It’s one thing to be invited into the home of a comic, but to see them in the thick of motherhood is, to me, like the spotted owl of documentary conversation. Today’s episode is a sort of extreme form of eavesdropping. An audio portrait of the sacred struggle to get a kid to bed with comic, mom, and brilliant facebook satirist Julie Kottakis. AKA Madge the Vag.
I first saw Julie perform at the New York Fringe festival last year in her solo show “Does This Dress Make Me Look Alone” which she called an “Alone Woman Show. She did address the circumstances surrounding the conception and birth of her daughter, what it’s been like to care for her on her own, but I hesitate to bring that up because there’s a danger in thinking this was just a mom doing a one-woman-show about being a single mom. That sells it way short. Her performance spanned the range of comic and tragic registers and she laid out some rawness in a way I don’t remember seeing before. Not tell it like it is stuff. Afterbirth type stuff. Literal and metaphorical. Frankly, I wish more comics packaged their jokes less and did more of what Julie is doing.
As you’ll hear in this episode she offers her life with abandon and pushes nothing. Frankly, I was surprised she allowed me to put some of this audio in here. Having wireless mics on people makes them forget they’re on tape sometimes and that yields some very candid moments. The moments people don’t talk about like a 5-year-old kid that still asks to breastfeed sometimes. Take a listen. I’ve received permission to use all of it. And I’m so grateful to Julie for that because it’s stuff people need to hear I think.
It’s a very real, very earthy, and absolutely beautiful and generous look at something a lot of us who don’t have kids take for granted. And if you don’t laugh at this, rot in hell.
Friend her on facebook (Julie Kottakis) if you can because that’s where the really good stuff happens. Also @theweirdjulie
Music this week:
“When the Saints Go Marching In” – Marysville Marimba
“Glockendoodle” – Aaron Campbell (@banjoporkchoppy)
Technical Help from:
Vince Fairchild at WNYC (@vincefair)
Doug Shugarts at WBUR in Boston
Consulting Producers:
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SN5:EP1 “Six Foot Feelings
Season five’s inaugural episode is just me and you (a reasonable distance from each other) at an Aldi in Omaha, a Safeway in Denver, and notes from one of the most purgatorial weekends in the history of standup. -
SN1:EP7 “1-800-BAD-TOUCH”
It’s impossible to tell the story of how I know comedian and psychologist Marc Gerber without getting into a host of sordid and vulnerable-making trauma from my past. He offered some perspective back in June that changed my life and comedy.Gerber is an atypical hybrid of a professionally funny and employably empathetic person. He and I met when I performed on a show at the PIT called Relationshit where he served as on stage therapist for a story I told about a piece of material about my own childhood sexual abuse. In this episode I play the recording of that performance along with another version I did more recently at a recovery show in New Jersey. The revision of this bit over time is the best example I have of how my perpetual over-disclosure has unintentionally helped saved my life.
He also opens up about his own struggles and offers a much needed and practical solution for quelling loneliness, a call to 1-800-Contacts.
Check out his weekly show at Comic Strip Live on Mondays called Three Day Weekend.
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SN5:EP10 “The Edge of Denver”
What begins as a failed trip to REI for a hat, becomes Steve Vanderploeg @slumdogchillionaire giving @bambifransworth a surprise visit to the now-defunct “Dog the Bounty Hunter” retail store. We walk Sloan’s Lake and find the solace of our earliest curse words among the wary pandemic ducks.Consider supporting the show on Patreon! (or just tell a friend).
