Caterpillar Goo

I met Joi Razinha, known professionally as Tamra Henna, in high school. I had a couple circles of friends, one that smoked, drank, skipped school, and got into other miscellaneous teenage hooliganism, and one that was artistic, academically successful, and sat on the edge of the pool talking about Sylvia Plath and whatnot. Joi was in that second group, although she told me she maybe would’ve preferred to be in the first.

After reconnecting on Facebook many years later, as high school friends are prone to doing, I first saw Joi belly dance at a hookah lounge in Addison, I believe, around 2013 or 2014. I had never seen it before and had no idea how to react. She hung out and chatted with me between dances, and I realized that she was not the shy, quiet person I thought that I remembered from high school. She was smart, funny, and charming, and I’ve loved watching her adventures through the lens of Facebook ever since. As she says, I could do a whole series of episodes on her and her life.

Thank you so much, Joi, for the time and energy you brought to this project. If you like the result, we should definitely collaborate again. Hearing smart, thoughtful people talk about what they’ve learned and how they’ve learned it is the best way to grow, and looking into universes in which you yourself don’t live is the best way to expand your worldview and develop your compassion.

You can find Joi at:

tamrahennabellydancer.com

Instagram: TamraHenna_Official

TikTok: TamraHenna_Official

Facebook: Joi Razinha

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. Music from Audiio: “Welcome to Us (Instrumental)” by Sebastian Kauderer; “The Slowest Journey (Instrumental)” by Good Weather For An Airstrike; “Bang Bang Bang (Instrumental)” by Moarn; “Acceptance (Instrumental)” by Frankie Orella; “Intertwined (Instrumental)” by As Tall As Pine Music; “Enter” by Christopher Galovan. Music from YouTube: “Arabic Wedding (arabic instrumental)” by Boris Skalsky; “Sahara Rains” by Hanu Dixit; “Shesh Pesh” byJR Tundr. The song “Ya Tamra Henna” was originally performed in the 1957 film by Fayza Ahmed, and this version was commissioned by Joi Razinha from, and performed by, Matias Hazrum. Other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the tabla and the outro music, which I put together from instrument loops on Soundation.

Here’s the transcript:

Joi: Well, it's funny that the name of your project is Caterpillar Goo. And that really made me smile when I saw it because, I think I had seen recently the whole thing about how, when a caterpillar transforms it essentially disintegrates and comes back together, and I resonate with that quite a bit actually, and I kind of feel like I'm always in a state of goo. I'm not sure if I've ever actually become a butterfly. I'm just always kind of gooey. Maybe that's not the same for everyone, but for me it's true. I'm always changing and trying to figure out who the hell I am just in general.

If you don't have any experience with belly dancing, it's okay to look at the dancer. It's okay to interact with the dancer. The whole point, if you're ever at a place and a belly dancer shows up, is for the whole evening to be more fun. No matter if the dancer doesn't look like what you expected them to look like, or if you are weirded out because you're not used to that, it's just all about having fun and enjoying the moment. I like it when my audience interacts with me. I want them to yell and scream and applaud, and they can tip, and they can get up and dance with me. I don't want touching or anything like that, obviously, but I want interaction. That's really one of the biggest things about being a belly dancer is that you are there to facilitate the party. And there is not a worse crowd ever than one that is I not looking or just refuses to be into it. It just sucks every bit of energy out of you. It is so hard.

I've done a lot of shows, and I've had a lot of people tip me in a lot of different ways. Depending on where I'm at, in the nightclub where I first started, in the beginning, they did not allow anyone to touch the dancers. So you could not accept tips in your costume. They could hand it to you, but it was mostly, they would come out on the dance floor, and they would do a money shower and they were allowed to dance with you a little bit, but the bouncer would escort them away from the stage if they stayed too long. That was awesome. I felt like such a rock star back then. But other places where I danced, where it was maybe a smaller restaurant, I would accept tips in my costume. And usually what I do is I tell them where I want them to tip me and, side of my hip, maybe I'll have an arm band, and I'll point to my arm band if… Maybe I'll let them do it in the front of, like in my strap. But a lot of people go straight for the front of the bra, and you just have to block it off. But, mostly it's Persian grandmas want to shove $20 bills down your bra, and I'm like, okay, I guess this is what we're doing now.

I've had very, very few incidents where people were really handsy, or I've had real problems. Occasionally you get somebody who decided they want to dive down the front of your costume to give you that whole dollar that they had in their hand. And you know, it's like, you just get really good at evasive maneuvering. But mostly people are respectful. The worst problems I had were probably with 20 year old college girls trying to twerk on me.

My dad is a Muslim, he's a white guy, and back in the seventies when everyone was converting to Islam, that's what he did, and him and my mom got divorced when I was really young. I was about two. And so I never, he wasn't in my life a lot because he went off and did his own thing. Spent some time in Bangladesh I think. And then got married again and married a woman of the faith and then went off and lived someplace else, and just wasn't a very present person in my life after that. He's lived in Turkey and Cyprus and places like that.

But I think the fact that he became a Muslim kind of in the back of my mind peaked my curiosity about the Middle East maybe. And so the story is that I was signing up for classes at community college in Austin and there was a course called Mideast Dance. So there was a connection there and I think that's what kind of peaked my interest. But I quickly realized that you're not going to connect with your Muslim family member by becoming a belly dancer. That's just not the best way to do that. And he's very religious, and there's a lot of tension in the Middle East between people who are very religious and people who are more secular, and the dance is definitely frowned upon in religious communities in the Middle East, because it's not how traditional Muslim women would behave, right?

So yeah, I started taking Z-Helene's class and, her name is Z-Helene, and there was, they used to have a show at the Student Union, and so that was where I went and I kind of saw my first actual belly dance show, and I was so enamored with, you know, the ladies were beautiful, and their costumes were sparkly and everyone's dancing and everyone's free. And, you know, I'm 19 at this point, 20, and I just thought it was amazing and it was so different from what I had been around growing up, that I was hooked. I really wanted to do that thing. And I really fell in love with it. I fell in love with the music, actually, is what happened. And it really did change my life. I mean, obviously it took me in a direction that I never would have gone if I hadn't taken that one class.

So yeah, I took a couple semesters with Helene, and her style was really a lot different from what I do now. She's a very American, hippie, goddess kind of thing. And as I started studying the dance, I kind of became a little bit more interested in how it related to the cultures that it came from. And, so I wanted to do more of the Arabic style. I loved the Arabic music. I wanted to use that kind of stuff and learn.

I had a job at a hardware store off of 29th Street. And I was a cashier for a couple years and one of the guys that worked in the paint department, people would come up to me and say, hey, do you know Jonathan's girlfriend is a belly dancer? And I was like, yeah, whatever, because this is Austin. And like the hippies used to dance at Eeyore’s Birthday Party in their patchouli and their broomstick skirts. And they were like belly dancers. And I was like, that's not a real belly dancer, you know, I'm just like, yeah, right. Whatever. And when they would go to Jonathan's house and see his girlfriend, they would go, hey, this other girl, she's a belly dancer. And she would go, yeah. Right. Whatever.

So then we met each other, and I don't even remember how we met, and she's probably been the biggest influence on my life. We're still best friends, like 26 years later. She was dancing at the Student Union. She was teaching through the Student Union. She started doing workshop productions and things like that. And I was just kind of her tag along buddy. I would do whatever because I was broke and she would let me come to things if I worked for her.

So I just, I was doing it as a hobby, really, only. And there were a couple of restaurants that I started dancing in, in the late nineties. There's a place called Ararat, a restaurant called Ararat on North Loop. And that was one of the first places that I gigged at. And then there was another little Persian place called Best Middle Eastern.

So I danced at a couple of places, but it was really intermittent. And, then in 2001, my ex and I ended up moving back to Dallas. And that really changed my life as far as actually becoming a paid gigging dancer and really, teaching and all of the things that I've been doing for the past 20 years.

I started working, Dallas had the clubs, it had bigger nightclubs, it had a Greek restaurant, it had a Lebanese club called Al-Amir, and it had Persian nightclubs. So it had things that Austin did not have. It had nightlife and it had paying gigs. So I started dancing in the clubs and either… I think I did my first professional gig in Fort Worth at a restaurant called Byblos, which is still around. It was New Year's Eve. He probably couldn't get any of the local dancers. And I was probably cheaper than the going rate because I didn't know what I was doing, but that was my first paying gig.

And then after that, a good friend of mine that I ended up dancing with for a long time in a professional troupe, she got me a job at Al-Amir, which was the prestigious club. It was where all of the Arab families went, and it was a really great international club. She got me a job there, and I started working on the weeknights when it was slow because you gotta work your way up in this business. And I think it was 50 bucks on the weeknights, and sometimes I wouldn't even dance because there was not enough customers to dance for.

But then the weekend shows were amazing. And it was a three level club and there were, it was packed with people. We had bouncers that would walk us through the crowds to the stage and it was just amazing. And so yeah, I danced there, actually danced at Al-Amir. That's actually the job that I've had the longest, my whole adult life. I worked at that club from about 2002 until I moved here to Ohio in 2021.

I have a website it's tamrahennabellydancer.com. I have an Instagram. It is TamraHenna_Official with an underscore. So my TikTok is TamraHenna_Official. And I'm on Facebook as Joi Razinha. And if you, I'm less politically vocal on Facebook than I used to be because I've been Zucked a few times and I figure I'm going to lose my privileges if I say anything more about what I really think about things politically on Facebook anymore.

Rod: I'm glad you said the Tamra Henna part, because I was going to ask you that. Where did the name come from?

Joi: Tamra Henna is a movie character, and she was in this movie. She was a dancer. She danced with the family circus, and It's kind of an Egyptian My Fair Lady story, like rich guy comes to the circus, makes a bet that he can take this girl and make her acceptable to society. And the dancer that plays the role, she was actually a dancer and an actress. She was one of my favorite of what they call Golden Era dancers, the dancers from the ‘50s, like the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema. The title of the movie is Tamra Henna. And the song is “Tamra Henna”. And the character is Tamra Henna. And I loved the song and the dancer so much that when I decided to pick a name, and this was back when it was the thing to do to pick an Arabic name if you were going to have a stage name or some kind of stage name, I decided that I would pick that name because it's a fictional character, and I figured I'm not passing myself off as an Arab woman. I'm naming myself after a fictional character so anyone who hears the name, who is of the culture, knows that's not my real name. And the song's a great song. I still love to dance to it.

Rod: With the belly dancing, what was it about it that resonated with you? Like how, how did it get it hooks into you so fast and deep?

Joi: Honestly I think it was the permission to move and to be kind of free. And I think that's what really draws a lot of people into it. And unfortunately it does tend to draw a lot of people who've had, you know, trauma, bodily trauma in their lives and have not been able to express themselves physically because it's so much about personal expression and expressing your sensuality, your… it's not so gendered as it used to be, but like when I started it was all about expressing your femininity and the whole goddess angle, and being a woman and yada yada. As of 2022, we've kind of moved past that somewhat and realized that both people who are male and female and everywhere in between, like to express those sides.

But I think back in the day, it was definitely marketed quite a bit towards women and freeing, kind of give a space to express yourself, physically and to dance and be sensual. And to feel beautiful. And I think that's initially what drew me to it. And there's a lot of orientalism in that as well. Like it's exotic, it's sparkly, it's a persona that you can put on. I think the thing that really kept me was definitely the music. It was deep and complex and it really struck me. And then when I started learning about how did people move to this music, it was also really different from any dance form that I had seen before. And I think that just kind of captured my imagination and really pulled me into it.

As you go along, you start creating, not necessarily a persona for yourself, but in a way it kind of is a persona for yourself. And I became a belly dancer, and that's who I was and what I was. It's not spiritual, but it is. It's very, very physical. For me, it was the way to get in touch with my body, and it's like that for a lot of different people.

Rod: I get the sense that you think deeply about how you engage with belly dancing as a white person.

Joi: I do. I definitely do more now than I did. I mean, there's racial bias everywhere, and it's just when you have people that start pointing it out, people who are of other races and say, hey, this has been our experience in this community, it's really kind of, it was a challenging time, and I think it still remains a challenging time. When you're a white person engaged with the world in general, you really look at it one way and then you have an idea of how the world is. And then when you start hearing other people's experiences, then hopefully you realize that it's not the same for everyone.

It's really easy as a white person to get sucked into, “I'm so put upon; nobody likes me because I'm white,” and I've seen that conversation happen. I know how people get sucked into the resentment of woke culture because I've seen it happen within the belly dance community. I have felt it within myself and had to wrestle with it and go look, this is not the road you want to go down. This is not going to uncover a part of your own personality that is good, so check yourself. But it's easy to do. And it did make me take a step back and try to be a lot more introspective with how I'm engaging with other people, with the dance form, the cultures.

And so I did have to be… I don't think I had to be; a lot of people have chosen not to. But I became a lot more introspective about what it means to be a white person in a space that is not mine. It's not my culture. I think a lot of dancers who spent a lot of time in this space just assumed we're getting these jobs and we're gigging, and it's because, always it's because of our ability or whatever it is that we have that is appealing to the audience and to the venue owners, whoever's hiring us at the time. And so we assume that we're getting jobs because we're the best person for it. And a lot of other people having found their voice online, were able to come in and say, hey, I'm a dancer, I'm a black woman. Or I'm a man, or I'm a trans man, or whatever, and I'm trying to get jobs. And I can't be hired because of racial biases that exist and people who are gatekeeping and who have a lot of say on who gets to dance and who doesn't. And sometimes it's because there's racial bias in the owners of the venues, and they tell you as a scheduler that they don't want certain kind of people. I know I have been told, I did the schedule for Al-Amir for many years and other clubs, it wasn't just there, but I've been told so and so looks old, don't have them back. I've never been told specifically, we don't want black dancers, but black dancers on the schedule have felt like they weren't welcome.

And I heard that from people who were in my community who said that that was the way that they had always felt. There's a lot of racial bias, all over the world. Anti-black racial bias all over the world. It's not specifically a white American thing. I've seen other biases, size biases, people being told that dancers were too overweight, too old, too this, too that, whatever it is. And some of it was in the professional spaces, where I was more familiar, and in other situations it was members of the community, say a teacher would make comments to her students about who looked right, or dancers being too dark for this or too light for that, you know, just whatever.

And so I think people started talking about the biases that they had experienced in this dance form. And it caused a lot of consternation, and a lot of people weren't ready to hear that maybe some of the things, the ways that they had behaved themselves, were problematic for other people. And there's a lot of controversy around it. I think that there are a lot of people who felt like it went too far. There was a lot of talk about canceling certain people, and some people needed to be canceled because they had really hurt a lot of other people and didn't really seem to care. But it's really interesting because it's kind of a microcosm of the same conversations that you may have seen happening in our culture at large over the last year or so. It happened within the community on a smaller scale, and with everyone being home and being online, people were talking about things a lot more.

So it did make me have to think about what was I doing? How was I engaging with other dancers? How was I engaging with the culture? You can't help the skin you were born in, on either side, but you do have to recognize how have I benefited, how have we benefited I should say, from being the right color or at least not being the wrong color.

And do I even really need to be practicing an art form that belongs to a different culture? And it took me a while. I never thought that I would give it up, but I really thought that if I'm going to do it, I need to be thoughtful about it. I've engaged with the communities personally for a long time. I worked in nightclubs that were owned by Lebanese and Syrian people, and I heard the conversation from their end on what are they looking for in entertainment, so I understand why am I making the entertainment choices that I am making. I don't present the dance form as a cultural exercise. It is very based in the traditional styles from the Middle East, but there's also an element of Las Vegas showgirl happening. And for some people, they feel like it invalidates the, like a lot of people want it presented as, this is a thing that I have learned, and it's an academic exercise, so I am doing this dance from this region and I'm, you know, and it's very specific. Whereas I come from the entertainment side of it, whereas I kind of know what the traditions are, but they've asked me to do fire. So, which is not necessarily traditional, but my boss is saying, hey, we want the New Year's show this year to be like, what can you do to make it bigger than last year?

So it's a real balancing act trying to stay somewhat traditional and always be respectful of the cultures that I am interacting with, but understanding that Friday night is Bollywood Night at the Arabic nightclub and the crowd wants me to dance to Bollywood music. And so I do, because they tip when you do it, because they're happy that you're dancing to music that they like and enjoy, you know what I'm saying? So it's real interesting. But if I posted a video of myself doing that, somebody online who has been studying belly dance and has some really, ideas about, what is appropriate and what's not, and are you being orientalist and are you doing all of that? They may look at that completely without context and go, what are you doing? You're just contributing to the muddying of the waters. And as an outsider to the culture, I have to understand what I'm doing and make sure that I'm not going too far, if that makes sense.

The teaching world, the hobbyist world, and the professional world are sometimes really different. And a lot of people made their living as dance teachers and had studios and taught a lot of people and put on a lot of big workshops and made money and produced other dancers. But depending on what area of the country you were in, you might not have any real opportunity to engage with anyone from any of the communities where the dance is native to, or where the dance is from. So if you're in some small town somewhere and there's no one who's from the Middle East, but you like belly dance because you were exposed to it, like you could open a studio and teach everyone that you know how to do this dance. And no one has met a single person from the Middle East.

So I think in a lot of cases, that's where there's some divorce from the reality of engaging within the communities and just a bunch of Western people, in a lot of cases a bunch of white people, doing a dance form that they can tell themselves a lot of different stories about that aren't necessarily true. Like there's a lot of incorrect history of the dance and how it came about and what it was for. If you've ever done any Googling of the history of belly dance, and I don't know why you would have, but if you ever do, there's a lot of stories out there that it was goddess worship, or it was birthing rituals, or it was this or that, or the other thing.

And none of those things are true. Belly dance is not thousands of years old. It's from the turn of the last century. And it kind of came out of, what we see today as being placed on the stage entertainment in nightclubs and in the movies and things like that, kind of came from the cabarets that were started in Egypt in the early 20th century, late 19th century, mostly early 20th century, but was kind of a result of colonization. There were nightclubs because people wanted to see Western style shows. And they were kind of catering to their own culture, but also trying to emulate the colonizers, perhaps, in putting these things together.

And then you get the movies which were heavily patterned after Hollywood. There would be musicals where, or any movie, didn't matter what the movie was, had to have a belly dance scene because it's what, people wanted to see stuff like that. So there was a lot of cross pollination even back then, but what we do today came out of that time. So what was happening before then, the dances that were the entertainment that was happening in people's homes, at weddings, at gatherings and things like that looked a lot different than what we see today.

And so, no, it wasn't thousands of years of birthing rituals and, and goddess worship, but when you're in a little town someplace or some place in California or whatever, it sounds really cool, right? It sounds great. And it's appealing to your customers who are middle aged housewives, and it sounds really awesome, and I want to worship myself like a goddess, or I want to take part in this dance that's as old as the pyramids. And so there's a lot of stuff going around out there that we made up. And now it's possible to be confronted with somebody who is from North Africa and says, wow, that's a bunch of bullshit. What are you doing?

So we're being confronted as Westerners with our own colonizer ways, I suppose. And it's not always fun. It's not always fun to hear. So it's been a tumultuous time within the community. And I don't know how that really has changed what I'm doing. I think it has caused me to think more about how I've benefited from my own privilege and to really examine, am I doing anything to help people who haven't been, for whom it hasn't been as easy to participate, am I doing anything to help those people feel more welcome? Am I making sure that the choices that I make don't stray too far and go into the realm of disrespect.

But I've been doing this for a really long time. I can do something else, and I guess that's kind of where I'm at right now. I'm not ready to do something else yet. Gigging is an addiction, truly. Performing is addictive, and steady income is addictive too. This year I'm turning 50. How many 50 year old belly dancers gigging in clubs are there is the question, and the answer is probably more than you think. But you know, there are younger dancers coming up and you don't want to be asked to leave, so it's better to leave on a high note. I don't quite look my age yet. And I can still teach, and I think I'm not too bad at that. I've done okay with the teaching, and I'd like to do more of it. I can still do it physically. I can still do everything that, almost, that I used to do before. I don't have any physical limitations yet. In this business, it's more about, does your client perceive you as being the right age to be entertaining them? Because ageism is a thing, yo. Everyone at the nightclub is still 21 and I’m not. But I do have to start thinking about what do I do when I'm not a dancer anymore full time. What do I do with that? So it's like the next chapter. And do I try to stay a dancer as long as possible? Or do I just chuck it and open a restaurant?

So I've talked about what I've been doing, but I really haven't talked about how it changed me, I guess. Like how did I change from being a really, really shy teenager to, I don't, I'm not shy anymore. I was really shy, or maybe I wasn't shy. I think maybe it was circumstantial. Um, you know, it's, I was always the new kid because we moved a lot. So I never had really the opportunity to make friends, you know, and this is when I'm going to get emotional. So just bear with me. So when you come from a really shitty situation, you, I personally don't want to bring that, like I don't want to burden other people with that I guess like how do you talk about it? I just wanted to go to school and get away from it. And I certainly didn't want to make school life for the friendships that I found there about my personal drama, I guess, so it was just like, I don't have anything good to talk about. So I'll just be really quiet.

I guess that's kind of where I was at at that point in time. And really, I, I don't know that dance changed me. I think it just drew it out what was already there, if that makes sense. I think maybe if I hadn't had the experience of becoming a belly dancer and having all of the different experiences that I've had through that, I might have stayed more reserved. I don't know, or just would've gone a different direction. But this was really a way for me to figure out who I was and who I am and really just express that. And like I said, I don't think I'm different. The transformation has been in allowing me to become who I am. It's like the butterfly isn't any different from the caterpillar. It's just the final form. It's the same DNA, right? It's just whether it's able to figure out how to fly.

I decided to try something different this time. I wanted to experiment with turning short stories I wrote into audio, and this is the first of several, I hope. The hard part for me is always asking other people to do something for me, like sitting for an interview, or in this case reading the story out loud into a recorder.

As I explain in a conversation with Flora after the story, I met Anne McQuary virtually in 2007 when we were both writing blogs, largely about our thoughts, feelings, fears, joys, frustrations, and laugh out loud moments of parenting. While I’ve never met in what I happily still think of as the real, physical world, we were blogger friends and then Facebook friends, and when I thought of someone to read my story, she immediately came to mind. I asked her, and amazingly, she said yes. And she killed it! She didn’t just read it, she performed it, and the result still chokes me up after dozens of readings and listenings. I couldn’t have asked for better. Thank you Anne! If ever I can return the kindness, let me know, though I’m not sure I’ll live up to the standard you set.

The story itself is a meditation on returning to dating later in life after divorce. I’ll resist all the things I want to say about it and let you have your own experience with it.

Thanks also to Flora, for getting on the mic with me and always encouraging me to be myself, try new things, and to commit the time to get it finished.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. I made the outro music on Soundation. The three other songs came from https://audiio.com/ and include “Building a Treehouse (Instrumental)” by As Tall As Pine; “Early Hours (Instrumental)” by Andy D. Park; and “Giving It All (Instrumental)” by Marshall Usinger.

Here’s the story:

“And The River Churns Opaquely” by Rod Haden

Madelina shifted her weight to the right. Her entire left leg, from her buttock all the way down into her calf, was dead. Well, not dead. She imagined dead doesn’t hurt. Sitting on the ground was not something people her age were meant to do. She could feel the blood returning, and it felt both better and worse at the same time. If she got up now, she would shamble and stagger, but if she waited much longer, she‘d have to ask him for help to make it upright at all. Dating was not something people her age were meant to do either.

“Let’s walk down to the bridge,” she said, stealing a sideways glance at Franklin’s face. He was staring across the river, not quite smiling. His thoughts were far from here, she supposed. He turned then, and his eyes snapped into focus on hers. Now he grinned, and she blushed. She couldn’t say why. He looked so different just then. Not younger, really, just… something. She couldn’t name it.

“Perfect,” he said, holding her gaze a moment before she looked away. The water was quick. Its red-brown surface was opaque and stippled with rushing debris.

He rolled awkwardly to his hands and knees, grunting. He paused there, staring intently down at the space between his thumbs. “It’ll take me a second,” he said simply. “I’m not the man I used to be.” He gave a short laugh. She thought she heard something else. A fart, maybe. She wondered if she imagined it. “I suppose I never really was the man I used to be!” He laughed again and lumbered up to one knee, then onto his feet. If he had farted, he made no sign that he was aware of it.

Madelina wondered if she should roll as he had done. She wasn’t at all certain she could get herself up and keep her skirt down, gracefully, modestly. She tried to remember how she got down there in the first place. Maybe she could reverse the process. She wished she had suggested a different spot for a first date. She loved to read here, in the sun, before the divorce. Nothing felt like hers anymore. She had wanted it to be hers again.

“May I give you a hand, lovely?” he asked. He set his feet at shoulder width and bent his knees, as if preparing to lift a great weight. She wondered if she should be offended at the implication. He reached out to her.

“Lovely?” she thought, and took his hand. She rose almost effortlessly. “Oh!” she breathed, and blushed again. “You’re stronger than you look!” He chuckled, and she caught herself. “No, I mean… not that you…”

“Yeah, I guess I do all right, once I get a solid foundation under me. And you’re light as a feather. You make me feel quite strapping, actually.”

His large, brown eyes held her as firmly as his grip. His bald head shone wetly. She suddenly felt the humidity herself, and a flush of heat. She brushed the back of her skirt. It was damp. She hoped it wasn’t muddy. The flooding of the week before had receded, but the riverbank was still saturated. It was foolish of her to bring him here to sit in the grass in a bright yellow dress like she was 20.

She could hear his breath. His face was still bright with that nameless something. It seemed like she had seen that face before, that she recognized him from somewhere. He released her hand and turned toward the bridge. He bent his arm, and she threaded hers into it. It was comfortable. Their feet moved in easy synchronicity as they strolled slowly along the bank.

“I’m sorry,” she said, touching his elbow with the fingers of her free hand, “for bringing you here. I should’ve suggested a coffee shop or something. I haven’t really done this in a while, you know.”

“Regret nothing,” he said. He has, she thought, a reader’s sense of language. “It’s beautiful here.” He breathed in. She felt his chest expand. “It smells like a fresh start. Everything’s been scoured clean.” He turned his head toward her. “Was there much devastation?” he asked. “In the flood?”

“Some,” she said. “But the bridge held.” They were almost underneath it now. There was no traffic passing above. The bank was slick as it descended to the water. They stopped on the last patch of grass before the mud, looking down. The water hurried, thick and rough. At the edge, waterlogged branches and unrecognizable detritus snagged in a tangle.

“Look,” he said, and slipped free of her arm. “There’s something there.” He took a few steps forward, moving slowly, planting his feet deliberately on the treacherous surface, step by step. “What an odd shape it is.” He crept forward, each step intentional.

“Setting his foundation,” she thought. She stayed where she was.

“It’s a stone,” he said at last, stopping and turning back to her. “A headstone, I think. Let’s take a closer look.” He held out his hand to her, but she was too far to reach him. Emulating his technique, she stepped slowly, slowly, setting her feet, glad of her sensible shoes. At last their fingers touched. They gazed down at the stone. It was chipped and rough, like slate, and half buried in the mud. She wondered from where it had washed up. He gripped her hand then, firmly. She didn’t pull away.

Our baby, Hope

Lost before she lived

Loved fiercely and forever

June 3, 1973

He squeezed her hand, shifted it from his right hand to his left, and squeezed it again. He slipped his freed arm around her waist and held her like that. She pressed her thigh against his and felt his warmth through the damp fabric of her skirt. He was solid, rooted to the ground. He didn’t move. They stood like that for a long time, saying nothing.

It’s been a struggle staying active and healthy and creative as this pandemic stretches on and on and on, and I just haven’t felt much like writing or creating or editing and adding music to the audio I recorded with brooks back in January. Often the basics have felt like just too much work. But here it is! Just in time for new surges in hospitalizations. Death is sitting right down on the couch with us and eating our snacks these days, so we might as well talk about it.

So although I often thought of Eddie Izzard’s bit on “Cake or Death” through the making of this episode, let’s all have a bit of cake AND death, shall we?

My thanks, as always, to Flora, whose steady support, love, humor, and real talk have made this pandemic so much better, at least for me. I don’t know about you.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the outro music, which I made on Soundation.

The podcast story on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that I reference in the intro is Radiolab's “The Queen of Dying”.

Here’s the transcript:

brooks: My name's brooks kasson. I don't know what else to say, except that I'm a Scorpio. I guess I should start, the origins, not that I knew at the time, stretch back to when I was 32 years old and I joined for some inexplicable reason, I joined the Austin Memorial and Burial Society. So I have been a member of that for 40 some odd years. And I'd get the newsletters, and they were always interesting to me. And that particular organization now is called Funeral Consumers Alliance of Central Texas. And Nancy Walker is the Executive Director. She's fabulous. Fabulous.

And it may have been her that introduced me to Jo Jensen, who was an Oncology Chaplain at Seton at the time. And I had, all within a matter of a couple of weeks, I had heard about Death Cafes, and my ears perked up. And then the topic came around again. It was about 8 years ago. I met up with Jo and told her that I was interested in starting a Death Cafe, and I think that had occurred to her as well. And somehow we met up, and we decided to start or to hold a Death Cafe. Of course, neither one of us had ever been to one, but we were both interested in it, hers with the end of life process with her patients and me by whatever fluke, natural inclination I suppose. And so we found or went to the Death Cafe International website and learned a little bit about the origins of Death Cafe.

Voiceover: From the early 1980s, Swiss sociologist and anthropologist Bernard Crettaz and his wife Yvonne worked together studying the rites and rituals of death. After her death in 1999 and his retirement in 2002, Dr. Crettaz held the first of his Cafés Mortels, a salon of sorts that he facilitated gently with only a couple of rules: participants must always exhibit deep listening and rigorous honesty. The purpose was to pierce the taboo of speaking openly about death. Dr. Crettaz continued to host his Cafés Mortels until 2014.

In 2010, Jon Underwood, a web developer in the UK, was working on his own collection of projects about death. In his research, he read about Café Mortel and decided to hold an event in his living room in Hackney, London. He established the current Death Cafe model, built a website, standardized protocols, and spread the idea globally, with thousands of Death Cafes currently in existence in dozens of countries. A key innovation in Jon’s model was the addition of tea and cake to every Death Cafe event.

brooks: And traditionally, and of course I jumped all over this one, you served tea and cakes at a Death Cafe. Very British, very European. And I was already attracted to that idea. I grew up in the military and the first, in, when I was 4 and 5, we were in England right after World War II. So I have that European love of tea and pomp and circumstance kind of way imbued in the early neurology and preferences of me.

And I went out to the Salvation Army and bought dozens of tea cups and saucers, and of course made a big production of the whole thing. And we ended up in that first, and we advertised it, we spread the word, and we had like 50 people show up, way too many to do a Death Cafe effectively, but nonetheless, it was very new. And so we ended up with, Jo and I broke the group up into two circles of 25 people each, and then each one of us facilitated a circle.

And I think we had two or three meetings in that mode. And then it became obvious, a big circle was too much to handle and have any kind of intimacy, so we changed it to four tops. So we had four people in a group and then Jo and I would move around from table to table and just kind of sit in on the conversation. Every meeting I baked homemade brownies that were chock full of pecans and extra chocolate chips in there, and people brought their own water or tea or whatever it is they wanted and ate chocolate while we talked about death. If you're going to talk about death, you have to have chocolate. It is just part of the deal. And the format that we used there was a talking stick, and we used, had prompt cards, like a deck of cards with some questions on it that people could use for, to get their small group begun.

Rod: For you to have 50 people show up on your very first one, clearly it had some resonance in the community. I mean, it must’ve met a need that wasn’t being met elsewhere for it to immediately just jump off like that.

brooks: I agree.

Rod: What do you think appealed to you? You said you joined the group about funeral information when you were 32. What do you think it is about death and talking about death that connected with you?

brooks: Aside from the fact that I'm a Scorpio, and I'm constantly in transformation, which means that I'm involved in a process of loss on a very regular basis. And I'm very aware of that. I can't answer why I joined it back when I was 32, except that it was interesting to me.

You know, it's not like I've had a near-death experience. I can't tell you it's something glamorous like that. And it's not that I had my favorite childhood friend die in front of me. None of that. I didn't experience death in my family in any unusual way, other than losing grandparents, and then eventually in my 60s losing, my parents died. So the only thing, I mean, I'm just making up stuff here. All I can pin it on is just my natural inclination to focus on the loss piece.

I grew up in the military. My dad is, was, an officer. So that whole mindset, and I come from a long, I mean, my mother was second generation military as well. So I come from my long line of warriors and that's all about following orders, doing just what you're told to do, and killing people. Now, you don't want to inspect the killing people part. It was never talked about. The first dead body that I was presented with was from my father's mother, and I didn't want to look at it. So I didn't, with the open casket. So I didn't. Avoiding, avoiding, avoiding was how I was brought up with the topic.

OK. So here's a, maybe a better answer, especially in this culture. We, where it's a consumer culture. We are about getting things; we're not about releasing things. And all I know is that I've never been interested, for instance, in the beginning of life process. Didn't want to be a midwife. Didn't, wasn't particularly interested in birthings, but am very interested in the letting go piece, partially because it feels in this culture so off balanced, because we don't look at losses as a part of the process. It's something to be avoided. It's something be not talked about, run away from if you possibly can, or buy your way out. And I absolutely disagree with that. As I've aged, claiming death as part of my life is, and owning it, and keeping the topic current, is all a really important part of valuing life.

Rod: Really the one Death Cafe that I experienced personally with you was on Zoom. I feel like I kind of missed a whole dimension of it with the cake and the tea and everything. That seems like such a valuable piece to it. Do you miss that aspect of it in the COVID time?

brooks: Well, that's a great question, because to be honest with you, when it became apparent that there weren't going to be in-person gatherings, I thought, do I want to give this up? And the answer was absolutely not. And especially in these times with the topic being so prevalent and ubiquitous. I forced myself to learn the mechanics of Zoom, and I wondered would I be able to hold space electronically with people being little squares on the screen? Would I be able to create intimacy under those conditions?

But let me back up and say too, Rod, that every Death Cafe, even mine, from month to month, every Death Cafe is different, and every facilitator runs their group in a different way, so there's a different flavor. There's a nurse in town who started a second Death Cafe, maybe a couple of years ago. I don’t know whether it’s still going or not. But again, presumably because of her background being a nurse, the flavor of, and I never went to one, I just, Heather Black, that's her name. I just had lunch with her once. And her offering in a Death Cafe, I think, was more practical things, your paperwork and the physical things that happen.

So as you perhaps recall in the Death Cafe you went to, my interest is more in the emotional, spiritual, transformative aspect of death. And it's really important to me to hold that space so that people can fall into that kind of intimacy. The topic is such a taboo and delicate topic that it really, whatever entry door is available, it’s important to open it because again, the topic is so not discussed in our culture.

Rod: Did you shape yours intentionally to be what it is? How did you prepare to start? How did you know how you wanted to run it?

brooks: We became, if you can imagine, a circle of 25 people for the first few events down to a table, 8 or 10 tables of 4 apiece, automatically the intimacy has increased. Right? So, not that I thought about that at the time, it just became obvious that we didn't want to do the big circles. So we switched to the talking stick and the smaller tables, and then eventually Jo had retired, she’d gotten tired of co-facilitating, and so I had the choice of, do I continue this on my own or not? And I wanted to, so I moved, wondering if it would survive, but moved the venue to here to South Austin, and began more like what you experienced when you came to the Zoom meeting.

So the most I've ever had, the biggest number I've ever had here in South Austin is probably 15 or 16, maybe 14, right around in there, crammed into this small room, people sitting on floors and so forth. But typically the numbers tended to float around 8 to 10, sometimes as few as 6 if it was raining and snowing outside or whatever. But it stabilized in a smaller group. Now what I'm using is what you experienced, is what's called the Conversation Cafe format.

And so I'm finding that, and just briefly what that is, you go around, and you open the circle by going, each person says their name and why they're here and what they expect at the beginning. And then the body of a meeting is open to open discussion. And then right before the end, you go back around the circle again. It's like a closing of the circle, and everybody says, this is what I got out of the meeting. And that's a good way to recall what it is, but it also lets everybody else in the group know that their place and their offerings are important to the group as a whole. And with this format that I'm using now, there's so much richness, Rod, and people discover things about their own beliefs and talk about their own fears, and sometimes, much of the time, for instance, it doesn't have to do directly with death, but it always has something to do with loss.

Rod: I was curious who tends to come. Are they typically people, I guess not, typically people that are dealing with a recent loss of a loved one or something like that?

brooks: It tends to be people of age that are aging into this part of our lives. And there are some young people that come that have insights that just blow me away. It could be that they're dealing with their own health issues perhaps, and sometimes not. Sometimes they're coming because, I don't know exactly why, but they're interested in the topic and/or there's not very many places that are open to the public that you can have truly safe, intimate discussions.

And so people are certainly, aren't required to talk in Death Cafe. On the other hand, in my opinion, they showed up for a reason, and I'd like to know what it is, so I'll do what I can to help them feel safe enough to speak. It's not about voyeurism for me. It's about participating in a group and in a topic that is delicate and difficult to talk about. So for me, at least, the structure is helpful in establishing the safety.

So people come as they're able to, or as they're drawn to, or as they want to. And sometimes they'll come like two times and then skip a time or two, come eight times in a row, that sort of thing. It just depends on where they are, and sometimes they'll be gone for six or eight months, and then all of a sudden they're back again. It's wonderful, I think, to have that kind of continuity and familiarity for me.

Rod: How has going online affected your turnout? I would think that in the time of a pandemic that people would be flocking to it.

brooks: Yes. And I think that certainly has drawn people back. And I have to say that the numbers have stayed stable, kind of where I was talking about,  in and out of a dozen or so. But the other thing is at this stage of the pandemic, people are Zoomed out. I mean, they are just, enough of the electronic communication and connections, which is why I do my best to keep the electronic piece in the background and make intimacy a priority. So in order to do that, some structure is, in my opinion, is absolutely necessary, and so is the safety of not cross-talking, not having somebody want to fix if I break into tears or something. The scariest thing is to have somebody want to fix me or make me stop. But my emphasis is when somebody is indeed having a breakdown of tears and emotions that they are allowed to do that and begin to recognize their own strengths in being held energetically in the group.

And so I talk about that at the beginning of every meeting, that these are the parameters, and that silence is really important. So that for instance, if somebody makes an offering of an incident or whatever, then I ask that before somebody else speaks, and you could be all excited about, Oh, I have this other experience that's similar to that, that I want to talk about, but before they speak, I ask them to take a breath or two. And so what that does is that it allows the offering that has been made to land in everybody. And it helps make the gifts of people's feelings and experiences sacred.

Rod: You’ve been doing it for 8 years you said?

brooks: Seven and a half. Yeah. Come I think next June it'll be eight. Is that right?

Rod: How do you think it’s impacted you? How do you think it’s changed you to be doing this for so long?

brooks: It surprises me every time I say the number of years. Like really? Because it seems so ordinary. And I look forward to it because every single time, Rod, every single time, I have not been to, I have not experienced a crummy one, and every single time I come away feeling satisfied, like I've had a really good meal. And as a Scorpio, it's important to me to experience life in as much, with as much juice as possible. So I get a regular dose of that, which I absolutely crave and love and love to offer it. I do it for other people, and I do it for myself. I would not do this if it did not feed me. I'm too old for that kind of stuff at this point. And I never wanted to be and am not so inclined to be Mother Teresa anyway.

Rod: Where do you see it going from here? What do you think it would take for you to feel safe to do it in person again?

brooks: That's a good question. I will have to feel safe being in a closed room. And what I'm finding very interesting about COVID now is how different people have different levels of fear and safety around this particular virus. So, as we both know, there's people that don't come out of their house, and they still have their groceries delivered to the front door, and they spray them with Lysol or whatever before they bring them in. And then there's those that insist that there's no such thing as a virus, and they refuse to wear a mask. There's just all levels of how people deal with this. So I really won't know until I know, and part of it will be, am I comfortable being in a closed room?

And I wouldn't say, because I don't think it's a reasonable answer to put a pencil point on when there's a virus, then I'm going to do this, I mean, a vaccine, then I'm going to do so-and-so. I don't know that. I'll know it when I get there.

Rod: Have you developed any relationships out of it?

brooks: Oh, absolutely. Oh, sure. Sure. These days, of course, there's not much meeting outside, but I've had lunch with people and continued relationships or telephone calls or whatever, that sort of thing. I mean, seven and a half years is a long time to have a thread of a person in and out one's life. And so, yes, that's delightful.

Rod: How do you handle it if somebody dies, if there’s a regular who’s been coming, you said people come because of, they age into it. Have people come and gone?

brooks: Well, in fact, that has just recently happened. And so my way of handling it has been to reach out and talk to the spouse, which I was doing before the spouse died anyway. So it's more like a continuation of that. Or regular members, for instance, whose mom or dad's died, then I will express my own personal feelings and sympathy around that. But there's no like group collection and send her some flowers. There's none of that sort of thing going on.

Rod: Do people come with misconceptions about what it’s going to be? Have you ever had anybody say that was…?

Brooks: No, and I'm glad to say no. and part of that reason is that everybody that I know of, almost, has come because of a referral. So they come knowing a little bit of something about it, and maybe what has prompted it is the death of a parent or a pet or something like that. And I also, because I'll email them back and forth ahead of time, because especially now that we're on Zoom, I know who's going to show up because I send out a notice that Death Cafe is going to happen, and then these days, what I say is, if you want to come, you need to email me back and let me know that you're coming. And that way I have the chance to communicate with a newcomer and let them know how I run the meeting so that they can think, well, this isn't for me, or I'm intrigued. I think I'll show up. It's very important to me to maintain, to create and maintain the sanctity of the group, which I could do certainly when we were in physical proximity. And so that's one of the reasons why I'm careful about, for instance, not sending out the Zoom invitation to my full email list, because I want to know who's coming and that they are committed to a certain protocol.

Rod: You said a lot of it comes from referrals. Is that mostly how you, I don’t know if market is the right word, but mostly word of mouth, or do you, have you developed any relationships with hospitals, hospice?

brooks: Nope, Nope. It's all word of mouth. Yes. And I'm clear that although there's plenty of grieving that happens that this is not a grief group. I mean, I'm not qualified to run that. I don't have a social worker's license or whatever.

And I guess I would like to emphasize, it's not all about death. What it's really about is living. It's really about how do we be alive and hold in us and in our awareness, the fact that we will not be here forever. That's the entire point is that it's that kind of wholeness that I'm most interested in supporting, because it's so lopsided in this culture.

Rod: Well, I really appreciate your time. I think you were nervous about doing it. I hope you found it a comfortable experience.

brooks: Thank you. I did. I did indeed. Rod, thank you so much for asking and for prompting me to speak about what I love to do. It's been a delight.

I spoke to Andrea Rudnick, one of the founding members of Team Brownsville via Zoom in July. They are a group of Brownsville citizens who are doing necessary work in even more difficult circumstances now under the challenges of COVID-19 than they were facing over the last two years. If you are moved to support them, please do. They spend close to $100,000 per month in feeding, clothing, and sheltering a couple thousand people in a camp in Matamoros who are waiting their chance to request asylum and enter the United States legally. You can read more here about the cynically named Migrant Protection Protocols, and the other new U.S. policies designed to essentially eliminate asylum seeking. The U.S. signed the 1967 Protocol, agreeing to provide asylum to refugees, and has stayed in compliance with it for half a century. Since then, a process has been in place to verify refugee status for asylum seekers. Recently, that process has been cynically manipulated to eliminate it in fact if not in law.

Andrea references the Department of Homeland Security page about Migrant Protection Protocols, here.

Our theme song is Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the outro music, which I made on Soundation.

Here’s the transcript:

Andrea: Transformation. Transformation comes slowly. You can't really seek transformation. It comes to you. It comes to you because of what you do, because of the ways that you put yourself out there. I could say that all of us that have started with Team Brownsville, that we've all been transformed in ways that we never would've expected, that our eyes have been opened to things that we just never knew about. I don’t know. Your priorities change, I think, when that transformation happens.

We started in July of 2018, and we've gone through a lot of changes, certainly more changes than we ever would have known about. We continued just by trying to meet whatever the needs are that day. Because if we had known what we were going to be doing for two years, we might've said, nah, we can't really do that. That's just too much. But this way, just, just one day at a time, let's see what today brings. OK. What are the needs today? What needs can we meet? That's really how we continue, just every single day.

You would think it would give people more compassion, more understanding of that situation, that the crisis was here. It wasn’t somewhere else, and so it was a lot harder to throw up your hands and say, well, I can’t do anything, because yeah, the people are right in front of you. There are people here that ignore that and go on with their business as though there are no people sitting in an encampment in Matamoros. I guess my biggest surprise has been that aside from Team Brownsville and a few more people, there’s a lot of people that kind of choose to ignore the whole thing.

I think each of us has slightly different creation stories of how Team Brownsville was formed, and the truth is that we came to the same work in different ways. We came in just as teachers and administrators from the school district here in Brownsville. The skills that we bring in, our skills that we've had from being teachers and administrators and working with kids with special needs, working in a community that's a high poverty community, the community where you do have a lot of kids that are undocumented, kids that are families that struggle a great deal. We came in with that more than anything, just that background of, these are our people. They're not different from the people that we'd been working with all along. For me, what inspired me was going to the big march, the March Against Family Separation and just, I knew about it. I knew what was happening. And then I went to that march and it was a really big march for Brownsville.

So I would say that was just a catalyst. And then the next thing that happened for me personally is one of the organizers, one of the people that works for the ACLU, his name is Mike Seifert, he sent out a message saying please do what you can, because we have people that are sitting on the bridge with nothing. The truth is if you feel called to this work, and you see people sitting on a bridge with nothing, with no shelter, with no water, with no food, you have to do something. You can't just ignore it. Or at least I can't. And I think that the people who eventually came to be Team Brownsville, couldn't ignore it either.

We started with five or six people and pretty quickly we got up to maybe 10 or so. We kind of had to come up with how are we going to do that work? And we did have good models to go by because there are other organizations that have been doing the work, especially in the bus stations. Like there's an organization in San Antonio and I'm sure there's one in Austin as well that meet and greet people at the bus stations. So this would be the starting place because we have three detention centers in the area of Brownsville. They would bring people that were released from the detention center to our bus station. I mean, we were getting people from here to wherever and we just had this network of people that would meet and greet at bus stations all over the country. The numbers have gone up and down. Right now because of COVID, I think that they're releasing more people because they have had many COVID cases in the detention centers. And so there's been a big outcry to release people.

And we talk to a lot of people and horrific stories and the stories affect you. You realize that there's so much you can't do. And I don't know, for me, that's just, my drive is just to keep doing what I can do. But just knowing that I can't do everything and I can't meet every need and I can't, there's many things that go on, in the encampment that we have no control over. There’s cartel activity everywhere in Mexico, and that doesn't exclude the encampment. Those are all things that we don't have control over.

I really don't know how these families got here, but they're getting here at a really bad time. But it was really metering that set these people on the bridge, because that stopped them from crossing into the United States to request asylum.

Rod: The population that you’re serving isn’t illegal anyway, right? They’re following the legal procedure for seeking asylum, right?

Andrea: They are, and a lot of people don’t understand that. But that’s also the rhetoric that comes through from the current administration, that these are illegals, they’re coming for the wrong reasons. It presents these people in the worst possible light. Hence the Migrant Protection Protocol. It's not protecting the migrants at all. It's protecting the American people against the migrants. Look it up. I think it's on The Department of Homeland Security webpage is where they have like a write up about what MPP is and you'll see, you'll be shocked. I was.

Because the rules say that if you're on US territory, you can request asylum. But if you put the checkpoint right at the midpoint, kind of straddling the line, and you don't allow these people to cross the line, well, then I guess it's fair game. It was making sure that asylum seekers did not get through to request asylum. As long as they keep them back in Mexico, you know, they haven't, they haven't requested asylum yet. So we never had people sitting on the bridge like that waiting to, to request asylum. They were, they had always been able to cross freely.

And so it was kind of like go back and take a number and then very, very slow crossing of people to request asylum. Where before, they would arrive, and they would cross, now they would arrive, and there might be 50 people ahead of them. And they were crossing people, they might cross two men one day, then they might wait a few days and then they might cross a family. And then a couple of more days would pass and then they'd cross a few more, you know, it was never very many. And so just had this effect of more and more people arriving and not being able to get across, and so just kind of building up and building up the encampment.

And it's frustrating and infuriating to think about, you know, you're serving these people that have been through so much, and our own government refuses to let them in. And we have people now that have been there a full year because MPP started near the end of July in Matamoros. That's when they started the policy, and we had our first family cross and come back to Matamoros. We almost didn't believe it when we heard it, almost thought, no, it just can't be. But when we got the first families back, everybody was devastated. All the people that were waiting were devastated because of course they had kind of heard about MPP and the possibility, and they knew that it might mean that they weren't going to their family in the States, that whoever was waiting for them in the US wasn't going to receive them because they weren't coming. And so now we have people that have been there a full year. It's heart wrenching to see people go through so many different things. And COVID is just another thing thrown on top of everything that was already really terrible there, just makes everything that much worse.

But how are we going to meet the needs of these people? Because at that point, which was the fall, it was growing and growing and growing and growing. So we went from about 150 people prior to MPP to by, let's say October, November, there were probably 6 or 700 and it was just growing by hundreds every month. So now, there have been up to 2000 in the encampment, and then there's been another 2 or 3000 they say in the city of Matamoros, there's a lot of people under MPP.

I think if we get a new president, I'm pretty sure that things will change. I think that MPP will end quickly because it's such a horror. I just cannot imagine that it won't change, be one of the first things that does change. I just, and if that happens, then the encampment will empty out. There won't be an encampment anymore, which is great. I mean, I'm actually looking forward to the day when I don't have to cross into Mexico multiple times a week with, and I don't have to receive numerous calls because this one needs that and that one needs this. These people have suffered tremendously and deserve a chance to come into the United States. These are not bad people. These are people that have suffered and have gone through terrible traumas, many of them, and they just deserve a chance to live.

Because right now the numbers say less than 1% are actually going to get asylum as it is. And then if they, and if they pass that new round of rules that they're trying to pass, it's going to be a tinier fraction of 1% that are actually going to get asylum, which means that the majority of the people in the encampment will never get to come into the United States and they've waited for a year for nothing, suffered for nothing, gone through traumas in the encampment, as well as back in their home countries, and now it's not going to come to fruition, and they've done it the legal way. That's the thing that gets to me. These people have actually done it the legal way. They've followed the process. They've followed the rules. They haven't crossed the river, like so many other people have.

Rod: Do most of the people who come, come knowing that the rules have changed and that their chances are extremely slim, or are they still operating under the belief that things are the way they were before Trump?

Andrea: You know, it's interesting. I see most people, and you cannot convince them that they're not going to get asylum. They just kind of hang on to that. You know, God's gonna let me, and I have suffered a lot in my own country, and God's gonna be with me and lead me to the promised land. And even if you put it down to statistics, you'll still hear people say, well, then I will be in that less than 1%. That will be me. And I guess when you've gone through as much as they have, that's all that you have left, is that hope.

Rod: How many, you, I saw on the website, you have a dinner program, a breakfast program, the bus stop program and a school program. How many meals do you think you, I, I don't, I'm sure everything has changed with Corona, but how many, how many meals do you serve in a day?

Andrea: So the breakfast meal is about 6 or 700. Not everybody gets up. Dinner meal is about 1200, but we also are providing food staples because a lot of people prefer to cook for themselves. And so they've made clay stoves in the encampment, out of the dirt that's there. It's full of clay and they mix it with water and they know how to do it. And they make stoves, incredible stoves that you cannot believe that somebody could just take a shovel and mix it with water and make a stove like that. But they do it. At this time we’re purchasing kindling, what you would think of kindling wood. That's what it looks like to me. And we pay someone to do that. And so they bring three loads of that wood a week and distribute it to everyone who has a wood stove so that they can cook.

Our funding goes in a lot of areas, and a lot of areas that people wouldn't even know about because you see, OK, they're funding food, clothing, shelter, all that kind of thing, but you don't see the other funding that we do, which is transportation costs to asylum seekers that come to the bus station and don't have a ticket. Buying phones, we've bought many phones, because when people get out of detention, and they have no way of communicating with their families, and they're crossing the country, sometimes we just feel like we need to do that, but that's an expense that most people wouldn't know about. We also help funding the shelters in Matamoros that take in asylum seekers, because there are people that definitely don't need to live in the encampment, that shouldn't live in the encampment, people that have chronic illnesses, people that have newborn babies, there's all kinds of reasons. And so there's two shelters in Matamoros that will take asylum seekers in, but limited numbers. Right now they're full, and they're not taking anybody, again because of COVID. They're scared, don’t want to take new people in.

When we could go into Matamoros, I was going into Matamoros three or four times a week, and each time I would go, I would be there for hours of the day. Now we're not, we can't really go into Matamoros like we did. We've been delivering supplies and leaving them, having some of the asylum seekers come down out of the encampment with their wagons and pick up supplies and delivering things that way. But we have chosen to stay out of the encampment really since this all broke, because we don't want to be the ones that take the virus in.

So it's hard, it's hard in the encampment. It's hard to get them to wear masks until there actually was the first diagnosed case in the encampment. I think they've been hand-washing, and well, social distancing is another thing. When the tents are wall-to-wall tents, it's kind of hard to say that you're socially distancing, but they're trying to keep people apart in lines, like lines for dinner, for breakfast and things like that. But we know that people get together. They just do.

So I actually retired from the school district three years ago. So, but I retired to help my daughter take care of her young son, who's now, he just finished kindergarten. We ended up homeschooling him from March on because there was no classes. So I didn't cross at all during that period of time. And my daughter is a nurse, and she's very opposed to me crossing, because she knows how the asylum seekers live close together and things like that. And so she's... 

I mean, I don't like just putting responsibilities on other people and not doing it myself. I don't feel right about that. But yet at the same time, I also have to live in the reality of, There is no winning. There's no… Either way. If I say, OK, well, you know, I need to do this. I'm going to do this. Then she says, OK, well then I guess you won't get to take care of him because you're going across. So that's kind of a big threat, isn't it? You're going to get your one grandchild that you have in Brownville, you're going to get cut off from him.

So, yeah, it's a stressor. I mean, it stinks. But as far as other things pre-COVID, it definitely affects you. And I'm the volunteer coordinator. And up to the point that COVID stopped people from coming, I was receiving probably 10 to 20 calls or emails or texts a day about people wanting to come and volunteer. And so that was in a way taking up every bit of my time that I wasn't across, that I wasn't in the encampment, or I wasn't at the bus station. That was taking up a lot of time, and I didn't really know how to stop it. I couldn't really come up with a way of both addressing people's desire to come and volunteer and my own need to actually have some time where I could think about something else other than this work.

Well, as it happened, COVID kind of cut all that off because we can't accept volunteers right now. So, I'm sorry the volunteers can't come, but in a way it was like a relief for me because I didn't have to deal with all those calls and letters. Looking at the positive here, I would say that because we have to rely on the Team Brownsville people that actually live here to do anything, we have become closer and perhaps more organized because we're the people that we have to rely on.

Rod: Do you think you were in danger of getting burned out before COVID kind of put the brakes on some stuff?

Andrea: Not, not burned out from the work. Where I was feeling burned out was from that job of volunteer coordinator, because it just, I had no way of reining it in. I didn't, maybe I needed some professional person that says, hey, I have a degree in nonprofit management or something. I know how to do this. Let's come up with a better system. And so it was always, you know, contact Andrea, contact Andrea, contact Andrea. And I certainly didn't mind talking to people or telling them about the work that we do and all that. I don't want you to misunderstand what I'm saying. It was really more of the unending quality of it. There were like six different ways to contact me. And sometimes people would contact me like in three or four different ways. And they would get irate and like, well, I called you and you didn't respond, or I sent you a text and you...  and I just, I did my best is all I can say.

Everybody always thinks of retirement as, Oh, OK, well now you'll be able to do all... now you'll be able to travel, and now you'll be able to do all the things you wanted to do. And now you’ll be able to relax, and you'll be able to do nothing, and any number of responses. But that's not been retirement for me at all. I think I'm actually working harder now than I did when I was working a paid job. It's just constantly thinking about what is the next thing? What is the next thing I need to do? What have I forgotten?

In January, so we had been doing it for, already for a year and a half. I had been talking to World Central Kitchen about coming because I said, what's happening is that we're getting a lot of volunteers, but nobody knows how to cook for a thousand people. Nobody has experience doing that. And so when I say, well, what we need volunteers for is to prepare a meal for a thousand people, people would often say, we can help in whatever way possible, but I don't know how to do that.

And we, because it's an all volunteer organization, we didn't have a person that was assigned, that was hired to, OK, you're going to be the head chef, and you're gonna lead all these volunteers to make the meals. We didn't have that. So we had to kind of work around ourselves and trying to find someone in each group that maybe had a little more experience with cooking and just giving people menu ideas and talking about budgets and how much. And the thing is, so we expected them to, if they were going to come with a group, we expected them to come up with a meal plan if they were cooking, one night, two nights, OK, you gotta come up with a meal plan. You're preparing a meal for a thousand people. How are you going to do that? And we would give them some resources, other people that had come and cooked.

 And it worked very well for some, pretty well for some, and not so well for some, but everybody managed to get a meal across anyway. I mean, even if it was hot dogs and store bought cookies. Occasionally people did that, they said, OK, well, we'll just make hot dogs and buy carrot sticks or something like that. OK. All right, let's go with it. Or sandwiches. Sandwiches was another thing that a couple of groups made.

But so finally, World Central Kitchen came, and they have their whole setup. They have, I mean, they cook for 10,000 and 100,000 people. They know what they're doing. So they came in January of 2020, they started. And so they set up in the parish hall of a church, and it was great. We had to kind of let them tell the volunteers what they needed to do and how to help. It was tricky, and we were just really getting used to it when COVID stopped everything, and they had to leave. And so they really only cooked for two months, and then they had to leave because we couldn't cross the food anymore.

So right now we are paying a restaurant. So this restaurant is now cooking both meals with a little assistance on a few days from a church that cooks some meals. But right now we are not cooking and crossing because we can't. And so we are totally relying on this little restaurant, and we have brought them a lot of PPE. We have supported them in whatever way we can to try to just let them do the work, and of course they've had to hire more people, just from going from a little mom and pop restaurant, which would maybe have, I don't know, at the most 10 people in it at any one time to now having to cook daily meals for over a thousand people.

Rod: How do you think you personally have changed over the last two years? How has this affected you?

Andrea: Well, As a person of faith, and that's challenging in this environment, I think that I’ve seen how other people's faith has carried them along through this process, and I feel like that has, well, it's made my own faith grow in a lot of ways. I am a seminarian at this point. I am an Episcopal seminarian in the Diocese of West Texas, and so as one of the other things that I do, I have to go to classes and study and do papers and all that kind of stuff. And so I am now in my, going into my third year. So it happened to be, and I never, ever would have planned it this way, it happened to be that I started seminary, and I started working with Team Brownsville, almost at the same time.

And I have been told that maybe I shouldn't be doing this because it's taking too much time away from my studies and the work that I, the seminary work that I have to do. And I have just said, look, this work drives the seminary. If I don't have this work or some work, some meaningful work, some work where I can actually see the whole point of the Bible and the gospel and all those things, if there's not something tangible for me to look at and say, this drives me to that there, this is the meaning of that, then I might as well not go. I'm not going to say, oh, I'm going to not do, I'm not going to be part of Team Brownsville, I'm not going to do the work because I need to study some or other theologian’s book.

I mean, I get the work done. It may be at midnight and it may be last minute, but I always get things in. I mean, I'm very driven in that way. I do the reading. I watch the lectures, I do the papers. I attend the classes. I do what I need to do, I guess is how I see it.

I think my call is to work in this ministry, work in migration ministry and to work with families in a colonia here. I don't see myself being placed in some church that they might want to place me in, because I already know what those churches are... They’re churches that are, well, I don't know if you know much about the Episcopal Church, but we have a long history of being a mostly white church, and not just white, but also the people that had money. I don't want that to be my church. And so I have presented and am going to continue to present the argument that my call is to migration ministry. And I live on the border. And even if the encampment closes, that's not the end of migration ministry. Migration ministry has been, there've been people migrating for forever, and they will continue to migrate. And there will be people in my community that are undocumented, people that are struggling, people that need to hear that  there actually are people that care about them and are concerned for their well being. And that's really what I want.

Rod: Well, I did want to ask you, what do you need, what do you want from people?

Andrea: The needs we're facing are we spend close to $100,000 a month on food, clothing, shelter, all the different things, wood, water, paying the people that bring that stuff in. I mean, there's so many different facets, all the bus station stuff. We just have a high outflow of money, and now because of the new people that are coming that don't have a place to go, we need to try to address that. How are we going to come up with a place? Do we have to buy, build, rent a building, make a shelter of some kind? I mean, how are we going to meet their needs? And so every one of those things costs.

Luckily before COVID started, we had gotten some fairly large size donations, and that's carrying us because we've been able to do the things, like kind of make the transformation from carrying the food across to having to buy all the supplies for the encampment. Right now, Team Brownsville is buying everything, every bit of everything that is supplied to the encampment. All food, all clothing, all is either donated, I mean, we take across things, donate directly like through Amazon, and we use the money to pay for all the things that we're buying. But the Mexican government does not buy anything. They're there. The immigration people are there. They’re more like a police force in a way you could say for the migrants. But they don't buy anything, and we sometimes say, what would happen if we weren't here? What would these people be doing? What would they really let them starve?

Rod: I've heard when people really want to donate after a weather disaster or something like that, that relief organizations would rather have money donations than material donations, because it creates a problem of sorting and storing and distributing. Is that true for you? Do you accept material donations?

Andrea: It has been true, and not so much now. We cannot accept any more used clothing. They're not allowing us to cross used clothing into Mexico, and we can't take it. And we got some good donations, don't get me wrong. We also got a lot of really junky stuff that we had to just literally throw away or get in there with gloves, because you never knew what you were going to find, clothing that was just so dirty and stained and ratty that were you really gonna give it to someone in the encampment? No. But so in a way it was kind of a relief when the Mexican customs people said, well, you can't cross used clothing anymore. You have to bring receipts. You have to have tags on the clothes.

So now pretty much what people send is stuff from our Amazon wishlist, which is stuff that we use and we need, or they send money, or we've gotten donations from CWS which is Christian World Services, which is kind of a ecumenical organization of a lot of different denominations. And they provide blankets, and they also provide some other things, some other like disaster relief kits and things like that. And we've gotten other donations from other organizations in the United States. There’s one that's called Baby to Baby that would send us just a lot of nice things, diapers, wipes, bags with baby clothes, things like that. This one group raised money for lanterns, for solar lanterns, and came down, and we got to distribute those with them. Then another time they raised money for Crocs, Croc-type shoes, cause people were saying they needed things that weren't flip-flops, things that had toes because of the mud and everything.

So people have done that. People have, yeah, lots of different kinds of donations, so we're grateful for that. We're grateful for people making donations, continuing to actually think about these people right now in this COVID time, because it's hard to think about anything but yourself. What am I doing now, or am I just staying in my house all day long and can't go anywhere? 

We have had very strong outreach from Austin to Team Brownsville, and there's a large group of Episcopalians. I guess I attract Episcopalians. But no, we've had really a lot of denominations like that, but this group just happens to be from a number of different Episcopal churches in Austin and they've come down. They actually started coming every month, and they would come and they would bring donations and they would work at our escuelita, which is, was, on Sunday morning. And they would cook, and it was great. It was great. We're sad to not have them coming right now.

Well, I could talk about Christianity and things that were meaningful to me as far as the teachings of Jesus and what all that is about, but doing this work has made it much more concrete, has made it much more tangible in a way. So when people talk about things about, well, what are the teachings of Jesus? Or what did he say about this? Or what did he say about that? For some reason, migration ministry always seems to fit right in. There's never a moment when I can't in my mind think about, well, he said this, and it relates to that. And I actually have to kind of hold myself back on more than a few occasions, especially when I'm around church people, because I know that you can bore people, and you can piss people off, and you can make people think that you have dementia because all you can talk about is asylum seekers. The eye-opening aspects of doing migration ministry have also opened my eyes to the fact that so many people that go to my church have zero interest in this. And actually they don't want to have anything to do with it.

Well, the other thing I discovered is that probably the majority of my church are Trump supporters, which also floors me. I guess I never would have, I mean, this is Texas, this is Bush country. And not a big fan of Bush either, but now he kind of seems like a saint, unfortunately. If there's anything positive that I could say about the Trump presidency, it's that it has brought enlightenment to a lot of people, their eyes have opened to, oh my gosh, what is he saying? This can't be. No, this is all kinds of wrong. He's driving people that are not supporters of him to action. He's driving people to reach out to others in a way that we haven't done in a long time. I mean, really since the Civil Rights Movement. That’s really the only positive thing I can see about the Trump presidency, really. I want to believe that, I want to believe that five years from now, we will look back and say it was a transformational moment, and not just another moment.

They keep trying to call me. I’ve had like 3 or 4 calls from the encampment just in our little talk here. I don’t know what they want, but anyway...

I spoke to Alfredo Gomez after he spoke at a Circles of Men Project gathering. The theme was “If you know yourself, you can move past fear.” It was his first time at a Circles of Men gathering, and he was inspired to share. When I later asked if anyone would be willing to speak for a podcast, he contacted me to share his story in a little more detail.

Thank you so much, Alfredo, for sharing. I think it means a lot for men to be able to model openness and vulnerability to other men, and your story was moving and definitely relatable.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music in this episode was made by me using my new toy that I’m having so much fun playing with and learning: Ableton Live. So much fun! I hope you’re all finding ways to learn and grow and connect while we’re staying the hell away from each other.

Here’s the transcript:

I was born in Mexico. I was born one of 12 kids, and my mother had kids kind of like in a row, like almost every other year or every year. And so there was 2 older brothers and 2 older sisters before I was born, and then the rest of them followed, so I’m the 5th kid. Well, I felt like because of the number of kids that my mom, the large number of kids that my mom had, she just couldn’t, didn’t have the time to attend every one of us, and she neglected some of us.

And my father was a federale in Mexico, which is kind of like the Texas Rangers used to be back in the day. And he was rural, which means that he had machine guns, shotguns, .45s, carrying, you know… So he was very aggressive, and he would take some of that aggressiveness to the house. And he had a horsewhip for us. Sometimes he used the handcuffs on my older brother that I saw that he did. He handcuffed him to the window and whipped him with the horsewhip.

My mom, she would try to stop him from beating us, but then she would become a victim herself. He would push her out of the way, and then he would, that would really, made him more angry than anything because he would continue the beating, and then he would hit her after that for getting in the middle or trying stop him.

And so all those things made me fearful. I mean, I got horsewhipped too, but more than anything, what scared me the most is watching a lot of the stuff, my mother getting beat. It was just a lot of trauma. For me, just watching that and even my older two brothers were fighting at one point, and I went and told my dad so he could make them stop. They were hurting each other, I mean, there was blood. So I went and told my dad. I said, “Hey Dad, you know, they’re fighting.” So I wanted him to stop the fight. So he goes and stops the fight, of course, and whips both of them, and then he comes and whips me for being a snitch. And as a 6, 7 year old, you don’t understand what you did wrong. I didn’t understand what I did. And so it was, to me, very brutal.

And then so when we came to the States when I was 12 years old, the whole family. My dad, my mother, and all my brothers and sisters. We all came. Well my father had a job. He first came in and got a job here in Corpus Christi. He did a lot of construction. And then he brought us after he got settled, he brought us into the States.

I couldn’t speak English. I went to the school, and next thing you know, people don’t like me. They’re being mean to me, and they’re telling me, I don’t even understand what they were saying, but they kept on repeating this word “wetback,” and I didn’t know what that meant. I really didn’t know. That was my first time… Living in Mexico, there’s no, everybody’s the same, you know? There’s no racial tensions or any of that stuff, and so when I came here, that was foreign to me and a different culture.

So things didn’t get better for me. And then going to the school and then not being able to speak the language, the teachers would get mad because I was speaking Spanish. But what else was I going to speak if I can’t speak English, right? So then I would get in trouble for that.

And my English teacher, we were reading, everybody was reading out loud, and then she called me to read, and I had a really heavy accent, and she made me read out loud, and if you can imagine, the rest of the kids laughing at the pronunciation, giggling and all that. It was really hard for me. Being there, kind of like in front of everybody so everybody can laugh at.

So then I was 15, and my father had a gun in the kitchen, and I knew where he kept it, a small .22 revolver. And I decided that I just wanted to just finish this, finish with this anger, this anxiety, this hate that I was feeling constant. So I went to the kitchen and reached for the gun. And I looked in the chamber, and it had bullets, all of them. So I put it on my head and decided to, started squeezing the trigger. Well, being that it’s a revolver, and it’s, you know, as you’re squeezing the trigger, the hammer was all the way up, and I figured OK, it’s got to go off any time, and then there was a little pause in my mind that said, OK, what are you doing?

And then I stopped and thought for a second, and I say, maybe this is not what I should be doing. So I took it off my head, grabbed the hammer and put it back into place slowly. I put the gun back in the kitchen, and I went and picked up a Bible. Just a Bible. I just wanted to read something, something reassuring. The first thing that I read, I just opened it at whatever it would come up, and it was a scripture that I read somewhere along these lines. “God gave you life, thou should not take it away.” And then from then on, any time I felt that that was the answer, I knew it wasn’t the answer, taking my life out. So I decided that was never going to be an option.

It’s kind of funny because my father talked about the Bible a lot, and he said he had read the Bible, but it seems like he was choosing the things that kind of stuck, like using the rod and not letting kids get away with anything, but instead he used the whip, the horsewhip and belts and whatever. And then, I never saw him go to church, but he would send us to church. 

And there was a bus from the church that they would send by our house, and so I really enjoyed those times because they called it the Joy Bus, and so we were all singing church music and church songs, and it was really nice. I really enjoyed that growing up. But still, I always felt like I was alone, because I couldn’t talk about the stuff that was happening at home anywhere else. This is kind of like a secret, or a family secret. Still I felt alone during those times.

Then I got into athletics. I kind of decided that athletics was a good thing for me because I felt a lot of anxiety, and I felt like by doing athletics, by exercising, by running, by playing a sport, it would get my mind off and concentrate on something else than all the stress and all the anxiety at home and at school and so on. I tend to be competitive, if I couldn’t depend on people, I could depend on my own self by being the best that I could be on whatever sport that was.

And so the abuse with my father still continued, but I joined the track team when I was a sophomore, and I became a very good runner. I was a naturally good athlete, and they put me on the JV team, and because I joined like a week before the first cross country meet, and I was training by myself on my own, I had no knowledge about training, but I would just run as fast as I could for as long as I could, and that was my training. So my coach puts me on JV not knowing anything about me. And he told me before the race, Alfredo, if you get tired, just walk. He did a prayer also, before the race, and that was really neat, and I really liked that.

And when the gun went off, I ran into the guys in front of me because they were going like, they weren’t racing, they were jogging. So I went to the front with the frontrunners, and they were doing the same thing. They were jogging. In my mind, it’s like, you run as fast as you can. It’s a 3 mile race, cross country. So I’m like, OK. I ran with them for about 2 or 3 blocks, and then it’s like, I have enough. I just took off. I took off. I tried to relax as much as possible, but I ran at 90% effort, 85% effort, and then if I got tired a little bit, I would slack off a little bit and then resume again. That was my first 3.1 mile race, a 5K, and my time was a 16:08. As a sophomore in JV. And the winning time for varsity was a 16:06. So then my coach was just so happy, he’s like, oh my God, who are you? Tell me more about you! So the next time, he puts me on varsity.

So then I felt stronger, too, as a sophomore, and I started working at Kentucky Fried Chicken part time after school. And so my routine was to go to the gym at 5:30, go for a 3 mile run or lift weights, and then be at the school at 7:30 to start the classes at 8. And then after school, and after the track training, I would go to the house, and then get ready, go straight to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and then get off at 10 o’clock, do my homework, and then get up early in the morning the next day. And that was my sophomore year.

But then one day I decided, they were having something where they had some balloons that the manager said, hey, you want to take these to your brothers and sisters? Three helium balloons. And I said, yeah, I have a little brother and 2 little sisters I can give them to. So I took those helium balloons to the house, and I gave them to each one of them. And then my younger brother wanted the balloons, the girls’ balloons. And I told him, no that’s, you have yours, and you have yours, and you have yours. Now my dad was spoiling kids now. Now he wanted to change his ways, I guess. So he spoiled the youngest one, and he told the girls, give him their balloons. And I’m like, no Dad, that’s, everybody has a balloon. And he got really mad, and he started yelling and cursing at everybody, saying give the boy the balloons.

So he walked away, I went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and popped all 3 of them. Well, if you can imagine my father. He goes, oh, you see what you're going to get. So he goes inside to the bedroom, comes back with the belt. I’m 16 years old already. And he’s coming towards me, and I stopped him. I put my hand up, and I said look, Dad, if you hit me, we’re going to fight. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen. I’m going to fight you. I’m probably going to be on top of you most likely. I’m just letting you know, and I don’t know what’s going to happen after that. I’m not going to let you hit me again.

Well, he looked at me, and he saw that I was very angry. He knew that I wouldn’t have it any more. He looks at me, he says, well just don’t do it again, turns around and walks away. That was the first time I felt some relief. I felt some relief that that stopped. My father was never going to hit me again, and now I could stand up to him.

I mean, it was still the struggle. And my father was still very loud and aggressive and abusive with my younger siblings and with my mom. But he knew that he couldn’t do the stuff that he used to do to me. So I felt safe, but I would see what he was doing with everybody else.

And then my brothers, my brothers used to drink and do drugs. And I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, and one of them was more aggressive than the other towards me and everybody else. He was more angry. And one day, about the same time that I stood up to my dad, he came in, and I was playing with my youngest sister, and I was sitting on the floor with her playing, and he was sitting on one of the couches behind me. And then he told me to leave her alone.

So I looked at him, and I saw that he either had been doing drugs or he was drunk, one of the two, so I said, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just playing with her. And then he kicks me in the back of my head and tells me again, I told you to leave her alone.

So when he kicked me, I got up, and I felt that anger rise out of me, and then I hit him. I just hit him one time. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the expression, turning off the lights, but I did turn off the lights on him. He couldn’t see. I didn’t knock him out or anything, but I hit him like right on the temple, and he could not see for like 15 minutes.

And I just had so much anger already, and I just had enough, everybody beating me up, and everybody… And I couldn’t talk sense into them, so I just felt like I had to use physical aggression. And now that I was running and lifting weights, I felt like, you know, I’m going to defend myself now. And I don’t feel good about it, but that’s what I did as a 16 year old. I hit him.

But you know what? That was the last time he ever tried to hit me again.

So then, it’s like I feel OK. I feel better now. They can’t mess with me anymore. But I felt like a lot of the damage was already done. But running would help me get out of the house, and I became one of the fastest, like I said, I won district in the mile, the two mile, in cross country. My sophomore year, my junior year, and senior year, in a 5A, which was the biggest division there was. And then I went to regionals and won the mile, or the two mile at regionals, and then I went to the state. I ended up 4th my senior year, and I think it was also 4th in the mile and two mile.

So I started getting scholarship offers, and I could go anywhere in the country, basically. I never thought about going to school. Well, with that, being that my brothers were also working construction, my dad worked construction, I’d be the first boy to go to college. My grades were OK. But my coach said to me, Alfredo, you ought to try it. Try to go to college, and if you don’t like it, try it a little bit more. And if you still don’t like it, try a tiny, tiny, tiny more before you… What I’m saying is, just give yourself a chance. And once you give yourself, you tried, and you didn’t do it, and you couldn’t do it, and you tried again, you couldn’t do it still, then you can say, at least I tried. So I said, well, I’ll try it coach. And next thing you know, I graduated from Rice.

But going through Rice and going through college, I found myself with a lot of anxiety. Doing presentations, I would feel that anxiety getting in front of groups, large groups in front of the classroom, I felt a lot of anxiety.

R: Did you think about those kids laughing at you in high school, and that fear of being laughed at?

A: Yeah, being laughed at, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t belong there, almost kind of like I felt like I didn’t belong in the States, coming here to the United States, because I was a wetback. I felt like I didn’t belong at Rice, that I shouldn’t be there. Same old feelings. And then getting in front of a classroom, I felt a lot of anxiety in speaking in front of, in doing a presentation.

But then after I graduated from Rice, I decided to teach there at Lamar High School in Houston. And I was teaching there, Spanish and coaching soccer, and I did that for one year, but again, I felt a lot of anxiety being in front of, in the classroom. And Mondays was like my worst day of the week. Well, actually Sundays, like the anticipation of Monday, and then Monday was terrible my first hour or two, and then I felt better towards the end of the day. And then Tuesday was better than Monday. Wednesday was better than Tuesday, and so on. And then Friday is like, what the heck was wrong with me on Monday, right? Well, the weekend came, and then Monday came again, the same feeling again. I felt awkward. I felt insecure. I felt, and I’m like, OK, it’s going to get better, right? And people say, well, it’s natural. You know, you get over it after awhile. It just wouldn’t go away. And I’m like, what’s wrong with me?

R: Why do you think you were drawn to that profession when you had such anxiety about standing in front of people?

A: Well, because I care about kids. I wanted to help kids. Helping people, even like love and affection, or caring for your students, showing them that you care for them, and that kind of thing. I really liked that, but I didn’t like to be in front of the class all the time. And I know that that was what I was signing on for, and I thought that I could handle it, being that I’m not talking to a whole bunch of professionals. These are high school kids, right? But then still I felt that anxiety of being in front of the class, like I said, Monday through Friday. And it was a cycle. It never got better.

So I moved to Austin from Houston. I started working for Texas Employment Commission, and I did a lot of good programs for them. I did Communities in Schools, which is a dropout prevention program. And I also did the Job Corps program, helping kids get education and training, and a lot of those kids had problems with the court system or with the law, and they were on probation and trying to get their life together. So I was trying to help those kids, and I did that for awhile, altogether for like 10 years working for the state.

But then I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what that was. I found myself that I couldn’t breathe, and I was breathing very heavy and hard. The breathing would not slow down. So I’m like, what the heck is wrong with me? So then I started getting light-headed, and I felt like I was going to pass out. This is at the office. And so somebody said, you’re having a panic attack. You need to go to the doctor about it. And I went to the doctor, and they said, yeah you did have a panic attack, and he prescribed Xanax.

I was doing the Unemployment Services also for the Texas Employment Commission, so I was always doing presentations at which I felt anxiety, but it was a little bit more controlled, suppressing some of those feelings. And I would still do my job, but it got to the point where it was kind of like putting stuff under the rug all the time and just piling and piling. I mean, the medication would help me, but it never solved the problem. To me, it was just kind of masking my feelings and my emotions.

So after the Texas Workforce Commission, I got a call from a new program that was starting. It was Steve Jackobs from Capital IDEA. Capital IDEA is basically getting people into careers, not just a job, but a career. So we provide the training, the education, everything that they need so they can get a good quality job with benefits and the whole 9 yards, not just a job. It was 5 of us that started that program from scratch, and we started recruiting, we started doing presentations. I worked for Capital IDEA for almost 5 years.

But it got to the point where I felt that I’ve taken a deep dive, and I was running out of oxygen. And I could see the surface, but I didn’t think I had the energy to swim all the way to the top. That’s how I felt when I left Capital IDEA. And they offered me all kinds of different options, work from home, part time, don’t leave, what about your benefits, and all this and all that. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to leave. I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I went into a deep depression, anxiety, paranoia.

R: Were you doing anything besides the medication, like seeing a therapist or counselor or were you involved in church or anything?

A: No, not at that time.

R: Just on your own, huh?

A: On my own. So when I had, I call it a nervous breakdown, I mean, because I totally went under the radar after that. I just stayed at the house after that. I didn’t want to leave. I even felt embarrassed going to the mailbox to pick up the mail. So I just kind of stayed in one spot on the couch or whatever and just stayed there all day. And it was really dark for me.

That lasted for about 3 years, until I just felt that I needed to get a job, get back on my feet, and I got some medication. They thought I was bi-polar, and then they thought maybe it’s just anxiety, and then depression, so I was taking medication for just about everything for a large number of years. But it wasn’t doing anything for me. I mean, I would gain weight, it made me foggy, and it wasn’t just doing the trick. I had a lot of side effects that were kind of worse sometimes. I felt worse.

So I tried everything, and so then, so what is the answer? What can I do now? I started to look at more manual work, more using my hands more, and trying to ease the anxiety. So I tried to look for work that was less involved with the office and meetings and stress and the anxiety that I felt and working more on my own. So, and then for the next, I don’t know, 15 years, I would get a little job here and a little job there.

So then I started reading more about... and reflecting. Why am I so nervous? Why am I feeling so anxious? What happened to me that’s causing me… Is it in my blood? Is it passed down from my mom or my dad? What’s going on? Why do I feel so awkward? Why do I feel so much anxiety? So I started reading more about it, educating myself more about it. I went to church too, praying. Maybe I don’t have enough faith. More prayer. Maybe God, I need to get on my knees more often. So I was trying to do all kinds of things to help me deal with my anxiety, but I wasn’t finding a lot of positive feedback from a lot of that stuff.

My girlfriend and I were looking at documentaries, and we were looking into yoga, and then she was telling me, because she's been into yoga a lot herself, and she was telling me about it. And then we were looking at some documentaries from some of those masters, like the Dalai Lama and all those guys that are very deep. And then we saw Thomas Keating. And I'm like, oh, who is this guy? I don’t know, So when I saw the documentary of Thomas Keating, a guy that gave his life to God basically when he was 5 years old, because he got really sick, and he heard the nurse and the doctor talking about his condition that he might not make it. OK, I want to know more about it. 

So I started watching the documentaries, and I started, and then we start buying books, so we started reading about Thomas Keating and his beliefs and his findings and all of that. He studied all religions, not just the Catholic Church, or Christianity, but all the religions around the world. And at the end, you know how we have this little, something is missing in our lives? Everybody’s got that almost, like maybe you think it’s money, maybe you think it’s a relationship, maybe you think it’s a hobby, or a house, or something that you’re always trying to get to fill that little empty hole, that little empty thing in your heart. And what I’m gathering is that it’s the union with God, that you have to have that union with God in order to fill that empty hole there.

So then I started to do that for myself. I want to feel close to God. How do you get that union with God? Well, through prayer. And silence. So then I started doing some meditation, some prayer, and I started looking into yoga. And I started looking at Thomas Keating for answers, and I felt like that was one person that I could trust. One person that I know I can trust because his intentions were good from the beginning. He could have been a millionaire, he could have been whatever, if it was about money. But he saw that that was not him. So I found a little bit of a relief reading about him and what he's saying about our intentions, and to be kind to yourself, you know, and I've never been kind to myself. I hated myself for the longest. I hated falling short, not measuring up, and I’ve never been kind to myself.

But I started thinking about all that. And then, so my understanding of prayer was that you pray, and you’re always asking God for something. God, can you help me with this? God, can you give me this? Always asking. And I felt, and thankful, you know, thank you for the health. Thank you for helping me today, for this, with this.

But then when I started listening to Thomas Keating, he was talking about more, you kind of surrender to Him in silence, and you want to connect with Him in silence. You do that for like 20 minutes, most of the time, because of my anxiety and all the things that I'm always thinking about something, it's very hard for me to get anywhere because always, he talks about not getting on the boats that are passing by because your mind goes somewhere, and get off the boat and go back to the word that you, for the prayer. I find myself that for the first 20 minutes I was thinking the whole time about something else. And then the little alarm that I set up goes off. It's like, Oh my God, I didn't get to do the silence as much as I wanted to.

But it takes practice. It takes practice. So then I would do like, I'll try it again, and then I would get somewhere. I did it one time where I actually did 20, about 20 minutes of totally silence, and I felt getting deeper and deeper with union with God, and I felt the connection of almost kind of like stages as meditation and being in union. I felt so much peace. And I'm like, I want more of that.

So now one of the things that I'm beginning to realize in being kind with myself is that I do get a physical reaction with stress and anxiety. I do. I don't want it, but it happens. It's kind of the fight or flight sort of deal response for me because it happened to me for the first 16 years of my life. Even though I understand that is what is happening, I have to acknowledge that and not try to change it, but accept it sort of, and be kind to myself and tell myself that, yes, this is my body reacting because of my trauma, but it's not really who I am.

And so I joined the men's group, the Circle of Men. It's like 30 people in a group, 25, 30 people. And when Clay Boykin did the introduction about, OK, we're not here to judge anyone. We're here to support everyone, and this is not a group. This is a network. And we love each other. We care for each other. And what’s said here, stays here. And I felt a lot of love from everyone.

And I'm still, with my fear, with my anxiety, my fear’s always on guard. I always have my hands up for whatever happens. So then I started dropping my guard down, and I started listening to the stories or the conversation. I felt that I needed to come out, and I told my story in short, very compacted, but just basic, I came from Mexico, and all the things that happened to me at home, my dad was very aggressive and abusive and my brothers and sisters, and so on, and growing up and then coming to the States. And I, oh my God, my nerves were just, I felt it all over me. I was shaking inside me. I was sweaty. My body was reacting, and I was like, what is happening to me? as I'm talking and telling my story.

And the group was just so understanding and so compassionate with my story. And then I put my head down, and I said, I'm sorry guys, I'm feeling this way. And everybody's like, no man, there's nothing to be sorry about. There's nothing. They were giving me assurance and acceptance for the very first time in a large group like that. And I still, I was, I felt embarrassed. I felt the shame. I felt all these negative feelings about myself because I just kind of like, I've been carrying this load of rocks and I just dumped it right in front of the group. And when I did that, I was apologizing for that because the group had to hear it. And everybody was so understanding and caring, and loving and supportive and all that, that it was the very first time. I've been afraid of men for a long, because my history and everything that I experienced in my life, and I was angry at men.

So being in a group of nothing but men and feeling a little bit of acknowledgement, acceptance. Validation. I just felt like, ah, man. After I finished doing my spiel and feeling embarrassed and all that, I usually, when something like this happens, I tell myself that was stupid. Don't go back there. You're an embarrassment, sort of thing. I tell that to myself, so my natural reaction is like, OK, I’m out of here, I'm not coming back. I'm so embarrassed and so ashamed, I’m not coming back. But I told the group, you know what, I am coming back.

We are harder on ourselves. I've learned that, and for me, people are nicer to me than I’m nice to myself. And, and I realize that, and I realized that that's how we are. I tell my daughter who's 15 years old, that has some of the, as a 15 year old girl going to school, and the friends and all of that, and being very critical of themselves again. It's like no mama, just, it's like, I don't even tell that to myself and then I'll tell her, and it’s like, I should listen to myself when I'm talking to her. It's easy for me to tell her that, but it's hard for me to tell myself.

That helped me a lot being in that group. But still, I'm always going to come out with my hands up, guarding myself, especially the first 5, 10 minutes. And then I feel more at ease. Now can I stop my body from reacting? So far I haven't been able to stop my body from reacting. I don't want to fight it. I just want to be kind to myself and saying, it's OK, Alfredo. You've been through some hard, it's OK. Don't be anxious about being anxious. But I just have to be kind to myself, accept it.

And maybe sharing. Maybe others might feel the same and maybe I can talk to them about it, compare notes and help each other out. This past meeting, we were talking about free will and what is God's will. But I really believe that God's will for everybody is for everybody to be nice and be the best human they can be. You got struggles? We all have struggles, some worse than others. But at the end of the day, God's will for us is to be the best person that we can be. Help each other out, be there for each other, give somebody your hand so they can lift them up, and maybe they'll lift you up next time.

I hope everybody out there is taking good care of themselves and each other through these strange days. This is our first episode since the COVID-19 madness sent us home, but I’m glad I had a chance to talk to Jonny Reynolds from inside Forbidden Fruit after hours before social distancing was a phrase I’d ever heard. Thank you so much, Jonny for your time, and I’m looking forward to when this is all over so we can all get out to a Bat City Bombshells show again.

There is adult language and adult themes throughout this episode, including human sexuality.

Thank you always to Flora Folgar for her editing skills and her voice talents in the intro/outro. And for always making me laugh.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. Other music in this episode:

“Downtown” by bensound.com

“Bossa Antigua” by Kevin MacLeod

“HIPHOPHOUSE” by B Side

“Dances and Dames” by Kevin MacLeod

“Man Outta Town” by FORGET THE WHALE

“Funky Junky” by Jason Shaw on Audionautix

“Cabaret” by Kai Engel

“Kitchen Suite” by Spiedkiks

“Funky Hunky” by FunkyFlo

“Summer Time | Boom Bap | Old School” by PRIDEOUT

Here’s the transcript:

Born and raised in Vegas. We all did theater and dance and all that stuff, We all had to learn an instrument. So I play the piano. I also play the flute. I say that I play the flute. I have not picked up a flute in like 15 years, but I was taught the flute. So yeah, no, it's I've always been a performer. I like being the center of attention. That's one of the things that I always used to say, it was, I love me. I'm awesome. 

I was extremely lucky to have the family that I do. My parents are even more crazy liberal than I am. I never really had to come out ‘cause I was never really in. I never did that whole, like I have a fake girlfriend or anything like that. It's like, Hmm. No. I had a boyfriend through high school. I was pretty much always out. I had a very supportive, loving family. My grandmother actually introduced me to my first boyfriend. So yeah. Multigenerational. We're all a bunch of just, yeah, everybody's free to do their own thing.

In my family, we never did that whole your pee pee and your hoo hoo, no, that's your penis, that's your vagina. If anybody touches it, punch him in the face. If anyone touches it without your consent. So we never had any of that kind of body shaming growing up. It was just, no, that's your body. You should probably know how it works. Try to love it as best as you can. And everybody has their own and you know, respect everybody else's.

But yeah, no, my ideas behind body positivity and sex positivity and just being open and friendly and let's talk about all this stuff really does go back to when I was a kid like this, there was never anything that was taboo.

Ms. Calizoria is a character that I developed years ago. I actually started drag at a really young age. I started drag when I was 14. So... And this was in Vegas, so a whole different world. And so basically my aunt was doing something. My aunt is a choreographer in Vegas and she was doing something and she got me, she was like, well, do you want to do it? And I was like, all right, fine. And after that it just kinda took on a life of its own. But yeah, I started drag at 14, and I really didn't have a character. I've done singing and dancing and art and theater pretty much my entire life, and when I first started with drag, it was basically like, I followed folks like Marilyn Monroe and Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and so I liked that old Hollywood, those kind of ladies and performers.

And then I finally developed the character of Calizoria in high school when we moved to Texas, and the character came out of the fact that being young, black and gay in Texas, I just needed something to do. And somebody asked me, what was my name? And I was just like, Jonathan? No, what's your, who are you? And I was like, Oh yeah, I probably should come up with that.

So Calizoria was born out of moving to Texas and having to come up with a stage name. I was like Calizoria. It's Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, and Queen Victoria put together. Calizoria. It also sounds like a ghetto black name.

For me, I am a man. I like being a man. It's fun to dress up as a woman, but I've never had like body dysphoria or thought about what it would be like, well, I've thought about what it would be like to be a woman just in the grander sense of the world. But for me personally I like being a guy. I do identify as cisgendered male. I use he/him pronouns. I answer to pretty much anything, but for me personally, I call myself a guy. So I've never struggled with it, myself. Now obviously being gay in Texas was an interesting experience. Dealing with other people's masculinity. High school was a bit of a nightmare.

So I've never had, I've never struggled with my own personal identity as a guy. Navigating some of the traditionally male spheres has always been interesting because I am a bit more colorful and flamboyant than most guys. But my usual approach to that one is, that's just me. If you don't like it, don't talk to me. That's just who I am. I'm comfortable in my own skin. I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself to be terribly masculine, but I like being male. I like having a penis. Life is good.

The only thing is that you just have to, every once in a while, you have to deal with somebody else's masculinity, and that's fine. I have more than enough ammo. Back in the drag scene, I used to be known, I'm very quick with hecklers. I can pick the biggest redneck in the room and talk his ass straight out the door. I'm not worried. I had a, actually at the Opulence Ball a couple of weeks ago, I had, I was wearing this gorgeous red fringe gown, and we were all just like standing out in the back alley, and somebody came by and screamed something or other. And my general response was like, what motherfucker? You want to go? Don't let this dress and these heels fool you, motherfucker. I can turn it on when I have to. So yeah, my usual issues with masculinity is dealing with other people's masculinity. I'm happy with mine.

I am the last founding member of the Bat City Bombshells. There's a couple of other girls that are about a couple of years behind me. But I, I'm, I'm the last founding member. We've been around 12 years. It's kinda scary to think about that. And when we first started, we were all just kind of flying by the seat of our pantyhose. But nowadays I'm one of the people that I actually own the company. We are incorporated. We are a business.

So, when we moved to Texas and I was still doing drag, this is in the early 2000s. So anyone listening to this, this isn't about the Austin drag scene now, but almost 20 years ago, back in those days the Austin drag scene was cutthroat. It was, the way I usually describe it is, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Showgirls? Well, there's a scene in there where one of the dancers takes a handful of beads and throws them out on the stage, and so the lead dancer slips and breaks her hip or something. And so then she becomes the new lead dancer and that's basically what the Austin drag scene was like. Like everybody was out for themselves. There was no community. Nobody supported each other. It was very cutthroat. And that was very different from Vegas where everybody got along and everybody was friends and blah, blah, blah.

And so for a couple years I just stopped performing. And then one day I was, this was when I was working at Lucy in Disguise, it was the end of the Halloween season. We're all fucking exhausted, and this gorgeous woman comes in to buy pasties. My friend next to me, Riley DoRight. She was calling people for their late costume returns and this woman comes in to buy pasties, and I'm showing her pasties, and Riley was like, are you a performer? She was like, no, these are just for my husband. And Riley was like, you should be a performer. It’s like, okay. And then Riley started talking to her about… ‘Cause she was putting together a burlesque troupe, ‘cause Riley had moved here from Amarillo. She didn't want to be a solo performer, but all the troupes back in those days, once again, this is about over a decade ago. This is a different scene than it is now, but back in those days, the Austin burlesque troupes weren't too nice either. So when Riley tried to join a troupe, they basically told her to grow her hair out, shave her pits, and cover up her tattoos, and lose 15 pounds. And she was like, fuck you, I'll do it myself.

And so Riley was like, I'm starting a troupe. And I'm like, you go girl. And then Tracy came in to buy pasties, Riley was there, I was there. And we were just like, I'm starting a troupe. Do you need an emcee? I'm a great host. Yeah, you can come in, and you should be a performer. And we just collected friends and misfits and whatnot. And that's how the Bat City Bombshells were born. Basically everybody that told us that we shouldn't be on stage, like screw you guys, I’ll do it myself.

The Austin community has been, I won't say hard fought, not amongst ourselves. We've had to fight a lot of venues and a lot of managers and quote/unquote producers. But no, the Austin, there actually is an Austin Burlesque Alliance. We all work together. We have worked very hard to build the community that we have. Right now there are about 8 different troupes and over 50 independent performers in the Austin community. And we do look at it as a community and we try to, we all try to support each other. We try to go to each other's shows.

I used to say that the Austin burlesque community is unionized. There's a minimum amount that you get paid. There is a minimum amount that we charge for shows. There are some venues that have free burlesque shows, but we make sure that those free shows still pay the performers because they used to try to pay with exposure. Any artist or performer or band has always heard that, Oh, yeah, no, you, you do a free set, but you know, there'll be a crowd of 500 people. So, you know, you'll get more fans that way. You play for exposure. No, we don't do that. If you perform, you get paid. One of my number one things with the Bat City Bombshells is that if your foot touches that stage, you get paid. Sometimes a performer might have to drop out of a particular show, but if you were there for rehearsals, if you help somebody with their number, if you helped with costuming, if you did something to support the show, you get paid. Nobody, none of us have the time or the luxury to do this for free. Everybody needs to be supported.

Rod: Is that sense of community and family, is that part of the history and culture of burlesque generally? Or did you fight for it to make it true here or is it part of the culture?

Jonny: It is a part of the culture, but it is also something that you have to strive for. But yeah, you create your own community. And I think the Austin community, we built it. And part of that is just the kind of Austin friendliness of, hi, we're all friends. Let's all work together. Let's cut the bullshit. Most of the bullshitters are gone. Thank the gods.

Rod: Did you ever perform as a burlesque dancer yourself or do you just, you just emcee these shows?

Jonny: Oh yeah, I did burlesque probably about five years. I started out in drag and I did drag for a long ass time. I did drag for about a decade. So then I was about 24 when I stopped performing and then a couple of years... And then after that when we started the troupe I used to do a few numbers and basically, you know, I'm just going to be honest with you, I just dusted off some of my old drag numbers and took my clothes off. I was like, I already know the choreography. I’m not coming up with a whole new number. I got costumes and music and cues I got. Nah. So I did burlesque for a whole minute, but I'm more funny than I am sexy. Most of my numbers were either over the top and campy or just weird and goofy. So nah, I like to, I like the stand up drag queen aspects of burlesque, of it more than the actual, like take off my top. So I did burlesque for a whole minute.

Burlesque has a long history. I mean, about a hundred years or so. Which is why for the Texas Burlesque Festival, we always bring in a legend. And I'm one of the producers for the Texas Burlesque Festival, so we bring in somebody that was doing it back in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. Our headliner this year is Judith Stein. Oh, what is it? The Greatest Beaver in Canada or something like that is her tagline.

Rod: That's a good line.

Jonny: She started back in '72. So we’re bringing her out. We've had so many legends have come out and I've met so many famous people several of whom are no longer with us unfortunately. But I love the fact that I at least have the opportunity to meet them. ‘Cause when you start talking to the legends, you have the women that mainly did, they were like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston. Like that was their scene. And then you have the women, that toured all over the country, they're doing shows in fricking Tupelo, Mississippi ‘cause they were willing to pay. And so you have the folks that went that route. And so everybody has a story, and we all have a great deal of respect for those that came before and those that are still out there now.

Rod: You do like national tours and different venues or do you go do like is there like a festival circuit that you do?

Jonny: There's the festival circuit and then there’s two big burlesque events every year. There is BurlyCon, which is a big burlesque convention up in Seattle. That is huge. And then there is BHoF, the Burlesque Hall of Fame. BurlyCon is about education and learning and, and again, meeting people from all over the country. And then so that one's more about like taking workshops and like improving your craft and you know, learning from these other people. And then BHoF is when everybody just comes together, gets dressed up and you just watch like the Hall, it's the Hall of Fame. It's like the best of the best performers. And so that's always a fun one. BHoF is in Las Vegas, so for me it's just going home.

Rod: I was curious how gender and race lay over this. Like for gender, it seemed like most of the performers were women, but I did see a couple of shows where there was a man, but he seemed to be a featured performer, not like a regular part of the troupe. And I was curious how, how gender plays into it.

Jonny: Male burlesque or boylesque or manlesque or whatever the term is this week, it is a novelty because it's different. It's not thunder from down under. It's not necessarily puppetry of the penis. It is still held to the same standards of burlesque. It is expected to be performed and danced, and there's a story to be told, and there's usually... and just like in a traditional female burlesque, there's also a wider acceptance of body types these days. Back in the day it was like, you either look like Chris Hemsworth or not. That's how it worked. Now there are very thin guys. There are some wonderful male performers that are a bit heavier, that are a bit huskier that are rocking the dad bod, if you will.

One of the newest members of our troupe, his name is Rock God. But yeah, he's a bit on the heavier side, but his number fricking killed it at our Anti-Valentine's Day show. And so gender is becoming more fluid because there are also now trans performers, trans men and trans women that have gotten into burlesque. And so, and I'm not going to say this is true everywhere, but I will say here in Austin, it is everybody is invited to play. Some of the best performers in town are transgender. And we, it's one of those, you know, what are your preferred pronouns? And that's how we go with it. 

I will say as far as race goes, we're doing some work on that. It is not uncommon to have maybe one person of color in a show or in a troupe. We have several in our troupe, but again, we're weird. If you talk to Toni Elling who came down, I want to say Toni was here 2013, 2014, for the Texas Burlesque Festival. But Toni Elling tells a story how she would get booked, but it wasn't, it basically wasn't until she became a star and a headliner that she would get booked in some of the bigger theaters and some of the bigger clubs. So she literally had to like work her way up from the bars. Whereas certain performers, literally they went from the chorus line straight to the main stage, and she didn't have that opportunity, so I would say that a lot of people of color probably don't get their just due as performers. Now, there are some amazing performers. Ray Gunn, Nina Josephine... I'm not even gonna try to start naming people ‘cause I have a terrible memory, but there are some amazing performers. 

Like I said, here in Austin, we have gotten rid of a lot of toxic producers. So it was just like, hey, don't do this show, don't work with these people. I won't name a specific festival, but there was a whole big blow up over one of the festivals in the South that in that particular city, just in that city, they had a huge black burlesque performer base. And that particular festival did not book a single black person. Like no black people. Like basically no people of color whatsoever. It was all thin, young white women. That was their entire three day festival of nothing but thin, young white women. And there was a huge outcry about that. And then one of their producers came out and said, sorry, didn't notice. And the other one came out and was like, it's our festival. Get over it. As far as I know, those people are no longer producing because basically across the country and across the spectrum, everybody was like, and I'm done with you. Not performing with you anymore. You're not invited to our festival. Get over it.

But yeah, so that's one of the things in like... Oh, just recently there was a troupe that came through Austin that was out of New York, and I can't remember what their name was. But basically it was like this entire troupe of these gorgeous black people. And there it was just like so much gorgeous brown skin and all y'all, and we just saw the show, or we saw the ad for the show, and we were like, who are they? What the hell? There's an entire black burlesque troupe in Austin, and I don't know about it? And then when we looked it up, turned out they were like touring from New York and we were like, Oh, okay. Well that's amazing cause yeah, if there was an all black burlesque troupe here in Austin, I need to know about that. Austin needs to know about that.

But yeah, so there's Fat Bottom Cabaret, which is all curvy women of color. They have a pretty wide spectrum from Latinx, I think is what we're supposed to say now. I say Latina still. I mean, one of their members, I love her. Her name is Chola Magnolia. I love people. Come on now, if you're gonna, you don't necessarily have to be racist about it, but embrace your culture. Come on now.

Rod: Where do you, where do performers generally come from? Like are they people that have done it their whole lives or the sense I got is that some people come to it later in life. And I always thought like people, and maybe especially women, and maybe not especially women, get to a certain age where they're just, they're ready to just say fuck all the bullshit of people pleasing and, and it's about me now. And there's such a sense of like confidence and body positivity and just that feel to burlesque. I just wondered if these, if a lot of the performers came to it later in life.

Jonny: It's kind of a mix. I will say that there are, I'd say probably about 50/50. There are some folks who have long backgrounds in theater and dance and whatnot, and then there are some people that are literally like, they came to a show and they were like, I want to do that. And either they reach out to a troupe or there's the Austin Academy of Burlesque. So we actually, there actually is a place to learn burlesque here in Austin. You can either learn to become a performer, or it's kind of like that pole dancing for exercise, just because you go to a pole dancing class doesn't mean you're going to go down to Yellow Rose and apply for a job. Same thing with burlesque. Just because you take a couple of burlesque dance classes, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're ready to hit the stage.

So some folks go through the academies, some people just they've decided that, yeah, no, fuck the bullshit. This is how I want to feel. And one of the things that I've heard from, her name is Cruel Valentine. She's a performer. But she’s a bigger girl. She wears it well. She has no problem with it. And one of the things she says is, one of the best feelings you'll ever get is when your big ass is naked on stage and 500 people are cheering for you. And I would have to agree, like hell yeah. So yeah, it depends on the person, but I think, I think it's about 50/50. A lot of people come from an actual dance background and then a lot of people are just like, you know what? Fuck it. I can do it. Step back and watch.

And that's actually one of the great things about the Bombshells is that we actually, we teach, we coach, we help. Not everybody in our troupe is a trained dancer. Not everybody in our troupe wants to be a trained dancer. And some people I think are better because they are not in their head trying to go five, six, seven, eight. Nah. Hit the stage, go with what feels right. And you know, you do have to have a sense of musicality and rhythm. But other than that, no. You don't need to know how to do like a full on Bob Fosse number to hit the stage. If you can dance around topless in your kitchen while making macaroni and cheese, come on down.

But I think burlesque is kind of in a transition right now where a lot of people are trying to find their own voice instead of trying to fit into a mold, ‘cause there’s classic burlesque and then there's neo burlesque and then there's like different ways that you can do it. And so a lot of the classic performers are what are now, are the folks who are now becoming the legends of our generation. But the fact is that a lot of the folks that are coming up now are looking at those classic numbers and those classic performers and thinking to themselves, well, they're already doing the glove peel and the boa dance and everything else. What the hell can I do? And I think that actually sparks a lot of creativity in the sense of, yeah, what the hell can you do? You can get up there and do a walk step, you know, take off a glove. Sure. Or you can get up there in spandex and dance to frickin’ ‘80s hair metal. As long as you can make it work, cool. If you have, you know, some deep emotional stuff that you're trying to work through and you get up there and do a somber, slow strip to frickin’ Evanescence, cool. What can you do? Get creative. You can't just do a, well, you can just do the walk and peel, but we've all seen that. What else you got?

Rod: Well, we're sitting inside Forbidden Fruit. Are you an employee, or are you part owner? Do you have a stake in this place or…?

Jonny: I'm the general manager and the quote/unquote heir apparent. In a couple of years when the sisters retire, I'm going to be buying the store from them. Let’s see, we've been around since 1981, so right now the tentative plan is 2021. So Lynn, who was one of the people who started the store, so that'll give her a solid 40 years of doing this. And then yeah, I'm going to be taking over the store and I'm very much looking forward to it.

22-time winner of Best Adult Business in Austin, Austin Chronicle Reader's Poll. We've, but we don't take it for granted though. We actually feel very appreciative every time we do win ‘cause yeah, the Austin, I think there's like seven different sex stores in Austin. So the fact that folks keep coming back here makes me happy.

Rod: How did you come to it?

Jonny: When I was in college and doing the drag circuit and whatnot around town, Lynn and I used to do shows together. It was me, Lynn, Coco Lectric, a few other people, Goldie Candela. This was, they weren't quite burlesque shows back in those days. It was called the Saturday Night Sex Party. It was up North. It was just this weird just naughtiness that we were doing. And so that's how I got to meet Lynn. So I knew Lynn before I started working here. I knew Lynn from shows and then one day, it was after Extravagasm, we were both frickin’ tired. We were standing in the box office counting out money. And at the time I had quit my job at Lucy in Disguise, and I was just living on my savings, and I literally just looked over at her and I was like, are you hiring? She was like, actually yeah, our manager is about to leave to start his own store. And so I came in, I interviewed, and yeah, and that's how I started working here.

We try to be the not creepy sex store. So the store is very open. You can see from one side to the other, there are no racks where someone might be hiding and doing something untoward. We also, we curate our products. We don't carry everything. We do have people who come in and they'll look at our dildos for example, and they're like, wow, these are kind of expensive. Yeah, they're also dual density silicone from some of the best manufacturers in the business. If you're looking for like a $20 jelly thing to like, you know, use as a gag gift, sorry, we don't have that. We do have some less expensive, I usually tell folks I can get you anything from $10 to $200. Just depends on what you're looking for. And so if you're looking for a little vibe, yeah, I can get you a little vibe for like 15 bucks. It's still going to be a nice little vibe. It's going to last you. It's not going to be a cheap, breaks in three days type of deal. So that's another one of the things that distinguishes us is that we curate and make sure that we carry the best that we can get within any given price range. But then also we do custom orders. So for those people that you know, can't quite find what they're looking for or they really like this one, they just wish it was in purple. Okay. I can get you one in purple. Probably take about three or four days.

Rod: The vibe that I got when I was here as a customer was that it was just very relaxed, very open, very honest, very direct. There was no sense of titillation. There was no sense of embarrassment or anything. Do you think that's a fair assessment? Like is that a goal of the business?

Jonny: Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's the, that's the whole point of it. It's like this isn't, I mean, you can try to go for the titillation factor if you want to, but no, these are products, this is human sexuality on display. This is what, I'll have, you know, someone coming in to buy her first vibrator and you know, might be a little underwhelmed. I usually ask the same three questions, large, small, internal, external, and what kind of power are we talking? And go from there. Like, we don't need to get this, what do you want it to be? Flesh tone. Do you want it to feel real? No, it's a toy. Calm down.

So that's our, that's our general approach is treat everybody like people. Come on in, and no question is weird. We don't do any of that what’s referred to as kink shaming. We don't do any of that. So I've had folks come in and they'll come up and they're like very quietly whisper and it's like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm I'm looking for a glass toy. Oh yeah, come on down. My glass stuff is back here. It's like, you don't need to whisper. What of my number one things I always say, I tell folks is this ain’t Target. Spit it out. If you can't say it here, if you can't say it, you can't buy it. Them’s the rules.

Rod: How did you get into teaching classes? Did you do that from the very beginning, or did you work your way up to that?

Jonny: Ah, I worked my way up to it in the sense that I was told, you should be teaching classes. And so that was I already worked here for probably about three or four years. And at that point I was facilitating the workshops. So I helped run the store while the workshops were going on, but somebody else was actually teaching. It's actually one of my favorite workshops to teach is my fellatio workshop. And that was literally, that workshop literally came out of a friend of mine who... this was back in college. She swore that she would never suck dick. It's like the most disgusting thing in the world. Why would anybody put a penis in their mouth? That's so gross. She would never do it. Fast forward to her studying abroad in Scotland, and I get an email, “Hey Johnny, how do you, how do you do that?” So I created a PowerPoint for her.

And this wonderful woman who has since retired, her name is Charla Hathaway. She was a sex educator. She was actually one of the first people that started teaching here back in the ‘90s. So Charla taught here for a while. Charla used to teach our Fellatio 101 class, and I would facilitate, and Charla would ask me questions, and she would always start it the same way she would go, Jonny as a penis haver and a penis lover, what do you think?

And then one day after the class you know, I was writing her the check, getting her paid and giving her the evaluations and whatnot. And she was like, you know, you know enough about this stuff, why don't you teach this class? Like I'm not a teacher. She was like, yes, you are. Okay. Maybe I can teach this class. And so I kind of did a bit more research and kind of looked up if I were to teach this class, what would I talk about? And kind of went from there.

And so most of my teaching experience just comes from working here at the store and just answering a million questions a day. So it's like, yeah, I do know all of this stuff. Spread the knowledge. So that's how I got into teaching was basically somebody told me that I should teach. She didn't just tell me, she basically kind of made it sound like I didn't have a choice. You're going to teach this class. And I was like, okay. So that's how I first got into teaching, and then I just more and more stuff that interested me and I found out more about it and I was like, people should know about that. Let’s teach a class.

So the same thing with my anal workshop, which was one of my, that actually my anal workshop was actually my favorite workshop to teach. Cause that's where I’m like, everybody's got one. You can play with it, go for it. But then I have people who come in and they're like, what if it hurts? Well, it's not supposed to hurt. Well, what if it does hurt? Then stop doing it. Assess, try more lube, try a different position. There's different things that you can do. But it's not supposed to hurt. That's one of the things like, cause we sell a lot of kink, bondage, and BDSM gear, and one of the rules of the store is that we do not sell anything that harms the human body. We do sell things that hurt the human body, but we don't sell anything that harms the human body. We don't sell spermicide. We don't sell condoms with spermicide. We don't sell any oil-based lubes cause oil-based lubes break down latex barriers. We don't sell jelly toys and things like that because a lot of the, if you open a toy and it's like sticking to the plastic or like has a funny smell, don't put that in your body. Yeah, there's a reason why you got a 10-inch dildo for 20 bucks. Don't put that in your body. It's just weird.

A lot of folks ask why we're still around. Like how, you know, the internet's a thing. Why would anybody go to a sex store? You can buy everything online and it’s like, you can. Not quite sure what the hell you're going to get. And I've actually said that to people who come in, they're like, I can find this on Amazon for $30. No, you can't. I guarantee you you can't. You can find something on Amazon for $30. It's not going to be that product. And if it is that product, I guarantee you it doesn't come from the manufacturer, and it doesn't come with a warranty. So yeah, best of luck.

We're a small store. We try to make sure that we have the best of the best and if you can find it cheaper online, if you want to risk it, go for it. But there is still some value to coming into a store and being like, nope, that's the exact one that I want. I'm going to take it now. I don't have to pay shipping, and I know it is what it actually says on the box, and no one has used it before. So that's my number one thing is, if you're going to buy online, be very careful. Otherwise, you know, go into a store, talk to somebody. It's okay. We generally try to be friendly unless it's first thing on a Sunday and I'm slightly hung over. I think that's about it.

Rod: Anything you wanted to plug? Like any upcoming show, like it usually takes me a while to do this. So you got to show next weekend it's going to be too late, but...

Jonny: I would say Texas Burlesque Festival at the Long Center. That'll be April 24th and 25th. Tickets are on sale now. We're going to have some amazing performers coming in literally from all over the world. So yeah, if you can't go see a show in Tokyo, maybe come down to the Long Center in April and you can see some performers.

Rod: Wow. That's a nice venue.

Jonny: Yeah.

Rod: That's cool. All right. Thanks Johnny. I really appreciate it.

Jonny: No problem.

Amy Haden-Knost talks about her military service during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, online dating, same sex marriage before Obergefell v. Hodges, and becoming a grandparent. My thanks to Amy for sharing her time with me, especially since I don’t think talking is her favorite pastime. This was the first interview I’ve done long distance, so it was fun figuring out a recording solution, and a backup solution for when that fails, which it did! But I still got the audio. I’m always grateful for learning opportunities.

Amy and her wife Renee (who is also my sister) rescue, transport, foster, and adopt Rottweilers throughout the southeast. It’s a cause that’s very dear to their hearts and to the hearts of the houseful of dogs (and cats), so if you’d like to support that work, please check out Florida Rottweiler Rescue Ranch and Sanctuary, in Dover, Florida, and consider supporting their mission.

And as always, thank you to Flora Folgar for her love, support, and voiceover talents.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

8:09: “Higher Up” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

11:50: “The Rise Of Heroes” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

15:05: “Acoustic Guitar 1” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com

18:22: “Black Knight  by Rafael Krux” - https://filmmusic.io/song/5617-black-knight-

22:03: “Can You Feel” by Nordgroove from Fugue

26:17: “Alone Lonely (Instrumental”)  by Michael McQuaid from Fugue

29:23: “Call to Adventure” by Kevin MacLeod

33:41: “Blue (Instrumental)” by Rojj from Fugue

37:27: “Danse Macabre” by Kevin MacLeod

43:53: “Blue Ska” by Kevin MacLeod

Here’s the transcript:

In theory, everybody thinks that I’m the one that quote/unquote “wears the pants in the family” and all that other fun jazz because, well, I may look pretty good in a suit and tie or a shirt and tie. But that doesn’t mean I’m more manly, and honestly, in our type of relationship, that’s the whole idea is that there isn’t that male person in the relationship.

I mean honestly, she’s the one that says walking down the street, people are like, oh yeah, you’re gay. And they look at me. You’re gay. But she has to come out every single time. She passes. She passes as a straight woman. I mean, it’s one of those, she’ll even say it. She’s like, yeah, you totally pass as gay. That’s not a problem. People look at you and go, yeah, ding, you’re done. She’s like, where people look at me and go, so who’s your husband? And she’s like, actually, that’s my wife.

Renee’s telling me to go upstairs, so… See? I told you I don’t wear the pants in the family.

Well, actually, in this family, we’re pants and kilts, but then again, some of the big, burly, hairy dudes that we hang out with wear kilts as well, so that’s an OK thing. What’s more dainty and feminine than doing bench presses and back squats and deadlifts? And in all actuality, every woman should be doing that anyway, because it’s good for their muscular structure as well as their bone growth. Being sedentary is not good, ever. I mean, I hate that I have to work behind a desk and work with a computer all day. But that’s only 8 hours out of my day. After that, I usually leave, and we go to the gym, and we work out for at least an hour or so.

We do Weight Over Bar, Weight for Distance, well, Heavy Weight and Light Weight for Distance, Sheaf, Stone, whether it’s Open or Braemar, Hammer Throw, and then Caber. Caber is the small tree.

We’ve done the whole Ancestry DNA thing, and I’m like 93% British Isles, which covers England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, in which I think 55 or 60% of it is Scottish and Irish. So yeah. I’m kind of heavy on that ethnicity. But yeah, we got into it because we decided, hey, there was a Celtic festival over in Gulfport, Mississippi, and we went, “Let’s go see what’s going on over there!” So we went, and we went and wandered around the festival, ate the foods, and had a couple beers, and we started watching some of the Highland Games, and I’m like was watching them do Weight Over Bar. And I was watching this, and I’m like, this is like a kettlebell snatch, but you let it go. I said, “I think I could do that.” And Renee’s like, “OK, then let’s get information and find out where the next one is.” And so the next one, because that was like in November, and the next one was in March in Dothan, Alabama. And so I was like, “OK, then we’re going to practice with whatever we can practice with.” And so we started, I took a couple kettlebells home, and I took just a sledgehammer to use as a hammer and went out to a baseball field and started throwing stuff and started figuring it out.

And then I competed that, in Dothan, and then afterwards, Renee’s like, “I want to do it too.” I went, “OK, then let’s both do it. It’s not a big deal.” And so the next competition was in April in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so we drove up there, and we both competed up there. And we’ve been just doing it since.

It’s fun. I mean, it really is fun, and it’s such a small group that are very supportive of one another, and around here, when we go to the games in the different areas, we see the same folks. And so it’s kind of like friends getting together. We’d all go out to dinner the night before, and then we meet on the field for competition the next day, and then have cold beer that night, the night afterwards.

We train together, so now, after doing this for about a year or so, we’ve actually gotten to the point where it’s like, OK, she’s trying to do Weight Over Bar, or I’m trying to do Weight Over Bar, and we don’t hit it, but the other person’s watching, go, “OK, it peaked at this point, so you need to take a step either forwards or backwards.” And so it’s like, “Oh, OK, cool.” And so we make the adjustment, take a big swing, and it makes it. And it’s like, “OK, there you go.”

I don’t really think about gender identity necessarily. It’s like, you have the 1950s stereotypes of what a mom’s supposed to be and what a dad’s supposed to be, but things progressed over the ages and the years, and I don’t think that is something that is a common thought now necessarily with gender roles. I mean, friends of mine at work, we were talking that being in a same sex relationship is common practice. You wouldn’t think this back in 1950 or 1960, but you see that every day now. You see Target commercials. You see airline commercials. So it’s not really a thing anymore. It’s one of those, you can be whatever you want to be, however you want to be it. You don’t have to be limited by what gender you were born.

I’ve got pictures of the whole class pictures of going through middle school and high school, and it’s like, no. No. I just… I mean, you can see picture after picture I am just who I am. I’ve heard about people, “I had a horrible childhood” or “I had a horrible time when I was in high school.” Yeah. I can’t relate, because I didn’t. And I know, most people would be like, “How is that possible?” It’s 100% possible, because I just didn’t have that situation.

I mean, I grew up right outside of D.C., and so it’s one of those, it was I would say fairly open, even my middle sister, which is 4 years older than me, her best friends were a whole bunch of gay guys. OK? She’d go clubbing with them and had a blast, and that was back in the ‘80s, which was way before anything blew up and exploded in reference to the same sex culture. I grew up there, and then I moved out to Colorado for 12 years. There wasn’t anything that somebody went, “Oh, by the way, you can’t be this way.” Or “you can’t be that way” or “you have to do this” or “you can’t do that.”

I pretty much wore whatever clothes I wanted to, except there were a couple occasions where my father was very, very stern with, “OK, this is a big event. You have to wear a dress,” and I went, “No, no! No, don’t make me! Don’t make me!” of course, because me and dresses were not a thing. And then I came home from school after getting class pictures in my dress and put on my jeans and t-shirt and my boots and went out and rode my motorcycle. So it all worked out. No harm, no foul. It was just the way it was. It was just me.

It didn’t matter who you were. Everybody played pickle with a baseball and hopefully you didn’t hit the window or hit each other. You played kickball in the park down the street. There was no, “Oh, well, girls get picked last” or “boys get picked first.” No. It’s everybody plays.I grew up in a really weird society, or maybe that was just my fog of consciousness of it. Maybe I just lived in that little bubble world or a cloudy day, the cloud over my head, and I just didn’t notice. It’s like, “OK, people are people. OK. We grow up, so that means we have to buy bigger clothes and bigger shoes. OK.”

I was actually stationed at the Air Force Academy. That was my first duty station, and then after being there for about 4 years, I got sent down to Peterson Air Force Base, which is on the south side of town. I was a contracting officer. So I got to buy supplies and services and did construction there. I bought their space simulation chamber for their physics department. And then I bought their lasers. It was a laser machine that actually helped the physics students learn about wavelengths. And then of course, I had stairs built on the terrazzo between the dining hall and the terrazzo with heating elements in them because they’re granite, and you can’t shovel granite. So they had to have heating elements underneath so when the snow and ice would come on, it would flip a switch, the heating elements would heat up the stone and remove the snow and ice.Those were like cool little moments at the Academy. But I mean, it was a lot of fun. I mean, I had a lot of fun doing my job, working and contracting, and then I went down to Peterson and did more advanced stuff. And then I also was one of the procurement agents for the Cheyenne Mountain facility as well, because that’s, Peterson kind of covered that too.

I was in the Air Force active duty for almost 10, and then I’ve been in the Reserves for just over 3. Air transportation. That’s like the official title. Pretty much anything that has to do with getting things on and off of airplanes, that’s what we do. Whether it’s people, cargo, special stuff, rolling stock, like if they had tanks or any type of vehicles that needed to get to a destination, we would load them up, and then the plane would take off. I drive a forklift. I can drive all the forklifts. I can drive Halvorsens, which are 25K loaders. Yeah, all that cool, fun stuff. 

And then I got out of the military in 2001. That was 15, almost 16 years. That was to raise my kids. And that was I was supposed to go on a 15-month “short tour” is what they refer to it as. A long tour would be a full PCS with family and everything. Short tours, in the active duty world, at least back then, I don’t know if they still do them, were just like little 12 or 15 month stints at an alternate location, kind of like a TDY, but it was a little more permanent. TDY is “temporary duty station,” so… And PCS is “permanent change of station.” So I was scheduled to go somewhere for about 15 months, and I went, “Eh, my kids are 2 and 4, and I really don’t trust their dad to actually raise them correctly.” And so I went, “OK. What are my options if I don’t go?” And they went, “Well, then you’ll need to get out.” And so I went, “OK, for my kids’ sake, I’ll get out.” So I did.

We were not married. We lived under the same roof, and we had kids together. One’s 20, and one’s 22. That was a long time ago. And now she’s a mom of her own, too. We are officially grandparents now. That’s crazy. And I actually held him the other day, and I went, “Oh my God, he’s so teeny tiny. What the hell?” I’m like, “How can a little human be so tiny?” And he, I mean honestly, at birth, he was as big as my first one. Same size exactly. I’m like, I’m holding him like, “Oh my gosh.” And I’m like, “Ooh, little tiny toes.” 

I’m like, I don’t… It’s a word, but it’s kind of weird, and I probably won’t feel that way until he says whatever. Because everybody’s like, “Oh, what are you going to be called?” I’m like, “I have no idea.” Well, that’s what Renee’s like, “Um, I’m just going to be Renee.” And I’m like, “You know what? He’s going to call you something, and you’re going to figure it out, and that’s going to be your name.”

You know, Nana is a banana. A Nana is what a small child calls a banana, and I do not want to be called a banana. So I’m like, you know what? If he utters the phrase ‘whatever’, I grew up with a Red Grandma and a White Grandma, because Red Grandma of course dyed her hair, so she had red hair, and the other one had white hair. It made total sense. So, again, it will be whatever is uttered out of his mouth. If he decides to just call me Amy, that’s fine.

Zero involvement, and Renee yells at me all the time. She’s like, “Oh my God.” But I know she was heavily involved in the whole AIDS thing in San Francisco, and she has people that were dying of it, and have died of it. That affected her a lot. It didn’t affect me at all. She goes, “You just turned a blind eye to everything. I just cannot believe you didn’t… like, you weren’t a part of any of that, and you didn’t know about any of that.” I’m like, “Nope. Sorry.” I mean, I didn’t know of anyone I grew up with or in the area or that I was friends with that had it, or have it now.

In high school, Renee of course, Renee and I have totally different views when it comes to high school and even middle school and growing up. She was “Errrr!” I mean, you know. Where I was just kind of like, OK, I was in band, and I played sports, and I had good grades, so yeah. And I hung out with the jocks. I hung out with the theater nerds, you know, the drama kids, the chorus kids, the band kids, even the rednecks. I was friends with everybody. It just didn’t matter. It’s like, if you were good people, I hung out with you. If you were bad people, I was going to tell you you were a bad person, and you need to shape up.

Before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was slammed down and said, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do. This is a hardcore policy,” it really wasn’t an issue. Nobody cared, and it wasn’t in the forefront of anyone’s mind. But as soon as that came to headlines that Clinton’s going to be, “Oh, no, we don’t have to ask this anymore. We’re not going to ask it; you don’t have to tell us. You just behave and watch your Ps and Qs.” Well, for the most part, we were all like, “OK, well if you’re not going to ask, and I’m not going to tell you, then I can kind of live my life as long as it doesn’t affect my job.” Where in all actuality, from being there in uniform at the time, it became a witch hunt. I mean, it was one of those, people were seeking out people doing wrong so they could go, “Oh no, no, no. He came out of his room!” or “She came out of her room!” It was more of that rather than, “Well, we’re not going to ask, so it doesn’t really matter.” And don’t even give them even an inkling of an idea that something may be happening, because someone’s going to go to OSI and go, “Hey, I saw Jane come out of Suzy’s room at 6 o’clock in the morning.” OK. And of course, now we’re wasting OSI money and time by investigating something that, “Oh, they were just studying together. Who cares?”

I mean, truthfully, yes, I was personally investigated, but it got tossed out. And I mean, they asked my roommate, because I had a female roommate. They even asked… They brought her in and asked her questions, and then I had several of my friends go up,  volunteering to say, “Hey, I want to put in a statement.” And so, it’s like, pretty much at that point it got tossed out, because I had probably at least a half a dozen people go up and go, “Hey, I want to voluntarily put in a statement for this person.” And once they see all that come through, they’re like, “Yeah, no, we’re barking up the wrong tree here.”

I was very happy when that ended, though. It’s like, “OK. So you’re gay. So? And? Do you do a good job? OK. That’s all that matters.”

We’re almost 14 years later, so… But yeah, we actually met online way before all the cool dating sites like match.com and eHarmony. There was a wonderful little site that apparently I joined, and I was fairly new. It was actually specifically… It’s called ButchFemmeMatchmaker.com. As funny as that is, it was an actual real website way in the early 2000s before all of this other stuff has come out. And it matched more masculine and more feminine people together, if you… And you can pick and choose, say you were quote-unquote butch, which is the more of masculine visual. If you like other butches, you could say, “That’s what I’m interested in.” Or if you were more feminine, and you liked more feminine, then you could say, “I was interested in more feminine.” I mean, it just kind of curtailed you in your… You could refine your filters, quote-unquote.

And well, she messed up, because she was searching for new individuals that had joined the site to see if anybody intrigued her, and she forgot to put in a zip code. So she pulled up all of the new people on this website rather than just new people within a certain proximity of her. And of course, I popped up, and she just looked at my picture. I can even show you the picture. It cracks me up. She’s like, “That’s the one that got me.” I’m like, “OK, whatever. It doesn’t make any damn sense to me, but OK.”

And then she clicked on my image and went through the profile, and she went, “Dammit. Why you gotta be so far away?” And then she went back, and she revamped her search, and she did her own searches, but then she actually clicked on my link two more times. So she actually viewed my profile three times in the same night. I got home from work, and the cool part about this website was that if somebody had viewed your profile, you could see who had viewed your profile, even if they didn’t give you a comment or leave you a message. You could see who it was, and so you’re like, “OK, well who’s been checking me out?” I mean, it’s common sense. I look up, and I’m like, “Wow. Who are you?” So I clicked on her profile, and I read her profile. It was very, very honest, as was mine. And I was like, “You know? She seems like a really cool person. Hmm.” So I sent her a message, and I went, “Hey, I viewed your profile. You seem like a really neat person. I would love to chat with you more.” That’s it. Knowing she is 2600 miles away. It’s never going to happen, or at least the chances are like so far and few, I just, she seems like a cool person to chat with.

OK. And then all of a sudden, whoop! She sends me a message back, and I’m like, “Oh shit! She’s online! Oh damn, that was fast.” And we started chatting.

We chatted for probably 5 or 6 hours that night, just chatting on the web, just typing up words. That’s all it was. We were both very, very truthful, but I had not said my name, nor had I given her my phone number, and so, at the end of the conversation, I was like, “Well, I’d like to call you sometime.” And she goes, “OK,” and she gives me all of her phone numbers, so I picked up my cell phone and called her. 

She came across the country alone with the boys and the 3 cats.

My family’s kind of different. I’ve introduced her to my mom, and my mom’s actually come here to visit. But yeah, my parents are southern Baptists, and they don’t view this as a good thing. They hope that the good Lord will cure me of this.

Well, and the thing is, I was raised in a Catholic family. Even growing up Catholic, it was no big deal. It was just do what you do as long as you’re a good person. It didn’t matter. You know, be kind, be good. And then once my parents changed their faith and converted over to southern Baptist, they’ve been quite interesting folks, shall I say. There’s lots has gone on, so I don’t know if changing their faith pattern has modified their perceptions and their, the way they do things. I think it does. But as long as they’re not harmful to each other, I really don’t care.

But yeah, I remember when Renee introduced me to you all when I drove up with her and the boys, and apparently the first night there was that huge gathering, and it was, the chairs were set up in like a round circle she told me. And she’s like, it was so weird, because we all sat around in a round circle and talked. I was like, “OK.” And she says, “And I really wanted you to be there, but I really didn’t want this to be focused on Renee Day and oh my God, what crazy crap is Renee bringing into the family?” And I was like, “You know what? I’m fine. I’ll just hang out at the hotel and just chill. If I go swimming, I’ll go swimming. Don’t… It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. Whatever. You know, I’m not going to push this.” And then apparently she finally got your dad aside and went, “I brought a friend.” And he went, “OK, who is it?” And so they had a chat and talked about it, and that’s when I met you guys at the Pancake House. And then I remember being grilled by Meg and Kathleen. They were sitting across the table from me, and it was like the fire, question, question, question, question, question, and I’m like, “Oh, crap! I didn’t know I’d have a kevlar vest for this shit!” Oh yeah, it was one of those… It kind of… Afterwards, it’s like, Renee’s like, “Are you OK?” And I’m like, “I think so. I’m still in one piece. I think I’m OK.”

We had decided we really wanted to get married after being together for a year, but we couldn’t because there were only like two states, I think at that time, that legalized it. And we’re like, “You know, we really want to get married at home. We really want to get married where our friends and family, blah blah blah blah blah.” Normal normal. Normal stuff. And 5 years later, I went, “To hell with this.” And she went, “What?” I said, “Let’s go get married.” And she went, “What?” I went, “Let’s just do this. If we’re going to do it, let’s just do it.”

I had proposed after a year. So it was a very, like 5 year engagement later. I mean I was just, you know, because we had talked about it, we had talked about it. I was like, “I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of waiting for Florida to get off their ass and do what they should do. Let’s just go get married, and then when Florida recognizes it, then Florida recognizes it.” And she went, “OK.” And so I went through every single state, because there were 6 or 7 states that allowed it. And I went to every single state and looked at their requirements, because D.C. actually allowed it, and we were thinking about going to D.C. to do it, but D.C., the problem was is time, being that our kids were all still young, we couldn’t leave them for like a week and a half. And with D.C., say, you went in and put in, requested your marriage license on Monday, there was a 3-day waiting period, so you had to wait 3 full days after that. So that meant you could pick up your marriage license on Friday and go get married, but you had to have that waiting period.

So, I mean, I went through each state that it was possible in, and I found Connecticut, believe it or not, there was no waiting period, there was no required blood test, and you did not have to have witnesses. So that means we didn’t have to bring anybody. The only thing you had to have was an officiant, and so I found a nice little lady up in Connecticut, and she was an officiant, but more so, just our photographer. She took some pretty darn good pictures afterwards. And we went to a little town in Darien, Connecticut. We show up, and I’m in a suit and tie, and Renee’s in her dress that she’s made, and we go to the Clerk of the Court, and the lady turns around and goes, “Oh, are you two getting married?” And what does my smart ass say? “Oh no, we dress like this all the time. We’re just here for like trash schedules.” And she looked at me and went… And of course Renee, at that point, elbow went right in the arm. I was like, “Ow! I’m sorry.” It was hard to resist.

So we got… I mean, we paid quote-unquote half down for our marriage license. You have to pay them like 20 bucks. And then when you bring it back after you get married, and you know, to get it actually officially certified and stamped and all that, then you pay them the rest of the fee. So it’s kind of like you have to pay a down payment on it, and then you pay it off when you get back. So we grabbed the marriage license, went down to a wonderful little park that we had explored the day before that our officiant suggested, and we found a cute little probably hundreds year old bridge in the backwoods area, and we went, “This is perfect.” And so that’s where we got married. And we went back, she took the marriage certificate back and signed it officially in front of them so they could witness it, and they stamped it and approved it and said, “There you go.” Done. And then we flew home a couple days later.

Yep, it was just me, Renee, and Mary. That’s it.Yeah. I mean, it was super easy, super fast. It’s one of those, Renee will gig me about the saying of the vows every time, because we originally had said we want the shortest possible, don’t make me talk a lot. OK. So I find the shortest possible. “Do you take… to be your lawfully wedded wife?” “Yes, I do.” “Do you…?” You know, very, very simple. We’ve already said that, and I’m like, “OK, we’re in like Flynn. Cool. We’re good to go.” And she went, “OK, Amy, repeat after me.” Renee stops, and she looks at me, and she went… she just started laughing, because I looked at Mary, and my eyes got like the deer in the headlight, and I went, “You mean I have to say more?” And she went, “Yeah, officially you do.” And I went, “Oh, damn. This is going to get rough. I thought I was in. I was done.” And she went, “Nope. You got more to say.” And I went, “Oh, crap.”

Actually, we didn’t have a lot of issues. I mean, even, you know, we’re down here in the Redneck Riviera, southern Alabama, whatever you want to call it. We’ve had two occasions that I kind of remember that I kind of laugh at and go, “OK.” There was one, we were going into Wal-Mart years and years and years ago when we actually shopped there on a regular basis. And there was an older white gentleman pushing a cart, and his wife was walking next to him holding her purse, and they were walking down the aisle, and Renee and I walk in. Of course, we’re a couple. We’re holding hands. It was no big deal. And we thought his head was about to pop off in like a total Exorcist moment, like totally cranking all the way around. And his wife turned around and took her purse and slapped him upside the head and went, “You need to look forward, sir!” I was like, “Oh, damn!” I mean, because it was very, very apparent what was happening.

And then, the second thing, oddly enough, we were in Mobile, because we hadn’t ever really gone to Mobile, so we drove over for a day just to kind of walk around downtown Mobile to see the sights and grab something to eat, just kind of relax and kind of be a tourist. We weren’t even holding hands. We were probably walking about two feet apart, just walking down the sidewalk, just chatting, talking. And this older black man, he was probably in his 60s, maybe early 70s, walking the opposite way. So he’s walking towards us. He just gets past us and goes, “All these goddamn gay people!” We both just kind of… Because we were just talking, and we weren’t holding hands. There was nothing that he would’ve seen. Just stopped and turned around, and he’s just shaking his head as he walked down the street. And we’re like, “I have no idea what the hell that was all about.” But that was actually really funny.

That’s really it. I mean, over 14 years, that’s like, OK. Everybody just kind of live and let live, and just don’t worry about it. But then again, we’re not the militant type. We’re not the ones that are jumping up and down on statues and flag waving and armband wearing and all the other stuff that you see on TV or you’ve seen on TV in the past. That’s not us. We just live our lives.

Today we have Clay Boykin, a Marine, a retired business executive, and a New Compassionate Male. He was called to servant leadership in his professional life and in retirement has made connecting and helping others connect on a heart level his mission. My favorite quote of his from this interview is, “And this whole idea that once one is committed to one’s path, and they’re in line, and they’re on purpose, that providence moves, the divine will of God moves… Well, let me tell you, that’s not a metaphor. I’m learning that every day. The next thing happens, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. And I’ve got more uncertainty financially now than I’ve ever had, and I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been because I’m on purpose.”

The word “heart” appears 17 times in the transcript below, and Clay is definitely living his life completely in touch with his heart. My sincere thanks to Clay for all the time he spent with me on this project, literally hours before boarding a plane to Kenya. He is something to behold.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Redwood Trail” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 7:26

“Tiny People” by Alexei De Bronhe at 11:27

“Rastafarian” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 13:46

"Almost New" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 17:16

“Marathon Man” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 21:08

“Living in Hope” from Purple Planet at 25:24

"Laid Back Guitars" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 28:01

“Haunted” from Purple Planet at 31:21

“A View From Earth” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 33:05

“2 Above Zero” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 39:23

"Carpe Diem" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 44:25

Here’s the transcript:

I went to Texas A&M, and I got a Marine Corps scholarship there and took a Marine Corps commission, and that was in ‘76. When we were freshmen, they marched us over to the Memorial Student Center, and they said, “You memorize these lines.” It was an inscription. It was a Bible inscription. It was John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” And that’s the heartbeat of A&M. And so I went into the Marine Corps. I served 4 years there, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. If a person is looking for an example of leadership, and leadership from the heart, it’s there in the Marine Corps.

In the Marine Corps, they teach us about servant leadership, and that really was ingrained, although they never used that term. So leadership begins there. Old gunnery sergeant back in the Corps, when I first checked in as a second lieutenant, and I said, “Look, Gunny, What can I do to help clear things out in front of you, from in front of you, so that you can do your job?” He’d pull me over to the side sometimes when I was heading off in a direction, and he’d say, “Lieutenant, don’t do that.” And he’d kind of keep me on the straight and narrow, and I’d support him.

When I got out, and I got into the corporate world, that spilled over. And I brought that into Motorola. I’d have supervisors and lead production operators, and I didn’t know about semiconductors. I didn’t know about test floor or anything like that, so I really had to rely on them. And so it was the same principle. What can I do to help you do your job and clear the stuff out of in front of you so that you can come through and be successful. Today I would say that I brought heart and spirit into the organization, but back then, we called it leadership, and I thought about it as servant leadership.

Motorola had gone through a quarter where it had lost money, the whole corporation, because of the downturn in DRAM prices. Well, it was a $250 or 260 million organization. I got there mid-year, and we ended up at $300 million. And so it’s time for forecast. I’m the marketing director. And I said, “Well, I’ve done an analysis, and based on this chart and numbers here, I just want to grow the business wisely, just add $100 million a year to it, and that’ll be good. But you know, I’ve done a little bit more study, and I think we could really do $460, so let’s forecast $460, but let’s budget on $400.”

They said, “Well, that’s fine. What are these numbers.” I said, “Well, it’s funny you should ask. I was looking at the Austin American-Statesman this last weekend, and there was a chart in there, and I found a correlation between that chart and the trends in that chart and our business, and so I’m using that as a guide.” “Well, what was that chart?” “Well, it turns out it was the history of rainfall for Austin, Texas, by month, for the last 10 years.”

Well, you could hear a pin drop. “What?” You know, “what?” And this really happened. The point being is, nobody can forecast, and you can’t forecast DRAMs. Sales guys were like, “Did you hear what Boykin did, forecasting on rainfall?” During the year, the sector president would come poke his head in the door and say, “How’s the rainfall forecast doing?”

Now, here we are in the semiconductor industry. High tech. And it was fun. There’s so much stress. And we had this crazy vision that we were going to forecast our business based on rainfall. It was crazy. But it was something to rally around.

Well, we missed the forecast. We did $461 million. We beat it by $1 million. Now think about that. A volatile market goes up and down, and bingo. You hit the number. Now how do you do that? It’s not by analyzing things. It’s by people putting their heart into something. People seeing something greater than themselves, being part of a bigger picture and getting some good energy out of it.

People noticed that. People engaged with that. People felt connected. And to notice that, and to bring that out within a group of people, within an organization, is to connect on a deeper level and aim at something greater than yourself. That’s the formula of success from my standpoint. About 3 years later, the organization was about $750 million.

So fast forward. I left Motorola after 22 years and went with a couple of startup companies. I ran one here in Austin for about 3 years, and then I was with one that was based in New York City.

I was running pretty fast and hard. I was pretty worn out. In ‘07, we took some vacation with Laurie’s family to Jamaica, and while I was there… You know, I like to get off into the woods by myself and just enjoy the peace that’s there, and I had my little Swiss army knife, and I would make things, just using whatever’s out there. And I started to realize that I was really not feeling well, that I was having symptoms that I thought were heart attack symptoms. But they would come and go. As long as I was calm, I was fine, but if I exerted myself, I would start feeling really bad. And I thought about going to the doctor, but then I thought, mmm, we’re in Jamaica. I don’t know that I really want to do that.

So I just stayed calm, and I also contemplated that really this is, these are heart attack symptoms, and this really could be it. And then I continued to work on my crafts. I don’t know what it was, but I went into an incredible peace during that time. It was leaning against the veil, as they say. Part of it was, gee, there’s a lot I don’t have to worry about anymore. But the other was just, I don’t know, it’s hard to put words to it. And there was almost a mystical experience, the things that happened there before we came home.

Well, sure enough, 24 hours after we got back to Austin, I had a quintuple bypass. I had 3 months of convalescing, and so I had a lot of time out on the patio reflecting on that and asking the questions. Who am I? Why am I here? And where am I going? And really thought hard about that and had a lot of confusion about that point.

Because you know, we guys, that’s what we’re taught to do. We’re taught to go to school, get out, climb the corporate ladder, so that someday you can retire and do what you wanted to do in the first place. Well, that sets up a real anxiety. I’m always looking over my shoulder as I’m climbing the corporate ladder, and that’s a way to trip up. And so I was reflecting on all that.

Well, I went home. The market was crashing. A few days after I got home, I got laid off. First time since I was 16 that I wasn’t earning a paycheck in some way, shape, or form, and I panicked. I really did, and began working desperately to get work. I barely got an interview for 2 years, and it took me down, hard. And I was just questioning my worth in the world, and goodness, I was deep depression, extended, eventually hospitalized.

So coming out of the hospital, I thought, “OK, maybe it’s time to go get back into church or something like that.” And so I would go down to church downtown on Sunday for 8 o’clock service, and I’d run up to the Unity Church for 9:30 service, then I’d head across town to the Austin Recovery Center for an Episcopal service over there, and I called that churfing. And I remember specifically, it was about 9:20 in the morning, January 3, 2010, I walked into the Unity Church for the first time, and if you’ve ever talked to anybody that goes to the Unity Church, and they’re talking about their congregation, they say when we walk in, we feel total love, total embrace, no judgment. And for me, I felt like the prodigal son. And it really, really touched me.

I remember early on, I’d sit in the pew talking about making notes and mind mapping everything, and I’d cry. There’d be tears. Something Reverend Steve said that really struck deep, but you know, one day he was talking, and I don’t remember the overall talk, but at one point he said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I don’t have to build a condo there.” And I slapped my forehead. I thought, “Oh! I have choice! I can choose to move away from this victim mode. I can choose to do something different, take a different path. It’s well within my power to do it.” I was 54 learning that lesson.

After I’d been there for about a year, Reverend Donna came up to me, and she said, “You know, I think you’d make a good prayer chaplain.” And I got this big old lump in my throat, and I said, “Well, that scares the heck out of me, and so I guess I’m supposed to say yes.” And I did.

I became a prayer chaplain there, and I’d make hospital visits periodically, which I never was comfortable with earlier. What do you say to the person? What is there to say? Well, I’ll tell you what you say: nothing. You just show up, and the right thing will come, and it will come from the heart. But more than anything, it’s just the presence, sincere presence, to stand there and basically, “I see you.” To be their witness that they are going through something. At a certain level, that’s healing in itself. Those are the experiences that, and the opportunities to really connect on a heart level that I found over at the Unity Church and being a prayer chaplain.

A couple of guys, there were only like 3 or 4 of us out of 30 prayer chaplains, you know, 3 or 4 guys, and we started getting together to say, “OK, well what does holding space really mean? What is prayer really about? How do we show up? How do we make hospital visits?” And so, we decided to meet every week and talk about it. And it was a very formative time for me because I grew up not trusting men, and so I was beginning to step into being, it’s OK to be vulnerable. It’s OK to speak.

And I look around the foyer after service, and all these men are out there, and they’re not talking to anybody. And I said, well, if I have this feeling and this drive and this curiosity, and I’m afraid to talk to another man, I bet you there’s another guy out there that’s like that, or maybe there’s a few of them.

So in one sense, it was self-serving. I said, “I’m starting a men’s circle. I’m going to do it once a week, because that’s what I need. I don’t care if anybody shows up. I’m putting the word out, and I’m going to be there and set a drum beat. I’m going to show up.” And I did, and we had 12 guys show up.

So we started there, and we’ve been gathering every week for 7 years. And we may take off a week or 2 during the year, but that drum beat is there. And we’ve got a different mix of guys every Monday night. We’ll have 18 to 20. We had 37 one time this last year. And it’s so fascinating how we figured out how to set a container that’s safe, where people can, men can step away from everything that’s going on out there, and they can sit with other men.

And that’s really the essence, and I’m not teaching anything. I’m facilitating. And it’s interesting to watch the dynamic, especially when trust is built that a man can speak his heart, and nobody’s going to try and judge him. Nobody’s going to try and fix him. But he’s going to be heard by other men and accepted for where he is in life. Where can you go and do that? This is the one place for me where I can safely do that.

And that’s another thing. At the very beginning, I would say, “I want to make sure everybody has an opportunity to speak.” So I’d go around and make sure everybody had spoken, and then I pulled away from that because there are guys that are coming in there, and they’re wounded, and it’s enough for them to be in a circle of men. That’s a big step, and then just to listen and hear the experiences of other men. And they will assimilate themselves, and at some point they’ll say something. So that’s sacred time, and I can almost see the wheels turning when somebody is silent in there. And to hold space for somebody because they’re on their path, and there’ll be a time when they’ll share. More times than not, somebody that’s been silent for a long time, I mean weeks and weeks, first time they share is incredibly profound, and we all come out better for that.

Here’s an interesting fact: last year, 49.4% of the people who went to that website were women. And I was talking out in Bastrop, Texas, around the table at a luncheon that I was at, and I pointed that out, and they said, “Well, why is that?” And I said, “Well, the most obvious is that they’re women looking for a resource for their man.” A woman sitting next to me, very seriously looked at me, and she said, “Clay, I’ve been following your website for a long time now, and let me tell you why. I’m a man in a woman’s body. Where do I go? Where do I go to figure this out?”

You know, I knew intellectually, but to look into her eyes and see the pain, and to hear those words was very sobering to me and reminded me that we have no idea of how far our ripples go. And if we’re putting good energy out there, you have no idea of all the good we’re doing in the world. It’s still men, OK; on the website I also point out that it’s anybody who gender identifies as male.

And that’s the other thing is, I don’t ask anybody to commit. Guys will come up to me and say, “You know, I’ve been going and stuff, but a few months ago, I kind of got sidetracked, and business, and life and stuff, and I really need to commit to come back.” And I said, “No no no no no no. Don’t set yourself up for failure. You’ve got enough commitments in your life. You don’t need another thing that you’re going to beat yourself up for when you don’t show up. Set an intention. Set an intention. My intention is to be there. And I’ll be there, it turns out, when the time is right.” That’s how it plays out. It gives much more latitude because there’s so much going on in life. This is a place to relax and go within. It’s a contemplative circle. We can be pretty shallow at times. We pride ourselves on being shallow at times. But we can go really deep as well.

Back to the job side of things, I had resumes everywhere, and I got this phone call, and it was a young fellow at Office Max. And he said, “Clay, you’ve got a resume as long as my arm. What are you doing applying for a $9 job part time at Office Max?” And I said, “I just got to reconnect. I just got to reconnect with people.” And this was right after I’d started going to the Unity Church. And he said, “Come talk to me.” So I did, and he said, “You’re not going to be here long, are you?” And I said, “No, but I’m going to be your best employee that you ever had. You see, I’ve got to reconnect with people. I have to have that energy, that interaction.” And so he hired me.

So I went from the top of the Empire State Building, at the top metaphorically, and my next job was $9/hour part time. But that $9/hour job was so enjoyable, to observe myself learning again and observe myself connecting again, and just the energy made a huge difference. And then about 6 weeks later, an old Marine Corps buddy heard of my circumstance, and he called me up and said, “Let’s have coffee.” So we did, and he described what the position was, and I said, “I’ll take it.”

So I eventually became general manager of that company, then moved on, did some business development work, and then this past October, I decided that, you know, reflecting back on Jamaica, sitting in the woods, at the end of my life, doing my arts and crafts, doing something creative and being at total peace, that’s what I was doing at the end of my life. Well, what’s to say that today’s not the end of my life? And am I doing what’s mine to do? Am I on purpose? And it was at that point, I got home, and I said to Laurie, I says, “You know, I’ve been doing this for 42 years. I’m tired. It’s time to change. If I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it?” And so, the 1st of October, just a few months after my book came out, I left the business world.

When I was a kid, that I would catch birds with a box and a stick and a string. I caught one one time, and I had it in my hands, clasped down, and I could feel its wings fluttering in my hands. And my Mother said, “What do you got there?” And Dad’s like, “Let it loose.” And I was a little kid, and I ran off with it. Well, in the process of running off with it, I didn’t realize that I was squeezing down on that bird, and I killed it. And that fluttering that was in my hands, that I could feel, translated up into my gut. That twinge, that anxiety, I felt like it had been transferred into me, and I was filled with guilt and shame. And metaphorically, I grasped that anxiety, that flutter, with my hands, my one hand was guilt and the other was shame. And I held it tight.

And that flutter is the divine energy. And guilt and shame is what I’m holding it in. And you know something? It’s stronger than we are, and it’s going to come out one way or the other. So when I can turn loose, open my hands up, turn loose of that guilt and shame, that divine energy, that light can integrate with us.

So yeah, October 1, I said OK. You know, I said it in my book, I’m committing the next 20 years of my life to men’s work, and I mean it. I put it in print. I guess I need to do it. Well, a couple weeks after that, mid-October, a woman called me up and said, “Let’s have coffee.” And so we did. Turns out that she was the local director for Charter for Compassion, Karen Armstrong’s organization. And she and I talked, and she said, “You know, Clay, you really ought to go up to the Parliament of the World’s Religions. It’s in Toronto, the last week of this month. And if you decide to go, would you represent me up there?” I said, “Well, yeah, is there any budget?” And she said, “No.” So I thought, “Well, OK, this is another one of those things where this door is opening, and I need to walk through it.” And I did.

Well, Karen Armstrong had an influence on me in my book. Just look up Charter for Compassion, and one, sign the charter saying, “I as an individual believe in these principles that are about the charter.” IPeople think about compassion as being the soft side of things. Some people say, well, that’s the bleeding hearts club. It’s anything but that. I say compassion is not for sissies. Sometimes you have to do hard things. And the president of the Charter says that a compassionate city is an uncomfortable city because they are leaning into the norms to affect change, and that’s uncomfortable at times.

So I set my intention to meet Karen Armstrong and give her a book. And there she is, and to get my picture with her holding my book. It’s pretty cool. But I also had looked, and I said, “I want to meet the board chair for the Charter.” And I kind of ferreted out where he was, and I went and talked to him, and I shared with him what we were doing with our men’s circle. And I pointed out to him and said, “You know, I’m just looking around here at the Parliament, like 10,000 people, 80 religious traditions, countless sessions going on. Do you realize that there’s not one session on men?” He said, “My goodness, isn’t that something.” I said, “Yeah, and furthermore, the Charter for Compassion has got 12, they call them sectors, their initiatives. And the last one, they’re in alphabetical order, the last one I saw on the website was Women and Girls. Where’s the Men and Boys?” I said, “My vision for the Charter is that there be a Men and Boy....” Well, I said just men. And he said, “Well, if you add boys to that, why don’t you write it?”

And I said, OK. Another door opening. No, I’m not going to sit down and write it. But I’m going to create the conversation. He said to me, “OK, why don’t you introduce yourself to the woman who leads the Women and Girls sector? and you’ll see what she’s got going on, and learn from that.” That’s what we’ve been doing. And the truth of the matter is that in a way, the Women and Girls sector are giving birth to the Men and Boys sector. I’m translating what I’m learning. It’s not going to be the same. We have different things going on with us. We have different issues and stuff.

So I’m still up there at the Parliament, and I run into an organization called Gender Equity and Reconciliation, International. In a nutshell, they are about deep healing between men and women. And it’s recognizing that both men and women are wounded by the patriarchy and creating a space for women and men to come together and do that deep work. And I spoke with them for just a few minutes, But he said, “Why don’t you come out? We’ve got a facilitators workshop. I said, “Well you got any budget?” He said, “No.” I said OK. So after the Parliament, I flew home, changed clothes, and flew to Seattle, and I spent a week out there. And it was a transformative week for me.

And for men and women to come in together, a group of 20 or 30, and to go to that level, and to hear each other’s wound, to connect on that level, there’s an alchemy that happens. And it’s eye-opening. It’s one thing to generally know, but when a person really gets down to it, and they’re sharing that most intimate fear, that wound, you can’t walk away and be the same person. It changes you.

But this is what is so exciting to me about the Gender Equity and Reconciliation. We’re doing our work. We men have got to up our game. We’ve got to come up here and meet women where they are, and that work is work that men have got to do with men. We’ve got to get over this “I don’t want to be vulnerable” business. You know, there’s half a dozen different models for men’s work, and there are hybrids and stuff, but you’ve got the Jungian model, you know, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. You’ve got Robert Bly, which is mythopoetic. You’ve got Mass Movement. You’ve got neopagan, drum beating in the woods. You’ve got the traditional, you know, Knights of Columbus. And then you’ve got this integrative reflective.

All those models are kind of an outside-in approach except for the integrative reflective. These are “break the man down, get him to his heart, and then grow him from there so that he can connect head and heart.” What the Circles of Men Project recognizes is that there’s a whole population of men out there that are already in their heart, and they’ve gotten there because something is broken. They’ve been broken open. They don’t need somebody to break them open; they’ve already been broken open, and they’re in shame, or they’re in fear, or they’re in guilt, and they don’t know where to go because they’ve gone through their recovery program, and they’re looking for something a little bit higher level, maybe something a little more positive. And I can speak with my wife deeply, but there’s still a level underneath that that she just doesn’t have a frame of reference to connect. So I need to go to another man, but we’re raised, “Don’t trust other men. Don’t show your underbelly.” So where do I go?

So if we can create a circle of men where we can begin to open those hands up, connect with one another, then we can do our work. That will enable us to then be ready to move into something like Gender Equity and Reconciliation.

Now, that’s not to say I don’t agree with those other models. I do. Matter of fact, I’m in conversation with the board chair for the Mankind Project. Mankind Project is a big one, and it’s about rites of passage, and it’s about breaking, I want to say it’s productively, but it’s opening the man to examine himself. But it’s coming in from a different frame of reference. Absolutely valuable, and the Mankind Project is also connected to Gender Equity and Reconciliation.

And it turns out that one of the women who is a trainer for the Gender Equity and Reconciliation organization is from Kenya. And when I was out there, she said, “Why don’t you fly down to Kenya and do some work here. Do a men’s retreat here.” And I was going to do that, but a rocket attack on a hotel in Nairobi kind of shut things down. The State Department said no go. But tomorrow, I’ll be on my way to Kenya. I’ll be running a young men’s retreat. It’ll be a 3 day retreat. The first evening at least is going to be one question: what is it to be a man in Kenya? Who am I, this western white male, to come over there and think I’ve got the answer? You guys gotta teach me first. Help me. Assimilate me in, so then I can take my wisdom and share it. Not teach it, but share it, after we’ve built trust, after you’ve heard my story, after you’ve seen me open and share, stand in my truth with an open heart. It’ll be 30 or 40 young folks, and I’ve got 2 gentlemen that are there from Kenya who are my co-facilitators. I’m just thrilled with the opportunity.

So things like that are unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. Every day something’s unfolding. And this whole idea that once one is committed to one’s path, and they’re in line, and they’re on purpose, that providence moves. The divine will of God moves. Well, let me tell you, that’s not a metaphor. I’m learning that every day. The next thing happens, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. And I’ve got more uncertainty financially now than I’ve ever had, and I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been because I’m on purpose.

So in years past, I’d be a bucket of nerves right now. I’ve got to get my PowerPoint slides. I’ve got to get this thing all nailed down before I go, and I’ve got to go blah blah blah. Well, no. I’ll show up. And it’s how I show up and recognize that so much of life cannot be scripted. It’s all about showing up.

So I’m thrilled to be doing that. After that… Let’s see. I come back, and a few days later, I go up to Baldwin City, Kansas, and there’s a men’s retreat there that I’ll participate in. And then I come back from there. I go to Houston, and the Unity of Houston has invited me down to work with their team to give them a workshop on doing a men’s circle. And they had some budget to spend on that.

Rod: Somebody finally said, “Yes, there’s a budget.”

Clay: Yeah, all of this has been out of my own pocket! Yeah, but so I do that, and I get back from that, the first couple of days of October I fly to Atlanta. I get picked up there to go to North Carolina to do another Unity retreat. And I come back from there, have a little bit of a break, and then October 16th is an alchemy event in Seattle, where the woman who heads up the Women and Girls sector and me and a group of people are coming together to put on a day-long event, and there’ll be men coming and using circle principles to get a sense of what it feels like to speak on a heart level with other men. Women running circles, doing the same work, and then in the afternoon we’ll come together and have a mini-taster they call it. They’ll get a taste of what the Gender Equity and Reconciliation work is all about. There will be, we’re anticipating about 300 people to be at that. So it’s blossoming.

In May, I was invited to join the Gender Equity and Reconciliation team at the United Nations. And we put on a workshop for the Committee on Spirituality, Values, and Global Concerns. The first step into the United Nations. And what an incredible experience that was, to be part of that, women, men and women from all over the world. And the common theme is the patriarchy system around the whole world, and it’s wounded the whole world. And to be in that, immersed in that, with the United Nations of all places, again, I would’ve never dreamed that. And to make that, just those few days, it moved the needle just a little bit.

I go back to servant leadership. To create an inspired vision, to model the way, to enable others to act, to encourage the heart. That’s… To set a vision for something greater than yourself. It’s connecting at the heart level with another person, connecting on a level of compassion, bringing that good energy into the environment. And that’s not la la land, that’s the real deal.

Why not connect at a deeper level? I spent my career chasing a paycheck and had my chest cracked open and was reminded that there’s a little bit more to life. And look at the stark difference that I’m witnessing within myself since the first of October. I am connected to something greater than myself, and I’ve got a passion for it. And it’s helping me heal along my path. And I’m trusting that to make it sustainable, that the funding will be there, the part-time consulting work will happen. But I’m not focusing on getting this job or getting that job. I’m aiming at something higher.

Rod: Well, it’s good to know that you’ve really slowed down for retirement, have a nice relaxing time sitting on a beach. You’re a busy man, and I really appreciate that you committed the team to me and my little project.

Clay: Well, I appreciate the opportunity. I really do. And I want to thank you too. Well good. Are we complete?

I couldn’t resist another story from Steve Birch, one I cut from the last episode in the interest of time. I learned a new word from Steve in this one: Kenshō. For this story, recall that Steve is writing a book on discovering his family roots, a discovery that started with a family friend finding a photograph in a magazine of Steve’s great grandfather, a circus contortionist, which lead to discovering Steve’s long lost grandfather, Joe, and connecting with an entire branch of his family tree that he had never known.

Thanks again, Steve!

Music for this episode comes from Free Music Archive, including:

“Negentropy” by Chad Crouch at 00:00

“Superconnected sleep” by Soft and Furious at 03:50

“Multiverse” by Ketsa at 06:37

“Dream Catchers” by Lobo Loco at 09:35

Additional audio came from YouTube:

“Tibetan Monks Practice Multiphonic Chanting” by Wilderness Films India, Ltd. at 02:54

Here’s the transcript:

OK. I had finished maybe the fifth writing of the book, and I have all kinds of marked up copies of the book, and I was feeling like I was getting close, and I met with a friend of mine, she worked with authors, she put together book tours, and stuff like that. And she did a lot of marketing. And I went to meet with her just to share what I’d been doing and to kind of pick her brain. And what I didn’t know was that she had also done some channeling and stuff, and it had become just too disturbing for her, so she put that aside.

But we’re having lunch, and we finish talking about the book and possibilities of how we might market it, because it’s not… it doesn’t fit in a typical niche. So she says, “So what are you doing? You have some kind of practice or something you’re doing these days to get clear and to stay connected?” And I say, “I’m not that guy. I don’t meditate. I don’t put much weight in that.” And then I said, “But there was one time when I was in Squaw Valley, and I had this experience where my grandfather had taken me through a series of steps, the spirit grandfather. It was like he was taking me by the hand, and he gave me a Kenshō experience, which is a spontaneous, sweeping, life-changing vision.

I was leaving the valley, I was going to go into town to do some more writing at a cafe there that I had found. The Olympic rings are still there from when the Winter Olympics were there in the ‘60s. And I looked over, and there was just like a mist over this clearing, and I saw a grid start to form. It was about this high off the ground. and then it started to separate out and turned into like multicolors, stuff. And I started hearing, if you’ve ever heard the sound of the multiphonic voices of Tibetan monks. I’m hearing that, and it’s blowing me away. I pull over to the side of the road. I’m in tears.

And then the next thing that happens is the veil drops. I was looking at the mountains, the sky, and all of a sudden, it just rolled away, like the backdrop in a theater, and all I saw was energy, bursts of energy. And it was like I’m sitting here, with the sensation… It’s hard to… It’s the hardest thing to describe, but the sensation was like I was at the center of a lotus blossom. And I saw ley lines going up the side of the mountains, once I could see the mountains again, there were ley lines going from me up the sides of the, I mean the middle of this mountain pass. And I’m just broken up. I’m just sitting there in this rental car, and I look up to the rearview mirror, and there’s my grandfather just with a wide open smile, laughing.

And that was the experience. It was something that changed everything. After that, I started seeing auras. I started seeing rainbow rings around the moon. And then I started tuning into it, and I started seeing rainbow rings around all light sources when I was in that zone.

So, I begin to tell her about this story, and at that moment, I felt my grandfather come down through me, like to the base of my spine, just this electric energy. And I tightened up, and she dropped her fork and said, “Did you feel that?” I said, “Yeah.” But she gets disturbed by it, because my grandfather is coming through to her. We’re sitting at the table. and she says, “What is this?” And she was going, “I don’t know this, but it’s clear, and he’s saying that you need to finish this book. He doesn’t even want you to rest. He doesn’t even want you to sleep. You have to finish this.” It’s like, this has to be done. And so, and then she apologizes, so I said, “That’s OK, I understand. I understand you don’t want to be in that zone anymore, but do you know someone who I could go to who could help me complete the picture?”

So I get booked, we go through this whole thing. I talk to all my relatives who are gone who were part of that nuclear family and the extended family, and filling gaps about, that I’m later able to go and verify about what happened through those years. And she’s trying to shut down the session. It’s coming close to the end. She wants to do some healing on me and clear my chakras.

So she’s trying to bring the thing down to an end, and I said, “So, are they still here?” And she said, “Oh yeah, they’re here to witness the healing.” I said, “I want to do one more thing.” And then my dad bursts in, because my dad’s gone at this point. And so she said, “Your dad, he has a thing he wanted to tell you. He said it’s really important that you know this. And he said you need to know that when he was a little boy, he used to love the circus.” I was writing this book all with circus themes throughout. I had the manuscript in my computer bag next to me. I had never mentioned anything about it to her.

And then before we go into the healing, I asked her, “So, is Joe still here?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Ask him what is it that I saw in Squaw Valley?” And she, so she’s doing her pendulum and she’s talking to him and getting messages, and she says, “No, no, no. Don’t show me. Don’t show me. Tell me so I can relay it.” And so they start arguing and stuff. It’s like she’s arguing with this person she’s channeling. And he’s saying, “I can’t explain it in words! That’s his spiritual experience. And there’s no way you can understand his spiritual experience.” And she’s pressing him more for words and stuff, and one of the things he had said a couple times was, “Receive the message in the book you’ll receive.” OK, what do I do with that? And then it came up again. And she pressed him on that a little bit, and he drew a circle of energy. She said, “I’ve never seen this, but he drew this circle.” And she said, “I don’t know what that means.” But then he said again, “Receive the message in the book you’ll receive.”

So I went home. I slept through the night and then woke up about 4 o’clock, you know, lucid dream state, was encased in this like blanket of energy. But I started seeing these images. I wanted to stay in that state, so I closed my eyes, and I started seeing images flying by, and then they slow down and stop. And Cathy’s, she is like a sister from another life. She used to be the manager of the bookstore at the church. It was a picture of her just standing in the bookstore smiling with the stacks of books behind her. And then it stopped, and I woke up.

So I’m at the church, and Cathy is working in the bookstore. So I go, and tell her the whole story about everything, tell her about “you’ll receive the message in the book you’ll receive,” and I’m talking about all the family and all the pain in the family and finding these relatives, and the whole thing. And I mentioned… I said, “So let me know if that book appears.” And she said, “I know exactly what the book is.” So she went into the back room and came out with a book, and it’s called Remembering Wholeness. And she got this sly little smile on her face and said, “I’ve been holding this book in the back room for months. I keep forgetting to send it back to the publisher.” She said, “It came to us, and half of the book is bound upside down.” She said, “It’s contorted.”

And she went on to say, “There’s an exercise she does in the book where she has you draw a circle of energy in your imagination on the floor” I said, “Woah.” And she said the underlying message in the book is that there comes a time in people’s life, in some family’s life, some very broken families, there will be opportunities will arise where someone can step in and heal for themselves, for future generations, and also for the generations that came before. She said it’s a rare occurrence, but it sounds like that’s what happened.

So that was… But it was so cool, you know? And it’s just… It’s all very pedestrian. It just happens in my life. People sit down next to me in Starbucks or something and strike up a conversation. The next thing, we’re, God, we’re in another world. It’s like we’ve known each other. You know? That’s what lights me up. That’s what lights me up.

For a full transcript and music attribution, please see https://www.caterpillargooshow.com/. Many thanks to Steve Birch for sharing himself and a few of his stories. Thanks also to Flora Folgar for her support and her help with the editing.