The Lauren Ignited Podcast Ignited is a transplanted Houstonian who podcasts the way God intended: she addresses her passions and doesn’t worry about thematic seamlessness. That happens anyway, since co-host Gregory Perrine joined the show. It helps that they’re both charming, that they conduct winsomely casual interviews with music-makers from both Chicago and Houston who open up about performing and consuming. Ignited and Perrine are breezily, irresistibly free-associative; a recent podcast was titled, “Lauren and Greg talk SXSW, Chicago Festivals & Kolaches.” (Robert Rodi) player.fm/series/the-lauren-ignited-podcast
What Cuts At My Soul: James Elder’s Story of Mama Lizzie I met James Elder in the early 1980s when he was a creative writing student at Columbia College Chicago, who was well known as a gifted writer. Many years later, in the middle of my first interview I stumbled across his story of Mama Lizzie.
The Mass Menagerie: How Suburban TV Pioneers Bruce and Claire Newton Connected and Collected the Ephemera of Al Capone, Garfield… The Newtons were extreme collectors. During the early 1980s, I visited their four-story, eighteen-room house in Aurora filled with antiques. A secret bookshelf door in the basement opened to a modest-sized workshop where dozens of marionettes and puppets were created, including Nautilus the Sea Dragon and Polly the Parrot, the latter of which was used for political campaigns of that…
