At the Podium with Patrick Huey

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Too often today black neighborhoods are graveyards for exploded dreams as drug addiction, poverty and low expectations take root in the people and institutions of the neighborhood. In most of the world’s eyes, the souls who live in these food deserts, healthcare deserts, and educational deserts are merely statistics, not three-dimensional people with deep, real and valuable humanity. And still what remains, as Quentin details in his memoir Strong in the Broken Places, is the love of the people in the community for each other. 

Maya Angelou said when you learn you teach. And through his harrowing story of overcoming a prescription drug addiction and a suicide attempt in order to step into his destiny as father, healer and teacher, Quentin uses his life as a classroom. His lessons are weighty. God has a bigger plan for your life than what you can see in your current circumstances. Prayer works and prayer requires work. Surrendering is not weakness, but a necessary step of faith. And quite simply, you have to choose life.

With his honest telling of his struggle through profound prescription drug and alcohol addiction, Quentin Vennie gives us soul-stirring life lessons. We can turn our traumas into our triumphs. We all have to receive forgiveness and extend it to people who hurt us, even when we don’t want to. And in a world where society often strips people of humanity, when we have the courage to tell our stories to one another honestly, that’s when we can feel and see each person we meet through a lens of empathy and compassion.


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Kathryn Hahn has played them all. From her critically acclaimed roles of Mrs. Fletcher on the eponymously named HBO series to Agatha/Agnes on Disney +’s WandaVision, and soon in her latest series Agatha: Coven of Chaos, Kathryn has left the idea of typecasting and pigeonholes in her formidable dust. At the core of her ability to shapeshift into a variety of roles is her Yale School of Drama training which she describes as “there is something about a craft [training] that anchors me to something ancient… My career is not a fluke.” 

It is refreshing to hear someone in our current world speak about the importance of training and expertise, particularly in an industry that will have us believe that famous people have a special quality that sets them above the rest of us mere mortals. In a time when people seek fame so quickly and recklessly, Kathryn speaks honestly about how flying under the radar through much of her career and doing the work has given her the freedom to make unexpected and varied choices in her roles. This freedom has given her longevity and much respect. 

Equally important to her success has been her ability to know her worth and ask for what she wants. She tells us, “The vulnerable first step off the cliff is terrifying” when you ask for what you want, but you must take that step with love and zero defensiveness. 

Hers is advice that hearkens back to another time; keep your head down, do your work, treat people with love and kindness. These words may not be fodder for sizzling headlines, but for creating a successful career, she proves the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Into the Woods, “Witches can be right.”

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Dennis Williams breaks open a lot of taboos in our conversation about his journey as single, black, gay man navigating through IVF and Assisted Reproductive Strategies to become a father. With a startling clarity of thought, he takes us through the maze of doctor visits, legal de-entanglements, and identifying egg donors and surrogates to achieve his dream. Along the journey with him, he asks us to explore how we define our own worth and what parental and societal expectations we wrestle with on a daily basis. He asks us to reimagine and expand our thoughts of what a family is and with whom and how we create our families. 

In a poignant plea, he asks us to open the channels of empathy within ourselves for each other, for this is the way we build true sisterhood and brotherhood. This is how we create humanity. How we literally create humanity. And in the face of uncertainty and heartbreak, keep knocking on the doors, because on the other side is your son.

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Regina Bain is many things. She is an actress. She is a singer. She is an educator and social activist. She is the Executive Director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Ask her who she is at heart, and she will tell you that she is a dancer. A Double Dutcher who finds the expression of her soul’s joy through movement. 

When we pondered who would be the first guest At the Podium, Regina sprang to mind. I believed she could speak authentically to this moment. At that time in February 2021, Regina herself was making significant life transitions that inevitably caused her (like all of us) to look back at what was, even as she (like all of us) contemplated what would be. I also knew that she could find the language to express what it meant to go deep into one’s heart and excavate truths and yearnings that may have been dormant for years, and once awakened could cause one to rethink the very concept of who one is. That is a core tenant of At the Podium. When we start rummaging around in the forgotten places, the overlooked places, we start creating the space for something new to enter our lives. 

There is another profound action that Regina brings to this conversation. She calls the names of those we know and those we do not know, who make impacts on our lives. To honor those names recognizes the power of community and the gifts of those who can see past race, color, social circumstance to acknowledge brilliance in another human being. It breathes life into the notion of John Donne’s “no man is an island entire of itself.” This is also at the core of At the Podium – learning to see our common humanity and our unique worth reflected in the eyes of another person and accepting that we all play a part in one another’s life journeys.

The metaphor of Double Dutch is apt. A group of people working together in time and rhythm while having a really good time in order to win that prize. To be crowned Double Dutch Queen.

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In 1916, Robert Frost published his poem “The Road Not Taken”. I wonder if he knew when he wrote it that he was composing a poem that would resonate with artists, rock bands and school children 100 years later. It is a story about a single traveler who has come to a fork in the road. He has reached a point in his journey where he has to make a choice about which path he will take. He has no friend to text, no therapist to consult, no other opinion to consider. On this particular day, there is no real appreciable difference between the two paths, but he chooses the one that has seen less traffic, and in doing so, steps into poetic and literary history.

Gamal Palmer’s journey through his life and career has been a series of roads less traveled. His introduction to theater came at the age of 12 when he joined a prison theater group whose plays helped incarcerated men experience if even briefly, freedom and their own humanity. As a young child, he went with his mother who volunteered at needle exchange programs to keep users from contracting HIV in Philadelphia, not soccer practice. At 14 years old, when most kids were fighting to stay in the closet, he came out.

Using vivid memory recall and storytelling, and a willingness to speak frankly and from the heart, Gamal illustrates what a rich life and career look like when we dare to spread our wings and soar. When we dare to design our lives in ways that people may not recognize. And like our traveler in Robert Frost’s poem, Gamal experiences the consequences of taking an unexpected journey. Some things fall away, as they must, to allow new wonders to emerge.

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In my wide-ranging conversation with the brilliant Rachana Garg, I was reminded that the antidote to chaos is not a staid peace, but rather a radical dose of empathy, detachment, and curiosity.

Empathy is the vehicle to build community with the people in our world. All people. Not just our cohorts or political comrades. Not only those whom we go to church with on Sunday morning, or synagogue on Saturday night, or no church at all.

Detachment comes from freeing ourselves from the labels that we use to define as the dreaded others/them/they, those who disagree with our worldviews and beliefs. And curiosity is having courage enough to ask even a stranger, “What do you need?”

Rachana pulls from an array of life experiences – the theater, pharmaceutical sales, and yoga, as well as the example of her hard-working parents – to orchestrate a life of openness, breath, and a focused mind.

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My conversation with my dear friend and colleague Pun Bandhu was a great reminder that we are not here to be supporting players in our narratives. There is power and freedom in recognizing and embracing with open arms the wide dimensionality of who we are, even if who we are doesn’t fit into a neat and convenient category of who the world, our parents, and even our friends think we should be. As Pun reminds us so beautifully, we must break free of prisms that prevent us from being the heroes and emotional engines of our own lives. 

Through Pun’s honest detailing of his journey – beginning from life in Jakarta, to navigating his teenage years as an immigrant in America, to living out his passion as an actor from the stages of Yale School of Drama to significant roles in theater, film, and television, to becoming an award-winning producer as well as an activist– we learn our life’s work is about paring away the artifice and noise of expectations so that we can reveal who we are – not only to the world but more importantly to ourselves.

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