Episode 655
Roger Reeves, Sean Jordan, and Erin Rae
Poet Roger Reeves explains how he tried to reach the universal through the personal in his first collection of essays Dark Days; stand-up comedian Sean Jordan unpacks why instructional videos on potty training your kids might be flawed; and singer-songwriter Erin Rae performs the title track of her critically-acclaimed album Putting on Airs, recorded live from Pickathon festival. Plus, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello share some parenting challenges from our listeners.
Roger Reeves
Award-Winning Poet and Essayist
Roger Reeves is the author of two poetry collections, King Me and Best Barbarian, as well as the essay collection, Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2015 Whiting Award, and a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University. His essays and poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, Granta, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Sean Jordan
Comedian and All Fantasy Everything Co-Host
Sean Jordan is a stand-up comedian and podcaster who co-hosts the popular podcast All Fantasy Everything. Named "Portland's Funniest Person" by Willamette Week Magazine, he has written for Comedy Central and was selected as one of Splitsider Magazine's "Comics to Watch." His debut album, The Buck Starts Here, hit #2 on iTunes in 2019. Jordan made his national TV debut on The Late Late Show with James Corden in 2022 and appeared on Comedy Central's "Featuring!" series in 2023. His recent stand-up special "Girl Dad" explores fatherhood, childbirth, and IVF with both humor and heart. According to Paste Magazine, "Jordan is both genuine and genuinely hilarious." Website • Instagram
Erin Rae
Indie-Folk Singer-Songwriter
Erin Rae, a Nashville-born singer-songwriter, has quickly risen to prominence in the Americana and indie-folk scenes. Her sophomore album Lighten Up (2022) showcases her evolution as an artist, blending baroque-pop, cosmic country, and indie-folk influences. This release follows her critically acclaimed debut, Putting On Airs (2018), which earned her a nomination for Emerging Act of The Year at the 2019 Americana Music Awards. Known for her introspective lyrics and ethereal vocals, Rae's music explores themes of self-acceptance and personal growth, and it has earned her spots performing at Newport Folk Festival and the Grand Ole Opry, among many other places. Website • Instagram
Show Notes
Best News
Elena’s story: “This Diné leader is using horses to bring ‘the greatest Native turnout ever’ to the polls”
Luke’s story: “Meet the Kid Who Wowed the Internet With His Incredibly Accurate Bird Calls”
Roger Reeves
Roger’s new book: Dark Days: Fugitive Essays
Roger mentions Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal.
We last interviewed Roger on August 20, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency in Austin, TX, for episode 367.
Roger lives by this Robert Frost adage: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
Sean Jordan
Listen to Sean’s stand-up comedy special: “Girl Dad”
Erin Rae
Listen to Erin’s album: Putting On Airs
Station Location Identification Examination (SLIE)
This week’s station shoutout goes to WHQR-FM in Wilmington, North Carolina.
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Luke Burbank: This episode of Live Wire was originally recorded in October of 2024. We hope you enjoy it. Now, let's get to the show.
Elena Passarello: From PRX. It's Live Wire! This week writer Roger Reeves.
Roger Reeves: We delay our joy until we experience the freedom that we're looking for. And I've come to the place where. Not that we're going to stop fighting for it. But what would happen if life. It doesn't get any better.
Elena Passarello: Podcaster and comedian Sean Jordan.
Sean Jordan: Having a baby absolutely blows everybody always at the immediately they're like, oh, when you get on the second kid and you're like, I don't like this one yet.
Elena Passarello: So with music from Erin Rae and our fabulous house band, I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much Elena Passarello. Thanks to everyone tuning in from all over the country. We have a spectacular show in store for you this week. Lots to get to. First though, we got to start things with the best news we heard all week this week. This right here is our little reminder at the tippy top of the show that there's good news happening out there in the world. Elena, what is the best news you've heard all week?
Elena Passarello: Oh, I love this news. And this comes from Arizona. Specifically Navajo Nation, where the Diné people are the largest Native American tribe, both in terms of land and in population in the country. And there's a 34 year old Diné woman in Arizona who is making a huge difference in that community, and she's using horses to do it. Allie Redhorse Young grew up in the Navajo Nation, where 75% of the roads are unpaved, according to The Guardian. And a lot of the smaller communities in the nation are so remotely spread out that voting or accessing state services can require like an hour or more of driving. Just imagine having to go travel for an hour just to vote. So back in 2020, when access was even further restricted during Covid, Allie Redhorse Young founded Ride to the Polls in order to raise awareness and provide access, and ensured that the community was fully represented in that year's census. Because you got to be counted in the census in order to get federal support, and that went over extremely well, a lot of visibility. So they're doing it again this year in 2024. Ride to the polls has a series of events. There's trail rides. For some reason. There is a skateboarding competition which I'm assuming the horses didn't participate in that part.
Luke Burbank: I hope not for them.
Elena Passarello: There was a bull riding contest. There's concerts, tons of events to encourage indigenous voter registration and indigenous access to the 2024 ballot. And of course, this is making a huge difference. And the indigenous vote is making a huge difference in Arizona politics. And Allie Redhorse Young says that it makes a big difference in indigenous communities as well. She says we need to protect our tribal sovereignty and with that, protect our sacred sites, our languages and our traditions. They've registered hundreds of new voters in the past couple of months and in mid-October. I love this. They had an offshoot event called walk to the polls, where a whole bunch of people, including Mark Ruffalo, who's okay for a friend of that community. [Luke: The Hulk.] Yeah, the Hulk and a bunch of members of Navajo Nation walked for three miles to cast early voting ballots. But everything is going to culminate on Election Day, when over 100 riders are going to take their horses to vote in Arizona via a trail ride. So super cool idea. Very interesting way to empower young people and to bring attention to this really important issue in the American political system.
Luke Burbank: Whatever you've got to do to get to the polls, right. Planes, trains, automobiles, horses, Mark Ruffalo, whatever it takes. The best news that I heard this week also involves animals. Elena, well, involves a human who sounds exactly like a bunch of different animals. You are a bird enthusiast. You've written extensively about birds. You've written books that feature birds prominently. And I think maybe a future fan of your work would be ten year old Samuel Henderson of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Now, last May, there was a talent show at Samuel's school, and Samuel wanted to show off his like, cool trick that he can do, which is basically bird impressions, but like, hyper realistic bird impressions. And his mom, Laurie, said that she was like a little bit nervous because Sam is on the autism spectrum and, you know, school age kids, you never know how they're going to react to something, particularly your son sharing his, like, favorite passion. But it went really well. Like I watched the video of Samuel up there. He's got the audio is a little dodgy, so I'll spare you that. But I'll kind of describe what happened. He's standing up on stage. He asks all of his classmates to hold their applause until the end of his performance.
Elena Passarello: Oh, cool. As a box.
Luke Burbank: With various stuffed versions of birds to represent the calls that he's doing. And then he sort of pulls them out. Does the bird call. And you can just tell the kids are like, freaking out. They are so into this. Laurie says that it took them 30 minutes to get out of the auditorium, because so many kids were coming up to Samuel to high-five him and ask him how he did it. Like, this has completely sort of enshrined him as like a superstar at this school in Oklahoma City, and now he's becoming a superstar, of course. Elena on TikTok. Yeah. This is Samuel responding to fan mail doing various bird calls. Here's just a sampling.
Samuel Henderson: Today I'm doing some of my fan requests. So first one is the American Kestrel. Next one is the Common Loon. Next one is the Gray Catbird. Next one is the Bobwhite.
Luke Burbank: So there you go. Just a little sampling of Sam. Yeah, right. I mean, he's really got a knack for this, apparently. His parents say that he has really experienced his world, kind of in an auditory way. He's always been able to reproduce sounds that he hears in the world. He's so good. You probably know about this because, again, you're a bird person. But there's an app called Merlin that, like you can use to try to identify bird calls. He can fool the Merlin app with his impressions.
Elena Passarello: Oh my gosh, I have to meet this guy.
Luke Burbank: Right, he's also been invited to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is like kind of the place for this stuff. It's the, you know, the Harvard Law of Birds stuff. Yeah. Now they've invited Samuel there. So the best news that I heard this week, Samuel Henderson and his amazing bird calling ability. All right, let's get to the show. Our first guest is the author of two poetry collections, King Me and Best Barbarian. He's also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and lots of other awards. He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin and according to Kirkus, his latest book, which is Dark Days Fugitive Essays, is a cerebral essay collection brimming with insight and vision. Roger Reeves joined us on stage at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the show. It's so nice to have you here on our home turf. The last time that we had you on the program, it was in Austin, Texas.
Roger Reeves: My home turf.
Luke Burbank: Your home turf. And it was a weird show. We were at a public radio conference and we were trying to impress the public radio bosses. So we just did the show. We did Live Wire in a hotel room, and just tried to get people in from the hallway to watch. And Roger, you were there and you were incredible. But I'm glad you can see what it looks like when we really do the show.
Roger Reeves: Yeah, this is kind of amazing because I just was like, oh, they must always do it in a hotel room. Like it is very intimate.
Luke Burbank: That's right. This book is is a really incredible piece of writing. And I'm curious, it's your first book of nonfiction. You've been doing poetry previously, mostly. How did this book come about for you?
Roger Reeves: It's really funny. The book came about in a weird sort of fashion, which is I have a PhD, I have to admit, confess. I have a PhD.
Luke Burbank: Listen. Okay. This is a public radio show. You're amongst friends, okay?
Roger Reeves: Yeah, yeah.
Elena Passarello: They're like just one. Yeah, they're.
Roger Reeves: It's true, it's true, it's true.
Luke Burbank: For the record, none of them are using them.
Roger Reeves: Oh, Okay.
Luke Burbank: But they have them.
Roger Reeves: And so I've always written essays, but they were always, you know, scholarly essays, academic essays, which is fine. I think there's a place for that. And so I love poetry. I loved writing poems. But then as I was sort of publishing poetry, I noticed that the engagement with poetry and it's sort of not its difficulty, but it's nuance wasn't always I wasn't seeing the public intellectual work. Right. When I think it was like the public intellectual work of someone like Lionel Trilling or James Baldwin or Gore Vidal. All right. They weren't engaging poetry. They're engaging civil rights. They were engaged. They saw, like, the world through all of these means. And I and I didn't feel as if there was sort of an abundance of that. And so I just started it was actually a friend. And I took like a pact. We were like, how about we, you know, we're always going to write poems, but what if we just, like, wrote two essays a year, just, you know, around things that we're interested in And I realized at that moment I was like, oh, I can write these however I want. Right. It doesn't have to be written in the way that I was sort of raised to through my education. And so but the the essay that really let me know I was in the book is actually the second essay in the book where I, I'm visiting a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, called the McLeod plantation, and I was asked to give a poetry reading. Yes.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: That, by the way...
Roger Reeves: Yes, all of those reactions are...
Luke Burbank: All those PhDs at work. That is the proper response.
Roger Reeves: But this was one of these plantations that wasn't trying to do it, sort of gone by the wind style. It was very much like here was the truth of what it was to be enslaved in. And, and I remember getting a tour of the plantation that day. And there is a song to it. Right. But there was that narrative I thought was more effective. And that's when I was like, oh, let me write this right in. First, I tried to write it as a film. I know, that's weird. And then I was like, it's not a film, it's actually an essay.
Luke Burbank: Well, as a person who read that essay and appreciated the clarity with which it was written, because I could follow along and you were you went into it saying, I don't want to be overwhelmed by this, and I don't want to cry from this. And you start seeing these things that are so hard to take. They're such horrors that are still there, the evidence of them. And eventually, you know, you weren't able to sort of keep that plan together. But I wonder, why did you why did you go into that? Not wanting to cry when it seems like a place where that would be a very natural reaction?
Roger Reeves: It's so interesting. One of the difficult things that I think I'm always grappling with is there's a way in which sometimes when our emotions become the center of an experience, we actually miss the experience. And so particularly when we're trying to grapple with history, right, we are moved by history. However, history has its legacies that we're often living. And so one of the things that I think is required sometimes is not to not be vulnerable to one's feelings. Please do that, especially men. But one of the things I think is important to do is not to center our emotions such that we think when we've cried about the like, horrible, historic thing, that's the end of the work. Right. That's actually just the beginning. Right. The end of the work is to think about how that thing is manifesting in our lives. [Luke: Yeah]. And then what are we going to do? Right. So I wanted to make sure because I'm a crier, I'm a poet, I cry, I cry like I cry over anything. And I just wanted to make sure I was seeing. Right. So there's a fingerprint. There was a child's fingerprint in one of the bricks. I wanted to really see that. I wanted to really think about what is this means. The only remembrance of this child is a fingerprint in the brick. You know, we have to sit with that.
Luke Burbank: You're listening to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We are talking to the author and poet Roger Reeves about his essay collection, Dark Days Fugitive Essays, which Roger is going to read from when we return after this very short break. Don't go anywhere. Welcome back to Live Wire. I'm your host, Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. We are listening to a conversation we recorded with award winning poet Roger Reeves, talking about his book, Dark Days Fugitive Essays. Let's get back into that conversation. Recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon. You you talk about a photograph that you have in your house, I believe. [Roger: Yes.] At the top of the stairs. And it's a photograph of a young black child. And you call him our angel of history. Why did you kind of start the book with this photograph?
Roger Reeves: Okay, so my brother in law is a photographer, used to be a photographer in Phoenix, Arizona, and he's a beautiful photographer. And he was in Arizona when Obama was just sort of teasing if he were going to be the president. So it's like some of his first rallies. And I had seen this picture. His name is Julio Jimenez's amazing photographer. Julio had lost his job as a lot of newspaper men and photographers lost their jobs when the sort of newspaper industry collapsed. And so he came back to Texas and he had this photo. And I just loved this photo. It was just it's a beautiful photo of this boy with the shadow cutting across his face, and he's looking. You can tell he's looking deeply into like Obama. He's looking into his face. And I just I just thought of that moment as like, if we think about that boy, he's probably six. In 2006, I was writing this book in 2020, or sort of thinking about it more as a book in 2020. I'm thinking, oh, that boy watched Obama get elected. He watched Michael Brown being killed. He watched Trayvon Martin, he watched Trump be elected. He watched our nation become what it was. Right. And then we have the uprisings in 2020. And I thought, oh, that's who, that's who the angel of history is right now. Right. That's that's a that's the person who was like actually bearing witness to the change. Right. And to the to sort of where we are now.
Luke Burbank: It is a phenomenal picture. And it's right at the beginning of the book, I can't stop looking at it and kind of going on that journey that you're going on with him. Could you read a little bit from the book?
Roger Reeves: Sure. I'm going to read from the second essay, which is called A Little Brown Liquor. So there's this idea that I kind of grew up with a little bit where, like, certain types of liquor will make you me. [Elena: Yeah.] So, like, brown liquor, you know, white liquor. You know, the clear liquor we call it. White liquor would do things. So this poem's all about, like, sort of being drunk on thinking about, like, black linguistic practices. So little known fact was, I was a youth minister, was a I grew up in a Pentecostal church. And so like, yeah, it's full of. Oh, wow. People are like, oh Lord.
Luke Burbank: Did we just start having church?
Roger Reeves: And so I love this term. Dearly beloved. All right. So each section of the essay starts dearly beloved, Dearly beloved. Black life is a constant improvisation on what it means to be human, which is to say dirty in the parlance of outcasts and skewered on the Barbie. A changing of the rules from old school to new school and back again, a simultaneity, bad and boujee being in time and out of time, yet being on time. In other words, timeless but hella present. As a practitioner of this sort of living. I'm constantly astounded at the discourse black folks have created to transmit, signify, and inhabit the hoodoo, hetero, glossier and hauntings of our improvisational and luxuriant lives. We've created a sonic landscape in which we can ionize, cry, and celebrate black life in the space of one line of verse. Louis Armstrong's What Did I do to be So Black and Blue, for instance, and Armstrong singing, you can hear both a smile and a wince of pain and simultaneously a little laugh as the term blew in. The course takes on a plethora of meanings. It's a shifting blue, a blue of both midnight and The River that calls you a little too close, a blue that Langston Hughes writes about and suicides know when he declares the face of the river. As for a kiss. Armstrong's blue is the blue of loneliness. And a blue of dawn of possibility. A blue of Jimmy rushing when he declares he's going to Chicago. And sorry, but I can't take you. There's nothing in Chicago that a monkey woman can do. While it might seem rushing is singing this song forlornly to a lover, it's a devious sort of tongue in cheek confession in which leaving his lover offers the possibility of new territory, new horizons, the avant garde. Yet and still in Russian singing, we hear some ambiguity, a tinge of sadness, black life needs and creates the linguistic and epistemological flexibility that can articulate and allow these simultaneous cities getting up to be getting down, riding dirty as a way of writing clean with an ounce in the sock on these and Vogues the paint job candy coated or suicide risk read. We've created a discourse that accommodates the irony of once being property, the irony of objects that can and do resist objects that speak, moan, and make love, all while dancing to Outkast or Ornette Coleman or Sister Rosetta Tharpe, or that sister from around the way, who sings only when she gets a little brown liquor in her, a red solo cup in one hand, a lit and burning down cigarette in the other.
Luke Burbank: That's Roger Reeves reading from Dark Days Fugitive Essays. You write in this book that freedom is how you come to art and it's what makes you stay. But I'm curious, how do you find that freedom in a country that has been pretty much set up to not make people like you free.
Roger Reeves: Man? You know, that's a you know, that is the question of black art. That is the that is what the black artist is constantly sort of thinking about. Right. And some people would say that's how African-American lit came to be. Literature came to be. I think how I'm thinking about it is so there's this there's this idea, right, that generally what we do is we kind of delay our happiness, right? We delay our joy until we experience the freedom that we're we're looking for. And I've come to kind of the place where, like, what happens if like, not that we're going to stop fighting for, but what would happen if like, it doesn't get any better? For black folks, what happens if it doesn't get any better for queer folk? For trans folk? Are we gonna delay our joy? And so I'm beginning to think about how one might be able to inhabit joy in the middle of what feels like catastrophe. Right in the middle of what might feel like disaster. I think about 2020. Going out to protest and watching people dance in the middle of protest. Right. I think we have to do this. I also think about these moments of rallies and like I think about, like before the civil rights movement, right before, during the civil rights movement, before they would march in Birmingham or in Selma, the night before they would get together and sing. Right. And it would that singing would help to buoy up their spirits when the police, the water cannons were coming. So what I've been thinking about is, like, the way I think about art is it's a place to be beautiful. It's a place to make my beauty and my joy now.
Luke Burbank: Because if you try to wait for everything to be solved, you may miss the chance to have your joy.
Roger Reeves: Correct. Great. Because there's no there's who's to say there's. There's not always a rainbow at the end.
Elena Passarello: What does that look like in the writing space? Like we see it on the page once. Once all is said and done, it's so evident on a sentence by sentence level. But when you're in your bathrobe or however you, however you make.
Roger Reeves: Early in the morning.
Elena Passarello: What is it? How do you keep that present while you're actually trying to argue these big things?
Roger Reeves: You know what I try to do? I just try to listen. I listen for the next word. I allow myself to be surprised. Allow for digressions. That's the poet in me, right? Like I. One of the things that I think is really beautiful, and I live by this adage is Robert Frost is a good adage, though he used to say, no tears for the writer, no tears for the reader. No surprise for the writer. No surprise for the reader. So what? I'm so whatever I'm feeling while I'm making it is what you're going to feel and what you're going to know. Right. So one of the things that I'm always interested in is when I'm there finding ways. So we're in this moment right now where everybody has a hot take, has a critique. But one of the things we don't know how to do is talk about the complexity of beauty. And I want to always sort of think about the difficulty of beauty and I want it rather than being like, oh, this is bad or this is terrible, or this could be sometimes I want to be like, look how amazing this is. And shouldn't we replicate this amazingness? Right. So what I'm trying to do is just be in the place of like, celebration, right? Like celebration as a rigorous form of engagement.
Luke Burbank: This book covers such a wide range of things: music, art, military, hunters.
Roger Reeves: Actually.
Luke Burbank: I just got so much in it. I'm curious who who did you write it for? Who are you hoping finds this book? And what do you want their experience to be?
Roger Reeves: That's a great question. I wrote it for you. But I also was thinking about my daughter, who is eight now. When I started writing the book, she was probably about 2 or 3. And what I was thinking about is I'm writing it for her and I'm writing it for me. I'm writing the essays that I wish existed when I was having some of these difficult moments around beauty, around what to do with U.S. policy. And it's, you know, used in South America and in the Middle East. I'm really thinking about sort of putting another brick in a house, and I'm just contributing a brick. Right. Each of these books are bricks in the House of Liberation, and that's the way I think about it. So to me, when I was thinking about the book, I was like, oh, right. You know, your first audience is yourself. Right. I think it's okay for writers to first write to themselves, because we need that thing, because if you write something you need, I always say this if I write something I need, I'll write something someone else needs as well. Yeah, it's kind of impossible to write something you need to not.
Luke Burbank: Yeah. You get to the universal through the personal.
Roger Reeves: Right to the very specific to the very particular.
Elena Passarello: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Well, I'll tell you, this brick is holding up its corner of the house, so thanks for writing.
Roger Reeves: Thank you for having.
Luke Burbank: Roger Reeves everyone right here on Live Wire. That was author and poet Roger Reeves right here on Live Wire. His latest book, Dark Days Fugitive Essays, is available right now. Sometimes checking your email, let's be honest, can be a little stressful, but we want to change that. Over here at Live Wire, we want to make checking your email more joyful with our weekly newsletter, which is only good news. That's all we do over here at the Live Wire newsletter, we got sneak peeks and deep dives on upcoming events. Details on where you can join us live, new episode drops, and even more than that, getting this drop a joy. It's super easy to head over to Live Wire Radio dawg and you click keep in touch. It takes like 30 seconds 25 if you're speedy. So help us help you have a little more fun in your inbox with the latest from the Live Wire newsletter. This is Live Wire. Of course, each week we like to ask our listeners a question based on our upcoming guest Sean Jordan's comedy special, which is about parenting. We wanted to ask the Live Wire listeners a question relevant to that Elena : what did we ask folks?
Elena Passarello: We wanted to know what has been the most surprising slash funniest, weirdest parenting challenge that you've ever encountered?
Luke Burbank: And I'll tell you what, as now the parent of a 30 year old, they just change over time. They don't go away.
Elena Passarello: Your your 30 year old kid is still saying interesting and challenging things to you.
Luke Burbank: No, now I just see on Instagram that she's in Los Angeles and I had no idea this was happening. That's the that's the a grown adult version of this kind of stuff anyway. Elena, you have been collecting up the responses from our listeners. What are they saying?
Elena Passarello: It's always good when we ask the listeners to talk about their kids. Always just a gold mine. You get things like this one from Chelsea, who remembered how hard it was to convince my kids that the word plaid is not pronounced played. It took me years, Chelsea says.
Luke Burbank: Honestly, I'm with the kids on this. Whoever and I know you're you know, you teach English, Elena. So maybe this, you know, is near and dear to your heart. But if you really go through the pronunciation of most of our words, it makes no sense.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. No, because you got braid and stayed. But then you also have paid P A Y E D, so who knows.
Luke Burbank: How do we expect our children to trust us when some of the first things we teach them is that we've been lying to them about visually, about how these words should be said?
Elena Passarello: That's right.
Luke Burbank: All right. What's what's something else weird that happened to one of our parent listeners?
Elena Passarello: This one is from Laura. Laura says my kid likes to rank people by the amount that she loves them. And I guess that's fine, but I've been trying to teach her not to share people's rankings with them or update them. Whatever the ranking changes, for that matter, which is often.
Luke Burbank: I have a feeling I know what Laura this is, and we may be part of the problem because we've been elevating the child in question to like superstar status by featuring them on various episodes of Live Wire.
Elena Passarello: And I bet our ranking is really good.
Luke Burbank: Don't tell me if I'm not in the top five, please. Okay, one last weird parenting moment that someone wants to tell us about.
Elena Passarello: This one is from Sam. The hardest parenting challenge that Sam has encountered is supporting your child's interests, while being honest about the fact that the video game Minecraft is so all caps freaking all caps. Boring. It's true. We have a kid, right? Sometimes you have to engage with the same piece of media again and again and again and again, like Barney for [Luke: Cocomelon.] What's Cocomelon, is that?
Luke Burbank: Oh, boy. You're I'm. That's the right answer, by the way. [Elena: Okay.] You know that you don't. It's just some of that inane content that some, for some reason seems to really work for kids. But most of the parents I know, it's the bane of their existence. And yeah, Minecraft as well. Like that's one that never clicked for me. I knew it was a thing though, because I was at a 4th of July parade and all of the kids were carrying around these pixelated like swords from the little kind of like vendors. And I was like, what is that? And my friend who has young kids said Minecraft. And I was like uh oh.
Luke Burbank: All right. Thanks to everyone who responded to our audience question this week. We appreciate you. Hopefully your children will forgive you. In the meantime, this is a live wire from our next guest is a comedian and also podcaster who co-hosts the wildly popular show All Fantasy Everything with friend of Live Wire Ian Karmel. He's been named Portland's funniest person. He made his national TV debut on The Late Late Show with James Corden, and this year he released his first full length standup special called Girl Dad, which details the sometimes hilarious and often unexpected process of becoming a father. Sean Jordan joined us at the Alberta Rose theater in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.
Sean Jordan: Take a listen. Hey. Hey hey hey. Thanks for having me. I have a three year old daughter. Having a three year old. Is fantastic. Having a baby. Absolutely blows. It's probably the stupidest thing anyone could do. And so, yeah, it's just nice to be out performing. I love any chance I can be away from my kid. That's great. Nobody's honest. Nobody says that. But it's not that fun. You know what I'm talking about. Everybody always at the immediately they're like, oh, when you get on the second kid and you're like, I don't like this one yet. So. It'll. Be a big old never from your boy. I felt extremely inadequate the whole time. Just the whole process was so scary. Like going in for the delivery process. It was such a I don't know, it's so scary because I don't know, you know, I don't know if I could help at all. I just feel so as a guy. I just feel so dumb all the time. You know, I was walking in the hospital. My wife is doing magic with her body. She's radiant. She's just perfect. And I just look like this all the time, you know? Pretty good joke for an audio medium, I get it, but I look like what you think I look like listeners. Kind of a schlub. And so I walked in when we were going to go for delivery, I walked up to the nurse and I was like, hey, can I help at all? Like, is there anything I could do that would be of assistance? I didn't want to get in there and like, help, you know, for real. But I was just like, can I be of any assistance? And she said, yeah, actually, when labor starts, we've found that if the partner tells some jokes. She really said that. She said that if a partner tells some jokes, that kind of helps things out. I had never seen a labor before, so when she said that, I thought, well, awesome, this can't be that tricky. So as all excited for labor to start, I was going through jokes that I really was. I was going through jokes I was going to try. And then I saw her first contraction. I saw labor start right in front of my eyes. I saw her first contraction. I thought to myself, what a silly suggestion that was. Shame on you for recommending I tell a joke during that, it wasn't funny, it didn't look funny, and a lot of it looked like the craziest thing you could go through. And a lot of guys, they're real quick to hop in and be like, well, it's just like breaking your femur, bro. It's like a big guy thing, they say, and I just can't. I can't go on that walk with you. It didn't look like that. I've broken my legs a whole bunch now, my femur, but my tibia and fibula seven times. So I think that equals a femur and Skateboarding. I don't have gambling debt or anything, but. I broke my legs. A whole bunch didn't look like that. There's no real comparison. It looked like the only thing I can compare it to is if you took every bad thing that's ever happened to me. Like every breakup, every flat tire, every ice cream headache, every time I've talked to a cop, every time I've been hit in the face and just like, balled it up to the size of, like, a watermelon and then shove that in my butt. You're. Really? Really in there. Like. Because the baby is not kind of, you know, flush. That's like flush. There ain't no crowding or anything. And you made me keep it for about ten months, said nine, but it's ten. And then on a day that's pretty inconvenient for me. You were just like, all right, come on down to the hospital and shove that out in front of a bunch of strangers. I don't think a joke would help me through that. Yeah, she's three right now. Having a three year old's fantastic. She thinks everything I do is dope. She thinks it's cool. I have long arms. That ain't gonna last forever. She can't reach something across the table. I'm like, that's all right. Let Superman get it. And I just slide it to her. We bought her Christmas presents right in front of her. You fool! We got this Barbie as a Barbie kitchenette. It was a big one for her room. And her eyes, it looked like her eyes were like dinner plates where she was looking at it. She's like, who's that for? And I'm like, you, dum dum, it's for you. What are you doing? Because $9 at the goodwill. You better enjoy it. Yeah. She's three, so we're potty training. Figured it'd be rude not to. So we're doing that. A little trickier than I thought. I thought animals just. Just figure it out. I thought it was a little more intuitive. They don't. They don't know what they're doing. She. She just poops her pants. And it's just it's wild to me. The last time she pooped her pants. She came out and told me what she did. And the way that she explained it, she was so articulate. When she explained it, I was like, why do you do it then? It was insane, she said. She just said it just like I'm talking now. Not with like the pronounced L's, but, you know, she kind of got there. She had a big she came out, she's wearing tights and she had a big lump in the bottom. You know what I'm talking about. She did and I knew what it was. I'm not being you know, I wasn't mad or anything, but I knew what time it was when she came out. But she came out and I saw this big lump of poop in her tights, and she stopped. She stopped. She looks at me. She's like dad, dad. And she's like, above my pants and kind of shrugged her shoulders a little bit. Which that's empathy. That's an adult emotion. Why do you do it? So she's like, I kind of poop my pants. I think we should probably go in the bathroom and clean it up and, like. Yeah, we should. We're going to. But why do you do it then? I just imagine her standing in her room thinking, man, I really gotta poop. I could just do it in my pants. I'll just go tell dad and he'll handle it. I'm not going to waste all those extra steps to the toilet. So my wife, she found a video online of a medical professional that's just explaining how to potty train. And this medical professional hops on. It's a video, and they say when you're potty training, you're supposed to refer use the technical terms when referring to a kid's genitals. You're not supposed to use slang, which I wasn't going to. I'm not a godless pig. Anyway, remember I said technical? So this this woman, she says you need to use the technical terms when referring to the genitals. Technical terms like penis, vagina, and butthole. The technical terms. Penises. Technical. Vaginas. Extremely technical. I don't know if that last one is technical. I think you might want to run it up the flagpole a little bit. Has anyone ever heard a doctor call it a butthole? It's a pretty funny word, but, like, in the room, I just. I don't think they're doing that. It's called an anus. I'm not. I'm not trying to. I'm not a doctor. Far from it. I went to two years of college. Didn't graduate. No plan on graduating. That's why I had a daughter. So she can finish what I started. Neither here nor there. That being said, I don't think it's technically called your butthole. I'm going to have to get my prostate checked sooner than later. I'm 43. It's coming up. And if the doctor calls it that. I don't think they get to check it. I just I don't see a world where a doctor, where a doctor, an actual doctor comes into the room and dips their fingers in the in the little jelly. And then they look at me and I'm pretty vulnerable. I imagine at that point there's a few people in here that I can definitely tell I've had it done. And it's I mean, I'm not I'm not scared, but I like I'll be vulnerable. I'll be facing the wrong way in a gown which is never, you know, flattering. And if the doctor comes in, dips their fingers in the jelly and looks at me and said, okay, I'm going to check your prostate. To do that, I'm going to gently, gently insert these two fingers into your butthole. They said, I could say this, I asked. It's the funniest email I've sent in a while. If they say that I'm going to turn around and say, no, you're not. You are the funniest fake doctor I've ever met. I'm going to get out of here and find a real doctor. Have them gently insert their fingers into my anus. And on that note, I'm going to get out of here. Thank you so much.
Sean Jordan: My name is Sean Jordan. I appreciate it.
Luke Burbank: That's Sean Jordan, everyone, right here on Live Wire.
Luke Burbank: This is Live Wire. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. We have to take a very quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, we're going to hear some music from Pickathon featuring singer songwriter Erin Rae. Stay with us. Welcome back to Live Wire from. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right. It's that time in the show where we like to play a little "Station Location Identification Examination". This is where I quiz our esteemed announcer, Elena about a place in the U.S. where Live Wire is on the radio. She's got to guess the place I am talking about. We recorded this live at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon, where the stakes could not have been higher. Right Elena.
Elena Passarello: That's right. I felt the pressure was gripping on me like a vise.
Luke Burbank: And you performed beautifully. As always, let's take a listen to that. Hey, Elena.
Elena Passarello: Hey, Luke.
Luke Burbank: Are you ready to play another round of "Station Location Identification Examination"?
Elena Passarello: I think so.
Luke Burbank: That's not the most confident voice I've heard you use, but all right. You're actually incredibly good at this, so. And I think you're going to. I don't want to jinx it, but I think you're going to do well with this one. Okay. All right. I did not know this, but the Venus flytrap is native to a wetlands that's within a 60 mile radius of this place. And nowhere else in the world. What? Yeah.
Elena Passarello: Oh, well, it's got to be somewhere boggy and smoggy and swampy.
Luke Burbank: Ish.
Elena Passarello: A little salty, maybe a little coastal.
Luke Burbank: Yes, yes. Definitely coastal. How about this? It's known as Hollywood East due to its role as a filming location for several popular television series and movies, including Blue Velvet. Weekend at Bernie's. I Know What You Did Last Summer. Scream. One Tree Hill. Dawson's Creek.
Elena Passarello: Oh, okay. I do believe it's Wilmington, North Carolina.
Luke Burbank: I believe you're exactly right. Wilmington, North Carolina, where we are on WHAA-FM. All right, big shout out to the folks tuning in from Wilmington, North Carolina. Woo! All right, before we get to our musical guest this week, a little preview of what we are doing on the show. Next week, we're going to be talking to Ira Madison, the third, about his new collection of essays. It's pure innocent fun. It's kind of a mix of memoir and cultural criticism, where Ira reflects back on, like, the pop culture that shaped his career as a writer, and also what it was like for him growing up as a black gay man in Milwaukee. And then we'll hear some musical comedy from Riki Lindhome. Riki is an Emmy nominated actress, comedian and musician. You may know her as one half of Garfunkel and Oates. Now she's set to release her first solo album. It's called No Worries If Not, and we're going to hear, well, a song that kind of takes a real twist on the scandalous relationship in The Sound of Music. Yes, The Sound of Music like you've never considered it before. From the perspective of the Baroness. It's going to be a really fun show. Make sure you tune in next week. This is Live Wire from our musical guest. This week earned a nomination for Emerging Act of the year at the 2019 Americana music Awards, as well as spots performing the Newport Folk Festival, the Grand Ole Opry and 2024 Pickathon music festival where live Wire set up shop. Now, if you are not familiar, Pickathon is a four day experiential music festival that brings talent from all around the world to an idyllic farm in Happy Valley, Oregon. So take a listen to this. It starts off with a conversation with Erin Rae. We recorded this at the Lucky Barn from this year's Pickathon music Festival. Thank you. Hello, Erin Rae fans. Hello, Lucky barn. I read on the internet that you were not particularly interested in music, or at least it wasn't something you saw yourself going into. And then you got a guitar as a gift when you were 18. Is that true, or is that like many things on the internet, not true.
Erin Rae: It is true, I didn't. Well, music has always been a part of my life. My parents played together, so I grew up hearing them sing together. Yeah, I was like, I went to a semester of college and I was going to be a therapist, which could also happen one day, but.
Luke Burbank: You could be doing that. And that's true. It's own way now. Two records ago, it was called Putting on Airs. And this one's called Lighten Up. Yeah, those those must be a related conversations.
Erin Rae: I guess the through line is just personal experience. And lighten up, I guess after putting on airs, you know, broaches a lot of subjects, a lot of mental illness, talking about being afraid to be gay in the South, growing up with a bad mind. And so with Lighten Up, I was like, maybe I'll have a little fun this time. Even though I had a lot of fun on both records.
Luke Burbank: But all right, without further ado, all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, Erin Rae.
Erin Rae: Thank you for being here. [Erin Rae performs "Putting on Airs"]
Luke Burbank: That was Erin Rae right here on Live Wire, performing the title track from her critically acclaimed album Putting On Airs. By the way, that performance was recorded at The Lucky Barn as part of this year's Pickathon 2024 Music Festival. If you want to learn more about Pickathon. Head on over to Pickathon.com or follow them on Instagram at Pickathon. All right, that's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests Roger eaves, Sean Jordan, and Erin Rae.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our executive director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Eben Hoffer is our technical director and our House Sound is by D.Neil Blake. Our production fellow is Ashley Park. Valentine Keck is our operations manager. Our house manager is Ezra Veenstra and Andrea Castro-Martinez is our intern.
Luke Burbank: Our house band is Sam Tucker, Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox Tucker, Zach Honi Delmar, Ayal Alves, and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer. Special thanks to Chris Bright, Jason Powers, and all the good folks over at Pickathon.
Elena Passarello: Additional funding provided by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank our members Laura Canapé of Portland, Oregon, and Nancy Weil of Arch Cape, Oregon.
Luke Burbank: For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, visit LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire team. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
