At the Podium with Patrick Huey

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Nick Prefontaine survived the unthinkable. A snowboarding accident at the age of 14 where he landed on his head, with only a pair of thick goggles protecting his skull as a he was flung down the mountain. In a coma for almost a month, even the doctors said the prognosis was grim. When he finally awoke, he had to learn to walk, talk, and even swallow again. How he survived and rebuilt his life one small step at a time, is miraculous. What he did with his life after that, is a testament to the power of the human spirit, and what a person can do with the support of his family, and the inner spirit and strength to overcome all the obstacles life puts on his path.

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Never Let a Closed Door Keep You Out.

Kate Miller has had a prolific career as an actress – from starring on Broadway with Carol Burnett in Moon Over Buffalo, to working the soap opera scene in New York on One Life to Live, to working opposite Tom Selleck in CBS’s Blue Bloods, to her latest role as Amanda Shaw in Hightown, Kate has done it all. Not bad for a woman I met in her 20’s playing a rambunctious Tatiana in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a theater company performing on the streets of New York City. 

In an industry that is known for discarding women after a certain age, Kate did the impossible and reinvented herself and her career in her 40s – in Los Angeles! Despite the doors being closed to her. As she says no one in Hollywood was interested in her when she showed up to begin her television career in Hollywood Land. But she persisted and those doors eventually opened to her. 

Today, Kate is sanguine about those times she was wandering in the wilderness of an industry that worships at the altar of youth. Kate used those hard times and the down times that she faced, as a catalyst for huge growth and personal changes that she says were necessary. She got married. She bought a house. Made a posthumous peace with a mother with whom she had a complex relationship. All the stuff that grown people hopefully do – settle into their life. Learn a few lessons. Live.

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Live the Life You Want to Have. Be the Person You Want to Be.

Robyn Vie-Carpenter-Brisco has a big name and has built a big life of many different existences. Author. Crystals and semi-precious stones expert. President of the Board of the History Museum in Baton Rouge. Self-proclaimed Goddess of Joy. Today, she is the founder of The Confidence Conference. A nonprofit organization that she is building to address the decline in young girls' confidence and belief in themselves (the numbers are worrisome). She says that this advocacy and passion is the one that will be with her for the rest of her life. More poetically she states that in her work today she is “making space for women and girls to understand that they are magnificent.”

Robyn has lived an expansive and unexpected life, and she has lived it on her terms, because as she views it the life you are experiencing is the life you've decided to experience. Hers has been a life defined by love, gratitude and joy. She reminds us that if you are getting the gift of another day, you have the opportunity to create something new. You have the opportunity to live the life you want and be the person that you want to be. You can decide to love yourself in a way that is meaningful.

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The Future of Wellness is Ugly.

With the founding of Sanctum, Luuk Melisse has started a sound, dance and movement phenomenon that is being called a Nomadic Movement. At the core of the Sanctum experience is Luuk’s mission to help his followers (and himself) face head on those things that hinder our fullest expression of who we are: limiting self-doubt, the need for perfectionism, always having to look cool and be in control, and not wanting to face the parts of ourselves that may be unpretty. As Luuk says with potentially some controversy “the future of wellness is ugly.” It’s messy. It isn’t about getting it “right.” 

In the Sanctum experience which Luuk conceived because of the profound loneliness that people were experiencing during the pandemic, there are tears, there is laughter, there are people maybe even looking silly. People are coming together. There is freedom! What isn’t there is competition. There is no electronic board posting how many calories you are burning or how you are performing against the other people in the class with you. Luuk creates a safe and nurturing atmosphere for people to break free by pushing their bodies to almost physical exhaustion through what Luuk describes as a “holistic movement sequence rooted in kundalini yoga, martial arts, animalistic flow, breath work and primal fitness.” They can no longer resist but give in to the letting go.

Enriching this journey for Luuk, is the fact that he is building this global movement alongside Gabriel, the man he calls his partner in life, crime, and business. With a dark, candlit space and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, Luuk, Gabriel and their vibing followers are bouncing to a beat underpinned by music from the electronic music scene in Amsterdam to give themselves the space to move through the physical discomfort of intense physical movement into what Luuk describes as more peace and more headspace.

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Getting Engaged in Your Life.

Delia McLinden (founder of the lifesaving Archangel Animal Network and Vice President of the global skincare and body care brand Farmhouse Fresh) poses a profound question for us – “When you take away your coping mechanisms. What then?” Her answer – “You realize there are a whole lot of other things [you have] to address.”

For Delia it was consciously changing her relationship to alcohol. As she describes it, drinking had become a thought consuming and physically impacting crutch for her. Though she seemed to have it all together from outward appearances (she has not one, but two thriving careers, has a husband whom she works with, and is parenting a teenage son who just started driving!), inside, she wasn't well. Something had to change. That something was her drinking. We talk about her process of how she broke the cycle of drinking, her perspective on AA and the labels she chooses to apply to herself. We also tackle the big idea that if there is something in your life, in your world, in your neighborhood that you think needs to be fixed or changed or done over, then get off your duff and take action! No matter how small, you must do something, because engagement is the price of admission to this thing called life.

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Mistakes. Triumphs. And Celebrations.

I met John Adams in 1996 through one of my closest friends Toby Poser (Season 1, Episode 12 ATP) who would soon become his wife. John, at that time, was an ex-model, and a punk rocker fronting his band called Banana Fish that performed in bars around Manhattan with John sporting a white g-string (pun definitely intended) – talk about a man unafraid of risks!

 He was also a cancer survivor. Prior to his diagnosis, he was one of the chosen few men who sat at the apex of the modeling world working with geniuses like John Varvatos, Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani. Naomi, Linda, Christy and Cindy were “fun and great to work with” as he recalls today. But when that lump appeared on his neck, and the doctors had to cut it out of him to biopsy it, he had to wait from that Thursday to Monday to find out whether he had a chance to live, or whether he was going to die. Today, he describes that waiting game as the hardest part. As he says, “Those days from the day they cut your tumor out 'til they day they tell you what you got, those days are the most terrifying of all. That's where you really gotta dig deep down into your heart and get through every second.” John survived the diagnosis and the devastating lows of chemotherapy. It ended his career. More than the physical havoc cancer visited on his body, it made him realize he wanted more from his life. And more he would get. A wife. Two beautiful kids. A spiraling drug addiction that almost upended everything, and a rising from the ashes that will inspire your soul.

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Find Your Voice, Own Your Joy, Live in Balance.

Belgin Aksoy has started a global movement for the health and wellness of the world. As a way to show gratitude for her own health and recovery journey, she founded Global Wellness Day in 2012 after her diagnosis and treatment for thyroid cancer. Since that time of her healing and the launch of Global Wellness Day, over one billion people in 170 countries have participated in Global Wellness Day activities. Her premise is quite simple: wellness is a human right - no matter your financial status or where you live. And it is also a responsibility - you have to do the things that allow yourself to be well. Among them are drink more water, take time to eat a meal with your family (whoever that may be), get exercise and perform acts of service for other people, and get rest. 

Very few things in this world can bring one billion people together in peace and harmony, but from her cancer diagnosis to her expression of gratitude for her healing, Belgin is living proof that it can be so. We can all come together for the good, and we can change our lives and our world by searching for spiritual , mental and emotional balance, finding and owning our voices, and finding and owning our joy. 

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Grappling with My Biracial Identity.

In this two-part episode of “At the Podium,” I sit down with LeRoy McClain. An award-winning actor who has distinguished himself On and Off Broadway, and in television shows such as And Just Like That (in the role of Andre Rashad Wallace) and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (in the role of Shy Baldwin) and the feature film Respect (in the role of Cecil Franklin).

In Part II Grappling with My Biracial Identity we examine LeRoy’s origin story and the man beneath the success. LeRoy and I look back at his time at our shared alma mater Yale Drama School which he refers to as one of the roughest, yet most important times of his life. We learn how he had to navigate the complexities of growing up a biracial child in England and Hawaii. And how the murder of George Floyd brought into LeRoy’s family life the contentious dialogue about race, responsibility and representation that was being fought for out on the streets of America in 2020. These questions of race and racial identity were inevitable, because, As LeRoy says, growing up he didn’t get to choose despite having a white, English mother because “As society views me… I am a black man.”

In the midst of it all, LeRoy is still able to acknowledge how lucky and blessed his life has been. He graciously gives flowers to the people in his life and career who not only believed in him along the way but gave him the opportunities to be who is and to work (gifts from God to any actor or artist).

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The Career that Almost Wasn’t.

In this two-part episode of “At the Podium,” I sit down with LeRoy McClain. An award-winning actor who has distinguished himself On and Off Broadway, and in television shows such as the Sex and the City reboot  And Just Like That (in the role of Andre Rashad Wallace) and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (in the role of Shy Baldwin) and the feature film Respect (in the role of Cecil Franklin).

In Part I The Career that Almost Wasn’t we delve into the journey of his career and how he transitioned from his love of a life in the theater where he played such iconic roles as Hamlet in Hamlet, Cassius in The Public’s Othello with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jessica Chastain, and Walker Lee Jr. in A Raisin in the Sun to his burgeoning career in front of the camera. LeRoy also gives us a personal and touching view of his relationships with three major leading ladies in his career: Jennifer Hudson (Respect), Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Karen Pittman (And Just Like That) – and what he learned from working with these three powerhouse artists. We also explore how the untimely death of his father made him consider giving up his acting career but was also the event in his life that freed him to experience some of the biggest successes in his career to date in television and film. And how one flippant comment impacted his view of himself and the trajectory of his career.

During it all, LeRoy is still able to acknowledge how lucky and blessed his life has been. He graciously gives flowers to the people in his life and career who not only believed in him along the way but gave him the opportunities to be who is and to work (the real gift for any actor or artist).

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Charles Chen is a man on mission to bring wellness, healing, and clarity to the world. His platforms have been broad and far reaching – Dr. Oz Show and Good Morning America. His prayer is simple: “Use me. Use me wisely.” His life of service and transformation began with what he calls his surrender moment. When he was 15 years old and began to free himself from the mental and emotional prison of his childhood growing up as an immigrant in America. To face the shame of his emerging sexuality, and the unacknowledged and unreceived pain of the sexual trauma he experienced as a young boy, that lead him to becoming mute. To stopconsuming mounds of junk food and French fries that led him to suffer from obesity. 

 The surrender moment. When he hit rock bottom, and that pain became the catalyst that sparked change within him. When he moved from a life of numbness and standing stuck at closed doors – unaware of the opportunities to live that he simply could not see – to his life today where he can proclaim, “Don’t be scared. Live fully and be in the present.” Today, Charles boldly professes that we are all divine vessels, here to be used in service to other people by showing up as the highest versions of ourselves. Looking back, he does not regret his journey, because he says that for the divine to come through us and to use us, we must first be broken. Broken to be transformed.

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