Lisa Elliott’s super power is helping you take take the power back from films you love, but that don’t love you back. “By teaching…the art of…appreciating film…people [learn] how film has shaped them and how culture has shaped them, and then that gives the power back to them. It helps them heal from the traumas of loving something that doesn’t represent you or doesn’t show what you feel your lived experience is as a woman or as a lesbain or someone who’s gay or somebody who lives on the border or somebody who is Hispanic. Like all of these things that could be part of your identity that film doesn’t represent [well] and you can take that back.     

Professional tour guide Mercedes Medici calls herself “a giver of words...I’m always impressed about the power or words – the tremendous, magical creative, healing power of words.” Sit back, picture the Coliseum in Rome in the distance, and listen to Mercedes Medici’s silky voice, beautiful accent and poetic phrasing explain how she uses the art of guiding to heal herself and others.

“First off…I am not comfortable at all being interviewed. Working in radio, I definitely feel more comfortable and confident as the interviewer than the interviewee. Revealing myself and putting myself out there in the world is very scary to me.” Kudos to Teddy for going “there” with me in talking about trauma and change and growth. And also hamming it up. As usual.    

Nevena Christi’s career path goes from from the Met Gala to Hollywood and beyond. But basically she’s “the same kid from when I was little. I just want to make stuff and draw and get messy and basically anything – furniture, art, boots, anything – that’s me...at home we restore vintage travel trailers – we love everything old. On weekends I’m restoring the [Rocketbuster] building which was built in 1900. Before the movie people came downtown to film, I spent 8 weekends varnishing the floors. That is my play time.”

A lifelong actor and theater person, Julie Wright decided to become a teacher, a decision she thought was novel. Others saw this as an obvious progression for her. “When I mentioned it to other friends and family members, you know at the time, like ‘I think I’m going to be a teacher’, every single person without fail, they were like, ‘Well yeah – duh.’”

After a career of helping others, Sherri lives the dream retirement in Costa Rica. “I live on top of a mountain. I have a very chill lifestyle. I get up when I want to get up and I go to bed when I want to go to bed. No alarms, other than my dogs and monkeys when I’m in the jungle.” Listen in to hear more about her Pura Vide life.   

At different stages, Christina Sanchez has lived creative and professional lives. Hear how her experience with dance in many ways perfectly prepared her for public life. But replacing her love for dance with her current role as the El Paso County Attorney gives her pause: “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how my journey has – how I got to where I’m at…I know a lot of it is luck and a lot of it has been just the good people that I think have had faith in my abilities...So I don’t know necessarily if that’s like that trauma, but maybe there is something there I haven’t thought through.” Intrigued? Take a listen!

Living in Juarez by way of Chicago, DeDe entertains for a living at Drag Story Hour, at your next Joteria party or anywhere. “If I had to put it into a character that you might recognize, [it’s] kind of like ChiChi from Tu Wong Fu.” If you know you know. “Drag is powerful,…because it can take someone out of reality into something beautiful.” 

In this weeks episode, Joshua Peugh describes his experience in using dance to heal from trauma and at the same time explains dance as a metaphor for life. “Because your body is your instrument and because for me as a choreographer I am sharing my internal landscape with a group of people, it’s a very vulnerable life and sometimers that comes with thorns and pain and sometimes its beautiful and lovely and smooth and easy and peaceful and other times its challenging and rough and that’s where the exciting parts of it are.”   

Would you agree with Daniela and me that practicing yoga and practicing law are similar? “I’m an attorney by day and then a yoga teacher by night slash weekends. So I have these two very seemingly opposite parts of me but [it] really creates this wonderful, wonderful balance...Yoga and the law have this commonality where whether we’re in a courtroom or we’re in a yoga classroom as a teacher, we are holding space. We are holding space for others.”