Plague Talk

A law-abiding and respected husband and business owner who had not been in legal trouble since he was eighteen made a simple, momentary mistake he did not know was against any law and wound up having his life ripped out from under him and sentenced to prison for years. Now released and dropped into a pandemic-shuttered world with only the bare essentials and little-to-no government support, we talk about his sobering and harrowing experience with a ruthless and merciless "justice system" engineered for recidivism.

Melissa talks about how our perverse and tyrannical criminal justice system derails lives, devastates families, destroys communities and how its very personal invasion of her life drove her to make a difference in the lives of our discarded incarcerated populations.

Jacob Ivan Schmitt has spent more than three decades in so-called correctional institutions. But nothing was being done to correct to his path, his past, his childhood traumas, his thinking. After his last failed, though heartfelt attempt at reentry and assimilation, he realized that if real change was going to happen, it would have to begin with himself figuring out and accessing the means to bring those changes to maturity.

He now brings positive, problem-solving insights and leadership to building support networks on the inside and the outside for ensuring successful preparations for reentry, and community reintegration after reentry.

Please join us as he offers his origin story, testifies to the power of loving and dreaming large, and talks about lockdown under pandemic 2020, and the need for autonomy and connection for our hidden and discarded prison populations.

First Segment in the Plague Talk Behind Bars Series.

Former inmate Gordon Davis discusses his 24 1/2 years on the inside, incarceration under COVID 19, and how rising to meet the challenges of higher education freed his mind and then his body.

Seasoned actor George Saulnier has wanted to act since he was very young. And he has suffered from depression for almost as long. Join us for an in-depth discussion of the craft, sexism, bullying, empathy, effort, humanity and how to weather lockdown with depression when many of your lifelines have been suddenly severed. George also reviews some movies, Columbo, a book of plays, COVID deniers, conspiracy theories and the current administration.

Spoiler Alert: If you STILL haven't seen the classic film The Apartment, you might want to skip through that section once you hear the title.

Yogi & lifelong practitioner Deborah King talks about healing from trauma based upon personal experience and years of training. She offers gently radical remedies for owning our pain and our truth and breathing into and through trauma into healing and unity.

Dr Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and expert on emerging infectious diseases and global pandemic talks about all things COVID 19, best therapeutic hopes, best plague practices, the need for safe and responsible return to work, our new normal and what's next for us all.

Veteran Casting Director Nancy Mosser talks about how the film and television industry has changed over the last three decades. And about how the last several months may have changed just about everything, possibly forever.

Los Angeles Photographer, Filmmaker & World Traveler Bumdog Torres has been homeless by choice-for-thirty years. We talk about how his city has changed and how COVID 19 has made an already hardscrabble existence much harder for the homeless.

World-renowned arranger, composer, pianist and producer and television and movie score composer talks about his battle with COVID 19 and how he has dealt with the many calamities along the journey of his spectacular life.