Unteathered Talks

Excited to bring you Justin Lewis of JLew’s Food and Justin’s Pantry. He is a Community-Supported Kitchen and Hospitality Professional, a local cook, sommelier, entrepreneur, aspiring musician, and man about town.

Justin is husband to Britnee Lewis (who you may remember joined us on our pilot!) and he and I share a co-associate Kelsey Mort (from episode 3!). Among other endeavors such as the Pay it Forward program or Savoring Sundays, he also works with Yorba Wines, an oft-mentioned local tasting room and grape grower up at Shake Ridge Ranch. Justin calls Shake Ridge one of his favorite places in the county or maybe even the world! It IS a pretty special place (:

I very much enjoyed relistening to this conversation because we talk a lot about process and mind set, especially manifesting your dreams into reality. Leaps of faith. Gig industry life. Following your heart. How to make your own luck. Justin says, “it’s like a muscle you have to work to listen to, otherwise you won’t hear the voice”. There is a lot of inspiration and good life reminders alll up in this chat, as well as some pretty word marketing and content creation tips from J.

Hope you enjoy! Cheers - "Pantry Helper Heather".

Red the Shred rejoins me on a special FaceTime edition of Unteathered Ears. Recorded over a week ago, I wanted to wait to post until I was safely out of quarantine and didn’t have the ‘Rona so as to not jinx myself (:

Because Red and Brandon Carroll are good friends, some of the conversation here is his reaction to topics Brandon and I previously breached (on Episode 4!) such as their podcast together “Not Another Critic”, the power of comedy, and what it’s like to live in a ghost town. We wind down some philosophical corridors about science and its limitations, thalassophobia, how conspiracies “muddy the waters”, living in echo chambers, and how to compensate the loss of non-verbal communication in the age of masks. Red reflects, “I look like a menacing person to someone who doesn’t know me, all covered in tattoos.. People hold their children closer when I walk by. And now I don’t even have the ability to at least smile at them.” We also talk about death.. a lot.

Oh, and it’s Red’s birthday this week so to celebrate (but also to maybe make his nihilist heart cringe lol), I did his natal chart reading! Stick around to the end if you want to hear some of that woo woo.

Word (:

Super stoked to bring you another local rockstar Casey Sexton who rolls with “big dick energy” -–former radio host of Highway 49 Radio and co-owner and purveyor of musical talent at our favorite tap room Provisions in downtown Sutter Creek. She tells us how dreams come to life by “following the marrow in your bones” and how she and her crew are keeping things afloat amidst 2020’s hard hit on the live music industry and small business. If you aren't privy to ProV's offerings, prepare for the trifecta of sensory overload from Darin’s craft beer selection and Tim’s culinary goodness to Casey’s heartlandrockabilly line-up. She describes her musical selectivity as heavily curated and one of my favorite things she says is: “I’m not whoring out my stage! If you’re on my stage, I LOVE your music.” We also talk about some of the ruts of small-town life and Casey’s fear of NOT changing when change is kind of the only thing you can count on, especially these days (:

How do we balance worldly awareness with our own personal sanity? This year more than ever, Miss Kelsey Mort finds solace in the mushroom “promise lands” in our little chunk of the Sierras. A county native, she can usually be found sharing her wealth of knowledge with locals and tourists alike at the Yorba tasting room, where she and I have carved a relationship of deep conversations based on curiosity and jest.

In this episode, Kelsey shares insight into the magical world of mushroom foraging: “Until I see that first morel of the day, I always worry that I can’t see them anymore. It’s like magic how they almost come into being like ‘there you are!’ and until you see that first one you always worry that maybe you don’t have the magic anymore.” We also discuss small town life, leaving things better than you found it, and how the movie Zoolander was way ahead of its time. Kelsey says, “Rewatch it now, Nerds, ‘cause it’s going to hit a lot of buttons!”

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, we get a brief cameo from Lucy the Dog and the Yorba meister herself, Ann Kraemer, which is hopefully a foreshadowing that we can get her on the show eventually, too (:

And, if I didn’t freaking say it enough throughout this episode… mushrooms are aliens.

It’s been two weeks and a day since George Floyd's murder and California is in Phase 3 of reopening businesses after the Covid shutdowns. Recorded on June 9, 2020, Episode 2 brings musician and artist Red Martin to the mic. Red grew up in this small rural community but was afforded a different worldview by touring in a metal band over the last decade. We discuss the current shit show of events and how they relate to zombie movies, virtue signaling, satanism, Jehovah’s witnesses, and open relationships. Favorite quotes of his from this chat: 

“Facebook is a fucking garbage fire right now.” 

“We’re playing a video game and we still don’t know what the rules are yet.” 

“We should understand our lizard brains a little bit more and not think we’re fucking arbiters of truth.” AMEN.

Our pilot episode begins on June 2, 2020 #blackouttuesday, a critical time in the Black Lives Matter movement. My first guest is Miss Britnee Lewis, a badass lady in the county where we live in Northern California. We discuss wine country, her background, and then delve right into the raw bits about what privilege means and the current wave of civil rights protests. She says, "there's always going to be this feeling that we're not doing enough, until the whole community feels like we've done enough. And that's okay."