it's a mother, and they bring him into the laboratory and they have three two minute blocks. The first two minute block is engaging, so they're just playing back and forth. It literally they call it serve and return - the baby coos the mom responds. And it's really this biobehavioral synchrony. You can literally see it happening for you. And then they tell the mom to turn away and then turn back and to not engage for two minutes. And if you watch the video it is viscerally painful because the child noticed there's a rupture in the synchrony and does everything they can to try and get back engaged, everything they can to get back engaged. And then they tell their mom to turn back again, and now to start to repair. And it's palpable. The children's relief immediately. Oh, we're back again. You're back again? I'm safe. You got me. The important thing is, is there repair, right? And the most recent evidence suggests that it's the latency to repair that's associated with secure attachments and distress tolerance, that ability to say the goodness is coming. We're going to get back together again. It's really, really important. And so, again, that's great news for parents. We're not going to be perfect. We're all going to make mistakes as parents. We can't always be perfectly engaged. The important thing is it's all about repair. It's the ability to come back and become back engaged and basically be saying that, child, your perspective is important to me. The relationship's important to me. And it's way more important for me to be kind than right. Lee: Yeah. And I think that that's one of the challenges for me as part of people from the African-American community who had my experience. For me, knowing that my parents loved me and knowing that that love could be shown, but then the next minute I could be being beaten with the belt. And then they're loving me again. And then I'm beaten with the bel,t going back and forth. I do wonder…I do believe that there were there were some kind of protection outcomes that came from the love that was shown, but the unpredictability of it was, was very difficult because the relationship to violence was weird. Like it because violence was almost framed as love. Dr. Garner: Yeah. That's one of the one of the big paradoxes, I think, of corporal punishment is that having been a victim of corporal punishment, that increases your risk of being a victim of other physical violence down the line, which is sort of counterintuitive. But I think it gets at what you were saying there is that leads to what those expectations of what love are.And throughout my research, I found disturbing instances where enslavers used Bible verses to justify corporal punishment and enslavement. This deeply troubled me as both a Christian and a Black man. I've often heard the phrase "Spare the rod, spoil the child," which, contrary to widespread belief, isn't even in the Bible. And even still, this metaphorical use emphasizes guidance and care rather than punishment. Dr Garner's wife is a Methodist pastor, and I talked to him about how people have often manipulated and weaponized scriptures and proverbs to justify and advance slavery, whipping, and their own agendas. As a result, generations of people have come to believe that it is moral, righteous, and holy to beat children. Dr. Garner: I think it's very upsetting when, these scriptures are being used in a way to propagate violence, when clearly that is not what Christ's intention was. He said, bring the children to me. Bring the children to me. Right. He didn't say, bring them to me so I can whip them. Right. Said, be like a child. Be be like a child. Be empathic. Be full of wonder. Right. And somehow we sort of lost that. So, discipline, you know, comes from the Latin word to teach. Right? So it doesn't mean to punish. Right. And of course there are multiple types of punishment, which actually runs the spectrum right from, a loss of privileges, right. So, you know, if you, you lose your driver's license, if you speed too much, right, to possible incarceration and then all the way to physical harm and even even death. Right? So punishment is the, are those negative consequences. They're imposed for undesired behavior. But punishment is only one form of discipline. And the more we know about it, the more we know it's actually not as effective in the long term and actually can cause potential harm. Lee: And what I love about this research that you've done in everything that you're sharing with us today, is that you're showing that a child's brain is being wired as we go, right, that we're creating the future adult every day when we're working with that child. What do stress toxins do to the body in terms of health? Dr. Garner: Toxic stress, which can be precipitated by any number of different forms of adversity, is associated with basically all of the leading causes of death. Right? So if you want to look at, asthma, you want to look at cancer, do you want to look at suicide and mental health issues. You want to look at obesity. You want to look at substance abuse. Right. So I mean, there's no doubt that, when we are programmed to expect adversity, that we're going to find ways to try and cope. And so if you think about it, you know, people overeat and abuse substances and, are promiscuous for a reason. In the short term, they turn off the stress response. But in the long term, the worse health outcomes down the line. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, I think your point, though, that the brain is, is being made over time is really important, and so are the relationships. And so one way I think to try and frame all of this is affect regulation, how we handle our emotions. Because if you have an angry parent who's spanking a child, the message to the child is when you get angry, it's okay to hit right. And so, that's not what we really want for our kids in the long run. We actually want them, to learn that it's okay to have strong emotions. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be frustrated. But when you have those emotions, what can we do with them? How can we channel them? Dr. Garner has worked with parents and treated children as a Primary Care Pediatrician for more than two decades. He co-authored the book "Thinking Developmentally: Nurturing Wellness in Childhood to Promote Lifelong Health" and the American Academy of Pediatrics' Policy Statement on Preventing Childhood Toxic Stress and Promoting Relational Health. As a speaker, he focuses on early brain and child development, preventing childhood toxic stress, and promoting early relational health, and he considers himself to be an advocate for all children and their families. Lee: And what do you tell parents when they bring their children in to be treated about corporal punishment? Dr. Garner: One, to heal any wounds that they've had as a parent? Because we've talked before, parents tend to parent the way they were parented. So, I'm going to want to know, what the stressors are in their life with, what the stressors were when they were kids. What a good question often is, what, did your parents do that you want to make sure you do for your kids? But then also, what are the things your parents did that you want to make sure you never do for your kids? As kids get older, I'm going to help them understand, that it's really not the behavior you want to focus on. That a child's behavior is always telling us there's something they need or something they want. And what we need to do is trying to interpret it and help them figure out a better way to have that behavior met. And so this starts really early, you know, with temper tantrums in 3 or 4 year olds. It's really not about the behavior. It's the emotion that's driving the behavior. And if we can help parents understand that, then we can help parents help their child say, look, you're allowed to be angry. You're allowed to be frustrated, allowed to be disappointed. But when that happens, we're not going to yell and scream. We're going to do the things that bring us joy. We're going to try and, spend some time doing some Legos or some coloring, teach them how to cope instead of just saying stop. The problem with, with corporal punishment and all punishments is it's basically saying, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. And then the child, then in, in sort of in their own mind, thinks there's something wrong with me. Because I feel this way and the message needs to be, you're allowed to feel that way, but when you feel that way, do this instead. If the parent is able to say, I'm so sorry I lost it, I'm so sorry I used those harsh words. I'm so sorry I was demeaning. I'm going to try better and we're going to work together to build this relationship. Then that's what those kids are going to do someday, right? I mean, I tell kids that empathy is a superpower. It is an absolute superpower. Not everyone has it, but we can teach it. And when you have it that allows you to repair, that allows you to have relationships. After speaking with Dr. Garner I want to believe that if more well-meaning parents knew hitting their children can also harm their brains and emotional health as opposed to just being temporarily painful, fewer would do it. However, in a country where hitting children is part of a centuries-long pattern of violence, and amid a system that offers the smallest people the least protection, I understand why many believe hitting children is beneficial, especially for Black children.But now that I'm out of that situation, I do view it as abuse and a legacy of my country's legal system and culture, and the enslavement and torture of my people. And it's not just in the home - in 17 states across the U.S. corporal punishment is legal in public schools. Most of these states allow educators to hit students three times in the rear with a long wooden board. And in all states except for just a few, corporal punishment is allowed in private schools.To help me understand it more I reached out to Professor Geoff Ward at Washington University in St Louis. He's a historical sociologist and the director of the Washington Slavery Project. Some of his work connects the dots between the history of lynching in southern states with the modern usage of corporal punishment in schools today. I've had a couple conversations with Professor Ward, the first time was about 2020. I spoke to him again more recently to learn more about the logic of racial violence, how it intersects with our judicial system and how we can break the cycles of racial violence. Lee: You know, before when we talked, we talked a lot about racialized social control. Can you give us a definition, to hold on to here? Prof. Ward: I think a good place to start would be is to recognize that we live in a racialized social system, a society where rewards are allocated along racial lines, where meaning is constructed along racial lines, things like, you know, reliability or, beauty, or intelligence, morality, are riddled with racial logic because we live in a society where race has sort of been infused in the way we relate to and understand each other, the way the society has been organized. And in that context, social control becomes racialized. And social control generally describes the definition and enforcement of norms. And social control can be informal, you know, a sideways glance or a disapproving look. But we also have systems of formal control. And that brings in the State. And our regulatory systems, our courts, our criminal legal system and so forth that are part of the system of social control. And, you know, all of that complex is racialized.I remember reading Professor Ward's work and being shocked by his citation of a 1901 Alabama constitutional debate over the legality of whipping prisoners, in which a county official remarked that “everybody knows the character of a Negro and knows that there is no punishment in the world that can take the place of the lash with him.” And he noted, that juvenile court records from 1930s-era North Carolina reveal that court-ordered whippings were reserved almost exclusively for Black boys and girls, given “widespread feelings among white county juvenile court judges that whipping is the most effective way of handling delinquent Negros."Another court official noted a common diversionary practice of “sendingdelinquent Black boys downstairs with a big police officer to have themflogged” prior to release.Prof. Ward: So this was a an example we, we used from the historical record in the article I mentioned where we examined how histories of racist violence, particularly lynching, relate to patterns of corporal punishment in contemporary public schools. Where we found that, that net of other factors, every additional lynching in the history of a county increased significantly the odds that a child would be corporally punished in a school in that county. This was after accounting for things like how, the funding of the school, the racial makeup of the school, whether it's urban or rural, how experienced the teachers are, how religiously conservative the residents of the county are, and so forth. And in that article, we used the story you're referring to to provide some context for how this relationship could come to exist. How is it that contemporary schools, likelihood of using violent strategies of school discipline has anything to do with the history of slavery or lynching in in that county? What is the story there? What are the mechanisms that connect the past to the present? And we cited that example because it speaks to the racial logic of corporal punishment, the idea that African-Americans are not fully human, are not sentient beings, can cannot be, influenced through, you know, appeals to things like morality or decency or logic, you know, white supremacism historically asserted that that Black people could not think deeply about anything. And so you and so this what this judge is saying in this case and we found numerous examples of this, judges, legislators, you know, rationalizing corporal punishment. And was saying that, you have to appeal, you have to reach, you have to address African-Americans through pain. Lee: Yeah. Prof. Ward: Because, because the you can't reach them through the brain. Lee: Yes. And and what I love about your research is that you've really just blown the doors off of this and shown that the public record is full of governmental rationalizations of violence against Blacks, even after emancipation. you show that African-Americans have always been framed as warranting more violent control strategies. And this is deeply rooted in the idea that we are not fully human. Is that something that you just have seen all through your research? Prof. Ward: Well, yeah, it is, I know it has to also be said that that, you know, racialized social systems are contested. You know, this this idea, this attempt to dehumanize African Americans, never actually fully succeeded. It resulted in a tremendous amount of oppression and pain and violence and death and so forth. But, simultaneously, you know, my research is also showing that Black communities and their allies are countering these measures. But even with respect to the juvenile justice system in my book, ‘The Black Child-Savers' is mostly about how generations of Black women organized, beginning in the 1890s, to dismantle this Jim Crow juvenile justice system. And, they were fundamentally motivated by their own recognition that Black children and people were, in fact, fully human and fully capable of realizing the benefits of a more enlightened approach to social control. One that focused on, on child welfare and development. You know, the system that was being developed for white kids, who were not being subject as much to this, yeah, this brutality. And so they did create, you know, other kinds of institutions and practices that also have to be kept in mind as we think about the sort of how this history unfolded. Lee: You talk about the connection between corporal punishment and the history of lynching, which is really an incredible contribution to this body of work. Lee: Are you still seeing the trend in which, historical areas where lynching was the most prevalent tend to correspond to the amount of corporal punishment that's being done in a particular school district? Prof. Ward: There certainly have been study after study showing that that that histories, area histories of lynching and other racialized violence, predict contemporary patterns of of conflict and violence and inequality. Things like, Black victim homicide rates today and, patterns of vote suppression and white supremacist mobilization, you know, and, white political conservativism, things like Black infant mortality or racially disparate infant mortality, differences in heart disease. I mean, all kinds of contemporary outcomes have been shown by social scientists to be associated with histories of racial violence in, in specific areas. So I would I would imagine that, you know, that that the relationships we saw with respect to corporal punishment in schools, have not suddenly gone away. Understanding how governmental institutions have historically ensured that Black children are subjected to corporal punishment, including in schools, helps me see why my parents feared they had to use violence to protect me. They were conditioned by a system of legal white supremacy to equate violence with love. Like agents of the state, they and generations of Black parents saw violence as a necessity, convinced that nonviolent reasoning wouldn't work with a Black boy.As a result, while my parents were opposed to police violence, they turned our living room into a whipping station, becoming indirect agents of the very police brutality our people protested. Each generation in my family had a hypervisible white police officer who symbolized the need to beat Black children. For my father's generation, it was Birmingham's white supremacist "Commissioner of Public Safety" Bull Connor. In my generation, it was the officers who brutalized Rodney King, and epithet using Officer Mark Fuhrman from the O.J. Simpson trial. For Millennials and Gen Z, it's Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd. It felt as if my parents unconsciously partnered with America's most racist police elements to enforce violence and keep their Black son in line.As I delved deeper, I saw similar patterns among some Black educators and religious leaders. Despite the disproportionate use of corporal punishment against Black children, many administrators and school board members advocated for its use. Legendary psychiatry professor Alvin Pouissaint once told me he once traveled to the South to lobby for the repeal of corporal punishment, only to find that Black educators and leaders were some of its most vocal proponents. One of the school board members who once adamantly advocated for corporal punishment in Mississippi was also a prominent pastor in the Black church. He was one of the many people I'd studied who used the Bible to justify their pro corporal punishment stance Prof. Ward: I think one of the issues here, which relates to what we're talking about in terms of Black religious leaders, is there's an issue here of a kind of sovereignty where local community figures in a context of generally diminished power, economic power, political power, are holding on to a form of power that they do have, which is in the home, through the church, and saying, look, don't, let this, you know, social research fool you. And don't listen to these people who aren't from here and don't know our ways and aren't part of our church. We know what works, we've been whipped and we're fine, and listen to me, and I think there is a fair amount of, you know, manipulation on this issue that is about really about power. About holding on to power, holding onto power in community context, but also asserting power, as you mentioned, in the context of the home. In a society where, you know, there is so much humiliation and alienation, and and refusal of influence on things like, policy and practice and so forth. We commemorated Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and I was part of an event at my university where we specifically focused on his theme - beloved community. And, our conversation is making me think about, you know, some of the basic, you know, fundamental, tenets of this concept of beloved community, which include that we are stuck in a society marked by, you know, a chain of violence, you know, where we're just in this situation where violence is seemingly a constant. It's almost how we communicate. He talked about how our society is organized by fear and resentment and that fear, you know, the politics of fear and resentment... We for good reason often in that in that context, think about, you know, white reactionary politics. But but our conversation today is also about how fear and resentment contribute to other communities and, and their politics and that are, that are part of this larger chain of violence. If we're ever going to realize this idea of a beloved community, you know, that is a community organized by mutual understanding and universal goodwill. And King, King stressed that to get there, we'd have to reckon with these realities of how our politics of difference breed violence, breed fear and resentment. We'd have to get to a place of mutual understanding and goodwill and, and, you know, for example, to see our to see how, we have common interests in an issue like corporal punishment, whether it affects us directly or not, we have interest in creating a society where we aren't, reifying a culture of violence starting in the high chair, or assuming that there is also going to be an electric chair. How do we get to that place where we collectively disavow, violence as a means of social organization? Lee: Geoff Ward, thank you so much. This has been powerful. And we'll keep the dialog going. But thank you for the wonderful work that you're doing. Fabulous. Keep up the good work. Prof. Ward: Thank you. Lee, it's great to talk to you again. Lee: All right, brother.For years, I had an inner voice that told me, "My parents hate me." So much around us in America, from Black comedians who entertain and electrify crowds with their jokes about beating Black kids, tells us that there is often great contempt for Black children – that they hold the lowest standing in society and therefore should be violently punished with impunity. It takes a countercultural, conscious Black parent to see that every Black child deserves life, liberty, happiness, and positive reinforcement every day.These interviews helped me understand that the first step towards breaking this toxic belief—that violence with Black children is a necessity—is recognizing that they possess bodily integrity and innate intelligence and are neither superhuman nor subhuman, even if the broader society doesn't always see them in that light. We must be careful about internalizing the historical belief that Black children are built differently than white children and can endure more pain. The reams of science proving that corporal punishment has harmful long-term effects apply to them too. I believe that my parents and others unconsciously internalized these classically American beliefs about Black children. We have experienced every facet of America, from its deepest injustices to its greatest achievements. Because of that, it is easy to embrace the prevailing philosophies of this country that we played a heavy hand in building—we are deeply interwoven with its history and its belief system. But those who continue to advocate violence against Black children in homes and schools must reject those racist beliefs and instead embrace a new paradigm that sees and nurtures the full potential and worth of our children.There's a gospel song that says, “He saw the best in me when everyone else around could only see the worst in me.” We need more Black parents and communities to take the lead in seeing the best in our children. I hope that, armed with information about the generational and ongoing cycle of governmentally codified violence against our children, combined with the ever-evolving neuroscience showing that even the anticipation of being beaten can trigger the brain in ways that lead to anxiety in adulthood, more parents—Black and of all races—and school administrators will make a conscious decision to retire the hand, tree branch, belt, and wooden boards of the slavery and Jim Crow eras. We need to breathe life and affirmation into all children, ensuring they grow up with the support and validation they need to thrive, both at home and in society.If corporal punishment was designed to protect Black children, did it really help when it came to growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood? Black kids and the American Dream - that's the next episode of What Happened In Alabama…CREDITSWhat Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening.
“Candy Cane? Hey anybody know a Candy Cane?” We watched “Joy Ride” (2001) with the hilarious Michael Morgan and we're still brushing up on our CB lingo. This little gem of a movie from 2001 fits nicely into that category of unintentionally homoerotic films from the early aughts. Obviously, Paul Walker (RIP) is serving your friendly neighborhood Abercrombie & Fitch employee that stood outside the store, possibly shirtless, definitely way too hot to ever speak to in person, but we would be remiss to leave out or guy Steve Zahn. All three of us have in our notes how cute Steve Zahn is in this movie - even with his dad-chic tucked in shirts and light washed, relaxed fit denim. We buy them as estranged brothers on a road trip to pick up Lewis's (Paul Walker) crush? Girlfriend? FWB? Whoever she is her name is “Venna” and she's played by the stoic - and since retired - Leelee Sobieski. Don't ask us why, but if you were a fan of Leelee's work around this time - you're gay now. On this road trip across the American west, the boys play a prank on a trucker via their newly installed CB radio and all hell breaks loose. This movie has many rewind-able moments for little gay boys including Paul and Steve's buns on full display and Paul giving us his best lady voice over the CB, impersonating the fictitious “Candy Cane”. The scary trucker hell-bent on revenge is named “Rusty Nail” and the voice is provided by none other than “Buffalo Bill” himself, Ted Levine. It doesn't get anymore queer coded than that. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! www.patreon.com/moviesthatmadeusgay Facebook/Instagram: @moviesthatmadeusgay Twitter: @MTMUGPod Scott Youngbauer: Twitter @oscarscott / Instagram @scottyoungballer Peter Lozano: Twitter/Instagram @peterlasagna
The Sistas are back! Benita,Sweet T and LeeLee welcome or newest Sista Raegan to this jam and talkfest! Check out our RVA Soul Spotlight,In Da News and of course "Dumb As Fuck! segments with the best of R&B,GoGO and Hip Hop! Shout Outs (804) 321-1010 www.rvasoul.com talkingsmackpodcast@gmail.com
When journalist Lee Hawkins was growing up, his father, Leroy, would have nightmares about his childhood in Alabama. When Lee was in his 30s, he started to have his own nightmares about his childhood in Minnesota. These shared nightmares became a clue that set Lee on a decade-long genealogical journey. In this episode we meet Lee and his Dad, and through them, we discover the roots of What Happened in Alabama?, and reveal the stakes of daring to ask the question – and all the questions that followed.TranscriptLee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org. Listener discretion is advised. In 2004, when I was 33 years old, my dad called me for the first time in a year. I remember it so well. It was a Saturday. It wasn't long after his retirement party, which I missed, because we weren't talking.[phone ringing] A year may not sound like that long to some of you, but you have to understand, my dad and I used to talk every day. He was my best friend. We stopped talking because I asked my parents to go to therapy. I wanted them to confront some things from our past that had started haunting me as an adult, but they refused. And then a year later, Dad called. That one call turned into hundreds over several years. And what he told me, would change my life forever. Lee Sr.: I really haven't shared any of this shit with anybody, you know. But what it - I'm sorry I'm goin' back in that shit. But you know everybody's life isn't as peachy as people think. My name is Lee Hawkins and this is What Happened In Alabama: The Prologue.[music starts]Before we go much further, I need to tell you how uncomfortable this makes me. I'm a journalist and a writer; and as journalists, we're taught to tell other people's stories — but this story, well, it's all about me and my family. So that takes me out of my comfort zone, but I've learned over the years that sometimes the most powerful story you can tell is your own.So let's start at the beginning. Back home in Maplewood, Minnesota, where I grew up. [game sounds] Maplewood was that suburban American dream – the white fences, green lawns and ranch-style houses. It was the 1980s, so my two sisters and I were always either playing outside or in the house listening to music. My favorite was the handheld Mattel Classic Football 2 game. I used to play that thing all day. [game sounds] We lived and went to school in a predominantly white neighborhood, but we also spent a lot of time in our Black community in Saint Paul, where our church was, and many family and friends lived. Having that balance was a real blessing. A lot of the childhood joy I experienced as a kid was fueled by the time I spent with my Dad and my grandfathers. Playing drums and singing at music gigs. Going to the “Brotherhood Breakfast” – which was a pancake and waffles extravaganza that my church organized for Black fathers and their sons. We talked about everything from the Muhammad Ali-Larry Holmes fight to Prince's latest hit.[barbershop sounds] Getting lined up at Mr. Harper's Barbershop – basically one of the few places for a Black man to get a haircut in Saint Paul. And on Sunday we went to Mount Olivet Missionary Baptist Church.[church music starts] Lee Sr.: [singing] Who's on the lord's side? That's my dad, Lee Roy Hawkins Senior, singing at our church. From the time I was a little kid, it was always me and him. Lee Senior and Lee Junior. Lee Roy and Lee Lee.But there was something bubbling up under our picture perfect surface. [foreboding music starts]Sometimes, my dad would have nightmares. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to his screams. He'd wake the whole house. I'd hear my mom shouting, “Lee Roy, you're having a dream! It's okay, you're having a dream!” She'd say it over and over and eventually he'd wake up and calm down. Like most boys my age, I idolized my dad. I thought he was the most fearless person on Earth, and that he wasn't afraid of anything. So hearing him scream out like that told me that whatever he was dreaming about had to be pretty fierce. I knew better than to go in that room during those nightmares, but one morning, I somehow found the courage to finally ask him, “Dad, what were you dreaming about last night?” He hardly spoke. He just looked down at the floor and said, “Alabama, son. Alabama.”My father was born in 1948 in a small town in Butler County, Alabama, during the height of Jim Crow. He rarely talked about it or what happened while he was there. But Alabama was always with us. It's like he'd packed it into his suitcase when he moved to Minnesota. In his screams at night and in the things he didn't say. I couldn't explain it back then, but it also showed up in how he punished us. Like this one time back in 1979 I was eight years old, and as usual, playing my video game.[video game noises] It was a Sunday. I remember because we'd just come home from church. My dad was in the kitchen putting mayonnaise on a bologna sandwich, and I was in the living room, when suddenly…. TOUCHDOWN![video game beeps]I jumped up man, and I ran over to dad in the kitchen. And I told him, “Dad, dad, I scored a touchdown!” [dark music starts]Instead of congratulating me, he snatched the game from my hand. He threw it down on the ground, and then he picked me up and body slammed me to the linoleum floor. Hard.And then he just started screaming, “Do it on the field! Do it on the field!” Looking up at him from the floor, I was completely bewildered and confused. As an eight year old kid, I had no idea why he'd done that.Like many Black kids we knew, we got the belt whenever we did something wrong. If I try to estimate it, I definitely got whipped with a belt over 100 times throughout my childhood and my teenage years. Both of my parents whipped me with inexplicable anger. You didn't always know when their tempers would be triggered, but when they were, you couldn't forget it. There was a sense of fear of the outside world that hung over our household constantly. When we'd get punished, our parents would tell us that it was to protect us, to keep us from being killed, by the police, by white racists, or even someone from our own Black community. I could sense it in my Dad's nightmares. But I didn't think about it too much until I started to have my own nightmares as an adult. The summer of 2003, I was a journalist in my early thirties, and I'd just landed a job at the Wall Street Journal covering General Motors from Detroit. I had a new apartment, strong friendships and my loving family – my two sisters, my mom, my dad. They all lived in suburbs around the Twin Cities. My parents still lived in Maplewood. Like always, I talked nearly every day to my dad on the phone.I was, in a lot of ways, fulfilling my dreams. But at night, something was happening. I'd fall asleep, and then, I was eight years old again, getting body slammed by my dad. I started having these dreams like multiple times a week. And each dream focused on that same attack.I would wake up sweaty and disoriented, still thinking from the vantage point of that eight year old kid looking up at my dad's face from the floor. Every time it took a few minutes for me to realize that I wasn't still that kid. That I was an adult. I was far away from Minnesota. And I was in my own home. There was one particular night when I realized that the nightmares were seeping into my daily life. I was at a bar with my friends. [bar sounds] The bar was packed. We were standing around tall bar tables, and everyone was talking over everyone. It smelled like Grand Marnier. As my friends talked, all of a sudden their voices became distant. I was standing next to a table, trying to laugh along with everybody, but my mind's eye was on that 8-year old version of me – that little boy who kept springing up in my dreams. I was admonishing myself. I kept thinking over and over about what I could have done to protect him. And then, I leaned back, and suddenly, I was on fire. My shirt had caught the flame of a small candle that was burning on the tabletop. My friend Marcus jumped into action. He started putting out the flames on my arm with his hand while everyone else took a step back.A little later, Marcus made a joke about it and we laughed, but I could tell my friends were baffled, wondering how could I be so out of it that I'd set my arm on a burning candle. What in the world is going on with me? Why can't I stop thinking about stuff that happened two decades ago? That year got harder and harder for me. The endless replay of this past memory, the brain fog, the anxiety, the disorientation, and the anger. The weight of it all became overbearing. So much so that one night I was screaming at my father in the dream. When I woke, I knew I needed to confront my parents. Immediately. I reached for the phone.[phone ringing] I tried to catch my breath while it rang. When my mother answered, I shouted, "Put Dad on the phone!" My heart was pumping outside of my chest. My fists were clenched, and I felt like I could punch through the wall. When he answered, I asked him if he remembered body slamming me to the floor when I was eight years old over a game I was playing. He just sat there listening to me breathing and said, “I don't know. I did a lot of crazy things.” My mom started screaming into the phone, telling me I was being disrespectful.I told them I would stop talking to them forever unless they went to therapy first. They refused. So I hung up the phone. And I didn't talk to my parents for over a year. I was committed, and I was done with them. [music starts]And during that time, I tried to confront my nightmares. I went to therapy. I exercised and started meditating. I did all the things I could do to manage the stress on my body and my mind. And I thought about that conversation with my parents a lot, about how all I had wanted was to know why. Why did they treat me like that as a kid? Intellectually, I knew that in that particular instance, they were trying to teach me a lesson – a lesson that even at eight years old, I had to hurry up and become a man.That's what “do it on the field” means – that Black boys need to make real-world accomplishments if they want to be successful in life. I understood this, but I didn't understand why my dad felt he needed to body slam me. And then my dad called. He told me he'd missed me at his retirement party, and he'd missed all of our hours-long chats. He apologized, and said that he understood that I had been taken for granted, and that I had every right to be upset about everything that happened to me as a kid. It was our separation that made him realize that. He told me he and my mom were ready to go to counseling. And I was too. Lee Sr.: Yeah, but see I got a lot of memories down there that I really didn't wanna deal with, you know? They've been living in this survival, get what you can bullshit all these years, man, it's been like that my whole adult years. Been putting out fires, man, my whole life. My whole adult life. There were so many questions I wanted to ask my parents growing up. Questions about them, about their lives. And about how that affected the choices they made in raising me and my sisters – choices that were imposed on us by our own country, and our country's perception of our place in it. I started with my dad. His life in the south was a mystery to us, and I wanted to know what happened to him. What happened in Alabama?Lee: Tell me about your earliest memory in Greenville and what it was like to grow up there. Lee Sr.: Lived in a little house…had two or three rooms and a kitchen. My dad built the house. When I started working on this project in 2014, Dad really opened up about his life in the Jim Crow south. And I was blessed to be able to record some of our interviews. Some of what he shared were beautiful memories of this little boy we'd never seen pictures of. He shared fond memories of Alabama, especially the baseball field he played on. His team would play during the day. And sometimes Negro League legends like Hank Aaron and Satchel Paige would play there at night. Other memories were super hard for him to revisit. But he courageously kept opening up. He told me about something he'd always been too pained to talk about: how the loss of his mom in 1961, when he was just 12 years old, changed his whole life. Lee Sr.: You know, that was a real devastating thing for me when I lost my mommy. I just can't even, you know, shit, I couldn't, I couldn't make it through that man. And how it felt when, after his mom's death, he moved north to live with one of his older sisters and her husband in MinnesotaLee Sr.: When I had left Alabama, something came out of me, man. A big ass relief. And I didn't even know where I was going. But it was a big ass, just, man like a breath of fresh air, man.Later, he expressed the regret, confusion and rage he felt when he returned to Alabama at 27 years old, when I was just a baby, to bury his father – who was killed.Lee Sr.: I was looking forward for him to see you guys. And I was always thinking I had more time, you know, because he was a healthy guy, man. He was a healthy man. And how hard that return was, for many reasons. Lee Sr.: It was horrible because somebody had killed him, and people were looking at us like trying to figure out what we were gonna do about it. And I was saying, fuck, I got to get through this and get out of this motherfucker. You know, I ain't got time to look for no murderer.As he told me these stories, I realized that my father knew very little about his own upbringing. He had left Alabama at such a young age, and because of that there were so many secrets that were kept from him – and these were the secrets that showed up in his nightmares as an adult. The ones he kept from me. As a journalist, for me, one of the hardest things is to know there's a story there, but to not be able to break it open and just tell it. It was nagging at me, and I knew something had happened in my family to make my parents so extremely fearful for themselves and for us. So in 2015, I took a DNA test.Lee Sr.: And that thing, you know they say, if you don't know where you come from, how the hell you know where you going? For years, I had believed that the stories of Black families like mine were irretrievable, but with the help of that test, my father and I went to work filling in that family tree. I embarked on a genealogical journey for myself, but also for – and often with – my dad. [phone ringing]Lee Sr.: Hello?Lee: Hey, Dad. Lee Sr.: Yeah. Hey, man. Lee: Can you hear me okay? Lee Sr.: Yeah. You're good.Lee: Okay. Good, man. Good. Thanks a lot. Lee Sr.: Oh, yeah. Let's get it. I dug into archives and sifted through census records. I'd call him up when I found new information.Lee: I'm looking at this um, hmm. This genealogy shit is crazy.Lee Sr.: Well, I'll be darned. Lee: Did you realize that when your mom's father was killed, she was nine? Lee Sr.: She was nine? Lee: She was nine. Lee Sr.: No, I didn't know that. Lee: But, you know, your dad has, in the census, he had a couple brothers and sisters that were listed as mulatto. Lee Sr.: Oh, goodness me. The project became so much bigger than discovering our family. It turned into an exploration of American history that no one really likes to talk about: the aftermath of slavery and Jim Crow, a history that shaped my family's experience in America.This is a story about some of the more tragic parts of my family and my country's history. The parts that, amid all the love and the closeness, were buried and rarely if ever discussed. It's about my journey to uncover and understand those tragedies.I did hundreds of interviews. Some of them with family members, others with genealogists and academics on everything from the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants, the effects of slavery on Black America, and even the mental health of the children of people who have been incarcerated or murdered. Even when it didn't seem like it, every interview I did was also a means to understand our family history and in turn myself, so much better. Brandon Jones: Well, we have a lot of old parenting techniques that were picked up and conditioned from slavery that have continued on. Doctor Joy DeGruy talks about this in her book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. Prof. Christopher Haveman: There was no real justification – moral justification – for it other than whites had the racist premise that they were civilized and the Indians were “savages” and that the whites could make better use of the land than Indians.Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller: And for folks who think that, you know, that was like 50, 60, 70 years ago, we've gotten past that – oh, no, no we haven't. The people who lived through it suffered through the violence and everything that went along with being an American living under a system of Jim Crow. They haven't recovered.The punishments, the belt, and the nightmares that haunted me and my father — I knew they couldn't be isolated incidents. They had to be echoes of a deeper shared history. A history that is alive in all of us today. [music]For four years, my dad and I kept calling each other up on the phone to talk through my most recent discoveries. In 2019, he did an epic three-hour interview. It was planned as the last interview that I'd need for him to get it done.Since Dad and I were both still actively involved in music and had just recorded a Christmas song together, we were both looking forward to doing more. I told him I'd come to Minnesota to produce a song for him. And I thanked him for going so deeply into the past with me – that I was proud of him, and that he'd done an amazing job. He asked me, “Son, is there anything else you need?” I said no, but I'd see him soon.Lee Sr.: Alright man, thanks for the call, man. Lee: Okay, talk to you later. Lee Sr.: Keep on keeping on. Love you. Lee: K, love you. Bye. [phone hangs up]Shortly after that, he and my mom went to celebrate their 50th anniversary at the Buddy Guy/Mavis Staples concert, and he had a massive cardiac arrest, right there in the concert venue. Four days later, on February 28, 2019, he died. It was devastating. I think about my dad and the dynamic duo we were. And just like the music we made together in our life, this project was largely inspired by him. Even though it was hard for him at times, he did it, yes for himself, but especially for me. It was the greatest gift he could ever give me. And his unexpected death completely changed the story for me. For all of us. Roberta: He went through so much in his life. Went through so much. He did. This is my mom, Roberta Hawkins. She met my dad while they were both hanging out at McCarron's Lake in Roseville, splashing around on the beach with friends. They were just 14 year old kids. And that concert my dad had the cardiac arrest at was one of the many date nights they went on, this time, in honor of their 50-year wedding anniversary. That teenage love just grew stronger and stronger.On a cold, snowy afternoon in Saint Paul, I sat down with my mom and one of my sisters for a conversation. We'd rescheduled our meeting because of a blizzard earlier that week, so the day we recorded this just happened to be a significant one. Lee: Today is the fourth anniversary of Dad's death, and it's just a coincidence that we're here today talking. Can we reflect on what this means for us? Roberta: One thing, great memories. Great memories. But it's, it's hard because I miss him so much, and life isn't the same. When we sat together on the anniversary of his death, the pain of losing him was still very raw for us. We reflected on dad — and how we missed and loved him.I've come to understand that all of the grief, all of the racism and all of the stressful experiences that started when he came into the world as a child of Jim Crow stayed with him until the day he died. When I think about my dad in the context of American history, I recognize that the country that we all loved – and he defended as part of the Air Force – refused to love him back. Our country, which I also love so deeply, sought to destroy my family by forcing them to live under this brutal caste system for five generations following Emancipation. That's one of the reasons I'm here. I continue with this project, day after day, because I know that without intervention and education, history can repeat itself. I'm doing this for my father, and for my ancestors and elders. But especially for our Black children, and their families. Because the process of breaking the cycles born out of slavery and Jim Crow that many of us inherited and internalized has to start inside of our families. The beauty and the power of our people, and our true, authentic Black identity of unwavering excellence and dignity that comes from those family members who came before us, that's the part we need to celebrate and to keep.Lee: What does family mean to you, and what do you want people to know about you and the family, our listeners? Roberta: I think family means everything, because that's one of the reasons that we can survive, with family. And we all go through a lot. And this has been the hardest part of my life, is – even with my husband gone, and knowing how much he went through in his life. And he was a wonderful, wonderful husband and father. And I just don't know. It's very difficult even to go day to day without him, because he was my best friend, too. When my dad died, I lost my best buddy, a father and a mentor. And in many ways, he was a partner in all of this. He needed to do this work. We needed to do this work. And I believe it's necessary for any cycle breaker, not just for my family but for many other American families.I hope that this podcast can serve as an inspirational blueprint for others looking to discover, investigate and understand their own family history. We can no longer bury the dark parts of American history because it makes people feel uncomfortable. For none of us are responsible for the sins of our forefathers, and we can't rewrite the past. But we certainly can shape the present, and most importantly, the future.This story is mine, yes, but it also belongs to you.[music]CreditsWhat Happened in Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced, and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam. Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Landa. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou, and Ziyang Fu; and also thank you to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening.
Growing up in a middle-class suburb in the 1980s often felt idyllic to Lee. It was the age of crank calls and endless summers playing outside. The Hawkins kids were raised by their parents to excel in everything they put their minds to — and they did. They were model students at school and in their community. But at home, a pervading sense of fear and paranoia governed the household. In this episode, Lee sits down with his younger sister Tiffany to discuss the tensions at home. Later, he talks with psychotherapist and trauma expert Brandon Jones to uncover the roots of his parents' fears, and how it dates back to slavery and the Jim Crow era in the United States.RESOURCESPost Traumatic Slave Syndrome | Dr. Joy DeGruyTranscriptLee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org. Listener discretion is advised.Hi, this is Lee Hawkins, and we're about to dive into episode two of What Happened in Alabama. This one's about family and how policies impact parenting. There's a lot to get into. But you'll get a whole lot more if you go back and listen to the prologue – that'll give you some context for the series and this episode. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much. [music starts]Family. There are so many variations of what this unit is. For me, it's mom, dad and my sisters. No matter what your family looks like – be it blood or chosen – there's a shared experience of people who know you inside and out, who've seen you grow. There's a common language for your memories, an ease when you're together.This journey I've been on to understand how I was raised and the histories behind who I am today starts with the people who know me best and have seen me at my highs and my lows. They bear witness to stories in the far reaches of my mind and fill in the gaps when my recollection isn't clear.Growing up in Maplewood, Minnesota, there are a lot of memories. Understanding myself means understanding my parents, my grandparents, and all the people who came before them. [musical intro]I'm Lee Hawkins, and this is What Happened In Alabama. Episode 2: Meet the Hawkins. [music starts]In many ways, I grew up in a picture-perfect American family: mom, dad, three kids. Me and my two sisters, Tammi and Tiffany. Tiffany: I would be outside from sunup to sundown playing with the neighbors. We'd always have a game of kickball or softball, fight over, you know, whose ball it was or if the person lost the game, they'd take the ball and want to go home or kick it over the neighbor's fence. I mean, we really had a great time with that aspect growing up. That's Tiffany. Looking back on our childhood with her brings back so many great memories. We were children and teenagers of the '80s, and that was an almost magical time to grow up in. Tiffany: You know, we'd go play in the woods or you know, ding dong ditch or, you know, the phone calls that we would make pranking people. I mean, these are things that could have –Lee: Oh the prank calls on the three-way? Oh man. Tiffany: Yeah, you know, I was really mad when they came out –Lee: That was some funny stuff though.Tiffany: That caller ID really messed us up, you know, caller ID ended all of that. [Lee laughs] Because we used to really get people in some binds there. I mean, if social media was out there, we coulda made tons of money off of those calls that we were genius –Lee: Oh man, we would be blowing up. [Tiffany laughs] We would be so rich if we were, if social media was out now, our show would be the bomb. Our prank call show. [Tiffany laughing] Oh my gosh. Tiffany: Yeah, it would've. It would've. Like I said, we had fun as kids. But there were some tense times, too. Mom and Dad were strict.Tiffany: You know, it's just like them coming home from work. Like, is, are all the chores done? Like, what kind of mood are they gonna be in? Like, are we gonna get yelled at or beat today, or you know, what's gonna happen? You never knew. You were constantly having to live with this, you know, fear. And you had no control over how, what was gonna happen. Lee: Right, and then our parents would come home, and they were like military inspectors, and they would go over – Mom would go over and make sure if there was a, you know, if there was a smudge on the mirror, then that meant you were gonna go – she was gonna come into your room, drag you out into the living room, and beat you down. And tell you, [yelling] “There was a smudge on the mirror!”Tiffany: [laughing] It's so crazy because, yeah.Lee: And we laugh now because there's that thin line between comedy and tragedy, right, that's what they say. And I think that now that we made it out – we made it out, Tiff. We made it. Tiffany: Yeah. But for the grace of God. Our parents raised us to be perfectionists. We were super high achieving kids. Both Tiff and I were elected class president, me four consecutive years, Tiff three consecutive years. She was the homecoming queen and a star athlete. And I was known more for my activism and was elected YMCA Youth Governor of the State of Minnesota. We had lots of friends and were often thought to be role models. But at home, we were sometimes seen as falling short, and the penalty for that was the belt, or verbal tirades from our disappointed parents.It's a hard thing to talk about, because I can't in good faith paint my parents as evil monsters who just wanted to abuse us, because they weren't. In fact, they didn't see it as abuse. And neither did we. We were a close family, and we loved our parents, and I know they loved us. Our parents were and are good people. They were active in the church, they were amazing neighbors, and they made a lot of sacrifices to raise us into the productive citizens we've become. That said, they, like a lot of our Black friends' parents, could be really mean. Over time, my research into the history of my family and my country, revealed an explanation for that.Before I go too deep into this, I should mention that Tiffany and I – and our family's experiences – don't represent that of the whole Black community. We're speaking about ourselves. The terror our family went through during enslavement and Jim Crow made our parents feel that they needed to be brutal with us. A few months ago, I sat down with Tiffany to talk more deeply about how we were raised trying to make sense of our parents' fear and trauma and how it impacted us. The focus on hard work, getting ahead and the American Dream – all things Mom and Dad thought would keep us safe. You'll also hear parts of my conversation with Brandon Jones, Executive Director of the Minnesota Association for Children's Mental Health. He helps us process how this tension between some Black parents and their children manifested as trauma in every generation going back to slavery. We had to follow the rules, and the penalty of not following those rules was almost always violence at home and social condemnation in the world outside. The interviews with Tiffany and Brandon helped me see it so much more clearly.Tiffany: You know, being the youngest comes with a lot, where I had siblings – and you and Tammi were, I think in that day and age, were quite a bit older than I was, but not really because, you know, five and seven years older. But we were, still had this closeness. Lee: And what do you remember about me? How was I as a kid? Tiffany: You were very animated. I remember that you were always very talented at everything you did. You could sing and dance, and you were always a leader, a leader of the pack. You were never, did the same as everyone else, and I thought that was a great thing. You also were mischievous, I think. [laughs] At times you could be: “Oh, Lee Lee.” “Oh, what's Lee Lee done now?” Lee: Right. 'Cause we called it “hyper.”Tiffany: He's always getting in trouble.Lee: On my way to prison. Tiffany: Yeah, well, yeah. [laughter]Lee: Or to get killed by the police. One of the two. ‘We better whoop his ass.'Tiffany: The paranoia. Yeah. Looking back, I now see we were under a lot of stress, even though we also had fun as kids. But the pressure to never make any mistakes – under the threat of the belt – was constantly weighing on us. The understanding was that if we messed up as kids – even buying a candy bar without getting a receipt – that would go on our records and could be brought back by white people, even years later, to destroy our futures and lives and careers as adults. So we avoided a lot of trouble. But when we did really well, especially against white kids, our mother sometimes seemed reluctant to celebrate with us. It was almost as if our success and our confidence and our belief in ourselves as Black kids sometimes frightened her. Lee: Did you feel supported when you were achieving all these things?Tiffany: No. You know, at times in, I had, you know, two different – and depending on which parent you were talking about, I mean, Dad supported us in everything. But there were still limits to that. I mean, I felt like they were glad to have something that was keeping me busy and out of trouble. But never really embraced the fact that that could have been something that I took a lot further. I'm not sure why Mom was like, you know, with pretty much anything that we did almost, as to keep us in our place in some way, she would also make it, always make it feel like, ‘Yeah, that's great and everything, but it's not really that important,' you know? ‘It doesn't mean anything.' Lee: And also, ‘Why do you think that you can be this or that?' ‘Why do you think –,' you know? Did you get that? I got that all the time, right in the midst of accomplishing things.Tiffany: Oh, I got that a lot. Or, ‘Why do you have to be –,' yeah, ‘Why do you have to be always doing stuff?' Like, ‘Can't you just be satisfied with this?' Like, ‘Everybody else isn't doing that.' That was another thing that drove me crazy, is hearing about what everybody else's kids were doing. And it was like, ‘Yeah, but I mean – and that's great and I'm glad that they are – but do you see what I'm doing? Everybody else's kids aren't doing this.'Lee: But that was when we would get beat. I remember a time Tiffany had a big track meet leading up to the state tournament. But it coincided with a family trip down south. When they picked me up on the way down, I asked Tiffany how her track season was going. When she told me she'd qualified for this meet, I was furious, because it was a huge opportunity. I didn't understand why my parents didn't let her go to the meet and join us on the trip later. But Tiffany and I knew not to push. Lee: You and I have talked about the play Fences – August Wilson's Fences – and Troy Maxson and how he despised his son coming home saying, “Dad, I got a football scholarship, and they're gonna pay the way. They need you to sign off for me to go to college for free,” and Troy Maxson said, “You're not going.” Because he was a major league, he was a Negro League baseball player, and his dreams got dashed and he really resented the opportunity and the freedom of that next generation. And I always look back, and I think back to how Mom used to tell us about Grandpa Buddy, which was so hard to hear, because Grandpa Buddy was so supportive of us, but she would say that Grandpa Buddy thought she should just get married and not go to college or anything. “You're just a woman, so just go get married. Why should I spend money on college?” And so it seems like in our bloodline – not on Dad's side of the family, but definitely on Mom's side of the family – every generation kind of resented sometimes the next generation's opportunities of, you know, that it was like, ‘Yes, I'm providing this for you, and we're going to make sure you have braces, and we're going to make sure that all of your needs are met. We're not gonna hug you. We're not gonna tell you we love you. We're not gonna baby you, we're gonna beat excellence into you. But then when you become excellent, we're also gonna resent you because we didn't have the same opportunity that you had.'Brandon: Well, we have a lot of old parenting techniques that were picked up and conditioned from slavery that have continued on. Doctor Joy DeGruy talks about this in her book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. Brandon Jones is the executive director of the Minnesota Association for Children's Mental Health. He also consults for other organizations in developing culturally relevant and trauma-informed mental health services for children throughout the state. When I told him this story, he immediately recognized the connection to slavery and Jim Crow. Brandon: One of the things that really just blew my mind is the downplaying of achievement of our children in kind of – it's, it's in a, it's in a joking way, but it was a protective measure on the plantation where you would have Black parents, mostly mothers, who would downplay the achievements of their son or their daughter because they didn't want their child to be sold off or moved to another part of the plantation where they couldn't keep an eye on them or protect them. Lee: Right, they would have a talent for playing the violin or something, and the fear was that Massa's gonna sell him to be, and say, “Oh, this Negro plays the violin and he can work during the day,” and get a pretty penny for that person and then they'll be separated from the family. Brandon: Right. So there was a protective measure to keep kids close to their parents.Hearing that from Brandon actually made me feel a lot better, because when I was a kid, I just thought our mother hated us. But it's not that simple. Looking back, I now see she was under a lot of stress, working a full-time job as a nurse and a health coordinator at a major corporate assisted living center, raising us, taking care of our dad, and being the matriarch who made a lot of sacrifices for us. And quite often, she'd have chest pains, which is a telltale sign of a heart attack. And I'd say 90% of the time she complained of chest pains, it would be because we upset her; usually if we disagreed with her, were perceived as talking back, or even if we looked at her in a certain way she didn't like. That really scared us, but it horrified our dad. He would transform into an attack dog and just haul off and slap us, and then order us all to get into the car so we could take our mom to the emergency room. It got to the point where that scenario just kept playing out. Tiff and I couldn't tell if she was really having pains or if she was using it as a weapon of punishment. We were scared for our mom. And for ourselves.Tiffany: Yeah, I can laugh about it now, but it was actually terrifying as a kid because, you know, I can remember several times that she did this, but one in particular when she pulled that having chest pains thing. And maybe she was having chest pains, maybe that was a sign of her anxiety, but I also know that she knew how to use that to play that card with Dad. You know, the ambulance was called, it was all of this. And Dad looked me in the eye, and he said, “If anything happens to my wife, I'm gonna kill you.” And I believed that. I mean, he was so scared that something was gonna happen to her. And it scared me so much that I caught a cab from there and left, because I was afraid that something was gonna happen and Dad was gonna kill me. Lee: Other moms that we knew, if someone threatened their child, especially their husband, and said, “I'll kill you,” then they would say, “No, don't do that. Don't do that.” And a lot of black women that we know from the church would have said, “Uh uh, you're not gonna threaten my child's life.” [Tiffany laughing]Lee: But our mom was just like silent, like, and she would look at us like, ‘Yeah, see? He'll kill you for me. He'll kill you for me.'Tiffany: Yeah, it would give her fuel. And we didn't know enough then. And also I feel like we – they knew how to isolate us in that way. We were fearful of ever communicating what we were going through at home, because one of the reasons, I think we didn't even realize that this was not normal behavior because we knew, you know, other friends that would say that their parents spanked them. We thought we were getting spanked, you know? It wasn't until later we realized this was a lot more than getting spanked, I mean, ya know? And so then that's when I realized when I did start sharing with people and they would be looking at me like, ‘Are you crazy?' Like, ‘What are you talking about?' Like, ‘That's horrible.' Like, people would be affected. And I'm like, ‘Why are you so affected by that?' That's not a normal spanking. This is not normal behavior. But I didn't know that until after. We never could tell family business. You remember, we were always told that? “Don't tell family business.” [music starts]And of course, years later, my father opened up about how, when he'd beat us, he'd scream, “Don't ever disrespect your mother! I would give my life for five minutes with my mama!” And be beating us and going into a whole explanation of how sweet and kind his mother was. And the more he'd say, the harder he'd swing that belt. His mother died of a kidney infection when he was just 12 years old, and I think when she died, he never got over the pain and the guilt of feeling like he didn't protect his mother. So he wasn't going to let that happen again in his adult life. I guess he addressed that pain by protecting our mother from us. I wish my dad would've just talked about his grief and explained what it felt like to be in that helpless position and how much losing his mom affected him. Maybe if he did, life at home would've been more peaceful.Tiffany: I'm sure there were a lot of people that had no idea that this was going on in our household. Lee: Mom to this day to me has said, “We've never beat you with the belt. We never hit you with the belt. We only spanked you.”Tiffany: Yeah. Lee: And we were hit hundreds of times with the belt. Tiffany: Yeah.Lee: And to this day –Tiffany: With a belt, comb, shoes thrown at us. Lee: Slapped –Tiffany: I mean – Lee: Slapped across the face.Tiffany: Slapped. Tackled. Lee: Thrown down the stairs. Tiffany and I both got the belt. But we were also sometimes punished in different ways, depending on the parent, and depending on the moment. Tiffany: Through therapy, I realize some of the things, some of my paranoia, some of, you know, the anxiety that I have were triggered from situations that happened during my childhood. So like getting locked in a house that you couldn't leave, and if there was a fire, would have burned in. Not being able to access the phone if there was an emergency because it was blocked so that you couldn't make calls out. There could only be calls that were coming in. You know, being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night…[laughing] this is almost embarrassing to say – because someone ate the Breyers ice cream. I mean, like – Lee: But Tiffany, like, okay, so you said that it wasn't until you started talking about it with other people that you started to realize that this was not normal, right? But I remember when I was a kid, I think part of the reason I didn't completely implode at that time and it took like many, many years later for me to break down was because I thought, ‘Well, we're Black kids.' Mom and Dad programmed us, and I guess society programmed me – I don't want to speak for you – but it programmed me to believe, ‘This is what Black kids have to get. I'm a Black kid. And being Black, Black people –.' And mom would say, “This is a Black custom. We whip our kids. This is what Black people do.” And so I just believed that because I'm Black, I have to be beaten because this is our heritage and this is who we are. And Black kids are not allowed to have that level of freedom. [music starts]My parents were among the approximately 70% of Black parents who believe in hitting kids. Out of all the ethnic groups in America, Black households believe in it at the highest rates, and in the 17 states where corporal punishment is still legal in schools, Black children are hit more than children of any other race, and their parents are most likely to sign forms allowing teachers to strike their children. Once again, I'm not saying this is the case for all Black families, but in my home, and in the homes of many of the Black kids I grew up with, it was framed to us as being a Black custom. I asked Brandon Jones about this.Brandon: Unfortunately, due to our own historical trauma and our adaptation of intergenerational trauma that has become culture, spankings or whoopings have become primary. And what ends up happening is you have a lot of kids who are spanked or whooped as a first approach towards discipline without other methods of means happening. And you get a lot of shame as well that takes place when parents don't whoop or beat or use corporal punishment to their children. Other Black parents or family members will encourage you to do so or ask you, “Why are you not spanking your child?” Or, “Why are you talking to your child about what's going on? That child needs their butt whooped,” and things of that nature. Like these are very common conversations and interactions that happen within the Black community. In hindsight, a lot of the reasons for my whipping was because I was often asking questions. Yes, as a student leader, but especially as a Black kid. I wasn't afraid to speak out. I never felt like I couldn't compete, or any anxiety about being Black and having lots of friends of all races. And my parents would say, “Be careful at that school. Watch what you say, and don't get cocky with these white people.” And I feel like I got punished for not being afraid and staying in my place, for that unapologetic curiosity and confidence to ask questions and express opinions. And of course, I made it worse by becoming a journalist. I was in my thirties before I began to question the way we were raised. Until then, I think I too believed that Black kids needed to be treated this way, to keep them out of the criminal justice system or to be able to work in corporate America without being kept out because they stole a candy bar from Walgreens when they were nine. But Tiff was much smarter and braver than me. She knew it was wrong as a child. As a parent, she broke that cycle in our family and talked a lot about the need to focus on healing. Tiffany: A lot of people have been through different childhood traumas that are horrible, but it's what you do to try and reverse that. So I've spent most of my adult life, and I know you have too, trying to heal, you know, and sometimes it's exhausting going to a therapy session and coming home and all this stuff is drug up and, you know, you just feel defeated. But I also know that it has caused me to be a better mother. Because that was my biggest fear, is when I started having children, I did not want to repeat the cycle. So I haven't, I never spank my my children. And I try to, you know, talk to them about things. And I always want them to feel like they could come to me about different things. Now, there were times when I'll say, and they'll, they could tell you too, like I saw little Lee Roy or Roberta in me, you know, especially with, like, the explosive, you know, or yelling. And that would make me feel horrible, you know, some of the things, the verbal things that I've had to catch myself saying. But the difference between that is that, you know, once I was able to calm myself down and really critically think about what had just happened, I will always give someone an apology about my behavior and how that impacted them. It doesn't mean that it didn't affect the person, you know, because words hurt. But I have, you know, tried to live a life where I'm not continuing the cycle. And I just constantly working on it. You know, there's things that still trigger me. Lee: Right. And I remember when you and Tammi started having kids. That was when it triggered something in me that made me confront Mom and Dad. Because I was also afraid that they were gonna try to beat them, to beat my nieces and nephews. And I remember I was vicious, you know, I was, I had a vengeance in me and saying, ‘Don't you dare repeat that cycle another generation.'Tiffany: Mm hmm. As a journalist in 1999, around the time Tiffany and I started recognizing all this, that was when the first version of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study came out, showing that traumatic childhood experiences can stalk people and increase the likelihood of mental illness, substance abuse, and chronic health problems. Subsequent updates to the research showed that childhood trauma can shorten life expectancy. That's when I started thinking consciously about how adults – of all races – have this responsibility to protect children. But that doesn't mean trying to beat safety into them. And yes, there are political, social, and economic realities that caused my parents to legitimately worry. But it's my hope that for new generations, we put down the belt and find a way to give a child a peaceful home without screaming, violence, and constant uncertainty about when the next outburst could happen. That said, this is a very complicated conversation to have, because despite it all, I wouldn't be the person I am today without my parents, my dad especially. And I'm talking about all the good things – his unwavering encouragement and belief in us, his omnipresence in our lives, and his undeniable devotion as a husband and a father. My sister Tiffany feels the same way too. Tiffany: I get people that tell me all the time about the way that Dad changed their life or how invested he was in them. And even just to, like, call them and say, “Hey, remember what we talked about, that thing you were going to do? Did you ever do it?” You know, he was always a great person for that. Lee: He was an incredible motivator. He was someone who wanted to see us go to the next level and far beyond what he could have ever dreamed. For our whole childhood, our dad's life before us was a mystery. We couldn't even ask about it. We just knew the basic facts. He was born in Alabama and moved to Minnesota after his mom died when he was 12 years old. But beyond that, any clues about his childhood would appear at the most unexpected times. Tiffany: I still have never seen a picture of him as a child. And any time I did try and bring things up, like, “What was your mom like or your dad like?,” we would either get told to be quiet, not by Dad, but by Mom, like, “Shhh, don't, we're not gonna talk about that. You know that it's really hard for your dad.” Sometimes having these kinds of conversations about the difficult things that have happened to us can feel like poking an old wound. But I believe that the wound needs to breathe before it can be healed. And that's really what this conversation with Tiff was. It was healing. As part of this project, I also talked with my mom. She sat down for an interview on the fourth anniversary of our dad's death. She answered some very hard questions about why she was so hard on us, and she cried, because it was a tender day. And I realize now it's not fair or true to make the blanket statement that our mom didn't support us. For example, she came out and did the interview – not because she was dying to do it, but because she did it to support me and this podcast.And the conversation with Brandon really helped me further process the reality that our mother was afraid that our success would make us targets for white racists. Yes, when we were younger, she pushed us to excel. But once we got older and got into the limelight in spaces where it mattered, it was frightening for her. Lee: What were your fears for me as a Black boy in Maplewood?Roberta: It was because of the, we just don't know how other people would accept you. And one of the things about it is that you were really outspoken and all that, but some, they hated, I mean some were haters. And we, and their parents too. But we were afraid for you, that something would happen. Because things have happened. That's the complexity of coming from a family like mine. Our mom may not have shown up in the way some people think a mother should. Still, I believe she did love us. She worked hard, sacrificed and gave us what we needed. And I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for my sisters. Tammi prefers her privacy, but she still came out with Mom and talked with us, for me. And Tiffany, too. This couldn't have been easy for my baby sister. She didn't show up because she wanted to be in a podcast talking about her life and her childhood pain. My mother showed up for her son, and both of my sisters showed up for their brother. For me. Lee: I love you so much, sis. Tiffany: Aww I love you, too.Lee: I want to thank you for the courage that you've exhibited in everything you've done to support me in this at times where I was so alone. Tiffany: Yeah. And I just want to say thank you for the opportunity, because this has been healing for me, and I know I've thought about you a lot, I've prayed for you. I can't imagine what it was like with all the research that you've gone through. Having to be there and go through and process all of the things while your regular life is going on and then in the midst of this, to lose our father. I think this is an important part of your legacy, and I think it is going to really change the way that people view things. But yeah, the time has come.[music starts]All of this encouragement, this support, that's what love looks like to me. And I'm so happy about that. During this whole process, I had so many family members who poured out a lot of memories and feelings, facing up to parts of their Black experience that they may not have ever discussed. Especially my dad. And all of that, really, was the starting place for all this. When I started working on this project, I knew I'd have to go back to where it all started with my dad in Alabama. But I had no idea even where to begin. So I started researching and asking questions, and pretty soon, I realized that this was so much bigger than him. It's not just his story, it's America's story.CreditsWhat Happened in Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced, and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam. Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Landa. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou, and Ziyang Fu; and also thank you to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening. Next time on What Happened in Alabama. He died tellin' them to take care of me, that's what happened there. There's a reason why you're killing each other. There's a reason why, you know, you don't have land. There's a reason why, you know, they've criminalized your body and put you in prison for free labor.
Mother's Day is right around the corner and we're celebrating by interviewing Lo's Mom, Leelee!! She shares stories about how her childhood affected her as an adult, her marriage story, why she got divorced, and what it was like raising kids as a single mother. Happy Mother's Day to every kind of mom out there!! If you like this podcast please leave us a review wherever you listen! We love you guys Listen to the Fairly Odd Sisters on Spotify & Apple Podcasts: Spotify // https://open.spotify.com/show/6NUNG59rPABfoHRh2dvEWM?si=GkZlt91RQkehXlW67Av3fg Apple Podcasts // https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fairly-odd-sisters/id1724839923 Follow the Fairly Odd Sisters Podcast: https://instagram.com/fairlyoddsisters.podcast https://tiktok.com/@fairlyoddsisters.podcast Follow Sarah & Lo to submit your stories for the pod! https://instagram.com/sarah_bee https://instagram.com/lobeeston https://tiktok.com/@sarbeeston https://tiktok.com/@lobeeston Sarah YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBeestonFam Lo YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thebeestonbunch #fairlyoddsisterspodcast #sarahandlo #sarahbeeston #lobeeston #fairlyoddsisters #thebeestons
What Happened in Alabama? is a series born out of personal experiences of intergenerational trauma, and the impacts of Jim Crow that exist beyond what we understand about segregation. Through intimate stories of his family, coupled with conversations with experts on the Black American experience, award-winning journalist Lee Hawkins unpacks his family history and upbringing, his father's painful nightmares and past, and goes deep into discussions to understand those who may have had similar generational - and present day - experiences.TranscriptMy name is Lee Hawkins. I've been a journalist for 25 years. I research, listen and ask ALOT of questions.My story begins in 1980s Minnesota. In the Twin Cities suburb of Maplewood. We were a Black family living in a predominantly white neighborhood. Naima: Oh, Maplewood. It was, it was really interesting. It certainly was. My childhood was marked by so many things.Watching our backs on the walk home from school.Getting our hair cut in the Black neighborhood. And church on Sundays. [MUSIC IN: Lee sr singing “Whose on the lord side”] Leroy Hawkins: Alright Who's on the lord's side? That's my dad, Leroy Hawkins Senior, singing at our church. [MUSIC OUT Lee sr singing “Whose on the lord side”] He taught me how to sing. We played music together. And he really believed in me Lee Sr: Cause when you grew up, everything, you touched was great.From the time I was a little kid, it was always me and him. Lee Sr and Lee Jr . . . Leeroy and Lee Lee. But while my dad was happy at church, nightmares interrupted his sleep sometimes. He'd wake up screaming, startling the whole house. It scared me so much as a kid.One morning, I got the courage to ask him what he was dreaming about. He just looked down at the floor and said, “Alabama, son. Alabama.” Lee Sr.: When I had left Alabama, something came out of me, man. A big ass relief. And I didn't even know where I was going. But it was a big ass, just, man like a breath of fresh air, man. And that's the way I felt.Born in 1948 in a small town in Alabama, he never talked about the place, but for my Dad, Alabama was always present…In my mid 30s, I started having my own nightmares. I tried to ignore them, but couldn't. I had to find out why I was being haunted. Did it have anything to do with my dad? To answer the question, I went into journalist mode. I had deep conversations with my dad, family members, and even experts, all to to understand what happened to him... and to meLee Sr: I really haven't shared this shit withanybody. You know..Ruth Miller: It's going to take a whole lot of truth telling for folks to really understand. And i think it's time now because people are passing on, and if we don't document this history it's going to be gone. Zollie Owens: I may not have money in my pocket. But if I have that land that is of value, that is money.Zollie Owens: My kids can fall back on this land, they'll have something Lloyd Pugh: I'm looking at the will of John Pugh. One woman, Judy worth $200. One young man name Abraham. $400. I mean, that's the proof of our line owning slaves. Lee Hawkins: Do you feel guilty about it? Lloyd Pugh: No.While I started to unravel questions for myself, as a reporter it's never just about me. This journey revealed a part of American history we haven't talked much about. The aftermath of Jim Crow. Ruth Miller: That trauma, That collective trauma, keeps happening over and over again. And every day that you live You're running into something.It's a history that's shaped my and other families' experiences in America. AND how my parents raised me as a Black kid in my own country. Roberta Hawkins: We were afraid for you that something would happen, because things have happened.Asking questions can lead to answers that lead to healing. And that's exactly what I'm trying to do. Daina Ramey Berry: There's so much strength and power in this history.Daina Ramey Berry: If you look at history as a foundation, the foundations that were laid are still what have built our houses.This is “What Happened in Alabama?”, a new podcast from APM Studios. I get answers to some of the hardest questions of how things came to be for many Black Americans, and the truth that must come before any reconciliation can happen.First episode drops on May 15th.
This episode is brought to you by the Golfweek amateur tour Upstate NY chapter. Join a tour near you at https://www.amateurgolftour.net/ On this episode of the Upstate Golf Guys Podcast, we invite Paul, owner of Lombardi Golf. A master putter designer, who has an affordable line of putters, from a few womans putters his wife LeeLee helped him create to a line of children's putters he keeps very affordable for our growing kids. He plans on starting a line called "The Lombardi Kids Club" Come listen and find out what it's all about! Paul is one cool dude. you don't want to miss our chat! Lombardigolf.com Our Cape Cod course of the week is Highland Links in Truro. Brought to you by the Cape Cod Golf Guys Capecodgolfguys.com Be sure to stay tuned to the final segment, "the Golfweek Spotlight" where I give you the winners of our week two event at Frear Park in Troy, NY. I am joined by a few members of tour! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Here's what to expect on the podcast:Alethea's journey dealing with chronic illness and how she overcame it.What can we learn from the story of the phoenix, and how can we use it in our own lives?The power of visualization and mindset shifts in achieving transformation.How important is it to seek guidance from a coach, therapist, or trusted individual when facing challenges?And much more! About Alethea:There was a time when Certified Wellness and Empowerment Coach Alethea Felton was on the verge of death, including almost being placed in hospice care in 2012 due to a chronic illness that she battled since birth. However, Alethea chose to reclaim what could have been the end of her earthly journey, and she decided to make intentional, gradual changes of healing beyond the physical. Thus, her journey of holistic healing and empowerment through wellness was birthed. Connect with Alethea Felton!Website: https://www.aletheafelton.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aletheafelton/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Alethea.LeeLee.FeltonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/aletheafelton/Free Discovery Call (30 min): https://calendly.com/alethea-felton/discovery?month=2024-04The Power Transformation Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-power-transformation-podcast/id1660835113 Connect with Candice Snyder!Website: https://hairhealthvitality.com/passion-purpose-and-possibilities/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/candice.snyderInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/candicesny17/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/candicesnyder/ICAN Institute: https://vl729.isrefer.com/go/mindandbody/PassionPurpose22/Shop For A Cause With Gifts That Give Back to Nonprofits: https://thekindnesscause.com/
Benita, Sweet T, Lee Lee and Mr. C returns from an extended break. Jams, News, Dumb as Fuck and More! Shout Outs! www.rvasoul.com talkingsmackpodcast @gmail.com (804) 321-1010
We teamed up with Visit Florida to send some KiddNation members to the Sunshine State.
Benita, Sweet T and Lee Lee are back with Mr.C. Hot Jams, an extended "In Da News" and " Dumb as F_CK" are back. You don't wanna miss this one! Is perverted sex a thing? All this and MORE! Shout Outs! Comments www.rvasoul.com (804) 321-1010 VM Hotline talkingsmackpodcast@gmail.com
Benita and Sweet T welcome Mr. C and Lee Lee to the first podcast of the year! It's Party time plus" In Da News "and "Ladies Only" segments. What 's your take on the Katt Williams interview and should couples share a Facebook page? What would you do for $100 million? All this and MORE! We welcome you to comment at www. rvasoul.com! Listen on the go on the Tunein app! Email us at talkingsmaackpocast@gmail.com VM Hot Line (804)) 321-1010
This week on Unorthodox, we're chowing down. Cookbook author and chef Jake Cohen returns to the show to tell us about his new cookbook, I Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Every Day. He also shares some recipes for your Rosh Hashanah table. Producer Quinn Waller brings us along to Lee Lee's Baked Goods in Harlem to talk to Alvin Lee Smalls, the man behind some of the best rugelach in New York City. Tablet writer Maggie Phillips returns to the show to visit PLNT Burger and chat with co-founders Seth Goldman and Julie Farkas about the surprising Jewish ethos behind the business and their work to make burgers available to people of all faiths. We're also taking a trip Across the JEW.S.A to the thriving Orthodox community in the Catskills. Across the JEW.S.A. is created with the support of the Jewish Federations of North America. You can catch up on the rest of our travels across the JEW.S.A. at tabletmag.com/jewsa. We love to hear from you! Send us emails at unorthodox@tabletmag.com, or leave a voicemail at our listener line: (914) 570-4869. Check out our Unorthodox tees, mugs, and hoodies at tabletstudios.com. Find out about our upcoming events at tabletmag.com/unorthodoxlive. To book us for a live show or event, email Tanya Singer at tsinger@tabletmag.com. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get new episodes, photos, and more. Join our Facebook group, and follow Unorthodox on Twitter and Instagram. Unorthodox is produced by Tablet Studios. Check out all of our podcasts at tabletmag.com/podcasts. SPONSORS: Hadassah is hosting “Inspire Zionism: Tech, Trailblazers and Tattoos,” a two-day online event featuring panels with inspiring Zionist women, hosted by our own Stephanie Butnick. To join the conversation October 25 and 26, register at go.hadassah.org/inspire. MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger is fighting hunger among people of all faiths and backgrounds in the United States and Israel. Visit mazon.org/unorthodox to join their fight to end hunger: Right now your donation will be doubled, up to $100,000!
The mission of law & disorder is to expose, agitate and build a new world where all of us can thrive. But how do we get there? How do we build a world many of us have only seen in our dreams? That's where we believe the artists come in. So, each week we feature an artist, holding down a weekly residency with us, helping us to imagine a different, more liberated world. This week's Resistance in Residence Artist is playwright Leelee Jackson, who writes postmodern narratives of the African diaspora. Her play Comb Your Hair (Or You'll Look Like a Slave) was featured earlier this month at BAMBDFEST. Check out Leelee Jackson's website: https://writewithleelee.wixsite.com/website — Subscribe to this podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1637968343?to=page Get in touch: lawanddisorder@kpfa.org Follow us on socials @LawAndDis: https://twitter.com/LawAndDis; https://www.instagram.com/lawanddis/ The post Resistance in Residence Artist: Leelee Jackson appeared first on KPFA.
On June 6th, 1985, 3-year-old Alisha Smiley went missing. She had been sitting on a bench outside the Omni International Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Alisha is a black female with brown eyes and dark brown or black hair (which was braided and tied with lilac-colored ribbons). At the time of her disappearance, Alisha stood 3 feet tall and weighed about 30 pounds. She had her ears pierced and a little gap between her lower front teeth. Alisha was last seen wearing a red and white checkered sundress, white sandals with silver buttons, and gold earrings. If you have any information concerning Alisha Smiley's case, please contact: The Atlanta Police Department at 404-853-3434 or 1-800-843-5678 the lost. Elyssa Vasquez was 12 years old, when she disappeared after starting a new school in Clarkston, Georgia, on January 28, 2003. For years after Elyssa's disappearance, she was classified by police as a runaway but now her case has been reclassified to an endangered missing child. At the time of her disappearance Elyssa was 12 years old, 5'1 and 117 pounds. She has brown hair, hazel eyes and is bi-racial (Latina and Black). She has one scar below her chin where she had four stitches and another round scar on her right shoulder. Elyssa also has pierced ears. She was last seen wearing a blue ski jacket with a white stripe down the center, dark blue jeans and white sneakers. Elyssa would also answer to her nicknames Lee Lee or Lisa. Today Elyssa would be 33 years old. If you have any information about Elyssa's whereabouts you are urged to call the Dekalb County Police Department at 404-294-2519 f you have any information about Elyssa Vasquez or her disappearance, please contact NCMEC at 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678) or the DeKalb County Police Department at 1-404-294-2519 or their Special Victims Unit at 770-724-7710. Click here to join our Patreon. Click here to get your own Inhuman merch. Connect with us on Instagram and join our Facebook group. To submit listener stories or case suggestions, and to see all sources for this episode: https://www.inhumanpodcast.com/
The Founding Director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University, former Legal Editor for the Chicago Tribune, and well-known Christian author and speaker, Lee Strobel, at the Summer 2023 Christian Product Expo in Lexington, KY, discussed his book, Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life. You can find him online at leestrobel.com.
The Founding Director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University, former Legal Editor for the Chicago Tribune, and well-known Christian author and speaker, Lee Strobel, at the Summer 2023 Christian Product Expo in Lexington, KY, discussed his book, Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life. You can find him online at leestrobel.com.
This months scandal is an awesome professor or English, mama to a very cool kid, and reader of all things romance Welcome LeeLee
Joining us on The Most High Show tonight is LeeLee. She is a Reoffend Prevention Specialist, a Community Reentry Coach, a Speaker, and a Business owner. Her passion is helping others to experience a positive life change after incarceration. She is also an advocate of being Convicted Out-Loud!
A retired global technology executive and former Ironman Triathlete at 62 years old, Lee Fogle contracted Covid in The first wave in January 2020. After the resulting two bouts of pneumonia he found himself unable to walk upstairs or do normal activities. He was diagnosed by CTSCAN with end-stage Pulmonary Fibrosis, less than 30% remaining lung function. He was given a life expectancy of 1-3 years unless he could get a lung transplant. As a lifelong biohacker, Lee refused to accept this reduced life expectancy, and although he was unable to walk more than 20 steps without assistance, and required 6 L of supplemental oxygen 24 hours a day he began the process of battling back against the disease. He did exhaustive research and began a gradual, but steadily increasing program of pulmonary rehabilitation and exercise, combined with meditation, nutrition, proper sleep, breath training, and natural supplements. Today he has resumed normal activities of swimming, biking, running, playing pickle, ball and golf, and he's living, a full and active life. He has written a book, A Matter of Life and Breath (available on Amazon) which chronicles, his dramatic health decline and ultimately recovery. He shares the 7 Steps to Recovery in his book. Today he serves as an ambassador to the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation, and volunteers his time in hospice and memory care facilities as a Reiki practitioner. Here's where you can contact Lee: Lee.Fogle@injuryclaimsexpress.com http://linkedin.com/in/leefogle https://www.facebook.com/lee.fogle.007?mibextid=LQQJ4d Here's the link to his book: A Matter of Life and Breath: My 7 Step Guide to Overcoming Near Death From Long CoVid and Pulmonary Fibrosis https://a.co/d/2RSUPR8 Exercise effect on pulmonary fibrosis study: https://apm.amegroups.com/article/view/74647/html
Happy Cinco de Mayo. More tequila will be sold today in the U.S. than any other day of the year. The drip,drip, drip of graft, sleaze, and utter corruption from Fap-Fap and Gin-Gin (ft. Har-Har and Lee-Lee) continues unabated. Good. Testicle Toasting Tuckyo Rose Carlson keeps getting weirder and the suits at FockSnooz are getting scratchy about it. DiFi is coming back to the Senate . . . maybe next week. We're facing dire times at The H.O.R.N. We finished the week still unfunded by $250 with some horrorshow bills coming. Please help if you can. As ever, you have my eternal, undying gratitude!
These last three weeks, LeeLee has found the movies to be subpar. Will Jack end his mediocre streak with Baby Driver? Or will we lose Leeann forever in a pit of despair? Let's talk about music, car chases, and a whole lot of action bukkake in today's episode of HHV!
Historically, LeeLee don't give a F about a vampire. Will that change with this 80s classic? Place your bets and find out!
Want to know how to invest in multifamily real estate WITHOUT being a multimillionaire? We aren't talking about tackling a duplex or triplex; we're talking about sixteen, eight, or ten-unit apartment buildings that could help you replace your W2 income. And while these deals may seem too big to take down for a rookie real estate investor, they're much easier to get done IF you know what to do. But you'll want to follow Lee Yoder's advice, who left his job and took a hefty pay cut to start investing in real estate. As a corporate physical therapist, Lee knew that time was passing him by. The one thing he could do to ensure a life of financial freedom and time with his growing family? Multifamily real estate investing! He made the risky decision to switch gears, leaving the corporate world and thirty percent of his income behind to make the jump. Thanks to smart saving and spending, Lee was in a position where he could dedicate large chunks of his time to flipping houses and later investing in passive-income-generating real estate. The best part about Lee's story is that he did all of this on a middle-class income, without a ton of cash, using tools that almost every investor has available to them. If you want to know how he did it, what steps helped him skyrocket his portfolio, and how you can repeat his system, stick around! In This Episode We Cover: When to go full-time into real estate and saying goodbye to a steady paycheck House flipping and buying under-market homes at online auctions The “passive income” fallacy and why real estate investing ISN'T what you think Living below your means and why spending less allows you to take bigger risks Using real estate meetups to find partners, mentors, and deals in your area The rental property “scrapyard” that most investors overlook when buying multifamily Buying in the multifamily “sweet spot” that new investors and big syndicators won't venture into And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Investor-Friendly Real Estate Agent BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets Merch BPCON2023 Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area David's BiggerPockets Profile David's Instagram David's YouTube Channel Work with David Work with Andrew Andrew's BiggerPockets Profile Try the BRRRR Calculator on Your Next Deal What is the BRRRR Method & How to Use it to Invest in Real Estate How to Properly Analyze a BRRRR Property Hear Andrew On Our Recent Episode About Asset Management Connect with Lee: Lee's BiggerPockets Profile Lee's LinkedIn Lee's Facebook Lee's Website Click here to listen to the full episode: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-752 Interested in learning more about today's sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email advertise@biggerpockets.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
New Jack City, New Jack City, B*TCH! This week, Lee Lee is back and, along with Jack, these two whites D.A.R.E. to talk about how America ain't changed a bit. Let's chat Cash Money Brothers and New Jack City.
The Mighty Manfred's guest is LeeLee, who helped produce our recent Coolest Song in the World "Hollywood Forever" by Havanna Winter. Join the Mighty Manfred and LeeLee for another Coolest Conversation, presented by Hard Rock
Amy and Nancy Harrington, Co-Founders of The Passionistas Project talk with the creative team from “I Thought the Earth Remembered Me” about the Power of Filmmaking. Director Prem Santana, producer Carylanna Taylor and star Madonna Cacciatore discuss the process of making the short film, the AFI program and their inspirations. Learn more about “I Thought The Earth Remembered Me” and Prem Santana. Learn more about Carylanna Taylor. Learn more about Madonna Cacciatore. Learn more about The Passionistas Project. FULL TRANSCRIPT: Passionistas: Hi, we're sisters, Amy and Nancy Harrington, the founders of the Passionista Project Podcast, where we give women a platform to tell their own unfiltered stories. On every episode, we discuss the unique ways in which each woman is following her passions, talk about how she defines success and explore her path to breaking down the barriers that women too often face. Today we're talking with the team from the gorgeous and powerful short film “I Thought The Earth Remembered Me.” We'd like to welcome the film's director Prem Santana, producer Carylanna Taylor and star Madonna Cacciatore, who along with her wife Robin McWilliams have been long-time and beloved members of our Passionsitas community. We're going to let each of them introduce themselves, tell you a little bit about their backgrounds and share what they are most passionate about. Madonna: Hello, I'm Madonna Cacciatore. I feel like I'm in a group. So, hi Madonna. I love these two women on the screen with me. And of course, I love you two women who are hosts. You've been friends of mine for a long time, and Robin and I adore you. Prem and I magically met during her work at AFI, at the conservatory. And I've always been drawn to her sort of directing style and her work. I mean, she's just got a brilliant vision. This is the second film I worked on with Prem. I have a background in theater, dance, film, television, and I also produce events when I'm not, you know, in the downtime. And I do some nonprofit fundraising as well. I'm passionate about telling stories, helping change the world through stories and being able to create those characters that are brought to me by wonderful people like this. How about you? Prem: Hi everyone. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Prem Santana and I am a director and a writer. I'm also an actor. I was an actor for over a decade, almost 15 years before I transitioned into becoming a director. I recently graduated as a directing fellow from the American Film Institute Conservatory, where I met my Muse, Madonna. We met in a class and she and her wife Robin were my actors. And I instantly fell in love and saw a talent I had never seen before and started writing. “I Thought the Earth Remembered Me” based on seeing Madonna's face. There were some other experiences in my life that had inspired the short. Madonna's, my muse, and I've just been very honored and grateful to be able to work with such an actor. Passionistas: I actually want to follow up on one of the things you were saying, because it was actually a question we had is, and we'll get into it more, but the whole movie that we're talking about really lives or dies on Madonna's face. Prem: Yeah. Passionistas: And the amazing range of emotions she can portray through her face. So that really was actually part of the inspiration for writing it? Prem: Absolutely. Because she's able to, I mean, when an actor can act without words is to me, is the hardest thing is to act in the silences. When there's so much carried in the eyes that is the number one thing that I look for in an actor to collaborate with. And Madonna does it super. Carylanna: My name's Carylanna Taylor. I'm a filmmaker and anthropologist recent graduate of the AFI producing program and I have the pleasure of producing “I Thought the Earth Remembered Me” with Prem and Madonna. It was really Prem's script that just gave me a gut punch when I read it and we'd been kind of talking about maybe doing something together but hadn't had a chance to work together yet. The script, I have an environmental conservation and migration past, and it just really hit me on the environmental connection very strongly in a way that I hadn't felt for a long, long time. And Madonna embodies that beautifully. So, yeah, and, and she's, she said it beautifully. I'm passionate about bringing stories to life that might just move culture's needle a little bit, might give people a chance to walk in somebody else's shoes that they wouldn't have otherwise. That can come in lots of different forms, but this is certainly one of them. Passionistas: That's great. Well, sounds like a perfect marriage between the three of you to make this film happen, which is, you can tell when you watch it that the people who created it have that passion for all of those things. So, it's really well done. And Prem, maybe you could talk a little bit about what the film is about and, and again, a little bit more about your inspiration beyond the beauty of Madonna. What else inspired you to write it? Prem: I realize I didn't say what I'm passionate about. So, I'll say first that I'm passionate about telling stories from the margins, especially from the female perspective, and I believe that we can make a huge difference. Telling stories and making movies that reflect our human experience. And I'm so grateful to be able to do that. So yeah, that's what I'm passionate about. But the story, so I also take 35mm photographs. And my mom is also someone I, she's 76, and I've been photographing her throughout my life. And just the process of aging has been something that I find so beautiful. It is something that I find so beautiful. And watching my grandmother who passed away at 98 a couple years ago, go through this transformation from the finite to the infinite or whatever you want to call it. And then my mom getting older and myself, you know I'm now what they call “of a certain age.” And I've just committed to using that in my art and celebrating aging as something that's not negative or bad or something we have to hide or erase or change or transform or fill up or fill out or whatever. So anyway, back to the photographs. Sorry. I took a photo of my mom's hand, the beautiful like texture and wrinkles and she laid it against this beautiful oak. And I took this photograph, and I was like, that's the image. That's where originally in the script, we start on her hand. It changed over time but that was the igniting image. I was like, there is a woman and she's in the woods for some reason. And then, you know, I started writing and just dealing with my own grief and losing a friend during the pandemic. Losing my grandmother. It was a real way for me to cope, was to write this story. And having had such a connection with Madonna, I was able to step into that emotion myself, I feel like, in a way, and write this story about transitioning from end-of-life transition. Madonna: That's funny because when I saw that, when I saw that, that image of Prem's mother's hand on the tree, I thought it was my hand. I said, “Oh, when did you take that? I don't remember that?” Like, I remembered us going to the woods and shooting some photos and I thought, oh, that's, that picture we took. And she goes, “That's my mom's hand.” And I was like, “Our hands look so much alike.” And then her mom came to the premiere we sat and we compared hands. Prem: Oh yeah. That was so sweet. Madonna: Yeah, it was very sweet. So, it was cool because I felt like, I felt that connection too, you know, through her and through you, Prem, through your love for her and your heart. So, it was really, really cool to sort of have that background to know that it actually wasn't my hand that inspired her. It was her mom's, but cosmically. Cosmic. Prem: Yeah. Cosmically. Passionistas: So, Madonna, what did you think when you first saw the script? Madonna: Well, I had worked with Prem on another beautiful script that she wrote called “Dreamhouse of Salt” and also just in that first class where Prem and I really connected. We were on a Zoom. We were all isolated. We were on a Zoom. We weren't in person, but there's just something in her soul and energy that just drew me in right away and I thought, she's going to be getting an Oscar in my lifetime. This woman, I know that's not why she's doing it, but her work is that impeccable and her stories are beautiful. So, we did this. It was one of your cycle films, wasn't it? It felt like a big studio film because it was just so beautifully done. But it was really just in her process and as a fellow. And so, I knew when we talked about collaborating again in the future, and I knew whatever she brought to me, it was just going to be, it is going to speak to me, you know? And so when I read it, you know, it's always interesting to have a script that doesn't have dialogue and that has a younger version of me in it. So it was, you know, back backstory and, and memories and so I'd never done anything quite like it before. So, I was like, yes, let's dive in. You know, in those moments when Prem talks about me connecting, that's because she would come over to me and say something. She would give me something that really resonated with me. So that was sort of, it was a wonderful process. The whole thing was just incredible. Even it was, it was freezing cold, I think I remember being cold. And it was in that beautiful space. And there was a lot of, you know, everybody on the crew was just, Carylanna was running an amazing production team. And the cinematography was beautiful, and it was really safe working with a crew of mostly women. You know, it felt really, I felt nurtured through the whole thing by the trees. We were standing from everything from the trees. We were standing into the, just the backdrop to the house to our beautiful crew. So, it was a great experience and so when I saw the script, I knew that's what it was going to be. I knew it was just, I'm ready. Passionistas: It sounds a little cliché these days to say the location is another character, but it really does feel like that in this production, and it feels, maybe it was right off the main road, but it feels like it's incredibly remote. So Carylanna, talk about finding that location and the complexity of shooting there and bringing your crew there. Carylanna: Credit for finding it actually goes to our Unit Production Manager and Line Producer Sarah Niver, Prem, the Production Designer Daniel Berkman and our cinematographer Liz Charky. Prem and I had done a lot of scouting from, I don't know, I guess kind of casually starting over the summer and the fall and a little bit more aggressively in January, February. And we weren't finding anything that looked like this vision of the Pacific Northwest that Prem wanted. If you read the script, it sounds like it's either in an old-growth forest in Washington or Oregon, or maybe in the Adirondacks of New York – but nothing. We're limited to shooting within 30 miles of the center of Los Angeles. That's all that we were allowed to shoot at AFI. So, trying to find something that looked even remotely lush was quite the challenge. And we had gotten to the point where we were almost ready to switch it to the desert. I don't know how serious that was, but that's about where we were at. When Sarah started location scouting and she came up with this place. And it was a challenging location in a lot of ways. It's in Topanga Canyon and it's like deep down in a canyon. And just the topography of it is such that it keeps the water in. There's just a little stream that runs through, but the moisture stays in. It's cooler than the surrounding areas. This is a place where they used to run liquor during the prohibition. It's got a total history of this area but it's also pretty remote. Like Madonna was saying we had to go past another film set even to get to where we were at. And we couldn't drive our vehicles right up to the house or right up to any of the scenes that you see shootings. We were having to do a lot of couriering with carts and things like that. So there was a whole logistical element to it. And it was a big enough piece of our budget that we didn't have a full prep day and a full wrap day. So all of that was done in five days in one location including load in and load out. So it was, yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun logistically. But it's beautiful. I mean, I don't think there's anything quite like it that we would've found elsewhere in the area. Passionistas: Yeah, it's really extraordinarily beautiful. And like we said, the cinematography just is incredible. It just captures it all so well. The other thing that's amazing is the casting of the other two women — and especially the woman who plays young Lee. So, tell us a little bit. Madonna: They were calling me Elder Lee, which is really sweet. Always. Just Lee. Passionistas: You were the original Lee. So, Prem, tell us a little bit about the casting process. Prem: Well, Madonna was locked in, like day zero. I was determined to find someone that looked like Madonna because I really find it annoying when on TV or in a movie and people are cast and you're just like, that looks nothing like this person. I'm like, okay, I get it. I get maybe because of this and I'm making justifications or there are limitations and things get in the way, whatever. But it's something I noticed. So, I was determined and our casting director, Rich Mento, gathered so many, like, there were a lot of submissions. We had a ton and I mean honestly it was like going through, I went through every single one. And Penny, it was like one of the last ones. That's how it always is. And I was like, in shock, like how much they looked alike. And then her audition was perfect. So, I wanted, it was those moments where I just wanted to be like, you have the part, but you have to wait and do a callback and follow procedure and really talk about it with Carylanna and, you know have a conversation. It was all done on Zoom too, so that was… but I guess from what I haven't been acting in a while, but Madonna, I feel like a lot of auditions are Zoom now anyway, right? Or it's self-tape, anyway. Madonna: Right. Prem: So I guess that was right — not in the room as much. So, I guess that wasn't too out of the ordinary. And then we found Christine through our Casting Director, as well, and she had this beautiful, just, I felt like she was this angel in this way, that she just carried a light that I think balanced Lee Lee's heaviness and her weight. The weight of the world that Lee sort of is holding so deep inside of her and not wanting to… she's not ready to fully give it all. But Janine, Christine was able to bring that out in both, I think in Penny's character, younger Lee. But Madonna and I actually rehearsed with Christine. I wanted them two to rehearse together because it wouldn't, it would deepen the memories for Madonna. At least that was the goal. I think it helped, right Madonna, like working with Christine? So yes, even though you're not on screen together, I wanted them to have that established relationship in the energy that they carry on. We would feel that connection. But yeah, we were blessed. We were just blessed with the cast. Like it just really worked out perfectly. Madonna: Penny has an Irish accent. And it was interesting because you know, I don't say anything. My character Lee, Elder Lee, doesn't say a thing. Patty does an American dialect, I guess. She drops the accent and beautifully. She's a really talented actor. And when I first saw her, I was, we met… Our first rehearsal together was on a Zoom and I think the first time I couldn't wait to see her. I was like, what? Damn, I was cute when I was young. Okay… So, it was cool to sort of… I've never worked with somebody who's me in my past experience. So, I really enjoyed that process and sort of enjoyed… We hung out together and we just, on set, we just sort of like bonded and that was our opportunity physically to be together because we had really just mostly been… I think we had one rehearsal in the grass somewhere. Was that this film? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was Christine. That was with Christine, yeah. Yeah. And it was we were at the at the beautiful campus of AFI and a deer showed up when we were… just like walked around by us and. There we were on Las Feliz and Western, you know, Franklin. And there comes a deer. So, it just all felt so storybook like. It felt like a little fairytale we were doing. But it was really great to sort of get that background with Christine and for us to connect. And I hope it helped her with her scenes with Penny as well. Passionistas: For people who aren't from LA or haven't been here, AFI where you were all attending is right in the middle of the city of Los Angeles. So, it would be like being in Times Square and having a deer walk by. Madonna: Exactly. Passionistas: It's really a random thing, but that's how Southern California is. We have peacocks in the middle of our neighborhoods, like suburban neighborhoods. Talk a little bit about AFI for people who don't really understand what that is because it's such a unique and special place and experience. So, what is that program and how does it prepare you for being in the film industry differently than most film schools? Carylanna: So, it's a two-year conservatory, very hands-on. There are six disciplines producing, directing, cinematography, production design, editing, and screenwriting and it changes each year, but roughly we had about 22 directors and producers and such. There's a track of just classroom classes and watching films and reacting to film classes. But in addition to that we have two years of production. So, our first year we actually, each of us does at least three films. And we team up around the idea for each of the films. So, someone generates the idea, then there's a pitch process. The producer comes on board, we hire the rest of the team, then we go out and work with volunteers from the filmmaking community like gaffers and art directors, and what have you. And there's a conservatory program for SAG, as well. So, Madonna's part of a SAG/AFTRA AFI conservatory program. So, we have access to these wonderful, wonderful actors even for our classroom exercises and these three short films that we produced our first year. And then the second year everybody produces a thesis film, which is what we're talking about. “I Thought The Earth Remembered Me” is Prem and my thesis film. So, I produced four, no, six films in two years including the cinematographers had visual essays. And there are, I have classmates who did way more than that. I was actually on the low end, but it's a lot of hands-on. And our crews aren't union, but we run them like union shoots. So, we follow SAG-AFTRA rules for everything we follow. We try to keep our days tight and our crews are usually around 30 because it was capped because of Covid. Ours were definitely 30 or under and so they're big. They're big projects. We have a lot of gear from AFI that gives us. We shoot in sound stages, but also like, just all around LA. It's a lot of hands-on experience. Pretty amazing. Passionistas: that's incredible. And so, we keep talking around the COVID thing. When did you film this? Carylanna: It was it in the midst of COVID or was it sort of towards the tail end of lockdown and. So Prem and I found out that we were accepted into AFI about the week that the shit hit the fan in March 2020. So we had to decide whether we were coming or not. I'm coming from New York. A lot of our classmates were coming internationally, and we had to decide whether to try doing this or not. Our first year of classes were totally online. And then our production was the only thing we were doing in person. It's like with masks and if we were near actors, we had to have face shields and such. There are lots of social distancing rules. There's like a whole list, COVID compliance officer on set and what have you. The second-year production continued like that and this was produced during our second year. So, this we produced April 2022. And our classes at that point were mostly in person, kind of. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Prem Santana, Carylanna Taylor and Madonna Cacciatore. To learn more about “I Thought The Earth Remembered Me” and Prem Santana's other work visit www.premsantana.com Go to first encounter productions dot.com to stay up to date on Carylanna Taylor's projects. Stay on top of all of the great work that Madonna Cacciatore is doing at IMDb dot com and on her website m cacciatore dot com. Now here's more of our interview with Prem, Carylanna and Madonna. Madonna, why do you like to be a part of these AFI projects? Madonna: Well, I think, as every actor in town, we work sometimes, sometimes we don't. Like on TV film sets, and commercials, we are always auditioning. And so, when there's an opportunity to work, I want to work, you know? And I find I don't do every project like this. This particular class of people was extraordinary. I've worked on another director's films, as well. I liked it because of the story. I like also the thesis films, you know go, can go to festivals, so that's great. But you know, when there's an opportunity to work your craft, work it, you know, and I love working my craft. I love roles. I love working. I love being on set. I love the experience. AFI films are done in such a way that you really are getting the full, you know, you're being treated, I'm treated really well. It's like it's working on a SAG set. I also like the Conservatory a lot because of what they do for students and what actors can get out of it, as well. Like sometimes I'll get just called in Victoria Hoffman, you know, call and goes, “Can you do this kind of class or that kind of class?” Well, for me it's class. I love class. I love working. I love learning. You know, we never stop learning and we never stop connecting. So, every experience onset is different and you know, you learn something new no matter what your age or how many roles you've done. I came to LA pretty late in my life. So, I didn't get here in time to sort of have a young career here. My background was, I was dancing most of my life and then I ended up going to musical theater. And then I started training in Washington, D.C. at the Studio Theater there in all the forms. So, I took a lot of classes and, you know, I had this experience. I was in Seattle and I got a little under five part on “The Fugitive” that Tim Daly was in, that they were shooting up there. And I had only ever done as far as film and television at that time. I'd only ever done extra work, background work. So, I go on set and they had an umbrella for me because of course it was Seattle and it was raining. And then they take me and they said, “We'll take you to your trailer.” I said, “I have a trailer. I have five lines. I'm so excited.” And I thought, I'm moving to L.A. That's it. But you know, I wish I'd done, you know, I don't regret it because I had a lot of experience along the way and I got to do a lot of wonderful theater and I still love theater very, very much. But it was good to you know, get here. And so, it didn't matter to me because yeah, I was older, but then I just got different roles so I just, you know, I just keep going like we all do. So, there's, you know, all the auditions, all the ones you don't get, and those gems you do get, just make it, it never leaves you, it's part of you. So, I'm, you know, I'm always happy when AFI called. Passionistas: Prem, based on what Madonna was saying, do you think as an actor, she brings something to a part because she has those life experiences that weren't all… She wasn't just an actress for 20 years. She had all these other life experiences. Do you think that makes a difference as an actress from a directing standpoint? Prem: Absolutely. The way Madonna carries, there's her body and the physicality of an all a dancing background and a theater background. You really have to I mean, I also have a theater background and dance actually, but you really have to know space and your emotions are constantly be connected to your physical, and those things are never separate. And so Madonna is a master at… there's just a natural… Madonna carries her body so naturally and is able to sink into it, you know like this is the scene. Because sometimes, you know, you see actors and you can tell that they're not comfortable or they're not… and their physical body shows that. So, to answer your question, I think it's such a treat to have an actor with this diverse background. And also, I think Madonna, women your age, my age… beautiful time. I feel like that is to see, this is what I'm passionate about too is putting women that are older on screen, you know what I mean? And I think there's such like power in the age that you are, and I can't wait to be, you know, each year it's like, oh, this is so fascinating and interesting, like, my body's changing and, but I have so much more to offer and storytelling and to see. I don't know. To see a face like Madonna's on screen is like, every time I see our short film, I'm like, this is what I think we need more of. Passionistas: It's funny you say that about her body and her walk because I don't know that I've ever seen an actor act with their back before. Like Madonna walking away from camera. expresses more than most actors can do with a five-page monologue. Madonna: Wow. Passionistas: And it was fascinating to see. I'm in tears and all she's doing is walking away from me. I can't even see her face. Because what's going on, even though we're not on her face, like it's all happening still inside of her. Prem: So, and you're right. You see through everything, you see it. You see it no matter what. Like the camera picks up all of it. Even that, you know, being on her back, I'm not going to give away the shot we're talking about, but yeah, it's really magical. Yeah. Madonna; But there was a lot of magic in that space too and, in that environment it was, you couldn't have found a better place to shoot this film. Honestly. There were so many natural lines and, and so much beauty in that forest, you know that it was just like, honestly, like the film resonated. The message of the film resonated and the foliage in the trees. And the house like you were asking earlier, you know, when you asked Carylanna like this almost was another character. The house was definitely another character. The house was like, I felt like I had to be very respectful of the house and we had to have a connection. Honestly, there was just some stuff going on there. And then the outdoors, of course, was, I love being out in nature, so it was very much fun for me. Passionistas: I love that house. Tell us about it. Was that the condition that it was in or did your production designers bring it to life like that? Carylanna: A bit of both. Our production designer definitely pushed it. The house was built as a prop house in the eighties for a movie called “Shiloh 2.” And it is just… Prem: You remember that, Carylanna? Carylanna: Yeah, especially with my memory for names. But it sat there just open to the elements for what is that now going on 40 years that it was not ever meant to stand for more than the length of a production. So, there are literal holes in the ceiling where vines are growing into the building. And yeah, it's definitely on its way to succumbing to nature. And Daniel and his team definitely pushed it a bit more, but it's, yeah, it's, it's certainly like infused with that environment. It definitely felt like a place with history. That's interesting that you say that, Madonna, the feeling like you had to respect it. You really see their work whenever they're making it seem present because the past is kind of there. There are some scenes in the kitchen, and they really make that warm and inviting and feel lived in. There are some dark room scenes too that are kind of the same, that's where you see their magic on screen. Passionistas: Prem, you were saying that it's important for you to foster women in film, on screen and off, and one of the things that you have founded is the Moonfaze Feminist Film Festival. So tell us what that is and why you started it and what's the current situation like that Prem: The festival is no longer, unfortunately. It lasted for four. Two years in person live events and then we went online but I created it out of just necessity. I directed my first short film called “Luna” which I also acted in, and I was struggling to find a platform for this baby of a film that I'd made. It was my first film, you know, so, I was struggling to find a platform to showcase my work and I just was struck with the idea of why not make a film festival for myself and my peers. And once it was one of those, you know, when you get creative, like, I'm sure you felt that when you started Passionistas, where you're like, oh my God, that's it. This is what I have to do. Right? You're just like, you know, in every cell. And we get those hits. I don't know how many we get in a lifetime, but I'm, I'm grateful for every one. And that was one of them where I was just like the doors started to open and the right people came in and all of a sudden, we had a venue and I had the most amazing experience curating that festival where we celebrated, it was all, you know, female-led, non-binary-led films. And it was amazing. But as I transitioned into really focusing on directing, I couldn't do both. And it was one of those things that just naturally dissolved, but I'm still hold it up to one of the most amazing experiences of an artist and an activist being able to provide a platform. I wouldn't, maybe someday we'll bring it back because it was pretty amazing to be honest. Yeah, it was cool. You're making me think about it. Passionistas: Maybe it could be part of the Power of Passionistas Summit some year. Prem: Yes. Ooh… Passionistas: We'll have to talk. Prem: There you go. Oh my God, I would love that. Yeah. I mean, asking about that. Passionistas: Yeah, there is so much synchronicity in all of us, I think in what we are doing with The Passionistas Project, in what you have all said is your passion and about storytelling and advancing women and social justice issues. So maybe each of you could just talk a little bit about that and about how that informs the film projects that you like to work on. Madonna: You know, I'm a been an activist since, I've been an out LGBTQIA person since I was, since 1971. I saw a thing one time that said Gay AF Since 1971 on somebody else's thing. I was like, that's me. Uh, I've always sort of been out. I've never really, I mean, I grew up in Texas, so I, you know, there was a lot of opportunity for bad things to happen. I don't know why they didn't, but they didn't. So, I've always been a person who has fought for people's rights one way or the other, and for animals rights, like to protect our, our four-legged and our, and our humans with kindness and respect and dignity, which is what every, I think, every living being deserves. Why we beat each other up, I have no idea. I think it's a horrible model. I think we should stop doing it immediately. I'm putting my foot down. We all need to stop doing that. But, you know, so, any time, like Carylanna was saying, and Prem, we're saying anytime you can tell a story or I can find a character who's revealing something about that, who's helping someone else who might be in a situation and they somehow, something you do helps them through that situation, helps them. You know, there are many ways, there are many instances where that could happen and I just think, you know, my wife and I have both had people reach out to us from through our acting and through other means because they are young. We've had people reach out to us from Russia and other sort of hostile areas where they could not be themselves and say, you know, something you did helped me see myself. So I think when you can do that through living your life with the passion that we all have in this room, and that I'm sure many people watching have that you, that you are making, by simply living your life, but then to take it further and make films and, and do The Passionistas Project. You know, I watch a lot of the people you interview and your shows, and it's just the work you're doing is making change in the world. So, we've all sort of made that choice. And sometimes it gets hard to keep the light shining when things are happening, but it's these mediums that help us keep it shining. We can reflect something to someone. And I think that's, for me, that's why it's important and that's why I'll always choose projects. I mean, I, you know, I want to work, but I also love projects that advance social justice for humans and animals and the earth. Carylanna: So, I mentioned before, I come from cultural anthropology and that's. It's about understanding the world holistically and understanding humanity and all its diversity in time and place and in connection to other things that are going on in the world. So I tend to look for stories that channel that. And it's never all of that in one thing like I've done a feature film called “Anya” that has, that's like critiquing the idea of what difference truly means and how we can get past that. Because underneath it, we're still humans. And I'm currently working writing a project that's inspired by my research in Honduras with migrants and natural resource management there and trying to shape it as a lens into what makes Central America unstable. Like we have a tendency in the US to look at it as being this very unstable place that's not livable and that that's why we get all these migrants at the border and yada yada, when in reality I've spent, I mean, a decade off and on living in Honduras and working with people from there and they come from a beautiful place, a place that's a home, a place that they love, a place where they love, a place where they work hard and when it becomes unstable, it's tragic. When somebody has to leave home, it's involuntary. So, I'm trying to write, probably a series. It keeps splitting around between a film and a series and a novel that captures that sense of home, but that does it in a way that an American audience can kind of encounter that and understand it — maybe people who wouldn't automatically think like that. So that's what I'm working on right now. I'm also passionate about mental health issues and working on a script for that. I also get to read for some really interesting companies and have a little bit of an opportunity to say, this is a really great project. You should think about making it. And it's always exciting when I find something that's really, really special that might get made. Prem: I'm very like, proud of you, Carylanna. I'm like, yes. So exciting. Hard. You know, Madonna said it. It's hard. It's hard to have the faith in yourself to say, I can have a voice in this. I can, yeah. It's worth the next four months of my life to work on this as opposed to like scrambling to find a particular job. It's like it's hard to, yeah, it's hard to hang onto the passion. So, I really appreciate this because it helps remind me to hang onto the passion. Yeah. It reignites the flame that's like, sometimes it's like just about to go out and then things like this happen and I'm like, “Oh, okay. Yes. Okay.” I was just thinking of, you know, I realized. I tend to write stories that don't have a political or any sort of agenda. I don't think stories necessarily have to have an agenda to shift the paradigm, to have an impact because I think the thing that really does change us is the emotional feeling, connection. That's the beauty of drama and raw, brutal, honest, beautiful truth. So that's where I'm coming from because I think we can get lost in pushing an agenda, political, gender, all of it, you know, and lose the root intention and core and heart and soul of what we're trying to say. And so, to me the most important thing is that and the other stuff will come naturally if that is part of what you're passionate about, and we all are. Passionistas: What did you each learn about yourself from making this film together? Carylanna: I'm going to kind of punt and say that I, coming from academia, I'm very, I tend to be very analytical and it gets in the way of filmmaking and it gets in the way of writing sometimes. It's very helpful with research. It's helpful with market analysis. It's helpful with all kinds of things. But in terms of telling a story that just grabs somebody by the lapels and carries them along and immerses them in somebody's life, that requires emotion. And that's why I wanted to work with Prem is because she does such a beautiful job of embodying emotion. So, our relationship was not always like super easy because we're coming at things from very different sides. But I learned a lot about tapping into emotion and working with somebody who's so in tune with it and watching her work with actors was really enlightening, too. So, I think in that arena, I grew a lot because of this. Prem: I'm going to dive in if that's okay, because I want to say the same with Carylanna, like working with the other side of my brain and learning how to hone the emotion, but like use it efficiently and productively and adapt to different ways of using it to my best ability. Being on set is such a magical thing… like there's all this emotion and you have to go, and just be like locked in sort of like carrying all this emotion, but also very in a jar, like you have the lid and you're releasing it every now and then to like connect with the actors. So yeah, I just learned a lot working with Carylanna and working with such a good producer. I learned what the director's part in that collaboration really is. And I think that I can now go forward and, I don't know, have some really beautiful relationships and I'm excited about that. Madonna: I just learned, I mean, it's just another experience of being with a group of people who have really great hearts and are incredibly talented and can show me something about myself. As an actor, you want to get feedback, you want to get notes. I mean, Prem and I had the luxury of having some rehearsal time, which you don't often get. And so we got to have some nice conversations. And seeing Prem's sort of point of view reminded me of myself when I was younger and when I was sort of really, I mean, I'm still passionate, but it's different for me. It's taken a different kind of a vibe. And I was able to sort of harness like Prem's passion in the way that she works and use that in my, in this character, but also just sort of as an actor, like opening myself up again to my younger self and to my older self. You know, sort of really appreciating my age. And that's what this story does. I've never had a problem aging. I love the lines on my fa I love that Brandi Carlisle song. You know, the story. That's one of my favorite songs. Mm-hmm.., because these lines are my experience in, in this world and I like them, you know? And so, this film continues to help me see that and embrace that part of myself. Because aging is also not for the fainthearted. You just start going through new things. You just, things hurt that you didn't know were going to hurt. And so, you know, it was really a reflection of honoring my aging process as well. Prem: So, Carylanna, you were telling us about up your upcoming projects. What about Prem and Madonna, what do you guys have in the pipeline? Prem: I am developing multiple projects, multiple feature film scripts. One of them is the feature film version of this film, which recently I made it to semi-finalists in the Outfest screenwriting lab. So, that was a win for me. I'm celebrating all semi-finalist things. Every little step counts. So, I was really excited about that, but I also got some feedback that I feel like is really beneficial to the script. So, I'm thrilled to execute that and take it to the next level. I'm also working on a feature film script about, The California Gold Rush seen from a non-heteronormative female perspective. I'm, I'm obsessed with westerns and period pieces. It's like my other… So, it's a huge undertaking. So that'll probably be in a decade, maybe. And then a horror film I'm slowly working on. Madonna: Oh, I love horror films. Prem: Me too. Madonna: I just keep auditioning. I've got a couple of fingers crossed on a couple of things right now that I can't talk about, but I, you know, just hopefully, I just keep, as all actors do, I, we just keep auditioning. Robin and I set up, we finally have a media area where we can keep our ring light and our backdrop up and we can keep doing scenes. And two of the things that I have had come my way recently, whether I get them or not, they're really great projects. And I always consider an audition like I'm going to work. So, yeah, just fingers crossed on those. And we just keep going, like looking at I've got great agents and a great manager and, and they know me, so I'm really happy about all that. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interviews with Prem Santana, Carylanna Taylor and Madonna Cacciatore. To learn more about “I Thought The Earth Remembered Me” and Prem Santana's other work visit www.premsantana.com Go to first encounter productions dot.com to stay up to date on Carylanna Taylor's projects. Stay on top of all of the great work that Madonna Cacciatore is doing at IMDb dot com and on her website m cacciatore dot com. And be sure to visit ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list, find all the ways you can follow us on social media and join our worldwide community of women working together to level the playing field for us all. We'll be back next week with another Passionista who is defining success on her own terms and breaking down the barriers for herself and women everywhere. Until then. Stay well and stay passionate.
We speak on the difference between Upstream and Downstream (we learned this from Abraham Hicks), we also share a new suggestion for couples to consider. We speak on this recent viral video of a stud who was caught harassing her neighbor, which leads into speaking on a social media influencer named: Leelee, who's also experiencing stalking from a stud in her area. Visit our website to order herbs and check out other content from us. www.nicandcarla.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carlaandnic/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carlaandnic/support
STRA Episode 18: How to Manage the Holidays With Your Short-Term Rental [00:00:00] [00:00:05] Hey everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. We are John and Wendy Williams with the Short-Term Rental Authority, your authority on all things short-term rental related to help make you the best operator. Ever. And it's the holiday season. [00:00:22] The holiday season. Mm-hmm. , I dunno, the lyrics after that. . . Why do you think I'm wearing this fancy hat? , right? So if you're listening on audio again Last time Wendy had her beautiful Christmas ugly llama sweater on, who You call it ugly. Well, they're they're called that, aren't they like ugly Christmas sweaters? [00:00:43] You have on your ugly Christmas sweater this year? I do. It's, it's, so if you're listed the audio, you'll have to come to the YouTube channel and see the. Wonderful Christmas sweatshirt actually that I have on. It's doth Bader. It says your lack of cheer is disturbing. I find your lack of cheer. I find your lack of cheer disturbing. [00:01:03] Yes. So it's fabulous. Yes. And then if I put my hat up like this and then pull it down. . You look like a g Nome. I look like a gnome, a Nome for some reason. Wendy's into Nome. I really, they're everywhere. Oh, really? There's all these Christmas noms here. I'm a, I'm a big fan. Our Christmas tree topper is, is a Nome as well. [00:01:23] Well, no kidding. Everything's a freaking Nome down here. , but, okay. Either way. And they have names. I would, I'd like to tell you that , she's named. Oh, but that aside it's a holiday. Fun. This is our holiday holiday. The holiday episode. Holiday episode. So we are going to be talking about the, oh my god, there's a cat in a box. [00:01:44] Okay. Yes. We also are wrapping presents. . Right. The boxes. And there's boxes. So every time a box gets delivered, a cat gets in the new box. Right. And on the wrapping paper. Yes. It's ridiculous. It's a zoo around here. Yes. So we're going to be talking. The holiday [00:02:00] season in your short-term rental. So we're going to be talking about the questions that we usually get asked around this time of year, such as should I put up decorations in my unit? [00:02:14] Is there special pricing that I should do availability. How to make it so that guests can't check out on a holiday, for example Christmas Day. Because you don't want your cleaners to have to work on Christmas Day, right? Since we always clean on checkouts and those are the typical questions that we usually get asked this time of year. [00:02:39] So let's start with. Hmm. What should we start with? Let's start with decorations. Got it. So, yeah. So there's, in the past, and actually this question comes not only from operators, but it comes from guests too. Yes. Mm-hmm. , because sometimes they will ask, Hey, we've had that. Either do you have a Christmas tree up, for example? [00:03:05] Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. Or can we put one up? Can, can we decorate ourselves? Yes. Can we decorate ourselves? Mm-hmm. . Yep. And typically just as a general baseline, we don't decorate correct our places for the holidays, right? Because not everybody celebrates. Christmas. Right, right. Not everybody celebrates that holiday. [00:03:23] Correct. So there's, there's that. So we don't, we don't decorate, but we will allow people to decorate if, if they would like to, as long as they take it down and they, if they're using a, a live Christmas tree, then. They have to use a stand . Well, they have, that's cleanup, right? Yes. Yeah. So there's a little more to it there, but we do often have, especially in the the houses that we have, a lot of times it's either right, someone coming to visit family, right. [00:03:52] Or what, and having their celebration at the home, right? Yeah. They'll actually do it there because maybe they live in a smaller space, like a one bedroom apartment or [00:04:00] something. Right. And they want to have family, and so, house them there and then actually go there for mm-hmm. , like Christmas day and stuff. [00:04:08] Yeah. Stuff like that, which is really neat. It's really neat. I, I really enjoy. hosting that and being able to provide that service for people. Right. That makes me happy. Yeah. And we've actually talked about providing that as a service like this. Maybe, maybe this is something you could sell Uhhuh as an extra add-on, as an upsell, Hey, here's the holiday package. [00:04:28] Mm-hmm. , or here's the Christmas package. Mm-hmm. , or here's the New Year's package. Right. Cause we got New Year's coming up too. Yes. That. Thanksgiving not as much, but you could do some things there. But yeah, generally on decorations. I wanna say our general advice is don't provide 'em for one thing. Are you gonna have pictures of them and are they gonna be professional photos or are you gonna put the Christmas tree up and take it with your cell phone and say it's there? [00:04:52] Right? So there's that aspect of it. Just do it as an add-on upsell package. Yeah. If you want to do something, sell it. Yeah, sell it. I think that's a really great idea. I do too. Because I think there are people that would pay for that. I think so. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Especially in, in the homes. Mm-hmm. if you're doing houses. [00:05:08] But I can see it happening in apartments too. So Yeah. Any, any type of, any, anywhere. Yeah. Rental. Yeah. Yep. I agree. So generally we don't but if somebody asks, we'll let them do it. Mm. and hey, maybe it's an idea. Sell that as a, as a thing. I think that's a great idea. I think that's a really great idea. [00:05:24] Yeah. So, so we, we also want to be considerate of the people that work for us as well, such as our cleaners and our customer experience specialists. And our operations specialists which we also call the runner because they're the ones. Do all the running around for us. You know, we don't want them to have to work on, on the holiday as, as well. [00:05:52] So we try to make it so that people, so that guests cannot [00:06:00] check out on, say, for example, Christmas or Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve or New Year's Eve or New Year's Day or Thanksgiving Day. Yeah. So one of the things I've discovered or we've discovered that we should be doing is when we bring on a new cleaner, for example, ask them what are, what are the holidays that you guys don't work during the year? [00:06:22] Right? And one of those holidays can't be every Sunday, right? , right. So that's actually one of our filtering questions. But as far as, you know, national Holidays go, or, or it could be 4th of July, it could be, you know, whatever Thanksgiving, you know, do they take off Thanksgiving? Do they take off Christmas? [00:06:38] Is it Christmas? . I mean, is it Christmas Eve or Christmas Day that you guys don't do? Or is it both? Is it New Year's Day or New Year's Eve? Cuz I always get confused like which one's the actual holiday. Right. Because everybody celebrates on New Year's Eve, right? Sure. . Right. But you're getting year's day off. [00:06:54] So I don't know. But e either way, that having that conversation up front will tell you, okay, these are the days that we don't want checkouts on. Yes. Because I'm not cleaning it . Right. And you definitely don't want me to clean it. Right. So it's, it's not only a courtesy thing, but it's also a, just a practicality thing. [00:07:12] Mm-hmm. of when do they work? Right. And you may have somebody that doesn't bother 'em at all because they don't celebrate Christmas. Right. Right. So maybe it's not a big deal. The, the technical, how do you do that is different than you might think because a lot of people, the first thing they think is okay, I'll make Christmas day a three day minimum. [00:07:31] And that's not actually doing what you think it's doing. It just means if, hey, if they book Christmas Day, they have to book three other days. , and then those days could be the two, the two days, days before, right? Mm-hmm. or the five days before uh, even or whatever. Right. So it doesn't actually prevent the checkout on that day. [00:07:48] Correct. So to do that, the, the only way I know of doing it right now is to go to the actual platform like Airbnb or vrbo, Airbnb or vrbo. Mm-hmm. . And actually you can set up what are called [00:08:00] rule sets that essentially won't allow a checkout on that day. So at the beginning of the every. We go through all of those holidays. [00:08:08] I know we're talking about Christmas and things, right, but there are other days during the year that we don't want that too, right? And so at the beginning of every year we'll go through and for the year set those rule sets up so that we don't have to remember to do it later. Cuz you never know how far in advance somebody's gonna buck. [00:08:25] So we set that up for the whole year and then we don't have to worry about it. And then next year we readjust because some days are always like December. 25th is always Christmas. Right, but it's on New Year's Eve is always January or December 31st, but it's on a different day of the week, right? Yes. [00:08:44] Whereas Thanksgiving's always on a Thursday, whereas Thanksgiving's always on a 30 Thursday. And that's important because when you're setting up those rule sets, it's not like you're saying you can't check out on the 25th, right? You're really saying you can't check out on a Thursday and Well this, this year, Christmas is on Sunday. [00:08:59] It's on Sunday. It happens to be that Christmas is on Sunday. And New Year's is on Sunday, I think. Isn't it always that way? No. Cuz it could be Monday. No, I mean they're always on the same day of the week. Cuz I don't know if that's true or not. It seems like it would be, but maybe, maybe not. I don't remember. [00:09:16] But either way. We want to set up those rule sets so that it applies for that year. Mm-hmm. , where Thanksgiving, for example, is always on a Thursday. Right? Right. So that one you probably don't have to, and, and we can show you how to do that and, and we would be glad to, to help you out with that if you'd like to message us and Yeah. [00:09:34] And, and get on a call. And we would, we would be happy to show you how to do. Yeah. And when Wendy says Message us, she means you can find us on Instagram, short-term rental authority. You can find us on Facebook, short-term rental authority, any of those places, message us and and we'll get back to you. [00:09:50] Yeah. So there's that. It's, yeah. Don't allow people to check out on holidays, right? Is is the general rule, right? And then there's a, a way of doing that that's typically on the [00:10:00] platform, but it's not your minimum stays that do it, however, , when we are talking about availability, we usually do set minimum stays for those holidays, right? [00:10:10] Because those tend to be the most expensive days of that month. So like for example, in December, it's kind of a slow month for us. Mm-hmm. normally, but. If you can get someone that books, you know, those three or four days around Christmas, those dates are, are elevated because we're using a pricing tool, dynamic pricing tool, which you should be using, and it will capture those higher days than what it does is it offsets for the lower occupancy and lower prices that generally occur earlier in the month. [00:10:42] Mm-hmm. . Right. So it's, it's important for us at least to set, you know, 2, 3, 4 day minimums perhaps. Christmas, new Year's, those types of days, so that you're not just selling Christmas Day. So you're also capturing Christmas Eve the day after and you know, maybe even the day before Christmas Eve. Right. And, and it helps with, I'm, I'm assuming that it helps also with people who actually do want to stay those longer stays, makes it available for those people. [00:11:12] That's true. And we, and we all always do that anyway. It's part of our pricing and availability. Strateg. is that we simply don't allow short stays beyond a certain window for us that's 10 days, but at the same time, I wanna make sure that that extends out for those days. Mm-hmm. anyway. And you can do that with Price Labs. [00:11:33] It's something that you know, we can show you how to do jump on a coaching call messages. But that, that is a way of. actually enhancing your revenue. Mm-hmm. during this time as well. Mm-hmm. , because at least for us, it tends to be, yeah, we get the holiday bookings, but what do we do with the rest of the month? [00:11:48] Right. Right. And so there's that. Right. That's all I have to say about available. , what was the next thing? Pricing. Pricing. . Well, pricing. I kind of just mentioned that a little bit, [00:12:00] but you want to take that. Pricing. Mm-hmm. . Well, you're usually the one that does that. . Okay. Cause I don't . See, I have my lane. [00:12:11] I will do the decorations. I stay in my lane and I do not deviate from my lane . Right. Okay. So I do the, you know, I, I'll do the, the personnel aspect of the business and I, I go get. . I make them look pretty and then I give them to you and say, here you go. Here's a new unit. Fill them. Are you, fill them up for me. [00:12:36] Fill them up, please. , right? And you are fantastic. About that. That is, that is your lane. You, you're the master. Yeah. So if you want pricing and availability and booking help, you are the master. Give us a coaching call as well. You are, or give us a shout. We have people more social are, are, we have coaching clients all the time that, that say, you know, I, the changes that we, that you made on our pricing, we got booked. [00:13:05] People say that all the time. You're 10 out of film. Right? Right. So generally when I'm talking about pricing, the, the pricing tool's gonna do a lot of it. So your dynamic pricing tools, again, it's a tool, but when we use Price Labs, there's others out there. Price Labs is wheelhouse we prefer or whatever, but there's wheelhouse. [00:13:24] There's beyond pricing, there's there, but the principal's the same, correct. What they're doing is they're raising and lowering your prices dynamically on a per day basis based on demand. And those holiday days are always high. . So the price is always above your medium or your median, your average, right? [00:13:43] So the pricing tool is going to capture that. If you're gonna do anything at all, you might add an additional percentage to that, at least further out because you've got time. Mm-hmm. , you've got time to get it booked. So you might as well book it at a premium and then you can always pull that back [00:14:00] as the date get clo gets closer. [00:14:02] But keep in mind as the date gets closer, your quote competition, which I don't like that word, but the other things, other units that are available in your area are, well, they're booked. Mm-hmm. . So you become more and more in demand because there's less and less supply, and that allows you to actually capture that. [00:14:19] So that is one of the strategies is kind of a last man standing type strategy. However, you kind of have to be careful about that because longer stays are a thing. and they tend to be booked further out. Mm-hmm. . That's true. So it's kind of a balancing act. You can be, you can price yourself out of those longer stays mm-hmm. [00:14:39] That you might've gotten, that would've been overall more profitable. Mm-hmm. , however, you can get a premium for those, you know, a few days around the holiday. . So it's, it's kind of a, there's a little bit of an art, there's a little bit of a science to it, and I bet experience has something to do with it too. [00:14:55] And experience knowing your market and, and ha when, when you start to operate year after year, you know, you'll, you'll tend to see those, there, there will be trends too, right? And there's certain metrics and KPIs that you want. , basically tracking, like on average, how many days in advance do people book in December, for example. [00:15:16] That's a great kpi. You know, how, what is your average length of stay in a December, right? What, what is you know, how, how many views to bookings? What's that ratio look like, right? And all of these kind of things. So you can start measuring that and seeing where you need to be and what you're actually trying to target. [00:15:37] with your pricing and with your strategy and with your availability, and it's probably a good idea to track that per month. You want to track it, it could be as granular as you want, right, but it, you're right, because each month is a little different, right? Because the, our, the industry seems to be very seasonal, not seasonal by [00:16:00] like winter, spring, summer, and fall. [00:16:02] or seasonal by month. Yeah. December's not the same as November. Right. And November's not the same as October. Right. And January and February are totally different, and every month is a little different. So as you operate throughout a year, now you have that data to go back and look at because it's always, you know, you, you can't come to me and say, Hey, is this a good number? [00:16:25] Because as one of my mentors, Jay Massey says all the time compared to what? . Right. You know, have to know what am I comparing it to, to know if it's a good number or not. Right. So if you have that past data, then the, the longer you operate, the better you get at it because you know what to expect. [00:16:41] Mm-hmm. and you know, what's abnormal and what's normal. Right. And, you know, post covid, it's, well, the data change, all the, yeah. All the data changed. So if you had data pre covid, well, during Covid, that wasn't relevant. Yeah. Totally. At all. And now we're, the world is in the, what we call the new normal. [00:17:00] Mm-hmm. coming into the new normal and now it's all different. Yeah. So your data is not as, you know, even if you've been operating for five years. Right. , well, you can discount the last three , right? . Right. And, and say, okay, we're kind of start over with our metrics and great. The data collection and see what's, what's happening in today's world. [00:17:20] Mm-hmm. , right? Mm-hmm. as far as that goes. Yep. So that, that's my pricing and availability. Long-winded answer to how you deal with that. Okay. And it really applies across the board. It's just a little more targeted when you get a, you know, a holiday. And I would say that applies even more to what we call a tent. [00:17:39] which is kind of like a holiday. Uhhuh. . Yeah. I was gonna, oh, that's, that's interesting. So a temp pole event, if you don't know, it's, it's like a, it's almost like a one time event that comes to your area. Like for example, we had the NBA All Star game here in Charlotte one time. Right, right. That that's something that they don't come to the same city every year. [00:17:57] Or if you're the city that has the Super Bowl this year, [00:18:00] Uhhuh. Yeah. Right. Or if there's, you know, whatever it is, it could be one of the political party conventions. Mm-hmm. . We have the DNC convention here in Charlotte. And that was a, what you call a tentpole event, right? So for those events, it's very similar. [00:18:13] We tend to do the same thing. So not only holidays with this strategy, but also those tent pole events that you have coming in. Mm-hmm. . Oh, that's really good. I, I hadn't, I hadn't thought about making that. Yeah. And, and another reason you should be using a dining up pricing tool, because it'll do that for you. [00:18:29] It'll catch it. Because you may not know. Right. You know, it may be the International Spatula Convention coming to your area and you're not that into spatula, so you don't know. Yes. But the pricing tool is gonna notice that, oh, the demand is cre increasing, there must be a reason, let's raise prices. Right, right, right. [00:18:48] That is i'll it to it really cool about, about the tool. But you know, it's, it's a, it's a tool. It's not a set it and forget it. Type thing. And it's something that you have to learn like, like Jay Massey says, it's an expert tool that you have to learn how to use Expert. Lee Lee, right? Yeah. And it, and, and we can help you with that too, right? [00:19:13] So learning how to use those dynamic pricing tools and. is, is a skill, and, and we can, it is okay. I I'm not gonna say we . John can help you with that. . Wendy can help you too. I can to a certain extent. That's true. That's true. You act like all you do is design places. And that's true. I that's not true. [00:19:35] That's not true at all. That's not true. I can help with a, to a certain extent, yes, but the, there is a strategy. to it, to, to using those tools. So if you want help with that, you'd let us know. Yeah. Dms, dms, social media. Mm-hmm. , we are all in this one from Facebook. Anywhere. You can find us all over. Yes. [00:19:57] The short-term rental authority. That is us. [00:20:00] You got anything else in your words of wisdom in your, say it in your doth Vader. [00:20:12] your lack of pricing is disturbing. . Your lack of dynamic pricing is disturbing. . That's funny. , the student becomes the master. [00:20:27] Okay. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not James or Jones. Sorry. . I don't know. It was pretty good. Yeah. You do have the Santa beard going on. Yeah. Well, if you wanna see my Santa beard, , maybe you should be wearing the hat. Oh, I'm already wearing a sweater. I just need my, I have the bowl full of jelly. Oh. Oh. It's perfect. If you made me a gnome, I can't tell. [00:20:46] No, but I. Oh, let me see. . Okay, now I'm a jolly nom . So again, if you wanna see the jolly Nom , head over to the YouTube channel and you can check it out. . Well, I hope you found some value and entertainment in today's podcast. Be sure to like and subscribe. We are John and Wendy Williams. This is Darth Vader. [00:21:12] And we will see you next. On to the next. Ho, ho, ho. [00:21:23]
B. Cox is joined by NaturallyAlise and JR of the R&B Representers to review SWV's debut classic album It's About Time as it turns 30. The crew is also joined with a very special guest appearance by Brian Alexander Morgan, one of the album's principal producers and co-writers.As R&B continued its evolution in the early 90s, the trio from NYC burst onto the scene with a jam packed album of hits and a long list of singles that would keep their album in the public consciousness for years until their next effort. Formed by Cheryl "Coko" Gamble, Tamara "Taj" George (nee Johnson) and Leanne "LeeLee" Lyons, the group started in gospel, but soon transitioned to R&B.The majority of the album was primarily produced and co-written by singer and producer Morgan. It also featured production from Genard Parker, Michael Brown, Saphreem King and Donald "Dee" Bowden. It's legendary run included seven singles, including the #1 R&B ballad "Weak", top R&B hit "I'm So Into You", "Right Here", "Downtown", "Anything" and the Morgan vocally-assisted "You're Always On My Mind".The album was certified triple platinum and has been considered a staple of the greatness of 90s R&B music. SWV would go on to release many albums and reunited to tour after taking long hiatus in new millennium, having influenced a great deal of their contemporaries and successors with the sound of their debut effort.Catch Alise and JR of the R&B Representers!Web: www.rnbreps.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/rnbrepsIG: https://www.instagram.com/rnbrepsYoutube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RBRepresentersVisit The Vault Classic Music Reviews Onlinewww.vaultclassicpod.comSupport The Vault Classic Music Review on Buy Me A Coffeehttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/vaultclassicpodShow NotesAlbumism: SWV's Debut Album "It's About Time" Turns 30 | Anniversary Retrospectivehttps://albumism.com/features/swv-debut-album-its-about-time-album-anniversaryEssence: An SWV Biopic Is In The Workshttps://www.essence.com/entertainment/swv-biopic-movie/UrbanBridgez: UB Celebrates 30 Years of SMV's "It's About Time"https://urbanbridgez.com/2022/10/27/ub-celebrates-30th-anniversary-of-swvs-its-about-time/Sterogum: The Number Ones- SWV "Weak"https://www.stereogum.com/2174931/the-number-ones-swvs-weak/columns/the-number-ones/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vault-classic-music-reviews-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
