The Passionistas Project Podcast | Passionate Women Empowerment Hosts

Lydia Ricci is an artist who transforms scraps from junk drawers, supply closets, and the occasional neighborhood trash can, into miniature collage-like sculptures. These "tiny tributes to times past," as she calls them, are made from paper, glue, broken staples, and the back-side of almost anything. Her Lilliputian pieces, including a pull out couch, a row of airplane seats and more, are currently on display at the Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas and in the Philadelphia International Airport.

Learn more about Lydia.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT: 

Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where Amy and Nancy Harrington. Today we're talking with Lydia Ricci and artists who transform scraps from junk draws, supply closets, and the occasional neighborhood trashcan into miniature collage like sculptures.

These tiny tributes to times past as she calls them are made from paper glue, broken staples, and the backside of almost anything. Her Lilliputian pieces, including a pullout couch, a row of airplane seats, and more are currently on display at the conduit gallery in Dallas, Texas and in the Philadelphia international airport.

So please welcome to the show Lydia. Ricci.

Lydia: Thank you very much.

Passionistas: Lydia, what are you most passionate about?

Lydia: Making lots of different things and I'm goal oriented, so yeah, getting a lot of things created, I would say is what I'm most passionate about. That could be a meal or a piece of artwork. It doesn't always have to be in the form of finished art piece.

Passionistas: But let's talk about the art. How did you get started and how did your passion translate into your art and always made something on the side?

Lydia: I mean, if I was at a job, I still made a little collage to capture the day, or I used to do print making at night, so I've always needed some other outlet during the day to feel completely accomplished. Even though my day to day life is graphic design, which I would say is a very creative outlet as well. But I don't feel like it was ever enough. You know, I'm working for clients, I'm getting their vision accomplished, so I would make something that would kind of document, I guess it's equivalent to someone creating a journal.

But I would typically always documents certain moments in time, maybe in the past or the future perhaps, but often in the present. And so then I don't know why collaging was always something I maybe I don't have enough confidence in just drawing straight, you know, just pen and ink or you know, sketching. So I always kinda created a 2D collage, you know, just a flat piece of work, some glue ripped up, this, that. And then all of a sudden making them 3D.

I was trying to capture my fear of driving. I moved to the suburbs after living in New York. I lived in San Francisco for about 10 years. I lived in Pittsburgh for four years and I lived in Brooklyn for five years and so it was time to move out to the burbs and still take the train and stuff. But I had to drive once a day and literally I'd wake up in the morning and think about driving.

I’d drink coffee and think about driving. I think about, you know, a young kid, I'm nervous about my young son, but I was obsessed with health, you know? Okay, so I'm going to go in the right lane, I'm going to turn here. It was crazy to kind of deal with that.

I made cars, cars that were relevant in my life, so I made the green Dodge. I think it's one of the first cars I ever remember being driven around in and I don't know if I have good memories about it or bad memories about it. It's just a quintessential car in my life and it took me, you know, a few weeks to make this a little bit during the day between projects and things like that. I carried it home and I remember I put it on the mantle and I'm thought I'm going to make another one.

And I did. And so that kind of kicked off making things. But then I realized I was making them out of all of these artifacts that I kind of had collected two or three boxes of that. Then it turned into four or five boxes that turned into half of my studio now. So these boxes became very valuable medium for the projects.

Passionistas: Describe your art for someone who hasn't seen it.

Lydia: They’re small sculptures of everyday objects, kind of the stuff you forget that's around you. It's been around you for, you know, it could be today, it's right next to you or it was 20 years ago. 

And what I realized too, it's in all the photos that you have in all around your house, it's this object that in many ways was around for more memories maybe than some people. So there are these tiny objects that can fit in your hand. They're not completely in miniature. You can see they're all different scales and they're, for lack of a better word, collage assembled of the ephemera, which is a word I've just learned in the past few years from boxes and old paper, old bits and bobs, old tape, old tickets, staples. I don't want you to really see what the object is made up, but I believe it holds a bit more memory because it is made of the materials that big also been in our lives for just as long. And that you would probably throw away.

Passionistas: So did the materials relate directly to the objects? Do you use something from a record album to make a record player?

Lydia: No, I really don't want you to get caught up in necessarily what it's made of. I think it helps me like an old mattress was made out of really old utility bills and there was something about this, you know, I mean even buying a good mattress and like what you think to spend your money on and the mundane this of being an adult. And paying bills and buying your first bed in time decided if you want to queen size, you know, I'm just mattresses through your lives. So in a way it has a lot of layers of meaning, but I don't want it to be a trickster aha.

Like, 'Oh, I see that staple making that.' I don't want you to get too lost in what the medium is because it really, your eyes really do meld everything together. But for me it's what drives the whole. The materials really have to be right and not just in surface and sheen and all that.

So I have this typewriter that, I think it's from the sixties or seventies I don't know. But all the keys in there are floppy disks. You can't tell. No passerby can tell. But I know. And it really felt right in the process of making it, the floppy disk went into the typewriter and you know, the evolution of how we communicate and how that changed.

Passionistas: So why tiny art? Why did you decide to do the scale that you did?

Lydia: It took about three or four years and someone said, Oh, you make miniatures. It never even occurred to me. Never even occurred. I had no idea I was making small objects, I was just making things and I think I was making them so they felt comfortable to me and they don't relate and scale to each other at all. Every object is at the scale that's right for it. Okay. And I don't know what that is. It's just what's right.

And sometimes I'll even make something and then be halfway through it and realize it's too big and I'll literally have to chop it in half and start essentially start over. And that's just my own editing process. But I don't, no why? They're the scale. They are again, to feel some control over them and to relate to them in a maybe a more intimate way, but it was not conscious.

Passionistas: And how do you decide what your subject is going to be?

Lydia: I walk a lot and I think a lot and I think about what's happening today or yesterday or what I'm obsessing about or working through. And then I realized that there's an object that kind of summarizes and it's typically something I've been wanting to make. So it's like, it's so strange how the two worlds collide. I made a can opener recently. I was coming home from a work day, it was summertime and the kids were on their bikes and it's new, you know, they're out on their bikes in the street now and they're wearing their helmets and that. But I could see it, I'm out behind them.

I think we were going to go return something at the library and I'm like, ‘Oh shit, there's cars. And it just, the one son didn't look enough my opinion enough. And I realized I am obsessing about of course cars and these bikes in the fact that they're getting to this next level.

And I made a can opener that next day mainly because my whole thought with can openers is how dangerous they were. And you have to be careful. And that's what everyone said when you picked it up out of the drawers. Like, ‘Oh, you know, you might cut yourself, God forbid.’ And it was that same thing about just getting used to using things more independently and independence in general.

Passionistas: How often do you make a sculpture and how long do they take?

Lydia: There's no set schedule. I really get grumpy if I haven't had the opportunity to make one in a couple weeks. Okay. That's the longest I can really go is two or three weeks. I actually think I get a little depressed, but I also get nervous, like I forgot how to do it.

So it's this weird process that happens every couple weeks where it's like, if I've gone too long, I'm insecure in this. And so I had to sit down. And so then once I start, it goes very quickly. But an element that takes a lot of time is finding the right material for the objects.

So it's like if I have the memory, I start feeling that elated, feeling like I know what I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make the toilet, I'm going to make the toy. And I have to even tell myself, ‘Oh, that's so dumb that you're making a toilet.’ But you know, it really makes sense because that's about, you know, and I'm kind of going through that dialogue and realizing no, it's right. It's right for right now. Like it's time to make the toilet. And then I'm like, which toilet are you making? And I'm like, ‘Oh, I need to make the blue toilet’.

But then I don't know if I had the blue paper, I have to like find the blue paper in my collections cause I don't like to buy anything. It doesn't feel right to vine. But I'm like, I've got to have the blue paper in the thing and then if I want to make it that night, I'll even like go into my kid's room and like start looking through their stuff and they're like, you're not gonna rip anything of ours apart, are you? I'm like, ‘Oh no, no.’ You know, like I can get a little desperate by six o'clock cause I'm like, it's getting dark. And I, you know, I know the library gives some stuff for sale, something like that's free. So I'm kinda like, ‘Oh, I can go there, you know, and go to the basement.’ And you know, if I, I'm like no, I have to find it in my piles.

And once I get like kind of the basic amount of materials to get started, I would say it takes two or three days. It depending on how much time I can devote, I work mainly at night and it's not even efficient. But once I start, you can't do much else in my office cause it's a very messy process because again, I can't find the blue paper. So there's, everything has been destroyed.

Like sometimes you can open the door and then you know, there's a dog and a cat element and the kids get scared. They're like, are we allowed to walk in here? I'm like, yes, it's okay. It's a little safe. Or sometimes it's not safe because there's sharp things. So then it's two or three days, maybe four days of any free time. I just get up there and work and then when it's done I shoot it.

And that's a very satisfying part of it. Shoot it and go for a walk to figure out the words very succinctly because those are the words about the little writing that goes with them is as important as the piece itself. And then I clean up and I feel like, okay, now I have to think about the next one. So yeah, it definitely crescendos. I would say so, yeah, every two weeks, but about a three or four day stretch for each piece.

Passionistas: We read that you would go shopping for materials in your dad's house. Can you tell us about that?

Lydia: We grew up in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and it gets moved to the house when we were five. My dad's still in the house. It was a huge, it's, you know, it's a suburban house and you know, by a mall, but he really has held onto a lot, whether it's in the garage or the ad, it used to be everywhere.

He's recently done a major overhaul of cleaning. His girlfriend moved in after, I think they'd been dating 25 years. My mom died when I was in college and we cleaned up some stuff. But you know, there also wasn't a major organizing figure in the household. There was more of a hoarding, you know, and someone asked me if they could call him a hoarder and would he be offended. And I said, not much offends my dad at all. I said, let's go on the sentimental hoarder. And it's true.

But once he caught on that what I was grabbing and he lives, you know, 20 minutes away he'll pop by and you know, there's a box of, I mean here's an old cigar box with your mouth guard and some egg containers from the refrigerator and a hole punch, you know, and a box of tax records and he'll just drop it off. So he kind of understood pretty quickly that I would take anything and I think that since it wasn't going to waste, he would drop it off and that kind of helped him clear out his house a little too. But there's good stuff there. There's still good stuff there in the attic.

Passionistas: A lot of your stuff seems to have a retro vibe. It is that conscious?

Lydia: It's funny. Again, that's something else someone pointed out to me and I look around, I'm like, Oh yeah, I guess I've spent more time with those objects, but I'm not necessarily capturing a retro memory with them. So I feel like they feel very present to me. Well the dishwasher, it's a more retro dishwasher, but that's, you know, just all about relationships and struggles and dynamics and stuff like that. So again, it's a very present memory with perhaps a retro.

And I did pick on all of green dishwasher so I could have gone more modern and you know the hairdryer that you put over your head, and again, I'd still go under those to get my hair colored, but I did the retro one. I think they're just more attractive. Again. Yeah, I think I've seen them longer without even realizing I had been looking at them longer. I'm not restricting myself to that. When I do go looking and I searched for an example, I do kind of pick something with a little more character. I don't know if I'll ever do a cell phone, never say never.

Passionistas: So you photograph in front of white and then you also do little vignettes and you also do videos. So talk about that process and how that evolved.

Lydia: I always do a document on the white first to kind of put the succinct memory and it's the first time I, in my mind I've put the piece out there and then as I've lived with the piece longer, whether it be a movie projector or a box fan, I'll look up at them one day and realize, Oh that's the vehicle which will help me say this. Like today I'm going to use a phone for a few things. I've been talking to our friend and we were commenting on how quickly an hour goes and then I was saying, ‘Oh, I'm going to talk to you.’

And I was just thinking about this time of communicating on the phone and you know how sometimes it goes by quickly and sometimes it doesn't and we don't do that as much anymore. So the white starts and then the backdrops kind of fill in the bigger memories or when I want to tell a little bit more like you said, of a vignette or a bit more of the story and I realize motion is important.

The emotion can do something. That reading or just seeing, it's sitting there can't like you put that mattress, you move that onto the floor next to a TV. We've all been there. You know, versus on the box spring you roll that AV cart  in versus just seeing the movie projector. It's a visceral reaction. That's a path of exploration that I'm really trying to go down much further is figuring out the movement and engagement and the kinds of stories I can keep telling. Cause again it's a cash register. Like there's only so much movement there can be around it. Does it need to be this ornate scrap made cash register to tell the story? Why not just show a picture, you know? So what is it about these objects that I could zoom in on or use them to kind of tell the story in a way that wouldn't have been told another way?

So it's interesting. Yeah, the backdrops, you know, I'm telling the story, but I like to be universal. I want people to be able to relate to it and I kind of carve away of the too many descriptors so that it is more relatable, even though they're very personal, these anecdotes and moments, if there's just enough information there, we can all kind of travel together through the moment.

Passionistas: So you recently had a short film at the San Francisco film festival. Tell us about that.

Lydia: That was awesome. Okay. First of all, film festivals are damn fun. Okay. And there's free drinks and food. I'm a such a sucker for free food and drinks. It's insane. Free bag of God. It could be hand soap or a stupid breath mint and I am giddy. Okay? Giddy. And throw a pair of socks in there. Whew. It's also, I like going out to dinner too, and I'm a very good cook, but it's the simple things in life. So the film festival was fantastic. I did not realize how magical it would be to see, okay.

The film is essentially a culmination of many of the moments, you know, they're assembled together, but also if you haven't met before I open up the film, I'm like, okay, well no one knows me, so I can't just show these anecdotes because you know what? Some people can't tell that the objects are small, there's something kooky about their scale, but you can't tell. So there's something neat about them being miniature and that you can approach them in a different perspective. So I add some video of me making the objects, I show some moments of the scrap piles. But what I also had that I think is really interesting is I had to give a talk about my inspiration or something and I went through, my mom kept such good photo albums, amazing photo albums, and I have them all in my office.

So I'm going through to look for a picture of one of the cars. Well, I'm going through these photo albums, realizing half the things I documented are actually in these photos. Now granted I did not look at the photos and make them from there. But even to the point of the fish tank that our two journals were in. Okay. That my sister convinced me that my journal had died first, even though we never named them, never paid attention to them, but no one died. And of course it was mine. So I have a picture of her and I excited about this. I have so many pictures. I have the chase lounge, you know, but it was about the dog tippy, the dog sitting on it. So of course we have to document the lounge chair. We have put the car in the snow, the green Dodge, we have the car out front in the spring, you know, behind us. So these objects were with us all the time. So then I started putting some dialogue in it and it was horrendous.

So these friends that helped make this movie, they wrote a song. The title already of the movie was that I had made, was called, don't you forget about me? So they wrote a different song and I had been talking about how these objects are with us all the time, but we don't realize it. So it's a beautiful little song. It shows some of the photos where the objects are. But you would think that I saw the photo and made the object, and I'm going to tell you that it went opposite. I made the object and found the photos.

We even have a photo of the AV machine of my girlfriend and I, and there's an AV machine in the background. It's crazy. So anyway, the San Francisco film, the fact that it got selected and it was amongst all these other animations, it was amazing. It was like going to see awesome, inspiring animations and all of a sudden yours pops up in there. And it was really neat to see a huge vacuum cleaner skid across the screen. It was fantastic. And I did not expect that. I was like, Oh, I'll go. It'll be nice and it was magical.

Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, in your listening to The Passionistas Project and our interview with Lydia Ricci. To see Lydia's incredible creations visit FromScraps.com. Now here's more of our interview with Lydia.

Passionistas: It's one thing to start making these sculptures for yourself and at home. It's another thing to get them in galleries all across the country. How did you do that? How has this become such a phenomenon?

Lydia: I would say I'm really at the beginning of that. I've gotten some nice feedback that I don't know. I will say one of my biggest helps and everyone's antisocial media. It's changed my life. I freaking love social media. I feel like I'm comfortable connecting with communities I would have never connected with. I've put myself out there in a way that I don't know if I would've ever been able to do that.

I don't think galleries would have embraced me. I'm not an artist artsy. I'm a little awkward in that world. I've gotten some lovely shows and opportunities and I'm hoping for more of that. But if that's not my path, at least these movies and these other way to relate to people and connect with people and show people my work and see theirs, I mean, cause everyone that follows, I follow that. You know, I'm like, I'm looking and I'm looking at what they do and I'm inspired.

I think that I would say my biggest help was social media and also not being too afraid of the imperfect and just be, you know, okay. Just put it out there and see what happens. I do think my work has gotten better, knowing what's better for social media versus what's better for a show and stuff, but to not think everything has to be so important and just say, ‘Oh, this is kind of goofy.’ Like I'm going to talk about how I had to put toilet paper on the seat and it got stuck. You know, like I'm going to put that out there today and see what happens. And people enjoyed it and it wasn't too lofty, but it was sincere. And I think that that connected with people, which has gotten me more lack of a better word audience, but also I would call it more of a community.

It's a community because people, when they get excited about something, like we all talk about, I think I put up a wheat bench and a spray bottle and I did some Windex and he probably get, you know, you can't spray mirrors with Windex, you know, and there was like a whole discussion on the best way to clean a mirror and it's with newspaper and Windex by the way. So yes, I have a show coming up in Dallas, Texas at the Honda at gallery and they reached out and I'm going to go to Dallas, Texas for the night. I've had one in New York with Marcel Jamey. I just was in Philadelphia at this huddle gallery with Brian, the guy that runs a Brian Jacobson. He and I, nine made my studio there for a month. I worked on site for a month and we called the show, come talk to me and it was in the paper and people came from all over and talk to me while I worked.

So I think the fact that I'm not just limiting my, not limiting but like the art world is not like woo Lydia Ricci, you're a darling right there by note. That is not happening. But I think I'm relating to enough people that there's conversations and we're having a good time.

Passionistas: What are you currently working on?

Lydia: I'm working on another movie, but it's going to be no more than four minutes again, but I'm going to tell one story again since you haven't seen the other one, which is more of like a compilation, like it's more of an introduction in all the little anecdotes. This one is a day in the life. I have a lot of kooky stories I would say. And because I have a horrible sense of direction, I've gone to cities, I've done a lot on my own. You know, I moved myself out to San Francisco when I was 21 so this is a story about my trying to find a job and I mean I don't want to ruin it, but it does end with me selling my pantyhose.

Okay. So spoiler alert. Yes. So things happen when you're just out in the world and need help from people, you know, and, or don't. Okay. Even better. I've gotten a little more street smart. That's not really true cause I still get into the same conundrums on a daily basis. I think also maybe when you don't drive and you walk everywhere and you take the bus and you take Uber, like you really, I'm out in the world. So I think that helps with things tend to happen. And I'm going to try and document some of them and I don't know if it's going to go well right now. Verdict's out. Okay. And it might not go well. Okay. So, so then I think I'll just stick to more of the simpler ten second things. And I think that's okay. Like I'm not positive this is my path is to make something longer.

I'm not sure that's gonna work and I'm perfectly reasonable about that. I'm working on a little book that's out that little pitches out in the world. So we'll see how that does. And like I said, the gallery thing and then I would like to get the work in an editorial or commercial capacity. Like I would like it to illustrate an article when we all, and in our article in the times I would like it to be in a fun magazine with, I'm wired with something else, I editorial and I can make anything. And I feel like they can illustrate other people's stories too. And that might make me some money. I'm not gonna lie. So I come from the idea that when sometimes when people give you parameters, I don't always think it's restrictive. I think it can be a challenge that enlightens you and forces you to go somewhere and maybe that you wouldn't have gone.

I was in a, a wonderful show with D. Thomas Miniatures there in New York and it was called badass miniatures. And at first I was gonna make a bowling alley or something like that. And then they sent this really neat note about, you know, the word bad-ass and aches and just do something that might make people look twice or be uncomfortable in this.

And so I thought about it, I'm like, I did the OB GYN table and I love that piece. It's, and no woman can look at that without kind of like getting a little bit, you know, cringy but then, you know, then I'm like, Oh, I don't want this to get all, I don't want to turn myself all serious. I'm not trying to put this. So then I put the like the fuzzy animals on it to kind of roll it out. And then I talk about the paper coming down and it's like, ‘Oh my God, it gets stuck to you and there's just no way you're going and they forget about you in there.’

Like you go in there and you're like, well at least if I'm in here I should lay down for a second. And you try, you can't. And you can't just have this Zen moment on the OB GYN table. There's no way possible you can try, Oh I'm going to elevate my legs cause that's good. And then you just can't put your legs in those syrups before. You have to know. It just seems wrong. It seems wrong.

Passionistas: [LAUGH] It is wrong.

Lydia: [LAUGHS] It is wrong.

Passionistas: You do so much. Do you ever feel unmotivated?

Lydia: Not unmotivated, but insecure is more. I would say I'll work my way out of a funk. You, they'll do something, but I'll be like, no one's gonna like this. Why am I doing this? What's the point of this? So that's my dark spot when I get there. Then I question if I can.

Lydia: Like I said, I said that whole cycle of like, Oh, is this going to be nice instead of like, this is stupid. Like there's already enough miniature toilets in the world and I have to really talk myself into the why. Why am I staying up late? Why am I taking the time? You know, what is I, you know, I grew up in a very practical, my dad worked for the government for 30 years. You know, he left at six 30 or six o'clock in the morning. He'll even lets it off. You know, he's supportive, but you know there is a question of no one does stuff just to do stuff like are you going to get paid for this? There's that question every once in awhile. So not being practical or functional throws me into a tizzy too. That's where it can stunt me a little bit.

And then sometimes you know, you just make stuff and you feel like it's stupid, you know, and that is scary. And then you go back and it's like you've still put it out there and then you go back and you look four weeks ago and you're like, Oh, that wasn't stupid. I wish I could have told myself that wasn't as bad as I thought it was. But you can't be. Try and remind yourself. And also if I feel like I'm in a funk, I'll cook more or I do other physical things more like I'll clean the bathroom, I won't clean it. I don't like cleaning the kitchen as much, but I will. I want to say I'll organize my office and I just don't even know how to anymore. It's never going to look meticulous and that's going to solve everything. So, and I do make my bed every morning. I'm one of those people that even though I'm messy, I'm very goal oriented and productive. So even on my worst day of feeling like unmotivated, I think I'm still getting, I had a friend say, she's like, you get more done in your morning than I do in my week. And, and she wasn't being, she's not lazy. She's no Slack. I just, in a way kind of have to keep moving.

Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project and our interview with Lydia to see Lydia's incredible creations, visit FromScraps.com.

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Debbie Arcangeles started her career as a photojournalist and traveled the world to teach art to kids. She’s admitted to starting businesses where she followed the money and not her passion and didn’t always have great success. Now, through her project The Offbeat Life, Debbie shares the insights she’s gained on her adventures with others in her podcast, mentorships and a website full of resources to help you live the offbeat life of your dreams.

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Mae Chandran overcame a difficult childhood in China, and fled from a dysfunctional family life in the US. She went to college in California where she met and married her husband. After having two children, she left a successful career to raise them, vowing to give her family the happy home life that she never had. These days she enjoys watching her children flourish, gardening and cooking, and has won the international silver award in a UK marmalade contest.

Find out more about Mae Chandran

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington. About a year ago we interviewed Sashee Chandran, the innovator behind the premium beverage line Tea Drops, and during our chat she spoke about her mother Mae, who is her biggest cheerleader and a constant source of support. We were beyond excited when Sashee nominated Mae to be a guest on our podcast.

Mae overcame a difficult childhood in China, and fled from a dysfunctional family life in the US when she went to college in California. After marrying her husband she left a successful career to raise a family, vowing to give them the happy home life that she never had.

So please welcome to the show Mae Chandran.

Passionistas: Take us back to the beginning and tell us where you were born and where you grew up.

Mae: I was born in Canton, China, Southern China in 1948 just after the war and since I was a baby of that era in China. It was a very difficult time and my parents had me late in life because my father came to make his fortune. He went the way of Cuba and then he came to Massachusetts and my mom was still in China. Usually the husband goes abroad, then leaves the family behind. And so my mom was there. This is like after world war two people fled to Hong Kong. So I was three years old when we went to Hong Kong. I mom was there and we live together. She was called to come to America and in 1952 she came, I was four years old. She left me behind with her friend. She took care of me and it was very difficult because you're four years old, but it had to be because when you're a baby, when you're a woman, you're not worth much. My father saw my birth papers because it was worth some money because of that, I didn't have identity and so I couldn't come with my mom, so my mom had to leave me and I knew she was leaving, but I didn't want to give her a lot of trouble.

My only salvation was school. I loved school because to be home and that environment was not pleasant. Then my brother got married, he went to Hong Kong and got married to a young woman and you don't know Hong Kong people there. I like rats 25 square miles and you get all these millions of people so you become very aggressive. Your grabber and that was what my sister long was. She came from a large family, I think seven children and she was I think 19 and she was 10 years older than me. From the moment she came, she demanded the business. She wanted the restaurant because the restaurant was doing well now because we had moved and in those days, you know, Fall River was 90% Catholic. So we did really well on Fridays when they didn't eat meat, they had to come to the restaurant or eat the Champaign sandwiches. So she demanded that restaurant. And because my mom and my father never got along, it's like this, like Lincoln said, a house divided cannot stand.

Passionistas: We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and you’re listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Mae Chandran. To see photos of Mae’s beautiful gardens, delicious culinary treats and beloved family, follow her on Instagram at MaeC Chandran. Now here’s more of our interview with Mae.

Passionistas: It's one thing to say that you want to have a happy family. It's another thing altogether to actually create a happy family. How did you do it?

Mae: Well, you know, my dream was always a happy family. Really, truly, I knew that I was born to be a mother. I just knew that because I knew I could not make any difference. I am a very smart person. I was a good student and all, but it didn't matter. That's the outside world. I knew that I was born to be a mother and my nurturing on my kids. There was nothing greater than that. I know some people, some women are not. They don't feel like I do and it's okay. But I felt that way.

Passionistas: One of your other big contributions to society are those delicious scones and the incredible marmalade that we were lucky enough to taste earlier today.

Mae: Appreciate it.

Passionistas: Oh my God, we appreciate you treating us. So tell us about your passion for food and specifically about the marmalade and how that came about. 

Mae: I really don't even know how I became interested in my family to his bone. And 10 years ago I read about something about it and to me, I like to take on a challenge because marmalade is the granddaddy of all, like jams and preserves are not as complicated.

And number three, you must take the precautions in life. Don't smoke, don't drink. I mean, you drink socially fine. I don't drink at all, but that's my personal preference. You must live a clean life. So you must think good. Do good. Live a simple, healthy life. Keep things simple. I have friends who are drama. Queens is unnecessary. Life is simple. We make it complicated. Let's stick to the facts. Just stick to the point. And life is easy.

Passionistas: Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Mae Chandran. To see photos of Mae’s beautiful gardens, delicious culinary treats and beloved family, follow her on Instagram at maechandran.   

Look for our quarterly subscription box The Passionistas Project Pack. Each box is filled with products made by women-owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. And we’re excited to announce that our featured Passionista for the first box is Sashee Chandran, who inspired us to go into the subscription box business.

Sign up for our mailing list at ThePassionistasProject.com to get 10% off your first purchase.

And be sure to subscribe to the Passionistas Project Podcast so you don’t miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two-time Grammy nominee and the award-winning author — Holly George-Warren has written 16 books including the New York Times bestseller The Road to Woodstock and the new biography Janis: Her Life and Music about rock icon Janis Joplin. Holly is also working with Petrine Day Mitchum on a new documentary called Rhinestone Cowboy about the story of Nudie, the Rodeo Tailor.

Find out more about Holly George-Warren.

Read more about The Passionistas Project.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with two-time Grammy nominee and the award winning author Holly George-Warren. To date, Holly has written 16 books, including the New York times bestseller, “The Road to Woodstock” and the forthcoming biography, “Janice: Her Life and Music” about rock icon Janice Joplin. Holly is also working with Patrine Day Mitchell on a new documentary called “Rhinestone Cowboy” about the story of Nudie, the rodeo tailor. So please welcome to the show Holly George-Warren.

Holly: Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about?

Holly: Wow, gosh, what time is it? Every time it changes on the hour it seems like, but of course right now I'm most passionate about, I guess both Janis Joplin and Nudie. As far as my work life goes, my head is wrapped around both of those people. And interestingly enough, Nudie actually did make some outfits for Janice in 1970 so there's a connection with everything. And of course my other passion in my personal life is my family, my husband Robert Brook Warren and my son Jack Warren, who fill my life with joy and excitement and share, uh, my love for the arts, film, music, the outdoors, etc. So I'm very blessed.

Passionistas: So tell us a little bit about what first inspired you to become a writer.

Holly: I think music really did first inspire me beginning at a very, very young age. I grew up in a small town in North Carolina and literally I'm old enough to have discovered music back in the days of am radio. And in my town it was so tiny. We had very, you know, little radio, just some gospel, I think country and Western. This was in the ‘60s. But I discovered at night after like say nine o'clock on my little clock radio that I could tune into w ABC in New York and WCFL in Chicago. And that just blew my mind. It opened up this whole world for me of all these different sounds and styles of music. Cause that was in the day of very eclectic radio. Playing a DJs, they, they didn't go by strict playlists or anything like that. And I literally started just kind of writing, I think inspired by the music I was hearing.

I started writing a little bit about music and I of course started reading biographies also at the same time. So that was the other major I would say inspiration for me. I started reading in elementary school these biographies of all kinds, everyone, you know, from like George Washington Carver to Florence Nightingale to Abraham Lincoln biographies and became kind of obsessed with reading those books. And you know, I just love to read from a young age. So I think those interests kind of combined that. Um, by the time I got to college I was writing quite a bit and uh, always did quite well with my writing assignments in school and then found myself writing more and more about music, going out and seeing bands performing live. And then that's what I did when I moved to New York city in 1979 I started writing for all kinds of fanzines and underground magazines that existed at that time in the East village.

About then, it was kind of the post punk scene I guess, but I had been inspired by the original punk rockers, you know. I got to see the Ramones and bands like that in North Carolina before I moved to New York. So I've just started writing about the scene, which was not that well covered at the time. Talk a little bit more about the scene at that point. Back in those days, in the late seventies in New York city, there were only a couple of clubs where you could go out and see bands that had, were kind of either following in the footsteps of the original punk scene in New York and London. And a few of those people were still around New York and playing. So there was this great resurgence of kind of DIY homemade magazines, sort of called fanzines that all kinds of people that were into the scene started writing articles for.

And it didn't have as many gatekeepers as say the big glossy magazines of the day, you know, even Cream magazine, which was kind of an upstart as compared to say Rolling Stone was pretty restrictive as far as who could write for those magazines. And I would send out queries and tried to get assignments and never hear back anything. But in the meantime, just people out on the scene who were playing in bands, booking bands, going out to see shows every night we're putting out these music magazines that pretty much anyone through, you know, string a sentence together and had a little bit of knowledge about writing. But a lot of passion basically. Again, passion was very much the key word of I would say the music scene, the people on stage and then also people writing about the music. So that's really what got me started and I started getting published in some, again very small run underground, a little music magazines.

Passionistas: Then you did eventually start to write for Rolling Stone and you became an editor of the Rolling Stone press in ’93. So tell us about the road to that and your experience working there.

Holly: It was quite the fun road. It was circuitous because I did get swept up in the whole band scene and actually started playing in bands very early. I played, I used to call it lead rhythm guitar. So again, playing in different bands over pretty much throughout the 1980s and while I was doing that, I didn't write quite as much, but I felt like it was a huge tool for being able to write about music to actually be in a band. You know, we went on the road, we toured around some of my different bands, I did several recordings. So I learned what it was like to work in a recording studio.

And just the whole life of being a musician became a real thing for me. So I felt like I could write about musicians with much more authority. I never considered myself a real musician. I still was a fan, but I, I could play a mean bar chord. And I started out with a fender Mustang and then I moved up to a fender Jazzmaster of the vintage one from the late fifties so I was pretty hip. Let me tell you. In the meantime, I did start getting some real jobs to pay the bills, including, believe it or not, I became an editor at American Baby magazine, which funnily enough, almost everyone that worked there was childless. And that was really my first nationally published articles was for this magazine. Um, how to know when your child is old enough for a pet or, you know, I did a research article where I went out and interviewed parents of quintuplets and quadruplets and triplets, you know, um, but I, you know, really kinda cut my teeth writing for that magazine.

I learned how to be a journalist, you know, a real journalist. And then gradually through meeting people and also being a total rock and roll geeky nerd who was constantly reading every rock biography that would come out. And also I was really into, it was weirdly enough through punk rock, I got totally into old timey country music, like the Carter family. And honkytonk music like Hank Williams and I loved, uh, Patsy Cline, Wanda Jackson, the queen of rockabilly. So I got into that kind of music pretty much while I was a full-fledged punk rocker. And again, I think passion is the line between those two, the thread that connects them that, you know, both of those kinds of music, that earlier country that were raw primitive kind of country music as well as punk rock had that passion was very obvious in the music and that I loved it.

I was totally into all that kind of music. And in fact, I saw George Jones at the Bottom Line in 1980 which blew my mind. So anyway, so I started learning more about that kind of music by just reading books all the time and eventually heard about a job as a fact checker at Rolling Stone press in the 1980s they were doing this big rock and roll encyclopedia and needed someone to double check everything. You know, these established writers who I'd been reading for years, Rolling Stone, like people like Dave Marsh had written. And so that was my first, you know, I was getting to call up Question Mark of Question Mark and the Mysterians and asking him, you know, was it true that he came from another planet and called up, you know, all these people.

In fact, funnily enough, I handsome Dick Manitoba, the singer, the Dictators, I called him up to check some facts about this notorious horrible fight on stage, basically abroad between him and Jayne County at CBGBs. And then literally when I was playing in my band, we were rehearsing and this music building famously where Madonna once lived before she got an apartment near times square I was in, had gotten a taxi to get home with my equipment and there was, who was driving me, but you know, Richard, Manitoba, handsome Dick himself, who I had just caught up and asked him about his career as a fact checker.

So anyway, that kind of got my foot in the door at Rolling Stone, which led to me over the years doing freelance projects for them. And till finally in 1993, well actually ‘91, they hired me as the editor to do a couple of their Landmark books, had deals with Random House to do new additions, “The Rolling Stone Album Guide” and “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll.” And so they hired me to kind of be the editor to work with uh, Anthony DeCurtis and Jim Hinky at the magazine to guide these books, which are these massive, massive researched, you know, a lot of people involved, you know, a lot of moving parts to do these new, uh, additions. So that went really well. So in 1993 they decided to start up a new book division, which had kind of fallen by the wayside and they hired me to come on board and run that book division. And that was a great experience and that's what led me to start writing for the magazine. I started doing assignments for the magazine, record reviews and things like that while running the book division.

I learned so much from working on those kinds of big reference books. You know, and again, we had amazing writers that I got to interface with and on “The Illustrated History of Rock and Roll,” too, I got to work with everyone from Peter [inaudible] to Mark Marcus to the late great Robert Palmer. Again, Dave Marsh, you know, many, many writers. And then I got to assign a lot of new chapters and in fact I wrote a chapter, Anthony DeCurtis became a real mentor to me. He was an editor at Rolling Stone that was in the trenches with me on these book projects and he assigned me as the writer to do a big piece on the changing role of women and rock, you know, beginning with Patty Smith, et cetera. Up to that current time. I think, you know, I covered, I think Sinead O'Connor at that point was maybe one of the newer artists that was, uh, the focus of my chapter.

But that was a real huge, exciting thing to get to be part of. And then I got to do another very cool book with a wonderful writer editor named Barbara Odair, who came to my office. She was working at Rolling Stone and then at US magazine back in the day when it was owned by Winter media and said, “Let's do a whole book on women in music with every chapter written by women and every, as much as possible, all the photography done by women.” So we did this really cool book called “Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock.”

And funnily enough, one of the chapters I did for that one was this big piece on Nico, who was my first ever famous person I ever interviewed when I was, you know, living in New York city. I was still waitressing at the time. And Nico, of course from the velvet underground fame was kind of down at the heels. Editorials at the time, but having to go to a methadone clinic across from where I was working and would come in every day afterwards and have an amaretto on the rocks and cheesecake. So I got up my courage and asked her if I could interview her and I didn't even have a platform for my interview, but she said yes and got to spend some time with her and interview her and use part of the interview and a little fanzine back in the day. But then I got to really expand and write this whole chapter on Nico and use this interview I'd done 10 years earlier or even earlier than me, I guess 12 years earlier for this book “Trouble Girl.” So that was really exciting. Yeah.

Passionistas: So you were writing about women, you're interviewing women, but what was it like for you as a woman starting in those early days in the punk rock scene through this time where you've becoming a more established rock journalist? What were your experiences like both as a musician and a journalist, as a woman in the music industry?

Holly: Well, when I met people face to face and worked with them, say for example, Anthony DeCurtis and Jim Hinky, who sadly just passed away just a few weeks ago or a month, a month or so ago. They were very, very encouraging and very supportive. They really encouraged me to write and gave me assignments, et cetera. But before that I really found, and maybe it's true whether you're male or female or whatever gender, you know, but if I just blindly sent out queries or blindly tried to get gigs writing, when I first moved to New York City, it was a disaster. I mean, people either ignored me or just blew me off or said no or you know, it was really hard to get the foot in the door without actually working with people and for them to see what my work was like. Now, I did have the good fortune early on to meet some people that had worked with punk magazine and part of, there was this whole cool kind of resurgence of comics.

This really great artists. Peter Bag had joined forces with John Holmstrom who had done punk magazine. And Peter and I, a Peter's wife and I work together, you know, at this restaurant. So Peter knew that I, you know, at this time I was just going out and writing about stuff on my own and pitching it to a few people I knew actually from North Carolina had moved to New York, but then they started giving me assignments for this. These magazines they started, one was called Stop and when it was called comical funny. So they, you know, they really encouraged me. So, you know, I can't say that I experienced gender bias or anything like that. Once I knew the people, I think maybe I was just, it's hard to know. I mean I did definitely get a lot of rejection. A lot of people that I pitched didn't really take me seriously and whether it's they didn't really know my work or because I was a woman, I don't know.

I mean I, I did frequently find myself being the only music geek, you know, blabbing away on all this arcane kind of Trainspotting rock and roll history trivia with, you know, I'd be the only gal in the room blabbing away about that, you know, with some guys and stuff like that. There weren't a lot of women doing it and there weren't that many women around Lee for me that I crossed paths with to kind of support my endeavors at that part of my career. However, I very fortunately met a couple of women when I was a fact checker at Rolling Stone Press who were very, very encouraging and really I would not be talking to you right now if not for them. And one was Patti Romanowski who was the editor of Rolling Stone Press at the time, who hired me as a fact checker back in the ‘80s. She went on to write many as told two books with everyone from Mary Wilson to Otis Williams at the temptations. And that book has recently been the basis for this very successful Broadway show right now. So Patty was fantastic.

And then her boss, the woman who ran rolling stone press with Sarah Layson who became, you know, really made my career because after she left Rolling Stone Press, she started a book packaging company and became a literary agent and hired me continuously for her book company. And then she became my literary agent when I left Rolling Stone. No, actually before I even started at Rolling Stone, my first ever book, which I uh, got my first book deal around 1990. So it was even before I went to Rolling Stone actually, she became my literary agent and my first ever book, she connected me with my coauthor Jenny Boyd, who had been married to make Fleetwood and her sister Patty Boyd, you might know the name was married to George Harrison, Eric Clapton.

And Patty was a really interesting person who had kind of dug out a new life for herself. After her marriage with Mick Fleetwood ended, went back to school, became a psychologist, got a PhD and wanted to do a book on creativity and in musicians. So she hired me to be her co-author and we did this book called, well, it's available now. It got repackaged again and republished in England called, “It's Not Only Rock and Roll,” but it was basically about the creative process of musicians based on interviews with 75 musicians. So that really started me on my path as an author. That was my first book and that came out and a ‘91 Simon Schuster, a Fireside Division. So Sarah did that and then she became my, you know, agent. I wrote a few other books, a couple while I was at Rolling Stone and then when I left there in 2001 I've been writing books ever since. And Sarah has been my agent for all of them up to this my Janice Joplin book.

And she definitely is one of my, you know, if not for her, I would, you know, like I said, I would not be talking to you right now.

Passionistas: You're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with award winning author Holly George-Warren. To find out more about her latest book, “Janice: Her Life and Music” visit HollyGeorgeWarren.com. Now here's more of our interview with Holly.

So clearly you have an extreme in depth knowledge of the history of women in the music industry. So how do you think the music industry has evolved over the years in terms of opportunities for women?

Holly: When I first moved to New York as far as women performing in bands, that was just starting to really happen thanks to the whole, you know, punk explosion with bands from England, like the Slits and the Raincoats, the Modettes, you know, I saw all those bands, that little tiny clubs and it just was a much more welcoming atmosphere for women to pick up instruments and play in pants.

And like I said, I started playing guitar in bands. Then of course, you know people like Tina Weymouth and Chrissy Hynde, I mean Patty Smith of course. So as far as getting the courage to get up on stage and play and then just, um, to have other like-minded souls out there that wanted to be in bands with you was very, uh, it was a great time to be in New York and gradually there became more and more venues, places to play. I got to play at all of them from, you know, CBS to Max's Kansas city, peppermint lounge, Danceteria, you know, all these great classic clubs in New York, you know, late seventies, early eighties. And as far as the music business, I mean, you know, at that time we were like screw the music, but you know, we were punk rockers, man. We were underground. We didn't want anything to do with that.

In fact, when I started even working for Rolling Stone in ‘93, I would tell people like, yeah, I'm working for Rolling Stone so I can afford now to write about the bands I really love. For it cause I was still writing for this really cool magazine called Option, which, and I'll if you remember that magazine, but very cool magazine based on the West Coast. And so I'd still write about people that would never ever get covered in Rolling Stone, but all different types of music. And again started writing about some of the early country music pioneers and rockabilly people like Wanda and people like that. So I didn't really interface that much with the mainstream music business at that time.

You know, I basically had good experiences on that very low level. Again, this was the time of the Go-Go's had come around and the Bangles, my band Dos Furlines, went on a tour of Canada with a couple of other all women bands and it was, you know, it was a male promoter and everything went really great.

Once I started moving up the food chain, once I was at Rolling Stone, I started working on producing some CD packages with labels. And again, everybody I worked with were male, but they were very supportive. They were really into what, you know, my ideas were. So I didn't really have any problem with that. And you know, gradually I started meeting some very cool women that a lot of women I discovered had been really behind the scenes. So I started meeting some of those women who had been working at labels for years. Some of them had left, it started their own publicity companies, some of them were in management, et cetera. So, and then I, you know, finally got to meet a few of the women who had been pioneering women, female journalists. But again, there weren't that many. It was very cool to see. And then, you know, like I said, Barbeau Dara and I did a whole book with lots of great, great women writers.

The scene I think helped, um, a lot of women find their, you know, their niche a lot. You know, a lot of women were total big into music just the way I was. But you know, finally, all these channels that opened up for them to pursue it as either a writer or you know, an A& R person manager, publicist, a photographer, lots of great women photographers. And again, I was, I loved meeting women who started in the business in the ‘60s into the ‘70s. So I loved getting to meet them in the ‘90s and just, I wish I would've known them or could've somehow met them when I first started out in the ‘70s, late seventies, even early eighties to get encouragement from them. But you know, they, they were really kind of behind the scenes. They weren't that obvious. And some of them became very good friends like Jan new house ski, uh, fabulous, wonderful.

A writer who was one of the early women writers for Cream magazine. And, uh, I got to know her and work with her and you know, Daisy McLean, who had written for Rolling Stone, um, back in the glory days of rock journalism where they were all these junkets and you were flown all over and wined and dined by the labels and all that kind of stuff. And she had some amazing stories to tell about being in the trenches. And Ellen sand or another wonderful writer who her great book called, I think it's called trips, was just reissued last year. And she was a very early writer. And when out on the road with, you know like LEDs up one and covered a Woodstock and a lot of Janis Joplin gigs, Forest Hills tennis stadium wrote about that. And so again, just these great writers who were hard to find when I started out.

Passionistas: You have an interest in all these genres. And you've written about such a wide range of music from country to punk. What makes a topic or an artist compelling enough for you to dedicate a book to the subject?

Holly: I guess if there's a complexity to the person and arguably perhaps all artists are a complex people, who knows cause I don't know about all of them, but I've been really attracted to writing about people that have had to really struggle, who've had to break down barriers to be heard, who have, you know, a lot of facets to their personality. And Janice is my third biography. My first one was Gene Autry, the singing cowboy who was a very complex man and very much a groundbreaking artist going way back to the beginning in the late 1920s broke through in the early thirties. And then Alex Chilton, who of course a lot of people know from big star, but it started out as this pop star at age 16 and the Box Tops and just had this incredible career in life.

I become passionate about them, their music, their lives. I never lose that passion. I mean I still get excited if some crazy, you know, online radio station plays, you know, a Gene Autry song. Same thing without, I was so thrilled. I went to see once upon a time at time in Hollywood and to hear a very deep cut box top song on the soundtrack of a, of the new Quintin Tarantino films. So two to train. By the way, I never lose the passion for the people that I like. Literally moving in with one of my biography subjects, you know, for several years. And you never forget your roommates, right? Most of them.

Passionistas: Tell us about why you chose to write a book about Janis Joplin and what you learned about her that you found most fascinating from writing the book.

Holly: I have to say part of it, I mean, I really believe that my subjects also choose me somehow. Again, following my passion, I ended up in a place where it just kind of comes together and with Janice for years, of course I had loved her music. She was definitely an inspiration for me growing up again in this tiny town in North Carolina, that didn't have a lot going on for me as far as the kind of things I was interested in. And now again, I might be like one of my biography subjects, but I think I saw her on the Dick Cavett show and just her whole look and attitude and sensibility and not to mention her incredible voice. I'm like, what's that? I want to be that. She was probably actually a little did I know at the time wearing this outfit that Nudie made for her. Of course. I was one of those people that was devastated when she died in 1970 and in 1971 I had joined the Columbia Record Blub and got Pearl.

I still have my original copy. So just a fan and then once I was working at Rolling Stone and started doing projects with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Hall of Fame did a really cool symposium on Janis back in the nineties, I think it was ‘97. And Bob Santoli, the head of education, VP of education and programming at the time invited me to be part of it and I'm, I got to go to Cleveland and give a talk about Janice's influence on contemporary women musicians, but the best part was I got to meet Janice's brother and sister Michael and Laura. I got to meet Sam Andrew, her a guitar player, Chet Holmes, who was the manager for Big brother and the Holding Company and started the Avalon Ballroom dances there back in the ‘60s some other people to her, John Cook, her road manager. So I got to meet all these people.

Then lo and behold, they did an American masters, American Music masters panel on Janice or weekend symposium on Janice again in 2009 I believe it was. And once again this time, um, and powers and I were asked to give talks about, Janis kind of a keynote thing with Lucy O'Brien, a grade a woman, rock journalists who's based in London. So the three of us kind of gave a joint keynote and again got to meet all these amazing people. So I just kind of got to learn more and more and more about Janice and about her music. The thing that really got me was I was asked to write liner notes for this two CD set called the Pearl sessions that Sony was doing in the early teens. And for the first time they had gone into the vaults and pulled out all this talk back between Janice and Paul Rothchild, her producer, who was known for being a very authoritarian producer.

Like he worked with Joni Mitchell and one of her first or I think or second album. And she's like, no, I can't work with him. He's too bossy. He tells me what to, you know, so she wouldn't work with him. He famously produced most of the Door's albums and he would make Jim Morrison like redo his vocal like 10 times or whatever. But he listening to them in the studio together, I'm like, Oh my gosh, this woman is calling the shots. Janis Joplin is telling Paul Rothchild like, Oh wait, let's slow it down here. Wait, let's try a different arrangement on this. Let's have this guitar part here. I mean, she was basically producing the record with him. She's never gotten credit really for being this very thoughtful orchestrator of music and hardworking musician. She created a very different image of herself in order to sell herself as a persona, this rock persona.

And she was very successful at that and I think I, and almost everybody else bought it, but I realized from listening to these recordings that there was a whole other side to her, this musician side, that she wasn't just blessed born with this incredible voice that she just came out of the box singing. She worked, she really worked. And that very much intrigued me and that made me more interested in wanting to spend four and a half, five years working on Janice's life story and trying to make a write a book about her that shows her trajectory as a musician because you know, there had been some other books, some very well researched. I'm Alice Echols wrote a great book about Janis with a lot of research, but I felt still that somehow or musicianship and had not ever been acknowledged the extent that it should have been.

So that was kind of my goal for this book to really find out who her musical influences were. What did she do to improve her craft, or how did she discover her voice? What were the obstacles she had to overcome, all those kinds of things. So that really fired me up. And again, my wonderful agent, Sara Liaison, who had actually been the agent for Laura Joplin's book that she wrote called “Love Janice,” which told her story of growing up with Janice as her sister and used a lot of letters that Janice had written home. She reproduced a lot of the letters in the book and my agent told Laura about me and I had met her back in the nineties and so I was able to come to an agreement that, again, similar to the Autry book, they would allow me to go into Janice's personal files or scrapbooks or letters, and I could use all that in my book, but without any controls over what I wrote, they would not have any editorial approvals or anything like that. So again, that's, that's how that came about.

Passionistas: And your other current passion, you've touched on it a couple times, but tell us a little bit more about “Rhinestone Cowboy,” the story of Nudie.

Holly: I think there's kind of a pattern here. You can see that none of these, I'm no one overnights and station or whatever. All of my projects really, they come from years of passionately pursuing something just really for the love of it, more than with any sort of goal in mind. And that's kind of the same story with Nudie. As I mentioned, I was a collector of Western where I worked on the, “How the West Was Worn” book and that's when I really learned about Nudie, who was this very showman, like couturier the Dior of the sagebrush or whatever they used to call him, who catered to early on cellular Lloyd Cowboys, people like gene Autry.

And Roy Rogers was a huge client and then all the stars like Hank Williams making their incredible embroidered outfits. Then he started putting rhinestones on the outfits. I'm for a country in Western singers. And then in the late sixties people like Graham Parsons, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Janice, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Elton John all started going there, getting these really outrageous over the top and bordered and rhinestone suits. So I learned about him gradually and then it turns out through doing “How the West Was Worn,” I met Patrine Day Mitchum, who herself had actually hung out at Nudie’s back in the ‘70s, knew him and he had tapped her to write his memoir with him. So she has hours and hours and hours of taped, uh, recordings with him telling his fascinating story about being an immigrant as a young boy from the Ukraine to New York, all these ups and downs. He went through very colorful stories that finally landed him in Los Angeles in the late forties and started his shop and started making outfits for all these Western swing performers.

Tex Williams was his first. So we teamed up and started talking literally back in 2002 about, Oh, we should do a project together about Nudie. Should we do a book, because should we do a film? And so literally, all these years later now, we've actually started working on our documentary. In the meantime, I had worked on several documentaries over the years as a consulting producer and producer on lots of music documentaries that have been on PBS, etc. So I had that experience. And then Trina has worked in the film industry over the years as well. So we were able to kind of combine our passion for Nudie and his incredible clothing and some of the other outfits were made by some other great, also immigrants from Eastern Europe. This guy named Turk who was out on the end. VanNess was the first one. His shop opened in 1923 and then back in Philadelphia on the East coast rodeo.

Ben had a shop beginning in 1930 all three of them in Nudie where they came from. Eastern Europe was young boys, young men, and then also the whole story of the immigrants from Mexico. Manuel who still at age 86 is designing these incredible outfits in Nashville. He worked with Nudie and Heimaey Castenada who is still right there in North Hollywood, making incredible outfits for Chris Isaac and Billy Gibbons and Dwight Yoakam. So it's a bigger story. Even then I realized as far as it's a story of immigrants coming to this country and creating the iconic American look, the rhinestone cowboy outfit. Right. So go figure.

Passionistas: Looking back on your journey so far, is there one decision you've made that you consider the most courageous? That sort of changed your trajectory?

Holly: Oh, I guess it was just picking up and moving to New York city with, I had a little audio cassette player. You remember those? It was even pre Walkman. I had that. If you could set mix tapes or suitcase and that was it. 500 bucks, maybe 700 I don't know. Just kind of moved to New York and I mean, I think, I guess that was the smartest thing I ever did because basically in New York I made lifelong friends. I met my husband, he was playing in a band, the flesh tones. Um, we were on a double bill. My band does for line. So that's how we met in the 80s all these passions, some of which I had as a young girl growing up in North Carolina, I was literally able to materialize into projects, into a lifestyle and into a livelihood. I mean, gosh, I mean, how lucky am I that that happened? Things that could have just been a hobby actually became a way of life and an occasional paycheck here and there.

So I feel very, very lucky. And I think moving to New York city, almost at a whim, I went to school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. So I had two sides of my personality, the former hippie Janice wannabe, and the punk rocker. So when I was going to leave Chapel Hill, I'm like, well, I'm either gonna move to New York City or Key West. So I think it's a good thing. I moved to New York city.

Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life?

Holly: Again, and I teach, I tell my students this, whatever you do, if you can pursue it with passion. You guys nailed it with the name of your podcast. Because if you can approach even, you know, path things with passion, you know, with anger or … of one with passion, I think, you know, whatever it is, if you can just engage and be passionate about things that's going to enrich your life. I mean it can maybe take its toll on you too. But I think how that kind of feeling and motivation that you're driven by the passion of whatever it is that you're thinking about or wanting to learn about or whatever, you're going to do a much better job with whatever it is you're pursuing.

Passionistas: What's your definition of success?

Holly: I guess success is not only attaining a goal that you had for yourself, but within that goal also having happiness and a good state of mind about it. Because I think horribly, you know, in our culture, a lot of people that find certain success, you know, material success or even career success, there's other aspects of their life that is not working out too well. So that's not really success is that I think you have to put all the parts of the puzzle together so that they're all kind of working out together to really be successful. It's tricky. It's difficult because life has a way of throwing lots of curve balls at ya.

Passionistas: So what advice would you give to a young woman who wants to be a journalist or an author?

Holly: First off, subscribe to your podcast. And seriously, I think surrounding yourself or finding out about or listening to other people who are passionate about things that you're interested in doing or even if it's something different, but people that their passion is driven them to be successful or to work towards attaining success, that that can be very inspirational and motivational for them. And then also not just do things through rote or whatever. You have to really find something that energizes you and does and passion you to want to pursue it, and I think that's really important and not do something just because you're supposed to or someone tells you you should do this, but you have to really find things that are going to bring you fulfillment.

Passionistas: Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Holly George-Warren to find out more about her latest book, “Janice: Her Life and Music,” visit HollyGeorgeWarren.com.

And don't forget, our quarterly subscription box The Passionistas Project Pack goes on sale October 30th. Each box is filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing [email protected] to get 10% off your first purchase.

And be sure to subscribe to the Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carolyn Koppel founded Aaron’s Coffee Corner while sitting with her son Aaron in his hospital room. Her mission is to provide 24/7 access to free Keurig coffee to the family, friends and caregivers admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of Ann & Robert Lurie’s Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

Find out more at AaronsCoffeeCorner.org.

Read more about The Passionistas Project.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. Today we're talking with Carolyn Koppel, the founder of Aaron's Coffee Corner.

Carolyn left a career in Hollywood to return to the Midwest where she worked at the Shoah Foundation and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios. Most recently she founded Aaron's Coffee Corner, while sitting with her son, Aaron, in his hospital room. Her mission is to provide 24/7 access to free Keurig coffee to the family, friends and caregivers of patients in the pediatric intensive care unit of Ann and Robert Laurie's Children's Hospital of Chicago.

So please welcome to the show, Carolyn Koppel.

Carolyn: Hello. Thank you.

Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about?

Carolyn: I feel that of course, right now I'm passionate about this project and getting coffee to people that really could use it, but I think in general, as I look back on my adult life, I've tried to work with organizations and people that do good, which I didn't really think about, but it turns out that it's a running theme in my life and I'm pretty proud of it.

Passionistas: Why do you think you're drawn to projects that help other people?

Carolyn: I think it's just my upbringing. I think I grew up pretty happily and my parents were always very kind to people and I think that my family has nurtured that. And as I went through middle school and high school and college, it's something that I carried with me. I think it's just my upbringing. I'll give that credit to my parents.

Passionistas: How does that translate into what you do in your day to day life?

Carolyn: Well, right now my day to day life is nothing that I thought it would be like 14 years ago when my child Aaron was born. So over the last few years I've thought about what can I do? Should I get a job? How can I get a job? Because there's a lot of medical appointments and there's a lot of time off if parent gets sick, how do I tell people that I need a really flexible job that can allow me to care for my globally delayed and medically fragile child?

So it's been a journey to try and find something that I can do. And along the way I've volunteered on a parent board, um, for a local organization here called North suburban special education district, which my son is a part of and has been a part of. And I slowly got back into the idea of filling my time, trying to help somebody else because after you're in a situation like I am, it takes a long time to kind of settle into your life. And I think that just over the last few years we've had a little more regularity so you can kind of look outside of what your craziness is and say, Oh, other people have it worse than me. And I think that when I started going to the hospital, I think that played a big role in how I was going to handle life with Aaron.

And that I always looked around when I was in the pediatric intensive care unit and thought, Oh my God, look at these people. They have it so much worse than we do. And I think that always rang true that no matter how frustrating and how difficult and how ludicrous you feel your life is, somebody has always got it worse. So it took a long time to kind of get to the point where I'm like, okay, well it's always going to be like this. Let's see how we can help other people because now I have things a little under control and let's open it up and see what we can do for others. And that started to happen about four or five years ago, but I couldn't really find what I needed until I was so frustrated in the middle of the night in a hospital room that I couldn't find some coffee. And that's really how we got here.

Passionistas: Let's back up a step. Tell everybody about Aaron and why you're in the hospital so much.

Carolyn: So my son has something called dihydro perimeter ING dehydrogenase deficiency. And it's not necessarily uncommon to have this disorder, but it is to have it from birth. So his symptoms started showing very early and at about 18 weeks he had a seizure and then we knew something wasn't right. And we took ourselves to that hospital and we needed to get transferred down to Lurie's children's because they didn't know what was going on and they had to get the seizures under control. So this disorder was known to people. And when Aaron was admitted to the hospital, he was there for about, I think the first time, about eight days. And they just did a battery of tests and they were trying to figure out what was wrong.

And they did EKGs to see about his seizure activity. And they took all kinds of blood tests and one test from that very admission kept coming back positive. And I remember that genetics factor coming in and saying, well this is something we're going to have to test again because I've never seen it in my career. So we're gonna send it to the Mayo clinic and have the, his blood tested it and then we're going to see what they say. And then it came back from the Mayo clinic and they said there's one man in the Netherlands that's doing research on this particular disorder. You did test positive for it and can we have blood samples from your whole family and urine samples and send them to him? And when that was confirmed, we knew what his diagnosis was. So a lot of kids that are medically fragile and globally delay, they don't have any kind of diagnosis.

So we were lucky right there that we had something to hold on to. And the way that we knew that this was what he had was because there was a drug called five plural are soul, that men in their forties when they get prostate cancer, sometimes we're treated with this drug and it had horrible side effects including death. So this man in the Netherlands had created a urine test that could test before they had this treatment to make sure that they can get it. And that's the test that Aaron kept coming back positive for. So they pulled it back around and they said, we don't have very much information on this disorder, but we know that children haven't lived past the age of three. So that was his diagnosis and his prognosis very early on, at around under a year. And that's a shock. Let me tell you what he suffers from I guess.

So he has epilepsy. He suffers from unmanageable seizures. He's globally delayed. He is not verbal and he is non-ambulatory, which means he is confined to a wheelchair. He doesn't really have the use of his limbs. So I guess he would technically be classified as a quadriplegic. And he has excellent hearing and a really good sense of spell. So he's fed through a G tube. He's on a number of medications, which he also takes through his G-tube. And as a result of the disorder, besides the epilepsy, he has lot of pulmonary issues, breathing issues. He's had pneumonia a few times. And one of the many reasons we've been in the hospital so often is that it doesn't take very much for him to get. And when he does, he has a really hard time recovering from it. So he's just a really sick, handsome little guy, you know, and, and he's just a love.

He recognizes voices, he smiles when he's happy, whether you know why he's happy or not. It's always good to have him smile. And I think that he is surrounded by so much love that he emanates it back. He really is a lucky kid and we're lucky to have him.

Passionistas: We're sorry that you've had to deal with all that.

Carolyn: Oh, it's okay. It's all right. It's turned out to be a pretty good life unexpectedly.

Passionistas: Let's go back and talk about your path to getting to here. So you studied journalism at the university of Wisconsin Madison, and what were your goals at that point when you graduated and what did you do?

Carolyn: Well, my goal at the university of Wisconsin was to get out of the cold when I graduated. And my parents had already had that idea and they deserted me while I was living while I was in college.

So they took off or Arizona and I went and shacked up with them for a year and I worked as a stringer producer. So there was a company in Arizona and we would do work for the Phoenix suns and for lifestyles of the rich and famous and for ESPN and all those kinds of stringer things. That was anything that was happening in entertainment tonight. Anything that was happening in Phoenix, we would run out and do a little bit and I would be the person holding the little microphone and asking the questions off camera. And a friend of mine had already moved out to California and she's like, well why don't you come out here? And I'm like, okay.

And I had another friend from Arizona that happened to be going to California for a summer program and she and I ended up being roommates with a couple of other girls and I got a job. I was, the first thing I did is I went to limited express to make sure I could work for them while I was there cause I had to have a job. And I had done that on and off. Like through school I had worked at limited express. So that was my first thing. And another friend of mine said, well why don't you come in and interview and see if we have a job for you at Viacom? And it was via con television. And at the time it was Dean Hargrove and Fred Silverman and they were doing all of these shows that old people like “Jake and the Fatman” and “Matlock” and “Perry Mason” “Diagnosis, Murder.”

It was awesome. And I ended up working for a woman who was the script production office manager, Donna and I was a script coordinator. So the first thing she had me do was learn how to type better because my typing skills were not up to par because I thought I'd be a broadcast journalist. From then on I was in a pretty good place. I was like, this is cool. I have a great group of friends, we're all in it together, we're all starting out. And it was a really great experience and I had done that for about four years. And I remember a friend of mine asked me to go see a movie and the movie was Schindler's list and I remembered that at the end of the movie we were on the universal lot and we had seen it in a screening room. And at the end of the movie it said that Steven Spielberg was starting a foundation to interview Holocaust survivors.

And I was like, Oh well, if I remember correctly, he's my neighbor on the universe a lot. So let me send him some universal mail with my resume in it and a letter. And that got me introduced to the show foundation. And by then I was in California for five years and I was known as the crazy aunt from California. All my nieces and nephews were being born. It was like a machine out West out East. And I was like, I should see if I can give them an idea and see if they'll give me a job. So when I sent them a letter, I said, I really do believe that you're going to be wanting to locate in Chicago, Illinois and I'm from the Midwest and I'd be more than happy to run your production office from Chicago. And they said, well that's a little far off because you know, we're in one trailer in the back of Amblin entertainment right now and we have to get set up here.

And I said, well, I'm happy to volunteer or whatever you need. And so eventually I volunteered there and they offered me the job in Chicago. So I became the Midwest regional coordinator for the show foundation. And that brought me back here. After that project was over, I went on to Harpo and an interviewer that was working for me on the show foundation said, Oh, you should meet my friend at the Oprah Winfrey show. She's a producer. And I said, okay. And I had coffee with her and I told her what I did and she went back to the office and told her, her boss, one of the producers and said, you know, you're starting up this new project, maybe she's the one for you. And I went in and I interviewed for that job and I got it. And it was the very beginning of Oprah's angel network, the original version of it where we raised money for kids to go to college and we built houses with habitat for humanity.

So between the Shoah foundation and recording these visual histories of what had happened to these people during the most horrific period of time in their lives, and to show at the end how they've survived and how they've created new families and continue to do good in the world. Then to go top Harpo and give back to communities. It was just kind of a theme I was on and it was great and I was like, okay, what's the next thing? And I had been at Harpo for a little while and the angel network had kind of morphed into something else and they were opening up Oprah online, they creating their own website. So I moved over to that website and I helped them start that website. And I learned a lot about things that I never thought I would know about, like HTML and all that kind of stuff and how to create a website.

But it wasn't really hitting the Mark for me. And I enjoyed my time there, but I had met my husband by then and he's like, well go look for a different job. And I think he found out about my next job, which was for adventure, which was an educational technology company right in the middle of the bubble. It was all very exciting and I was the operations manager and it was great. And then the bubble burst and I was four months pregnant and I look like I was eight months pregnant and one of those people that as soon as I got pregnant I looked like I had been pregnant for 17 years because I looked so pregnant at the beginning and I was like, I can interview for jobs because who's going to take a pregnant woman? And then I had my first child and everything was working out all right, we bought a house, my husband was working, did I really need to go back to work?

Not really. I was lucky and I did some work here and there and a little production work and then Aaron was born and that's when things kind of took a little different path. And so I became the primary caregiver and I think all of those lessons that I learned from all of those jobs, I think that's the secret to really getting through life is to remember what you've learned and bring a little of that to your next project and bring all of that to your next project and to build upon it. And I think that by the time Aaron came, I kind of knew this was going to be okay and it's not horrible, but we don't know what's going to happen. And once he hit three years old, we started having a birthday party every year. We just had his 14th birthday party and my backyard this weekend.

And I'm telling you, there's tons of people that come in there, his therapists and doctors and nurses and our family and friends that have supported us for 14 years, you know, that have gone through the highs and the lows and the hospitals, hospital visits. And I mean it just makes you realize how lucky you are. I think that they always say maybe a Maya Angelo says it. If you find it in your heart to care for somebody, then you've succeeded. So if you keep your heart open and you try and do the best you can for somebody else, you're going to get through the next door. And that's kind of how I got to where I am. I just, I love being in broadcast journalism, but I really loved helping other people and being a part of a bigger project and I think that's just the path I took, which turned out to work well for me. And I'm using all those skills now. So it's pretty remarkable.

Passionistas: We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Carolyn Koppel. To learn more about her mission to provide 24/7 access to free curd coffee to the family, friends and caregivers admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit of Ann and Robert Laurie's Children's Hospital of Chicago, visit AaronsCoffeeCorner.org. Now here's more of our interview with Carolyn.

Passionistas: How did the day to day skills you learned when you were in production apply to your life now?

Carolyn: We're going to take a little downturn for, for a minute. And I say that with as light of an attitude as I can, but when you're told that your child is not gonna live past three, so for those first few years, you're not sleeping, you're listening for him to breathe and not to have a seizure every night. And then when you wake up in the morning you're like, Oh my God, we made it through the night. You know, cause you always think it's going to be nighttime when something happens and you're gonna walk into that room and something horrible will have happened and there goes on for many, many years. And once he hits three, you're like, how long is it going to go on? How do you plan for it? So you're going to be here one year and then gone the next. It's like when you get classified, you get the hanging sticker that says you're driving a car that has a handicap ramp or something, that little hang or the blue one.

And then they're like, you know, well maybe you should have a license plate. And I'm like, no, because if I get the license play, maybe that's like superstitious and then something horrible is gonna happen. So there was a lot of that year after year, like I didn't want to think too far ahead, but here I am with a ramp van with a license plate that says we're handicapped. So you have to jump over those hoops to get where you are. And I think that's just a positive attitude. If you let go of what you think you're supposed to be doing with your life and then you're going, okay, well what am I supposed to be doing with it? Every time you do that you get a little further down the line. And I think I took that from all of my experiences in working with people and just volunteering and stuff like that.

So I think I might date today. It really played a role in just moving forward everyday move forward and see what happens. And here we are. I mean it's kind of worked, you know, we have these moments where he gets RSV or he gets pneumonia and we're in the hospital and we are at that point where people are talking about do not resuscitate letters and what do we have in place to move ahead with his treatment? Or do we put a breathing tube in so he can recover from his illness? Or is the breathing tube something that's keeping him alive? Like is it because of his underlying disorder that he needs some breathing tube? So you're making those distinctions and you're looking at your child who's on all kinds of machines in a hospital and you're like, okay, what if we have to bury him next week?

And those are not the kind of thoughts you want going around your head. But it's very practical and I'm a Capricorn and that's how I think. So I think the first thing that we did when those things kind of started happening, we were concerned about my older son Eli, who's 17 now and terrific and I was like, who is he going to talk to if something happens to Aaron? Because he's not gonna wanna talk to me or, or my husband stuck. I don't want to touch him. My sister, he needs like a third party. And I remember doing that early on, he was probably eight or nine and I thought, okay, we have that taken care of. We have a place for Eli to kind of process his feelings, but we have to, um, plan for things that you just don't think you need to plan for. And there are things that people don't want to talk about.

Like you just have to, uh, compart mentally maybe and say this is where he'll be buried and when it happens, this is how we'd like it to happen. But those change, all those things change as you go through the process. I think that just understanding that it's going to be okay. You don't have a lot to do with it. Right? And you just have to understand it and not accept it, but understand it and move through it because it sucks. Don't get me wrong. So I think that's what gets us true to this situation where I was like having a little self pity party and I was really upset that I couldn't find some coffee at 10 o'clock at night. What's wrong with that? And it was really frustrating and that's at one of those times when you have a sick child, you kind of know that something's happening, right?

Like he was not his normal self and he was having seizures that he didn't usually have and he was having some seizures that he hadn't had for a long time. So things were changing and you know that it could be growth, you know, it could be diet, it could be age, they have all these reasons for all these changes to happen and you end up going into the hospital a couple of times a year to have things checked out and that's where we end up. We end up in the hospital because everybody wants to help and the best possible way, except when you go for an EEG and people don't realize that there's a lot of times when you go into the hospital and you don't have full nursing care, you're on a floor and you're there and he's having all of these electrodes attached to his head and you're responsible for hitting this little alarm when you think he's having a seizure.

So they can watch the video and look at the EEG printout and kind of determine if it's a seizure, if it's neurological, if they can say that it's a seizure or not and how to treat it, but you're the one for three days. In Aaron's case, we were there for three days this last time so we could be sure to catch what was happening and you're the one that's for doing it. You give him his meds, you are awake, you're watching the activity as it goes through, and then when you go to bed, there's somebody that comes into the room and watches it on the camera so you can't leave the room. You can't go down to elevators to get a cup of coffee or one elevator to go to the cafeteria because it's not open and room service is closed and then you just getting pissed, right?

You're like, I have to stay up until midnight to turn him his last time. So Aaron, since he doesn't move, has to get moved every few hours. And the longest time that he sleeps on one side is from midnight to about six in the morning depending on when my husband wakes up. So I always have to stay up until midnight. And I was really frustrated and I'm like, why isn't there coffee ever in the hospital when I need it in the mornings before the rounds happen or the doctor start check again at seven o'clock in the morning and I've been up since five, why do I not have little more access to that? And I started thinking about it and I thought, well let's ask Keurig to help. And so that night, I think it was 10 45 I wrote them a letter and I said, it's 10 45 at night and I can't get a cup of coffee and how can we work together to make that happen in the hospital.

And I had big visions of every floor having a Keurig machine for the families and it would be great and super easy. It seems so simple. And the rest of our stay happened. I wrote the letter, I put it aside, I went back to my job as seizure alarmist and couple of days later we went home and I'm like, Oh I wrote that letter, I should go read that letter. Maybe I'll send that letter. So I went back and I read it and I told my husband that I had written this letter and that I'm going to mail it out to the CEO of Keurig. So I did and I didn't hear from anybody and I was like, maybe I should send it to like the whole board of Keurig. So, cause it was Christmas time and who's really reading their mail and they're probably all off on vacation.

And so in January, I think I sent it to all the board members listed on the cure USA website. And in February I got a phone call from this man, so I'm looking for Carolyn capital. I said, does this Carolyn? And he said, this is John Barrett from Keurig. And I'm like, it is not John Barrett from curate. And he's like, yes it is. And I was like, I was just trying to figure out how to start a fundraiser at Lurie's and how much a pure coffee machine would really cost. I'm doing all the research right now. And he's like, well, we'd like to help you out with that and as like you are kidding me. And he's like, no, whatever you need, figure it out, we'll help you. And so from that point I was like, I had already been complaining to people for two weeks and making sure that I was in the right.

Nobody was going to disagree, that I don't deserve coffee when I want coffee. And I was getting a lot of really good feedback. I could have been because I was a little aggressive, but I knew that I was right. So I got in touch with Lurie's and I said, listen, I have this offer from Keurig and wouldn't it be great if we could get a machine on all the floors? And they're like, hold on there we are a huge hospital and we got to figure out if we can do it. And I, I got a few notes and this is when you learn that no is just the wrong answer. And if you keep complaining and keep talking about it, somebody is going to hear you and say, Oh well why can't we just try that on one floor? Because I had already gotten it down to that.

My big dream had come in like how about a pilot program for three months? Can you give me that? And they're like, I don't know why we can't. That's a really reasonable thought and let me explore what we can do. So when this was all happening, it was my son's 13th year and in September I knew we were having a bar mitzvah. So in my mind, without telling a lot of people when I was up to, I was like, Oh, that would be a great way to kick off Aaron's bar mitzvah. You know, if people want to give money, we've always given money to make a wish. When I think Aaron was five, so Eli must've been around 11 we went on a Make-A-Wish trip and it was to this day, the best trip we've ever taken, I'm very grateful for that organization. And at every birthday for Aaron, we've always asked people to donate to make a wish.

And I thought they've gotten enough money from us. We've paid that trip back. We sent a few kids on their own. We are all good with them. Let's see if we can switch directions and put our energies into this project. And so I had all of this formulating in my head and I kept getting no. So there were a few more phone calls and then one woman, Barbara Burke from the founders board. I think at Lori's called me up to give me the final no, and I kept her on the phone and she's like, I'm going to find out why we can't do this. I have a Keurig machine in my own house. It's very easy. I'm like, I know. So what's more? He got on board, it moved really quickly and we were able to set up a website through Lurie's about what we were doing and we were able to get it all done before labor day weekend in September and at his bar mitzvah I got up and told people what I was going to do and all of a sudden people were donating and people were sending me pictures of how they were using their mugs because everybody got a mug at the bar mitzvah and they'd fill up with pants or they'd show me their copy and I had an enormous help from, she's down my social media coordinator, but she's been Aaron's babysitters since he was one years old.

She just said, we should put it online and this is a social media thing and you need an Instagram and a Facebook and a Twitter. And I'm like, I don't know how to use any of that. She's like, I'll teach you. And from that moment on, we've really snowballed when I was first formulating, and in my mind, people are going to give you money to give coffee to people. It's not for research or it's not for, you know, blankets or something for the kids. And I'm like, I'm done with the kids. Kids get tons of stuff. I don't think people realize that it's the whole family is part of the experience. And if you can bring a little comfort to the family in the smallest of ways, it's gonna make the biggest difference. And I always felt like if we could help the families, we were helping the child because you create less stress, you create a little peace of mind and it makes you better at navigating all of this unfamiliar stuff.

All of the machines. Your child is all of a sudden hooked up to the medicine that I V bags, the noises in the hospital, the family that wants to desperately do something for you and they don't know what to do. You know, these are all ways you can help the whole community that supports you to make it a little easier. And I, I think it's a great idea and I just wish, you know, we can take it to a second floor and then a third floor and eventually as we continue, we can create grants for smaller hospitals. Set could use a Keurig machine, maybe don't know, pick you because they aren't big enough to have a pediatric intensive care unit, but maybe in their emergency room, you know, maybe we can spread a little bit of the comfort and help a lot of people. It doesn't take much.

And I think the simplicity of it is really what's people are like, wait, what? You're just going to give them some coffee? I'm like, yeah, yes please. I think that people don't realize one in the hospital, it's expensive. So let's say that all of these years, until about two years ago, we got a Illinois medical waiver. So it helps us with everything. Like the 20% the deductibles, it goes through our insurance and then it goes to this waiver program and they help pay for it. So for the first 12 years we paid to have our house redone so we could have a wheelchair in the house. We had paid for diapers for 12 years. Those are big diapers and they're not like little Pampers. You can run to the store for wipes, gloves, you know, Chuck's for the bed, we have a really nice laundry machine because we do it all the time.

We've spent all this money that people think, Oh that's like everyday kinds of stuff. But I don't think everybody has like a $700 a month bill for one medicine every month. Right. And they think, Oh well you have insurance and that's with insurance. So it's like paying for college but not saving for college for all of those years. And you're trying to save and you're trying to move money around. And that is stressful on its own. So these people that find themselves in the hospital in an emergency that we're counting on that. Like I been doing this for a long time. I know that when I used to go into the hospital and I got up $536,000 bill, I needed to pay 10% of that to the hospital. And that's a lot of money. So for years I was on a constant payment plan and I think that people, one, they need to know about those payment plans.

Any hospital will take a payment plan and you should ask about it and get on it and only give them what you can afford. If anything anybody hears today, that should be it. But it's stressful. Money is stressful, sickness is stressful. So when you have those things mixed together and you find yourself in a hospital and you're like, can I really afford a $4 cup of coffee at Starbucks down the way? Maybe not. Maybe I could get a free cup of coffee down the hall and be back in time to talk to the nutritionist or the doctor. That's coming around. And if I'm gone for a couple of seconds, the nurse can say, Oh, she just went to get a cup of coffee. She'll be back in moments instead of finding out where the doctor is on the floor and what time rounds usually are, and then to rush out, get your copy and something to eat and then get back to your room so you don't miss anything.

It's a whole different like universe inside a hospital. And it's even more difficult and unnerving to be in a PICU because a pediatric intensive care unit, just like when adults go to an intensive care unit, things are not good. So the best day, and I've said this before in the PICU, is the day you leave the pick queue and you want to leave the PICU. So it's just a different way of thinking of it and really simplifying it and saying, we appreciate what you're going through. We been there, we're a family that has experienced it, and we want you to know that it's going to be okay. It might take a little while. The journey is a long one and you just gotta stick with it.

Passionistas: Is there one lesson you've learned so far on this journey that sticks with you the most? If you have a good idea and you hear no a lot, that you should take a risk and just keep trying for yes.

Carolyn: I think that's a really big lesson to learn and that these things take time. You know, it takes a long time for somebody to say yes and it's worth it at the end when you hear yes, just don't give up. It's not anything great, but it's hard to do in practice is to not give up and just not take no for an answer. Because when you don't stop, there's going to be a door that opens up and somebody's gonna say, Hey, I'm there with you. And I think that's important to keep in mind and, and learn about yourself. Stick to it. If miss, I don't know. It's been a good journey. Hard, difficult, sad, glorious, fun. I mean all of those things. But it's still a journey. And at the end, we're all going to meet our end and the Aaron's going to meet it in its own time surrounded by people he love living a life that has been glorious because the people around him are glorious. What more could you ask for really? Right. So it's all gonna be good in the end.

Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Carolyn Koppel. To learn more about her mission, to provide 24/7 access to free Keurig coffee to the family, friends and caregivers of patients in the pediatric intensive care unit of Ann and Robert Laurie's Children's Hospital of Chicago, visit AaronsCoffeeCorner.org. And be sure to subscribe to the passion Eustace project podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.

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After becoming the first woman to ever hold the title of Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at a major movie studio, Amy decided to leave that world behind and start working with Nancy. Together they founded The Passionistas Project to share the stories of strong and empowered women who are following their passions to inspire others to do the same.

Read more about The Passionistas Project.

Sign up for the mailing list to learn more about The Passionistas Project Pack — a quarterly subscription box launching this fall.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. I'm Nancy Harrington and today I'm interviewing my business partner, sister, inspiration and best friend Amy.

Amy left home right after college to follow her passion in Hollywood. She quickly rose through the ranks to become the first women to ever hold the title of Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at a major movie studio. After years in the film world she left all that behind to join forces with me to create the Passionistas Project where we share the stories of strong and empowered women who are following their passions through our podcast and our upcoming subscription box.

So please welcome to the show my very special guest, Amy Harrington.

What are you most passionate about?

Amy: I'm most passionate about fulfilling my sense of curiosity and trying to learn something new every day. When I had my first job on the TV show Matlock, my boss at the time, John McClain told me as long as I learned something new every day, I feel like I had a good day and I've always carried that with me.

Passionistas: So how does that translate into what you do for a living and with the Passionistas Project specifically?

Amy: Well, when we started working for the Television Academy, 10 years ago at this point, and started to do interviews with people, I realized that that's what I love to do more than anything else. And it really fed into that sense of curiosity that I have because I love to talk to people about what they like to do and what their experiences have been. And I love, in the middle of an interview, when someone says something that triggers a question in my head that we hadn't prepared before. So for me, being able to do that with the Passionistas Project and to use that skill and to focus that passion on women who are following their passions and are really empowering and really inspiring, just brings that all together for me.

Passionistas: So, let's talk about your background a little. You spent the summer of 1990 in Los Angeles at the Television Academy as an intern. So talk about what you learned from that experience.

Amy: The first half of that summer I had been in New York and I worked at MTV and had an internship there. And that really made me even more excited to get into television because it was fun and energetic and everybody was young and it just felt like you could do anything cause you were, everybody was your age. The executive producers were probably late twenties early thirties so I felt like, okay so this feels doable.

And then when I came up later in the summer to California for the Television Academy internship, I really felt like, okay, I am getting my foot in the door. I'm meeting other people my age and people who have experience who have been doing this for a really long time. And as long as I work hard and do a good job and prove myself, then the possibilities are endless. This is not just some crazy dream, a kid from the south shore of Massachusetts was having, but that, I could really move to California.

I could really work in television and I could make it happen, you know? And if I hadn't had the Academy internship, I don't know that I would have believed that and I wouldn't have met the friends that I made who helped me get my first job when I moved back the summer after I graduated.

Passionistas: Talk about what that first job was and what your path was that first few years of your work in Hollywood.

Amy: So when I first came back to LA, I had a roommate lined up, Amy Toomin and she brought me back into a circle of friends that we had made the summer before. And one of them, Carolyn Koppel, who is going to be a Passionista soon, worked on a TV show called Matlock. She suggested I interview for the job of post-production assistant, which I at the time had no desire to be. I wanted to be a sitcom writer and TV producer.

And I luckily had a professor in college who had told me, don't be so sure of what you want to do when you go out there, you know, keep your options open because you don't know what you actually are gonna like. And so I started working on Matlock and got into post production and one day my boss, at Matlock said to me, if you could be doing anything in Hollywood, what would you actually want to do? And I said, you know, if I could do anything I would probably want to be in what I thought at the time was called special effects and you know, build creatures. And you know, the Star Wars influence from my childhood was, was still very strong. And I thought like, I would really want to do that. And then coincidentally, my second year on Matlock, I was looking for a summer job and I got hired to be the visual effects coordinator on the feature film Coneheads.

And that was how I got into the visual effects industry. So from there I went with that boss John Sheeley to Warner Bros. Where we worked on Louis and Clark and then ultimately helped... I was one of four founding members of Warner Bros. Imaging technology, which we called Wabbit. We actually did hands on visual effects for Warner Bros. projects like Batman Forever and The Adventures of Brisco County on TV. And then after I worked at Wabbit for a couple of years, um, the head of post-production at Warner Brothers proper, the studio proper, Mark Solomon hired John Sheeley and I to come over to the studio and actually be production executives basically dealing with visual at Warner Bros.

Passionistas: Talk about your years at Warner Bros. And some of your best memories there.

Amy: So John, Sheely and I went over to Warner Bros. And ultimately he left the studio and I was promoted to Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production, simultaneously. I was the first woman to hold the job of a visual effects executive at a studio. What that meant was with Mark Solomon, who was my boss, we oversaw all of the teams who were doing the visual effects on all of the feature films at Warner Bros. And we oversaw editorial. So that was the editors and music supervisors and post production supervisors.

And we basically saw every movie from development through final delivery for the six or seven years that I was in that position at studio. So I worked on movies like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and uh, the Matrix trilogy and Perfect Storm and You've Got Mail. Because we worked in development and because we worked all the way through delivery, we basically touched every movie that came through the studio in the time I was there. So I probably worked on about 200 to 250 movies when all of a sudden done. Obviously some more actively than others, but had at least a hand in seeing a lot of movies through.

Passionistas: So in 2004 you and I started working together. So why did you decide to make that leap of faith and do that?

Amy: By 2004 I, like I said, I had worked on hundreds of movies in one form or another, and the studio itself had changed significantly. When I started at Warner Bros., It was very old Hollywood. Bob Daly and Terry Semel were still the studio heads. And Lorenzo Di Bonaventura was the head of the creative production. And the film and the filmmakers and the, the movie came first.

And by the time 2004 rolled around, the AOL Time Warner merger had happened. Everything was very budget driven. The climate at the studio was very different. And frankly, I remember being in a meeting on the third Harry Potter movie and the creative executive asking me how we were gonna make Harry Potter fly. And we had already made Harry Potter fly into other movies. And I just thought, if they don't understand this by now, am I really gonna spend the rest of my life explaining the same thing to everybody. And there was politics involved.

And at the same time you, Nancy, were, you were ready to leave your job. And our friend Lisa Karadjian had an idea for a cable network and it was a great idea. And you and I both had the same time thought, well let's do it. Let's leave the jobs we don't like anymore and do this together. So even though that cable network never came to fruition, it was the stepping stone to moving on.

Passionistas: In 2010 we founded Pop Culture Passionistas, and in addition to doing interviews and creating content for our own website, we've worked for a number of clients like the Television Academy and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So what do you think was the most significant work that we did for those clients that led us to the Passionistas Project?

Amy: Meeting Karen Herman and starting to do interviews for the Television Academy and what was called the Archive of American Television at the time was the most significant moment in our path. I think of it Pop Culture Passionistas. We had obviously done a lot of interviews before Karen let us do an Archive interview, but they were phone interviews with other bloggers or they were not very high pressure or they were, you know, okay, you can ask a few questions and, and that was it.

And then with Karen it became, this is how you sit down with someone for three or four hours and really go deep with questions and really get to know someone. And she just taught us how to do research and she taught us how to structure questions so that there was a flow to the interview. But she also gave us the freedom to ask a question in the middle of an interview if something came up that seemed like it should be followed rather than feeling, you know, tied to every word that was on the page.

And I just fell in love with that process. And if we hadn't done the Archive interviews it would never have led to the Passionistas Project because the other interviews we were doing weren't that satisfying to me. They were fun and oh cool, we get to talk to this person and ask a couple of questions. But when you're actually get to sit down with someone and stare them in the eye for three hours and talk about their childhood and talk about those moments that you've seen on TV your whole life that meant so much to you, that was really life changing.

Passionistas: We started the Passionistas Project in the advent of the #MeToo and the #TimesUp movement. What was your personal motivation for starting the podcast?

Amy: We had wanted to start a podcast for a while. We'd probably been talking about it for a year or so and we were talking about doing a pop culture podcast and we couldn't figure out how to do it differently and make it interesting. And we'd certainly didn't want to do the kind of podcast that was us giving our opinion about pop culture and talking for an hour. You know, we wanted to bring our interview skills into it. So for me, the moment when we, when it came to us to do the Passionistas Project, it just felt 100% like what we had been searching for two years. And for me the idea was just, we were hearing all of these really incredibly important stories from the #MeToo movement about women who had been put in horrible positions and who were being really strong and coming forward and telling stories that absolutely needed to be told and almost everyone we know has experienced in one way or the other.

But we also knew in our heart that there were a million stories of women who have had good experiences and have worked really hard and built something or been a part of something that was really positive and so in light of all of the darker stories that were being told, and again, they needed to be, I personally felt like we need to also have a platform or women are showing other women that there's a way to do this. You can do it. You can have a positive experience. You can build your own environment to make a positive experience and that was why I personally wanted to do it.

Yes, I had ups and downs at Warner Bros., But I had an incredibly positive experience there. I was the only woman most of the time I was promoted very young. I was given access to everything. I got to work with the greatest directors of the time and the best visual effects people and editors and I was welcomed in to a certain extent, even though I was a woman and I wanted other women to know. It doesn't all have to be the negative side of things. You can follow your passions.

Passionistas: What has the podcast meant to you personally?

Amy: Now that we're over a year into it? I think the thing that surprised me most about doing it is how connected I feel to the women that we've been interviewing. You know when we do the archive interviews for example, you feel by the end of it, like you have a connection with Julia Louis Dreyfus, but you don't, you know, you're going to see Julia Louis Dreyfus again and she'll say hi cause she's polite but she's not gonna know why she's saying hi to you. I have become used to the fact that I have this intimate experience with someone and then we are strangers. Justifiably.

So from that point on. But with the Passionistas Project, I have felt like there's a connection with these women and even if they're not people we're staying in touch with every day or you know, some we seem more than others. I feel like we've got a bond and there's a connection that is really special. And every single woman that we have interviewed has talked about their desire to help other women.

And not to bring everything back to Warner Bros. but when I was there, I was the only woman most of the time, or maybe one other woman in a meeting, you know, studio executives. And it was never a real sense of camaraderie with the women. You know, I had my team of women that worked with me and my department and we were close, but the other women in the studio, we were nice to each other, but we didn't bond really. And everyone out to drinks with any of them.

I'm finding with the Passionistas Project that women, I think especially in light of the #MeToo  movement, women are looking out for each other. Women are trying to figure out how they can help each other and are trying to move each other's agendas forward in a way that I have never experienced before. I don't think it's unique to what we're doing, but I'm experiencing it first hand in a way I don't think I would be if we weren't doing the podcast. And so that's a selfish answer, but my hope and, and I think what we've already showing that we want to and can do is taking that and connecting people. Oh, you know, we interviewed a woman who has a farm. We interviewed a woman that has a mill, let's introduce them so that maybe they can help each other in some way.

Passionistas: What have you learned about yourself from interviewing these women?

Amy: I think I've learned that even though I consider myself shy and an introvert, that whether it's because of the project itself or just where I'm at in my life, I am way more determined to step out of my comfort zone and talk to people and open up more about myself than I might have before. Because again, I think the women that we're meeting have made me feel comfortable that flaws are okay in the midst of the positive stuff. And so I feel embraced by them. And so it's letting me, I think because I'm being more open, I'm getting more openness back from them.

Passionistas: I'm Nancy Harrington and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and my interview with my business partner, sister and best friend Nancy Harrington. Join our growing community of women supporting other women who are in pursuit of their passions on The Passionistas Project Facebook Group. And go to ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list and get 10% off our upcoming subscription box. Now here's more of my interview with Amy. 

Do you ever feel unmotivated and what do you do to get past that feeling?

Amy: I don't feel unmotivated very often. I usually wake up feeling behind in what I wanted to get done for the day, so it's rare that I wake up and go, I don't want to work today. Especially because I love what we're doing so much that it's not like some jobs I've had in the past or it's like, ah, I don't want to. But when I do feel unmotivated, honestly, I just figure out like, okay, but what can I do right now? That's not the least favorite thing that I have to do and if I can get that done, then that'll probably lead me to something else and I try and get the things I want you to do least out of the way first so that I have the carrot of something that I really want to do dangling out there. So it's like, okay, if I get through this, then I will be able to do the thing that I really want to do.

Passionistas: Is there one lesson that you've learned on your journey so far that really sticks with you?

Amy: I think the thing that I've learned that sticks with me is that I can do anything I set my mind to. And I don't mean that in like a cocky way. I just mean every job I've ever been given or every job I've ever chosen to pursue on my own. I have never known how to do it. When I started to do it, I've never been given a job that was like, oh, we see that you have 10 years of experience in this particular thing, so we want to hire you. It's always been like, well I know you can do this, but now we need someone that can do this and we're going to give you the job. I remember when I Mark Solomon decided to make me Vice President of Visual Effects and Post Production at the same time at Warner Bros. He had already asked me to do the visual effects job and then he said, will you do the post production job too?

And I said to him, I don't know how to do that. You realize that you're offering me this very like important position that I don't know how to do. And he said, yeah, but I know that you'll figure it out. I know you can do it. And I've been very lucky that a lot of people have thought that of me and it used to be that I didn't necessarily understand why or believed them when they would give me those jobs and now I feel like, okay, I can't, I can do, I can figure anything out, I can Google it. And I think that feeds, this feeds back into my original answer. What I'm most passionate about is like I want to learn new things all the time. So the more opportunities I get to do things I don't know how to do, that's what keeps me interested in working and living. So I feel like I'm finally at a point where I'm more confident in myself that I can take on anything than anybody throws at me.

Passionistas: What's been your biggest professional challenge and how have you overcome it?

Amy: I think my biggest professional challenge has been confidence in myself. I think when I was at Warner Bros., I was so young to have the job that I had that everybody else believed everything I was saying and I was right about what I was saying. Or I would bring in the right person to answer a question if I didn't know how to answer it. But I think the whole time I felt like they're going to figure out that I don't really. I don't think they should have given me this job even though I was doing a great job. So I think my biggest challenge has always been trusting myself and believing in myself and having the confidence that I belong at the table and that I'm good at what I do when I set my mind to it.

So I've learned over the years to have more faith and, and the job at Warner Bros. I think was what taught me that. Like that feeling lasted for a little while and then it was like, oh wait, I have everybody sitting in this room. I actually am the one that knows what the answer to this question is. Once I get over that feeling of being a fraud and realizing I belonged there and that I had earned it since then, I've felt pretty confident and like, especially when the chips are down and I feel like I can really kick in if there's a crisis and take charge of the situation. So, but that was, that was probably my biggest challenge along the way. 

Passionistas: What's the most rewarding part of your career?

Amy Harrington: Where I'm at right now is the most rewarding part of my career because I'm following my passions, I'm doing it with my best friend and I feel like what we are creating with the Passionistas Project is really important and there's so many elements to it that we haven't even started to explore that are going to give a platform for women and a voice to women and build a community. And so for me, getting to do this every day is so rewarding and I just want to throw all of my energy into it.

Passionistas: Looking back on your journey so far, is there one decision that you think was the most courageous that changed your trajectory?

Amy: Leaving Warner Bros. Was the most courageous thing because I thought I was going to work there my entire life. I thought, I thought I'd worked there till I was 65 and I would retire and I was making a very good salary. I had a very comfortable life. It was my entire life. During that period, I didn't really have much of a social life because I was so focused on what I was doing. I was the quintessential career girl. So the decision to actually leave all of that, especially because we were working on a cable network, but it wasn't a paid job and it wasn't okay, I'm going from this steady position to another steady situation. It was, I'm basically taking early retirement and figuring out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. It was very scary, but it was the best thing I ever did.

Passionistas: When you were a girl, what lessons did your mother teach you about women's roles in society?

Amy: Our mother was the greatest mother anybody could ever have. She was incredibly loving. She gave up everything she may have wanted for herself, for her husband and her children. She had studied to be an art teacher, but after she got married, she stopped doing that and she just raised a family, which was a very important job and she was, again, she was the best mother ever. But I remember throughout my life asking her like, will you draw something for me? You are an art teacher. You clearly loved art. You must have loved to draw, which she said she did, but our father was such a good artist that she would not draw because she said he was such a good artist. She didn't want to. Knowing my dad, I believe she didn't want to draw because I think she was probably a really good artist and she didn't want to steal any thunder from him, which was her way and made her as lovely as she was.

But it also was an example to me that that's really not the way to live your life. By the time I got to high school, my sisters and brother were older. And I didn't date much in high school. I rarely had a steady boyfriend, but I would say to her, you know, I wish I had a boyfriend. She would say, don't worry about that, you know, don't focus on that. She basically would say to me, follow my dreams and that will come when it's supposed to come. If it comes, you'll be happy. And if it doesn't come, you're still going to be fine.

But the most important thing is what do you wanna do and go out and do it. And I think if she had lived in a different time, she would have been an archeologist or she would have been an art teacher or some kind of teacher and she would have done something that she wanted to do. Because she was such a curious person. And I definitely got my sense of curiosity from her. So I know when she saw me come out here and do what I wanted to do and was around long enough to see me do well at it, that she got to live vicariously through me in a way.

Passionistas: What about professional mentors along the way?

Amy: In terms of what we're doing now and the Passionistas Project, without a doubt, Karen Herman was the biggest mentor that I could have had. She, again, we had some experience doing interviews, but I will never forget the day that she came to us and said, do you want to do an Archive interview and let us interview Melissa Gilbert, who was like the actress I was compared to constantly as a child because I had long hair. And Karen had no idea of that. And really taught us how to do what we're doing and again made it really fun and gave us opportunities like interviewing Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander. And the crown jewel of it all — Laverne and Shirley — partly because I know she trusted us that we would do a good job, but also partly because she knew it meant something to us. She knew that we would have fun doing it together without Karen. I don't know where we would be right now.

Passionistas: Who are your favorite cultural heroines?

Amy: All my cultural heroines growing up were TV characters. So I would have to say Laverne DeFazio, certainly Mary Richards, not Mary Tyler Moore because she was the go getter career girl working in television. Rhoda because she was the sassy neighbor who said what was on her mind, always made fun of herself so no one else could first. Those strong female TV characters that had a sense of humor and a little bit of an edge and were really super independent.

Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life?

Amy: My secret to rewarding life is having balance, which I never used to have. So it's getting to do what I want to do for a living with the people I want to do it with and having a really nice home and boyfriend to go home to. And knowing that I can have both of those things even though it's not always easy to balance them. Knowing that I don't have to pick one or the other.

Passionistas: Is there a mantra that you live by?

Amy: I would say there are two. One comes from one of my favorite movies of all time. The Sound of Music, which is "Mother Superior always says, ‘When the Lord closes a door somewhere, he opens a window.’" And I do believe that as hard as it can be sometimes and you don't think that it's a good thing. Sometimes the universe pushes you, actually pushes you out the door. And slams it behind you so you can’t go back in and you gotta climb back into something else or a window. That's that a huge mantra in my life. And the other is something our mother always used to say, which is "everything happens for a reason." And again, you may not always know what that is at that moment, but it always ends up being true.

Passionistas: What's your proudest career achievement?

Amy: Well, I think I have two, because I feel like I have two, I feel like I have two parts of my career. The first part, which is the Warner Bros. part, I would say I'm proudest of being a woman that accomplished so much, so young and worked so hard to play on that level and to get to work on movies like the first Harry Potter, and A Little Princess and to work with directors like Alfonso Cuaron and Tim Burton and Nora Ephron. To me, I get to, I get to work at these the studio that was at the top of its game and it pushed me to be the best I could be. So for that part of my career, that's my proudest achievement.

But now, and forever, I think my proudest achievement is going to be what we're doing right now. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg of what we're going to build and with the plans that we have to expand it into different areas. I think we are creating something that's going to last forever and be our legacy and carry on after we're gone. And I think it's to help women tell their stories that might not otherwise be heard and to hopefully inspire other women to do the same thing, which is just to follow their passion, whatever that is. I just think being able to do that is a true blessing and I already am proud of it, but I think I'm only gonna become more and more proud of it as we go on.

Passionistas:What's your definition of success?

Amy: For me, success is just following your passion and being able to sustain the lifestyle that you want to sustain. You don't need to be a gazillionaire. You need to be able to pay your bills and you need to decide what that comfort level is for you in terms of what your finances need to be. But if you're making money, doing something that you love, then you really, really lucky in this life.

Passionistas:What does it mean to you to be a female entrepreneur in 2019?

Amy: I feel like it's a good time to be a female entrepreneur and I feel like it's an important time for a woman to be an entrepreneur because on the tail of the #MeToo movement, it feels like doors are opening for women. And women are being more supportive of each other. But I think it could very easily slide back in the other direction and just be a moment. So I think it's really important that at this point in time we all do what we can to help each other be as successful as possible so that we build as strong a foundation as possible for women to build upon in the future. So I think what we are, I know what we're trying to do is help spread the word, you know, we're gonna have a subscription box. We're going to help get the product out there. You know, we're going to have an, we have an online community where we're inviting women to help each other. And I think now is a critical time for there to be as many female entrepreneurs in the game and supporting each other as possible.

Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and my interview with my business partners, sister and best friend Amy Harrington. Join our growing community of women supporting other women who are in pursuit of their passions on The Passionistas Project Facebook Group. 

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After a successful career as a graphic designer, Nancy decided to leave that world behind and start working with her sister Amy. Together they founded The Passionistas Project to share the stories of strong and empowered women who are following their passions to inspire others to do the same. 

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TRANSCRIPT:

Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast. I'm Amy Harrington and today I'm interviewing my business partner, sister and best friend Nancy. 

Nancy: I grew up with my dad owning an advertising agency, so all my life there were magic markers and t-squares and drawing pads and rubber cement and triangles and all these tools around the house that I thought were really cool.

Nancy: I kind of got into a rut. I found my way into this crazy boring world of public utilities. One part of the job was really cool cause I got to do annual reports every year and for a graphic designer, that's like a big coup to get to design an annual report and I love doing that. But most of the time I did these, like the newsletters that come inside your electric bill, so you know, there was a lot of how many different ways can you illustrate a light bulb or an electric outlet and it just got a little boring. I was ready for a new challenge. I think that that's part of my makeup too. I get bored really easily and I love to challenge myself and I just was in a Rut and I wanted to do something new.

Passionistas: So is that why you left?

Nancy: I wanted to leave because of that and I left because my darling sister, Amy and I were both burned out at the same time and she was at Warner Bros. and I was working at this advertising agency and we were presented with an opportunity to help a friend of ours try to launch a cable network. And so we both held hands and drove off the cliff, Thelma and Louise Style.

I think my next mentor was my boss at my very first job, her name was Billie Best and she, again, I was still in college, I hadn't graduated yet, but she hired me to create ads for a magazine and I was beyond excited cause it was a rock and roll magazine. So it was the two things that I loved. And within a few months she promoted me to be the art director of the magazine. So I was now designing the whole magazine on a monthly basis. So it was a dream job and she was an amazing boss and she had the confidence in me to let me do that and she just let me fly. And again, I don't know that I would have had the confidence to start my own business and do what I did without that experience. And I'm always grateful to her.

And then the third person and most important per person, I think as Karen Herman, she was the vice president of the Television Academy Foundation for the Archive of American Television at the time. Now it's the interviews and she entrusted us in doing interviews for the archive and she taught us the skills we needed to do that. We had done some interviewing before that, but they were minor and not very threatening. And these were big interviews. You know, my first interview was with Michael Patrick King, who created "Sex in the City" and I'll forget how scared I was that first day. And shortly after that I did Chuck Lorre who created "Big Bang Theory" and million other shows. And it was horrifying but exhilarating. And Karen graciously showed us the ropes and gave us incredible feedback. I still hear her voice in my head every time I do an interview and we wouldn't be where we are today without her. And she's also a dear friend and I'm so eternally grateful that she came into our lives. 

And then I grew up with my face five feet away from a television 24 hours a day. So I have a lot of cultural heroines from Mary Tyler Moore to Carol Burnett to Laverne and Shirley and anyone in between. Like I just, I loved television and I especially admire the women who were independent and stood on their own two feet. And probably the very first example of that in my childhood was Marla Thomas from that girl. I just thought she was the coolest and she had her own apartment and she had a job and women didn't do that. Then. And Marla Thomas has always held a very special place in my heart because of that.

But I think in this day and age — I mean that was 30 years ago — I think in this day and age I would have expected women to have come so much further. And when I hear about the inequity still in pay and in financing for women owned businesses and just the amount of women owned businesses in the world, and even in other areas like artists who you know, there's only a handful of female artists in museums around the world. It's just shocking to me that women still haven't risen to the level that they should. So I'm really proud to not only be a female entrepreneur, but to be supporting women entrepreneurs and business owners and hopefully be shining a light on them so that they finally get the credit that they deserve. 

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Billie Best is the author of the memoir Crazy Wife Farm and the blog It’s Not Easy Being Fabulous. She gave up a successful corporate career to become a farmer in Western Massachusetts. But when her lifelong partner and husband passed away from cancer, Billie found herself starting over, indulging her passions and looking for her purpose. Now her mission is to change the societal views on women and aging.

Read more about Billie.

Read more about The Passionistas Project.

Hear more from Billie Best:

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Sister Monica Clare is a nun with the community of St. John Baptist, an Episcopal religious order based in Mendham, New Jersey. Sister Monica, formerly known as Claudette Monica Powell, had what many considered a glamorous Hollywood life as a photo editor at a Los Angeles-based advertising agency. She gave up that world and all her personal possessions to dedicate her life to helping others.

Read more about Sister Monica's church.

Read more about The Passionistas Project.

Hear more from Sister Monica Clare:

Sister Monica on her secret to a rewarding life

Sister Monica on her definition of success

Sister Monica on her proudest achievement

Sister Monica on her biggest challenge

Sister Monica on her day to day life as a nun

Sister Monica on advice to a young woman who wants to be a nun

Sister Monica on the pop culture icon

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Beth is an independent producer, director and writer, whose fervor for American history, music and culture has led to a series of award-winning and critically acclaimed films. In fact a few weeks after we recorded this interview, Beth won an Emmy for her film Fort Vancouver that she made for Oregon Public Broadcasting. Her latest project, her first scripted web series, called The Musicianer tells the tale of Yodelin’ Vern Lockhart — a hillbilly singer with a problem.

Read more about Beth.

Read more about The Passionistas Project.

Listen to these BONUS CLIPS from Beth's interview:

BONUS: Beth Harrington on her definition of success

BONUS: Beth Harrington on her biggest professional challenge

BONUS: Beth Harrington on her plans for The Musicianer

BONUS: Beth Harrington on singing with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

BONUS: Beth Harrington on her most courageous decision

BONUS: Beth Harrington on opportunities for female filmmakers at festivals and markets

BONUS: Beth Harrington on her mantra

BONUS: Beth Harrington on her advice to an aspiring female filmmaker

BONUS: Beth Harrington on her mentors

BONUS: Beth Harrington on her pop culture icon

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. Today we're talking to a very special guest, our sister Beth Harrington. Beth is an independent producer, writer, and director whose fervor for American history, music, and culture has led to a series of award winning and critically acclaimed films. In fact, a few weeks after we recorded this interview, she won an Emmy for a film she made for Oregon Public Broadcasting about Fort Vancouver. Her latest project, a scripted web series called "The Musicianer," or tells the tale of yodelin' Verne Lockhart, a hillbilly singer with a problem. So please welcome to the show, Beth Harrington.

Beth what's the one thing you're most passionate about?

Beth: I mean, the obvious answer is filmmaking. With the close second being music. Those things are just so intertwined for me, more, especially more and more lately, that's all I really want to do and talk about and think about. But in of course in that is storytelling. You know, I love a good story and I love telling those stories. And lately I've just been feeling like a lot of it's about just being as creative as you can be for as much of the day as you can be creative. And I have some inspiration for that lately from people I've been working with and it's like, oh yeah, let's just be creative all day long. Let's cut out things out of construction paper and make little things out of clay. So I don't know, that's, I've been really excited about just being creative more and more.

Passionistas: So how does that translate into what you do for a living?

Beth: For a living large, actually I work for public television and I've been making films for Oregon Public Broadcasting in the northwest and before that in Boston at WGBH for a number of years. And that's been my sort of bread and butter. But what's great about that is I'm still filmmaking and it's never a thing that I feel anything but great about, you know, I, I love working in public television. That's been great. So there's that. But on my, as far as my own stuff goes, that preoccupies even more of my brain. And I've just always, I'm just kind of always thinking about that stuff. And I'm, I've been lately, you know, the last few years I've been trying to figure out how I can make music and film be so much a part of what I do, that I will live out my days doing those things. I think I spend every part of everyday thinking about how to advance the film and music related film stuff that I do, um, in whatever shape or form I can do that.

And sometimes, unfortunately that takes the form of just doing boring things like applying for grants. And some of it is really fun. I just came back from a month where a big part of the month I was just away shooting stuff. And then last night I got home from a few days of premiering that new pilot for my, my film project, "The Musicianer" in Canada to the audience that loves this, the star of it the most. Um, those are the things that I want my day to be full of and I'm working actively working to fill my day with those things.

Passionistas: Tell us a little bit about your path to becoming a documentary filmmaker.

Beth: I guess I should preface all this by saying that when I went to college and there weren't a lot of people actually making documentaries, and there certainly weren't that many women making documentaries, largely because independent film where a lot of documentary resides just didn't exist the way we know it now. You didn't go to college to become an independent filmmaker. I mean, you barely went to college to become a filmmaker unless you're going to UCLA or someplace like USC or someplace like that. So when I went, I was, I went with the intention of trying to tell stories in media somehow, but it hadn't fully formed as documentary. But the more I did work on the radio station and in this cable thing called Synapse, that was up in Syracuse where I went, the more I realized that the thing I most wanted to do was deal with these realities. And it was super fun to tell real stories because truth is stranger than fiction as it turns out. So when I got out of school, I wanted to keep doing that, but I had no clue how to pursue that. But fortunately for me, over time I chipped away at just working in media period.

And then several years out of school I finally realized I started working with other women filmmakers through Women in Film. And that organization really helped me a lot to connect with other women and a lot of those women worked at WGBH in Boston. And then I was like, oh, that's where it's all happening. That's really where I should be focusing my energy right now. And knowing those women, I realized that a lot of them did their own projects on the side as well as doing the things for series like "Nova" and "Frontline" and those kinds of shows. So it gave me a little confidence to go out and start working on my own projects. And so my initial foray into filmmaking making documentaries was that way. And then over time I got a gig working with WGBH and that further underscored all the things I was trying to do.

Passionistas: So the early films that you made on your own were inspired by the North End of Boston where you were living at the time. Tell us about what you found so inspiring about that neighborhood and what drew you to want to cover those things in film.

Beth: I had moved into the North End in 1977 and it was still very much an all Italian American enclave. There are hardly any people that became known as outsiders when I moved in. So, okay. One or two outsiders is okay. So I was, I was part of the very first wave of, in truth, gentrification in the neighborhood. You know, it had been largely an immigrant neighborhood at that point for over a hundred years. So I kind of thought there were great stories there and I was interested in figuring out what they were because as you know, our family has an immigrant history in Italian history. And so I thought, oh, this would be kind of cool to explore that part of what I know about our own family, what I know about the neighborhood when I know about Italian American history. And so I started filming these religious feasts because they were so damn colorful and there were 12 of them.

And so every weekend in the summertime I could go to one of these feasts. And I was like, Jesus, a crazy, they're so cool. People carry and saints and pinning money on the saint and all kinds of sausages and little neck clams and Italian memorabilia. And I just thought that was the coolest thing around. And I wanted to document that. And then it turned out to be one feast in particular that had a really cool climax, which was the angel ceremony, which was this little girl. They take a little, a little like eight-year-old girl, put her on a block and tackle pulley system and fly her out a window over the crowd. And she's dressed as an angel. And it was just nuts. And I thought, you know, this doesn't happen just anywhere in the world. And it's happening in my own backyard.

I should start filming this stuff. So that was really the impetus when I saw that ceremony, and I happen to be with friends of mine who were from Spain when I saw it, and they were like, what the heck? And I said, I know, isn't that amazing? They were like, this stuff doesn't even happen in Europe anymore like this. And I said, you're right. I should be documenting it. So that was the beginning of like what ended up being three films about Italian American religious ritual and this sort of anthropological approach that I took to it. But that didn't last for very long because then I get sucked into it and became the subject of my own film.

Passionistas: So that film was "The Blinking Madonna." So tell us about the genesis of that film.

Beth: I had made two documentaries about this one religious society. The Fisherman's Feast is what the common name for it was, but it was about the Virgin Mary. It was about the Madonna del Soccorso. And she was Our Lady of Perpetual Help. And so I'd gone and filmed a little angel ceremony and then I went to Sicily with some of the participants and filmed the connective feast that happened there. And I kind of came home from that thinking, okay, I've done all the work I need to do on Italian American religious feasts. And this one summer I had been laid off from my job. There was no more work at the Documentary Guild. I had broken up with the guy I lived with for a really long time. So I was not only on my own for the first time, but all of a sudden all my bills had just doubled. And I had no job. And I was kind of freaking out and really, really depressed. And my friends from the feast called me and said, you come into the feast, it's next weekend.

And I was like, ah, I don't think so. But they insisted and I brought my camera and I went to see them and I filmed the feast one more time with my own camera. And when they get back to their headquarters, they looked at the videotape. I just gave them the videotape and it was a videotape and they said, oh my God, there's a miracle on this tape. And the miracle that they saw was that the statue of the Virgin Mary appeared to be blinking her eyes. And they told me this on the phone and I was like, yeah, let me come down and take a look at it. And when I went down to look at it, sure enough, it looked like the statue of the Virgin Mary was blinking her eyes. And this is a plaster of Paris statue with no moving parts. I thought, you know, this doesn't happen every day.

And I could explain what happened, but the neighborhood being what it was and people's devotion being what it was that even though I dutifully told them, I think it's the auto focus on the camera, they wanted to believe otherwise. And so one thing led to another, and by the two days later there were busloads of people coming into the neighborhood to view the video tape to see the statue of the Virgin Mary and ended up on the front page of the Boston Herald. On all the TV stations that night and all of a sudden this fallen away Catholic that I am. And this media person, uh, became the agent of a miracle and in the middle of a media event of her own making, albeit inadvertently, it was a crazy time. And a good friend of mine, Deborah Granik, who's a pretty well-known filmmaker now, she encouraged me to try to make a film about it.

And I at first couldn't see my way through it. I couldn't, I couldn't imagine what it was. I, you know, I said, it exists already. It's the story that's on the news. And she said, no, it's about you. And I was like, really developed me. You sure? And she was like, yeah, you gotta be in this. It's about you. So with her encouragement and some real prompting, you know, she really pushed me. I started working on the film and finished it the fall and a couple of years later, and it's still my favorite film that I've ever made. That's still like, it says everything I want to say about community and my background and family and all those things.

Passionistas: What's the most important thing you learned about yourself by being the subject of your own film?

Beth: That you can run but you can't hide. You think you put these things in your bed, in your rear view mirror. I'm not a practicing Catholic. I'm not somebody who's, I haven't been to church routinely since I was a teenager and that even then it was largely to satisfy our mother and I kind of thought I didn't care about it, but clearly I did. If I'm making films about it, I don't know who I was kidding except myself. I was clearly exploring stuff that I thought I didn't want any part of. And so when this thing happened I was like, Huh, this is it knocking on the door. It's me going and I'm still here. You know, are you going to pay attention or not? So it's not like I had a religious conversion because of it, but it did make me realize that there were components of my upbringing and my education Catholic school that I really cherish. And there were things about it that I want no part of and we could do a whole show on that. But really that the stuff that I, I cared about that was embedded in it was very meaningful to me and made me who I am. And that's something you just, you can't get away from. It's there.

Passionistas: And now with time, even though you have a technical explanation for it, do you think it was assigned that the statute blinked at you?

Beth: Sure. Cause right at that time, a week prior to this or two weeks prior to this, a handsome French man moved in downstairs from me and shortly after I got my job back and I was told I was going to take this cool trip to the Philippines to do a film about volcanoes and I stopped feeling bad and obviously the sign was, I was ready to move on. I embraced the whole episode as being kind of fun and crazy. Like it was lovely. People in my community thought that I was the agent of a miracle, right? They thought I was capable of being the Saint Bernadette of the North End. And that made me feel really great. Not because I believe that, but I believed that it was so nice of them to think that of me, that that changed how I felt even I already loved the neighborhood, but I loved him even more after that.

So it just kinda cracked me open or made me realize that I was already cracked open and I was ready to make the next step. So that was the sign. The sign was, you're ready, move on. And as an, as a scholar, I know my friend Bob Orci, who's an Italian American religious scholar, pointed out the Virgin Mary when she appears to people, right. And that this, the body of literature about this, when she appears to people, she doesn't appear to people who are in good shape. You'd never, you know, she appears to poor people. She pours them, appears to people in crisis. That's her M.O. And he said, Beth, you were perfect. You were such a mess. You know, this is perfect. And I was like, you're right, I was perfect.

Passionistas: So then talk about getting into making your music documentaries. What inspired you to start making them?

Beth: Well, I really, I really wanted to almost from-the-get-go, you know, like I especially back when I finally started working in film, I thought, God, there's so many great stories. Why isn't anybody telling them? And one of the reasons nobody was telling them was that we're an outlets for them at the time. The other reason people weren't telling those cause they're expensive to make. And I figured that out fairly, fairly fast. I had friends who were making a documentary about women in the blues and they were in rights hell for a number of years trying to pay the music for those, for that documentary. So I was aware from the beginning that it was an expensive proposition. And as a young filmmaker, I thought, well, there's no way. Back in those days there was no way I could command the kind of money as an inexperienced person. I couldn't raise that money to do the kind of film I wanted to do.

So I would have to wait until I became a more experienced filmmaker. So really took me many years, both refining what I knew about just making films and then getting the confidence and the skillset to raise money. All of those things had to reach a point where I felt I was ready to do it. But you know, right around the time I moved away from Boston and moved to the Pacific northwest, I really had always wanted to do this documentary about the early rockabilly women and the rock and roll scene, the peers of Elvis's and Jerry Lee Lewis, his and Johnny caches who were women. And that story was dates back to when I was in the modern lovers. I had thought about that as a possibility in like 1979 but I didn't get to make that film until the late 1990s it was just wasn't possible, but I did get to do it and it was really, it was the right time and it went really well and the film did really well and I still feel good about it because I think I gave a window into these, the lives of these women that a lot of people would know about.

If the film hadn't existed and apparently according to some of the women in the film, it boosted their careers. Most notably Wanda Jackson's. She went from being marginally known to ending up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I felt like, oh good, my work is done. I helped do that.

Passionistas: And then your follow up film, "The Winding Stream" was also a very female centric topic. Talk about that film and also just why telling the story of women in music so specifically is important to you.

Beth: "Winding Stream" as a follow-up to that, it really organically came out of it because a lot of the women I talked to on the rockabilly film noted that a huge influence on them in the 1950s where these women from the 1920s Maybelle and Sarah Carter who had been arguably, they're the first famous women in country music and really first famous women in American music at that time.

This is at a time when radio is it coming in and the recording industry is coming in. So these people that would probably only have been regionally known are suddenly famous. Not only all over the country, but all over the world. Maybelle Carter and Sarah Carter, are two of the seminal women in American music. So I was really excited about telling that story. Sarah's husband AP was this sort of Impresario of the group, but the real musical engine of that group were the two women. And once I realized that, I was like, well, this is a no brainer. Why isn't anyone telling this story? And I also had the added impetus of knowing that Johnny Cash was a huge part of the promotion of the story because Johnny Cash married into that family. June Carter cash is the descendant of these women. And so I had made my rockabilly film, had Roseanne cash in it as a narrator.

So I had this connection to Rosanne and I was about to reach out to her when she reached out to me and said, you know, you should think about making a film about the Carters. I was like, well, it's funny you should mention it. I would love to do that. So she opened the door for several of the really important interviews, most notably the interview with her father in both cases. In the case of "Welcome to the Club, the Women of Rockabilly" and in "Winding Stream," like a lot of history, it isn't that people aren't there, it's just that they're not getting singled out. There are women in all these stories. There are people of color in all these stories. They're, they're there and they're not even on the sidelines, they're there. We just kind of have this way of until very recently just focusing on the white guys.

So I'm really excited that these films came out when they came out. I feel like they were in some ways a little bit ahead of their time. Then now I think it's, it's a little bit of a no brainer that we can now look back and say, Oh yeah, there are the women there. They're right there. But they weren't obvious in terms of how, how they were depicted in the media. I'm really proud of that. I'm proud to have helped contribute to some of that.

Passionistas: So besides musical talent, was there a common thread that you found with the women that were featured in both of those films that sort of contributed to their success?

Beth: Especially in the rockabilly film, but even to a certain extent in the Carter story, there were other strong women in the wings that made it possible. All of the rockabilly women had mothers that really wanted them to do what they were doing. Wanda's mother sewed her stage clothes. Laurie Collins, his mother couldn't have been prouder, drove them all over the place to gigs, get them on TV shows, insisted that they moved to LA so that the kids could be on TV. Janice Martin's mother pretty much almost like fell in love with Elvis during the whole process. Like took her to meet Elvis and took her to meet Chet Atkins. And then it wasn't just being stage mothers, although there was a certain amount of that. And in Brenda Lee's case, she was the support of the family. So her mother was like, you're doing this because we need the money. But they were all super proud of their daughters and they worked hard to make it happen. And even in the Carter family story at a time when women really weren't doing that, you know, they weren't out there touring, they weren't out making records.

It was just a weird thing. The community around them seemed to be fine with it and they got help with their while they were away because other people, some other when women supported them. So I think that's the most striking thing that there was that support from other women.

Passionistas: So you recently completed the pilot episode of your first scripted project, "The Musicianer." So what made you decide to move into a scripted format?

Beth: I love documentaries, but you know, you're waiting for people to say the right thing or to say the thing that you think will help tell the story. And I thought, gee, we'll be so liberating to do something where I put words in somebody's mouth and they send them. Wouldn't that be great? And I had done, you know, little attempts at narrative stuff before, but I had never really given myself the freedom to do that. And I started to think if not now, when, and there were a bunch of other forces that came together. One was that there was all this extra information from the research I did from "Winding Stream" that never shows up in the film. It has no place to go. It's important but not relevant to the story. So I knew all this extra stuff about the recording business and the movie business and the 1920s and so I liked quote, you know, living there. And I thought that was kind of fun. And at the same time I had been going to these academic conferences and meeting all these academics that cared about all that stuff too. And I got an immersed in that world of what they talk about and the way they talk about it. And then the third big thing, and probably the most important thing was as I finished "Winding Stream," I was introduced to this musician whose name his stage name is Petunia.

And Petunia is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting performers I've seen in a long time. He's just a force of nature and he's a kind of mysterious guy with a vague personal backstory. And he's somebody who I recognize had enormous charisma and I thought he'd be really great in a film. And right around the time I was sort of thinking this, he said to me, you know, if you ever needed somebody to play Jimmy Rogers in a film, I'm your guy and I thought you are. You are the guy. So I kind of tucked all that away and started thinking about it. I would see him periodically when he come through town and I kept saying, I haven't forgotten about that thing we talked about. So finally I, it all kind of came together in my head that it would be fun to do something that was vaguely supernatural that involved a story about the 1920s but also had a present storyline that involved musicologists in contemporary academia. And let me use all this extra background information that I had in a way that didn't fit into a documentary. So I wrote this thing called 'The Musicianer" and he's the star of it and he's really good. He did a really good job and it lets him use his music talents. It lets me play in the world of music still, but it also lets me make use of all this extra stuff that took me 10 years to put together

Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Emmy-winning filmmaker, and our sister, Beth Harrington. Visit her website, BethHarrington.com to learn more about all of Beth's films and her new web series, "The Musicianer." Now here's more of our interview with Beth.

As an independent producer director who's had to keep the momentum going for herself for a very long time. Do you ever feel unmotivated and if you do, how do you push past it?

Beth: That I used to be more problematic than it is now cause I now I recognize that you've got to have those periods of feeling unmotivated. It's like it's like recovery. I'm pretty driven. So if I find myself in a place where I'm like I can't, I can't, I just can't. I can't even then that's me telling myself you need to take this time. You know, right after I got off the road with winding stream, I think I sat on the couch for about two or three months, pretty much didn't, you know, I, I was just, I was just done and I didn't have an idea and I didn't know what I was gonna do next. And that was really unusual. And, and it, it was a little alarming for lit a little bit. And I did wonder and gave myself time to say, are you done with filmmaking?

Maybe this is the high note you go out on and it's good and it's over. But then I thought, okay, but what is it I'm going to do if I don't do that? I didn't have an answer that satisfied me cause there's nothing I like better. I've taught a little bit and I've done other kinds of writing and there's nothing that I like more than making films. And when it's going well, it's the best Gig in the world. So I allowed myself to really think about it and to feel it and to mourn it and to, and then it was like, Nah, I'm doing it again. So it's a little bit like a drug addiction. So there's that. But um, yeah, I'm happy I'm still doing it.

Passionistas: What do you think is the one biggest lesson you've learned during your journey as a filmmaker that sticks with you?

Beth:  I think the biggest thing that I know about anything creative is perseverance. I have come to realize it's more important than talent. It's more important than intelligence. That's who wins the game. You're, you have to persevere. And filmmaking is one of the big tests of that because there's so many parts that are hard before you get to do the fun part, that you better be willing to hang in there and the hard work because you might never get to the fun part. So I have always, you know, the Woody Allen thing showing up. You just show up and you, you do it, you do the hard work and you put one foot in front of the other. That's something I've become really good at, even when I don't even understand what the next step is all the time. It's like, well we got, I gotta take some step, I'll take this step.

So I think that's the biggest lesson I've learned from filmmaking is that there is such an obvious set of hurdles. Everybody has hurdles in the work they do. But for filmmaking to even get to be creative, you have to do all this other stuff before you even get the chance to be creative. It isn't like you go out and buy a canvas and then you paint. You have to raise the money to buy the wood to put stretch the canvas on the frame. And you know, it's, he just goes on and on.

Passionistas: What's been the most rewarding part of what you do?

Beth: The most rewarding part of what I do is having an influence on people's understanding of our culture and history. And sometimes that's very general, like just people come up to me and saying, I never knew that. Thank you for showing me that. And often it's telling untold stories about women and people who don't get represented usually in these things. You know, I, I'm really proud of the fact that with "Winding Stream,” part of the story was the story of Leslie Riddle, who was the African American Blues Man, that AP Carter enlisted to help him collect songs in the south. And AP and Leslie were ostensibly friends, but AP Carter benefited financially from the songs that got collected. And to our knowledge, Leslie Riddle did not. He spent lots of time with the carters. Many historians and people like me, think of Leslie Riddle is very important figure in the Carter family story. Maybe arguably the fourth Carter, you know, if there's a fifth Beatle and George Martin is the fifth Beatle, then Leslie Riddle is the fourth Carter. But he's usually not acknowledged that way. So I was able to tell a little bit of his story and after the film was done, people in North Carolina where he was born, who hadn't spent much time thinking about Leslie Riddle, used some of my research to justify approaching for the fathers of a certain town and getting them to erect a memorial in honor of Leslie Riddle.That was like, my work is done. I, that was, that was such a great feeling to be able to, to have that happen. So those kinds of things make me really, really happy and they don't always happen on that scale, but they do happen in the sense that people become aware of something that they weren't aware of before and maybe see it slightly differently. I also, the fact that when I showed "Winding Stream" to audiences that were kind of demographically mixed, I'd show it in places in the south where they're on one part of the auditorium. They'd be all these kind of hipster Americana appreciators and then there'd be people who were much more conservative, had grown up with the carters almost as part of their religious beliefs. You know, Carter sang a lot of religious songs, so there were these very different camps in the same room and we would have Q and A's afterwards and people would talk about everything from, you know, was Johnny Cash saved to, you know, tell me more about this African American Blues Guy.

And so to have those conversations was really, that was really gratifying. And my husband Andy, whom you know, has a phrase that he likes to use about when you get people to think about things they didn't think about or accept ideas that they might not have accepted ordinarily. And he calls it Trojan horsing. So we bring the Trojan horse in and then we climb out and we make people think about things and then we climbed back into the horse. Um, so that's Trojan horsing.

Passionistas: What do you think were the lessons that Mama taught us about women's roles in society?

Beth: Mama, like a lot of women of her generation. And I also will include my late mother-in-law, Marie in this, you know, you, it's the old, you can't be it if you can't see it. Right. And those women didn't have any range of opportunities. And Mama to her credit went to art school and she became an art teacher. And in conversation with her over the years, I realized there were things she probably would have loved to have done, but she was also somebody with a strong sense of duty. And she already had kids and that there was just like off her radar screen at that point. And she couldn't pursue those things to her way of thinking. And I remember many afternoons sitting with mam watching television. Watching the talk shows, watching Merv Griffin and you know, Gloria Steinem would be on, or Betty Friedan would be on, or you know, any number of radical Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, all these revolutionary figures were on TV. And I sensed a tremendous ambivalence from mom. On one hand she was like, now these people are crazy. You shouldn't, don't do what they're doing, you know. But there was a piece of her that recognized that things were being, some of it was being dismantled in a good way.

And I think she wanted that for all of us, that she wanted us to have opportunities that she didn't, have, you know. The fact that she always used to say she wanted to be an archeologist, she would've dug that, no pun intended. She wouldn't, you know, she would've loved that. She would've thought that was the, the greatest, you know, one day we went on a little dig together, the BU had just so she could do it. And I ended up going on a dig for a while in Spain and she thought that was great because it was something that she was so curious about. I mean, I don't mean to make it sound like I only learned stuff from her by what she didn't get to do because she also very much promoted our sense of possibility. She very much wanted us to pursue our, our ambitions and dreams, especially the creative ones.

Even at the same time saying, yeah, but you have to support yourself. You have to figure out a way to support yourself. And that was really important because some parents just go no, some parents just say, you can't do that. And they mean really okay if you can support yourself. But most people just say no. Mama had the presence of mind to say, yeah, go ahead and do that. You're going to be in Jonathan Richmond and the Modern Lovers just kind of after you've just finished college? Okay. You know, she never made it seem like that was a bad idea. As long as I could justify how I was going to take care of myself. And at that point they were paying me enough so I could. And she was like, great, then have fun. She was so accepting of people too. She was so incredibly accepting in a society that wasn't that accepting.

We had gay friends and friends of color and all these people come into the house over the years that I know other parents would not have been so open. And she was the one that was open. And remarkably so all of those people still comment on it today. That's an extraordinary thing for someone from her time, you know? And what she, what she couldn't do for herself in a way.

Passionistas: So what's your proudest career achievement?

Beth: I think still "Blinking Madonna" is my proudest career achievement because it was the first big creative risk I ever took and compounded by the fact that I was in it and it was super personal and I had to be really honest in a way that I'd been fairly guarded before that. And people really liked him for, because I was honest. So that I think was my proudest thing. I, you know, that I took a huge creative risk and I, and I sweated that I would go to bed every night going, oh, this is either the best thing I've ever done or the worst thing I've ever done and give on any given night. It could be one or the other. And I was like, oh. And a lot of people challenged me, especially then because I was a woman putting myself in the middle of my own story and making a film about it. And I had people guy say to me, what makes you think you're so special? And I, that wasn't what I was trying to do. I was saying, I don't think I'm so special. I think I have something universal to say, but boy, those kinds of remarks could've just cut me off at the knees and I didn't let it. So I think that's what I'm proud of stuff.

Passionistas: What's your secret to our rewarding life?

Beth: What's that line from "Spinal Tap"? "Have a good time all the time." Which is the best movie of all time. As long as I'm here talking about films. No, I mean there is something to that. There's, I, I do believe life is too short. Life is too short. And so, you know, we stayed up way too late the last few nights in British Columbia hanging around with people 20 years younger than us going to rock and roll shows four nights in a row. Yay. And um, Andy and I were both exhausted and he said, why are we doing this and this because we can because we can. And it's such, there was just such great memories. I'll sleep when I'm dead. I want to just keep doing the fun stuff. So I try not to turn down opportunities to do fun stuff. I try to be there during the sad stuff as present as I can be for the people that I love. And then the rest of the time the chips fall where they may, but I, I, I feel like I'm going to quote another musical. "We got a lot of living to do." Right? Again, this is stuff to do. So I think that's the key to a rewarding life is not until not sitting back and letting it roll over you. And I know a lot of my friends go, what the heck? And they see my posts on Facebook and like, aren't you tired? And when are you home and why don't you do this and that. And I just think at this, not enough time. Let's just keep going. You know, you can take a few days off and sleep, but go for the Gusto.

Passionistas:  Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Emmy-winning filmmaker, and our sister Beth Harrington. Go to PopCulturePassionistitas.com to see some family photos of us with our big sister Beth. Visit her website, BethHarrington.com to learn more about all the best films and her new web series "The Musicianer." And be sure to subscribe to the Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.

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