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Hey Reader! Last night I sat down with actor Katharine Franco, and what stays with me is that none of this was the plan. She was a shy kid who never performed growing up and came to acting later in life, almost by accident. Then she built a career on range. In one year she played Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, in the K-LOVE film Virgin Birth, and Suzy in a dark thriller called Kill Trip. She has led a western, played a mob boss's daughter in Red Stone, and brought real warmth to an...

Hey Reader! Last night I did an AMA, no guest, just an open hour with whoever showed up. I started with a question I've been sitting with all week: how happy are you, on a scale of five stars, right now in this moment? I ended up pulling things off my shelves for an hour. Two books Pearl Bailey inscribed to me back at Georgetown. My mother's ring from the Seychelles Islands (the one that gave me the title of Black Pearl). Book after book from past guests. And somewhere in the middle, I said...

Hey Reader! Last night was an amazing full-circle moment for me ❤️ My guest was Lloyd Kaufman, the president of Troma Entertainment and the man behind The Toxic Avenger. The last time Lloyd and I were on a set together was 1984 in Hell's Kitchen, where I was being chased down a hospital corridor by Toxie (with real rats they had spray-painted black for the scene, by the way). Four decades later, we finally hugged in person again at Creature Feature in Gettysburg this year, and getting him on...

Hey Reader! Last night's episode is one of those conversations where every story she told had another story inside it. My guest was Phylis Eagle-Oldson. She walked into the cable industry in 1971 at age 22, answered a Sunday ad in the Washington Post, and met Marty Malarkey, the first president of the National Cable Television Association. She did not know what cable was. He hired her on the spot. That kicked off 35 years in media. Nineteen at NCTA. Then sixteen as President and CEO of the...

Hi Reader, Last night's episode was AMAZING! My guest was Brian Shoop, a SAG/AFTRA actor with over 50 credits who is 75 years old, just finished four auditions across four different cities, and has absolutely no plans to stop. His story begins with a bank statement. A notice tucked inside his monthly statement mentioned auditions for a community play. He went. He got the lead. Something that had been dormant his whole life suddenly woke up. He was already in his 30s, with two boys to raise,...