🎧Lexapods 💊 Lady To Lady's Barbara Gray🥳
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
When do you prefer to enter an endless and consuming mind spin where you berate yourself for everything you said and did, and for every human interaction you had, the previous day? For me, it’s the morning time. Morning time is also when I read for pleasure, and there have been particularly bad mornings (usually after a night that involves drinking or any increased form of engagement) where I find myself rereading a single page for an hour because I’m obsessing over the dumb/annoying/rude/unfunny/all-of-the-above things I said or did.
For some reason I’m able to break this vicious cycle by listening to podcasts. In the morning I turn on shows that force me to think and focus or take me to another world, scripted or fiction shows, and for a few hours I can forget that I told my boss that he should try teeth whiteners in the elevator. (FOR EXAMPLE.) And then next thing I know I have escaped the devil’s hour of self-hatred and introspection, and I can begin my work day in a good state of mind.
I don’t know why I can’t do this with books. I think this is what meditating is FOR, but I can’t sit still that long. I think this is what Lexapro is for. But podcasts seem to be solving the problem for me, for now.
No pressure, podcasters. My mental health depends on you to continue serving me engaging content. If you are to all to close shop one day, please give me your best mailing address so I know where to forward the medical bills. You are all my therapists.
xoxo lp
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Lady To Lady’s Barbara Gray
Barbara Gray is a comedian and writer, and co-host of Lady To Lady and Britney’s Gram. Follow Lady To Lady on Twitter here, and follow Britney’s Gram on Twitter here. Follow Babs on Twitter here.
How did you meet your Lady To Lady co-hosts, Tess and Brandie?
Tess and Brandie and I met in the comedy circuit of Los Angeles around 2008. Tess had already been doing it for a few years, and Brandie and I started around the same time, and met because we were both taking classes at UCB. The curse of falling in love with doing standup is that you find yourself doing it every single night, multiple times a night, no matter how dank the basement, no matter how much the people in the cafe working on their screenplays do not want to hear about your Tinder dates, if someone puts a microphone in that corner, you're going to be there. So you end up seeing the same people over and over at these mics and you form a bond from being in the trenches together, as it were.
Did you have a hard time explaining podcasting to people when you launched Lady to Lady almost 10 years ago, before podcasting was cool?
Almost 10 years ago, oh my god! I truly can't believe it's been that long. At first we were a live talk show and the guy who ran the theater, David Janove, suggested we do a podcast. He had the insight that podcasting was going to be the next big thing. By that time everyone knew what they were but of course they hadn't blown up in the way they have now.
Women podcasters are often criticized for their voices. What’s your relationship with yours?
I've never heard this! Fuck whoever's saying this!
At the end of Lady To Lady, you always have a Lady Problems segment where you help someone with a problem. I remember thinking that was unusual at the time you started doing it, because you have a comedy show, but then the three of you get super earnest and helpful, you are good listeners, you pour your hearts into your answers, and you spend a lot of time with your listeners’ problems. How did that idea come about? Why was it important?
Lady to Lady is a comedy podcast first, but it's centered around women talking and relating to each other, which is still on the rare side in media these days. Having female friends who you can just gab with, be honest about yourself and your faults, and laugh about all of it, is a blessing. So Lady Problems seemed like it made sense as an extension of the show, because although a lot of the time we are messing around, it's also about having a community of women who support you when you're in need. Also as comedians I think we're naturally always striving to be insightful, and all three of us are endowed with a decent amount of empathy so that combined makes us good people to reach out to. Although I feel bad for the people who write in with problems about their fancy business careers because I have no idea what that's like.
You share a lot of personal stuff on the show. Is that tough to do? Do you ever share things you wish you wouldn’t have?
I've always been a very open person, for better or for worse, so it's easy for me. I'm more of a "put it out there and don't ever think about it again" person. It has come back to bite me in the ass before, with a family member hearing something they don't want to hear, but really you have to remember when you're a comedian and it comes to family, it's not for them. Tess and I talk about this all the time but we're like oh god it would be a nightmare to sit and listen to old episodes and hear all the stuff we've revealed. But I think that's obviously part of why people want to listen, it's juicy. Some listeners have told us it emboldens them to be themselves which feels amazing. I mean, I am who I am. I'm not ashamed of it, and I feel really happy to have gone through the journey of growing up a bit and loving myself on the podcast as listeners grow along with us. That being said, I often meet listeners who don't know how to act because they feel like they've been reading my diary for 10 years.
💎BTW💎
🎙️I start my day with a big list of shows that I “have” to listen to—things for work, shows my clients have been on, and there are usually so many things I’m dying to hear. I save my bingeing for the weekends. I started Monday morning with an episode of The Worst Sitcom Ever Made (Radio New Zealand) and told myself to listen to one ep, come back to the rest later. But I couldn’t stop. I felt like I was telling myself, “just one more potato chip” but was devouring the whole bag. The Worst Sitcom Ever Made is hosted by Geoff Houtman, who was part of the team that 25 years ago created what is known for many reasons as “the worst sitcom ever made.” Geoff is on a quest to find out what went wrong and to see if there are any lessons to be learned about failure in general. The project seemed doomed from the start–the people who came up with the idea left the project, they were working off a sitcom model for an American audience but they were writing for a New Zealand audience, the writers seemed disconnected from the story, etc. Geoff interviews the people who worked on this disastrous show that now everyone has a good sense of humor about. It’s all quite ridiculous and way too much fun to listen to.
🎙️Speaking of failure, Dead Eyes is a show where host actor/comedian Connor Ratliff embarks on a similar quest to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from an acting job. Tom’s note about Connor said that he had “dead eyes.” This sounds hilarious at first, but think about just how traumatizing that would be—to know that Tom Hanks saw you, hated your fucking EYES, and kicked you out of his project. You were intolerable to one of the most beloved humans on earth. I think this is more traumatizing than it seems. How do you bounce back? How do you regain your confidence? How do you continue to love your work? I guess Connor does this by starting a podcast. On episode one, Conor works through his pain with his friend D’Arcy Carden. And as Connor points out, everyone has a “dead eyes” story—an incident that has caused them to question who they are, that totally knocks them down and challenges them to get back up.
🎙️Because of all the internalizing Connor is doing, I was reminded of the latest episode of The Heart. It’s a beautiful exploration on people pleasing, but speaks to why that happens—how what we internalize makes us become people we don’t have to be. It felt like a good therapy session.
🎙️Thanks to Elena Fernández Collins and Lory Martinez for pointing me to a few podcast episodes covering the American Dirt / Jeanine Cummins saga: I had fallen a bit behind, but Latino USA’s Digging Into American Dirt episode efficiently caught me up. Host Maria Hinojosa talks to Myriam Gurba (who wrote a now famous, scathing review of the book that you should definitely read,) Sandra Cisneros (who defends the book, sounds like an idiot, and seems to be confusing optimism with ignorance,) Luis Alberto Urrea (💖, whose work was most likely plagiarized by Cummins,) and Jeanine Cummins herself (who plays dumb and doesn’t seem to understand that a novel is not just a novel.) I then listened to an episode of Latino Rebels Radio, and another one of The Bay (which interviews FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE author Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whom we interviewed on The Shelf-Care Podcast.) I was surprised how much I enjoyed the episode of Print Run Podcast–hosts Laura Zats and Erik Hane have a firm understanding on what happened on the publishing side. They point out that this book sold for $1M in a bidding war—other houses wanted it. Spending so much money on this book took away resources for other Flatiron titles. This is an example of white people trying to cover a Latino topic in an inauthentic yet palatable way. And though the press release that Flatiron sent out to try to clean up the mess asked us to consider the intention of the book, shouldn’t we judge art on the execution? Which was horrible? Wow. A lot to think about.
🎙️Inappropriate Questions is fun, but also doing an important thing. It answers the questions we aren’t supposed to ask with guests from the communities who are well-suited to answer. Transgender people can get asked invasive questions about their bodies. Hence “Have You Had The Surgery?” What about asking a mixed-race person “what are you?” Some Muslim women wear headscarfs but some do not. And they get asked: Why do / don’t you wear a headscarf?” Even if you know not to ask these things, it’s important to know WHY. The worst thing you could possibly do is say, “I know not to ask that person what they are but it’s for some strange reason.” And I guess if you are getting asked these questions, the show offers intelligent, polite ways to respond. (If being polite is your thing.)
🎙️If you’ve been keeping up with The Dream and the Make Me Over series of You Must Remember This (and I think even Fake Heiress,) you’ll welcome The Baron of Botox, a 10-part series about Dr. Fredric Brandt, who was dermatologist to the stars and eventually became addicted to his own product. It has been said that he was deeply impacted by a character on 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' that was almost certainly making fun of him, and he suffered from depression. This show examines his unusual practice and life and what led to his suicide. The show gives the story a “how did this happen?” treatment. You can’t binge it yet, it’s still rolling out. But I look forward to every day a new episode pops up in my feed. (From Justine Harman and the team behind Broken Harts.)
🎙️A healthy way to deal with your grief over the death of Kobe Bryant is to listen to The Punies, Kobe’s musical sports podcast for kids. The Punies follows a gang of sports-loving friends (known as “The Good Ol’ Gang”) in a spoof of old-timey sports radio. It includes play-by-play commentary of skateboarding contests, gymnastics meets and high-dive competitions, original songs, fake ads, and a thread of storytelling around the kids. It’s adorable and of course sad to listen to, because it’s a stark reminder that Kobe was trying to help the next generation of future-athletes and pass along everything he’s learned to them.
🎙️I binged the entire series of White Silence, another Radio New Zealand podcast about the 1979 Erebus Disaster, where a plane holding 257 en route to Antarctica from the Aukland Airport flew directly into the Erebus volcano, killing everyone. The Erebus Disaster shook up New Zealand, causing fingers to fly and several investigations to be conducted to determine who was to blame. Was it pilot error, or is the airline to blame? Was the airline engaged in an “orchestrated litany of lies?” as one of the reports said? It’s messy and interesting, and a lesson on how a country can move on post-disaster.
🎙️On Newcomers: Star Wars, two of the funniest people in podcasting (according to me, Lauren Lapkus and Nicole Byer) go through every single Star Wars movie in order of theatrical release FOR THE FIRST TIME and discuss with a guest, who is a Star Wars-fan. Lauren and Nicole have been purposely avoiding Star Wars, have led wonderful, fulfilling lives without it, it is totally out of their wheelhouse, they seem to know nothing about it, but have decided to take on this challenge. I also have never seen a Star Wars, so I benefited from their commentary on the first episode. (“I had heard ‘Luke I am your father’ before, but I don’t get it and like who cares?” —Lauren Lapkus.) Lauren and Nicole were genuinely bored watching the film and had a lot of stupid questions (that I also had) for their guest John Gemberling, who patiently held their hands through the experience. There is even a watch-along episode that accompanies every regular episode, so you can watch the films right along with Lauren and Nicole. After hearing their lackluster review of Ep. IV - A New Hope (again, why is the first episode episode 4? This is why I don’t do this) I’m not sure I have the guts. And watching it “with” them is probably frustrating for anyone who knows ANYTHING about the franchise. But I love that they are doing this. If you watch the watch-along episode, let me know how it goes.
🎙️ING podcasts are so hot right now! Finding Fred, Making Beyonce, Missing Richard Simmons, Making Oprah, Knowing Robin Williams…so I turned on Chasing Cosby thinking it would be just another one to add to the pile. But this one, unlike so many of the others (I do *love* Finding Fred) was able to hold my attention because it feels so different, so explosive. Interviews with Cosby’s accusers are so horrifying and visceral and do not hold back on descriptions of rape. I wonder if a show like this could have existed pre-#MeToo. Would it even have been greenlit? And I wonder how you could possibly listen to these women’s voices and doubt that they are scarred, afraid, and telling the truth.
🎙️After watching much of The Choice, The New York Times’ TV series that put us smack in the middle of interviews between democratic presidential candidates and the New York Times’ editorial board, I listened to every podcast episode they dropped as a companion series. I always prefer podcasts to television, but I felt the difference more strongly here. Listening, you are truly focused on what the candidates say and how they say it. There’s nothing for them to hide behind. I relistened to moments when Bernie didn’t seem to know what an app was (although his interview truly made me like him more) and Tom Steyer lashing out at the team. Pete had a layer of anger beneath everything he said that I felt so much more dramatically, listening to the podcast. Biden’s jerky retorts were bare. After each interview, there’s a deliberation episode, where we get to near not just what the NYT staffers thought, but the things we didn’t see/hear ourselves, like how Andrew Yang had helmet hair after riding his bike to the interview, or how Bloomberg refused to participate. One thing that drove me insane… (and I’m wondering if anyone else experience this…) there were way too many ads for To Kill A Mockingbird, the play. I set my app to skip the first 30 seconds of every episode, which eliminated some, but there were always more in the middle of the episode. Lack of ad variety really wears on me, I guess.
🎙️Despite the fact that I can’t stand the theme song, I listen to every episode of The Worst Year Ever, the show where Robert Evans, Katy Stoll, and Cody Johnston cover the election cycle. Robert was sick and not physically present for the most recent episode which explores the Bernie / Warren divide, so he was kind of in the background, which allowed Katy and Cody to take center stage. There were some tense moments that I’m not sure would have occurred had Robert been more present. Katy made some really good points about sexism—not just for the candidates, but for the people engaging with them—that Cody poo-pooed. It was interesting to hear these people who agree on so many fundamental things butt heads on matters that are truly at the heart of this election. Cody didn’t seem to understand how strong sexism plays when it comes to Bernie vs Warren, and I’m not sure he was listening to Katy, who highlighted some glaring problems with the Bernie campaign. (Even if it’s just with Bernie followers = Bernie Bros. And then of course there is the problem that we call them that. It’s the media’s fault!) At one point while Katy is talking, Cody interrupts. Katy says “please let me finish this point.” I relistened to that moment several times. I don’t think women do this often enough! Just stand up for themselves, and demand to be heard, refuse to be interrupted. I was applauding it in my head and when I’m done typing this sentence I’m going to put my hands together for Katy again. There. That felt good.
🎙️GOOD LORD DEAR YOUNG ROCKER IS SO PERFECTLY SPECIFIC IT GIVES ME CHILLS. (It’s an audio memoir about growing up a loner and finding a home in music.) The way the storyteller Chelsea describe her clothes, her posture, the awkward people in her band, the way she talks to them, the things she worries about…it makes me feel like someone has been watching me my entire life. I wasn’t even in a band! (But I was very awkward.) That speaks to how much Chelsea is able to capture this feeling, this moment of being a teenager. Get out of my adolescent brain, Chelsea.
🎙️Code Switch had an unbelievable crossover episode with Death, Sex & Money on how race affects our friendships. It all stems from an often-cited statistic from Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute that found that white people have mostly white friends. Code Switch invites experts to weigh in on why, as well as groups of friends with their own prickly stories. And then over on Death, Sex & Money you have Anna Sale basically mediating between friends who have had awkward hiccups around race and helping them to heal. (Where is her PhD in psychology?) Both episodes offer the listener totally different things but compliment each other perfectly.
🎙️I was thinking about Barbara Gray this week and her show Britney’s Gram (where Barbara and Tess Barker dissect Britney Spears's Instagram posts) and then I accidentally stumbled upon Images of Diana, a show that examines photos of Princess Diana and tells the stories behind them. Obviously Di didn’t have an Instagram account, but we can learn so much from the photos that were taken of her. It’s revealing to hear from the people that were there what happened before and after the photos were taken, and what went into the shots. It’s an interesting examination of the Di tragedy.
🎙️I love what Murmurs is doing—each episode is a “mind-altering” fiction story, and because each one is written by a different drama podcast writer, they’re all unique yet also cohesive. The stories are nothing like I’ve heard anywhere else, but the production is another thing that makes the show stand out. Murmurs plays with sound, dialogue, and story to create a feeling I can’t quite put my finger on. But it’s good.
🎙️The Sporkful’s Dan Pashman was on Planet Money with restaurant design expert Stephani Robson to talk about a data-driven restaurant makeover of an Indian restaurant in Long Island City. Stephani convinces the restaurant owner to make small changes (like moving the tables an inch) that result in customers spending a lot more money during their dining experience. What Stephani knows about customer behavior is so interesting, and her nerdiness about it makes her my hero. (She’s crawling around on the floor saying, “I love my job, I love my job.”) Look at the photos of Stephani and the restaurant on Instagram to get a fuller sense of the story.
🎙️I am fascinated by the idea of pain, how we all deal with it, and how our own pain is addressed by doctors and the media. Tight Lipped is a storytelling show that makes public what is often thought of as “private pain.” The episodes I listened to talk about something very specific—women’s pain during sex. But they speak to something much larger, that often women’s pain is ignored or not believed, that women often feel like they are on TRIAL trying to get a diagnosis, and that there’s a trust gap happening that often leads to women being misdiagnosed. This is such a huge issue and Tight Lipped gives voices to the people experiencing these problems. This show isn’t just enjoyable to listen to, it’s doing a service to women dealing with ignored pain. I hope men are listening to this. Our society is so sexist that you’d think that even if we don’t care about women having pain during sex, at least we would care about the poor men who cannot have sex with them. At one point the host Noa interviews her boyfriend about what it’s like to be in a relationship with someone who cannot have penetrative sex and it forced me to think how I would want my partner to respond.
🎙️I think it was Erik Jones who told me about Citations Needed, a podcast about the intersection of media, PR, and power, hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson. The episode about The Cruel, Voyeuristic Quackery of Rehab TV Shows was really fascinating. If you’ve watched enough episodes of Intervention or Celebrity Rehab, you probably know they aren’t actually constructive for the people on the shows, but you might not know how actually harmful this form of “treatment” can be, or how these depictions of rehab have shaped our common narratives about what addiction is and how it should be addressed. Journalist and author Maia Szalavitz joins Nima and Adam to talk about why this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, and the results can be devastating. And how these forms of entertainment are really exploiting addiction for the sake of story.
🎙️This week I was lucky enough to meet Chris Molanphy, Slate’s pop-chart analyst and author of the “Why Is This Song No. 1?” series, and host of Hit Parade. Talking with him reminded me how much I love Hit Parade, where Chris dives deep into what makes a hit a hit. I can remember, awhile back, knowing the show would be good, listening to the first episode on Red Red Wine, because while I don’t like the song, I loved the episode. It’s really a storytelling show mixed with lots of nerdy facts. Chris produces the show once a month (with mid-month bridge episodes,) and I think this is a great model because it always leaves me wanting more. I never miss an episode. (I feel this way about another Slate show that comes out monthly, Outward. I always wish these shows came out more frequently, but deep down I know I appreciate them more because they are such a treat. And so well done!
🎙️I love you!