Podcasts about when richard

There was a time in the late '80s and early '90s when you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing Richard Marx. Songs like Satisfied, Endless Summer Nights, Right Here Waiting, Angelia and Hazard – to name only a few – were bonafide radio staples. But there had been years of struggle before those hits. When Richard moved to LA from Chicago at the age of 18, he spent years getting rejected by label after label, and told time and again he should give up. Then when fame hit, it was a whirlwind that left him questioning the success he'd worked so hard to achieve. He writes about it all in his new memoir, Stories To Tell, and shares many of those stories in this interview.

Sometimes in life a show of good faith is needed, or rather customary. When Richard holds Tobias Brogan and his people back to have a private word, they trade more then silver for silver. Rumors, speculation and warnings are carefully delivered the whole time. Join Nate and Jade as we get into Chapter 13 of Blood of the Fold.

Chapter 15 starts with Richard Sparne loading his father's trunk with shotguns. Many Cones is a podcast novel based on true crime. The murders inspiring this crime fiction took place 30 miles from Chicago in Northwest Indiana, and captivated the area from the initial brutal crime scene all the way through and beyond discovery of a shockingly bizarre motive.     The Kid placed the shotguns in the trunk of his father’s car, next to Moffit’s. His parents were in the house, watching television, unaware of his activities. Outside it was dark, so he didn’t have to sneak around. He checked his back pocket to make sure he had the index card, then left to pick up Ricardo. There was a party going on. Fifteen Hispanic males eyed the white kid behind the wheel, viciously. Alcohol, drugs, and ethnic posturing intensified the confrontational craving of the young men. Sparne slowly skirted the outer perimeter of the pear shaped dead end. Enough good vibes remained, from the balance of the revelers, to prevent any overt displays of hatred towards the intruder. When Richard pulled into the Morales driveway, all cold stares returned to warmer pursuits. The Kid sat and watched as Ricardo, standing in the doorway, hugged his mother. He held her hand, said something, and then came towards the car. Once he was in the vehicle, Sparne navigated his way back around the festivities. Richard asked, “Are these parties any good?” Ricardo answered, “They used to be.” They drove to a third teenager’s home. A friend of Ricardo’s. He had been with them at the pimp’s apartment. Both agreed he was an up and coming soldier. Plus, he was the only other kid in the group who had ever fired a shotgun. The third kid lived on a quiet residential street ten minutes from Ricardo. Sparne parked on the street. Morales walked to the front door, chatted for a second with parents, and returned with a baby faced, cold blooded killer. When the two entered the vehicle, the dome light shone on Richard, holding the index card in his hand. He had read the address again, and hunched forward to return the card to his back pocket. Ricardo asked if he knew where “Zola’s” was located. The Kid said, “Yep.” Once the card was pocketed, they were on their way. The two more important participants talked about how this hit would finally get the message out to their underlings. The third teen sat in awe, listening, thankful to be associated with these two obviously important men. “Zola’s” was the second structure from the end of the block. It was a long rectangular building with a short side facing a fairly busy, four lane boulevard. A large picture window, framing the busy street, contained a bright neon sign that nightly announced its existence. Between the establishment and a third business, an empty lot loomed. It was covered by hardpan clay, severely rutted. A large notice, painted on the long side of the rectangle, warned that only patrons of “Zola’s” could park in the lot. There was an entrance at the corner of the bar, facing the boulevard, and a back door, of sorts, in the middle of the painted warning. The private parking lot was reached through an alley, which ran the length of the block, behind the establishments. Patrons usually angled their vehicles against the side of the building. Sometimes cars reached the lot by jumping over the curb and sidewalk from the boulevard, but not often. A long, shiny, mahogany bar ran from the middle of the picture window, half way back through the structure. Cheap, cushioned, bar stools, with no backs, stood at attention under a curved wooden lip. Behind the bar, rows and rows of various elixirs basked in the refracted glow of dim overhead lights. 

"The power of flowers to lift our spirits shouldn't be underestimated." Listen as Andy and his guest Richard Eagleton discuss the power of flowers, social prescribing, and how he feels that mental health and well-being will be the greatest human global challenge arising from the pandemic, plus much more on this episode of The Wedding Biz.   Richard is the CEO of McQueens Flowers, the internationally renowned luxury floral design brand and flower school. Founded in London's east end in 2001 with customers in Mexico, the United States, Japan, France, Korea, Kuwait, Singapore, Hong Kong, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Spain, and Australia. They have provided flowers for Vanity Fair's Oscars afterparty for the last twenty-five years and were the floral design partner for the All England Lawn Tennis Club's Wimbledon Champions Ball and the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards.     Listen, as Richard shares when he discovered his passion for flowers and his journey to McQueens. He discusses their flower school and how he handles being creative and working the business simultaneously. When Richard asked his team what they saw as McQueens vision, they responded to be the best flower business in the world to work for. Richard strives to make that happen every day.   Richard talks about what they did during the pandemic to make their online store profitable; he believes when you have falling or zero sales, it's an opportunity for improving margins. He discusses what he sees happening in the event industry post- Covid.   When asked for his advice at the beginning of the lockdown in the UK, Richard said be kind because it costs nothing and will always come back, keep an eye on the horizon because the bumpy road to get there is easier to travel if you know where you are heading and third, just worry about the things you can change and stop worrying about the things you can't.     Do you need some tips on handling stress during this crazy year? Andy has put together a list of the top ten tips for dealing with stress, which he has compiled from interviews with icons of the wedding and event industry. If you would like a copy, go to www.theweddingbiz.com/toptips.   Have you heard about the brand new show on The Wedding Biz Network, Stop and Smell the Roses with Preston Bailey? Listen as Preston shares the secrets, tools, and technologies behind his extraordinary ability to create a theatrical environment out of any space. Also, don't forget about Sean Low's podcast The Business of Being Creative, where Sean discusses the power of being niched, pricing strategies, metrics of success, and so much more. You can find both shows on The Wedding Biz Network.   SUPPORTING THE WEDDING BIZ Become a patron and support Andy and the show: If you are so inspired: contribute.    Show Highlights: [03:06] Welcome to the show, Richard! [04:41] Richard speaks about his quote on the power of flowers.. [08:34] When did you discover your passion for flowers? [10:03] Richard speaks about his journey to McQueens. [13:25] Richard discusses their flower school and what they teach. [17:38] Richard talks about how he handles the business and creative sides of the business. [20:14] Their vision is to be the best flower business in the world to work for. [23:15] Andy discusses the response he got from his team when they were asked what the vision should be. [24:06] Richard wants everyone to feel invested in the business, and he believes you need to have brilliant people around you. [25:19] He's learned that their customers trust them to be creative and trust that they will do what they say they will do. [26:38] Richard tells a story about taking flowers to a meeting at the Carlyle Hotel. [27:55] Andy shares some quotes that Richard made at the beginning of the pandemic. [28:33] Richard says you should never let a crisis go to waste. [30:05] Richard talks about taking the business apart and putting it back together because they had the time and opportunity. [31:08] Richard speaks about their online business and how they made it brilliant. [33:13] Richard discusses what he meant by how falling and zero sales are an opportunity for improving margins. [35:58] What will the event industry be like post covid?  [38:15] Richard shares his thoughts on social distancing. [38:39] Thank you for being on the show!   RESOURCES   Find Richard: McQueens McQueens Flowers Journal interview with US wedding planner Rebecca Gardner A Midsummer Wedding @mcqueensflowers Instagram | Facebook Videos Behind the scenes with McQueen Events team Winter Wedding at Claridge’s December 2019    Follow The Wedding Biz on Social:  The Wedding Biz The Wedding Biz on Instagram: @theweddingbiz The Wedding Biz on Facebook: @theweddingbiz   The Wedding Biz Network The Music Makers   Support The Wedding Biz by clicking here.    Title Sponsor: This episode is sponsored by Kushner Entertainment  www.KushnerEntertainment.com

Richard Warner is the Director of Ladygate Removals Limited which started in 2012. A small removals company with a very high standard. When Richard has a spare time, he's more often found in his house doing DIY projects, building, storing, plumbing -- any job that gets his hands dirty. Ladygate Removals is a family-run domestic removal company with offices in Beverley, Hull, and Bridlington and a well-established Removals and Storage company offering domestic and commercial relocations to the highest standards. On today’s podcast: 4:39 - Getting to know Richard Warner 6:36 - Why customer care is important to him 10:31 - How people heard about Ladygate Removals 12:11 - What attracted Richard in the Self Storage business 19:57 - What Richard checks when he finds a new site 22:53 - Richard's containers sponsored by Willbox 27:46 - Self Storage Offers 33:57 - How to contact Richard 36:25 - Quick Fire Round Email: richard@ladygateremovals.co.uk Mobile #: 0796721184

RICHARD FLETCHER:Can you rise to the 10K challenge? Coach Richard Fletcher wants to add some magic sauce to your business! Richard Fletcher is an up-beat, down to earth coach, who helps people make more money without spending a lot of money. When Richard claims to make his clients richer, he isn't joking or talking about small sums here and there. It's not unusual for Richard's clients to make between 10K and 20K in a couple of weeks, by implementing Richard's tailored plans and advice. However, Richard's favourite success story is the wedding photographer that was able to up their prices from £1500 to £15000 within one day – and get clients happy to pay a premium for their services.The driving force of Richard's desire to make money without working too hard, is sheer laziness plus of a love of interacting with all types of people. Richard loves to spend time with his wife and cats, and prior to his life as a coach, has been a professional gambler, a dating coach and a volunteer in a pet rescue centre. However, when Richard finally found his niche, his earnings exploded in a short space of time.http://magicsaucemarketing.comThe Douglas Coleman Show now offers audio and video promotional packages for music artists as well as video promotional packages for authors. Please see our website for complete details. http://douglascolemanshow.comIf you have a comment about this episode or any other, please click the link below.https://ratethispodcast.com/douglascolemanshow

RICHARD FLETCHER:Can you rise to the 10K challenge? Coach Richard Fletcher wants to add some magic sauce to your business! Richard Fletcher is an up-beat, down to earth coach, who helps people make more money without spending a lot of money. When Richard claims to make his clients richer, he isn't joking or talking about small sums here and there. It's not unusual for Richard's clients to make between 10K and 20K in a couple of weeks, by implementing Richard's tailored plans and advice. However, Richard's favourite success story is the wedding photographer that was able to up their prices from £1500 to £15000 within one day – and get clients happy to pay a premium for their services.The driving force of Richard's desire to make money without working too hard, is sheer laziness plus of a love of interacting with all types of people. Richard loves to spend time with his wife and cats, and prior to his life as a coach, has been a professional gambler, a dating coach and a volunteer in a pet rescue centre. However, when Richard finally found his niche, his earnings exploded in a short space of time.http://magicsaucemarketing.comThe Douglas Coleman Show now offers audio and video promotional packages for music artists as well as video promotional packages for authors. Please see our website for complete details. http://douglascolemanshow.comIf you have a comment about this episode or any other, please click the link below.https://ratethispodcast.com/douglascolemanshow

When Richard stops answering the phone and getting out of bed for Zoom meetings, daughter Kerry finds a new way to reach our dad.

Episode 293: Strange Planet Scratch at knowledge and invariably a mystery lurks just beneath the surface. It's his indefatigable and passionate pursuit of these mysteries, his insatiable curiosity of the world around him and his unique and finely tuned storytelling abilities that have earned Richard Syrett the moniker, Canada's Art Bell. And on Friday April 24th, 2009, Richard guest-hosted Coast to Coast filling in for George Noory. First, foremost, and always a broadcaster. Richard's writing, story-telling, and interviewing skills, infectious enthusiasm and the ability to stare down chaos and confusion with a smile make Richard a rare and valuable media commodity. He has been producing fresh, compelling and provocative talk radio in Toronto, North America's fourth largest market, for nearly 20 years. After graduating top of his class from Centennial College's Radio and Television Program in 1992 he began working almost immediately at one of North America's blowtorch stations, the legendary CFRB AM 1010. He received his “doctorate” in broadcasting working as the producer for such talk show legends as Larry Solway, Ed Needham, the late Brian Linehan, Andy Barrie, John Oakley, Michael Coren, Jim Richards and Spider Jones. In 1999 he took over the microphone for the first time with his own talk show and by 2000, his arcane Sunday night program examining political intrigue, the dark side of geo-politics, cover-ups, corruption, alternative energy, alternative health and unexplained phenomenon, had become an appointment tune. In 2003, his special brand of talk was chronicled on the front page of The Globe and Mail's Review section (Canada's national newspaper) and that spring his show earned a 13 share in Toronto's very competitive market. Later in 2003, Richard left CFRB for cross-town rival, AM 640 to build and produce an edgy, funny new morning show and continue his own unique show on Friday nights. The show continued to be a ratings grabber, drawing a larger audience than the stations' hockey broadcasts of the city's beloved Maple Leafs. Richard was lured back to CFRB in early 2007 to host five nights a week. Over its two year The Mighty Aphroditerun, it garnered a dedicated, even zealous, following. He consistently beat his rival in the market, the behemoth Coast to Coast by as much as 2 share points. When Richard's show was suddenly and unexpectedly cut from CFRB's line-up as part of a ‘corporate reorganizing' Richard's devoted listeners organized and staged a rally outside the radio station in minus 30 degree weather! Despite being off the air, his past, archived RB shows continue to be downloaded from his website. One of his last shows in December of 2008 has been downloaded in excess of 31,000 times. Richard has obviously struck a chord with a huge market and has become the new voice of alternative talk radio. Richard is not, however, a one-note wonder. As a whimsical impressionist, he had created followings for his fictitious characters during his morning show producing stint and he is recognized for his political acuity. Richard resides in Unionville, Ontario with his Mighty Aphrodite and their twin boys.

Episode 293: Strange Planet Scratch at knowledge and invariably a mystery lurks just beneath the surface. It’s his indefatigable and passionate pursuit of these mysteries, his insatiable curiosity of the world around him and his unique and finely tuned storytelling abilities that have earned Richard Syrett the moniker, Canada’s Art Bell. And on Friday April 24th, 2009, Richard guest-hosted Coast to Coast filling in for George Noory. First, foremost, and always a broadcaster. Richard’s writing, story-telling, and interviewing skills, infectious enthusiasm and the ability to stare down chaos and confusion with a smile make Richard a rare and valuable media commodity. He has been producing fresh, compelling and provocative talk radio in Toronto, North America’s fourth largest market, for nearly 20 years. After graduating top of his class from Centennial College’s Radio and Television Program in 1992 he began working almost immediately at one of North America’s blowtorch stations, the legendary CFRB AM 1010. He received his “doctorate” in broadcasting working as the producer for such talk show legends as Larry Solway, Ed Needham, the late Brian Linehan, Andy Barrie, John Oakley, Michael Coren, Jim Richards and Spider Jones. In 1999 he took over the microphone for the first time with his own talk show and by 2000, his arcane Sunday night program examining political intrigue, the dark side of geo-politics, cover-ups, corruption, alternative energy, alternative health and unexplained phenomenon, had become an appointment tune. In 2003, his special brand of talk was chronicled on the front page of The Globe and Mail’s Review section (Canada’s national newspaper) and that spring his show earned a 13 share in Toronto’s very competitive market. Later in 2003, Richard left CFRB for cross-town rival, AM 640 to build and produce an edgy, funny new morning show and continue his own unique show on Friday nights. The show continued to be a ratings grabber, drawing a larger audience than the stations’ hockey broadcasts of the city’s beloved Maple Leafs. Richard was lured back to CFRB in early 2007 to host five nights a week. Over its two year The Mighty Aphroditerun, it garnered a dedicated, even zealous, following. He consistently beat his rival in the market, the behemoth Coast to Coast by as much as 2 share points. When Richard’s show was suddenly and unexpectedly cut from CFRB’s line-up as part of a ‘corporate reorganizing’ Richard’s devoted listeners organized and staged a rally outside the radio station in minus 30 degree weather! Despite being off the air, his past, archived RB shows continue to be downloaded from his website. One of his last shows in December of 2008 has been downloaded in excess of 31,000 times. Richard has obviously struck a chord with a huge market and has become the new voice of alternative talk radio. Richard is not, however, a one-note wonder. As a whimsical impressionist, he had created followings for his fictitious characters during his morning show producing stint and he is recognized for his political acuity. Richard resides in Unionville, Ontario with his Mighty Aphrodite and their twin boys.

South Bay Coverboy, Richard Podgurski Jr., sauces out with The Chrises during a break from training his camera towards Butterball turkey stardom on Supermarket Sweep. When Richard is not adorning bare walled abodes with his stunning snapshots or raising $15,000 for community causes, the Oracle of the Internet is keeping Tahoe nude and chain linking with Keyboard Karens. Portland's favourite sneaker-hands, DJ Dik, gives an IG Live exclusive sneak peek at his unreleased, limited edition, custom Vans slip-on shoes. Shelby, the Turtle Leash tortoise influencer, escapes from the I Dunno Dude Pod's Pad to eat all the tasty plants, and she saves the planet with her valuable life lesson: always be happy and in the moment. Special Guest: Richard Podgurski, https://www.rp-photography.com/

This episode features an interview with my friend Richard de Gouveia. When Richard was 22 years-old a devastating blow was dealt him that made him rethink how he should live the rest of his life.

This is a teaser for Episode 10 of COOL STORY with David J. MacNeil. This episode features an interview with my friend Richard de Gouveia. When Richard was 22 years-old, a devastating blow was dealt him that made him rethink how he should live the rest of his life.

This week we're covering the 2020 movie THE LODGE. Katie and Britney talk about cults and Catholicism as well as mental health. THE LODGE is a psychological horror movie from the director team of GOODNIGHT MOMMY Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz. After their happy family falls apart, siblings Mia and Aidan are unhappy to learn that not only does their dad want to marry the girlfriend he left their now-deceased mother for, but he wants them all to spend Christmas together in a secluded mountain lodge. The girlfriend in question, Grace, has a dark past that haunts her still. When Richard leaves his children with the mentally fragile Grace, will they come together as family, or be torn apart as enemies? Next Episode's Movie: THE INVITATION (2015) Time Codes: Intro/Mental Health: 0:00 THE LODGE and Spoilers: 23:00 Suicide/Our Mental Health: 33:00 Back to THE LODGE: 37:20 Katie Makes Britney Cry (but in a good way) 48:00 Back to THE LODGE: 54:00 Final Thoughts on THE LODGE: 1:30:00 Kevin Smith: 1:39:50 Ratings and Movie: 1:41:29 Brit's Pick of the Week: 1:43:28 Royalty free music used: Ready Set Go and Outro White Smoke Copyright 2020 Grindhouse Girls Podcast

RICHARD FLETCHER Can you rise to the 10K challenge? Coach Richard Fletcher wants to add some magic sauce to your business! Richard Fletcher is an upbeat, down to earth coach, who helps people make more money without spending a lot of money. When Richard claims to make his clients richer, he isn’t joking or talking about small sums here and there. It’s not unusual for Richard’s clients to make between 10K and 20K in a couple of weeks, by implementing Richard’s tailored plans and advice. However, Richard’s favorite success story is the wedding photographer that was able to up their prices from £1500 to £15000 within one day – and get clients happy to pay a premium for their services. The driving force of Richard’s desire to make money without working too hard is sheer laziness plus of love of interacting with all types of people. Richard loves to spend time with his wife and cats, and prior to his life as a coach, he has been a professional gambler, a dating coach, and a volunteer in a pet rescue center. However, when Richard finally found his niche, his earnings exploded in a short space of time. MAGICSAUCEMARKETING.COM FACEBOOK PERSONAL: FACEBOOK.COM/RICHARDGRAHAMFLETCHER FACEBOOK GROUP: FACEBOOK.COM/GROUPS/MAGICSAUCE/ LINKEDIN: LINKEDIN.COM/IN/RICHARDGFLETCHER/ INSTA: INSTAGRAM.COM/MAGICSAUCEMARKETING/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pressplayinspired/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pressplayinspired/support

Richard Fletcher is an up-beat, down to earth coach, who helps people make more money without spending a lot of money. When Richard claims to make his clients richer, he isn’t joking or talking about small sums here and there. It’s not unusual for Richard’s clients to make between 10K and 20K in a couple of weeks, by implementing Richard’s tailored plans and advice. However, Richard’s favourite success story is the wedding photographer that was able to up their prices from £1500 to £15000 within one day – and get clients happy to pay a premium for their services.

Rita Reimers is the founder of Just for Cats, a company that has been providing cat behavior services and cats-only pet-sitting for the last 18 years. She's the world's most in demand cat behaviorist and has written a new book called The Lucky Cat Approach to Cat Behavior Correction, which will give people the knowledge and tools to better understand and develop a deep bond with their cats. She is joined by her Executive Director Linda Hall who worked with health and fitness guru Richard Simmons for 17 years, where she met Rita. When Richard retired Linda joined Just for Cats. Learn more about Rita. Learn more about The Passionistas Project. Full Transcript: Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Rita Reimers and Linda Hall of Just for Cats, a company that has been providing cat behavior services and cat-only pet sitting for the last 18 years. Rita, the world's most in demand cat behaviorist, has written a new book called "The Lucky Cat Approach to Cat Behavior Correction," which will give people the knowledge and tools to better understand and develop a deep bond with their cats. Rita also writes a hugely popular cat behavior help and advice column called "A New Cattitude" which answers questions through her membership only group Club Cattitude and is launching a new line of USA-made cat toys and bedding called Gracie and Esther. Linda worked with health and fitness guru Richard Simmons for 17 years, which is where she met Rita. Linda was Richard's customer service manager on his website — working with site visitors, posting content and participating in chats. When Richard retired, Linda joined just for cats as executive director. So please welcome to the show, Rita Reimers at Linda Hall. Rita: Great. Thank you so much for having us. Passionistas: Oh, I'm so glad I am exhausted just reading that intro. Rita: But we love it. I've dedicated my life to cats. I left a six figure salary job to start over from scratch. It's actually 18 years now. Um, I left corporate America about 15 years ago, but the first three I did was doing both cat sitting and cat behavior counseling. Actually three things. I was still in corporate America and working for Richard Simmons all at the same time. And I thought, how can I make my life harder? I know I'll quit the job that makes all the money and I've not looked back. I've not looked back since I'm, I'm very blessed. Passionistas: We like to ask our very first question on both of you is, and I think we know the answer, but what are you most passionate about? Rita: Cats. Keeping cats more than that. Keeping cats in people's homes. Helping somebody with a behavior issue that may have meant the cat. What's going to end up being surrendered if we didn't fix it? Linda: Yes. Cats are so often misunderstood. You know, dogs are so, they're just dogs. They're in their way. Tail is wagging and you hopefully know, I mean there are constant speech bubbles over dogs hands, right? Take you for a walk. Feed me. Cats are so much more complicated than that and the signs are so much less obvious. And Rita has really taught people how to read their cats behaviors, how to read their moods. Um, I can tell now by the way, the tail is curled that he's curious. Blinky eyes means I love you. I mean this whole language that exists and understanding the cats and in solving some problems, there are relatively small problems, which seem really big when you're dealing with it. Like your cat urinating on your bed every night. This gets really big. Rita: That's a big problem. Linda: People rehomed their cats over it and it may just be that her litter box, they had just changed litter. The cat liked the letter. So I started. So they changed back and it was all better and things like this. And of course some problems are a lot more complicated than that, but I've seen people on the verge of rehoming their cats that then Rita has spoken to them and given them answers. And these cats can stay home and safe. And that's huge. I mean that's just, I can't think of anything bigger than that than saving lives and keeping families. Rita: I agree. I agree. That's what it's all about. Saving lives. Yes. Passionistas: So where does this love of cats come from? Rita: I think I was born with it. Um, I was given a cat when I was eight years old. We couldn't keep it cause my dad was allergic. Um, but I always felt this affinity towards cats since I was, you know, like two years old. I'd go near a cat. My mom would say, don't put your face near him. And I'd say, I have a cat. He understands. I made my cat, my mom dressed me as a cat, every holiday, um, every, uh, trick or treat Halloween. Thank you. Um, and then my dad had an aunt, my great aunt Chesser who lived in the country and I think she was the original cat person in our family. She did TNR, trap, neuter, release before it was a thing. She fed all the outdoor cats. A few of them became tame and became her pets, but we would, various members of the family go down to Smithville Falx, New York and help her get the kitties and to the vet to be spayed and neutered. Um, I just fell in love with cats then I think. Passionistas: How about you Linda? Linda: Uh, yeah, I didn't have cats, like Rita, Rita, Stan was allergic. It was my mom. So we had dogs and I love animals and I love having a pet, but you know that in your face stuff is a little much for me sometimes. Plus taking them outside again, I live where there's snow. It's just not my thing. And so when I got a cat it was like this, this is my, this is my match, this is my soul animal, this is my match. And then, you know, as we got more and found all the differences in cats and, and brought more into the house, it just, it's amazing the things you learn and the feeling. Yeah. And it's just, it's indescribable. I just, I don't know. It's in my soul. Rita: Well, to make you earn their love, I always say a dog will love you until you give them a reason not to, but account won't love you until you give them a reason to love you. Linda: That's true. Passionistas: I love that. So tell us a little bit about your journey separately towards working together. Rita: Um, well Linda first started working for Richard Simmons way before I did. Um, so Linda, do you want to talk about what you did for and why I snagged you for my company? Linda: Yeah, I worked for him for 17 and a half years before he officially retired and I started out working as a typing angel, helping him to get his responses to people out, did some infomercials with and worked on some infomercials. We got to do a lot of fun stuff with him. And then I went into managing his clubhouse. So when he retired and Rita was thinking about starting up a cat club house so that people can have more access to her and her behavior, how she called me and she said, I heard Richard's retiring and you're losing your job. And I said, yes, I'm so stressed. And she said, lack of work for me. Yes, please. Rita: No, I needed your skill set. And I knew Linda through Richard Simmons and the clubhouse plus I, uh, produced radios, uh, Richard's radio show on Sirius for three years. It was a live call in radio show three hours every Sunday. Um, so I got my cred of working for Richard. So the other people that worked for Richard Simmons knew I was a genuine, you know, person and not just someone trying to get close to Richard. Um, so Linda and I started developing a friendship. Um, I moved back to the Carolinas from LA and right away I was so fortunate to be offered the opportunity to do some videos for Catster magazine. And the producer of the videos happened to be right here in Charlotte because I said, darn, I can't do it. I just left LA and they're like, well, you know what, the producers are in Charlotte five miles away from me. So I started doing those videos, uh, there actually for a website at the time called Pecha that's now owned by chewy. Everything's been changed around a little bit. And through that, um, Catster offered me the New Cattitude column right around the time I was wanting to launch the clubhouse. And Linda became free and she had been coming to me for cat advice anyway as her cat family was growing. And I knew she had the skill set to help me make a success of this clubhouse. And the reason I'm doing the clubhouses, you know, not everybody can afford a personal cat behavior session. Plus I'm in, just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. I can't be everywhere. I can't go everywhere, reach everyone. Um, and not everyone can afford that anyway. So I wanted to have a clubhouse where people can have a community of other likeminded people or other people who've had similar problems and access to me and my staff. Um, so they can come to us for cat behavior help, funny stories. Some camaraderie with each other. We've got some awesome sponsors with some great prizes from, um, Litter Genie, uh, Pretty Litter, Catster magazine of course. Um, and then, uh, the Cat Lady Box came aboard and oddly enough Spanglers candy, which that's good too. Doesn't love candy. Um, they were originally going to be sponsoring our Catstitute Cruise, but we can't do that right now with the COVID 19. So the clubhouse is even more important for people to join. We actually just cut the price in half. It was $19 a month. It's now $9.95 a month because I want everyone to be able to afford to have a cat behaviorist in their toolbox when they have a problem. Come to me, come to the clubhouse, come to the people there. Come to Linda who has eight cata and a dog. Um, Nikki and Sebastian, a married couple who have five cats. Um, we all know cats. Right. And what fun. It's fun to giving away. Linda: Yes. Yes, yes. Well, when we took the clubhouse, she was saying, you know, with Covdshould we offer a month free or something? Everybody's struggling. People are off work. So we decided to do a $1 for the first month and the dollar is going until June. We're donating it to a local rescue here in Ohio, Friends of Felines. And then after that we'll switch to another rescue so that you can get a month for a dollar and you're donating the dollar to a rescue. So rescues are in trouble right now. So yeah. Passionistas: Rita, you were saying that you had a six figure career. It's one thing to love cats and want to have a lot of cats. It's another thing to decide to make it your career. So what inspired you to do this full time? Rita: Well, I had a very successful career in information technology. I was somewhat of a hybrid between the tech people and the business people. And I was good at my job, but honestly I was bored. Mmm. My last position was with a nonprofit organization that's awesome, called the California Endowment, but by and large, my career has been spent working for companies, making the people up at the top, rich, not contributing anything much to society. And then doing pet sitting on the side, at the time I did both cats and dogs, seeing what some of these animals go through. Linda: Um, and then volunteering for rescues. Really getting a look firsthand at how many animals needlessly wind up in the shelters, let alone the ones that are born because people don't span neuter. Mmm. I knew I had to change the focus of my life and with the cat sitting, that was the first start, you know, towards getting into people's homes, getting people's ear, you know, having them trust me as a cat expert and listen to what I had to say if they came to me for advice. You know, I had to be very careful because someone came coming to me for pet-sitting cats and didn't necessarily want advice, but if they asked, they got it, you know, or if I, thought that something was really a miss and had to be addressed. No, I find a way to bring it up subtly. Uh, I know it was so much more rewarding even though at first it didn't pay well. It still doesn't really pay anywhere near what I was making. I don't care. I'm happier. And I want to leave a legacy behind of, um, having more people understand cat behavior. A goal of mine and Linda's is to go into the schools and teach children at a young age about appropriate behavior with all kinds of pets, not just cats, but cats tend to be the ones that get picked on a lot by children who really don't understand animals have the same heart, soul and feelings that we do. Um, I don't have children, so I'm looking to lend us children to carry on the legacy. When she and I and her husband, Brian, are no longer here. I want to leave something behind that. It makes a positive dent in cats lives and the lives of their owners, owners. I hate to use that word. We don't really own the cat. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's another reason we're looking at launching this. USA-made pet Caroline too. Um, something that I've been talking about doing for years. I've seen the tide change. People want more USA-made products. Um, so Linda and I right now we're working on um, catnip and cat toys, a spray catnip that's made from homegrown organic cotton grown in defiance, Ohio. And some cat toys that have this organic catnip in them don't have any loose. You know, sometimes you'll see little whiskers, a little eyes on the toys and you know, cats can eat those, swallow them, choke on them. So, um, Linda and Nicki, her, her daughter who works for us hand so's everyone by hand. Of course when we make it big, we'll have to go into a manufacturing situation, but we make them in such a way that even if the cat was to chew on the thread, somehow it won't come apart. Linda, talk about that a little bit. Linda: Yeah, I, so about an inch and then I back up and go forward. And so an inch, so if at any point it comes, and this, this was quite an eye opening thing that Rita taught me, you know, we buy toys that are cute and attractive to us, right? Googly eyes, your cat couldn't care less about that space or go go. They just want the toy. And we had, I remember we had a booking for when we had the cat sitting business and the lady called and said her cat was an emergency stomach surgery. He had ripped open his toy and eaten insides, weaker jingle bell or whatever and it was lodged in his intestine, emergency surgery, darn near die. You know, you don't think about this stuff. You just assume anything you buy is safe. And then you know, some of the materials have a lot of dyes on them. You see it water bowl and then your water bowl turns blue. Your cat slobbering on this is all very, very scary. So you know, you don't need tails and Danglies and, and you know your cat just monster. Rita: The thing is if it's shaped like a mouse or a square or something round, they don't care. I'm like little mice just for the owner. Exactly. Linda: But yeah, no eyes, no jingle bells sticking on them, nothing like that. And yeah, sewing and stopping and sewing and stopping because that was another thing. String causing obstruction or they can um, get it tangled around their neck. So this way, the most they're going to unravel is about an inch at a time. So they'll be separate pieces. So yeah. Rita: And why are we called Gracie and Esther? Linda: Gracie and Esther are our alternate personalities. You were any pet sitting conference and Rita gets these colds or whatever sinus thing and she can't hear. And what exactly, it's really fun sharing a hotel room with her because you say something and, and you'll hear, I think you said something, but I have no idea what it was or so one point I was just tired and loopy and said, Esther put your hearing aid and you can't hear a thing. It's so this just became this thing. Rita: Then her daughter became little girl. Linda: It just kind of took off on its own. So we decided that was a cute name to brand our business. Rita: It'll be just for cats by Gracie and Esther. Linda: Gracie and Esther. Rita: You gotta laugh. That's the other thing. You know, we laugh a lot. I didn't laugh in the corporate world, you know, we laugh a lot, even though we see some tragic things, you know, wait, we try to end the day on some kind of humorous note. My cats make me laugh all the time. I know Linda's yours do too.   Linda: We've learned to laugh at everything. Best thing on earth is to be talking to Rita and have her come out and tear you out. Who did that? You know, as she steps in that pilot bar for whatever. So I finally told her one day, this is the epitaph that's going on your gravestone. Who did that? Rita: Cause I'm a behaviorist. My cats are not perfect. I have 19 I just don't have the fighting or any of that. They get along well sometimes. But you know, I have little jealousy issues. I sometimes have pee pee on the floor accidents or you know, whenever they have a hairball, they're not going to do it on my wood floor. They're going to do it on my big area rug. Right, or the sofa or the bed. Yeah, there was like three nights in a row. This week I slept on the sofa because my two shy cats that are a little bit, yeah. Skiddish where on my bed? On my pillow, on my side and I'm like, I can't disturb them for three nights.   Linda:… gave up the bed one night and tried to go to the couch and they were mauling her and I got this text in the middle of the night. I'm just going to sleep on the floor in my office. Rita: So I went upstairs into their bedroom. I slept on it one of the nights, but you know, 10 of them found me. Unbelievable. Linda: Everyone the key to me, you know, it sounds crazy having 19 cats read and did not go to a shelter and decide no. Her cat house with 19 cats. I can find me. The key to Rita is send her a picture of a cat with the soulful eyes, you know, looking right into the camera and then tell her the story about how it's got a dangling leg or it's unadoptable or it's going to be euthanized. And she will be in the car and go get that kid. Rita: I've got one just three minutes before we went on the air. I can't do it. I can't take it anymore. I can't. So I CC'd my mom, who runs the humane society of Lancaster, South Carolina, and I said, can you get photos? Can you, can you shop this around on your web, on your internet, on your website, on your Facebook? I can't take anymore. 20 is max? That doesn't mean I have an opening at night. An empty spot. We're perfect right now. The last two that I adopted were kittens. I didn't mean to adopt them, but of course, you know, a friend of mine found an orange kitchen and she had 12 cats and she's like, I know this kitten's yours. I know you love orange kitties. I took the kitten and he was great. He was getting along with my adult cats but were going nuts cause he was hyperactive so I purposefully went out and got this last kitten Sweetie Pie and the two of them are best buddies since she's kind of my heart cat now. I'm glad I went and got her, but she's the only cat I ever went and got on purpose and I'm done. No more. Passionistas: You're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Rita Reimers and Linda Hall. During the month of June, Rita is offering cat lovers the first month's membership to Club Cattistude for only $1. She's also donating that dollar directly to Friends of Felines Rescue Center in Defiance, Ohio. To join visit RitaReimers.com/joinclubcattitude and use the discount code HELPFFRC to donate to Friends of Felines Rescue Center. Now here's more of our interview with Rita and Linda. Why do you think people who like cats are so open to having so many cats? Rita: Well I know what happened to Linda. It would probably help us to a lot of people. You go out and you adopt cat and you think, I want this wonderful lap cat. I want this cat to love me and sit with me. And you know, maybe you don't end up with that kind of cat and then you already have, then you start thinking, well how would I want to be the only cat in a house full of people? I should get one more. Everybody says it's easier with two, I should get one more. So you go get one more. Maybe those two get along. Maybe they don't. And you still don't get your laptop. You sit on the sofa at night and you're like, okay, I got to get another one. But then what happens is the rescue or shelter, they got your pegged and they're like, Oh, that's a sucker. So then, then she had went public and I know this happened to Linda and Brian. Linda, we just took in this cat. Oh yes, we have to find out a home. This was latte, right? Do you want to tell the story? Linda: Latte had been born in the rescue. I went and started with my daughter who needed a cat fix. So she wanted to volunteer at this, at the local rescue friends of felines, and, but she was under 16 so she needed an adult to go with her. Fine. I'm just going to sit and watch the cats. Right. So of course I fall in love when we come home and my husband has decided he hates cats, which I guarantee you, he's sitting in a chair of the cat in his lap right now. Guaranteed. So it didn't stick. So now he hates cats. No cats, no cats. So then finally it's all right. One can't go get super that you keep. So I went and got super, and then it's like, you know, everybody says you need to. So okay. So we went and we got back and then we went to this fall festival and the owner was selling things to raise money for her rescue. I was just thinking of you. She says this mama cat had had these babies, her name was Java. They got all got coffee names. They were all adopted out for some reason. Latte's Parents had to move lattes, lived in a home for a few years and Oh shoot, I just don't want to put her back at the rest. We went and got the cat. But you know, I find being a former dog person, when you sit down on the couch, your dog is jumping up with you. I had three cats was looking around. Where's the cats? You know, they're laying in the, I mean I have eight cats. All I can see one laying in the window right now, but nobody's in this bedroom with me right now. So you gotta have more to have interaction all the time Rita: They don't need as much focused energy and attention as a dog. So you can have I think three cops to one dog. Yeah. Still not be expanding the amount of energy it takes to take care of a dog. I love dogs. But they just, they were require more constant energy. Passionistas: So tell us a little bit about the book, Rita. Rita: "The Lucky Cat Approach," I'm working on that one right now. And that is based on, um, what I've learned from doing some cat behavior sessions with people. Um, I remember one session I did with this couple and they, they adopted this cat and the wife really wanted to keep the cat but he kept attacking the husband. I want to go out there to do the session. This is kind of sad. He was kind of treating the cat like people used to treat dogs with the rolled of newspaper, smacking it over the head. Well the cat would get, you know, bite him or nip at him cause he was trying to play cause he was never raised right. He was raised in a shelter. He didn't know what it was like to be in a home and the guy would yell at the dog or the cat and knock it on the nose and then wonder why when he went near the cat, the cat lunged at him. Okay. So I had to teach him. Let me, let me call it up on my other computer so that I tell you exactly the acronym correctly. Mmm. It's really all this will spell lucky cat. It's about loving your cat unconditionally, just the way he is. And understanding your cat's point of view on life and his unique capabilities, which means, you know, you may want a lap cat, you might not be a lap cat cause you don't know when he went through before he got to you. Right. I have one Picasso. She was very neglected. She wasn't really abused, she was just neglected. And she'll come to me when she's scared of something I thought were strong or what have you. She'll come to me and let me Pat her. I could scratch her under the chin, behind the ear with whatever. Other than that, I can't really touch her because she is not used to that. So I have to accept that that is her capability. That's the level of interaction she can accept. And that's it. I can't turn her into a lap cat like my Simba. Um, and you've got to communicate with your cat every day. Some people don't bring a cat home though. I care. I have a cat. They put it down and that's it. They never interact with it again. They expect the cat to come to them when it needs something. That's not how it works. You've got to communicate, you've got to seek out your cat every day. Mmm. And you've gotta be kind to your cat because that's what strengthens the bond between, right. If you're treating it like that man who was, you know, smacking the cat for not acting right. Or even the water bottle. I don't really believe in the water bottle. You know, your cat is going to start being afraid of you. That's going to cause all kinds of anxiety and behavior issues. Maybe you can't even solve them because the cat becomes some petrified of people ends up in the shelter and get euthanized. Right. So, you know, you've gotta be an active participant in molding your cat's personality. You can't just have them sit under the bed and be an aloof cat. You know, you've got to actively participate in drawing them out with toys and treats sitting by him, reading to, you know, showing him you're not going to hurt him. Mmm. Consistency is really the key to making it all work and the amount of tension and time you spend with your cats is critical to keeping that bond between you. So you have a cat, you know you've been paying attention to forever or you're, your daughter has been instrumental in this cat's daily life and then she goes off to college. Well somebody who's going to have to fill in, you can't just let that cat sit there cause he'll start to revert to his natural tendencies to be aloof. It's scared of people because um, the most important thing that people need to know about cats I think is that they're both predator and prey. Unlike dogs, their constant life is spent in a hypervigilant state waiting for something to have them for dinner. Okay. They are wither hunted or being hunted. So yeah, that's why cats get so startled when there's noises, when there's new smells in the household. That's why when somebody comes to your door, most cats will take off running to hide because their first instinct is self preservation. And you have to know that and that that's really what drives us 95% of what your cats do. Oh, Not a lot of people do realize that. You know. And another thing too is like we, we went out and we domesticated dogs. We turned them into working dogs and we bred them and made different types of dogs. Cat's decided to come to us. They domesticated themselves. They started coming to our, you know, many thousands of years ago to our, our camps, you know, to take the little scraps of food to eat the mice that were attracted by our food and slowly, you know, worm their way into our hearts. Cause if you look at kitten or even a full grown cat, look at their face, a lot of it resembles a human face. Their cry sounds like a baby cry. Okay. It gets right into our hearts. But they decided to become part of our lives. We didn't go out and domesticate them. So our relationship with cuts is a lot more fragile than it is with dogs. Passionistas: That's so interesting. Um, you, um, you also have a, um, cat behavior and help advice column called "A New Cattitude,” which I love, love that name. Um, is there, are, you know, is there one or two stories, are there one or two stories that stand out to you from your years of doing that, that kind of resonate with you? Some of your favorites are some of the more challenging questions you've been asked? Rita: I think, um, biggest challenge that I, I hate to pick on people that I know, but it just happens to be Linda's daughter and son-in-law when they were engaged to be married. And Sebastian and NICU moved in together to say, go for the wedding. She had two cats and I'll did he on tartar harder to not, he's a momma's cat. He did not like Sebastian at all. He would swipe at and his Adam and they didn't know what they were going to do. So I suggested make Sebastian the one that does the feeding, make him be the one that gives the treats, you know, make him be the one that puts the food down at night and talks to him. Slowly but surely they forged a relationship and I think he can even pet tiger now. Am I right Linda? Linda: Yeah, tight tigers. A cranky old man. That's, we just call him the grumpy old man and he even scares that tax not to need a lot of vet techs. Hand ones. You just see him with Nikki. He's like such a loving, wonderful kid. And then anybody else, it's like watch your face. He's not an ego. So he's, I don't think he's in love with Sebastian, but he tolerates Sebastian and Sebastian is allowed to sleep with his wife and that is a very good outcome. It's luck. It's, they're allowed to share a bed cause he wouldn't have and he'd wedge in between them and he'd growl and his like, the wedding's off. Tiger doesn't like me. Rita: That's an important factor though. I mean if your pets don't like your spouse, that's bad. Really bad. I think another one is I went to this behavior session here in Charlotte and they have three cats each living in a separate room and I said to them, How long have you been been in this situation? You know, two or three years. You can't live like that, but they were hesitant to do the introduction too because of course it looks like what children, they're not going to love each other at first. A few merge a husband and wife like a Brady Bunch, and you merge human children. There's going to be a resistance. Just like with cats. What are you going to do separate them? Your kids live on this side of the house and live on the side of the house. When they move out, we can get back together. There's ways to work through the painful process. Most often the posturing and the noise you hear when you're introducing cats to each other or even to a dog, it's noise, you know? Very seldom do you really see physical fighting and blood. That's very rare, but people, you know, it hurts them to see that. So they'd rather live with their cats all separated forever or they'd go through that pain. Linda: 90% of the time it's just bark. Like kids fighting with each other. Rita: Yeah, right, exactly. Even my cat that love each other, pinky and booboo, brother, sister love each other. Booboo gets a wild hair and he'll just decide to antagonize his sister and she'll yell at him and know she's like, what's going on in the background? Just pink and verbose. I don't even get up anymore. I think me teaching people that, that's just, you know, it's a temporary painful hatch they have to go through and it's much worse for them than it is for the cats. The cats, they either love each other or they learn to be respectful, be distinct from each other. Passionistas: Have you found a new behavioral issues arising during this time of COVID 19 and if you had tips for people about how to deal with the togetherness? Rita: Yeah. You know, at first, if you don't work at home and you're at home, you're interrupting your cats sleeping period. Usually they're sleeping during the day. They're like, why are you here? Get out of my, get off my sofa. I want to slip there. You know? Then after a while they're used to being there. Mmm. Then you're going to go back to work and they're going to go through separation anxiety. They're like, why aren't you there? I used to be on there at my Beck and call. I could lie on you whenever I want. Um, so I always suggest that people do what I'm doing right now. I shut myself in my office. There's no cats in here. Let them have some time. Apart from you, let them have their routine. You know, they're looking at, they're making a new routine. Cats don't like change. You disrupted their routine by being at home. Now you have to make a new routine, which I think includes having them be on their own and having you be in a separate room or go outside for a walk or do something to be apart from them. Um, so I noticed that I have a cat that's very attached to me. Smoochy I've had her since she was four weeks. She's three legged. She's always been extremely attached to me, but it's getting worse. Mmm. She's practically under my rear end when I sleep on it. When I sit on the sofa, I sleep all the stuff I want. I sit on the sofa and she started like lunging and parking at the other cats when they come near me. So I have to consciously make sure I get up here for a few hours every day. And that seems to be, make her relax a little bit, not be quite so anxious that she's got to be right up against me every moment of the day. Um, and the other thing I think that's important is cultivating this routine around, um, what I call the four PEGS of cat behavior. There's four basic behaviors that cats do every day to ensure their survival. One of them is they hunt for Prey. That's the P. We may make that by playing with them. So really take a wild type toy or something. You can make them chase around, mimic that they're hunting, let them catch it and then feed them. That's the E in the pigs is they eat, they'll eat their dinner or breakfast and then right away count's instinct is to groom and they do this cause out of nature. They want to get all the particles of remnants of their kill off of them so that their predators cap find them. Yeah, fine. Aren't attracted by the smell of the prey. And so they won't become someone's dinner. And then lastly they're going to go to sleep. That's pegs. So I always suggest people, even when they're home, practice those morning and night, because in the morning you're going to do play, eat, groom, sleep. You're going to go off to work, so sleeping or you're going to be up in your office or what have you. And then at night I'm going to do it again. So I always do it really, you know, maybe an hour or so before I want to go to bed. I do play, eat grim sleep, so they're ready to sleep when I'm ready to sleep. And that way they won't tend to wake you up at three o'clock in the morning when they have you captive and they want to expend that energy. You've already done that by doing PEGS and whatever other antics you might do with them during the middle of the day. Passionistas: Is this a good time for people to adopt a cat as far as you're concerned? Rita: I would say so. Um, because you're home, you're able to bond with the cat, especially if you've got introductions to do with other cats or dogs. Um, or children in the household. Um, I know some facilities they are doing video pre adoption screening. Um, so when you go to the shelter or rescue, you know, you get to see the cat that you've been talking about seeing on the video or what have you. Cause too, they're trying to cut down on their, you know, exposure to people as well. So it's not like you can go and walk through the shelters or rescues like you could before I know the shelter, her leg, Castro hasn't even been open. The rescues are, um, I know FFRC they're doing some of that, Linda, it's not what Jack had. Linda: I just talked to Jackie yesterday and she said it's, it's exhausting. This woman, she's don't, she's just given her life to, that's in her own way and has built this rescue onto her home and it keeps building and she's all about the cats. She's up early, she's up late. Well they have a webcam. So for one thing people can watch a cat and be like, Oh, I love that cat. But you know, often you, you decide, Oh this cat and then you get there and the cats really aloof and not your cat. So she's taking appointments and she's got thumpers room that she can let the cats and people interact one at a time and then they leave and they scrub everything down and disinfect it and then they take the next one. And so it's exhasuting , but it's kitten season and you know, they're getting full, they need help. Rita: So, and I know she's lost a lot of volunteers due to COVID. And the fear of growing, this is the backbone of what runs our rescues. So it's quite a detail deal, but they're making it work. Well you talked to a lot of places need fosters now because it's getting season. So they need people to hold onto the cats and socialize them. Maybe not adopt them, but, um, they need places to put all these kids. That's always a need. But I think it's more so now. Passionistas: So what's the most rewarding part of what you do? Rita: I am so blessed that I get to make money doing what I love. Um, and at night when I sit down to unwind, watch TV, I have all this unconditional love around me and I have so many people that support me. I didn't know were in my corner. Um, like I won't say her name, but she knows who she is, who hooked me up with my PR firm and my, my manager who believes in what I do so much. He's working pro bono right now and he's a big name. Um, you have support sometimes where you don't even know you have it. And once I started really being open about how many cats, what I do, it's, I'm just amazed. People that I knew from high school. I'm getting support from, I'm working with, um, somebody now who makes jewelry and I knew her in high school and her brother was actually in a Richard Simmons video. I grew up with him too. So everything converging it together. She's selling the jewelry to support animal rescue. She's a big animal rescue person. So we're going to write an article about her. So it's like people from all the aspects of my life are coming back into my life. It's amazing to me how many people care about animals. Linda: Well, I absolutely can't imagine read it. If there was a number out there somewhere of cats that have not gone to a shelter because of you. I mean, I'm not talking about the 19 you've rescued that, that alone. Well, plus, I mean the cats have come and gone in your life, but how many times somebody has just been, this is it. I can't do it anymore. And I'm going to, and then you help them find a solution and that cat gets to stay in the home. That's money. Rita: And one of our Richard Simmons friends, Wendy a cat, came up to her door. She'd never had a cat before, largely because I was able to answer questions from her. She kept this cat smokey Simone who passed away recently. She was heartbroken, but I helped her, you know, just, just answering a few questions and encouraging her that, you know, cats need love just like dogs do. It's just in a different way. Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life? Rita: I think loving what you do for a living. I'm one of those people that whatever I do for a living, it kind of becomes my life. When I was in information technology, it was a big, huge part of my life. Um, uh, it's kind of my identity. Uh, to me it works. You know, I have to be happy in my work and have it be fulfilling and fit in with my lifestyle. Yeah. Linda: If you can feel good about what you're doing, which isn't not, I mean like all jobs are necessary. I'm going to get really upset if everybody leaves burger King because I crave a Whopper every once in a while. This is rewarding stuff. But when you have put yourself, you know, working for Richard, I was helping people and support them and getting a healthy lifestyle and answering their questions and that was just, that was a high. And when he was here I was like, I don't know that I can go just work behind a desk and answer phones. I know I'm helping someone, but this was such an onboard and now here I am in this, you know, cat versus weight loss, but still a passion and helping people. That's huge. And if you know that your life has mattered and you help people, that's yeah, that's worth a lot more than money or anything. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to our interview with Rita Ramers and Linda Hall. During the month of June, Rita is offering cat lovers the first month membership to Club Cattitude for only $1. She's also donating that dollar directly to Friends of Felines Rescue Center in Defiance, Ohio. To join, visit RitaReimers.com/joinclubcatittude and use the discount code HELPFFRC to donate to the Friends of Felines Rescue Center. Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase. 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Richard Fletcher is an up-beat, down to earth coach, who helps people make more money without spending a lot of money. When Richard claims to make his clients richer, he isn’t joking or talking about small sums here and there. It’s not unusual for Richard’s clients to make between 10K and 20K in a couple of weeks, by implementing Richard’s tailored plans and advice. However, Richard’s favorite success story is the wedding photographer that was able to up their prices from £1500 to £15000 within one day – and get clients happy to pay a premium for their services.

When Richard first met Brittni he had no idea she had been featured in over 300 adult films and left the industry after becoming a Christian. Brittni knew he would need to know about her past if they were to have an honest relationship but was afraid of his response. Many people struggle coming to terms with their partners' past, but this was on a different level than most. This is the incredible story of two very brave individuals who worked through their past and are living to the fullest today. Over 50,000 people have watched our This Is Me TV episode featuring the story of Brittni and Richard. We follow up with them to see how their journey has continued. Related Links and Resources: XXX Church

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.   —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group”. Their name is actually “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band”.   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with “Long Tall Sally”, and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we’ve seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to “The Girl Can’t Help It”, and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we’re going to look in more detail at Little Richard’s career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, “Keep A Knockin'”] Richard’s immediate follow-up to “Long Tall Sally” was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell — “Rip it Up” backed with “Ready Teddy”. These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn’t have quite the same power as RIchard’s first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn’t sound like anything else out there, “Rip it Up” and “Ready Teddy” were both much closer to the typical songs of the time — the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn’t make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics — we’ve discussed “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “She’s Got It” in the episode on “Twenty Flight Rock”, but there was also “Jenny Jenny”, “Send Me Some Lovin'”, and possibly the greatest of them all, “Lucille”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Lucille”] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording — or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. “Keep A Knockin'” had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called “A Bunch of Blues”, written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy’s band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band, “A Bunch of Blues”] That itself, though, may derive from another song, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole in It”, which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group” have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it”, the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for “A Bunch of Blues” is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and “Georgia Tom”, who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He’s someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley”. But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like “Meat Balls” and “Banana in Your Fruit Basket”. As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it’s in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” turning into the song that would later be known as “Keep A Knockin'”. Tampa Red’s version was titled “You Can’t Come In”, and seems to have been the origin not only of “Keep A Knockin'” but also of the Lead Belly song “Midnight Special” — you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, “You Can’t Come In”] The version by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band wasn’t the first recording to combine the “Keep a Knockin'” lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody — the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James “Boodle It” Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody — Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red’s version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it’s not surprising that “You Can’t Come in” was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown — who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: “Keep A Knockin'”] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan’s version. Jordan was, of course, Richard’s single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Keep A Knockin'”] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew’s take on the idea. “I Hear You Knockin'” only bears a slight melodic resemblance to “Keep A Knockin'”, but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard’s favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record “Keep A Knockin'” in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that’s uniquely Little Richard — something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, “Keep A Knockin'”] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan’s version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Keep A Knockin'”, “drinking gin” verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped — there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn’t expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard’s vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song — the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the “whoo” after the first “keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in” after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, it remains one of Little Richard’s greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, “Ooh! My Soul!”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] That session also produced a single for Richard’s chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name “Pretty Boy”: [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, “Bip Bop Bip”] “Pretty Boy” would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He’s now probably best known for writing “Chain of Fools” for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard’s last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about… well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as “the female Elvis Presley”: [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, “He Will Come Back To Me”] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn’t continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent’s songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent’s absence. O’Keefe isn’t someone we’re going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he’s something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of — his biggest hit, from 1958, “Wild One”, which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Wild One”] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia — low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn’t believe him — until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on — I’ve seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn’t solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard’s real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard’s contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying — according to Marascalco — to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like “Good Golly Miss Molly” were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release — but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle — he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren’t sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard’s sexuality and his religion continued to torment him — he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet — but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent’s work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn’t allowed to perform on stage — so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour — later on, he would sing “Be Bop A Lula” from offstage as well. Vincent wasn’t the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn’t make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he’d agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard’s first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing “Peace in the Valley” and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn’t start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour — an audience that wanted “Rip it Up” and “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” wasn’t going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn’t know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about — he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn’t stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of “Twistin’ the Night Away” that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he’d not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he’d joined his old group to record Fats Domino’s “I’m In Love Again”, for a single that didn’t get released until December 1962. The single was released as by “the World Famous Upsetters”, but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, “I’m In Love Again”] So Richard’s willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke’s performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into “Long Tall Sally”. The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he’d pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing “Tutti Frutti”. The tour was successful enough, and Richard’s performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard’s own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn’t interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn’t record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, “Well Alright”, but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn’t do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he’d done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn’t, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair — but because he’s Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.   —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group”. Their name is actually “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band”.   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with “Long Tall Sally”, and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we’ve seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to “The Girl Can’t Help It”, and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we’re going to look in more detail at Little Richard’s career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, “Keep A Knockin'”] Richard’s immediate follow-up to “Long Tall Sally” was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell — “Rip it Up” backed with “Ready Teddy”. These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn’t have quite the same power as RIchard’s first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn’t sound like anything else out there, “Rip it Up” and “Ready Teddy” were both much closer to the typical songs of the time — the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn’t make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics — we’ve discussed “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “She’s Got It” in the episode on “Twenty Flight Rock”, but there was also “Jenny Jenny”, “Send Me Some Lovin'”, and possibly the greatest of them all, “Lucille”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Lucille”] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording — or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. “Keep A Knockin'” had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called “A Bunch of Blues”, written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy’s band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band, “A Bunch of Blues”] That itself, though, may derive from another song, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole in It”, which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group” have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it”, the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for “A Bunch of Blues” is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and “Georgia Tom”, who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He’s someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley”. But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like “Meat Balls” and “Banana in Your Fruit Basket”. As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it’s in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” turning into the song that would later be known as “Keep A Knockin'”. Tampa Red’s version was titled “You Can’t Come In”, and seems to have been the origin not only of “Keep A Knockin'” but also of the Lead Belly song “Midnight Special” — you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, “You Can’t Come In”] The version by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band wasn’t the first recording to combine the “Keep a Knockin'” lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody — the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James “Boodle It” Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody — Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red’s version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it’s not surprising that “You Can’t Come in” was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown — who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: “Keep A Knockin'”] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan’s version. Jordan was, of course, Richard’s single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Keep A Knockin'”] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew’s take on the idea. “I Hear You Knockin'” only bears a slight melodic resemblance to “Keep A Knockin'”, but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard’s favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record “Keep A Knockin'” in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that’s uniquely Little Richard — something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, “Keep A Knockin'”] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan’s version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Keep A Knockin'”, “drinking gin” verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped — there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn’t expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard’s vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song — the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the “whoo” after the first “keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in” after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, it remains one of Little Richard’s greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, “Ooh! My Soul!”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] That session also produced a single for Richard’s chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name “Pretty Boy”: [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, “Bip Bop Bip”] “Pretty Boy” would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He’s now probably best known for writing “Chain of Fools” for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard’s last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about… well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as “the female Elvis Presley”: [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, “He Will Come Back To Me”] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn’t continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent’s songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent’s absence. O’Keefe isn’t someone we’re going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he’s something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of — his biggest hit, from 1958, “Wild One”, which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Wild One”] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia — low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn’t believe him — until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on — I’ve seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn’t solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard’s real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard’s contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying — according to Marascalco — to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like “Good Golly Miss Molly” were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release — but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle — he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren’t sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard’s sexuality and his religion continued to torment him — he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet — but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent’s work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn’t allowed to perform on stage — so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour — later on, he would sing “Be Bop A Lula” from offstage as well. Vincent wasn’t the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn’t make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he’d agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard’s first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing “Peace in the Valley” and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn’t start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour — an audience that wanted “Rip it Up” and “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” wasn’t going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn’t know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about — he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn’t stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of “Twistin’ the Night Away” that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he’d not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he’d joined his old group to record Fats Domino’s “I’m In Love Again”, for a single that didn’t get released until December 1962. The single was released as by “the World Famous Upsetters”, but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, “I’m In Love Again”] So Richard’s willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke’s performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into “Long Tall Sally”. The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he’d pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing “Tutti Frutti”. The tour was successful enough, and Richard’s performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard’s own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn’t interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn’t record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, “Well Alright”, but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn’t do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he’d done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn’t, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair — but because he’s Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Keep A Knockin'" by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer's faith and sexuality. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "At the Hop" by Danny and the Juniors.   ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard's autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though -- it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group". Their name is actually "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band".   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with "Long Tall Sally", and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we've seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to "The Girl Can't Help It", and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we're going to look in more detail at Little Richard's career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, "Keep A Knockin'"] Richard's immediate follow-up to "Long Tall Sally" was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell -- "Rip it Up" backed with "Ready Teddy". These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn't have quite the same power as RIchard's first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn't sound like anything else out there, "Rip it Up" and "Ready Teddy" were both much closer to the typical songs of the time -- the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn't make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics -- we've discussed "The Girl Can't Help It" and "She's Got It" in the episode on "Twenty Flight Rock", but there was also "Jenny Jenny", "Send Me Some Lovin'", and possibly the greatest of them all, "Lucille": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Lucille"] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording -- or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. "Keep A Knockin'" had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called "A Bunch of Blues", written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy's band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues Band, "A Bunch of Blues"] That itself, though, may derive from another song, "My Bucket's Got A Hole in It", which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group" have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it", the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for "A Bunch of Blues" is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it" would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It"] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and "Georgia Tom", who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He's someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "Peace in the Valley". But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like "Meat Balls" and "Banana in Your Fruit Basket". As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it's in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it" turning into the song that would later be known as "Keep A Knockin'". Tampa Red's version was titled "You Can't Come In", and seems to have been the origin not only of "Keep A Knockin'" but also of the Lead Belly song "Midnight Special" -- you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band, "You Can't Come In"] The version by Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band wasn't the first recording to combine the "Keep a Knockin'" lyrics with the "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" melody -- the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James "Boodle It" Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody -- Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red's version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it's not surprising that "You Can't Come in" was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown -- who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: "Keep A Knockin'"] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan's version. Jordan was, of course, Richard's single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Keep A Knockin'"] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew's take on the idea. "I Hear You Knockin'" only bears a slight melodic resemblance to "Keep A Knockin'", but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "I Hear You Knockin'"] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard's favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record "Keep A Knockin'" in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that's uniquely Little Richard -- something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, "Keep A Knockin'"] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan's version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Keep A Knockin'", "drinking gin" verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped -- there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn't expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard's vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song -- the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the "whoo" after the first "keep a knockin' but you can't come in" after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, it remains one of Little Richard's greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, "Ooh! My Soul!": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Ooh! My Soul!"] That session also produced a single for Richard's chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name "Pretty Boy": [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, "Bip Bop Bip"] "Pretty Boy" would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He's now probably best known for writing "Chain of Fools" for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard's last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about... well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as "the female Elvis Presley": [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, "He Will Come Back To Me"] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn't continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O'Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent's songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent's absence. O'Keefe isn't someone we're going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he's something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of -- his biggest hit, from 1958, "Wild One", which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O'Keefe, "Wild One"] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia -- low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn't believe him -- until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on -- I've seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn't solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard's real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard's contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying -- according to Marascalco -- to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like "Good Golly Miss Molly" were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release -- but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle -- he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren't sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard's sexuality and his religion continued to torment him -- he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet -- but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent's work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn't allowed to perform on stage -- so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour -- later on, he would sing "Be Bop A Lula" from offstage as well. Vincent wasn't the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn't make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he'd agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard's first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing "Peace in the Valley" and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn't start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour -- an audience that wanted "Rip it Up" and "Long Tall Sally" and "Tutti Frutti" wasn't going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn't know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about -- he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn't stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of "Twistin' the Night Away" that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he'd not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he'd joined his old group to record Fats Domino's "I'm In Love Again", for a single that didn't get released until December 1962. The single was released as by "the World Famous Upsetters", but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, "I'm In Love Again"] So Richard's willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke's performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into "Long Tall Sally". The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he'd pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing "Tutti Frutti". The tour was successful enough, and Richard's performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard's own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn't interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn't record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, "Well Alright", but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, "Bama Lama Bama Loo": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Bama Lama Bama Loo"] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn't do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he'd done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn't, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair -- but because he's Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Jason Hartman talks with Richard Rahn, Advisor to former President George HW Bush and Chief Economist of US Chamber of Commerce for Ronald Reagan, about his thoughts on digital currencies and whether they will ever full grab hold in the United States with the power of the government. They also discuss Richard's time in politics and why he left the White House. Key Takeaways: [1:00] When Richard started being interested in what would eventually become cryptocurrency [8:23] The government could target any one of us because most people are committing crimes they don't even know about. But going after encrypted peer-to-peer transactions would be impossible [12:16] Why does Richard think Bitcoin won't be the answer? [13:29] Richard's time in the Reagan and Bush administration Website: www.IGEG.org

Jason Hartman and Adam start off today's show discussing the impact of Dodd-Frank on the US economy. The massive bill that was quickly pushed through in response to the Great Recession is still being sussed out, and it's possible some parts will never be fully enacted. Then Jason talks with Richard Rahn, Advisor to former President George HW Bush and Chief Economist of US Chamber of Commerce for Ronald Reagan, about his thoughts on digital currencies and whether they will ever full grab hold in the United States with the power of the government. They also discuss Richard's time in politics and why he left the White House. Key Takeaways: [6:50] The world of fakeness [13:05] Dodd-Frank gave the government the ability to audit loans being given to companies, but the volume of loans makes that virtually impossible to reliably do [16:12] Credit default swaps and the Great Recession [18:57] Property profile of a home in Merrillville, IN Richard Rahn Interview: [24:01] When Richard started being interested in what would eventually become cryptocurrency [31:24] The government could target any one of us because most people are committing crimes they don't even know about. But going after encrypted peer-to-peer transactions would be impossible [35:17] Why does Richard think Bitcoin won't be the answer? [36:30] Richard's time in the Reagan and Bush administration Website: www.JasonHartmanLive.com www.IGEG.org

This is the Crime Story Podcast with Kary Antholis where we have conversations about how and why narratives of crime and justice are told. Today's podcast is a conversation with Steve Zaillian. Steve won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for Schindler's List and won a Directors Guild Award for his miniseries The Night Of. The conversation was recorded as part of a series of classes that I taught at The University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Each week I would host an artist for a discussion that would help us better understand the values and aims of storytellers in the world of crime and justice.  I got to know Steve working as the HBO executive overseeing The Night Of.  Steve served as Showrunner, Executive Producer, Director and co-writer of that series. My experience working with him on The Night Of was a significant inspiration in creating crimestory.com and this podcast.  And with all that said, here is my conversation with Steve Zaillian. Kary:Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Steve Zaillian.  Let's start by asking you to tell us where you're from, and what were some of the significant steps in your path to becoming a filmmaker? Steve  Zaillian: I was raised in the San Fernando Valley basically. I went to college up in Northern California at Sonoma State then San Francisco State. That's really where I started to get interested in film. I always liked photography, but I was considering things like architecture, which I also liked.  I fell into some art department classes that were teaching history of film. I had never seen any of these films, most of them were foreign films. It kind of opened my eyes to something that I knew nothing about, and that's really where I started to think, “Well, maybe there's something for me to do in this world.” Steve  Zaillian:Once I got out of school, the first jobs I got was as an assistant editor, so I started editing, and I thought, “I can do this for the rest of my life. I really like it.” And then the writing came. Maybe when I was 26 or 27 I started writing really just to write something that me and my friends could try to make, and then sold one of them. It wasn't the first one, but I sold one of them, and got another job, and got another job, and that was it. Kary:Can you tell us some of the writers, thinkers, artists and/or experiences that have had profound impact on you, especially in your youth in terms of your aesthetics, and your world view and your values as an artist and as a person? Steve  Zaillian:As a kid, I can't really think of anything. I was just a normal kid who liked baseball. I do remember going to a film that my father took me to that stayed with me unlike a lot of the other films that I chose to go see, and that was In Cold Blood, and I was probably about 13. That had a profound effect on me. Kary:We started this class watching In Cold Blood. Steve  Zaillian:Really? Well, there you go. It's a perfect bookend. Kary:Truth be told, the idea for this class came out of my working with Steve on The Night Of, and the impact that In Cold Blood had on me as a watershed moment of how a crime film could be not who done it but actually have the elements of art, of novels. Can you articulate why that film had an impact on you? Steve  Zaillian:I don't think it did consciously. I know I didn't see it and start thinking about what they were doing in that film. I think what I took from it in later years, and maybe it kind of seeped into me, was that at times it felt like a documentary. At other times it felt like poetry. At other times it felt like stark horrible realism. That combination I think had an effect on me. The great Conrad Hall shot that, and I saw he's got a chair here on the plaque. When I actually directed my first film he shot it. I couldn't believe he agreed to do it, but the fact that this one film that he had shot back in the '60s, which had such a big effect on me now we were working together, is amazing. Kary:Were there other novels, works of art, things as you started to study Sonoma that impacted you? Steve  Zaillian:Yeah. Again, the first classes I took were film history classes, and the films I responded to the most were neo-realist films like Bicycle Thieves, and the French New Wave films, and then a little bit later in the '70s it was the '70s films. That was the trajectory for me. I actually see similarities in all those things. I don't think I consciously try to make a film like that, but I think that it did have a big influence on me, all those. I mean, 400 Blows — I think I've seen more than any other film. Kary:What was it about that film that captivated you? Steve  Zaillian:I think it was the same thing. It was just realism and a story that was that powerful about the emotions of a kid. I don't think I'd ever seen anybody make a film like that before. I think probably nobody had where that much care went into the portrayal of a kid who's, what, 10 or 12-years-old or something, and it was just gorgeous. Kary:You've had the opportunity to work with some of our great directors and producers. Tell us about collaborating as a writer with a director or a producer and some of the experiences that you've had that have affected you as an artist, as a writer and as a director. Steve  Zaillian:I've been really lucky. I've worked with some of the greatest directors and some not as great, but I would say what all the great ones have in common is that they do consider a script as something that's not just a blueprint. They are responding to it the way any reader should, and then bringing themselves in some kind of point view on a technique to making that script as good as it can be. I worked on Schindler's List for a while. Scorsese was the first director who was on it, and we worked together for a while, and then Steven got involved in it. Steve  Zaillian:I wasn't there much when they were shooting it, but when I saw it I was stunned that he was looking at scenes… I had seen these scenes in my head, and he was seeing them in a different way, but it was a really interesting way. The thing that I felt probably most profoundly on that film from a directorial standpoint was that he had a visual approach to every scene. As a writer, you know what the key line is in a scene, and you know everything else is just trying to get into and out of that line. You know what the point of the scene is. Some directors don't. It's just a scene. They're not quite sure where the focus is. He was sure where the focus was and also could find a visual way of telling that scene I think in a way that highlighted that. Kary:I was fascinated to learn in the middle of our working relationship that you started as a film editor. It illuminated for me how you write. Can you talk a little bit about how starting as a film editor impacted the way that you write and the way that you direct? Steve  Zaillian:Yeah, I guess. I think just learning how to do it opened up a way of seeing things. I worked on horrible films, so if you look them up, don't be shocked. They were bad, but the bad ones still have to be edited, and they still have the same problems as good films. I did learn how to put a scene together. I think from a writing standpoint I learned that these films that I was editing I could basically throw away the first 10 or 15 minutes of it and start later because people have a tendency to set things up. Steve  Zaillian:If you look at The Night Of, there were maybe five pages before he gets in that cab and the plot starts. There was some talk — and we had this conversation at one point — that maybe it should start with him in the cab pulling over. It's a great idea. I didn't quite have the nerve to do that, but that instinct was right, and that's something that I think I learned editing these films and something that I definitely do in my writing. Kary:Tell us about making the transition to directing in Searching for Bobby Fischer, and why did you want to do it, and then why have you directed so infrequently over the 25 intervening years? Steve  Zaillian:I look back on that and think, “Why did I do that?” Bobby Fischer came along at a time when my kids — one of them — was eight. Well, I guess when I started writing it he was probably seven, and the other one was three and a half. I was in that world. Not the world of chess but in the world of parenting, which is really what that film is about. I responded to the material, wrote the script, and really felt that I knew it better than somebody else could personally and because I had written the script. Scott Rudin was the producer, and he said sure, and the studio said okay, and so I did it. Steve  Zaillian:But I was probably bringing to it a lot of the things that we talked about earlier about these other films that I had seen – certainly 400 Blows – to the point that I was casting a kid who had never acted before. In fact, all the kids had not acted before and trying to approach it in a kind of … To me, it's a documentary and at the same time, as Conrad would say, a kind of magic realism. That's how he approached photography too, which was basically, “Okay, it's artificial. There's a script that's been written, and you've hired these people, and there's a crew standing around, but you're trying to make it look real.” Steve  Zaillian:With him just with his photography, “Okay, I have a light in this room, and it's going to seem like that light is illuminating this room, but it's not.” There's all these other lights around that you can't see. We were from a story standpoint, and a lighting standpoint, and a camera standpoint we were completely in sync. I think they work together in that film. Kary:After we watched In Cold Blood, we talked a bit about that fantastic scene where Robert Blake's character is telling the story of his relationship with his father, and there's rain coming down on the glass. The shadows of the glass are forming kind of tears on his face, and that is the classic example of magic realism. Steve  Zaillian:Yeah, definitely. We have a shot. Conrad did a shot like that in Bobby Fischer where it's not coming down the face, but it's there. It's coming down the walls of the room. Kary:Before we zero in on The Night Of, in the course of your career the film business and screen writing for the film business has changed dramatically. Can you just give us a sense of where it is today, how you as a veteran screenwriter see the world of film and television, and how that's evolved since your early days as a screenwriter? Steve  Zaillian:I don't know what the numbers are, but let's say a studio is making, I don't know, 50 films back in the '60s and '70s a year. Now they're making three. That's the stark reality. Luckily, television has taken over. I think that this is a natural progression. I think cable came into being because network got stale. There was this new form, which was cable television, and then as the film businesses waned, television has taken over. From a writing standpoint I'm sure. Again, I haven't seen the numbers, but I'm sure there are more writers working today than there were back in the glory days of film. Kary:Before the class started I showed a one minute trailer of Criminal Justice, the BBC miniseries, which gave folks a sense of some of the elements that were borrowed from that, but can you give us a brief history of how the show came to be made? Steve  Zaillian:Well, the brief history is that Jane Tranter sent me Criminal Justice. I think it was four parts, maybe five parts, with this idea of doing an American version of it. I liked it a lot. I was at the beginning a little bit intimidated because I think it's always better to remake something that's bad rather than something that's pretty good. Peter Moffat had written it, and he's a good writer. But when we started in earnest, I knew I couldn't write them all. It takes me a year to write a feature script, so I talked to Richard Price who I had never worked with before but had always admired. Kary:Have you ever worked with another writer before? Steve  Zaillian:No, I had worked with friends before but not like a collaboration like this became. Richard — he's a great writer. We really went into it innocently, meaning you have to make a pilot. Really, it's like you just have to make a short movie. It's 60 minutes. If it doesn't work, hopefully you had a good time making it and so on. Also, all the glory really comes from making the pilot whether you're a writer or a director. The idea of either one of us doing the whole thing didn't really enter our minds, but he wrote the pilot, and I directed the pilot, and then we started talking about, “Okay, now what?” He said, “Well, I'll do another one, but that's it.” Steve  Zaillian:It was kind of insidious. He got into it, and I got into it. He ended up doing them all, and then when I started directing them, the same exact thing happened. I said, “I'll do the first one. Well, maybe I'll do the second one. Well, I'll do the third one, and then all the characters will be established, and somebody else can take over.” Kary:We hired a couple of directors. They drifted away. Steve  Zaillian:I think it was the same feeling that I had with Bobby Fischer. Before the thing is written and I'm really immersed in it, whether it's writing or directing, I keep thinking somebody else can do a better job with this, and then there's a tipping point where I think, “Well, wait a minute, I'm so deep into this now. I think actually I can probably do a better job.” It's just a matter of convincing yourself honestly. Kary:This was intensely researched, and a lot of choices had to be made in adapting it for an American audience to an American milieu. How did you come to settle on setting it in New York, and what were the key choices made? And then tell us a bit about the kinds of research that you did in diving into it. Steve  Zaillian:Before Richard was involved in it, and there was a point where I was perhaps going to write the pilot, I imagined it in L.A. because that's what I know. I didn't know New York that well. When Richard got involved, he won't write about anything else. He writes about New York. That's his thing. In terms of the character, which became such a huge choice but at the time didn't seem like it, was to make this main character a Pakistani American because that's what he would be. If you're a cab driver in New York, you're an immigrant or the son of an immigrant. Kary:Just for purposes of those who haven't seen the original film, the kid was the son of a London cab driver, so most cab drivers in the UK are Caucasian, and when they transplanted it to New York, the question was asked, “Well, who would a cab driver be?” Who would you want to get? Steve  Zaillian:That was such a simple decision in one regard. We're just trying to be real, and then it would start to inform other scenes, and then we started getting into the family, and into the community, and into all these other aspects of it, but I think that when you start with the reality of it and let it grow from there it's a lot better than trying to impose some kind of point of view or some kind of an issue that you want to deal with. We weren't setting out to deal with any issues, and actually ended up doing that. Steve  Zaillian:That pretty much was the same for every aspect of the show. When you think about the rather lengthy scenes and descriptions of what he goes through in the police station, in the tombs and finally at Rikers, that was just our attempt to show what we had seen in these places, and that was it. Commercial for CrimesStory.com   Kary:Tell us a bit about the cat. The eczema that the John Stone character has is a slight remnant from the British miniseries, but you really ran with it. I think one of the magical additions that you brought to this was his relationship with the cat. Steve  Zaillian:They're very similar, and they're also similar to what we were talking about in terms of letting something lead you to another place. In the case of the eczema, yes, he had eczema in the British show. They didn't do a lot with it, but he had it. We started researching it, and writing scenes and going to doctors. Again, it felt as if it was a personality thing, something that was about his character in the way he would behave, and then there came a point where we realized that it could actually be a plot point. It had some place to go, and that's when it flares up at the worst time, which is the night before gives a summation,  Steve  Zaillian:Without that scene, I think they would just be filigree, but now it's figuring into the plot. The cat was the same way. The reason that there's a cat in the story was in order … Let's see. What was it? She needed to have a cat because he needed to be allergic to something because we knew we wanted him to have an inhaler, and that that inhaler was going to figure into the plot later on, so that's why the cat was there. And then we realized, “Well, what happens to the cat?” She's dead. What happens to the cat? And then one thing leads to another. Stone takes it. How's that going to work? Because he's allergic to cats. Kary:I believe you once told me that you had never seen an episode of a television crime drama. Is that true? Kary:You missed out, man. We just spent 15 weeks watching them. Steve  Zaillian:I was watching TV – I think it was last night or the night before –  and I saw Richard Belzer, and I thought, “Oh, is this Homicide? I wouldn't mind watching Homicide because that's a good show. I don't think I've seen it, but I hear it's great.” It was not Homicide. Kary:He actually plays the same character that he played in Homicide In the Law & Order SVU he plays … They share universes.  Steve  Zaillian:Anyway, I saw Law & Order, and I thought, “Okay, I don't want to see it.” I don't know why. It's one of those things that if you're doing something, you don't really want to be influenced by anything else. You don't want study what other people have done on that subject. I don't anyway. I kind of want to hit it fresh. Kary:One of the things that struck me in working on it with you was how much it echoed the films of Sidney Lumet and a lot of those films from the '70s that you mentioned. Talk a little bit about how those influenced your aesthetic in this. Steve  Zaillian:I was knocked out by French Connection. I don't think I saw it when it came out. I think I saw it a little bit later, and then Serpico I'm not sure if that came out before or after, but I was working at a movie theater that was showing Serpico. Back in those days it showed the same movie for six months, so the whole time I worked there they only showed Serpico, so I saw it hundreds of times. That was a college class. That was a very good class. Steve  Zaillian:I think a lot of the style of Lumet and Friedkin in those … Prince of the City. I love all of those films. How does it make into my films? I don't know. I don't think it really has before this. It wasn't conscious, “Let's do a '70s film,” but I think that when you see something and you like it, you like it for the same reasons.Kary:I found that when visiting the set, and you were shooting in the old post office on Eight Avenue in New York, and those windows that half a window takes up a room, and you've got half of the arc of the window. It reminded me of some of those rooms in Boston in The Verdict. Steve  Zaillian:Those were there. I actually didn't care for that. For that reason, I thought, “Oh, people are going to think we built this,” and I based it on The Verdict. We didn't. It was there. If you can imagine this place, the squad room and the precinct. It was a room that we built within a post office sorting building that was three or four square blocks in Manhattan, so it was huge, and you would have to walk through this dark creepy building to get to our set. It would take a long time to get there. Steve  Zaillian:I thought the whole building looked like Sidney Lumet, you know, the hallways and everything, and then Patrizia von Brandenstein who built that set I think she was a big fan too.  Just the set dressing I think in that place was amazing. Kary:I should give a bit of context before I ask the next question. James Gandolfini, as many of you know, played the role of John Stone in the pilot as many of you know. He passed away after it was completed.  And then after a period of time, you and Richard came back to us and expressed your continued interest in the show, and then we ordered it. And then you set out to make the remainder of the series, as essentially, a seven and a half hour movie.  How did you go about approaching that? Steve  Zaillian:Well, again, as I described before, it wasn't intentional to do them all. It really was one foot after the other. The pilot was its own thing. It felt like its own thing because we weren't sure if it would be picked up, so it kind of had to work on its own. The rest of it I didn't really feel like I was making seven more episodes. I felt like I was making a long film, and this was just day 56 of a long film. I didn't really break it down. The episodes that you see here are not the way they were in the scripts. The scripts were timed out differently. As far as I was concerned, it was just going to work every day. At a certain point once I did make the decision to stay, and you guys said, “Okay, you can do that,” then it really was a job. It was my career basically for nine months of shooting. Kary:Tell us about crewing up and your relationship with the various department heads on the film. Steve  Zaillian:Well, they're all different I guess, but I'll talk about the cinematography. We actually had three different cinematographers. Bob Elswit did the pilot. I think it has a very distinctive style. It is his style. I can see these things. I don't know if other people can, but I can see them. I'm sort of the constant, so hopefully it's not too apparent. And then Igor Martinovic did the next three or so episodes, and then Fred Elmes did the last ones. Steve  Zaillian:I think with Bob … I don't know if you guys know his work. He's done a lot of PT Anderson's films and a lot of other things. He's adept at it. He's kind of like Conrad Hall in that he doesn't really want to plan things out and, frankly, neither do I. It's really, “Let's figure it out as we go along.” He has the skill to do that. That's the way that I like to work to. Igor would plan a little bit more. We had a lot more conversations about the look. I don't really remember talking about '70s films with him. I remember talking about The Conformist. That was kind of our thing. It was that kind of composition we were both interested in. Steve  Zaillian:And then Fred took over later on. By that point, he did a great job, but I think the style was pretty much established by then. Kary:And then production design and wardrobe on the series. Steve  Zaillian:Yeah. Quickly with wardrobe, I wanted a pallet that looks like this room without these red shirts in it. No red, no orange, no blue, but everybody else. I want extras to be there but to not be there. I really want the brightest thing or the most important thing that you see color-wise, you know, a person's hands, or a person's face, or some particular thing you want to look at but not the background. Kary:Or a bloody photograph. Steve  Zaillian:Yeah, not the background. And then in Rikers, Catherine George was working on the series for two through eight, she got on the program, and she went with it. Everything's gray, off white, and there came a moment actually when she wanted to put a white shirt on Naz. I don't mean in the courtroom, but I mean like a cut-off sleeve white shirt, and it really worked. You suddenly realize, “That's the first time I've seen that in the whole show.” He's got that kind of confidence now that he can put on something really bright. It was still white. It wasn't turquoise. Steve  Zaillian:In terms of the production design, everything pretty much was based on the real places. Obviously, most of the locations were in New York, real places that we shot at, but those that were built, which was the precinct, the prison, the main prison ward, and the courtroom were all based on real places. Kary:Let's talk about casting. Tell us about your working relationship with Avy Kaufman, and how did that go? And then we'll talk about individual characters and casting. Steve  Zaillian:I met with John. Obviously, that's how it works. You don't go through a casting director for that, but there was something like 200 other parts which she brought in. Basically, I am very uncomfortable sitting in a casting session. I know a lot of directors like to do it, but I don't. I feel bad for the people that aren't that good. There's a bunch of them who are good, and you're going to have to pick one, and there's a personal connection, so I prefer just to see what I'm going to see on the screen, which is in this case a videotape. Steve  Zaillian:She videotapes everything, she sends me the tapes, I look at them. I would look at them on my own on my computer. I didn't have introductions to the people. I didn't know who they were. It was just what I saw on the screen. That's the way we work. She would send me, I don't know, I'd say on average 20 actors for each part. When you're talking about 200 parts, I don't know how many actors that is. It's a lot. Steve  Zaillian:Almost everybody was from New York. We couldn't really afford to fly people out for a one day part from Los Angeles, so we had very few of those. I feel like the day players … I'm basically talking about only the day players here. When I say day players, it doesn't mean they work for one day, but they work on a daily basis, and so they might work five days, or something, or 10 days. I think they were super important. I know that the bigger name actors… I know Bill Camp is good… I know John is good… I know Riz is good. These day players can make or break a scene. They're important, so I would take a lot of time with them. Kary:Talk about casting Riz.  Steve  Zaillian:Riz was so important. I knew Riz was important. I knew that I can spend five years of my life working on this, and if that guy was not really good, it could all be for nothing. I'd seen hundreds of people on tape from not just Avy but people in Europe as well and UK. I ended up screen-testing five of them, and they were all good, but I wasn't really convinced of all of them. Steve  Zaillian:It was actually Michael Lombardo who looked at them with me, and he said, “Who do you think?” And I said, “Well, I think I can do it with any of them.” He said, “Yeah, but which one do you really like?” I said, “Well, I can't really say. I think they're all pretty good,” and he said, “You shouldn't do the show. If you're satisfied with, ‘You know, they're pretty good,' then you probably shouldn't do it.” I kept looking, and Riz I saw him on YouTube on something. I just was doing some research. Kary:As a rapper? Steve  Zaillian:No, I did see that he had some rapping stuff going on, but he was in the movie called Four Lions and another one called Road to Guantánamo. I just saw clips on YouTube. It wasn't the whole movie. It was just a clip. There was one particular clip in Four Lions, one scene, and I thought, “That's the guy.” He was so good in just that one scene. Kary:Did the casting of Riz and Bill Camp affect the way those roles were written in the series? Steve  Zaillian:No, it was written before. The whole thing was written before they were hired, and it wasn't rewritten for them. The same is true about Stone. It was done. Kary:Talk a little bit about casting Jeannie Berlin. Steve  Zaillian:Jeannie maybe you know who she is. She's a prosecutor in the show. She's also the daughter of Elaine May. She's also someone who in her first movie was in early '70s nominated for an academy award. She was in the original Heartbreak Kid. I often think about people that I've liked in old movies or just movies from a few years ago and especially when I'm casting so many parts. I did that in another movie I did with Jackie Earle Haley. Jackie Earle Haley I really always liked, and I wondered what happened to him. He hadn't worked in 15 years. I tracked him down. I think he was in San Antonio, Texas, and he did it. He's still great, and he's working a lot now. Steve  Zaillian:Jeannie I knew who she was from Heartbreak Kid, but I was surprised that she had seemed to have disappeared. I can't remember if I asked Avy to bring her in or if she just came in on her own. I can't remember, but she made a tape, and it was instant. It was such a big part that it wasn't the kind of part that a lot of people that Avy felt just anybody can do this, so she only brought in about five or six really good Broadway stage actresses. I liked them, but when I saw Jeannie, it was- Kary:She's so specific and idiosyncratic. Steve  Zaillian:The character in my mind didn't really look like her, but it was meant to be. If you saw the script, it probably says at some point, you know, “She looks like a grandma, but she's a killer.” Everyone underestimates how smart she is and how focused she is. That's kind of who Jeannie is. She's very eccentric, Jeannie, and she's totally focused. What I didn't know at the time was that she was rehearsing all of her scenes with her mom. I met her mom, Elaine May, after we were done shooting, and she said that she played almost every part in the show. She was Dr. Katz. She was John Stone. She played all those parts. Kary:That's fantastic.  Commercial Break for crimestory.com Kary:Talk about casting Michael K. Williams. Steve  Zaillian:It was very inauspicious because he was … I can't remember what the site is called, Cast-It or something like that. There was 20 new videos in it, and I put them up, and they were all for the part of Freddy. I looked through them, and I stopped on one of them. It was him, and I didn't know who he was, and I said- Kary:You hadn't seen The Wire. You didn't know about “Omar coming” and all that. Steve  Zaillian:No, and he was just by far the best actor on those tapes. I was really happy about that because, again, it wasn't like, “Oh, I like him because I like what he did before.” I liked what he was doing with this, and I didn't know any better. He's really something. Kary:Let's talk about the editorial process. You had a different editor for the series and for the pilot. The editor that you hired for the series was relatively inexperienced. I think it was an assistant that you elevated. Tell us about that, and tell us about why you ended up choosing him. Steve  Zaillian:His name is Nick Huoy. He was an assistant on it, and I just said, “Well, he can assemble it. I'm not going to look at it until I'm done shooting, but I don't care if he assembles it,” and he did, and I was kind of blown away by it. I mean his assembly was so good. He was making the same kind of choices that I would make, and then he was bringing something new to it at the same time, his own perspective and doing things that I wouldn't have done that were fantastic. Unlike most of these series, I knew I didn't want multiple editors, and multiple editing rooms and everything happening because I wanted to be in the editing room, and I can't be in two places at once.  Steve  Zaillian:    Again, what's great about Kary and HBO was it was very unusual to be editing for a year on a show. Normally, I don't know what it is, three or four months or something, because you've got three or four editing rooms going at the same time. We just settled in there for a year and did the whole show.  Kary:One of the things that I found remarkable was that we would get your director's cuts, and they had about as complete a sound design in the director's cut as I've ever seen my 20 some years of working as an executive. Tell us about the care you take in what you deliver as a director's cut. You don't take much for granted in terms of what you are handing over. Steve  Zaillian:Nick, the editor, and I, we both felt the same way that a lot of these scenes really needed some good sound in order to work. Not that they were done wrong, but that the sound or lack of sound was important to the mood and the effect of the scene. Those things were important to me. Steve  Zaillian:Also, with the equipment you can do that. You can run unlimited number of tracks. He's really good at it too. I thought it was important to present to you guys something that felt like it was done or at least on the road to being done, and I honestly can't even watch the stuff myself thinking about what should be there. Let's just put it in there, and so we did that. Again, when I first started, that's what I was doing. I was doing sound work, so I guess it's always been important to me. Kary:Before my interview with Steve, the students in the class watched a video clip from an event at Georgetown Law School where a number of professors of Criminal Law reflected on aspects of The Night Of. Among those professors was Paul Butler who now serves as a Consulting Editor to Crime Story. Kary:I was particularly struck by something Paul Butler said in the Georgetown law symposium. He said, “I worry that we're maybe letting the concepts of innocence and guilt do too much work.” In Stone's closing argument he says that 95% of the people that he represents are guilty, but that shouldn't excuse the things that happen to Naz before the formal adjudication or after. Guilt shouldn't make it okay. Kary:As I was preparing for the class tonight, it struck me that what Paul Butler said and his appreciation of the relevance of guilt or innocence to the inhumanity of the system is analogous to your indifference to the who done it aspects of the stories. Can you reflect on your efforts to keep the focus on the character and the nature of the system while simultaneously keeping the audience engaged in the narrative? Steve  Zaillian:Yeah. I wanted to see the process from the beginning to the end, from the crime to the arrest to what happens to somebody through every aspect of the legal system. Whether they're guilty or not was secondary, and that I wanted for the audience to be a jury, and a jury never knows if who they just convicted is really guilty or not. It was intentional. I also knew that there are certain things that an audience expects, so it was really a fine line of using some of the tropes of the crime drama but also trying to do it in a way that was maybe using them a little differently. Steve  Zaillian:The problem is the system. Yes, there are bad apple cops, but the problem is really the system, and that was our approach too. I didn't want there to be a villain. I wanted all the people working on the case whether they're the prosecutor, the judges, everybody. It's too easy I think if you have a villain as a character. All of these people are just decent people doing the best they can,  Kary:And now we have a number of questions from our students.  The first one is…The caliber of the show inspired me to write crime drama because there is no other show out there like this. Why is it only a limited series. Was that your decision or HBO's decision not to have a second season? Steve  Zaillian:We had nothing planned. We had a story that had a beginning, middle and an end. Like I said before, in my mind it was a long movie, and that was it. Now that we've done it, we are thinking about that. Maybe we could do something else. But it's really how it was designed. It wasn't designed as an ongoing series. It was designed in order to have a completion at the end. Kary:I'll just add to that as the suit in the mix. We treat this as a film. In the way that really good films can have sequels, if we can agree upon and if Steve and Richard are inspired to create another story with the same set of characters and themes that feel like a worthy sequel, then we'll do it, but we didn't want the pressures of a second season to dictate us doing it again. You see there are examples of shows that have had great first seasons, and then the pressure of having a second season ends  ups resulting in inferior quality product at the end of the day. Kary :Next question. You said that started doing sound work. What kind of sound work did you do? Steve  Zaillian:One of the first jobs I got was working in a very low rent sort of production company. They got hired to … We cut horror films for television, take out the stuff that couldn't be shown on television. Now they've got a film that's too short, and so they would go out, and they would shoot new stuff. They would invent a new subplot with new actors, and they would slap this thing together and sell it to Channel 13. I was one of the assistant editors because now we had to do the sound for those things too. Back when I was doing it, and this was a long time ago, I was literally scraping 35 millimeter sound film to do dissolves, and fade-outs and things and going back to the original what they call three stripe and trying to re-record the music, and effects and dialogue tracks. Steve  Zaillian:It was really hands-on. I mean, hands-on with razor blades and splicers. That's what I know about the technique of sound from back then. Now I don't really know how to work an Avid, but I know what it can do. I love seeing what we can do on an Avid now sound-wise. By the way, one thing I wanted to say about that. I don't think I've ever said this to you, but you talk about the sound in the show. I think that this stuff has become so sophisticated now, and you can do a Pro Tools mix in the editing room. I think that mixing stages are going to be a thing of the past just like feature films. I just don't quite get it when you can run 100 tracks on an Avid. Kary:Next we have: Many of my South Asian friends and I saw The Night Of as a much needed political commentary on issues that really aren't being talked about. Was there a moment where the team decided that this was going to turn into political commentary and bring light to the intricacies of certain racial issues? Steve  Zaillian:No, not really, but I think it was the kind of thing that we knew it was there, and we could see it developing as we were going along, but none of us said, “Hey, we're doing this for a higher purpose.” .. Steve  Zaillian:Just like all the other things that we talked about here today, it grew out of a reality, and then, yes, we were aware. I'm aware if I'm going to shoot a shot, or somebody puts a swastika and “Muslims Go Home” on a wall. I know what that means. It's not there by accident. I think what we certainly didn't know is that even though the prejudice and the hate crimes have been around forever, that they would peak with Trump's campaign about the time we were coming out. Kary:Interestingly, the Paul Butler comment that you referenced earlier about going in the courtroom and observing. You're going to Jackson Heights and observing, you know, the South Asian community there. It's very similar to what Capote did in going to the small town and just observing, and absorbing and refracting that through your lenses as a writer. Steve  Zaillian:No, that's true. We spent a lot of time in Jackson Heights when we were working on it, and that informed a lot of the scenes and a lot of the characters. Kary:OK here we have: You mentioned that you were really influenced by the French New Wave and neo-realism. What are your techniques and methods for directing these actors in a way that is so authentic and realistic. Steve  Zaillian:It's not really a technique. It depends on the actor. I don't give any direction to an actor the first time through. They might just nail it. I'm only looking for something that's in sync with what I want. It's not that it's right or wrong for what they're doing. I would find that … I said “less” a lot the second time through, like just “less.” I'm trying to keep the performances at a place where they let the words do the work. They don't really have to do anything. They don't have to emote at all. Steve  Zaillian:There was actually one actor in one scene where I said that about six times in a row, and he really was making it less each time, and then at a certain point he said, “If I do any less, I'm going to be doing nothing,” and I said, “That's right. That's what I'm looking for, nothing.”  Kary:Next question. How do you handle the balance between the audience seeing the Naz character as possibly innocent or possibly guilty, and how do you have that progress throughout the series and maintain it? Steve  Zaillian:That was something that was from the very early outlines. It was described, but this idea that I wanted an audience to go back and forth several times. Initially, “Oh, he's got to be innocent,” then, “Well, wait a minute,” and then, “Yes, he's innocent.” That felt to me like an interesting thing for the character, and it was just a matter of finding those places in a story to highlight them. I remember deciding, “Okay, this is the scene where that can happen.” Sometimes it's a reference to something that happened in the past. Sometimes it's something that's happening within the scene as we're watching it. Steve  Zaillian:There's a lot of scenes where he's by himself in Rikers where you're looking at him and thinking, “This guy is not who we thought he was. How could he change so much?” There's a little scene … I don't know if you remember it or not, but it's when his high-powered lawyer quits. He doesn't take a plea. She comes into the cell, she says, “If you're not going to listen to me, I'm going to quit,” and he says, “Well, so quit,” and she says, “Well, I think I will,” and she leaves. We shot him watching her go, and his eyes are just different than anything we've seen before from him. We shot it at 32 frames a second on purpose, so I could see the little blink of his eye. Steve  Zaillian:That's one of those moments. I don't know if I'm the only who sees that. They're intentional. It was like this is a good moment for us to reevaluate is this kid innocent or guilty. Kary:We have time for one more student question. The notion of “evil” hovers over our reactions to characters involved in criminality,  In Schindler's List, the Amon Goeth character seems to be the personification of the way criminal evil manifests itself… In the Night Of, there is no such character.  Is that something that you have in mind as you write? Steve  Zaillian:No, I don't think that I consciously think about evil as a theme, but I do think about if there is a character that's going to represent that. What is that character like? Amon Goeth I think if you read about him, you wouldn't have imagined that character. The things that were written about him historically and certainly not the way that Ralph played him. To me, it was kind of like … it was definitely the kind of banality of evil. He was worried about how much money he was making and these normal things and at the same time unleashing these evil and horrible crimes against people, but my feeling about him as a character was that he had to be interesting in his own right and not just the evil character. Kary:Again, going back to In Cold Blood, the pathology of Dick and Perry, it's banal to the point of ridiculous at times. It wasn't until this moment you see that in the Amon Goeth character. Steve  Zaillian:I'm just thinking about the dynamic In Cold Blood, which I haven't thought about for a long time until we brought it up here today, was that you had these two characters, and Perry seemed the most normal of the two. He was the one who spent the most time with his friend whose name I can't remember. He seemed like the guy that was going to pull the trigger, and Perry was the guy that was going to stop him. That's what was so shocking about it. It was the other way around. Kary:I think that's a fitting place to end our conversation although I have to ask you one last question, which I've asked our previous guests, which is what is the best piece of professional advice that you've received in the course of your career? Steve  Zaillian:Does everybody have a ready answer for that? Kary:No, but sometimes they just wing it. What's the best piece of advice? If a young screenwriter, a young filmmaker comes to you and asks what words you can offer them as they pursue a career in this business, what would you say? Steve  Zaillian:I think that so much of what happens in our lives is so accidental in terms of what we do and who we meet, and one thing leads to another or it doesn't that it's kind of impossible to give somebody advice, but I do think the one thing that you can do and is important, and has always been important to me, is to keep working. If you don't really think it's going to lead to anything, it's better than doing nothing, and it might, or it might not, but it puts you in the same city, or the same town or the same room with somebody who you wouldn't have met otherwise, and that's the important connection. Steve  Zaillian:My path to even becoming a writer was circuitous it couldn't have been planned. However, I was always working on something even if it was these damn horror movies, you know, splicing the film. Kary:Please join me in thanking Steve Zaillian. Steve  Zaillian:Thank you. Credits and sign off.

DJ Jeff Long interviews legendary guitarist Richard Thompson. Listeners should go to ktuh.org for a link to purchase tickets or directly to ktuh50.brownpapertickets.com KTUH is excited to announce The Richard Thompson Electric Trio headlining our October 4th celebration at Hawaiian Brian's in Honolulu. Direct from the UK and a sold out concert at the Royal Albert Hall, legendary musician Richard Thompson will be there with KTUH alumni and ardent fans. The concert with the famed Richard Thompson Electric Trio will begin at 8:00pm, followed by The KTUH After Party featuring Z-Trip from 11:00pm till closing. Other KTUH 50th anniversary celebration events include a silent auction, a KTUH merchandise store, and KTUH themed trivia. Richard Thompson's career spans five decades and multiple genres from folk (Fairport Convention) to rock (with his Electric Trio). His October 4th concert follows several Honolulu appearances over the past 20 years but marks his first Electric Trio performance in Honolulu. Richard has been ranked one of the top ten guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, alongside performers that include Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. Richard Thompson has been called "The finest rock songwriter after Bob Dylan and the best electric guitarist since Jimi Hendrix" by the L.A. Times. Songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin (The Guilty Ones & The Blasters) said: "When Richard picks up his guitar, I put mine down!" Richard has soloed or collaborated on over 60 albums, his latest release being 13 Rivers. 13 Rivers commences on the tribal percussion and guitar rustle of “The Storm Won’t Come” as the artist bellows, “I’m looking for a storm to blow through town.” The energy mounts before climaxing on a lyrical electric lead rife with airy bends and succinct shredding. Ticket Levels: · Richard Thompson Show (only) $50.00 -- Event starts at 8:00PM at the Crossroads. Doors open at 7:30PM. · The After Show Party (only) $25.00 -- KTUH DJs and Special Guest Z-Trip and DJ. Mr. Nick. Event starts at 11PM until closing. · KTUH 50th Premier Package $90.00 -- KTUH Premium Seating at Richard Thompson show, access to The After Party, and KTUH keepsake. · KTUH 50th VIP Package $150.00 -- KTUH All Access to Reception at 5:30PM, Premium seating at Richard Thompson show at 8:00PM, Meet and Greet with Richard Thompson, access to The After Party at 11:00PM, and KTUH keepsake. Limited quantity - 20 tickets.

On this Episode, number 83, of the “Just Bein’ Honest Podcast”, I am faced with something that has forever shaped my every day fuel for stamina - SLEEEEEEP! For many, many years, Richard Jacobs struggled with sleep – just like a lot of people do. Doctors told him that he was too stressed, or that he was “just anxious” about things that were going on in his life and business. They gave him pills, and said they’d make him sleep again. But they didn’t. You know, first-hand, how sleep deprivation can eat away at your soul, how it can strain every moment of your work and family life. One day, Richard realized that he had a problem. Not a trivial problem, but a serious problem. After all, he had a business to run and a family to support. He couldn’t keep stumbling through life in an angry and frustrated daze, feeling miserable all the time. Over the next six months, this “research assignment” turned into an obsession. When Richard spoke with some of his friends and family, and discovered that they too struggled with sleep, it became a movement. He called it The Good Night’s Sleep Project™. Let’s get cozy shall we? Let’s learn how your brain needs this cleaning process, and let’s learn what it takes to make a change by the choices you are granted with. Sweet dreams and get ready to dive in, because you just turned on the “Just Bein’ Honest” Podcast. —————————— My favorite quote from this episode with Richard Jacobs is that “Quality sleep is not only important, but VITAL to our long-term health and wellbeing.” Take that in folks, absorb it and let it marinate. That’s true food for thought. This was a long distance interview, please note that the sound quality may be a bit jittery at times so don’t turn us off! This is spectacular information you are not going to want to miss. Please note: Remember, "Disease SPEAKS". (Disease or DIS-EASE). And ALWAYS remember to listen to your body, what is it telling you? It’s that time to turn up the “Just Bein’ Honest” Podcast and allow me to fill you with strength and satiation! SCROLL DOWN for a FREEBIE!!! ———————————————— I hope you all got a lot of value out of this episode today, and thank you so much for hanging out with me. And if you did, please make sure to share this out with your friends and family on social media, and you can tag me @JustBeinHonestKB , I’m so grateful of your support and love to see that. And please make sure to head over to iTunes to SUBSCRIBE to the “Just Bein’ Honest” Podcast, and leave us a 5 STAR rating to let everybody know that the show is fabulous. You have the power to help us bring to you even better content and guests each and every week! And as always I appreciate you so much, until next time, thanks for joining in. ————————————————— Follow ME - "KB" on my journey through LIFE: @JustBeinHonestKB + Just Bein' Honest Kiss Kiss, Hug Hug - Much of Many my little honesters! This is True Food for Thought + I'm Just Bein' Honest... Always. xoxo kb Please subscribe to our PODCAST on iTunes and give us a 5 star rating - We would be honored and so grateful. www.JustBeinHonest.com Show Sponsor : JUST BEIN' HONEST (KB's LIFESTYLE DESIGN) Today’s Podcast of the “Just Bein’ Honest” Podcast is brought to you by JUST BEIN' HONEST (KB's LIFESTYLE DESIGN) ! JUST BEIN' HONEST (KB's LIFESTYLE DESIGN) wants you to know that "DISEASE" stems from always trying to PLEASE, but the SOUL is where your truth speaks. When you let your soul be the guide, that is when you are at your most powerful. I (KB) am your lifestyle designer. Your advisor for - HEALTH, WELLNESS, TRAVEL and DOMESTIC everyday LIFESTYLE PRACTICES. I unveil your TRUTH and the choices you have to cultivate the life that you want. Are you ready to live your most AUTHENTIC and WELL-CURATED LIFESTYLE? I'd like to offer you a head-start on your journey toward healthy and authentic living. Say - "JBHFREE" - when you schedule your first appointment and receive your FIRST DISCOVERY CALL - - - FREE! {Please send me an E-mail to get started today!} katherine@justbeinhonest.com Sip on some TEA with 15% OFF! BUDDHA TEAS: JBH15 code for 15% OFF - Get some CBD Tea, Herbal Remedies and your favorite Green Teas! The Buddha Teas Philosophy: They strive to create teas that do more than satisfy a thirst. Buddha Teas use fresh, high quality ingredients to explore nature’s best qualities and enrich the lives of tea drinkers everywhere. The fresh, organic herbs and tea leaves allow their teas to stay pure and natural, free from chemicals, preservatives and added flavoring. The minimal processing and eco-friendly packaging helps to honor and protect the earth with every tea they make. {Please send me an E-mail for more JBH INSIDER deals!} katherine@justbeinhonest.com

Richard Ma is the CEO of Quantstamp, one of the leading smart contract auditing firms in blockchain space In this episode, Ahmed and Nic speak to Richard to understand what on earth Quantstamp do and why their smart contract auditing solution is so crucial to the development of this space. Richard starts off with his background and how the idea of Quantstamp evolved. Using industrial techniques he picked up as an also trader, he and his co-founder wanted to apply those techniques to provide smart contract auditing services to the up and coming projects which are all based on smart contracts. Nic dives straight intp addressing key concerns associated with smart contracts such as coding a simple mistake and how would a reissue be implemented. Would it be done through contract modularisation or would a fork have to be implemented? Richard goes into his experiences back in 2016 where the general consensus is code is law but that narrative changed with the introduction and uptake of blockchains such as Hyperledger and Corda. In term of permissionless chains, he goes into the concept of upgradeable contracts which can be implemented on Ethereum and draws upon an example and takes us through this use case along with the challenges it represents. We also go on to the topic of enterprise and how Quantstamp interacts with different levels of enterprise clients. One colossal client of theirs is Kakao’s Ground X project (Kakao is Korea’s largest messaging platform) and shares how he has interacted with them and the processes involved. Richard shares how they approach different projects according to their security valuations and how different they have become over time, particularly the big shift from 2017 to 2019. Ahmed shifts the topic to why Quantsamp is in cohort 6 of the Dubai Future Accelerators program, which is a 12-week program dedicated to bringing in start-ups from around the world to bring innovation to certain government departments. They were paired up with the Road and Transport Authority (RTA) in order to help them build a secure system to sync up the different data silos that exist in the various agencies of the RTA to bring the coordination of data from days to seconds. Richard shares his current experiences with the RTA explaining how welcoming and open-minded they are in trialing these projects, in particular how the government departments emphasize the business applications and benefits these solutions would bring rather than focusing on the hype that blockchain. Richard touches upon their global expansion, such as their new set up in Japan and Noumura’s recent investment in Quantstamp. Nic changes the conversation to trust and data standardization and given Quantstamp’s global footprint and diverse clientele, what this means for them introducing standards in the industry and becoming the trust anchor. Richard dives deep into the 3 verticals of standards they are working on, one of which is the Smart Contract Security Alliance (which Nomura and Fujitsu are current stakeholders). When Richard started the company there were 300,000 smart contracts on Ethereum and now on there are 12 million contracts deployed on Ethereum! This led them to think that security audits should be automated with future anticipated demand and theoretically a token can be used as a security and utility feature to secure the system and verify the smart contract audits. The QSP token of Quantstamp is the token that powers this protocol and Richard further explains the viability of why the token economics could work in the future. Nic further questions Richard if they would implement AI and machine learning into their business! Make sure to listen and find out what he had to say! All this and more was discussed on this week’s episode of Encrypted! Also, the legal bits for the soundtrack used in the podcast: Music Credit: LAKEY INSPIRED Track Name: Warm Nights Music By: LAKEY INSPIRED @ https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired Original upload HERE – https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired/warm-nights License for commercial use: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported “Share Alike” (CC BY-SA 3.0) License. Full License HERE – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode Special Guest: Richard Ma.

This episode features Richard Wiese, co-host of the public television series “Weekends with Yankee”—produced by two prominent New England media outlets, WGBH-TV and Yankee magazine. The series, now in its third season, provides a national audience with an insider’s look at the landscapes, attractions and hidden gems of the six-state New England region. Richard is also host of the Emmy Award-winning “Born to Explore” television series, and president of The Explorers Club, a prestigious society founded in 1904 that promotes the scientific exploration of land, sea, air and space. When Richard was 11, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with his father. Since then, he has traveled to all seven continents (and scaled Mount Kilimanjaro 15 more times). He has also tagged jaguars in the Yucatan jungles, led expeditions to the Northern Territory of Australia, went cross-country skiing to the North Pole, been on two expeditions to the Antarctica and participated in the largest medical expedition ever on Mount Everest. He is the author of “Born to Explore: How to Be a Backyard Adventurer.” In his introduction to the book, he wrote: “I hope ‘Born to Explore’ inspires both the nature enthusiast and the nature-impaired and provides information on the tools needed to discover and love the outdoors.” In 2002, Richard, then 43, was the youngest person to be elected president of The Explorers Club. He was elected to another four-year term as the club’s president in 2018. Life’s tough – you can be tougher, like Richard Wiese, explorer extraordinaire, who will travel anywhere to uncover what makes “people, places and the planet” so special.

In this episode, Stephen, Tim, Richard, and Kelly discuss:  How to define a speakers bureau.  Various types of speakers bureau models, how they work, and why they are advantageous for both planners and speakers.  Advantages for working with a bureau who is a member of IASB.  How the speaker industry has changed over the last 10 years, and where it is going in the next 10 years.     Key Takeaways:  Speakers bureaus work a lot like sports agencies, managing the logics and details for you.  Have a feel for the group for whom you are looking for a speaker – that needs to be formulated up front.  The internet is not the best place to start your search for a speaker – working with an IASB bureau brings credibility and ease to booking your speaker.  As a speaker, get the experience – do your 10,000 – that’s how you’re going to get noticed.     "For a meeting planner, I would advise reaching out to a bureau. Not only to save your time, but also, this is one small part of what you do. The goal is to make it as easy and seamless as possible, because when a meeting planner puts up a speaker for an event, it’s their reputation on the line within their own company. And our job is to make them look like the hero." —  Kelly Eger     Connect with Stephen Kirkpatrick & Richard Schelp at Executive Speakers Bureau:  Twitter: @ExecSpeakers Facebook: Executive Speakers Bureau Website: ExecutiveSpeakers.com YouTube: Executive Speakers Bureau: Book Keynote Speakers LinkedIn: Executive Speakers Bureau     Connect with Kelly Eger at The Harry Walker Agency:  Twitter: @hwaspeakers Facebook: The Harry Walker Agency Website: HarryWalker.com YouTube: HWASpeakersBureau LinkedIn: The Harry Walker Agency     Connect with Tim Mathy at SpeakInc.:  Twitter: @speakinc Facebook: Speak Inc. Website: SpeakInc.com  YouTube: speakinc LinkedIn: SpeakInc     Connect with IASB:  Twitter: @IASBWEB Facebook: International Association of Speakers Bureaus Website: IASBWeb.org LinkedIn: International Association of Speakers Bureaus    Guest Bios: Stephen Kirkpatrick, Executive Speakers Bureau Stephen Kirkpatrick joined Executive Speakers Bureau in 2015. He serves in a dual role as an Account Executive and as head of  their Speaker Management Division. Before joining the ESB team, Stephen worked as the Senior Director of Development at Christian Brothers University where he also worked with the baseball team.  Prior to his time at CBU, Stephen worked with an entertainment consulting firm in Los Angeles, California where he worked with clients like: Debbie Allen, Kathy Ireland, Ray Romano, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Stephen was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and graduated from Ole Miss, where he played college baseball, with a major in English and a minor in Spanish. He now lives in Olive Branch, Mississippi, with his wife, two children and his pets---an ornery cat and a hyper bulldog . He enjoys spending his time bettering his community through involvement with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, his college fraternity and his church.   Richard Schelp, Executive Speakers Bureau Richard Schelp is the President and Co-Owner of Executive Speakers Bureau. Richard has been with Executive Speakers Bureau for 15 years, and during that period of time he has helped lead the organization to an unprecedented level of growth. Known as a true expert in the industry, speakers and organizations from all over the world contact Richard for his insight on future trends and directions. In addition, Richard handles some of the bureau's largest and most significant accounts, including all of the state hospital associations, State Farm Insurance, American Rental Association, Chase Bank, Boston Scientific Corporation, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Allscripts, and American Heart Association. Prior to joining Executive Speakers Bureau, Richard was in sales and sales management with a few top technology companies including IBM and AT&T. During his tenure with those organizations Richard received a number of awards for his sales performance. Richard has lived in the state of Tennessee for most of his life, and has a BS in Business from the University of Tennessee and an MBA from the University of Memphis. He is married to his lovely wife Angela and has four wonderful children. When Richard is not working, he enjoys sports, attends his children’s sporting events and shows, and participates in international missions with his church.   Kelly Eger, The Harry Walker Agency Kelly serves as HWA's Chief Operating Officer. She began her career at the Agency two decades ago and in that time has worked in multiple departments, partnering closely with speakers and hosting organizations. Kelly has represented HWA as a board member and past president of the International Association of Speakers Bureaus (IASB).  Kelly graduated from New York University, majoring in Public Relations and Marketing with a minor in Political Science. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her husband Eric and their son, Alex, and daughter, Sloane.   Tim Mathy, SpeakInc Tim has been with SpeakInc since 1996 and was made Partner in 1999. He is actively involved with Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA), Meetings Professionals International (MPI), Worldwide Exhibition for Incentive Travel, Meetings and Events (IMEX), and serves as the SpeakInc. liaison to the National Speakers Association (NSA).  Tim is a graduate of the University of San Diego, but also studied abroad in Oxford, England. He and his wife Jennifer stay busy chasing around their three children, Kyle, Daniel and Sarah. Tim can often be seen on the weekends coaching his kids in one of their many sporting activities. In his spare time he enjoys playing sports, a good game of hold-em and diving into the latest bestseller. He currently operates our Denver office.     Show notes by Podcastologist: Chelsea Taylor-Sturkie  Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.   

The Eyres are embarking on another series to help keep your family focus. Over the next few weeks they will be debunking some of the more prevalent myths when it comes to marriage. When Richard and Linda were newlyweds they were told to never let the sun set on an argument, but that didn't work out so great. Today they bust the myth that the best way to measure your marriage is by how seldom you disagree. Disagreements and differences are natural and great for relationships.

This past Friday, Richard walked into his local Starbucks and noticed it was much busier than normal. There were people holding early morning business meetings, people deeply involved in work on their computers, and other usual sights. When Richard began overhearing conversations, he realized that the abundance of customers at Starbucks on this particular day was because of a special, reusable cup giveaway that Starbucks doing to promote the upcoming holidays. You may be wondering, what does this have to do with legal marketing? There is a fundamental connection in what Starbucks was doing and the methods Richard teaches to attorneys for marketing their legal services. He explains this connection and relates it to a real-life representation of a personal injury lawyer’s legal practice in this episode of the Attorney Marketing Profits podcast. 00:49 – Walking into Starbucks on Friday morning. o The different types of customers and waiting in an unusually long line. o Starbuck’s red holiday cups. o Solicitation laws. 03:32 – A story about how to avoid solicitation. o Richard’s lawyer friend, Joe, advertising on late-night television. o Joe waking up with a new list of clients and how he can use it. o Explaining the giveaway that Starbucks was doing. 06:03 – Tying this Starbucks giveaway into legal marketing and solicitation. o Offering potential clients something of value that draws them in. o A guide Joe could provide to his list of potential clients to obtain their contact information and follow up with them. o Building a relationship to eventually earn clients who know, like, and trust you. Website - AttorneyMarketingProfits.com Facebook - Facebook.com/AttorneyMarketingProfits Twitter - Twitter.com/AttnyMarketing

On today’s episode of The Business Mentor Podcast, Jay talks to Richard Fuller, the Managing Director of County Battery Services Ltd. Jay and Richard discuss investing in sales, expanding the business, being flexible on changes, having a mentor, valuing your staff, and so much more. Richard’s business started in 1974. It was his father’s back then. At the early age of ten, he was already learning the ins and out of their business. Like any other kid, Richard wasn’t fervent with the idea of working with his dad selling batteries, tires, etc. But fate has a mind of its own. At the age of 23, he was left leading the business when his father died that year. Richard was able to expand their business for over 4 decades. It’s bigger than ever and now has three branches. Richard tells Jay that it wasn’t very easy at first. He faced ups and downs in his personal and career life just like any of us. He experienced having his focus shifted, not having enough cash flow to sustain his family’s everyday life, and not sharing his ideas to grow. There’s more to know about Richard’s journey in which we could learn from so make sure to tune in! KEY TAKEAWAYS Invest in sales so you’ll be able to expand your business in the future. When Richard started leading the business, he was just trying to survive on a little cash flow. Sales are very important to make sure your business is growing in the long run. When you do it, make sure you know everything about it. Make sure your prices are set. Look at how your competition’s way of doing it. Find your target audience. Know the profit margins. Find a mentor. Your mentor will give you the guidance you will need. He’ll give you better options. Just like everyone else, we should seek help when we need it. When you start not focusing on your business, your business will suffer. There won’t be any cash flow when this happens. You might lose a source of income. Your staff is your business’ greatest asset. There are times when entrepreneurs want to keep their plans inside their heads. Try sharing it with your staff, it will be easier in the process. Besides, they know the job better. Tough times will come so be prepared. Don’t live day by day. You have to have backup plans and reserves. Flexibility is necessary. You have to adapt to changes quickly. We live in an ever-changing world. Find ways on how you still be on top of your game. You can concentrate on a certain niche. Technology is a big factor in every business lately. If we can use it properly, it will greatly affect our business. For example, Richard’s company is exploring on e-batteries. BEST MOMENTS "The bond between (father and son) is probably better because we're working together." "If you're not careful and you don't plan your sales, then you've got a big problem." “If you’ve got an idea and you think it’s great, get a mentor you could bounce the idea around. Chances of success are gonna be higher.” VALUABLE RESOURCES County Battery Services Ltd Website Fuller Battery Website ABOUT THE HOST Jay Dhillon is a serial entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist based in the UK with a proven track record of growing businesses from start-up to success- and helping others do the same. From humble beginnings, Jay grew his first business from 0-500 employees and three locations, racking up sales of over £30 million – all without any investment other than a small amount of savings. The business went on to acquire major clients such as Landrover, Jaguar, Toyota and New Look, to name a few. Its huge success inevitably brought about outside interest and at the age of 33, Jay eventually sold the company to a London investment firm in Doyen Resources. Today, Jay owns several businesses in different sectors and helps entrepreneurs achieve success. A calling to give back and help others led to Jay being chosen for the highly-coveted role as a Prince’s Trust mentor, where his achievements were marked by a personal invitation to Buckingham Palace to meet Prince Charles. After helping several young entrepreneurs to success as a mentor for the Trust, Jay’s burning desire to bring his wisdom and knowledge to a wider audience ultimately triggered the concept of The Business Mentor Podcast. Jay feels that anyone can achieve success in business with the right advice and mentoring and is now sharing his knowledge with his growing audience via his podcast. In the UK alone 95% of business fail within the first five years and Jay’s aim is to reduce that number. Backed with the hard-earned knowledge and experience from his time in business, The Business Mentor Podcast will share Jay’s personal business lessons as well those of other successful entrepreneur guests who share their wisdom and secrets on the show. ABOUT THE GUEST Richard’s been working with batteries since 1974 and over the years, have gained a wealth of experience in all battery types. He is the Managing Director of County Battery Services Ltd, a one-stop battery shop. CONTACT METHOD Richard Fuller-Battery Richard’s LinkedIn Richard’s Twitter Richard’s Facebook Jay Dhillon Jay Dhillon Official Website Jay’s LinkedIn Jay’s Instagram Jay’s Facebook E-mail Jay at jay@businessmentorpodcast.com See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information.

Richard Cook is the man behind optical boutique Spex Pistols in Dundee’s Westport. Chances are if you see someone with interesting eyewear in Dundee, they’ve been to see Richard. Spex Pistols specialises in designer, vintage and classic frames as well as their very own range that’s due to launch soon. I think it’s fair to say that Richard is a big personality and well known throughout the creative community. He has built Spex Pistols to be that go to place for great glasses. Not only that but he prides himself on the quality of his customer service. Whether you’re going in to buy glasses or not he’s created a relaxed and fun atmosphere in the shop. To be honest it’s worth just dropping by for a chat. We begin by talking about his school days and the problems and difficulties he faced within the education system. We later go on to explore that this is largely down to Tourette's syndrome and a stutter that he later overcame. His first real opportunity came working in a spectacle lens making factory in Dundee. Richard talks about how he excelled even in areas that he’s struggled with in school. It just took someone to believe in him and offer that opportunity in order for him to flourish. When Richard was screwed over by a business partner and his marriage failed he was left in a pretty dark place. Despite this, he decided to open his very own store and Spex Pistols was born. He talks about how being dragged to a Pecha Kucha night ended up changing his life. It also led on to Dundee’s first Pecha Kucha baby! It’s a really triumphant story of the power of a community around you. I was really surprised about how deep our chat got. We talk about mental and physical health which is often avoided. It’s something that I touched on with Jennifer Jones as well and hopefully something I can explore further with future guests. Spex Pistols website - http://spexpistols.com/ Spex Pistols Twitter - https://twitter.com/spexpistols Spex Pistols Instagram - https://instagram.com/spexpistols/

S1E8: The Wrongful Conviction of Richard Rosario Richard Rosario was convicted of a murder that took place in the Bronx on June 19, 1996, based on the testimony of two witnesses who had picked his picture out of a book of police photos. There was no other evidence linking him to the crime, and Richard did not know the victim or the witnesses. On June 30, 1996, after he heard that the authorities were looking for him, he got on a Greyhound bus in Florida, arrived in New York the next day, and voluntarily contacted the police. He named more than a dozen people in Florida who he said would vouch for him including a pastor and a sheriff’s deputy. But the police did not follow up, and prosecutors charged him with murder based on the statements of the two eyewitnesses. Richard was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life. When Richard challenged his conviction in state court in 2004, seven more witnesses appeared to say he had been in Florida around the time of the murder. He was released in 2016 after serving 20 years when the Bronx District Attorney’s office concluded that Richard did not receive a fair trial. wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom is a production of Lava For Good Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1 and PRX.

Episode 42 started as a listener suggestion. When Richard said a listener suggested the movie “Them”, Will and Jolyon said “Giant ants? Great, we’re in!” But it was a 2006 French movie about a couple experiencing a home invasion. So why not both? Why not, indeed! It turns out that “THEM!” (1954) is the first of the giant bug movies and probably the best. You get a heroic cop, the Thing, Santa Clause and a really swell dame ready to sock those ants right in the kisser! And Mr. Spock gets in on the action as well! All kidding aside, the casting is amazing and the moral of the story is a poignant one. And there’s an Evel Knievel connection! What about “Ils” (2006)? It’s considered one of the "French extreme” movies, and your host will attest that it is well-made, but in the end, kids are dicks. So, grab your fireplace poker or flamethrower (whichever works for you) and lets’s go hunt down some sewer-dwelling ants. Or kids. Whatever. Find us on Instagram, where we are @chewingthescenery or easily find us on Facebook. Chewing the Scenery can be found on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. Please rate, review and subscribe- it really does help us!

Richard and Linda bought a house in Spain and now share their time between the sunny Costa Blanca and their family and friends in the UK. I spoke to them about their decision to come and live in Spain, what they like about living here and the time Richard drove from the UK to Spain in a sports car!  to kick off - to startsolicitor - abogadocouncil - ayuntamientoponderous - pesado/a, agotador/alawful - legaltaken aback (surprised, astonished) - dejar atónitoto potter on - move without ?hurrying, in a ?relaxed way, with little energytake the lead - tomar la iniciativaeasy sailing - easy progresshigh-rise developments - edificios de gran alturato get aroud - moversearid - árido/a firm - empresa, agenciato engage - contratarto take a sharp breath - tomar una respiración fuertebarge in (push in) - colarseto make up for - compensarinevitably - inevitablemente swimming trunks - traje de baño, bañador 1. When Richard lived in the UK, he was an estate agenta judgea solicitor 2. What was the worst thing for Lynda about her job as a committee secretary? the salarythe peoplelocal politics 3. Who made the decision to move to Spain? RichardLindaLinda's boss 4. What doesn't Richard miss about the UK English beerfamilythe weather 5. What surprised Richard when he first saw Moraira? how traditional it washow green it washow easy it was to drive and park 6. What was an important consideration for Richard and Linda about the area they decided to live in? There were Spanish lawyers in the areaIt had nice beachesIt was close to shops and amenities 7. Why would Linda like to visit the Medieval period of history to see old buldingsto see how castles used to functionto see how life was in Spain at that time 8. What did Richard do when he was 16? Bought his brother's sports carGot arrested on a beach in SpainDrove through France and Spain with his brother Find the answers on www.inglespodcast.com/richardandlinda

Swan-Brotherby Gabriel MurrayThe—woman—took snuff.  "Good morning, Captain," she said, Capitaine in her accent.  "This is a colder day than I imagined."  She looked out over the swells, her mannish periwig bobbing as she tilted her head up to regard the horizon.  "Do you know, I hardly expected to see it."Gregory Everett clasped his hands behind his back.  "Your Captain did the correct thing," he said.He had.  Galatea's American captain had struck colours almost as soon as the Indefatigable beat to quarters.  If he hadn't Gregory would have sent him to the bottom of the sea.  Gregory had no way of knowing that the privateer Galatea carried but one petty sorceress, not one of Bonaparte's magi that could kill him and his men with an incantation and a splinter of Indefatigable's hull.  He'd have sunk her.Full transcript appears under the cut.----more----[Music plays]Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 12 for July 9th, 2015. I'm your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.Our story for today is "Swan-Brother" by Gabriel Murray.Gabriel Murray lives in New York City with two cats and a pianist.  His reviews and stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, We See A Different Frontier: An Anthology of Postcolonial Speculative Fiction, Ideomancer, and Daily Science Fiction.  He can be found at http://orestesdrunk.wordpress.com and @orestesdrinking. He is currently working on his first novel, which is a Regency fantasy about families and bad decisions.Our reader this week is Alasdair Stuart, the host of Pseudopod. He also writes reviews and blogs at http://alasdairstuart.com and can be found on Twitter at @AlasdairStuart.Swan-Brotherby Gabriel MurrayThe—woman—took snuff.  "Good morning, Captain," she said, Capitaine in her accent.  "This is a colder day than I imagined."  She looked out over the swells, her mannish periwig bobbing as she tilted her head up to regard the horizon.  "Do you know, I hardly expected to see it."Gregory Everett clasped his hands behind his back.  "Your Captain did the correct thing," he said.He had.  Galatea's American captain had struck colours almost as soon as the Indefatigable beat to quarters.  If he hadn't Gregory would have sent him to the bottom of the sea.  Gregory had no way of knowing that the privateer Galatea carried but one petty sorceress, not one of Bonaparte's magi that could kill him and his men with an incantation and a splinter of Indefatigable's hull.  He'd have sunk her.Wisely, Galatea had struck her colours.  The sorceress tucked her snuffbox back into her pocket and went about the fastidious business of dusting off her fingers."Well, I'm happy that he did," she said.  "As here I am.  And here you are.  Thank you for your hospitality, Captain."He inclined his head without looking at her and went back to studying the water's hue."Does a Navyman really face a court-martial for every time he strikes his colours?" the Québécoise mused with a dusty little sniff.  "What a curious custom.""It deters cowardice," said Gregory, of no mood to humour her."Have you ever struck your colours, Captain Everett?"In truth, at eight-and-twenty he'd not seen enough action for that.  Even happening on Galatea had been by accident.  "I've not been in that position," he said.  "I beg your pardon, have you been to breakfast?""Oh, yes.  I've no fortitude when it comes to eggs."  She smiled at her own charmless joke.  "Captain, I'm afraid I haven't come up to make small-talk.  I have a proposition."He glanced up at the grey-cast sky.  "Have you, then?""It's very fortunate that you've picked me up, after a certain fashion," she went on.  "You see, I do have an appointment in London.""How interesting."  Gregory looked down at her again.  "You are my prisoner.  You're welcome to go wherever you please after the Admiralty sorts you out in Spain.""My hearing could take place in England," she pointed out."It could."The sorceress sighed, found a cherry-wood pipe in another pocket.  "You strike me as the sort of man who dislikes a bribe," she said.  "All the same.  Is there nothing I might offer you as a gentlewoman magician?"He was ready to set her down sharply.  When he turned to do so, however, she was looking at him slant.  "You're a soldier.  Is there nothing you want back," she said, "that you've lost?"Something about the wig brought him over.  It was out of style.  He was given to trusting people of little personal charm.  His first lieutenant, Masters, was charmless; he was charmless himself, of course, no natural leader of men; but Masters was shrewder than Shylock, and Gregory Everett had a level head that had managed to remain on his shoulders.  The French war sat in the hands of men in unfashionable periwigs.Gregory tilted his tricorne down and lowered his voice in confidence to say: "Speak to me when we land.  If you'll excuse me, madam."When Gregory played soldiers as a boy, he'd pretend they were dolls.  He wanted a baby.  He wasn't supposed to, he was aware.  He wasn't supposed to not want them.  He was supposed to want victory, a ship-of-the-line, and to see the edges of the Earth, like Father.  He wanted those too, of course, but mostly he wanted a baby.Gregory Everett still wanted a baby.  His fiancée, his cousin Clare, was back in Dover; he wrote her daily, which his first captain had praised, and sometimes he pictured her pretty freckled face in a bonnet.  But then he would picture his own face and then imagine how their son would look.  Soon when the war was done and he'd go back home to Dover and start his family, finally, finally.He wanted a child like his brother.  Young Richard, nine or so, was perfect: tall and strapping already, but also sweet-faced and pretty like Mama, and unlike other boys his age he loved to learn his letters.  He sang his French alphabet back to his governess in his boy soprano and made all the women clap their hands in delight.  In his head at night Gregory preserved that Richard alive.  That Richard came in for supper.  That Richard always ran to show Gregory his watercolours first.  That Richard begged to go all the way to Portsmouth with Gregory when he left for his first commission, at fourteen, and sobbed into Gregory's blue coat."You're going to die," he cried with horrible ten-year-old candour while Father looked on in embarrassment; "you're going to die and I won't have a brother anymore.""You're being silly," had said Gregory, mortified and on the verge of tears himself.  He put his chin on the top of Richard's sandy head and gave his shoulder a rough squeeze.  "Hush.  I'm not going to die.  You're making a scene."To his surprise, the Québécoise sorceress took a drink with him at the officers' pub when they put in.  She daubed at the edges of her mouth with her handkerchief.  "The Spanish do not understand beer," she said with diffidence.  "Let's walk, Captain."The idea of offering his arm to someone in a waistcoat struck Gregory as too peculiar.  Instead, he offered her his coat as they ducked out of the smoke and into the dusk.She shrugged it on over her square shoulders.  "Oh, do bring a rifle," she said, lighting her pipe.  "And bayonet."Gregory's eyebrows nearly met his hairline, but he agreed to go back for one.They must have made a curious sight, the two of them.  It put him at a discomfort even after they strolled to the river, far from curious eyes.  Gregory knew how he looked at men who walked out onto the shore with women after dark.  On his back he could feel the weight of his own contemptuous stare.He shouldered his rifle into a more comfortable position on his back.  "I want you," he said, low, in French, "to bring my brother Richard back to me."The sorceress's eyelashes twitched as she glanced at him sideways.  Her pipe glowed; he could smell the bitterness of her tobacco."He's my brother," he said.  "I want him back.  Deliver him to me and I will take you to England.""I'm afraid it's not going to occur in that order," she said with a chuckle.  Her Québécoise accent was even thicker in French.He gave her a look that indicated what he thought of her levity.  She waved her hand.  "All right.  Come.  Walk further with me," she said, extending an arm he couldn't refuse.She led him to a bend in the river where birds paddled sedately, three swans and an array of ducks that huddled together at their approach.  The white shapes of the swans were still.  Asleep, surely.  Swans were headstrong and irascible animals.  He looked to her for direction."Take one," she said in English again.  "You've got to do this part yourself, I'm afraid.""You can't be serious.""I am serious, Captain," she said.  "Returning what's been lost is a bloody affair, and not easy, I'm afraid.  And—frowned upon.  Nevertheless, I’ve an appointment in London.  I'll do it.  But you'll be needing one of those birds."Gregory hesitated, then unslung his rifle and loaded it up without a word.  He shouldered the stock and closed an eye.  He was English.  There was something crude to him in killing a swan."Alive," she added."Alive?"  He frowned.  "Is wounding it acceptable?""Provided it'll live a few minutes at least," she allowed.He squinted through the sight again.  "It'll be loud," he muttered, already thinking of his advantage there.  He trained the barrel up to the sky and pulled the trigger.  At the shot's crack, the sorceress flinched and the birds took wing in a startled flurry.This bit was facile.  All gentlemen learned to hunt.  Gregory eyed the greatest white shape as he re-loaded and aimed above the breast, at an outstretched wing, and fired again.Blood was stark on a swan.  The downed animal thrashed about calling on the ground, splintering its wing further, no doubt.  He turned up his nose and set off towards it while the Québécoise sorceress followed behind, rummaging in her bag for a few odd objects: a flint, a candle, a crumpled-up paper.  "Do hold it in place," she was saying; he held his nose and seized the wretch by the neck.Even weakened it struggled, like Proteus.  He glanced up at her.  She was fussing with the paper.  "Muzzle the damned thing, if you'd be so kind," he snapped and glared at her until she undid her belt and bound it gingerly around the bird’s beak.  It was little effort to hold it down after that.  Sweat still beaded on his forehead and rolled through his hair.Her wig was askew.  She straightened it before crouching down next to him and the hissing bird.  "Right, then," she said.  "You'll be needing to skin it.""Skin it," he repeated at the bottom of his voice."Alive," she said again, screwing up her nose at the necessary distastefulness of a magician's work.  She also found what she was looking for in her bag: a tanner's knife.  "It's not squeamishness stops me doing it, in this case."  He must've looked doubtful, for she huffed and went on, "You're not asking me for a parlour-trick, Captain Everett.  This is exceptionally personal.  Do you want Lieutenant Everett returned to you or don't you?"It was the damned animal that was biting his temper down to the quick, having to hold the damned animal down. He said what he shouldn't have.  "More than anything," he ground out.  "More than anyone.  If you trick me—"She sniffed, not deigning to his insult, and handed him the knife.  He shifted his grip on the wounded swan, which was thrashing less and less, and tried to recall what he knew of skinning.It died not long into the process, but not as shortly as he might have liked.  When he was finished he had a useless, gory coat of feathers, a steaming carcass, and a soiled uniform.  He grimaced.  "Do your spell," he said.  "It's growing late.""I already have," replied the sorceress, and when he looked up at her, she indeed had her items packed away into her bag again, all but the sticky knife.  She looked the same, if a bit blanched, with soot around her fingers.She brushed that off; she'd burnt the paper, he remembered, and said words.  "Keep the skin.  Keep the skin and don't destroy it.  Those are the only conditions."  She coughed and reached for something in her pocket—snuff.  Of course.  "Pardon me.  The number who can't manage that much, well, you'd be surprised."Gregory Everett held up the malodorous pelt with the tips of his fingers like a house-proud woman with a mangled mouse.  "I'll have it tanned," he said under his breath, "Dear God.""No."  The force in her voice came from some wellspring he hadn't seen in her before; he looked up at the flinty black eyes of a magician.  "That wouldn't work.  Only like that.  You'll keep it in its original form, or you won't keep him."He glared, but buried his fingernails in the swan’s pelt.  Satisfied that he understood, she took her snuff.  "You've nothing to worry about," she said with that same fussy self-assurance that'd convinced him in the first place.  "Hold a man's skin and your claim is first, Captain, over God's, Death's, and his own.  It's done.  I am a sorceress in the employ of Emperor Napoleon the First," she said with another chuckle.  "My soul is spoken for.  God help yours."Gregory ignored everything that she said.  His tired mind had drifted to something else.  "Where did you learn my brother's rank?" he asked after a moment's silence."You have his cameo in your great cabin," was her affable response.  She snapped her snuffbox shut.  "At least I presume that's him.  He looks like you."He came home for the winter holidays.  So did Richard.  The crusted swanskin was bundled up in their father's cellar, gathering flies and putrefying.  Gregory was sitting by the fire hand in hand with Clare when Richard strolled through the sitting-room door with his rifleman's coat all buttoned up and dropped into an armchair.  "Of course you've already taken the warm seats," he complained with a theatrical slouch, kicking out his long legs.  "Et tu, sister?  A woman's heart is a cold and cruel thing, you know.  Cold and cruel."Richard held this dramatic expression for a moment or two longer before he looked sidelong at Gregory and Clare and grinned.  Clare, for her part, still had her mouth hanging open.  So did Gregory.She remembered herself first.  "Happy Michaelmas, Richard," she said with a pretty smile, smoothing her pinafore.  "I hadn't thought that—"  She caught herself, always polite, looked at Gregory, was reassured by his nod and his grip on her hand.  Clare smiled again and went on, "I hadn't thought that Lord Wellington could spare you.""Nor I.  Good tidings all around this Advent," Richard said, yawning.  His voice was as lively and clear as it had ever been, though his soprano days were long finished.  He looked tidy and tired.  His cheeks were rosy like a Botticelli.  "You too, Greg.""You're late again," was all Gregory could think to say.Richard sighed with a whoof.  "You're always on about that," he said.  "Dear Father: I saw Greg today after four years' time.  'You're late again,' he said."Gregory smiled in spite of himself as an unnerved shiver scuttled up his spine and down each of his arms.  He felt Clare's soft hand still resting on his, relying on his strength.  "Well," he said, "you're not as late as usual."It was true: Richard wasn't.  Clare giggled.Richard laughed and kicked him in the foot.  His hair was a little unruly, even tied back; little bits and pieces of Richard were always escaping any efforts at civilisation, no matter how one tried.  He was always sunny, even when he was unhappy in truth, but hadn't been this cheerful since he was ten, not that Greg could recall.  Not to Greg.  "You horrible man," he said.  "You're always the same.  You make General Soult look like our Granny."Mother cried when she saw Richard.  She'd always loved him best.  Losing him had snapped her heart like an icicle into ten irreparable parts, and now she just cried into his shoulder.  Gregory didn't begrudge her feelings, watching them from the doorway with his hand on the frame: who wouldn't love Richard best?  He was a clever, charming, beautiful boy.  Girls fell all over that rakish half-smile—Clare was practically the only one who hadn't, and thank God for that.  Gregory wasn't jealous of Mother's sentiment: if anything he envied her easier way with Richard, the way she could just wrap her arms around him and he'd accept her embrace.  Trying to hold Richard was like holding a changing naiad in your arms; how did she do it, even for a moment?He supposed he'd never tried.  He put his arm around Richard when they were walking away down the hall and said stiffly, "I'm glad that you're well."He waited for his brother to raise an eyebrow and say something ironical, or laugh and shrug him off, but Richard just put his head on Gregory's shoulder for a moment.  Richard was taller, now, and lanky.  Richard had been right about one thing, Gregory had to admit.  He really would have been eternally hitting his head on things in the Navy."I'm glad that I'm in Dover," Richard said.  The same peace-making smile that had carried him through Father's absences and Mother's sadnesses was on his face, but his voice was a little doleful.  By paternal or maternal instinct, Gregory pulled him aside in the hallway and into a hug, putting both his arms around his shoulders like Richard had skinned his knee.  This was awkwarder now that Richard had inches of height on him.  Gregory didn't care.  He held Richard tightly, as painfully tight as he'd squeezed him that day in Portsmouth."I'm sorry, Greg," Richard was saying into the air next to his head.  "I really am sorry."  He sounded like he was apologising for being late to supper on Michaelmas."It's all right," Gregory said into Richard's hair.  "Mother's happy to have you back.  She doesn't care anymore."  They didn't speak of Father; Father was away.Richard bought Clare pink ribbons on the boardwalk while Gregory sat with his mother.  Clare blushed in a rare moment of delight at her future brother-in-law—they hadn't got on, usually, she was a demure young woman—and even laughed high when he bound one up in her hair.  She was only twenty-one, after all.  Standing together they were a pretty sight.  Gregory admired it like a landowner.  His wife-to-be with his brother, the future godfather of his child.  Next spring he'd be wed to Clare, too, God willing, and he would have that child for Richard to christen, and he'd have everything.  And surely Father would understand by then.The skin on the back of his arm itched.  He scratched it behind his back, through his Navy coat, and took his mother for a turn about the cobbled square.When he had a minute alone with Richard he chanced to bring up what he'd been intending.  Gregory hesitated even so, even in Richard's good humour and gratitude at being with his family this holiday, even then.  He remembered Richard's first reactions to the subject.  Lord, they'd been upsetting.  Gregory nearly reddened recalling that supper with his parents and Richard even now.  It was dreadful.  Everything was spoilt.  Richard had spoilt everything.  Sometimes he was still that boy, that horrible wilful boy.But: he was older now.  Gregory would chance it.  "Irene," he said.  "I'm sure that she'd still have you if you'd still have her.  She does care for you."Richard frowned and put his head on one side.  Irene was their cousin too, once more removed than Clare.  She was perfect for Richard, Gregory was certain of it, so spirited and bookish.  He'd always been utterly certain of it.  Gregory was happy with the match.  He could've chosen it himself.  Everything would be perfect if Richard married Irene.  They'd have the loveliest children.Even so, Gregory braced himself for what he might say, even if he said it gently.  But he did not say that, not even gently: Richard said, "Do you think so?"Gregory crossed his arms behind his back and smiled uneasily.Among Father's pinot grigiers and his chardonnays, in the cellar no one touched when Father was away, Gregory rummaged in one of the casks on his hands and knees.  This was absurd.  He felt like he was playing sardines.The skin was easy to find, at any rate.  It smelled slightly less than before, but it looked disgusting when he dragged it out, like a half-rotten creature washed up on some Spanish beach.  He suppressed a retch just over that.  It'd curled up around the edges.  It barely suggested a bird at all, least of all a swan.  The resemblance was gone everywhere but the neck, which he'd slit the skin from almost tenderly with the tip of the tanning knife.He grasped the brittle stained feathers in his fingers, disgusted and fond all at the same time; it repulsed him and, the Devil take it, he was growing attached.  Maybe the sorceress had done something to him too.  He dismissed the notion as the shadow-boxing it was.All the same, he sat with his legs crossed on the cold cellar floor and the swanskin in his lap.  He found it comforting to have it there.  It was comforting to know where it was, of course, given all the sorceress had cautioned, but—there was something comforting about it, too.  God, it was perverse.  He was embarrassed at his own attachment to it, just as he was embarrassed by how he looked sitting there with a rotting feather pelt falling apart in his lap.Burying his fingers in the pinions made his breath come slower and calmer.  There was something logical about it.  It was being degraded the way that matter degraded over time and in a cool place, sealed away from rats."Greg," he heard Richard's voice above, walking over the hatch to the wine-cellar again without noticing.  "Greg?  Where's Greg gotten off to?  Ah, never mind!  Clare, we'll go without him; he'll be sorry when he comes back."  His harmonious laugh travelled off with him out the door.  Gregory closed his eyes.Seated in the drawing-room's northernmost bay window, Gregory had taught Richard his sums.  The governess was always better with the letters, and so was Richard, quickly enough, but Gregory's head had always been superior for numbers.  He took pleasure in it, placing hand over spindly little hand to render the curves of the numeral 3.  Back then Richard had even attended to what he was saying, even though it wasn't very interesting, even when Gregory wasn't any good at making it interesting.  He never was.  Clare would teach the children, he'd decided.Seated in the drawing-room's northernmost bay window, Gregory sat his brother down with him now, as men, and chose to broach once more the matter of Irene.  There was so much bubbling in his mind now that he was dying to say: have you written to Father?  What of your post with Wellington, are you considering your career now too?  What is he like?  Does he need an aide-de-camp?  Shall someone write to him?  But he schooled himself, restrained himself, and settled on little cousin Irene.  A tidy, consistent topic.  He'd ascertain if Richard's mind had truly changed.  All in order.Always, always Richard was faster than him: he leaned on his elbow with his chin in his long, spidery hand.  "Is this about Irene again?" he prompted.  "Or should I be calling her Miss Tracy now?  I suppose she's not a child any more.  Lud, though, 'Miss Tracy.'  I've known Irene since she was born.  We've known Clare too.  It's so silly.  It's all silly."Normally Gregory viewed formality as the only buoy in a vast black sea, and stood upon it accordingly, but in the case of Clare Everett and Irene Tracy, he had to agree with Richard.  He supposed this was incidental.  He and Richard had never agreed upon much, as men, except by accident.  "She's Irene," he agreed.  "She'd be hurt to hear otherwise, and that settles it, I believe.  What of her?" he asked, and couldn't resist, sardonic, "Have your second thoughts come back for Michaelmas too, then?"Richard toyed with a strand of his hair.  He was an insufferable peacock, Gregory's brother, and he could never make up his mind whether he liked the colour of his ash-blond hair or despaired that it wasn't brighter.  That was Richard.  Mourning for golden hair, of all things.  "Do you know, I don't know," he said with a frown.  "I was opposed to it, I won't deny that.""You were."  Gregory gave the ceiling a look."I was opposed to it.  Irene is—""Well, do you love her?" Gregory prompted with poor hopes, but hopes nevertheless.  Four years ago he wouldn't even have asked that question.  Maybe, though, maybe Richard had—reconsidered his, his feelings, in some way.  It was worth hoping for.Richard frowned.  "I don't know," he said.  "Maybe.  I care a bit for her, you know, I've just—known her for such a time, is all."That unnerved Gregory, for some reason.  That of all things unnerved him.  He must've shown it in his face, as Richard tilted his head at him.  "Is something the matter?""You aren't going to ingratiate yourself to me by lying about Irene," said Gregory, before he could stop himself.  "I've run out of favours to give you."Richard's eyes widened.  He had big eyes, which still rendered him childlike at his age and height.  When he looked stung, openly, like this, it was impossible to not feel guilty.  "I'm not lying," he said.  "I'm really not.  I just don't know the contents of my heart."When Richard was born Gregory climbed up to his crib and stood on the edge to look at him when he burbled and cried.  He'd never loved a kitten.  He didn't even like kittens; they were fast and had sharp little claws and they didn't care for him at all.  He'd never loved a thing, not really, before Richard.  Richard was his brother, no one else's.  He'd never had a thing that was just his before, either.He taught him sums at the bay window.  He patched up all his scrapes from trees and kittens, which Richard always loved better than he did.  He picked out things for him to wear, until he was a midshipman and couldn't see Richard any more.  He wrote him every day, even when Richard forgot to write back.  He never, ever forgot about him, not when Father forgot about them both, not when they were young men; he held fast, and he—he meant well, he knew better—and he feared anyway the day when Richard wouldn't want him anymore.Only one vase, ever: there was just one fragile thing Richard ever broke.  He wasn't a breaking sort of boy.  He was five, he shattered mother's china, and ran away in alarm.  Gregory caught him in the hall.  "It's all right," he hissed with a hold on Richard's sleeves. "Oh, for God's sake, do you think I'm going to hurt you?  I'm not.  Pull yourself together."Gregory interlaced their fingers and fisted Richard's hand in his in a deathly grip.  He was always holding him that way.  This Richard let him.The Admiralty helped him in Portsmouth.  He was Captain Everett, after all, set to become a Commodore, and if he looked a bit more drawn than usual when he asked questions at the offices, they likely assumed he was busy.  The Everetts were busy often: the father and the elder son, anyway.  Not the younger.  No one spoke of the younger.He found the address and pounded on the double mahogany doors with one fist, then the other, then two until the sorceress called Marceline Despourrins finally admitted him.  She looked quite taken aback.  She was in her housecoat, which was terribly improper, but he'd taken to thinking of her as an irritating, elderly gentleman with a very particular set of skills and wasn't interested in changing his conclusion.  She looked less scandalised than just surprised by the hour, though, and admitted him to her study while she brewed tea."You've travelled a ways," Mlle Despourrins observed.  "Oh, dear.  Please have a seat.""That—is not my brother," Gregory said in a rattle.Mlle Despourrins furrowed her brow.  "Oh, dear," she said again, not much upset, and went back to the tea.Later she gestured to a chair for the fifth time and he ignored her and leaned on her desk with both hands, staring into the knots in the lacquered wood.  "I don't pass judgement, Captain.  I'm a mere practitioner.  It would have been one thing if he were simply dead," she said softly behind him, between his back and the snapping fire.  "Death is a place far away.  Estrangement is another thing entirely."Gregory scrutinised his hands.  "Estrangement is not the word I would have chosen," he said."Well."  She sniffed.  "That's even worse, then, isn't it?"He was quiet for a while, knuckles clenching and unclenching over the hard edge.  She came around to her chair and left him be, stirring herself a cup of orangeish tea and tutting over the heat."My brother is half a Republican," Gregory burst out like he had a thrashing beast in his arms again.  "He's sick of the war already; he dislikes anything with too much blood," he said with a snort, "or too much early rising.  He hates Wellington.  He calls him Lord Arthur.  He wants a captaincy like he wants a plague of boils.  He wants a career like he wants the bloody clap."Mlle Despourrins stirred her tea and looked down and away.Gregory heaved a horrible, deep breath.  His voice had risen without his realising.  He loathed his shouting voice.  It was so shrill.  "My brother is a God-damned sodomite," he hissed between his teeth.  "And he flaunts it.   He'll never marry Irene.  Not in a thousand years.  Father turned his back on him in shame."  So had he.The sorceress was listening.  Gregory had the impression that she'd tolerated more than one tirade from a client in her time, and had learnt to listen, lest she be asked to repeat anything back.  She yawned and, when she seemed sure he was finished—the word "sodomite" gave her no more trouble than "Republican"—she gave a nod.  "I doubt this will reassure you," she said, "but I do know of the second Everett son and his—escapades.  Word does, er, travel."He was tempted to throttle her for the way she said escapades.  He shook his head instead.  "My brother is his own man," said Gregory Everett with love and contempt.  "He'll have everyone know it.  My brother."  It caught in the back of his throat like a bone.  "My brother hates me."Marceline Despourrins took snuff and looked at him with pity through her bent pince-nez.  "Then what on Earth," said she, "could I have possibly done for you?"What was left of the swan burned slow in the hearth, filling the drawing-room with acrid-smelling smoke.  Gregory tossed it in when the clock struck one and sat in the chair there until it struck two and he was sure it was all burnt away.  He had a day's growth of stubble.  He didn't know when he fell asleep there, exactly, his head at an uncomfortable cramping angle.He didn't know what time it was when his brother found him, either, but he woke to the sound of his footsteps. He knew the sound.  He would never be able to sleep through those footsteps.Gregory straightened up to the best of his ability as Richard regarded him with curiosity, then shrugged and took a seat in the bay window, kicking his feet up.  The oil in the Dover house lamps was expensive and did not burn out quickly.  No one had put out the lights in this room, so Richard's face was lit well as he closed his eyes and nested himself in the cushions.  His boots were still on, resting heel-down on Mother's embroidered upholstery.Gregory looked at him a little longer than was polite.  Richard smiled back, not kindly.  It was that pretty, armoured smile he put on whenever someone found him wanting.  This was Richard, after all, to the fey tips of his fingers.  He wasn't grown-up after all.  He was young.  He'd been in the Peninsula four years and he was so young.  He'd stopped writing to Father in the first, when Father never wrote him back.  He'd never written to Gregory at all.He tipped his head back on the cushions but Gregory could see the tension in the arch of his back, the way he looked at his older brother like a distrustful animal.  It made Gregory sick.  It was the very last thing he wanted in the world."Well, should I say something?" Richard interrupted his thoughts.  His voice was low and feline and had new gravel in it.  "I mean, this is dreadfully awkward.  What should we talk about?  The weather?"Gregory closed his eyes."Your wedding?" Richard went on idly.  He really was self-possessed.  With the casual way he went on anyone else might've believed he didn't fear God or his brother.  "That's in May, isn't it?  May, that's a good month for wedding.  For being wed.  You should move it up to April: decreases your odds of being sunk in the meantime by a fifth.""Shut up, Richard," said Gregory for the hundred thousandth time.Richard coughed.  It took Gregory a second to realise it was a laugh.  "I love you too, Greg.  Did you miss me at all?"When he closed his eyes he didn't know what he'd do to his brother.  When he opened them again he'd taken command of his nerves again.  He looked steadily at the fire.  That was what people, Father, Indefatigable relied upon him for: steadiness and a firm hand over his own baser nature, and theirs.  The world's axis spun on charmless men.  He opened his mouth to answer Richard's question.  The truth was coiled somewhere in his stomach, treacherous and waiting to strike; he knew it, God knew it, in his lowest days he feared Richard knew it too.  He wouldn't let it master him."You have to be gone before Father sees you," he said instead.  "You can't very well put him in that position.""I know.  Don't fret so much," said Richard.  "I won't make a scene."END"Swan-Brother" was originally published by Ideomancer in March, 2013.This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.Thanks for listening, and I’ll have another story for you on July 16th.[Music plays out]

Christopher welcomes his friend and author Richard Scheinberg back to the show for another amazing evening of conversation! During this show, listen as we talk about Richard's book 'Turning Trauma Into Triumph', how you can turn your own trauma into triumph, ways to let go of the fears, the past and so much more. When Richard last appeared on 'Conversations with Christopher' in October, the whole hour flew by! What if someone told you that the most difficult period in your life may be a blessing in disguise? As a psychotherapist with 25 years of experience, Richard C. Scheinberg has candidly and succinctly summarized the spiritual and deeply personal transformation of ten people attempting to overcome the worst challenges of their lives. In this inspirational book, Scheinberg also reveals how he survived the most difficult periods in his own life. Furthermore, he conveys his personal conviction that our common strengths emanate from a source more powerful than any challenges that may come our way. ABOUT THE AUTHOR RICHARD C. SCHEINBERG is a New York State Licensed Clinical Social Worker and he is recognized nationally as a Board Certified Diplomate in clinical social work. Scheinberg has twenty-eight years of professional experience and he is currently the Director of Sunrise Counseling Center, located in Bay Shore, New York, which is a mental health agency he opened in 1993. Aside from being a human resource specialist for community organizations and employee assistance programs, Scheinberg continues to serve as a seminar developer, workshop leader, and business consultant locally and nationally. Don't miss what this great evening with Christopher & Richard!