Loading summary
Transcript4 lines
- [00:01]
A
Anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder. At least half of us will experience a mental illness in our lifetime. In a new series of special reports from Call to Mind, we hear about the mental health impact of stress, climate change, immigration and more. Tune in for conversations with people managing hardship and experts seeking solutions. Listen to Call to Mind from American Public Media.
- [00:31]
B
It's the Smuckers Uncrustables Podcast with your host, Uncrustables. Okay, today's guest is rough around the edges. Please welcome crust. Thanks for having me. Today's topic he's round with soft pillowy bread. Hey. Filled with delicious PB and J. Are you talking about yourself? And you can take them anywhere. Why'd you invite and we are out of time. Are you really cutting me off? Uncrustables are the best part. The sandwich. Sorry, crust.
- [01:06]
C
I'm Maggie Smith and this is the Slowdown. Several years ago, while looking for a film or a show to watch, I came across Derek DelGaudio's One Man Show. In and of itself, it wasn't a magic show or stand up comedy or straightforward storytelling. There weren't card tricks or straight jackets or shackles to escape from, or doves or impossibly long handkerchiefs pulled from sleeves. No one was sawed in half. I don't want to say too much about that show or about Delgadio's memoir, A Moral man, because I want you to watch and read for yourself. Both moved me deeply and in ways I find hard to articulate. Derek Delgadio has called the One man show a theatrical existential crisis as opposed to a mere magic show, and I think that's why I loved it so much. It's singular. I'd never seen anything like it, and I know I never will. Both the show and the book recount important pieces of Delgadio's childhood. He was an outsider as a child raised by a single mom. You might think perhaps this is what drew him toward magic, something he could practice on his own. But it's even deeper than that in his work. Delgadio also talks about his mother coming out as a lesbian in a conservative small town when he was six years old. Magic, he said, was a way to protect himself from homophobic bullies. It is a powerful thing to have your own thing, to play a sport or an instrument, to have a talent or an activity that helps you define yourself at a time in your life when you feel undefined, when you could use some help moving through the world with more clarity, more inner strength, more definition. For me, and maybe for some of you listening. That was poetry. Being an introvert as a child is certainly what drew me to reading books and eventually writing poems of my own. Today's poem reminds me of the trick that poetry performs. Time after time, we can vanish into a poem and emerge whole, but changed, it's magic. The Magicians at Work by Nicky Beer After Jim Steinmeier's book Hiding the Elephant, how magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear. Over the years they hunted the wayward apprentice watchmakers, the disappointing sons who transformed their surnames. Hunted over acres of hinges, cogs, calluses, hidden whiskey mustaches a breath from feral poured an ocean of fortune into fabrications of brass and iron, spent entire seasons strumming massive harps of wire into perfect calibrations of invisibility, prayed to the gods of adjustable mirrors, cursed the gods of temperamental gaslights, broke the legs of imitators and thieves chewed holes in each other's pockets, Harnessed nightmares of giant silver hoops making endless passes over the bodies of the dead, Hoisted high a cenotaph for hundreds of sacrificed rabbits breathed miles of delicate thread into the lost labyrinths of their lungs, all to make a woman float. To make a woman float. And none of them ever thought of simply asking her. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. Find us on Instagram @downdownshow and blueskylowdownshow.org.
- [07:09]
D
Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the Splendid Table podcast. Every week on our show, we celebrate the intersection of food and life, and this month we're releasing a new series called Culinary Masters. It highlights some of the most iconic people in the food world, and we're revisiting conversations with people who have fundamentally changed how many of us cook and think about food? People like Jacques Pepin, Claudia Rodin and Tony Bourdain, to name a few. You can listen to this special series now. Just search for the Splendid Table in your podcast app.