Candace Bushnell–Is There Still Sex in the City? Live On Stage

Lauren Schiller November 6, 2019

Candace Bushnell gave us a reason to sit on our couch every week to soak in the stories of the women--and men--of the 90s television culture-changer "Sex and the City". Candace has written a number of books since then and her newest book is called "Is There Still Sex in the City?" This October I teamed up with Women Lit of the Bay Area Book Festival to have an on-stage conversation with Candace Bushnell, hosted by INFORUM at The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Bushnell kicked off the evening with an update about what she’s been up to lately and a reading, and then we got to sit down and talk--friendships, love, loss and dating over 50.

TRANSCRIPT: To err is human. If you find an error, let us know.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point with stories of how women rise up. On today's episode, Candace Bushnell.

C Bushnell: Like Sex and the City, once I started dating again, I discovered that there were certain types of guys out there just like there were in Sex and the City. And there were some surprises. One of the things that seemed immediately clear was guys your age no longer find you attractive and it does go both ways. Yes it does.

Lauren Schiller: Now that's a driveway moment. Stick around.

C Bushnell: At one point, I had this idea for a TV series where the women were going to run, it was a brothel, but it was for other women and they were going to employ these younger guys because there were so many young guys who, I don't know. And I thought the idea was really kind of interesting, but everyone's like, "No." But you know, I had a lot of wacky ideas about what I was going to do with all these stories and this material. And I really went back to the structure that I used in Sex and the City which is, it's really fiction written as journalism as opposed to journalism written as fiction.

Lauren Schiller: This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller with stories of how women rise up and that was Candace Bushnell. Yes, that Candace Bushnell who gave us a reason to sit on our couch every week and soak up the stories of the women and men of Sex and the City. She's written a number of books since then. She's a prolific writer and now she's out with a new book. This October I teamed up with Women Lit of the Bay Area Book Festival to have a conversation with Candace on stage hosted by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Candace kicked off the evening with an update about what she's been up to lately and a reading, and then we got to sit down and talk. Here she is on her new book called Is There Still Sex in the City?

C Bushnell: Is there still sex in the city? Yes. Yes, but less. And everybody's having less, including the millennials. They're having the least of all. Well, we'll talk about that later. This is not a sequel to Sex and the City, but it has different characters. But the inspiration for writing it was the same feeling that I had when I started writing Sex and the City. And when I started writing Sex and the City, the feeling was really like, this is uncharted territory. Writing about single women's lives in the city and the mating and dating rituals. And at the time we thought, oh gosh, this only happens in New York city. But it turned out that it actually happened everywhere. Now back in the mid nineties, I was a woman in my mid thirties and I felt like being single was really like a feminist kind of statement and it meant that you were kind of willing to break the rules and pursue your own dreams instead of maybe necessarily pursuing finding a man.

C Bushnell: And what's so interesting to me is that 20, 25 years ago, if you were a single woman in your mid thirties, people really felt that there was something wrong with you. Now, and I think partly thanks to Sex and the City, people just think you're normal. And so I think that's a bit of a triumph. But when I was writing Sex and the City, I felt very much like an outsider. And like a lot of my Sex and the City friends, I did end up getting married and I guess I found my Mr bigger and also maybe my mister was a little bit younger. And most of my friends also ended up finding their Mr big, their Aiden, their Harry or maybe even their Steve. Now all you guys, you know Sex and the City, right? Okay. Because I don't want to be like, people are looking at me like who is she talking about?

C Bushnell: And then something happened and I personally ended up getting divorced when I was 52. And so that was kind of the end of my, what I thought would be happily ever after because I really didn't think about it that much. And my first instinct was to run away. So I ran away to Connecticut, I started riding horses and then I had two other girlfriends who they didn't have children and I decided to do what women are always saying that they're going to do when you're younger. We're all going to live together and we're all going to live close by and we will be like the golden girls. And honestly, for six months it worked.

C Bushnell: We went to the vegetable markets, farm stands, we made dinner, we had one friend of mine Sassy, she came up with any excuse to have a party and wear hats. And I sort of thought, okay, this is going to go on forever. But then a whole bunch of my other friends ended up getting divorced. And what happens when women become single again? You go to where the other single women are. So all of a sudden, all of these newly single women, all in their 50s came to Sag Harbor, which I call the village in this book. Now when I got divorced, I really thought I did not want to date at all. I really felt like I've already done this. I've already done the reproductive cycle where I got married, I was in love, this and that, and then it didn't work. Why am I going to attempt to do it again? Isn't there's something better than we as women can do now that we're in our fifties besides looking for men?

C Bushnell: Okay. The answer was pretty much no. Because all of my friends and women who I know wanted to start dating again. And once again, and it's not just dating, but it's also reinventing your lives. And so once again, it felt like this is really uncharted territory because they are women who are dating again, they haven't dated for 20, 25 years. And things have really changed. And the other thing that happens when you get somewhere in your fifties is that there can be a feeling of invisibility and there's a question of are you still relevant? Children leaving the nest, careers may end, all of that kind of stuff. So there's also that struggle. But like Sex and the City, once I started dating again, I discovered that there were certain types of guys out there just like there were in Sex and the City and there were some surprises.

C Bushnell: One of the things that seemed immediately clear was guys your age no longer find you attractive. Okay. So 50 something guys, and I know there are men in the audience like, "I'm not like that." We're not really brought up to think of somebody in their 50s or 60s as being attractive and being like a potential sex partner. And it does go both ways. Yes it does. And one of the things that one discovers is there are younger guys who are interested. That's another story. And then one of the things that you do is okay, guys your age aren't interested. They're interested in younger women. So why not try to beat the odds by going for guy who's older? Maybe dating a man who's 15, 20 or even 25 years older? Which is fine except that given the fact that you're now middle-aged yourself, that means that man who could be 70, 75 or even 80.

C Bushnell: You wouldn't think that there would be a large contingent of men out there at that age who are dating. But when you think about demographics and how so many of the boomers are now in their later years, it makes sense that there's a crop of 60, 70 and even 80 something men out there acting like they're 35. I personally encountered one of these men at a party given by a married couple in their early sixties, and they decided to just get it over with and invite all the newly 50 something single women. I don't know how many of you guys have been in that situation. And then they would invite a couple of eligible guys who they could dig up.

C Bushnell: So there were lots of 50 something single women there and two or three of these senior age players or SAPs. These are older single men of means, meaning they have enough money to add it to their list of attributes and are often still employed in a lesser version of the high powered career they once had. At some point during the evening, I must've talked to one of these men because a few days later, Ron, the host of the party contacted me to let me know that out of all the 50 something women there, and I was in my fifties then, now I'm 60, he wanted to let me know that a fellow named Arnold had picked me out of the bunch to ask me out. Now, Ron was very excited about this and he was suddenly very impressed with me that I could attract a guy like Arnold because Arnold, he said was a big deal and everybody really admired him.

C Bushnell: Arnold played Ivy league football and he was once an oil man and a newspaper magnet and all the Park Avenue hostesses were always inviting him to their parties. He was sought after. I thought I remembered the guy. A tall, thick battleax type who was definitely older, too old for me I decided. "How old is he?" I asked. "He's a little bit older than I am," Ron said. So that would make him like 68. The thing is these guys often lie about their ages. They fudge somehow forgetting about that truth revealing device called the internet. Sure enough, when I Googled him, Arnold turned out to be 78 and that made him much closer to my father's age than mine. My father was 83, Arnold was just five years younger, but they couldn't have been more different. My father is very conservative and Arnold apparently is not. According to Ron, Arnold used to be somewhat of a notorious wild man at Studio 54. And even to this day, Arnold still has much younger girlfriends. The last one being 42.

C Bushnell: "I don't know how he does it," Ron said. I wanted to tell Ron that I didn't want to be the one to find out. And so I tried to say no to this fix-up. Peer pressure however, is one of the things that I hadn't counted on in middle age, and when it came to dating, it turns out there was a lot of it. My friends kept reminding me that it was good to go out and it was really good that someone had finally asked me out, when was the last time that had happened? Of course I should go. What's the harm in it? And besides, you never know. Of course the problem with you never know is that so often you actually do know. I knew or I was convinced I knew that I was not going to date a 78 year old man, no matter how wonderful he was. What if he fell down? I didn't spend my life working this hard to end up taking care of a strange older person.

C Bushnell: But every time I tried to explain this to people, I realized how ageist and judgy and anti-love hopeful I sounded because I didn't know. Did I? I didn't know what was going to happen. What if I fell in love with him, in which case his age wouldn't matter, right? Plus, I didn't want to be that creature. And you know that shallow woman who cares more about practicality than the blind illusions of love. Plus, as Ron reminded me, I must feel so honored than a man as powerful as Arnold wanting to spend time with little old me. In preparation for the date I went to my friend's Sassy's house and we looked at photographs of Arnold on the internet. His photos would have back about 35 years. He'd been a big man and rather handsome. "Oh honey," Sassy said, "he could turn out to be absolutely wonderful. You must keep an open mind."

C Bushnell: And so arrangements for a date were negotiated. We could have gone to a restaurant in my town, but Arnold really wanted me to see his house, which was in another town about 30 minutes away. However, he offered to pick me up and take me to his town and then I can always spend the night at his house if I needed to. And he would be really willing to drive me back to my house in the morning. A sleepover with a 78 year old man I didn't know? I don't think so. Thank you.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and that's Candace Bushnell reading from her new book, Is There Still Sex in the City? We'll take a quick break and when we come back, I get to ask her a few questions. Inflection Point is a listener powered independent production. I hope you'll consider supporting us with a tax deductible donation toward our fundraising goal at inflectionpointradio.org and clicking the support button.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point. I'm talking with Candace Bushnell, whose new book is called, Is There Still Sex in the City? We spoke live on stage at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival. Arnold. So-

C Bushnell: Yes. You know-

Lauren Schiller: You didn't spend the night I take it.

C Bushnell: I'm sorry?

Lauren Schiller: You didn't spend the night. He showed you his bed. He really tried hard.

C Bushnell: I mean, the thing about ... actually, I really made it funny and I worked hard to make it funny. He was really, really sexist, like shockingly so, and really quite oblivious and very entitled. Like one of the first things he showed me was his bed, which was 20 years old or older and he shipped it from California and he said, "I had a lot of really, I've had a really lot of good of sex on that bed and I expect to have a lot more." And I was like, this is just too much. He was, yeah. I mean it's-

Lauren Schiller: I want to know why your friends were so invested in you meeting with this guy.

C Bushnell: Well, I think it's something that we as women do, we want each other to be taken care of and it's still somewhere in the back of all of our minds, even though it really doesn't happen. That somehow the mail is going to be the protector and you'll be okay if you're partnered up. And I do, I think as human beings, we tend to feel that way. The problem is that they're looking for a relationship that's really just about fulfilling their needs.

Lauren Schiller: But it seems like from reading the book, what was so exciting to your friends about this guy is that he had a little bit of money and he had a little bit of power.

C Bushnell: Yes. Exactly.

Lauren Schiller: And so it seems like at this point in our cultural history in this moment that we're in right now, that maybe that would become less important, but yet it's still lingering on. What do you see happening with all that?

C Bushnell: I think it's still lingering on, but what's frustrating of course is that men like Arnold are not ... I don't know. I mean it's not what a lot of women are necessarily looking for and powerful men, they like to enjoy their power. And for powerful men, often part of that is a certain amount of sexual freedom. And that was Arnold.

Lauren Schiller: He was raring to go.

C Bushnell: He was raring to go. And I think, but that's the other thing that's very shocking, but it won't be shocking to any of the men here.

Lauren Schiller: Are there any men here?

C Bushnell: But when you start dating again ... there are men here, I saw them already and they're like, ah-

Lauren Schiller: Just checking. Okay.

C Bushnell: They're like, "We're going to kill her."

Lauren Schiller: Is Arnold here?

C Bushnell: They want sex immediately. It's like really? But I find though also when I talk to women who work in like old age homes and that kind of thing, they're like, "It's really a problem. These men, they want to kiss you, they want to do all of this and it's just not appropriate."

Lauren Schiller: Do you think it's just, you get into your seventies, I mean, neither of us are there yet, but like let's just cut through the crap. Let's just get to the sex. I mean is that maybe part of what's going on? Who knows?

C Bushnell: No, no, I don't think so. I think that this is somebody who that's how he operates. He has these certain things that he's going to tempt you with. Like he had this little pool and he was like, "You could come and swim in my pool any time." And I was like, "No." No. On the other hand, the thing that makes these situations so tricky is if the guy had been like incredibly attractive and all of that, that might've been something that I wanted to hear. So that's unfortunately human nature.

Lauren Schiller: Right. But what's interesting about, I mean we don't need to totally overanalyze Arnold for a guy but-

C Bushnell: No we don't. Because everyone's like, "We want to talk about this today." We don't even know who Arnold is and you probably won't even be in the TV series.

Lauren Schiller: But just that he expected that something would happen with sex and you, and like no matter what, like maybe, I mean I know he picked you out of the crowd at the party and everything, but that you maybe were more discerning.

C Bushnell: Well, one of the things that he said was that he asked how old I was, when I told him how old I was, and I think at the time I might've been 57 or 58. He was really shocked and he said that he had just upped his age group to maybe include 50, but he wasn't really thinking that that would be somebody who was like 58. And he made it very clear that ... because I think at a certain point I got so pissed off at him and I was like, "Why do you think women have sex with you?" And he said, "Because I buy them handbags."

Lauren Schiller: Oh my God.

C Bushnell: And this was a real thing. I mean this is another thing that I hear a lot from men is that they are hypersensitive, a lot of them and maybe rightfully so or they're incredibly aware of the power that money can have over women. And I do hear men complaining about things like women just want money from them and women just want them to buy things for them and this and that. And to a certain extent there are women like that. So that was Arnold's set up.

Lauren Schiller: Could you imagine a future where the power dynamic is totally reversed?

C Bushnell: Yes, I could. Although I don't know what makes me say that.

Lauren Schiller: And would that actually be better? I don't know.

C Bushnell: But you know power is it's about money really. But I know there's personal power, which is the power to get things done and make things happen on your own. But men, they exercise a lot of it's economic power over women. Economic and educational and access.

Lauren Schiller: Well, it was really fun reading the book and I mean it just, I want to say it starts with a bang, but it actually it starts with a bang. I'm just going to put it there and I'm ... not like that kind of bang. Okay. It's an action packed to beginning. And anyway, I got about 10 pages in and then I was like, "Wait a second, is this a memoir? Is this fiction?" And then I looked and it says fiction. So, talk about how it's constructed.

C Bushnell: We're calling it auto fiction because it's a lot of autobiographical elements of my life in a fictionalized setting with fictional characters. But yes, I mean there are a lot of things that that did happen to me in the book and a lot of very poignant things because the other side of all of this is that your 50s is a very different time than your thirties. In your thirties, you are not generally, I mean you can be hit with all of these life altering events, but it's not the same as being in your 50s or 60s when you're hit with a certain amount of loss.

C Bushnell: And that's one of the things that's a big difference. In your thirties, you're looking up, up, up, and you know you're going to move forward. You're going to ... maybe you're already in a relationship and you're raising children and you're doing that into your forties and your career. Everything's going up. And then when you get into your 50s, things can kind of go ... And you know there, a parent will probably pass away. A friend will probably die unfortunately. And so while I was writing the book, my father actually did die while I was writing the book and one of my best friends took her life. So it's an interesting experience. And I talked a lot with my editors. Like originally I had one editor and he was like, "It's just supposed to be funny. We don't want death." But it's like that is such a part of people's lives at this time. And it's one of the things that shapes this period and it changes you psychically and psychologically. And because it does, it can be an opportunity for growth.

Lauren Schiller: We had a chance to talk before we sat in this room and one of the things that we were talking about is that, well, just like your editors were saying, "We want it to be funny. We don't want any death in the book." That there's not great role models out there for how to process the death of a parent or a friend or even prepare for it.

C Bushnell: That is true. And you know, I mean one of the things that's really different in the last 50 years, maybe the last 30 years, I think it was like in the mid 1960s or maybe even 1970 or 75, 76% of the population over 50 was married. So that was pretty much everybody was married unlike today where it's 50% of people are single, maybe even more people. So when these things happen to you, they happen to you in this in a sense, in the comfort of your own home. And it's happening and you tend to have like relatives and people who have dealt with this, people are there.

C Bushnell: You still have a partner, you've got a family, you're probably in the same house that you've lived in for a long time. Today when these things hit you, that is not necessarily true. You may be single again, chances are you may be living on your own, you may have moved, you may be getting divorced. There are a whole bunch of things that happen that don't really insulate you from these situations. And I think that's one of the things that that makes these things a little bit tricky.

Lauren Schiller: While you're writing the book, you lose your father, you lose your friend. How did you process those events and then, I mean, was writing the book a way of processing them or did you have to kind of go through it and then figure out how you were going to write about it?

C Bushnell: You know, I kind of had to figure out how I was going to write about it kind of while it was happening. Like I went to see my father, I knew he was going to go and I was like, "You know, the reality is if you're a writer, as Nora Ephron said, 'Everything's copy.'" I mean, I hate to say it, but I was just very, tried to be very aware of my feelings, et cetera, and tried to process them in an adult way, which means not having a breakdown and figuring out, I mean that's really what this time is about. You know what? At 50 you're an adult and you have to be. You kind of do.

Lauren Schiller: You kind of want to have the breakdown though.

C Bushnell: I just do. Being an adult is not necessarily being busy all the time. Being an adult is being able to stand back, assess the situation, take your ego out of it and figure out what is the best thing to do, how to move forward in a way that is the most humane and kind to everybody around. And it's a time when you have to kind of reach down and figure out how to move on. And it's hard. I mean there were a lot of times when I was writing this book when I was like, I was depressed writing the book. But as I was writing the book, I also felt something was lifting. And when I've looked at that U-shaped curve, the realities for most people, the bottom of that U-shaped curve, it is in your fifties and then things kind of start to go up again.

C Bushnell: So it was this personal journey for me through my fifties and it wasn't always easy. And I do, you know, I have friends who are ... I've seen people in a lot pain and I've ... this is also a time when you see that some people just, they can't get it together and they just can't make it. Men and women. So for me, this is something to explore and to write about.

Lauren Schiller: Well, in that, and one of the things that you've written about consistently is friendship and female friendships specifically. What role does friendship or has friendship played for you in coming through those kinds of hard times?

C Bushnell: I think it's what it always is. It's like people being there for you. I mean, I had like one friend who she just decided, she's like, "I never turned down a funeral." She's like, "I'm going to them all. I'm going to figure out ... I'm figuring out how to do this." And it's like you got to show up for your friends in a different way. At one time maybe you were showing up with dating advice. Now you're showing up with soup. I don't know. But yes, it's again, another time of finding it's for a lot of people it's like reconnecting with people who you were friends with before you got married and had kids. Because when you have children, your friends tend to be the parents of your children's friends. And if you end up getting divorced, all of these things are changed.

Lauren Schiller: This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller talking with Candace Bushnell. When we come back, the Mona Lisa treatment. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point with a live on stage recording with Candace Bushnell for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival that we recorded the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Do you want to talk about the Mona Lisa?

C Bushnell: Oh gosh, yes. Well, first of all, it's a laser that ... and I know some of you have heard of this and they use it to restore elasticity and et cetera into your vagina. So it's a laser, but it's for inside and it's ... yes, they put it in your vagina and it works like lasers work. I mean it's just, it's skin. Okay. So it makes sense that it might work, but I want to preface it by saying that it's something that it's so easy for us to make fun of. The idea of women pursuing something, I don't even think it's sexual dysfunction, but something to enhance their sexuality or whatever. And there are basically three things for women and there are 77 products for men. So let's start with that.

C Bushnell: So it's actually could be a good thing. But what happens was I was thinking about doing it and it costs $3,000, but I thought if I'm going to do it, I only can do a before and after. So I have to find someone to have sex with before, and get the treatment done, because how am I going to know? I don't know.

Lauren Schiller: You don't think you'd be able to tell?

C Bushnell: I don't know. I'm making that up, but I don't know. Probably yes, because-

Lauren Schiller: I would hope for a $3,000-

C Bushnell: Well, I first heard about it, I heard about it from my gynecologist and then I brought it up at lunch with this guy, like have you ever heard of this? And he literally went pale, but he said, "My wife got it." And he said, "She's divorcing me and she's gone off with a younger guy." And this, I was like, "Wow." I heard the story about 20 times from other people of the same thing. So I thought that was very interesting of women actually leaving their husbands when, and really just being rejuvenated or whatever and saying, "Hey, I'm going to go out there and I don't feel like giving this up." So-

Lauren Schiller: Well let's, while we're on the topic, let's talk Tinder because you did a whole event experiment with [crosstalk 00:38:29].

C Bushnell: I did a Tinder experiment and-

Lauren Schiller: Everyone know what Tinder is?

C Bushnell: Yes.

Lauren Schiller: I'm just making sure.

C Bushnell: How many of you have gone on Tinder?

Lauren Schiller: Oh, show of hands.

C Bushnell: It's all the young women and it's a guy.

Lauren Schiller: Oh, you met on Tinder? No. Okay.

C Bushnell: You could meet on Tinder. I mean Tinder there are no filters or anything like that and people make their own choices. So, but I discovered an app like Tinder, it really is a game. It's designed like a card game and you know the app doesn't care if you meet somebody or not. It just wants you to be on it and stay on it. But what I found interestingly with Tinder, and this is something that I feel like I'm hearing it more and more out there from guys, and I think the thing that was most interesting about Tinder was how many men, first of all thought that the other men on it were absolutely horrible. And when men think like other men are bad, you really should pay attention because normally they cover up each other's bad behavior.

C Bushnell: And the other thing was how quite a few guys said how much they hated themselves when they were on Tinder and how it brought out like the worst sexist sides of their personality where they really just felt women were objects. And it was really interesting to talk to these guys and get their take on it and it's not heartening. And I ended up also talking to a lot of 25 year old women in their twenties who are on Tinder and they talked a lot about their frustrations and their biggest frustration seem to be with the quality of the men that they were meeting. So hello, maybe you shouldn't go on Tinder. And I thought, I mean I'd heard women complaining about dating before. Dating's never been easy, but it was really like the first piece I did for this book. And it was very eyeopening how much more negative women had become about dating and men.

C Bushnell: And I just heard like a lot more anger. I mean look, there are always women out there who are they're having a great time. It's all working out for them and they have it all together. But you know, a lot of women didn't and they insisted that the guys that I was going to meet on Tinder were going to be maybe not what they said, that they would have undiagnosed mental illnesses, and that a lot of them would use drugs, and that they were really unreliable and that this sort of thing. So I went on Tinder. The first thing that happened was Tinder set my age range for who I would be attracted to based on my age. I couldn't lie about my age because I didn't know I wasn't skilled enough on Tinder. And so it matched me up with, there were like two guys over the age of 58 and they were both like smokers.

C Bushnell: So I set the age, I was like, "What's going on?" I set the age range. I was like, "Okay, I will say 22 to 32 and see what happens." I got tons and tons of hits, so many hits and I really was like, "Wow." And people were writing really nice things. And I was like, "Those girls are so wrong." And then I matched with this guy who, he was 33 I think, and everyone kept saying, "Oh, he's a real man man." He had a beard and a lot of hair.

Lauren Schiller: Sure sign.

C Bushnell: And so we agreed to meet up, we met up and he told me a lot about like Tinder and how all the horrible guys were on it and this and that. And he was a vegetarian and the only place we could go, I could find to go was like a hamburger place. But he was like, "Don't worry, I'll deal. I'll just eat French fries." So I was like, "Okay." But it was interesting. It was fun. We kind of ... it was friendly and he seemed like a really nice guy. So then he asked me out again and we went to see this really cool downtown play and I was like, "Hey, this is like groovy. It's great. This guy's really cool." And then he asked me out again and I was like, "I really shouldn't do this, because I'm not going to date anybody for a story."

C Bushnell: And I wasn't really interested, but he asked me to go to this Shakespeare play in Brooklyn. So I thought, Well, why not? Am I doing anything else? I should go. So I was crossing the Brooklyn bridge and of course I couldn't help but think about that scene in Sex and the City when it's Miranda and Steve, they're going to meet on the bridge. And I was like, I'm crossing the bridge, maybe something's going to happen. Isn't this nice? Like I'm going to prove to everybody that you could meet a great guy on Tinder.

C Bushnell: And so I get there and everybody's pairing up and going into the theater, and then they're ringing the bell. And I didn't have the tickets, supposedly this guy had the tickets and he didn't show up. So it was an expensive taxi ride there and back. It was like $40 each way. And I was like, what's, you know. And so I texted him and I said, maybe we got the date wrong or something like that. And I didn't hear from him for two days. And then I got a really, really long text that said I am so, so sorry. I lost track of time. I took MDM PD do, some kind of new designer drug and I don't know what happened, but I tried to drive my car, I was arrested and then I was put in a 48 hour hold and it went on. And I was just like, he turned out to be exactly what the Tinderellas had said I would find. And I really thought Tinder, it's like Vegas, it's the house. It always wins.

C Bushnell: And then I was going to this black tie event and I saw this woman outside and she was really beautiful and she was smoking a cigarette. And I was like, "Wow, someone's still smoking a cigarette." I used to smoke. So I was like, I'm just going to go near the cigarette smell. And I just started talking to her and she was incredibly attractive. She was tall, blonde, she was maybe 32. She seemed like she had it all together. And so I decided to ask her about do you go on Tinder? Now I forgot to mention she was Russian.

C Bushnell: And she was like, "Yes, of course I go on Tinder." And I was like, "But why? You're so beautiful, you certainly don't need to be on Tinder." And she was like, "It's when you go on Tinder, you get more Instagram followers. It's all about Instagram." And I was like, "That's it." So there you go.

Lauren Schiller: And this is why millennials are not having as much sex obviously.

C Bushnell: Well, I don't know if anybody watched this. You know, there was that Lisa Ling thing about pornography and its effect on young men. And again, there were a lot of young men on there who were really very distressed about this constant use of porn and how they become addicted and how it affected them psychologically and how difficult it made them to find real women attractive and how it wasn't ... and how being around real women made them very nervous, very uncomfortable. They didn't know what to do. And again, like how they really, really did not like themselves.

C Bushnell: And I mean, I think that, and that's something that I hear. And I heard this when I was writing this Tinder pieces well from guys about how it's impossible for them to avoid pornography and how they get so much pornography, whether they want it or not, and how it's affects them in a negative way. And that's definitely, I don't know. I mean, I don't know, porn is such a big money making industry that we are never going to get a straight answer on it. I promise you. I'm not a fan of porn. I think I know too much about it.

Lauren Schiller: I'm just thinking about how women in their fifties and up are depicted in the media and in movies and in our culture in general. And how we can start to see a shift toward that being, we're not just irrelevant. It's-

C Bushnell: Yes. Well I think that is-

Lauren Schiller: New world.

C Bushnell: It's really, I mean, it's changing so much because I feel like the Sex and the City woman who to me, I mean, to me the Sex and the City woman is a woman who's my age. I'm 60, but it's about really it was a change that happened in the late seventies and the early eighties. And it really happened because of feminism, the pill. Also women's magazines at that time were really very important and they were just seminating information to regular women out there about things that you could have that you could never have before. And one of them was an orgasm and the other was a career. And-

Lauren Schiller: And that ladies and gentlemen is having it all.

C Bushnell: Exactly.

Lauren Schiller: Forget everything else.

C Bushnell: And in the late seventies and eighties, there was a huge influx of women into the workforce. This has happened a couple of times in the 1920s, for instance, but then it always, women end up going back to the home. And it happened at that time. And that really made for a lot of changes and it was a group of women who they were going to go out there and do something that their mothers hadn't done. They were going to try to have it all. It was really like the first generation of women that were encouraged, told that you could have it all, that you could have a family, you could have a career.

C Bushnell: So this is not a group of women who are shy violence. This tends to be a group of women who they're used to challenging the status quo and they're used to going out there and changing things and changing perspectives. And this is really the same group of women, but they're older. And they're not going to go away. So I do think-

Lauren Schiller: So now's the time to show up. They're showing up.

C Bushnell: Yes. Yeah. I mean I do think it's a different time.

Lauren Schiller: That was Candace Bushnell speaking with me live on stage at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival. Candace's new book is called, Is There Still Sex in the City? I'll put a link to it on my website influctionpointradio.org, where by the way, you can find future events by clicking on the events tab there. I'd love to see you. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller: That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at inflectionpointradio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on Twitter at laschiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go. inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host. Lauren Schiller.

A Brief But Spectacular Conversation with Steve Goldbloom, Flossie Lewis and Mahogany L. Browne

Lauren Schiller August 29, 2018

After Brief But Spectacular creator Steve Goldbloom filmed 94-year-old retired English teacher Flossie Lewis and “Black Girl Magic” poet activist Mahogany L. Browne, their short segments on PBS NewsHour went unexpectedly viral. Although they come from entirely different backgrounds, the two women share a deep passion for language and an appreciation of its power to heal and to harm. Join our live conversation, recorded at the Commonwealth Club to learn how, despite our differences, we can find connections that bring us together.

TRANSCRIPT

Lauren Schiller: From KALW and PRX, this is Inflection Point, stories of how women rise up. I'm Lauren Schiller. I've always believed that when you share the story of great women, everyone wins. So that's why I want you to know about a new podcast called Great Women of Business. They focus on the little-known details of the well-know women you're always hearing about, classics like Coco Chanel, Martha Stewart, and Julia Child.

Lauren Schiller: Great Women in Business explains how Debbi Fields started her empire at age 20. Plus, you may never look at tupperware the same way again. With captivating and well-researched stories, each episode takes you through the harrowing journeys and struggles that led these women to greatness, as well as the business principles she utilized. Find the 12-episode series of Great Women of Business on your favorite podcatcher, or visit parcast.com/business to start listening, that's parcast, P-A-R-C-A-S-T.com/business.

Lauren Schiller: Just as we are kicking off the summer and I was thinking about the next season, the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco called me up to ask if I would moderate an upcoming panel. They are the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum and every year present hundreds of forums on topics ranging across politics, culture, society, and the economy. The forum they called me about would feature the creator of Brief but Spectacular that airs on PBS NewsHour and of which I am a great fan.

Lauren Schiller: Steve Goldbloom and two of his most popular guests, Flossie Lewis, age 94, reminded me of my grandmother and all my brilliant great aunts, and award-winning poet Mahogany Browne, who wrote the sensational poem Black Girl Magic. They asked if I'd be available to moderate a live conversation between these seemingly different people about how despite our differences, we can find connections that bring us together.

Lauren Schiller: Obviously I agreed immediately. The evening finally arrived this August at her beautiful venue on the Embarcadero in San Francisco and began with a 15-minute excerpt from a film about Flossie Lewis by Steve Goldbloom and his team. So without further ado, I present a special episode of Inflection Point featuring this conversation at the Commonwealth Club of California. So we just watched this excerpt from a short documentary about you, Flossie. How does it feel to see your name in lights?

Flossie Lewis: It makes me feel like a fraud.

Lauren Schiller: Why?

Flossie Lewis: Because there were teachers who made me a teacher and colleagues who kept me honest. And I'd like to mention their names wherever they are.

Lauren Schiller: Okay.

Flossie Lewis: At Lincoln High School Marian Shepherd, at Lincoln High School, Genie A. Ecloff* at Lincoln High School ... Oh, I'm trying to think of a few more people, but they escape me now. At Lowell High School, Joanne Stewart*, who is still with me, and we still talk about teaching and books. At Lowell High School there was Maurice Anglenda* , there was Barbara Bates*. Thank you, Leanne Torlikson*. Thank you, Gwen Fuller. And I've left out so many. *Spellings may not be correct

Lauren Schiller: Always.

Flossie Lewis: But for me to receive all the credit when I know that every name I mentioned was as good as I shall ever be, and I still hear the sound of Genie A. Ecloff's middle English. Her middle English was better than any prof that I ever had. She taught me this sound of Chaucer. And I'm thinking of Joanne Stewart, who was littler than I am, but had as great a wallop. And I'm eternally grateful for what they taught me.

Flossie Lewis: And I'm grateful to this company because there is such a thing as teachers who aren't recognized. And there is such a thing as teaching. And I beg your pardon, there is such a thing as good books that deserve to be taught. I'm a little bit disenchanted with the Internet. And of course I don't like anything about Twitter.

Lauren Schiller: Does anyone?

Flossie Lewis: And not because our president is such a practitioner.

Steve Goldbloom: Of course she went viral.

Flossie Lewis: But to think that we have come to the point where we accept Twitter as a form of composition is moving in the direction of duck speak in 1984. Thank you very much for the moment.

Lauren Schiller: A cautionary tale. Well, Steve, will you tell us a bit about how Brief But Spectacular got started? What is it that you're hoping for when people see these glimpses into other people's lives?

Steve Goldbloom: Sure. Well, first I have to pick up on a theme, which is, Flossie, about collaboration and credit. I'm up here, but there's other people I have to mention. Zach Land-Miller, I don't know where he is, but where is he? There he is, my long-time producing partner from episode #1 makes Brief with me, and he does about 15 different jobs in one; Melissa Williams who runs my production company Second Peninsula, and she helped produce this event and countless others; and lastly is PBS NewsHour because if it was not for PBS NewsHour, nobody's up here. And two people I want to call out. Mike Rancilio is the general manager. He's here. And Sara Just is the executive producer of NewsHour, and she commissioned and greenlit this show over three years ago, and I'm eternally grateful to you for doing that. So thank you.

Steve Goldbloom: But the intention, as you said, was always to invite viewers to walk in somebody else's shoes. And we in the beginning felt a lot of pressure to book these big guests. So we went after Alec Baldwin, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Marina Abramović. And people were pretty excited to see them. But what has been heartwarming to learn from doing the series is to see the audience's overwhelming response to people that they didn't know. And the two best examples of that are Flossie and Mahogany, by the way, the two best names we've ever had on the show, Flossie and Mahogany.

Steve Goldbloom: And all the accident involved in how we met also melts my heart. I met Flossie completely at random in her retirement home. We were shooting a movie with Rita Moreno, and we literally bumped into her and just knew she was an original force of nature. And I said, "Will you talk to me?" And she said, "Sure, I'll talk to you."

Lauren Schiller: My understanding is she said, "Now, what are you doing here?"

Steve Goldbloom: Yeah, "Who are you? Why are you here?" So I explained myself, and then I had always wanted to interview somebody about life in their 90s. That had been something I'd wanted to do. And as we were talking with Flossie, Zach and I got this rush of adrenaline that you know as a journalist too, and I got the same feeling with Mahogany, which is, "Oh my God, people are going to see this. People are really going to see this."

Steve Goldbloom: And it was halfway through the interview we just looked at each other and said, "We have to get out of the way, and we have to go home, and we have to represent this person's story." And we just had a hunch that people were really going to spread this thing around. And they both reached millions within a day. And that just doesn't happen with everyone. I'd like it if it did, but it doesn't, so that's what they have in common: They're both truly original voices.

Lauren Schiller: I wanted to ask you, Flossie, I mean, you have a platform now. You have a platform about growing old with grace. So now that you have millions of people viewing you and hundreds in this room, is there anything ... not to put you on the spot. What do we all need to know? What is it you would like us to be aware of that we should talk about? Because nobody wants to talk about getting old.

Flossie Lewis: I want us to be aware of how tyranny asserts itself, how it comes to be. And I'm thinking now of a book by Professor Stephen Greenblatt, who was one of my profs. The name of the book is Tyranny. It came out in 2018. There were lots of authorities on Shakespeare, but he's outstanding. Sometimes he's a little bit ... he sells too many books, so that makes people suspicious, but he's worth the read. And in Tyranny he takes the great tragedies that Shakespeare has written and shows that the tyrant doesn't make himself. He needs enablers. He needs agitators. He needs people to push him. He needs people who whisper things in his ear. It may be a Steve Bannon. It may be a bunch of witches. The witch is in the eye of the beholder, the witches in the self as well.

Flossie Lewis: And to think about that book and remembering Shakespeare the way I taught it is to make me a better teacher and is to make me able to say, look at what we have today. Who are or who were his enablers? Who were his agitators? Why did they push him into the position he now occupies, and what's the answer to getting rid of him with some degree of our dignity? So I hope that answers the question.

Lauren Schiller: So that is actually a great setup for Mahogany because the role of poetry in telling the stories of the tyrants, and the saviors, and the angels, and the devils, and the truth, just telling the truth, as a poet I'm wondering for you, Mahogany, can you feel a poem coming on? How do you know when it's time to tell something through poetry?

Mahogany Browne: I no longer write from inspiration only. For the past I guess 10 years I've been practicing every day writing and just what does that mean to exercise the muscle as a writer. I mean, I write every day about everything. I'm writing about the cigarette lady in Brooklyn. I'm writing about the fact that it cost $15 to get to Staten Island and who wants to go there on purpose. I'm writing ... That's just like one way.

Lauren Schiller: It's not 25 cents anymore?

Mahogany Browne: No.

Lauren Schiller: What happened? All right.

Mahogany Browne: So I have these just like everyday moments. Like it's you're talking about you're writing history as it's happening because the poets and the writers, those are the first historians. So the poem really happens when I read it into the space with other people and I see how it affects them. And then I think, okay, so I've worked on the craft of it, and I know that it needs to be said, and now I know like I have to like finesse it and make sure that it can stand alone whether I'm here or not. So usually it takes two different settings--the writing is one, which I do every day for an hour a day, even on Twitter. And I-

Flossie Lewis: I knew it. I saw your face. I knew it. I knew it.

Lauren Schiller: Okay, I will just say you're the one redeeming quality on Twitter.

Mahogany Browne: I love it, but I can admit that like if you have a bad timeline, it could be trash. You just have a moment where you're like, "Who gave you Internet access? Net neutrality for everyone but you." So, yeah, I think when the poem hits the air, that's when I realize this poem is super necessary. Also when I'm scared, I'm realizing that a poem is happening.

Flossie Lewis: So, Mahogany, you and I are going to get together, and you are going to show me your Twitter fold.

Mahogany Browne: Done.

Flossie Lewis: Okay?

Mahogany Browne: Yes.

Flossie Lewis: That's a deal.

Mahogany Browne: We're going to record it. That too will go viral. It's going to be good too.

Steve Goldbloom: Yeah. Perfect. That's our next episode.

Lauren Schiller: There you go, a promise.

Steve Goldbloom: We'll be there.

Lauren Schiller: It's that Brooklyn-Oakland thing, I'm telling you. So we want to show the clip of you reading or speaking, I should say--I'm reading Black Girl Magic, you're speaking Black Girl Magic--this poem that you wrote, which I would say actually reads two different ways. When I read it on the page and when I hear you say it, the power in your voice is so incredible, and everyone is going to get to experience this in a moment. Is there anything that you want to say about that poem before we show it, which is a weird thing to say, before we show your poem?

Mahogany Browne: It speaks for itself.

Lauren Schiller: Okay. I agree.

Steve Goldbloom: I agree.

Lauren Schiller: Okay. Can we play that?

Mahogany Browne: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/brief/172844/mahogany-l-browne

Lauren Schiller: it's brilliant.

Mahogany Browne: Thank you. That day was funny because I was late, and we did it in this library in Brooklyn at Pride Institute.

Steve Goldbloom: We were going to JFK.

Mahogany Browne: Yes.

Steve Goldbloom: And we almost didn't make it in time. And you gave us one take and said, "That's it."

Mahogany Browne: Yes.

Steve Goldbloom: I hoped ... I looked at Zach. I said, "Did you get it all?" And he said, "Yeah," because that's all we have.

Mahogany Browne: He was like, "Do you want to do the other thing?" I was like, "No. We're done."

Steve Goldbloom: Yeah. You left it on the floor.

Flossie Lewis: You know, this kid and I could have hit it off.

Lauren Schiller: So I, in Poetry Magazine, which a poet pointed me to, you called this poem a triumphant and explosive war cry.

Mahogany Browne: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lauren Schiller: And in it you're directly addressing black girls. But yet I am clearly not a black girl, but I also feel like you're talking to me so that I can understand how it might feel. And I wonder as you ... Let's talk about that poem specifically. Are you thinking in both those terms? Is it about 'I want other people to understand where I'm coming from'? Or is it about 'I want you to know I know where you're coming from too'?

Mahogany Browne: I wrote that poem, when I said "war cry" in the Poetry Magazine essay, I was really speaking about how the poem came to be, which was going to these community rallies and seeing the mothers of the slain victims of police brutality stand up and be there for everyone. And they asked poets all the time to share a poem. And a lot of heart-wrenching poems happened, but I just wanted a moment of redemption to say that I see you, and also I see myself, and also I see my daughter. So when I wrote the poem, I was clear that I just wanted to have a moment of joy even though we are surviving trauma. What does resilience look like?

Mahogany Browne: And I think when people who are not black find joy in it, that is the moment of humanity. That is when you are seeing someone see themselves, revel in themselves, and that is a joyous moment, and that's where our connection is. The first thing I did wrong was look at the video and then look at the comments section. Oh, it hurt my heart. The first thing I saw was like, "What about white girl magic?" And I was like, "Really?"

Mahogany Browne: Like, you have America, mama. You all right. You're good. You're good. We've got two minutes, 15 seconds. Give me this. But really it was just the moment of here we are making space. Here I was trying to make space where it felt like there was none, right? And that's not true. If I'm honest, my pillars are Gwendolyn Brooks, and June Jordan, and Audre Lorde, and Ntozake Shange. And those black women writers make, made space for me to be able to even say that, to even find the articulation of what it looks like to love yourself when everything around you says don't.

Mahogany Browne: So when I see people loving that poem and not being a person of African or African-American descent, that is what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to show you what self-love can look like in a time where love is very hard to present itself.

Lauren Schiller: Well, it's also interesting just you talking about, both of you talking about people who come before you. And I will say that is one of the things that I do like about Twitter is that it leads you to people you might not otherwise discover. So if I follow who you follow, then I'm going to learn a bit more about where you're coming from.

Lauren Schiller: But I guess Twitter leads us to the question of polarization, and difficult conversations, and everyone getting into their own camps. And I wonder--I mean, this is really a question for all of you, and whoever would like to answer it first--how do we have these hard conversations without being at each other's throats? How do we open those doors?

Flossie Lewis: You start in the classroom where if the kids are going to tear at one another, you still have some authority to say, "Cool it." You start with a book that dares to touch on some of these issues. You start with a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks called Abortion, where the black mothers says, "I loved every one of you, but I couldn't feed all of you." And that's hard to take in the light of so many stereotypes because black women don't have as many abortions as white women do, and not alone because they can't afford them. So I think you start with the classroom. You start with books that you think not only should be read but that you want to teach because you have something to say about them. And then you fight it out.

Lauren Schiller: And how do you do that civilly? Because that's, I feel like, the skill that we all need to learn is how to find the common ground and stick to your point.

Flossie Lewis: You fight it out by taking a stand and letting the kid fight back, and you do that not only by office hours, you do it through composition. You do it through writing. And sometimes you have to lose a battle. I think one of the things that I learned early was that some of the kids I was teaching were 10 times smarter than I was. And once I recognized that, half the battle was over.

Mahogany Browne: I love that idea of it starts in the classroom. I agree. I facilitate poetry workshops around the world, and the one thing I always return to with the young poet is, "I don't believe you. If you're going to write this, be honest. Don't write what you think I want to hear. Write what actually needs to be said." And that's where the hard conversations happen, when you're willing to stand up and say this thing that's super difficult, and it may not be the pleaser for the crowd, but it's necessary to start that pivot in how we deal with each other, and how we change ideas, and how we change movements. So, yeah, I love the classroom.

Flossie Lewis: See, you said, "I don't believe you." And I would say, "Watch out for the passive voice."

Mahogany Browne: That's why you're the teacher.

Steve Goldbloom: I have to say-

Lauren Schiller: I see a co-teaching collaboration in our future.

Steve Goldbloom: I have to pick up something Flossie said. There's two books you should all get. First is Black Girl Magic. They should buy your book, and they should also buy a book by Flossie Lewis that I found on Amazon called Getting Engaged: Falling in Love with Your Paper, which you wrote in 1984. I got a copy of it on Amazon. And there's a stretch in the book where she ... By the way, it's all brilliant, but there's a stretch in the book where she talks about falling in love, falling in love with your paper, taking your paper out to dinner, making love to your paper, at one point you said.

Steve Goldbloom: And here's the line she says, this is directly to the student, "I know you are sometimes stuck. You're tied to a paper you have to finish. You have this act to perform, and you want to get it done as quickly as possible. I repeat, don't. It's so boring. It's so boring to pretend to love. It's such a drag." Those are your words.

Flossie Lewis: Yes, it's so boring to pretend to love, yes, indeed.

Lauren Schiller: So I want to talk about this point of authenticity and what you really feel because I feel like we are living also in this time of totally curated personalities and that we all feel like we're not people anymore, we're brands. And we have to stand for something, and we have to look a certain way, and we have to be consistent about it or we get yelled at by other people on the Internet.

Lauren Schiller: How do you ... This may be a personal advice question, but how does a person stay authentic in the middle of all that pressure to be, I don't know, something they really aren't or that other people expect them to be?

Mahogany Browne: Have a Flossie in your life. You really need a good tribe, and that means who are your circle of friends? Who do you check and balance with? Sometimes I get caught in the hype, or I could write a poem, and I think, "Oh, this person said it's amazing." And then I'll take it to a friend. I'm like, "What do you think?" And they're like, "Mmm." And I'm like, "Ugh. But he said it was great." But you need the circle of people who want you to push forward and be better. I think that's how you can be your most authentic self.

Mahogany Browne: And also Instagram I find I feel like you feel about Twitter, I feel about Instagram, which is the curated brand. It's the perfect picture, the perfect filter. There's this filter app now where you can do this and make yourself skinnier. It's bananas, and of course I was like, "I just want to see." Oh my God, I'm a 2. That's insane. I deleted it. Don't worry.

Lauren Schiller: Does it work on like ankles?

Mahogany Browne: It works everywhere.

Lauren Schiller: Everywhere.

Mahogany Browne: But you look kind of like an ocean of a body instead of your actual. It's weird. But that said, I'm looking at those apps now, and I'm thinking the best way to stay authentic is to be honest with like our flaws and how we're changing. And you can love something today and not tomorrow. And you can like support someone and then find out they did something that is less desirable than humans need and say, you know what? Call that out instead of just strong and wrong. It's okay to be wrong. If we say that three times a day, we will feel much better. But then you also have to meet the "It's okay to be wrong" with "What am I going to do to make it better?"

Mahogany Browne: You can't just walk in the wrong and it's like, "Oh, my flaws are so dope. I'm out here harming people with my flaws. It's all good because I said it three times today, so I'm okay." No.

Lauren Schiller: Right. Just live with it?!

Mahogany Browne: Once you accept that it's a flaw, it's something that can be changed, then you have to accept the responsibility of how to make it better, how to do better.

Lauren Schiller: That sounds like good parenting advice too.

Mahogany Browne: I have a twenty-year old, so we have these conversations often.

Lauren Schiller: Steve, through Brief But Spectacular it seems like you also have an opportunity to get past this sort of curated approach. It feels like when I see the stories that you produce, I feel like I'm seeing inside the person that is talking, that they really are presenting their true selves. How do you do that?

Steve Goldbloom: We're always searching for that answer. That's what we're always looking for. And we were really lucky to meet Flossie and Mahogany. But now we have a science that we're using to find our new subjects. And so one of the things that we're doing right now with Brief but Spectacular is looking at some of the leading issues in the country like misuse of prisons, substance abuse, mental health. And we're going to areas in the country that are most underrepresented.

Steve Goldbloom: And so to give you an example, last week Zach and I were in Tucson speaking with a young woman whose mother was deported, who raised her siblings and just graduated high school. We were the next day in Navajo Nation speaking with the lone female delegate on the Navajo Council about sexual abuse. The next day we were in Olympia, Washington, speaking to a mother whose son is incarcerated in 23-hour lockdown, has bipolar. He's bipolar.

Flossie Lewis: Oh my God.

Steve Goldbloom: And we talked to her about the criminalization of mental health. By the way, we're only able to do this right now because of the Heising-Simons Foundation, whose mandate has been that we get outside the coast and tell these stories. And so what we're trying to do is plant a seed with people, find these original voices, and then come back to them.

Lauren Schiller: So actually on that note we have a question from the audience that says, "How will I know when I have a brief but spectacular moment? I'm in my late 60s and still waiting for it, dear Steve."

Steve Goldbloom: "Dear Steve?" Okay. I have to say this because my parents are here. My wife is here. My dad's father is the namesake. When I was little, he lives in Nova Scotia, I would sneak out of synagogue, walk around the block, make it look like I'd been there the whole time. When I came back, he would say, "Brief but spectacular." That is the name. And he ... It's true. His name is Dick Goldbloom, and he's the 100th episode. We interviewed him on what it feels like to have memory loss or dementia, which he is experiencing now. So your brief but spectacular moment, the answer is I don't know. Email me, and make your video and make your voice known because we'll know it when we see it.

Lauren Schiller: But it feels like inside ourselves we should be able to recognize that too. Do you ever have a moment like that where you're like, "This is it?" Maybe it's black girl magic.

Mahogany Browne: No. I have the moments when I'm telling the story and someone goes, "What?" And you're like, "Oh, that's odd? That's a lot?" And they're like, "How did you get out?" And I'm like, "I don't know. I just did this thing, and then I wrote this poem." And they're like inspired, and I did not know that it was brief but spectacular. Black Girl Magic wasn't even the poem they asked me for. So that's funny.

Steve Goldbloom: That's right.

Mahogany Browne: Yeah. You asked me for something else, and then I said, "Eh, I have this other thing I really feel good about. Can I do that?"

Steve Goldbloom: Yeah. That's right.

Mahogany Browne: So in the moment I didn't think of it as like, "This is it." I just thought, "It's just on my heart. I really want to share this, and hopefully it'll change someone's mind." And since it aired, I've received about five that I know of to my person account, five videos from five young girls, all ages 4th grade and lower. I don't know what age that is, but they like this. And they use the poem in oratorical contests now. And I literally am like balling on the side of a freakin' mountain watching someone send me ... And I'm like, "What is she doing?"

Mahogany Browne: And then she starts this choreography, and she does like the voice. Like, when I say, "You are this," and she does it, and I'm like, "Are you kidding me? This is amazing." I'm going to cry now. Okay.

Steve Goldbloom: Well, I have to say, we were typing, somebody asked us if Brief was on YouTube. And so we searched it, and we saw a couple of them on YouTube, and then I saw all these other videos called Brief but Spectacular on YouTube, and I was like, "What? What is this?" And I clicked them, and there are hundreds of user-generated videos from people around the country and saying-

Mahogany Browne: Doing everything.

Steve Goldbloom: ... everything. And I was like-

Lauren Schiller: There you go.

Steve Goldbloom: ... I even had Sarah Jess, and I was like, "I don't know. I'd love to take credit for these videos, but we didn't shoot these. These aren't ours." So that has been one of the unintended consequences.

Lauren Schiller: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Steve Goldbloom: It's beautiful, yeah. It-

Flossie Lewis: Steve, may I say something?

Steve Goldbloom: Of course.

Flossie Lewis: She is a hard act to follow.

Steve Goldbloom: So are you.

Mahogany Browne: I'm staying with Flossie forever.

Flossie Lewis: But the world is hers. My world is passing. Her world is coming. And I think most of us realize that, and we will accept it gratefully and graciously very close.

Lauren Schiller: This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller. This conversation with Steve Goldbloom, creator of Brief but Spectactular of PBS NewsHour and two of his most popular briefs, writer and teacher Flossie Lewis and poet and professor Mahogany L. Browne. It was recorded live at the Commonwealth Club in California on August 22, 2018. We'll be right back.

Lauren Schiller: Hey, there, it's Lauren. Before we get back to it, I want to let you know about our new Facebook group for everyday activists. If you're someone who wants to connect with other ordinary people seeking to make extraordinary change, come join The Inflection Point Society. Together we'll have important conversations and come away with simple daily actions to help each other rise up. Search for Inflection Point Society on Facebook or go to Facebook.com/groups/inflectionpointsociety.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller, and this is Inflection Point. This conversation with Steve Goldbloom, creator of Brief but Spectacular on PBS NewsHour and two of his most popular briefs, writer and teacher Flossie Lewis and poet and professor Mahogany L. Browne. It was recorded live at the Commonwealth Club in California on August 22, 2018.

Lauren Schiller: I love that girls are sending you their videos because one of the things that I have been thinking about and has been sort of bothering me lately is that we have had a lot of talk of empowerment. And I want to know how are we going to get from empowerment to actual power? And what is that bridge? And how do we actually make change with the momentum that is being created around all these issues that we're tackling around racism and sexism and ageism, and add your ism? Fill in the blank.

Mahogany Browne: I think mentorship is key. I also the young people, they have it on lock. They know the verbiage is changing so drastically and so quickly often times there is little grace when you're learning and relearning. But the young people have a great idea of the way in which we're going, and I'm talking high school, y'all. I'm talking middle school, just talking to young people about pronoun use and racial epithets.

Mahogany Browne: They are on it, and they're super empathetic. They're super compassionate, and they're ready to like fight for what's right, which I think for some reason there was this lull. I don't know what it is. Maybe it was like reality TV, which I love. I just want people to know, I'm here for all of it, but it's anthropological research. It's research. But they like the ... But I don't know when the disconnect happened, whether it was like money, whether it was the crack epidemic, and then of course the generations that it affected. But right now, the time is now, and the youth, the young people who are writing, and speaking, and protesting, they have it on lock, so I think the power is already in their hands. It requires younger teachers to really just like show them the way, like open the door, make sure the door is open, right? Like Game of Thrones, hold the door--we're supposed to do that. That is our job, not like-

Lauren Schiller: [crosstalk 00:35:49]. Yeah.

Mahogany Browne: Thank you. Not fight them on respectability, not fight them on civility. That doesn't matter when you're trying to get free. When you're trying to liberate a people, civility ain't going to work.

Lauren Schiller: So there is another question here about which poet should we turn to to feel like we can take their words and turn them into action? Who will inspire us to do that?

Flossie Lewis: Well, let's talk about gender issues or relationship between men and women. I think we start with some of the old fashion stuff. We dare to start with how Shakespeare treats men and women in love. We dare to start with Romeo and Juliet, and we dare to see how equal their relationship is and how much they're hemmed in by a society that won't let them love. But I think that language itself can be liberated. I know that sounds like a lot of malarkey, but it has worked for me. And I remember when I would teach Romeo and Juliet, and I would let the kids take over, and they would do the balcony. And I would have to separate them with hot water.

Lauren Schiller: You mean while they were kissing? [inaudible 00:37:20].

Flossie Lewis: No, they don't kiss in the balcony scene, but my kids did.

Steve Goldbloom: I can't. Can I tell you, can I just say one things I've learned from Flossy, watching, rewatching the video just now with you? The scene in the cab, I'm so terrified in that car ride. I don't know if you know that, because I'll remind you, it was raining. I was worried about transportation, and I was worried the kids weren't going to show up. And I was worried that I was going to have wasted your time. And I was petrified in that car ride. And I remember there's a lot of silence. And I look to you and I said ... This is what you were wearing actually, and I said, "This is a beautiful whatever." And you said, "Don't make small talk."

Steve Goldbloom: But it tells you everything you need to know about Flossie because it's the power of intention. When I called her even the other day and I said, "You've reached 100 million people. It just ran on NewsHour Friday night." And I said, "And the comment that keeps coming up is you inspire people and you remind them of teachers in their life."

Steve Goldbloom: And you just said, "Let me internalize that. Let me think about that." And I thought, how long do we do that in the rapid form of communication or Twitter? How often do we just sit and think about what was just said? And so I've learned that from you. So thank you.

Flossie Lewis: Let's see what I have learned from you.

Steve Goldbloom: Oh [crosstalk 00:39:06]. Wrap it up.

Flossie Lewis: But a gonif is always lovable. Don't use that term unless you are deeply for that person.

Steve Goldbloom: Flossie called me a gonif. And-

Flossie Lewis: Yes, he is a gonif.

Steve Goldbloom: Crook, thief in Yiddish. And I said, "That's not ..." But you said, "Because you steal my heart." That's what you said.

Lauren Schiller: Nice.

Steve Goldbloom: I was so glad you said it because I was worried about that one.

Lauren Schiller: You didn't know this was actually a conversation about love, did you? It's actually what it's all about. So, Flossie, so I want to get back to this question that is so hard to talk about, which is growing old and growing old with grace, and you put it in your Brief but Spectacular story. How do you prioritize your time? How do you decide what you want to do each day as you think about the time you got-

Flossie Lewis: Well, if you live in a retirement community, there are activities. You can participate. You can sit. And if you sit, invariably you will fall asleep. But if you take an active part, we have a poetry class every Monday. And I work with the activity director. And we have a topic, a theme, and we have anywhere from 10 to 15 old ladies and some gentlemen who go back to find a poem that illustrates that theme. And if they can't, maybe they start writing themselves. And that's something to see at age 80 and 90 and getting up there.

Steve Goldbloom: That's part of the film that we didn't show, which includes we were there for one of those poetry sessions, and it was unforgettable. And Flossie took a backseat to that one and really let the other residence shine, and-

Flossie Lewis: And were they ever good. And there was Hugh Richmond, who was dying of pancreatic cancer and said very clearly, "I've had a good life. I'm ready to go." And he, knowing that he would be dead in a few more days because, guess what, his doctors had given him permission, he could stand up and read [inaudible 00:41:44], Robert Frost, and make the room shake. He hadn't gotten yet close to, how shall I say, Derek Walcott, for example, whose poetry he would have loved too, or Langston Hughes, or Gwendolyn Brooks, or some of the other guys and girls.

Lauren Schiller: And this brings us to another audience questions, and I apologize, the original question was for Mahogany, which is how can we all learn to use poetry to get through hard times?

Mahogany Browne: We had a poetic protest responding to the police brutality. And it is called Black Poets Speak Out, and that was with Jericho Brown, Sherina Rodriguez, Amanda Johnston, Jonterri Gadson, and myself. And it was a moment where all of these artist and poets and professors were like, "What are we doing? How do we respond? I feel like I'm going crazy. I feel like I don't understand. I feel silenced. I feel like I'm silencing myself."

Mahogany Browne: And we decided to do this initiative, which in turn still exists, and it is an archive of poetry written by all people from 40 years ago to two years ago. And I learned that poetry can be the balm that we require as citizens, as global citizens, as aware citizens, as human beings. There are times when we can't articulate the frustration. We don't know yet how to process what we're feeling. It just all feels kind of jumbled. Then you read the right poem, and it just kind of like clarifies. The room becomes still. I think someone else is doing a particular project for Poetry Review or Paris Review, Sarah Kay, who introduced us.

Steve Goldbloom: The first episode we did it.

Mahogany Browne: Mm-hmm (affirmative), and she did this ... She's doing it now, and you can find it on parisreview.com. And it's called Poetry Rx. And I think the basis is you ask. Someone sent in a letter: "I'm having heartbreak. What do I do?" And they prescribe a poem to read, and a specific poem, and it's really, it's such a great that you're in that moment of inarticulation, and you read that thing that thing that articulates it all, and you're like, "Oh, I'm not alone." And what does that mean to just not be alone, to not be the only one feeling this way and to know that there is, for lack of a better cliché, light at the other side of the tunnel? Gosh. Sorry.

Lauren Schiller: We're living in hard times. It's okay.

Mahogany Browne: I know. That was a bad one, guys.

Lauren Schiller: Right. Poets are not supposed to make bad, like those cliché metaphors.

Mahogany Browne: Yeah.

Lauren Schiller: Is that the ... Okay.

Mahogany Browne: I was going to blame Twitter, and-

Lauren Schiller: No, no, no. It just gets ingrained in you. Sometimes you can't help it. "Dear Flossie," this is turning into an advice column, "why did you decide to get a PhD after you retired from Lowell? your PhD classmate Hillary."

Flossie Lewis: I'd like to answer that question. Because I was scared. The PhD, for me, was unfinished business. We had so many principals in the public schools, even in San Francisco, who were semi-literate as far as I was concerned. But they had their EdD, their doctor's degree in education. And I thought, "Well, I can do that. I can get a doctor's degree in education. I've been a teacher for a long time." But I took my sabbatical years at Cal, and since I was a teacher of English, I got to work with some of the loveliest, greatest people I've ever known in my life.

Flossie Lewis: And in my first sabbatical year, I met Professor AAlex Zwerdling, who died very recently and who opened my eyes to what the English language was all about. And in his class when I was already an experienced teacher, he gave me my first real taste of George Orwell, which wasn't 1984, but which was politics in the English language. And that made me a teacher, that I could see how you could lie, how you could twist, how you could kill with language. And even though I killed some of my kids by making them avoid the passive voice, it became I had something to hold onto to.

Flossie Lewis: And when I became disillusioned with the courses in education, I had by that time become something of a writer. I had some short stories published, and I found that I wanted the PhD in English, and I thought that when I had finished my work as a teacher in high school, I would go back as a student, and those were some of the richest years in my life. That's why I waited. I wasn't sure of myself. And when I was a little more certain, then I could take on the rigors of the PhD at UC Berkeley. And let me tell you, it was not easy. Even though I was a high school teacher, I'd get my composition slashed the way only the profs could do it.

Lauren Schiller: They're hardest on the good students, you know. You may have heard that.

Flossie Lewis: Taught me a lesson in humility too.

Lauren Schiller: Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Flossie, Mahogany, and Steve for joining us all this evening. I'm Lauren Schiller, and this meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California, the place where you're in the know, is adjourned. [inaudible 00:48:27]. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller: This conversation with Steve Goldbloom, creator of Brief but Spectacular on PBS NewsHour and two of his most popular briefs, writer and teacher 94-year-old Flossie Lewis and poet and professor Mahogany L. Browne, and me took place at the Commonwealth Club of California. Many thanks to them for inviting me to participate. I'll put a link to Brief but Spectacular and the Commonwealth Club on my website at inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller: And while you're at it, remember to subscribe to Inflection Point. We're on Apple Podcast, Radio Public, Stitcher, and NPR1, and all your favorite podcatchers. I'm Lauren Schiller, and this is Inflection Point. That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcast, Radio Public, Stitcher, and NPR1. Give us a five-star review and subscribe to the podcast.

Lauren Schiller: Know a woman with a great rising-up story? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there I invite you to support Inflection Point with a monthly or one-time contribution. Your support keeps women's stories front and center. Just got to inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and follow me on Twitter at laschiller.

Lauren Schiller: To find out more about the guests you've heard today and to sign up for our email newsletter, you know where to go: inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our story editor and content manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller. Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 5: From PRX.

Photo taken at the Commonwealth Club of California, by Ed Ritger

Stitch Fix Founder Katrina Lake gives the C-Suite a Makeover

Lauren Schiller August 15, 2018

At age 35, Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake became the youngest female founder and CEO to take a company public in 2017. Stitch Fix is now worth over two billion dollars. She has not only changed the way many of us shop for clothes, but she’s also changing how we think about leaders. Find out she learned to embrace her history-making role as the youngest woman to take a startup to IPO.

TRANSCRIPT

Katrina Lake: " I was almost like prickly about being a female CEO in the early days and I think it was at a time when you would see companies like Dropbox and AirBNB and whatever else and I was like, I just want to be a CEO and I don't need to be a female CEO, and I don't need to be the female CEO. "

Lauren Schiller: Meet Katrina Lake. If you've got a Facebook feed there's a good chance you've come across her online personal styling company, StitchFix. If you haven't come across this phenomenon it's like having a personal clothing stylist pick out clothes for you, ship them to your house and not complain when you send anything back. At age 35, in 2017, Katrina became the youngest female founder and CEO to take a company public. Stitchfix is now worth over $2 billion, and she got there by breaking the mold of what you might still typically think of when you think of leadership.

Katrina Lake: "I think a lot of the things that you think about as an entrepreneur, you think somebody who's like super risky and somebody who's going to stay up for all hours tinkering with something in their garage. Not that I didn't spend all hours doing StitchFix at some point, but you know, I don't think that I had like the typical traits of an entrepreneur. "

Lauren Schiller: Katrina has not only changed the way many of us shop with StitchFix, but she's also changing how we think about leaders. For one thing, you may have caught all the press hullaballoo over the picture of her from the Nasdaq IPO when she stood onstage with her young son on her hip unintentionally setting the tone for a new generation of women leaders. Her executive team is as close to a 50/50 gender split as you can get and now she plans to send a message intentionally about the importance of family leave because she's pregnant with her second child and is going to take a full 16-week maternity leave.

Katrina Lake: "I had to do the same research of trying to figure out who were the people before me that took a maternity leave when they were a public company CEO? Like, I mean, you can do the math. If I was the youngest female founder and I'm 35, you know, there's not going to be a lot of other examples out there of people who faced that, and so there's not a lot of precedent. So, somebody who now is raising young people and is thinking about like how the world that you see impacts who people become, there aren't great examples."

Lauren Schiller: I mean, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Case in point, before starting her own company, Lake was convinced that someone somewhere would have developed a new vision for disrupting retail, but after meeting with hundreds of entrepreneurs she became convinced that the only way to find that company was to start it herself. I spoke with Katrina Lake onstage at Inforum at the Common Wealth Club to find out what makes her tick and how she turned this startup into a successful IPO.

(LIVE CONVERSATION)

Lauren Schiller: I have to make a confession before we really get into it, which is that I had to change my clothes like 14 times before I got here.

Katrina Lake: I did too. It's okay.

Lauren Schiller: I don't know about all of you, but it was really hard to decide what to wear, especially when sitting down with a fashion entrepreneur such as yourself, but it made me start thinking about what the role of clothing is for women and men and the way that we thinks bout it and how it says who we are, and I'm curious what your thoughts are? Your entire business is around making sure that people are wearing stuff that they look good in and that they're comfortable in. How do you think about the role of clothing?

Katrina Lake: It was a major point of inspiration to me and I think two different angles. So, one, there are so few other categories where people really thoughtfully think about like oh, I'm coveting this and I want this and you think about something for weeks and you get inspired by it and I mean, there's so few other categories. Food is probably one of them also where you have the same emotional connection to it, but with clothing it's just one of these things that is so important in people's lives, and not in a materialistic way, but in this way that like you thoughtfully decide every day what you're going to put on your body and that means something. And, so, I think that made it very attractive to me because I think it's just this really interesting huge category that people weren't really thinking about what does technology bring to it and what's the next generation of it? I think the second element they're getting to a little bit is like it really does have an impact on who you are. I know this, and this was shared recently, but I'm now, I don't know, four or five months pregnant. I'm in that phase where you're like chubby but not pregnant yet.

Lauren Schiller: Nothing fits.

Lauren Schiller: Congratulations!

Katrina Lake: Nothing fits and it's such a good reminder of the humility of like how much I really appreciate when I have clothes that fit and when I know what I want to wear every day. The reality is if you're feeling great about who you are, if you're feeling confident about who you are, it really does impact all the touchpoints in your day. I think all of us know that feeling of when you're not quite feeling that way or the flip side is when you are and I think how electric that can be and I think in all these little micro moments in your day it can change your life of how kind you are to somebody, how kind you are to your kids, how outgoing you're going to be, how confident you are when you're at work doing something that's really important. For all those reasons I love that apparel was both super meaningful in people's lives and I think in these really small, but meaningful ways has an impact on people's lives every single day.

Lauren Schiller: What was happening in your life when you came up with the idea for StitchFix?

Katrina Lake: It's hard to say exactly when I came up with the idea, but I guess some history. Growing up as a ten-year-old, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would have told you a doctor. It had never occurred to me that I should want to be an entrepreneur, I would be a good entrepreneur. You take all these, I forget what they're called, like a Myers-Briggs test. You take these tests when you're growing up and like zero of them told me I should be a entrepreneur. My mom was a public school teacher here in San Francisco for a long time. My dad was a doctor, but always in the university system. He was here at UCSF for probably over 20 years or so. There was not like an entrepreneurial bone in my body.

Katrina Lake: My journey was a little bit of an unconventional one where I worked at a consulting firm. I did that kind of out of indecision because I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but I wasn't ready to do that yet. I worked at a consulting firm and was lucky enough to kind of stumble into the retail and restaurant practice, and that is where both retail and restaurant I love because they're just these big meaningful categories.

Katrina Lake: The journey was more like I loved those categories and I was like, I want to work at whatever is going to be the future. I spent a bunch of time looking to join that company, and so I interviewed a bunch of places. I almost took a job at Starbucks. Ultimately, it didn't quite feel like that was exactly it and then I worked at a venture capital firm, thinking, okay, this is going to be a great way for me to meet the person who's going to create the future, so I went and met with 100 entrepreneurs in my two years there and didn't meet the person that I thought was going to be the future of retail, but got to meet 100 people who were all like pretty normal people who were not qualified to be an entrepreneur. I realized that any person could be this, and I think you get exposed to the Mark Zuckerberg and the Steve Jobs of the world and you don't have in your frame of reference that could be me. By meeting 100 people, you meet a lot of different types of people, so I realized I could do it. You know, I was really on this journey of I just want to work at whatever company is reinventing retail in the future and the formation of StitchFix was really just realizing that like, if I believe there is a different future out there, I could start it.

Lauren Schiller: Just create it. Just make your own future.

Katrina Lake: That was the beginning.

Lauren Schiller: Were you always a shopper? I mean, from an intellectual standpoint it was interesting to you, but in terms of your own personal, was that something that you either hated doing or loved doing?

Katrina Lake: Maybe both. I have a sister actually who's here. She's not the shopper either, but we have a sister who's the age in between us. She was a shopper and so she was the one who was definitely always the expert. She was the one taking the fashion risks. Natalie and I were probably more the followers in taking her hand me downs. What I still loved, and what I think even people who hate shopping can resonate with is there is nothing better than being able to feel like you have clothes in your closet that you love and there is nothing better than putting on an outfit and being like, this is a great look. Like, there is nothing better than that feeling. I really loved that and I loved the ways that clothing could contribute to that.

Katrina Lake: My middle sister literally will like, she would spend her free time looking at like the new arrivals on websites and that's not really how I spend my free time.

Lauren Schiller: Now you just have a company that has a combination of machines and people doing that for you.

Katrina Lake: Right. Well, and I think that's part of the inspiration too is there are people who love doing this and who are experts and know everything and in their free time love to do this, and wouldn't it be great to be able to create a job for people like that. That actually ended up being part of the inspiration too.

Lauren Schiller: How important was going to business school and creating this idea?

Katrina Lake: For me it was important because I wasn't this super risky entrepreneur type. I was never going to quit my reasonably well-paying job and have a gap on my resume. That was not something I was comfortable doing. For me, it was important because it created this two-year period of time where I could take this risk. I went to business school and my plan was to have a company off the ground, paying myself a salary, paying back my student loans the day I graduated, and if I wasn't able to have a business idea that was good enough that someone was going to give me money, if I wasn't able to have an idea that I wanted to do so that I would want to spend so far seven plus years on, then the worst case scenario is well, I have this MBA and I can go work at a great company. So, I saw it as kind of a risk-reduced way to start a company. For me, it was really important because I have a hard time imagining how else I would have been able to find kind of a two-year time period like that.

Katrina Lake: You know, I think that there's a network element that's somewhat valuable. The classes were great. It's so fun. I think, kind of like, probably the reason many of you are in this room, like getting to be an adult and go and learn is just like a really fun experience and getting to choose what you're going to learn. I definitely valued the experience, but the time was actually the part, I think, that was most valuable to me.

Lauren Schiller: Well, I'd love to talk a little bit more about this idea of risk because, you mentioned this a few minutes ago, that people have this idea in their head that entrepreneurs are these massive risk takers and anything goes. In fact, I saw a book just earlier today that said, How to Raise An Entrepreneur. It was like, teach them to take risks, like all these things that just go counter to what the actual common wisdom is about how you start a successful business, which is not necessarily to just let it all fly. Can you talk about your mentality around that and what you've run up against in terms of the perception of what an entrepreneur should be?

Katrina Lake: First of all, I think I am a good leader and a good CEO. I don't know necessarily that I was a great entrepreneur, to be honest, and, you know, maybe people think of, I mean, I don't know. Like, I just, it wasn't kind of where my comfort zone was. I don't sit back. You'll meet some founders who get to this stage of the company and they year the scrappy phases again and they like the building part. You'll hear that from people. I did like it, and it was really fun and crazy, but I don't know that that's the part that I feel like I thrive in, and we'll probably talk about this later, but you can also argue that I wasn't good at it. We've built a $2 billion company using $40 million of capital, not because I was like, I want to raise as little money as possible. It was because I could not raise more than that much money. In today's world a good entrepreneur is one that can raise the most money and hire the most people and buy the most time. You could argue I wasn't good at those things and ultimately was actually good at creating a company, which is maybe different.

Katrina Lake: I hope to be able to be a role model of a different type of entrepreneur because I think there are lots of women and men out there that might be thinking to themselves, that's not for me. I can't see myself being that crazy out-there person, and I felt the same way and I think ultimately like I actually think I'm good at this job and I don't know that I would have discovered it had it not been for kind of the convoluted path that I took.

Lauren Schiller: When you talk about StitchFix, I've heard it talked about as a fashion company, a technology company, the intersection of fashion and technology, what is it?

Katrina Lake: I mean, it is both. My theory on the whole thing is I think the world is, we are going to a place where like being a technology company will be table stakes for you to exist. You know, the idea of a tech company doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Like, I think Facebook is a marketing company, Uber is a transportation company, AirBNB is a hospitality company and we sell clothes. That is our business model. I think the reality is if you want to be around ten years from now,if you want to be successful ten years from now, all of us are going to have to be technology companies. Technology is certainly what is differentiated about stitchfix. I think what is very special about StitchFix, that at the end of the day the business that we're in is retail apparel. Actually, I just heard that on the analyst side, the investor side that Tesla has now been moved into the auto category for most, which makes sense. They make cars.

Lauren Schiller: They make cars. Where were they before?

Katrina Lake: They were in technology, and so there's this weird catchall bucket of people who have used technology as a differentiator that, like I think you're going to see more and more of that migrate back into. Even at StitchFix as a stock, we're covered by mostly tech people, actually, and then a couple retail people. I think you'll see more and more people recognizing that like, hey, these businesses are the same businesses they were before, just powered by technology in a way that we didn't see before. You know, I think we're both, but I think the marka tion ten years from now will probably be retail.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah. You had these big goals for yourself coming out of business school. Did you meet them right away? I mean, you wanted to pay yourself a salary. You wanted to have a stay-at-home business.

Katrina Lake: Not right away, but I really wasn't going to do this if I wasn't paying myself a salary and paying back my student loans. That wasn't an empty promise. Like, I really wasn't going to do it. So, I was very committed. I spent a lot of my second year in business school out here. I spent probably a week or so a month, like sleeping on people's couches. I was able to get a term sheet from Steve Anderson who's a seed investor who's one of the first investors I saw Kevin on. This was all real. Kevin was actually like my reference check for Steve the investor. He was the first investor in Kevin at Instagram. I was lucky enough to meet him early on and so he gave us what would now be considered a very small seed check of a half million dollars and so we closed that. In April of 2011, we started shipping fixes in that month and then I graduated in May and then kind of moved everything out here in June. I guess we closed the money a month before I graduated and so maybe I got in just under the wire. We didn't have a sustainable business model yet at that point, but I was able to pay myself a salary, pay rent, hire some people.

Katrina Lake: I think the other part that was important to me too in the investor thing is yes, it was important to raise money, but I think it's also important to have somebody who believes in you invested in the business. There's a lot of, I think, confidence and credibility that comes from the fact that an investor who's met a lot of entrepreneurs and seen a lot of companies, believes in the business. I think one of the things that you can do as an entrepreneur is delude yourself into really, really believing in something. Sometimes that's great and sometimes it's not reality. Having investors involved I think also helps to build confidence that like this thing is real and it's possible.

Lauren Schiller: How many nos did you have to hear before he said yes?

Katrina Lake: I mean, the seed was relatively easy I would say of just like, I think fundraising at StitchFix has always been either really hard or really easy and nothing in the middle. With him, I had worked with this woman Sue Kenderson-Cassidy who had been an advisor of mine and mentor of mine and she introduced me to him and so that part worked out well. Basically, he gave a term sheet for $750,000. He was going to put in $500,000, and he said, "Go find whoever else to fill in the rest of the $250,000. I probably talked to, I don't know, 20 or so people and everybody else said no, and I was very freaked out, like is he going to get cold feet when I go back to him and say nobody else wanted to. He actually said, and I think he meant it, he was like, "I'm glad that nobody else did. I'm happy to put in the other quarter million." I was, great.

Lauren Schiller: That's amazing.

Katrina Lake: And so, you know, he was like, "It just makes me even happier to see something when other people don't see it," is kind of the way he put it. That round we got done. Later rounds, I think, were a little bit more difficult.

Lauren Schiller: Did he tell you what it was he saw, I mean, what it was that made him believe in you?

Katrina Lake: I mean, at that stage anybody can come up with this idea. Anybody can come up. StitchFix has this great product market fit because when you tell people, wouldn't it be great if you could fill out a style profile and have a stylist who would send things to your home and then you could try things on at home and just pay for what you keep. The concept is so strong itself that I think we benefit from having a lot of just natural product market fit from it, but the flip side of that is anybody can think of that and anybody can pitch that to an investor. And so, I think with Steve it was really about am I going to be the right person to do it and honestly I had no experience that should have led him to believe that I was credible. Like, I had no entrepreneurial experience whatsoever. I had no network of engineers and whoever else to draw from, but for whatever reason he felt like I was going to be the one to be able to do it.

Lauren Schiller: Well, congratulations to him and to you for that. I want to go back to you maybe being a doctor at some point when you were ten. I understand that your mom came to America from Japan to go to graduate school. Did she have that immigrant mentality that my daughter must achieve absolutely everything to live up to the expectations of our new American family? Did you run into any of that growing up?

Katrina Lake: I'm looking at my sister. I don't know really.

Lauren Schiller: Keep her honest.

Katrina Lake: I think academics were very important in my family. Both of my parents really believed that succeeding in school, that having a great education would open doors and so I think that element was definitely very much ingrained and growing up, my mom immigrated here from Japan for graduate school and so we spoke Japanese growing up. In San Francisco there are schools you can go to so that you can keep up with the Japanese curriculum because Japan has a national curriculum and so every Saturday until I was in seventh grade I think, every single Saturday and then every day in the summer I went to Japanese school. I mean, that's like a lot of days of school if you think about it.

Lauren Schiller: That is.

Katrina Lake: Of 365 days, like, the vast, vast, vast majority of them were spent. I basically had every Sunday off. That's right.

Lauren Schiller: That's a lot of school.

Katrina Lake: I had 52 days off of school in a year.

Lauren Schiller: Did you resent that?

Katrina Lake: Well, yes. The reality is there wasn't like anything better that I should have been doing. It was so funny, too, because it was in the nineties and so everybody thought Japanese was going to be so useful. It's still useful when I'm in Japan or occasionally in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, but it wasn't quite the business onlot people thought it would be.

Lauren Schiller: It's not over yet.

Katrina Lake: It's more just like I do feel like they instilled the importance of education in us, so we definitely worked hard in school and definitely liked succeeding in school, and on the family side, I don't think I've realized this until being an adult and actually really in the last few years, I had a lot of exposure to women in my family who had done amazing things. Part of it was my mom immigrating here and not knowing English and she didn't learn to drive until she had had two kids in San Francisco and she was like, "Well, the bus isn't going to work anymore," and had to figure out how to drive. I mean, all of that is kind of amazing. The longer story is my mother's mom, so my grandmother, was actually the one who really desperately wanted to be an American. She had grown up in Japan at a time. She grew up during the war when Japan was in a very difficult place and she just always dreamed. She would see American movies or posters or God knows what the influences were, but she just desperately wanted to be an American. She was growing up in a time when women weren't driving. They had very little opportunity. She was in an arranged marriage. She actually ultimately did follow my mom. After my mom moved here she followed my mom here and she did actually ultimately become an American.

Katrina Lake: It's like an amazing thing to think that of all the things that you think are hard in life, imagine growing up in Japan in that moment and being able to think to yourself, some day I'm going to be an American and make that happen is like amazing. The other one is on my American side, actually, or on my Caucasian side. My greater grandmother, so it was my grandfather, my grandfather was raised in this very unusual household where my grandfather, basically his mom and her sister both lost their husbands. This was before welfare. It was before there were social services that were available. So, what these two sisters did was they were like, "Well, we're just going to create a household." I think they had, I need to fact check. I think they had four or five kids between them and they were like, we're just going to combine our households and one of us is going to go to work and one of us is going to stay home with the kids and two sisters are going to raise these kids together. So, my grandfather was the youngest of those. He had been raised by these two strong women. He had never even known his dad. To be able to have these examples in your life of like people doing ...

Katrina Lake: Anything that I achieve is never going to be as amazing as the things that they did. It's just a great example to be able to have in your life because I think it opens up kind of what's possible in a way that I really appreciate.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah. Do you think that changed his world view?

Katrina Lake: It totally did. My grandfather was the one. He like taught me to use a computer. He taught me to drive. I look back now and I can recognize those things as being really cool things that he did, but like, I think he came from a place where, oh, yeah, of course women are going to do these amazing things and of course my three granddaughters are going to do whatever they want to do and learn how to do the stuff on a computer. He definitely had a different perspective than I think a lot of people in his generation did.

Lauren Schiller: What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a new business? What's the one thing you wish you had known that nobody bothered to tell you, or the ten things?

Katrina Lake: Oh, God. There's so many. There's a bunch of things. I think one, this is a very permanent decision and so as much as you can do of like learning and validating along the way I think is really valuable. I do think there are times when you can delude yourself into like well, it's just one more product change and then everybody's going to love it or it's just one other thing. I think the more you can really get like concrete points of validation and I think it's called lean startup now, which is basically like how to build a shell of what you're going to create and then see if people like it. What do they like about it and then iterate from there rather than trying to have like a build-it-and-they-will-come approach. You know, I think that's definitely a big one. This is my personal philosophy, but I don't believe in entrepreneurship for the sake of entrepreneurship. You devote a lot of time and energy and a lot of your life to this and you really have to love it. So, not to sound like I'm discouraging entrepreneurship, but I think really making sure you have that like one thing that you really want to devote a lot of your life to. I think, I don't know, people can rush to imperfect ideas and, I don't know. I think that's one thing.

Katrina Lake: The last thing is just surround yourself with people who are smart that you learn from. That's true if you're an entrepreneur or just a regular person in your career like I was. You know, I think to be able to surround yourself with people who challenge you, to be able to feel like ... There's nothing worse than stasis and staying the same. It's a hard thing, actually, these days in how little I think we get exposed to other perspectives these days, but if you try to think about when was the last time I really changed my mind about something important? Like, it's a hard question to answer, and I love being proven wrong, and at work I get proven wrong probably more than anywhere else, and I learn from it. The only way that you grow is through learning and so I think that's just the best advice of like as you're building a team, as you're building a board, as you're thinking about your advisors of just really holding the bar high for people who are going to challenge you, people that you're going to learn from and people who are going to help you stay on this really steep learning curve.

Lauren Schiller: As the CEO of a public company it's kind of this high wire act. Like, almost anything you say could affect the share price, and you don't necessarily know what that thing is going to be. So, everyone is listening all the time. I'm wondering, as you think about the values that you want to instill in the company and what's important to you and where your priorities are, how do you balance that sort of like, "we've got to pay attention to what the shareholders want," versus, "We've got to pay attention to what's right for the company?" Maybe sometimes they don't always match up.

Katrina Lake: Yeah. I mean, I might have like a Pollyanna view on it and maybe we're early at this. We've been public for three quarters, but I really believe that what the right thing is going to be for the shareholders is also going to be what's right for the company, and you know, I don't look at the stock price on a daily basis. For better or for worse, I don't know what the fluctuations are or what causes them. Where we go in the longterm is definitely important and I think a lot of the things that we do are really looking at how can we make sure that we can create the most value for ourselves, for our shareholders, for our clients and the other brilliant thing about our model that I love is that there's this amazing alignment. Like, in our business model the more I can send you clothes that you love, the happier you are and the better our business is. There's like really, really great alignment that you don't always have. Like, if you think about Google's business model, for example, the more ads they can show the more ads they can get people to click on, the better their business is.

Katrina Lake: As a consumer you don't really want to see all the ads. You just want to use Gmail. There's this interesting, I think, kind of dance that a lot of executives have to walk of just like what's good for the business versus what's good for the customer? I have this amazing advantage where it's very aligned in a lot of the cases and so it helps us in prioritizing because if we can just focus on how can we help people to find what they love and how can we help people to find more of what they love? It just makes it really clear of what we need to do to create value. So, I'm hopeful that they are the same thing and that we won't have to feel like a lot of conflict of short-term versus longterm, but I think so far we've been, when we talk to investors we spend time with investors and it is actually in a lot of ways just like being a private company. There are investors that we can talk to at certain times and hear their perspectives. I think it's my job to make sure that everybody knows what that longterm vision is and to make sure that people all see it and believe it.

Lauren Schiller: We have so many entrenched ideas about how a company should be run because they've mostly been run by men of a certain age and hair color or hoodie, but Katrina Lake has been finding lots of ways to disrupt business as usual whether she intends to or not, and her vision for StitchFix has paid off so far. But it also comes with a spotlight on her every move.

Katrina Lake: Like, there are just these weird conversations around like well, what do you do with earnings when you're on maternity leave?

Lauren Schiller: That's coming up after the break.

Lauren Schiller: Before we get back to the conversation, I want to turn you on to a podcast that I just love. It's called Reckonings and it explores how people change their hearts and minds. Episodes have ranged from a deeply-conservative congressman who made a dramatic shift on climate change to a white supremacist who transcended a life of hate and became a force for nonviolence to two teenagers who managed to overcome bullying. In a time that feels so polarized, it's refreshing and hopeful to see people capable of such monumental shall we say reckonings. You can find in Reckonings on your preferred podcast app and at www.reckonings.show.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point. This conversation with Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of StitchFix, was recorded live at Inforum at the Common Wealth Club.

Lauren Schiller: I mentioned at the very beginning of this the iconic photo at the Nasdaq with you and your son on your hip, and it was a head turner. Are you tired of headlines that focus on taking your company public and being a new mom or just recently there was a headline, StitchFix CEO Katrina Lake talks about leading a public company and her upcoming maternity leave?

Katrina Lake: My perspective on it has changed over time. I had some pride about me, I think, that prevented me from embracing that early. This is more on reflection of looking back and thinking, why did I not think I could be an entrepreneur and now I just think it's so important. And so, even if it's just like I'm just an example, like I think it's good and I'm happy to be that example and like I said, I hope there's going to be many more people after me that can be ... Like, it's totally normal. There are just these weird conversations around like well, what do you do with earnings when you're on maternity leave and you're a public company CEO? There are all these things that like, I don't really know what the right answers are and I'm going to try to figure it out. There just needed to be more, I think, just having more examples of what different types of stories look like and different possibilities look like is super important.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah. I mean, it's one of those sort of can't-win situations in some ways, right, because like Marissa Meyer got dinged for only taking a couple of weeks of maternity leave, and you're probably going to get dinged for taking the entire maternity leave. I mean, it's like ...

Katrina Lake: Well, and these situations are all really different because I think when Marissa Meyer was in her place, I think she had like active shareholder issues. She had a company on fire situation, and so was that the right thing to do when your company is on fire? This is the problem is that there's so few examples. Actually, I was with a public company CEO literally last week who he has a six-week old at home and he is taking his paternity leave. He was happy to meet me at brunch wearing golf clothes and shorts and he was on his paternity leave. I think all of these situations are unique. You can't fault, I think, one person for having a different choice, but the challenge is that there's really only two situations now that you're going to be able to look back on and I think for many other men there's hundreds. Hopefully, this can add to what people think of as what are my options when I'm in this situation?

Lauren Schiller: Where is your husband in all of this? Does he like ... It used to be, like I remember, I don't know 10, 15 years ago, like Carly Fiorina, when she was running HP that whole story was on her husband was at home taking care of the baby and that's how they made it possible because they invested the typical relationship. So, do you and your hubby ever talk about divvying up the responsibilities so you can both do your thing?

Katrina Lake: Yeah, we definitely do, and he's not at home taking care of the kids as his job full time. It's not. We have a nanny and she's wonderful. But, that being said, I think to myself like am I being sexist in thinking this because it's less about this year. I travel quite a bit, but I think about next year and I think about we're going to have two kids and one's going to be a toddler and one will be an infant, and I have this enormous guilt around that seems really hard for me to be traveling and leaving him to deal with two kids at night, even though he's not taking care of them during the day. It's a lot of work in the nights and the mornings. I would think to myself, am I sexist in thinking that because there's many, many men before me that had wives that traveled and left their two kids with their wife and probably didn't think twice about it. I still haven't figured out like how are we going to do that next year?

Katrina Lake: I think I'm very, very lucky and grateful that I have a husband that's very supportive and a husband that probably takes more of the mornings and nights than I do, and I do think in this world it does take somebody who is willing to kind of put in a little bit more, I think. I don't think it's necessarily that you need somebody who's going to be like a complete kind of stay-at-home parent or anything, but I do think the reality is that it's hard. You know, the reality is there's sacrifices that one or the other is going to be making every single day and then just trying to figure out how you can do that and have a healthy relationship with your kids and a healthy relationship with your spouse and it's all puzzle pieces that aren't super easy.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah. Wow. Well, it sounds like you've surrounded yourself with a great team that come from a variety of big-brand backgrounds and Netflix and Google and Lulu Lemon was in there somewhere. Do you have a mentor? Do you have that one person you can turn to and be like, I can't ask anyone else this question?

Katrina Lake: I do, and I've had many throughout my journey and I would say I have different people that I turn to for different topics, and so actually one of the things that I think has been really fun and unexpected about being a public company is that it's not like I had lots of public company CEO's that I knew. I had met a couple. I really didn't know any. It was really amazing how people kind of came out of the woodwork and helped. You know, now it's all water under the bridge, but our [inaudible 00:38:10] show process, the process to getting public was difficult. It's like in the bucket of when I say fundraising has either been really hard or really easy. The IPO process was really hard, and we weren't kind of seeing the traction we wanted to see. We weren't getting people bought into the story in the way that we needed to. And I had a public company CEO who, through an investment banker, was like, "Hey, if she needs to talk, tell her to call me. It was somebody I'd never met before who had been through the process and kind of knew exactly how I was feeling in that moment. There's been others also who have kind of reached out since.

Katrina Lake: I think that was network that I didn't necessarily knew existed and where I didn't feel like I was part of it before. That just kind of emerged to be helpful. That's been great. You know, I think I have, my board actually, I have a lot of great people on board who I turn to a lot and over the course of the last seven years I've bene lucky enough to kind of build a network of, in a lot of cases, other CEOs, the people who are in the space and not in the space who are going through similar things that I can talk to and get advice from and you know, I think I've been very fortunate that there are a lot of women that I've met also along the way who are very happy to make time for me whenever I ask. It's certainly something that I hope to be able to repay the favor for.

Lauren Schiller: What do you look for, because I know you're involved in a few things that are female-focused in terms of investments and the female investment fund, something called Moving Forward, which is about diversity. In terms of when you now look at other companies that are looking for investments, what do you look for?

Katrina Lake: What do I look for? I mean, I don't do a ton of investing, but I mean it is really important to me that founders that I meet and kind of companies I'm involved in are committed to building diverse teams. That has a women angle, but I think it's much broader than a women angle of like, I think one of the things that StitchFix that has made the company great is the diversity of team and perspectives that we have and so the fact that we have data scientists who are sitting next to stylists and being like, why are you picking that one? Wait, why did you not pick that one? I don't understand. What's going on in your mind? They're just fascinated and really have this great respect for the job that they do, and I think part of what's amazing about StitchFix is I don't know if there's every been like a data scientist who sat down with a stylist and gone into their brain about why they're choosing clothes. I think we've really benefited from the diversity of people and perspectives that we have. I think it's really important for founders to start like that.

Katrina Lake: I think one of the bigger challenges of why we see so little diversity at the top and the technology companies is because so often founding teams are built by repeat founders who go back to their network to build the team. So, they're just perpetuating this kind of lack of diversity that has existed in the industry for 20 years. No one's putting up a job posting for a cofoudner. Like, you're just drawing from people in your network. So, as I have the chance to meet with founding teams, I push on it a lot. I push in with their board. I push on it with, you know, I've noticed you don't have any women on your founding team. What is your commitment on that? I think that's an area that I think helps to make companies better and I think also kind of creates a better ecosystem for all of us.

Lauren Schiller: Well, let's talk about your team and how the values that you're espousing are playing out inside your company around diversity. So, your executive team is 50/50, men and women. I actually went to your website and I counted. It's true. It really is true. Most of your on-the-ground employees are women, I think 86%. Is that right?

Katrina Lake: The number is a little hard because we have a 3,500 stylist organization and the vast majority of our stylists are omen. These are women who are working part time and mostly work from home. So, that skus the number to make it 80-something overall company wide, but then we also have 1,500 warehouses where it's about 50/50. Our headquarters I think is about 60/40 women to men. So, if you put in the 3,500 stylists into our 6,000 employee figure, then it becomes very skued sounding, but on average it's a little over parody where we have women a little more represented than men.

Lauren Schiller: One of the things I've been thinking about is we already know what the downsides are of a culture dominated by men and so I'm just thinking about what happens when you have a company that's kind of dominated by women? What's the outcome there?

Katrina Lake: I mean, first of all I would contest that culture dominated by women. Our management team is 50/50. Our board is 60/40 women. Like, I don't think that's dominated by women and I don't think that you would ask a male CEO who is progressive enough to have a 50% female management team. Like, you would never ask him about a culture that's dominated by men.

Lauren Schiller: I might now. I might now. I mean, maybe not five years ago, but now I definitely would. I'm just curious. I'm not saying that's what your situation is, but just sort of philosophically speaking, if there's any sort of up sides or down sides to having, even jut having at 50/50 is, in a sense, more dominated by women than it has been in the past.

Katrina Lake: Unquestionably, it is more so. I don't know. I mean, I think the down side is I get questions like that not in an insulting way, but in a way that like it's not obvious to other people, like that it's not something people are experiencing all the time, so it becomes something that is unusual. I think that's unfortunate, because I think there's a lot of up side to it. I think there's a lot of upside to it just like having different perspectives in diversity. I think there's also, we were just talking about parenting, so it's top of mind for me, I think there's also a lot of upside from the perspective of people who are men and women who are trying to live a life and work. I think there are a lot more conversations and there's a lot more empathy that happens when you see both sides of the equation every day at work. I don't know. I think, it's also all I know. I can't speak to the downsides or the upsides, but I think we've been able to create a place that people love to work and that has been able to take kind of this what people academically talk about is being important, and diversity and actually show, this is what it looks like and this is how it works and this is an example of it in a way that I don't know that we've had a lot of examples before.

Lauren Schiller: All right. I have one last question for you, which is an Inforum tradition, which is your 60-second idea to change the world?

Katrina Lake: I don't know that I have a specific idea, but like, I think that one of the things that has been a real challenge, and you can see it in kind of the political landscape also and loss of community. So, I think even just like this group of people getting together to do something like this in an evening is a really great part of that. I think there's been just kind of a loss of humanization of a lot of things that we do. So, when w'ere buying things, the way that we engage with each other, like a lot of it has been kind of dehumanized in a way that I think has taken away from communities. So, I don't know what the exact ID is, but ways that you can bring more commerce into communities, ways that you can make things like buying clothes a more human experience and a more human-to-human experience I think brings back the humanness that connects us a country and as a community.

Katrina Lake: I think a lot of, especially in eCommerce, it's become very anonymous and very transactional and I think that the harms of that are greater than what we're seeing in terms of the impact that it's having on how we think about each other and how we think about the space that we occupy together. So, I'd love to see anything that kind of just brings back a sense of community and brings communities together in more human ways.

Lauren Schiller: Katrina Lake's company StitchFix is often described as being at the intersection of fashion and technology, but at the end of the day she's using technology to solve one of the oldest problems in the book, what am I going to wear, and she's doing it by putting people first. It's bigger than just how we shop for clothes. She sees a problem with the lack of diversity in tech and makes sure her company is an example of how diversity makes good business sense. She sees a problem with the lack of parental lave and has made it her dedication to family as much a part of her public identity as her extraordinary success. I look forward to the day when Katrina's success and her dedication to a diverse and family friendly workplace is no longer extraordinary. It's just how business is done.This is how women rise up. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller.

Why Rosie the Riveter is "not my icon" - Betty Reid Soskin, National Park Service

Lauren Schiller March 28, 2018

For the past decade, 96-year-old Betty Reid Soskin has served as the nation’s oldest Park Ranger, where she gives talks at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historic Park. But the triumphant story of the now ubiquitous feminist icon, Rosie the Riveter, is not Betty’s story. While Rosie was breaking barriers for twentieth century white women in the workforce, Black women like Betty and her slave ancestors had been serving as laborers for centuries. In our live talk at INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club, Betty offers a clear-eyed perspective on the untold stories of the American narrative and the ever-rising spiral our country is making toward equality.

TRANSCRIPT: To err is human, please let us know if find a mistake.

Lauren Schiller:
From KALW and PRX, this is Inflection Point, stories of how women rise up. I am Lauren Schiller.

Lauren Schiller:
Something's not right and you go do something about it. I am Lauren Schiller and this season on Inflection Point, I'm talking with the women taking charge and leading change on the issues that are standing in the way of progress, and what we can all do about it. I need your help to make it happen. Our goal is ambitious, but we can do it.

Speaker 6:
Can you really say that out loud without [inaudible 00:00:42]?

Lauren Schiller:
Yes I can. I want to raise $30,000, which covers the cost of one season to pay for things like studio time, transcripts, equipment and people power. I am wildly thankful for everyone who has given so far. Now I need more of you to go to inflectionpointradio.org and click the Support button to make gifts of all sizes so we can reach our goal by November 18th. It's easy to do and it's even tax deductible. Help us make media that shows how women rise up. That's inflectionpointradio.org and click the Support button.

Lauren Schiller:
I just heard about a new podcast you are going to want to hear. It's called Sick from WFYI and Side Effects Public Media in Indianapolis. Jake Harper and Lauren Bavis are two seasoned health journalists. On the first season of Sick, they're diving into the fertility industry, the story of one doctor's abuse of power and the generations of lives he affected. You won't want to miss every twist and turn. Season One episodes start on October 15th and it comes out on Tuesdays. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Go to sickpodcast.org for more information.

Lauren Schiller:
There's a saying that goes, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." While that may be true, a wise woman once told me that ...

Betty Reid S.:
... what gets remembered is determined by who is in the room doing the remembering.

Lauren Schiller:
That wise woman is Betty Reid Soskin, who at 96 years of age, is the oldest serving career Park Ranger in the United States. You can hear her speak at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California. She was instrumental in ensuring the park was inclusive of African-American history. Now, three times a week, Betty shares her experience as a young African-American woman during World War II.

Lauren Schiller:
This International Women's Day, I was invited to interview Betty on stage for INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, where I introduced her to an audience of several hundred adoring fans in a gleaming new building.

Lauren Schiller:
One of Betty's first jobs was as a clerk in the segregated Boilermakers union during World War II. She has also been an activist, a singer/songwriter, and a field representative for California State Assemblywomen Dion Aroner and Loni Hancock. She was a small business owner, operating Reid's Records in Berkeley, which has now been operating since 1945. She's got an honorary degree from Mills College and the California College of the Arts.

Lauren Schiller:
Betty attributes her career trajectory to social change over the years. I would argue, Betty was part of making that social change. I started off by asking Betty Reid Soskin to tell us more about what she means when she says, "We have to go back and see the past for what it was, so we can see how far we've come."

Betty Reid S.:
We have to recognize in truth where we have been, because other than that, we have no way to know how we got to where we are, because we have been many nations over the years. Some of them I have lived through. Some of them were not very comfortable.

Lauren Schiller:
Your great-grandmother was a slave.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes, my great-grandmother, Leontine Breaux Allen, born into slavery in 1846, in St. James Parish, Louisiana, and was enslaved until her 19th birthday, which time she married George Allen, who was a Corporal in the Louisiana state Colored Troops fighting on the side of the north in the Civil War. She lived to be 102, not dying until 1948, when I was 27 years old, a mother, married and I knew my slave ancestor as a matriarch of my family

Lauren Schiller:
I read in one of your blog posts, so Betty's a blogger, you all can follow her, that you were doing an interview with someone who didn't want you to say anything too difficult or challenging about slavery. They wanted you to just keep it nice and tighty.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
Your response was, "What? Is that possible?"

Betty Reid S.:
My response was, "How do you clean that up?"

Lauren Schiller:
Noncontroversial, that was what they asked you for.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah. It was a family show coming out of the Universal Studios in Southern California where I was invited to participate. It seemed to me that there was a [inaudible 00:06:05] of history, that I was being asked to participate in. I couldn't do that. It's true that they wanted to mention my great-grandmother, but they didn't want to mention slavery.

Lauren Schiller:
That makes no sense.

Betty Reid S.:
How do you do that?

Lauren Schiller:
Is there anything that has just stuck with you about what was passed on about your great-great grandmother's time?

Betty Reid S.:
She was amazing. She was the midwife, the intern to the doctor who came to about every three months on horseback into St. James Parish. My great-grandmother was the one who delivered the village babies and took care of people. Her job was to go out on horseback and drop a white towel over the gate post every place he was to be needed when he came through. After he would come through, he would confer with her on the after care of the patients. She was the caretaker for her village.

Betty Reid S.:
That struck with me. That's a story that came down on my family from my grandfather and from my mother's younger sister. It set the patterns for me when I was very young. I thought, "That was an incredible thing for her to be."

Lauren Schiller:
What do you mean, it set the patterns for you?

Betty Reid S.:
Because when I was in Washington, the first award that I received was from the National Women's History Project. I knew that I was going to get this award at a hotel ceremony that evening, went down to Anacostia to the museum there in the African part of Washington, D.C., and there was an exhibit of midwives of the Civil War period. Wonderful pictures, and I found myself bursting into tears at the sight because she only had that role in my fantasies. I had never seen her in that role.

Betty Reid S.:
But that evening, during the ceremonies, I found myself able to receive an award that I felt unworthy of because you never feel worthy of those kinds of awards. But I felt it if I could accept it for her, because I realized that I had been wooed many times to run for public office, but this had never been a role that I wanted, that I had been dropping imaginary white towels over imaginary gate posts my whole life. It was in that spirit that I was able to accept that first honor and have been accepting them ever since in her name.

Lauren Schiller:
You mentioned your grandfather, which I also, I understand he was an inventor, an unrecognized-

Betty Reid S.:
Oh, my father's father.

Lauren Schiller:
Yes.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
So different grandfather.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
On the patrilineal side.

Betty Reid S.:
He was Charbonnet, Louis Charbonnet. He was a eminent builder, millwright, engineer. His degree was out of Tuskegee University on correspondents courses. I have his books in my apartment, books that took him through Tuskegee. He left edifices all through New Orleans. There's a high school, Corpus Christi Church, which he built. The First Order convent for the First Order of Black Nuns in this country, the Holy Family Sisters, he built their convent.

Betty Reid S.:
I have all those, but either he couldn't get patents because he was a Creole African-American. He couldn't get patents on anything that he built. He had to work under the licenses of a white contractor always. All of his buildings are under the names of others. That has been something that has been a cross that I've had to bear for my whole lifetime.

Betty Reid S.:
But I don't believe that he ever resented it. It was the world as he lived in it. It was the nation that he was born into. He accepted it. I'm not so easily accepting. That part of the tradition I didn't carry with me.

Lauren Schiller:
Was he able to see, at any point in his life, his name on one of his buildings or his inventions?

Betty Reid S.:
No. I have maybe two dozen old photographs, vintage photographs of his projects that have come down to me. There's a rice mill, there's a ballpark, the Crescent City Ballpark that was designed and built by my great-grandfather that under the ... There was an entrance on one street. From that entrance it was a dance hall under the bleachers. This was at a time when ballplayers, there were black leagues, and the only people who played in those parks were African-Americans. But I often wonder [inaudible 00:11:59] very much good. We should have kept those because that ballpark, I still take a look at it every now and then.

Lauren Schiller:
I have this notion that you have collected his drawings, and photographs and things like that, and you are now passing them onto the-

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah, I'll been going back to Washington, D.C. in April and I'm going to donate them to the African American Museum.

Lauren Schiller:
That's wonderful. He will finally get the recognition that he deserves. That's wonderful.

Betty Reid S.:
He will finally have recognition he deserves.

Lauren Schiller:
With all of this in the background of your life as you were growing up, and you were born in 1921?

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
As a little girl, what did you dream you wanted to be when you grew up?

Betty Reid S.:
I think I lived my entire life in a constant state of surprise. I'm not a planner, nor am I list maker.

Lauren Schiller:
A dreamer?

Betty Reid S.:
A dream, maybe, but I don't remember. I guess before I was 20, my life was framed by the country that I was living in. At that time, I could not aspire to even college. I graduated from high school with two opportunities for employment open to me. I could have worked in agriculture or I could have been a domestic servant.

Betty Reid S.:
My eldest sister, Marjorie, spent the first five years of her marriage as half of a domestic team. Her young husband was a chauffer and Marjorie was a housekeeper for a family in Piedmont. Because lived in on the premises with Thursdays off, which was traditional, they could save every penny they earned toward the down payment on their first home. This was the traditional pathway into the middle class for African-Americans. This is the country that I grew up in.

Betty Reid S.:
I escaped that because of the third choice. I married Mel Reid, whose family came out across the country from Griffin, Georgia at the first sound of cannon fire, the Civil War. In 1942, when I married, Mel was in his senior year at the University of San Francisco, playing left halfback for the San Francisco Dons. What 19 year old wouldn't prefer that? Mel, his father and his grandmother were all born in Berkeley General Hospital on Dwight Way. My life took a turn at that point. But up until then, I had no ambitions that I could think of because I was limited by what was possible.

Betty Reid S.:
Now, that meant that for about 20 years I lived out in the Diablo Valley in an architecturally designed home with my four kids that I raised to adulthood, outlived of two husbands. Spent a lot of time with friends, some who were quite powerful in my church who were in my neighborhood. I returned 15 years ago. Well, after 20 years in the suburbs I returned to Berkeley as a field representative, for a member of the California State Assembly.

Betty Reid S.:
If you're wondering whether I became a [inaudible 00:15:49] 20 and 15 years ago, may I quickly assure you that's anything but true. That arc of my life, from 20 to 15 years ago, is not a sign of personal achievement, but a solid indication of how much social change occurred in this country over those [inaudible 00:16:12] years. Something we all did, all of us, black and brown, and yellow and red, and straight and gay, and trans. Some of us did it kicking and screaming, and some of us are still kicking and screaming.

Betty Reid S.:
But enough of us because of what happened here in the city of Richmond, in the Bay Area generally. Between those years of 1942 and 1945, during the second World War home front period, because of that enough of us completed that full trajectory so that to this day social change continues to radiate out of the Bay Area into the rest of the country. That was enough to build a park around. That's what we did.

Lauren Schiller:
Did you build your home in the Diablo Valley after the war or before the war?

Betty Reid S.:
No, 1953.

Lauren Schiller:
It was well after.

Betty Reid S.:
It was after the war. Well after the war. Went through about five years of death threats because those people had built the suburbs with their GI Bill to get away from people like me.

Betty Reid S.:
The year that we moved into our house, I had a third grader who was the only young African-American child in his school. That year the PTA fundraiser was a minstrel show. All of his teachers and the administrators were in blackface because that's who we were in 1953. That's who we were.

Lauren Schiller:
Did you discover that upon arriving at what you thought was going to be a fun school evening or ...

Betty Reid S.:
No.

Lauren Schiller:
... how did you discover that?

Betty Reid S.:
I learned about the minstrel show from a neighbor who came to me the day before the show was to be shown, to be staged. She told me about it. I knew that was wrong, but it was something that I had never run into before. I had no idea of why it was wrong, but I got into my car and I went down to the school. I was led into the principal's office, sat there and he was not in, but he came in five minutes later. His costume was hanging on the doorway, big blousy polka dots, red and white, black pants.

Betty Reid S.:
He walked in about five minutes after I was there, and saw my face and turned around to go out. Then he turned back and I said, "You're having a minstrel show." The poor man, miserable, embarrassed said, "Yes." I said, "You know that's wrong." He said, "I didn't know that until I saw you there." He said, "But you know, don't really misunderstand. We're really showing how happy-go-lucky colored people are." I said, "Do I look happy-go-lucky?" He said, "No."

Betty Reid S.:
I said, "You know that minstrel shows were created to ridicule black people." He said, "No." I said, "I know that your show is tomorrow evening, and I can't possibly ask you to cancel it because it's too late now, but I want you, when you have your dress rehearsal tonight, to explain my visit to you to your staff." I said, "Tomorrow evening I will be here, sitting in the front row."

Betty Reid S.:
I did go with my neighbor Bessie Gilbert. We sat in the front in the front row and cried all the way through it. But we made them do their minstrel show in our presence. But the next week there was a Aunt Jemima pancake feed in the middle of Civic Center Park, so we didn't do that much. But as I say, that's who we were in 1953.

Lauren Schiller:
Talk about looking at the past for what it was. You really explained something.

Betty Reid S.:
It was a time of growth for all of us.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, even in building your home as the second black family in the neighborhood, and the experience that you went through with that, you then saw that happen to yet another family, right?

Betty Reid S.:
Yes. There was a young couple that was moving into Gregory Gardens, which is a low-income community that was being constructed at the time. I read about them because there was an Improvement Association meeting to find an answer to the intrusion of these people into their community.

Lauren Schiller:
Improvement.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes, Improvement Association. I read it in the local paper and decided that where I had felt impotent against what was happening to our little family, that as a defender I could have strength.

Betty Reid S.:
I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper complaining about this. Someone, an attorney who lived in the area, liberal attorney, name of David Bortin, now deceased, read my letter, found how to get to hold of me, called, and he wanted to offer help because I had said that I was going to attend that meeting and he said, "You can't do that Betty, because they'll hurt you." I said, "No, they won't do that because people don't say those mean things in my presence. They only say them behind my back. If I go there, I will be able to tell them what I want to say and then I will go." But I knew by that time that our community had gotten past this, pretty much, and that I could tell them that it could be better. They could all get through this.

Betty Reid S.:
I drove out to the school, parked my car and walked into the auditorium, and sat about in the middle on the aisle seat. I was not protected by my color because I'm so racially ambiguous that nobody picked it up. Though I was that black nigger family, only three miles away, here that evening I just blended into the crowd. They went on with their meeting saying all those awful things that I had never heard them say.

Betty Reid S.:
When one point a woman stood up and said, "If we can't get them out, the undesirables, if we can't get them out any other way, we can use the health department on the basis of the filthy diseases they bring in," and at which point I couldn't any longer stand it because I didn't want to be eavesdropping. I got up and I walked to the front of the auditorium, and I talked to her about 10 minutes, and then ran out because I panicked. Got into my car and David Bortin was there.

Betty Reid S.:
It had been daylight when I parked my car and it was dark when I came out of the meeting. I heard footsteps behind me. I thought I was being chased, but apparently there was a reporter who came and tapped me on the shoulder just before I was juggling with my key in the car, then the lock. He identified himself as being a reporter, said, "I need to know your name and give me your telephone number. I will call you because I need to get back in to see what happens now." Then David Bortin introduced himself. He was one of those that was running out of the [inaudible 00:24:38] and he [inaudible 00:24:41] me, and that was beginning of my being able to take on. That Improvement Association never met again. That was fine.

Lauren Schiller:
You're here.

Betty Reid S.:
I'm not sure, I wasn't sure that it was ever successful. Over time, I think that I was because that same community that was so disturbed by our being there sent me, 20 years later, to represent them as a McGovern delegate to Miami Beach. That's how fast social change was occurring.

Lauren Schiller:
I'm Lauren Schiller and this episode of Inflection Point was recorded with Betty Reid Soskin for INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club on March 8, 2018, International Women's Day.

Lauren Schiller:
We look at icons like Rosie the Riveter as a shorthand for what happened in the past and often what can inspire us for the future. The Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park where Betty gives talks three days a week is proud of its Rosie heritage. So much so that they've continuously held the Guinness World Record for largest gathering of people dressed as Rosie the Riveter for a few years now.

Lauren Schiller:
I took my family there to help them keep their standing just this past summer. The pictures were precious. I put one on our holiday card, you know, have a Rosie 2018. But Rosie is an icon, and history is never as neat and tighty about as say Rosie the Riveter's headscarf. Betty Reid Soskin told us why the Rosie Story couldn't be her story. We'll hear why in a moment.

Lauren Schiller:
This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller. This conversation with Betty Reid Soskin was recorded live for INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, we should probably talk about Rosie the Riveter.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:
She's become something of a feminist icon.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
But there's something missing from that narrative for you. She's not your icon.

Betty Reid S.:
No, she's not because in ... Where do we begin?

Betty Reid S.:
15 years ago, when we came back into the city from the valley, as a field representative, the park was created in my assembly district. It simply rose up. The Rosie Memorial, which had caught national attention, was less than a mile from my office in Richmond. I was in a satellite office, one-person office. Even though it was only a mile away, I had never [inaudible 00:29:34] to visit it because that was a white woman's story.

Betty Reid S.:
The women in my family had been working outside their home since slavery because back in 1942, it took $42.25 a week to support a family of five if you were white. But our fathers and our uncles were all members of the service workers generation, earning $25 to $35 a week. Pullman porters earned $18 a week plus tips. It had always taken two wages to support black families.

Betty Reid S.:
That story, it wasn't that I was boycotting the Rosie story, it simply had nothing to say to me. But when the Department Interior planners were gathered in my assembly district and held their first meetings to begin to frame this park, that was when I discovered the National Parks, because it was coming into my area and being defined by scattered sites that laid throughout the city, which I instantly recognize as sites of racial segregation.

Betty Reid S.:
But it's also true that nobody in that room knew that but me, because what gets remembered is determined who is in the room doing the remembering. There wasn't any grand conspiracy to leave my history out. There simply wasn't anybody in that room that had reason to know that but me.

Betty Reid S.:
I became involved in the planning of the stories because the Child Development Center, the Maritime Child Development Center did not service black families at all. Atchison Village was built by the Maritime Commission. It was part of the parks, but it was built to house temporarily Kaiser management, but there wouldn't have been any black managers at the time, so the [inaudible 00:31:35], but Nystrom Village, which was to be restored to show how workers lived, was built by HUD, but you couldn't live in Nystrom Village unless you were white. But there wasn't anybody else in that room that knew that but me.

Betty Reid S.:
Why the story of Rosie the Riveter is extremely important is the feminist story and as a feminist icon. There were many, many stories on the home front. There was a story of the internment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans, 70,000 of whom were American citizens. There was a great story of the explosion at Port Chicago, in which there were 320 live lost, 202 of them being black dock workers. The mutiny trials because 50 of those men refused to go back and load those ships because nobody could explain what had happened.

Lauren Schiller:
This was the ammunition [crosstalk 00:32:28] that they were loading onto the ship had exploded.

Betty Reid S.:
Yes, at Port Chicago.

Lauren Schiller:
They didn't want to go back because they were scared.

Betty Reid S.:
If you didn't live in the Bay Area, you had no idea that Port Chicago even happened, that those ships had even ... two Kaiser ships. There were so many stories that the home front ... There were 37,600 lives lost in industrial accidents in the home front alone, lives that were never memorialized. That story is so complex and has so many moving parts that being reminded of that became something that I was obsessed with because the story was so important and had been so lost to history. That's when I became on a four-year contract, to consult into the National Park Service because you guys have forgotten all that good stuff.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, it's so much easier to look at her pretty face and her flexed arm, and be like, "Yeah, unity. We got this."

Betty Reid S.:
I really think that that story, because I'm so passionate about my story, that that story gets crowded out because there is an important white feminist story that we don't get to. Some day we're going to get a kick ass white feminist that's going to tell that story just as I tell mine.

Lauren Schiller:
But she's not in the front of the room. She's on a lunch box, she's on posters. Rosie the Riveter is getting her day in the sun, that's for sure.

Lauren Schiller:
Would you have been a Rosie if you could have been?

Betty Reid S.:
No.

Lauren Schiller:
No.

Betty Reid S.:
That was simply beyond my imagination. Since I worked in a Jim Crow segregated union hall, that was nowhere near the shoreline, I never saw a ship under construction, nor did I ever see a ship being launched. All that history completely escaped me. I wasn't even always sure who the enemy was during that period. I would not have ever aspired to Rosie because that was simply beyond my imagination. I've learned more about that history since I've been a ranger than I ever knew before.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, even the job you did hold was not a typical job for a woman, right? At the [crosstalk 00:34:48] Boilermakers union?

Betty Reid S.:
[inaudible 00:34:48].

Betty Reid S.:
No. Actually, being a file clerk in 1942 was a step up. My folks would be proud of me. I wasn't making beds in a hotel, I wasn't taking care of white people's children or cleaning white people's houses, wasn't emptying bed pans in some hospital or rest home, I was a clerk, which in 1942 would have been the equivalent to today's young women of color being the first in her family to enter college, because that's who we were.

Lauren Schiller:
How did you get that job?

Betty Reid S.:
I backed into it as I did with most in my life. I came onto the National Park Service at first as a consultant on a four-year contract. After four years became a National Park Ranger at the age of 85, which the congratulations go to the National Park Service, not to me. I can't imagine the conversations that railed in Washington about that. But I have now been a permanent Park Ranger for 11 years.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, how did you get the job as the file clerk?

Betty Reid S.:
Because the unions were putting us together simply by the color of our skin. The Executive Secretary of the Jim Crow union hall was a friend of mine, [inaudible 00:36:24] was brought out here by his minister's uncle who was chosen by the Boilermakers and put him in charge of the union. He was a minister from Oakland, because he was the right color. Then he felt that was not fitting for a black minister, so he sent for his nephew [inaudible 00:36:46] in Chicago, came out. Because we were social friends, those unions were made up of people of color, mostly because they were connected socially.

Lauren Schiller:
Networking.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:
You said something just a few minutes ago about what gets remembered is a function of who is in the room doing the remembering.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah, that's true.

Lauren Schiller:
This is a philosophical question, but you can maybe answer it tangibly, which is how do you get in the room?

Betty Reid S.:
How can I answer that? No, it's related to another question that I can answer. There's been a drive in the National Park Service for a number of years now to encourage more people of color into the park system. I keep running into that constantly. There are professional programs, there are kids gathered up in inner cities and delivered to National Parks so that we can have representations in the parks. There's been an honest to goodness effort to get people into the parks.

Betty Reid S.:
I find myself feeling like the National Parks are really created and used by the middle class. You have to have the leisure time and the financial resources in order to take advantage of the parks. If the National Park as a federal agency concentrates on bringing more people of color into the middle class with the jobs program, we will find our way into the park. I think that that's the answer [inaudible 00:38:29].

Lauren Schiller:
I've heard that if any group is comprised of at least 30% of pick anything, 30% women, 30% people of color, 30% you name it, that that's the tipping point. That's the point at which more people who fit into that category will join in.

Betty Reid S.:
I don't know. I'm sure that there's a critical mass that [inaudible 00:38:53] operating and that might be true.

Betty Reid S.:
I am surprised sometimes and not at other times that my audiences at the National Parks don't have nearly as many people of color as I would expect to have because my presentations are clearly out of my shoes. But then when I realize that those were years of rejection, that there's very little to be nostalgic about, if you're not white of the periods of 1942 to 1945. My young husband, who was as I say a left halfback for the San Francisco Dons, went down immediately when the war was declared to enlist, fight for his country, and found himself in the [inaudible 00:39:48] because the only thing a young black man could do was cook in the Navy.

Betty Reid S.:
He lasted only three days and refused because he had grown up as a Californian, not as an African-American. He had never faced into that level of discrimination. He lasted three days. The commanding officer who was on the committee that examined him decided that he was clearly honest and his intent was not to get out of serving, but wanted to define how he was going to serve, decided to give him mustering out pay and honorable discharge. Told him just to forget that it ever happened, but that they could not put a man who was a natural leader of men onto a ship where men might be easily led because it might spell mutiny. They sent him home and he went to his grave believing that he had failed this country, when his country had failed him. That was who we were. Thank God we are not there anymore.

Lauren Schiller:
Do you feel like we've made enough progress?

Betty Reid S.:
I think that it's a fallacy to believe that democracy will ever be fixed. It's a process. It has to be regenerated by every single generation. It has to be recreated. We'll always be forming that more perfect union and promoting the general welfare. I don't know that we'll ever get there. I'm not sure that's the object. I think the 39% turnout four years ago in the election was predictive of the 400% turnout in the most recent election.

Betty Reid S.:
We have a [inaudible 00:41:50] protected right to be wrong. Our [inaudible 00:41:53] protected right to be bigot, if that's what we want to be, that's part of the freedoms. But we've also created this incredible system of National Parks where it's now possible for us to visit almost any era in our history, the heroic places, the [inaudible 00:42:09] places, the scenic wonder, the shameful places and the painful places in order to own that history. Own it, that we may process it in order to begin to forgive ourselves, in order to move toward a more compassion future, because I don't believe that we have yet processed the Civil War as a nation. Though they weren't designed for that purpose, that's how I see the National Parks at this point in my life, that's the National Park that I'm involved in.

Lauren Schiller:
It's so easy to think of history as just this dry boring thing we have to learn in school, but it's so not.

Betty Reid S.:
No, it's an amazing, amazing trip. No.

Lauren Schiller:
Well are there any ... Is there anything for the ... I've got two of my children sitting in the front row here, and there may be other kids in the audience. I see a couple. Is there anything that you would like them to know that they can take with them tonight?

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah, I think that there's a place on the film that we show that was ... It's called Home Front Heroes that's shown as an orientation film for my presentations at the park. There's a place on the film where Agnes Moore, a still living Rosie says that that period of 1942 to '45 was the greatest coming together that she had ever seen of the American people, that she had ever lived through. When she first used to say that on the film, and I would stand up against the wall and watch her, and I'd say, "How can Agnes say that? She knows that isn't true and I'm going to have to talk to that one."

Betty Reid S.:
One day after my 90th birthday, I was suddenly able to hear that as Agnes' truth. I realized that we all create our own reality and that there are many truths. They rise out of religious conviction, they rise out of education, they rise out of life experience. Many of those truths are in conflict. As long as there is a place on the planet where Agnes' truth and mine can coexist, that was all I needed from that day forward. I'd like to be able to tell every 14 year old that comes through our park that insight so they don't have to get to be 90 years old before they recognize it. Thank you.

Lauren Schiller:
I have to ask you one more thing.

Betty Reid S.:
Okay.

Lauren Schiller:
Which is, I understand that you played Spin the Bottle with Paul Robeson.

Betty Reid S.:
I sure did, I got kissed on cheek by Paul Robeson.

Lauren Schiller:
Can you take us inside that moment?

Betty Reid S.:
I was a teenager and we were picketing the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, A Song of the South of Walt Disney. Paul Robeson was in town, I think to do something at the Moore shipyards. We met him there at the Paramount Theatre. Afterward, there was a lemonade party for us kids and Paul Robeson. It was at Matt Crawford's house in Berkeley. We played Spin the Bottle and I got kissed by Paul Robeson.

Lauren Schiller:
You'll never wash that cheek again.

Betty Reid S.:
Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:
As you can hear, Betty Reid Soskin brought the house down. She received a standing ovation, including from me.

Lauren Schiller:
Now, a few days before we got on stage together, I met Betty on her stomping grounds at the Rosie the River National Park in Richmond, California. At that time, I sat with the audience and watched as a full house was also wrapped with attention as she spoke. She got a standing ovation there as well. I think it's because she's providing a clear-eyed perspective and a sense of optimism. It bears repeating.

Betty Reid S.:
I now am more aware of the past, and I am aware that these periods of chaos are cyclical, and that they have been happening since 1776. I sense that we're on an upward spiral. We keep touching the same places at higher and higher levels. I'm not enslaved like my great-grandmother was. Each time we hit one of these places and we're in one of them now, that's when democracy is being redefined and that's when we have access to the reset buttons. When that happens, on this upward spiral we're setting the stage for the next generation.

Lauren Schiller:
My conversation with Betty Reid Soskin was recorded for INFORUM at the Commonwealth Club. I'll put a link to the Rosie Museum and to Betty's blog on my website at inflectionpointradio.org. I am Lauren Schiller, this is Inflection Point.

Lauren Schiller:
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Lauren Schiller:
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Lauren Schiller:
Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7FM in San Francisco and PRX. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher and NPR One. Give us a five-star review and add us to your listening queue. Our Story Editor and Content Manager is Alaura Weaver, our Engineer and Producer is Eric Wayne, and I'm your host, Lauren Schiller.

Speaker 4:
Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 5:
From PRX.

Inflection Point

Hosted by Lauren Schiller