 Welcome to our interview show in which we interview LGBTQ guests who are important contributors to our community. We want to acknowledge that all things LGBTQ is produced at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded indigenous land. Enjoy the show. So welcome back to our interview show and since I am sitting here with the picture of the state house behind me, that might mean I found somebody with whom we could talk about what happened during this year's legislative session, the successes, the things that didn't quite make it through and what it was like to try and legislate in the era of COVID. And I can't think of a better person than someone who's becoming a frequent friend of all things LGBTQ. This is Representative John Kalaki of South Burlington. Welcome, John. Okay, it's so nice to be back on this show. As you know, I adore the show and the three of you are like my heroes. So it's an honor and a privilege to be with you. Thanks, thanks. And we have so much fun taunting you at times and engaging in conversations that we might not have that same kind of conversation with other politicians. Being an LGBTQ plus format show and talking with an out legislator. Entirely different type of conversation than just your cold journalist politician. Tell me your politics. But I'd like you to start with, what was it like when all of a sudden COVID shut down the legislative process and you needed to come up with a new way of doing business? Well, not only a new way of doing business and we went into Zoom Piliar where we started meeting on Zoom and it was with our committee work it actually worked very well because it was intimate. We had our witnesses come in on the floor with 150 people. Sometimes it was like a bad Saturday night live skip because people would forget to turn off their cameras and suddenly you would see them sweeping their floors behind us and it was like, no, turn off your camera there dude. Or I can't tell you how many times can you hear me? Can you hear me? You're muted Keith, you're muted. So it was the kind of reverb of that happened. The hallway conversations in the house in the state house behind you there for a citizen legislature were pretty important. For me, I could go to somebody and say, explain this bill to me and explain the backstory so I understand it. And that was kind of missing unfortunately but the committee work continued and I sit on general housing and military affairs. And so housing is a really big important issue for us and the amazing part of COVID is that we had to make sure people who were homeless were safe. And so we could not keep them in shelters because that was a congregate setting. So we moved people into hotels and at one point there were over 2,000 people living in hotels, 250 of our kids. So in a way, COVID got us to understand almost put our arms around this is our home of population in Vermont which is a big number but it's a doable number. And part of the great thing I was able to work on in my committee was an $85 million plan with some of the federal money we got to rehouse many of those people. So we're capital investments to buy and renovate. There's renovate the shelter so that they can have more social distancing in them. There was a marriage program for people who were behind in the rent. We stayed for mortgage foreclosure so we have money to help people with fat. We also, many people have a lot of different issues and so you can't just take someone who's been homeless, move them into a hotel room and think that they're safe. So we also had to build wraparound services in. And to think that this $85 million could actually change the paradigm for homeless people. It's not gonna eliminate homelessness but it's gonna go a big way. So that was kind of an amazing positive outcome of this. The- I had noticed that your committee in particular toward the end of this session was spending a great deal of time on affordable housing which I'm taking are the initiatives that you're sharing right now. You also did a great deal of work on recovery houses. Well, that was a bill that I worked on for over a year and the heartbreak of the session is that was the very last bill that was on the calendar and I had to, after we voted the budget and sent it to the governor, I had to ask the speaker to recommit it back to committee. So it was a bill that was really to expand recovery beds in Vermont. We really need about 1,000 beds and we have about 200 beds and we really need like a recovery home for women with children. And there's so many needs in the recovery community and we work so hard on this bill. So I don't have opposition in November so hopefully I'll be reelected and I will reintroduce the bill and make it a better bill. You know, I'll listen to the advocates again and people with lived experience because a sad thing about COVID is we now have a record number of deaths from overdoses in our state. And part of that is what's happened during COVID. So it's a crisis that I want to keep working on and didn't make it across the finish line but I'm a freshman legislator so in my sophomore term maybe I'll get it across the line. We're gonna be there rooting for you because looking at the LGBTQ plus community and the impact of addiction on our communities and the total lack of resources and what you're describing is essential. So what are the other things that you saw toward the end of the session that made it to the finish line that you were pleased about? I know before we started formally taping we were talking a little bit about the bills specific to policing which all of a sudden has come into the forefront and particularly around use of force. And this would be what was the bill introduced by Debbie Ingram, S119. You were there for that last volley back and forth about this bill. There were amendments happening. What was your sense of what it is that the legislature was able to accomplish relative to Vermont law enforcement and use of force? Well, when we went back into the special section we thought we were gonna prioritize only COVID things but then it was clear that we really had to address some of the criminal justice reform that in these bills have been vetted through the whole year. That was really important. And also the house as a body, our members, our 150 members have yet to deal with our own systemic racism. And we worked on Abinacky issues in my committee and things that people said when we talked about renaming Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day, people didn't even realize the outrageousness of some of the things they said. So when we really brought this issue forward and really looking at let's understand racial bias or police courses and really let's set a standard of what excessive use of force is. And again, the conversations were unbridled and very disappointing. So there's a lot of work to do. I think that particular bill that Senator Ingram put forward is important. We have Department of Public Safety and the Executive Director of Racial Equity comes back and really works statewide to get standards together and works with all the police departments. It's essential that we do this. We have to address the bias because we look at who's in our jails, who's getting stopped and it's not a level playing field. It is clear and the more data we get, the more damning it becomes. And so these bills are important. We'll see if the governor signs them. We do not have a veto session planned. So the body's passed them. We'll see what the governor does with that. We did overwrite the veto on the Global Warming Solutions Act, which was a victory. I think it's important that our state looks at these issues. Again, with the COVID emergency, we couldn't let the climate crisis just go away because it's not going away. And we really had to set something up. So I felt really good about that. Another big issue was Act 250. It's been 50 years of looking at zoning and development and stuff. And in the House, they worked on this comprehensive bill. It went to the Senate and it came with only two sections for trails and for force fragmentation. That passed. It's a step. So it's like, okay, we didn't get the whole thing, well, we got a step. A thing that I'm really happy with is in my committee, we do a lot of issues around employer and employee relations. And we did strengthen unions for people working in the public sector. So that was a bill that came in, was with us and I went to the Senate and then it changed and we got a piece of that. We also did a zoning bill where municipalities cannot do, it's more inclusionary housing. So you can't say it's the character of the neighborhood that we can't have this kind of development here. And so again, it's a small step, but it's an essential step that we have, our communities more integrated, our downtowns more robust. And we can't just say it has to be these beautiful Victorians, you know. So a lot of small steps with some of those bills, but the enormity of COVID, we appropriated $1.25 million of COVID relief money. And I would say the house, the Senate, the governor and his staff, everyone was incredible. We collaborate. We work together on this in a way that, I'm a freshman, but I hadn't seen that working before. And we had to get that money out in about six weeks. And then we had to relook at it. And that has allowed us, because we're a small state, we got this amount of money and that's a lot of money for our state to do. It allowed us then when we came back to finalize the state budget, which is 7.15 billion, it's balanced. We didn't go into the reserves. We paid our retirement contributions and we continued programs. So COVID kind of helped us rebalance all of this moving forward. Your head after this will be harder on our budget because the income is still down. The economy is not coming back as fast as any of us would like. And this is why you have to keep coming back. And as we run out of time, oh my, I want to sort of end this by acknowledging that you and your friend, Aiko Otaki, did a short that is made here, available on PBS called Elegies. And it's a conversation that both of you had with your mothers who have already passed over and sort of your final thoughts. And I want to thank you for creating something that personal and then sharing that in a public venue. And with that, I'm gonna say, I want you to come back just so we can talk about the artistic and expressive John Kalaki. And so we get to talk about Raindrop. The pony, my art. But listen, the next time I come back, I am interviewing you and the incredible women, the three of you. I told you that was my fantasy. I'm doing that. We're gonna plan that. So next time I'm on your show, we're turning the tables here and I'm gonna be asking you questions. Deal? And with that, thank you. I'm Four Worms and I'll start getting my wardrobe upgraded. Thank you, John. Fabio is there, you look. Okay. Hi. I'd like to introduce our audience to John Scaliotti. And it's a long and distinguished career in filmmaking and is an activist and is involved in many other areas of our community. Welcome, John. Well, thank you. It's great to be here. You know, I was very excited. I know we're friends on Facebook and I love your posts, all of them, especially about the governor, but I guess we'll leave the political talk for another time. Oh, sure. So I'm gonna read your bio for the audience so they can get a little bit of an idea about who you are, if they don't know and I can't imagine they wouldn't, but, you know, during the 1970s, John was the news and public affairs director of WBCN 104.1 in Boston. For his work in radio, he was awarded two major Armstrong Awards. In the early 1980s, he attended New York University Film School. He created In the Life for PBS. This was the United States First Gay and Lesbian National Series. He produced, in 1985, a documentary film before Stonewall, which won the Audience Award at LA Outfest and two Emmy Awards. He directed a companion piece after Stonewall, the film, Wanna Golden Eagle, and the Audience Award in the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. He's openly gay. His partner for 24 years was the late journalist, Andrew Copkind. Together, they produced the radio show, The Lavender Hour. So you are quite the man, I gotta say. I've been involved with a lot of media over the years and I've really enjoyed it. And, you know, it's really funny because I think Ann and I were in Madison, Wisconsin, when we first saw your film before Stonewall. And we were with one of the producers and Andrea Weiss. Yes. The audience was just hysterical and it was crowded and it was such a beautiful thing. So thank you for doing that. How did you end up in Vermont? Well, that's kind of interesting. My late partner, Andrew Copkind, he was a journalist in Washington, D.C. and had been a little bit older than me and was doing a lot of anti-war and also covering the African-American experience in the South, Selma with John Lewis and all that. And then the war came and he was covering the weather underground and the Chicago wait and all that. And he got pretty tired at some point and somehow ended up at a conference in Goddard College. Yes, that's right near us, yeah. And then came down, a friend had a house in Vermont and he came to live in it and he ended up, in those days, communes started very quickly and he ended up starting a commune in Southern Vermont and there were a lot of communes in the area and then his commune became a woman's commune and he started driving around in a motorcycle and he met me. I had been in the anti-war movement in Washington and then I came up to his house, sort of. Well, we met in the Fenway, if you wanna be honest about it. I remember the Fenway, I'm from Boston. Oh, I see. And then we ended up staying together and the first thing we did was go visit all the communes in Vermont. We then worked a little bit in Boston at WBCN and then this one of the communes collapsed and this house that I'm sitting in now was up for sale and so we bought it, it was cheap in those days to buy stuff from Vermont, not so expensive. We bought it and it was more like a summer place but as time went along, Andy being a writer and me doing films that allowed me to have a lot of flexibility of time, we started staying here quite a bit. And then Andy died in 1994 and I gave up my apartment at that time in New York and moved here full time and built a studio and an editing room in the barn and this became my place where I did most of my work after Stonewall was produced upstairs, dangerous living. We did a stars born with Tommy DePallo. So a lot of stuff started happening here in Vermont. And you do a film festival down there you've been doing for a while, of course you know. You know, as I got a little older, a lot of people wanted to talk to me about their skills and how they could improve their work. So after Andy died, we started a nonprofit called the Copkind Colony named after Andy and a lot of filmmakers started coming and we started showing work and we, and I thought, oh, well, you know, Southern Vermont needs a little gay and lesbian film festival. And so I spoke to a lot of people in town and I put together a small film festival and it's called CineSlam and we've been doing it now what for 10 years. And we also bring filmmakers to have workshops. So I deal a lot with younger LGBT folks about their works, critique. And so that's part of my work now too is help and especially fundraising, helping them get a foothold so that their work can be done too. And like you were saying, it's really important that we get the word out to young people whether they're doing their own work or whether they need some historic idea about what happened before them so that they will remember they'll have a history to kind of go back to. One of the sad things for younger gay and lesbian people is that they really don't have that much access to history. It's, you know, it's the kind of thing that you really don't wanna sit down and watch a documentary. I'm honest with you, until you do. And then once you do, you realize, oh, this is fantastic. I'm the same way. It's hard to get me to sit down and watch a documentary but once I do, I love it. So that's an impulse that's a little difficult. The narrative, which I've been pushing a lot, which is, you know, drama and stuff like that hasn't really covered much history. We had Harvey Milk and a few. So I think we need to find ways to get those stories out that excite people so that they know that we have a glorious history of struggle. And I think if people had a better understanding of that they might even realize what we could lose because we're not living at a time. We saw very quickly where, you know, Donald Trump was, you know, no transgender people in the military, you know? And then there's talk about getting rid of married couples in the Supreme Court, you know? All this stuff can go away rather quickly. And if you look at our history, it has. We, you know, in Weimar Germany, it was a large, beautiful, gay and lesbian community. It was very strong. There were poets and music and art and drag shows and it was really impressive. And then the Nazis came and it got wiped out to the point where they're burning stuff in, you know, in bonfires. And so it happened really quickly, historically, how fast that could happen really. It was like eight years and all of a sudden it was all gone. And so it is important that we know that, that we know that liberation is a constant battle. You can't really allow people to stop us. I'm sorry, there's a phone. Okay. It'll ring three times and stop. That's fine. Yeah, so it is really important. And one of the things we tried to do on the show is get a lot of older folks on. So we can record some of the history of people from our generation. So we have some kind of record, at least. We want to contribute to having that record of people who were in the movement before and after Stonewall. So I appreciate all the work you're doing. It's really, really important stuff. And for us in Vermont, I just want to add Linda, for us in Vermont, you know, we have a pretty amazing history of LGBT. Already we are like foremost in terms of being the first state to make it legal for LGBT people to get kind of married, we didn't call it marriage, but it was the first legal thing that was ever done. And so that history is an important history to remember. But what was most important is how it came about. We had something like 2000 lesbians in, who knew, in the Montpelier for that vote. The most people ever came to Montpelier for a civil, I mean, ever come for an issue, came around civil unions and came to the Capitol. So that showed power. That showed that we have a lot of numbers here in Vermont. Yeah, and I think I read somewhere, John, that I think per capita we have the most gay and lesbian people in the country live in Vermont. I believe, first or second, so that's amazing. So tell us a little bit about like, how did you get into filmmaking? I mean, did you like it as a youngster and you thought right away, this is what I'm gonna do? Or did you think, did it come upon you later in life? I think it came upon me later in life. And in college I was pre-med. That I had a terrible fear of blood. I couldn't keep going, you know? It was like, oh my God, I would almost faint when I saw blood. So I know this was not a business. Even if I wanted to be some kind of specialist that did have an issue with blood, you still had to go through medical school. What I did was I met Andy and he had been doing a little radio and doing this new sound type radio that included all kinds of things. It wasn't just the interview. It was sound effects and music and a lot of elements to give it a full contextual sensibility. So he then had a friend in Boston who said, why don't you come up and work at our radio station? So Andy and I used to do every week a documentary for the radio. Now this was a really well constructed documentary. I mean, a half hour, it was really well done. It wasn't just talking with someone. It was like actualities. It was music. It was a whole bunch of things that wind their cells into a rather impressive story. And after a couple of years, I said, and I was doing still photography. And I said, I wouldn't mind taking that next step in the documentary world, which was film. And so I went to NYU. They were mostly narrative, but I still learned something and I spent time. And so I think if you notice our documentaries, they're really filled with sound. And they're really filled with context of sound effects. So that experience really helped me, I think, make the documentary more dramatic and more emotional so that people have that either humor or sadness or whatever it is that they actually, you can create a situation where they really feel it. And so therefore, they transform themselves through their heart a little bit more than just through the brain. And so that's how I got into documentaries. Well, yeah, we're going to put it up on our site so that people can go to where your documentaries are, learn more about your website. And we'll put everything up there on the screen during the interview so that people can go and access whatever it is you're doing. And I'm ready to start a new film, so. Good. And our time is about up. John, I'm really, I can talk to you for hours. Let's do this again. Oh, yes, Linda. This is so great. And send me information about when this will be on. I'll make sure all my Facebook and Twitter fans get a chance. Absolutely. And when your new documentary comes out, maybe that would be a good time to do another interview whenever that is. That might be good. Yeah, that might be good. Thanks, John. I really appreciate it. And we'll get together for coffee before after the pandemic's over. I bless you. Yes, it'd be great. And give my love to Anne. I will. Thank you, John. Bye-bye. Hi, I'm here with Martha Shelley, who's been kind enough to join us today. Martha is a feminist researcher and author of historical fiction. She's one of the authors and owners of Abisu Publications, a longtime political activist from Brooklyn. After the Stonewall riot, she organized a protest march that morphed into today's gay pride parades or marches. I know you have some thoughts about parade versus march and I share them. Martha was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front. Her essays, poetry and short stories have appeared in many anthologies. She's published three books of poetry, Crossing the DMZ, Lovers and Mothers, and Haggadah, as well as two novels, The Throne in the Heart of the Sea and the Stars in Their Courses. There's a third novel now with third part of that series, A Meteor Shower. A Meteor Shower. Yes. This is a trilogy about the life of Jezebel, who was Queen of Israel in the 9th century BC. When I heard you read at the Stonewall Anniversary Panel, is that what you read from? I remember Jezebel figuring in the reading. I honestly don't remember what I read there. Don't care. You now live in Portland, Oregon and you're passionate about social justice, dancing and mango mousse cake. Well, formally, you're in Portland. I was wondering if we could start by asking you to tell us what it's like there with the fires and the demonstrations and tell us. Okay, well the fires are gone. We had smoke for a week and a half when it was impossible to go outside because it was so toxic. We have air filter machines in our house and we kept them running 24-7 for that week. And if I did have to go out, like to let the chickens out in the backyard or put them to bed or let the dog out to pee, we put on an N95 mask and then get back in the house. So you have chickens? Yes. Do you farm there? Yes. Within the city limits of Portland, we bought a double lot some years ago and the backyard, we've turned into a little mini farm. That's great. Yeah, so that keeps us busy. And how about the street activism there in Portland? That stopped during the smoke because it was too dangerous to go outside. But once the smoke cleared because it's been raining, then demonstrations started again. The news reports around the country have made it sound, especially the administration, have made it sound like there's rioting and looting and burning all over. In fact, the demonstrations have been confined to a small area around downtown near the police headquarters. And the rest of the town has been really quiet and people just go about what they're doing. There have been occasional demonstrations in different parts of town that haven't been involved with any kind of looting or rioting or anything, just people marching up and down with banners and chanting and stuff. And when I have gone by, I would just hunk my horn if I was driving or raise my fist or something. So it's been largely peaceful. Oh, yeah. Portland is a big spread out city. The demonstrations have happened in like mostly a two block area. I didn't know that I'd never been there. Tell me, how did you happen to move west in 1974? As we said, you're from Brooklyn. You did a lot of activism, important activism in New York. Okay, what happened at the end of 74 is life wasn't going that well for me personally. I'd been in love with someone and that didn't work out and I had a broken heart. And then I had visited the Bay Area more than once and was in touch with a couple of the people there. And then I decided I was going to move. I got in touch with a poet, Judy Gron. I was living in a house with three other people and said they had an expert room. So come on over and I rented a room there. So I was a fifth person there. You worked with Judy Gron to produce Crossing the DMZ in other words, Lesbian Speak Out and Other Books. Is that correct? I was, Lesbian Speak Out was published by the Women's Press Collective before I actually showed up. It was in process and they were, you know, gluing the thing together, binding it with this little hot glue machine. And they wanted to publish Crossing the DMZ, which was great with me. And I joined the Women's Press Collective and helped put together other books. I didn't edit them, I just helped print them and helped co-late and sell and just did whatever office work was necessary. And then at one point went around the country and raised some money for the Press Collective. And when did you move to Portland? 2005. At that point, I had been involved with my current, my wife really, since 1997. And her kids were grown. They were not in the house anymore. And we were living in San Francisco. And it became kind of untenable, was getting more polluted, more noisy. We came home from a camping trip and there was human excrement on our doorstep from homeless people. I mean, there wasn't any place for them to go. So we moved to a house that I had in Oakland and it was a drug-infested place. So that wasn't really tenable either. We took a road trip, decided looking at different places that we wanted to live in Portland. And so we moved. One more question I'd like to ask you before we get to your feminist biography. Do you get tired of being asked about Stonewall? Yes and no. I think the focus has been mostly on Stonewall and I'm really happy to say what I know to help straighten out some of the information, the misinformation that we get about that history and always to point out that the important thing about Stonewall is not that the riots happened because there had been a riot a couple of years before in a gay riot in San Francisco. There'd been one in Los Angeles but they didn't really change things. What happened after Stonewall was that a bunch of us organized. We organized the Gay Liberation Front out of that came Gay Activist Alliance and we made alliances with other organizations like the Black Panthers and Women's Movement, the Young Laws and so on. And that was what changed society. So it was all of that organizing that happened after the riots. And it struck me as you were involved in the Daughters of Boletus and you coined the term Gay Liberation Front while working with the Manishing Society at a Manishing meeting. And it struck me that maybe there's a parallel between those early homophile organizations and the current movement in LGBT culture to assimilate and develop alliances with corporations and a lot of the, even though the marriage movement has been important and a lot of people get married for many different reasons as we know. The gesture toward assimilation in some groups might be part of the motivation for the marriage movement. Well, when I was involved with Gay Liberation Front in those days, none of us ever even imagined that we'd have gay marriage. And of course as Gay Liberation Front, the last thing I was going to champion and fight for was gays in the military. I was anti-military, anti-killing people. Although I will make a few exceptions. And you can imagine who I'm thinking of. But I was happy about the gay marriage thing because at that point I had already married, had a Jewish wedding with my wife and this was very useful to us in terms of taxes and other things like that, fine. I didn't hurt anything. Healthcare is another reason. Healthcare, inheritance, children, all of those things, those matters and these are things that matter in people's lives. I'm still anti-military, not against the soldiers themselves. I'm against what this country does. I don't know how many wars we've got going, how many countries we have people stationed whose job it is to kill people. And no, that's not what I'm going to support. Right. Well, let's turn to your feminist bio if we could which is sometimes overlooked. You were part of the Lavender Menace action in 1970 which later became radical lesbians. No, radical lesbians came first. Good, see Wikipedia is my source and so please correct me. Okay, what happened was in Gay Liberation Front, the women felt that some of our needs were being ignored, overlooked, and men were oblivious and that was specifically when we had gay dances. We'd go to dances and they'd be these guys who are mostly taller than us who are busy looking for partners, dancing with each other, staring into each other's eyes. Meanwhile, straight guys would come in and put their hands on the women and the gay guys weren't even paying attention. So we felt that we needed all women's dances. Once we organized that, out of that we naturally formed our own organization, radical lesbians. And the, I think it was the second Congress to unite women, our group did that action but it was an action of radical lesbians. And you disrupted this now conference and you went up to the stage and spoke and it's such an iconic action, memorialized and she's beautiful when she's angry, right? But what happened was I didn't organize the demonstration but when it happened I was of course a part of it. And we showed up looking just like anybody else. We had our lavender men's t-shirts under other shirts and then one of our members doused the lights of the auditorium so the place was pitch black. And when that happened, a few of us went and put posters on the walls and all of us took our over shirts off and showed our lavender men's t-shirts and then somebody put the lights back on and I jumped up on the stage and said, try to explain why we were here that the panel discussion that had originally been set up was like one union woman, one black woman, one representing this, one representing that but nobody representing us, no representing of lesbians. And of course, Betty Friedan was a big homophobe and there was an awful lot of homophobia in the national organization for women. So I asked the audience, would they be, would they want to go on with the panel discussion the way it had been originally set up or would they want to hear what we had to say? And they all voted to hear what we had to say. So we spent the afternoon talking about the oppression of lesbians within the women's movement. And what happened the following year was there was a big national conference for now and now voted to include lesbian rights in its platform. The rest is history, huh? Really, I mean, that was another way we changed the society. Let's talk about your radio show beginning in 1972 and through 1974 you produced the radio show, Lesbian Nation on New York's W-A-B-A-I radio station. The Library Congress says that this is most likely the first lesbian radio show. How did you decide to do that? And what was the content? The net radio known who was the station manager asked me to do it. She contacted me and asked if I would do it, a radio show. So I said, sure, she connected me with this young man whose name escapes me at the moment and he taught me how to use the tape recorder mostly how to edit the tape, which in those days you did with a razor blade. You make little tapes on cassette, transfer them on to reel to reel and then took them into the editing room and sliced and diced and cut out parts that I would just edit the tapes. I would add in music and then I would have half an hour show once a week. Interviews with prominent LGBT people or? Yeah, and also, okay, there was one time when I covered a demonstration at the women's building of martial arts and there were these different women doing martial arts and showing their things. And what I did was I ran around the room with my microphone and somebody would show how to do throws and I'd have the mic right down there on the floor and you'd hear this thump and then the woman would say, and then you grab the groin and you get lots of sound effects. So that was quite a show with discussion of, you didn't have the video, you could use your imagination. You had early experience with the martial arts when you joined the first women's judo class? In the first year of study, yes. First world women's judo class. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, I was 17 and I really wanted to leave home. I was, I wanted to have an independent life. I did not want to do what my parents wanted me to do, which was find an ex-jewish boy, get married, have children and I already knew that I was different. I didn't know that I was a lesbian but I knew there was something different. And oh, yes, stay a virgin till I get married. Well, I already was not a virgin. So my parents would say that you can't live on it. A woman can't live on her own in New York City. It's not safe. One day I saw in the New York Post a little two line ad for this judo class, first of all women's judo class opening at the YMCA. No, YM, it was YWCA on 51st Street in Lexington. And I thought that's the answer. So I went down there and registered. I had to say that I was 18 and I just knocked my birth date back by a year and took the self-defense class, which was the first series and then signed up for the following classes, which were judo and learned how to throw and defend myself. I believe me, I'm no expert. I'm no black belt. I'm no great warrior but it certainly gave me a lot of self-confidence. And when I was ready to leave home, I had that under my belt, so to speak. And the other thing that happened in that all women's judo classes, I was wrestling around with women and discovered something about myself. One evening I went home with one of these women who was, we meet on campus. We were both at City College and she was a few years older than me. She had gotten married directly out of high school to escape a really abusive family. And when she invited me over to her place for dinner, her husband was a civil engineer who got up way early in the morning and then he came home and went to bed. I think he'd went to bed by eight o'clock to have to get up at five in the morning or something. So we were sitting around the living room and pretty soon we were kissing and it was at that point that I realized how different that was from kissing boys. And I was passionately in love with that woman and I knew what I was after that night. So I got a lot out of judo class. Well, the time has flown by and we'd like to end with a timely poem if you would be kind enough to read a poem that you've selected that will maybe cheer us up or at least give us some strength. Okay, this is the poem I wrote the morning after the election, 2016. At that point, my wife and I were in San Francisco. Who was growing in San Francisco, awaiting the election returns, not wanting to wait for the bus, walking at the modern 49ers, silicon miners, so young, so white, so tall, flush with high-tech bucks and desperation. To stay in the game, to be seen as taller, better looking, young forever, they spend. Here's a store uniquely devoted to eyebrows, another only for lashes and upstairs, a toenail boutique. A shop next block just washes hair and gives it a blow, but doesn't cut or die. The neighborhood cinemas are now gymnasia, the screens replaced with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, the ushers with trainers to sculpt those geeky, caffeinated frames. We spot what looks like a toy store and stop in, but it's the ultimate selfie emporium. They'll make a 3D, full-color resin replica of you or your dorm or this moment's mate, a doll to display on the coffee table of your studio apartment. It's three times the length of your desk and costs about one week's rent. Elsewhere on the continent, the white, but not so young are choosing their representative, the refusion of wealthy wanting more and the angry poor who could never hope to catch a cup of the golden shower that trickles down on the digitorati. I'm gonna have to turn the page here. They're entranced with a funhouse mirror version of themselves, taller, huger, a man who gazes at his life-size portrait in oils purchased with someone else's money, who is his own ultimate selfie, who gobbles cash and excretes cruelty. A long ride home. We return to our room to sleep until we can know the judgment of mourning and then it comes. Black smoke like burning tires pours from the radio. The empire rose, the empire will be destroyed, despair. And then we hear the piano, a neighbor's child, her fingers slow and tentative, stringing the notes together. Her name is Tikva, Nadezhda, Esperanza, that is to say, hope. Now her touch is sure as she practices the ode to joy. Martha Shelley, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you in two weeks, but in the meantime, resist.