12/8/06 Heather mixes pharmaceutical VC Antoun Nabhan, punk legend and trans leader Lynnee Breedlove, Darfur survivor Gadet Riek, and the people formelry known as the audience. How do we remember and stand up for our principles in everyday challenges, whether that means saying no to a business deal, going the men’s bathroom or taking another step?

Listen to the mp3 of the entire show (90 min)

All law is fiction.

Heather conversates with love artist Kathe Izzo, Superbowl Champion, tight end and filmmaker Dr. Jamie Williams, Shanan Carney (aka the Voice of TiVo) whose debilitating knee surgery is teaching her first hand about the art of receiving and the people formerly known as the audience.
Is it always better to give than receive? Why is it sometimes harder?

Listen to the mp3 of the entire show (90 min)

Last night’s show on Learning had a great full house which participated more than ever. Is it getting cliche that I keep writing first lines in these rundown’s full of exultation? If it’s not such a great night, I will definitely say so. My general inclination is to be inclusive and listen to everyone, but the show does need to watch for interruptions whether its from audience members or myself as one audience member kindly pointed out to me after the show. I’m not being ironic. She gave me some good feedback. One of the threads that had the most traction throughout the night was gender. Do we learn better in sex segregated environments as one audience member Don suggested? Does the reported increased sexual activity of gay people affect the kids they raise? That question prompted a heavy number of guest and audience comments.Early childhood education expert Tracy Burt said that the research neither supports that LGBT parents with kids have increased sexual behaviour or kids who turn out much different that any other, except that they’re slightly more sensitized to inequality. I commented that I don’t know any gay or queer people who are in out relationships that have had any children accidentally. An early childhood educator in the audience and guest Tracy said that the said that the elements that matter most for learning and growing as a child are: responsiveness, dependability, stability and a few more things that I can post after I hear all the tape :-) A woman of East Indian origin told a hilarious story about how she learned about sex when her mother was chastising her brother for making so much noise with his wife the night before: “Can’t you be a considerate like your father? He did his business and turned over and went right to sleep.”Our first guest, comedian Bill Santiago talked about his obsession with tango and what a difference it makes to be exposed to music early in life. He also said there are 3 year old kids who can tango. Exposure came up again many times as something that enables us to learn things. Bill told us the story of the first time he tangoed and was led by another man who was constantly disappointed in him. “He wasn’t gentle,” but Bill overcame the trauma to come back to the dance two years later. He also had a hard time learning learning swing because there was no syncopation. Tango has obsessed him because “the only men who are really pretty good at it are all over 70. So I got time.”Bill also spoke up about the importance of fun in learning. “I was home recently and looked through my old report cards. I thought I’d done well, but I had a paper with an F+. That’s really an insult…”we know you tried and you still failed.” He said that kids aren’t going to bother learning something unless it’s fun.Singer Michelle Citrin showed how easily we learn cues with her song Who I Am. Michelle spoke a lot about the need to survive as a driver of learning. If you need to know something you’ll learn it. For example, even though she grew up in a two-language household, her Hebrew got rapidly better when a recent trip to Israel forced her to speak the language in order to eat and navigate each day. She also spoke of the value of a means of self-expression in teenage years, like a guitar.The value of sensory-motor and musical techniques for teaching was discussed. Apparently music and dance are extremely valuable ways to teach kids who have difficulty in school. Unfortunately, if you want to making a living at them, as Bill pointed out, they’re less valued.Tracy Burt had an awful lot to teach us. There was so much chunky goodness, I’ll put most of it in the highlights below.

Highlights and Links

• Tango Video Project
• “We are always learning. Kids in school are always learning. The question is what is it they are learning?” Tracy Burt
• You need to have a nurturing, reponsive person in your life as a young child in order to lay the foundation to be able to learn almost anything the rest of your life. There’s another opportunity as an adolescent to get this, but then after 25 in because extremely difficult.”
• We remember 10% of what we hear, 20% of what we see and hear, 50% of what we see, hear and do and 80% of what we teach another person.
• There are 9 temperments that are set biologically
• Our brains are “plastic,” meaning they are able to change our entire lives. But the most important tendencies are set by 3.
• Audience member Samuel said that,as hard as he’s tried, he can’t seem to learn a foreign language. One of our regulars, Beverly, was sitting near Samual and also turns out to be a linguistic therapist. Evidently we learn language by chunking. To encourage both necessity and desire, Michelle, Bill and the audience suggested he find a French lover who does not speak English at all.
• We all learned the word rhythmicity, which describes an aspect of temperment. Do you like life to be steady or for the pace to vary?

Heather conversates with Vintage painting curator Rob Delamater, hora motivator Jill Slater, Anthony Marshall, creator of pioneering hip hop showcase and MTV show Lyricist Lounge (Biggie Smalls, Slick Rick, Mos Def + Sean “Puffy” Combs) and the people formerly known as the audience.

Listen to the mp3 of the entire show (90 min)

Heather conversates with Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, Dave Chappelle opener W. Kamau Bell, celebrated psychologist Dr Lillian Rubin (The Transcendent Child) and the people formerly known as the audience.
Listen to the mp3 of the entire show (90 min)

Watch the show (5 Min)How does one become self-made? Guests: Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, Dave Chappelle opener W. Kamau Bell and celebrated psychologist, activist and painter Dr Lillian Rubin (The Transcendent Child).

Photo credit: Heather Champ
Left to right: Betsy Salkind, Derek Powazek, me (HG) and Michelle Tea.

We moved the show to a bigger room because some folks got turned away last month and then we sold out Gallanter Hall. It was another great show last Friday. There was a great, diverse crowd (it may have been the first show at the JCCSF to draw both Jewish grandparents and a drag queen) and we ate glazed lemon tea cake and brownies made by my sweetie and Lanya from the audience.

Betsy announced that she was there to represent the “con” position (oh it’s hard to convey the irony in a text blog post). She followed up with dozens of hilarious insights about the difficulty of having intimacy and the genuine possibility of one-way intimacy, especially during a sexy dream about an acquaintance who refused to acknowledge in waking life what her body remembered as true.

Michelle Tea read from her new novel Rose of No Man’s Land and had her own anecdotes about the odd one-way intimacy that comes from performing and writing intimate details about ones life. She distinguished between physical intimacy in sex work which is real enough, but that renting that didn’t mean you the person providing it was actually going to be present. She talked about being loved for a day by love artist Kathy Izzo and what a difference it made to her day, knowing she was loved as she worked in a book shop.

Derek observed that human beings are “intimacy machines,” that we “can’t help it” and will use any tool we create to be intimate or “get laid.” This was true with the telephone which has become invisible to us and it is now true with the Net. He noted that the ideas now of a computer not connected to the network was an odd one. Does this mean that we not only end up using all technologies to connect but are somehow driven to create them in order to have intimacy?

The banter was so quick and clever that I really found myself stretching to keep on top of it which was a delightful feeling. It was conversation as jam session, complete with a timely reflective pauses from audience members. Steve shared how intimate death is, having been in the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the city, and how every “dropped their shit” and “got real” with each other because the loss around them. Another audience member advised that she was able to have more intimacy when she started listening to friends without thinking about her own ideas in her own mind when friends were speaking, but giving her entire attention to regarding the friend. I asked her how she noticed that she wasn’t really doing this before and she said ” I has to ask people to repeat themselves a lot.”

I’m wondering now. Is this kind of mutual attention and intimacy the same thing as prayer?

Insights + Highlights

• The intimacy that comes from being drunk or high together, in your own secret, shared space, is real, but not sustainable.
• Intimacy cannot be bought.
• Safety is necessary for intimacy
  • this is why distance and online connection is easier for some
  • it’s also why for years my family got intimate only on car rides on the way to the airport
• Intimacy can be experienced by practice and consciously wanting it. This can require confronting fear.
• I got intimate with the audience and read a poem I Love You With Technology

Audio podcast of the whole show 80 minute show and video highlights to come shortly. Do you want to see the whole show streamed in video? Let me know if you can help that happen.

After the show: Caterina, me and my sweetie Stacey sandwiched inbetween. Photo: Deb Schultz

We had a great sold out show last night. Many thanks to my great guests and audience for the conversation. Self-made is a rich topic and there’s so much more to it that we could get into last night. Flickr’s Caterina Fake discussed her self-made path as influenced by a mix of her Phillipino immigrant mother’s ambition for her and an inability to stay committed to things that didn’t interest her. A combination of getting fired and being passionate about new things kept moving her forward in life. It was only when her company hadn’t succeeded financially with their clever, postmodern online endeavor Game Never Ending “just enough fuel in the tank” to get something out, that Flickr was born.
Lillian Rubin observed that timing, luck and the larger social movements are an enormous part of success and being self-mad. For example, the Web came along at a time that made a huge difference for Caterina who had already been through many jobs and careers as a painter, Wall Street numbers cruncher and dive shop clerk in land-locked Arkansas. Caterina laughingly agreed that she hadn’t stayed up nights as a kid dreaming about creating the world’s leading photo-sharing site.

Lillian had so many insights that you’ll have to wait for the podcast to hear it all, but she was able to draw sustainable choices to “living in reality” (which often meant compromise without entirely sacrificing what makes you happy). She also made many astute connections between our opportunities and the social movements that created them (ie. working part-time or 40 hours a week because of the movement to create a 40-hour work week; her own academic possibilities opened because of the women’s movement, Kamau’s opportunities opened because black comedy wasn’t always available to more than a black audience. In fact Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson used to do it in blackface. To which I quipped, “In other words it took Jews to do black comedy? Now that Kamau’s here at the JCC maybe we’ve come full-circle). Lillian warned against the supporting the mythical belief that just anyone in America can make it “from the Bronx ghettoes to Nob Hill” as she had, since that just wasn’t a realistic substitute for social policy or a community committed to a sustainable life for everyone. Everyone does not have the same psychological resources and external resources and opportunities available to them. Her book The Transcendent Child was mentioned, which I highly recommend. It explains why some people come out of traumatic situations and achieve “success” and others “fall by the wayside.” One element of this is often disidentifying with ones own family.

Kamau’s set rocked and he talked about dropping out of the University of Pennsylvia, and making other choices in his life that would let him pursue stand-up. This is what Lillian likes to call “living in reality.” Josh in the audience wanted to know how to reconcile his passion for start-up companies, jazz piano and his solid and good but unstimulating job. Kamau: ” Are you good at jazz piano? I mean seriously?” The audience brought up so many good points that as Caterina observed afterwards at the bar, we should think about doing a series on this topic because it’s so rich. We talked about jobs that paid less but helped people be happier in their life, jobs that make you sick and thanks to Craig in the audience, working because of reponsibility. Craig says that he works 6 days a week and he never gets sick as a response to others in the room who believe that many are worn down by the work they do. Responsibility and duty to others and one’s own passion and internal path. This is a topic I’d like to be able to get into more. There’s financial responsibility to family and others as Craig pointed out and then there’s a deep motional and psychological sense of responsibility to family as Caterina, Deb Schulz, Judith and others pointed out at the bar after.

I’ve always wanted to know : where are all the hero’s journey stories about girls and women? Ok there’s The Wizard of Oz and Phillip Pullman‘s Dark Materials Trilogy. But these heroines are orphaned (my childhood fantasy game, now that’s a show in itself). So often women and girls are afraid to become oursleves if we feel it will hurt our families. So we either close down or try to bring everyone with us.

Insights and highlights:

• Unlikely risks that move you forward often happen when you are pushed beyond where you would normally go. The leap forward is not made by cool, analytic strategic planning but absolute necessity and burned bridges.
• HG: “How do you spend that time when you’re up late at night servous coming up with new ideas rather than saying “I suck.” Caterina: Your responsibility to others who believe in you (work for you, invest in you etc). The way she explained it it didn’t sound all self-confident and relaxed, It still sounded scary and uncertain. But they did it anyway.
• guest Kamau Bell observing that “passion can make you miserable.”
• guest Caterina Fake commenting that “entrepreneur is French for “can’t keep a job.”
• Buy Lillian’s book The Transcendent Child
• Jeff Garlin: “If you have something to fall back on, then you fall back.” (ok he wasn’t in the show but I love this line and it’s pertinent. Jeff, you’re welcome anytime.)

The podcast is coming soon. Please continue the conversation and comment away.

I’ve got a work-in-progress run through of my new show–The Law Project–tonight at The Marsh in SF.

All the details and some video are here. This show has already persuaded 2 applicants not to go to law school. That’s over $240,000 saved!

These workshops are really key to my writing process. Tonight I’ll be trying different audience interaction modules (I like to have pieces of every show that change every time) and integrating the lessons and my story. People have been asking me for years how I got from law student to comedian and this show is the answer. Living your life because you’ve “sunk costs” into something is just a recipe for more heartache and new unpredicted costs with decreasing upside. If “decreasing upside” makes no sense to you, congratulations on being happy and human. That sentence wasn’t for you.

If you’re in San Francisco, come to The Marsh tonight at 8pm.