episode 2: Power

Episode 2 of Divesting From People Pleasing. 

After considering her sexual past, NK learns that the body has information.  

The Heart · Divesting From People Pleasing: Power

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Divesting From People Pleasing is a mini series written, performed, and sound designed by Nicole Kelly, edited by Chiquita Paschal, and hosted by Kaitlin Prest. Design by Phoebe Unter.  Music in this episode: Nature Shuffle by Ketsa; Ole by Em Hache; Heat by Derek Cleg; and Gamma Burst by Nathaniel Wyburn. Special thanks to Aesha, the New Orleans healer, and Mistress Velvet, the reparations domme.  Produced with the generous support of Mermaid Palace & PRX. 

transcript

Kaitlin Prest:

From Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia… welcome... to The Heart.

[theme music starts, light bass sounds like a heartbeat] 

I'm Kaitlin Prest. This is Divesting from People Pleasing, a mini season by Nicole Kelly. In the last episode, NK investigated her anxiety and shame and some of the psychology of why we feel, how we feel, the conditions that affect Black women in particular. In this episode, the second installment, NK tries to understand herself on a somatic level. This is episode two: Power.

[Jazzy heartbeat fades out]

NK:

I want to get out of my head and into my body, I want to get out of my head and [NK’s voice begins to echo and layer over itself} and get out of my head, out of my body, out of my head. into my body, I want to get out of my head and into my body. [throbbing pulsing bass]

Phoebe was going to Berlin for a few weeks. [party noises, people chatting club music]

So she threw herself a going away party at this place we like in the Valley, earlier in the night at my house, some of us had shared a little bag of our favorite party favor. [twinkling whirling star synth]

It's a drug that makes most people want to dance and make out and touch each other. But it always makes me want to stare into someone's eyes and share the things I don't normally share. That's why I love it. Like, Phoebe and all of our friends are on the dance floor moving around under the multicolored disco lights. And I just wanted to talk. I stood near the bar with a new friend and the conversation turned to sex.

[NK moans Uhhhh and it turns into a chuckle]

I tell my friend that I think I may have been ruined by cis-het sex. 

Neither of us are straight. But something that we have in common is having been with men more often than we've been with women. And coming out later in life then a lot of our queer friends, I can orgasm when I'm alone, but with a partner, I, almost never get off. I say.

[stringed instrument plucking, guitar song begins]

Of course, I know that trauma can be ordinary. Can be so subtle and commonplace so as to not even register as trauma. 

I know that the body and the brain don't need many opportunities to create automatic and habitual responses to perceived danger that they both are working to protect me in ways I'm not even aware of.

But that night, I don't sleep. And it's not just because of the drugs. Something clicks. Something makes sense to me for the first time.

[plucking rhythm guitar continues- the sound of a brain figuring it out]

It's hard to explain what I'm feeling. A slideshow of my sexual past runs through my head, and I realize that for most of it, I haven't really been in my body. I've been there, but not there. And having sex as if my own body didn't belong to me. 

And now I wonder why.

[Drum beats, synth goes up and down like a bee buzzing] 

NK:

I only orgasm when I'm alone, and usually that feels like a defect. I remember coming for the first time around age eleven. Already I'm preoccupied with sex. I have no idea if this is unusual, but I make two Barbies kiss each other. I make one hard plastic mouth hit against the smooth plastic absence of a nipple. [synth continues]

I make the two Barbies feel each other up. [mechanical toy talking voice says "I love (something) under the stars"] I act out elaborate romantic fantasies, fantasies where I'm older and have a body. The kind that can fill a bra. And I straddle a little mound of bed pillows lined up in a generic shape of a boy. No one in particular. With something hard to rub against. Positioned more or less where his crotch would be something like a plastic toothbrush holder. [gem sounds- then a sax comes in quietly]

I've always been the kind of person who thrives between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 in the morning. And I've been doing this since I first saw softcore on Showtime late at night. [jazz sax slides back in for a moment] I realized the squiggle pen I got for my 10th birthday is actually the same as a vibrator. And when it stops working and we change up our cable package, I realize that face lotion and fingertips work just as well. Or the bathtub faucet. Another idea I got from porn [water splashes down onto tile-a synth starts to make a tapping and throbbing sound]

Everyday after high school, I have two hours alone before my mom and my sister interrupt my privacy. I turn the TV back and forth from Bob Ross [Bob Ross says "double prime pre-stretched canvas"] to the scrambled Playboy Channel [woman's voice moans] and back again. Every time I think I hear the garage door go up. [Bob Ross says "tap it"] This is a strategy for plausible deniability. [Bob Ross says "Little criss-cross strokes'' then abruptly a woman's voice moans]. I'm not furiously jerking off to distorted images of white dick, white fake tits bouncing. I'm just an innocent, small-town girl who regularly attends Fellowship of Christian athlete meetings and appreciates the arts. 

[Bob Ross says quietly: I just sort of make a decision and put it in]

NK:

Where I live, high school girls do not masturbate if anyone suggests that they do. It's considered hilarious and disgusting. [guitar starts to jam] I keep my frequent masturbation seshes hidden. I don't tell anyone. I never admit it, until senior year when a certain prestige comedy makes it cool to acknowledge our clits. [vibrator sounds]

Everyone knows that I'm still a virgin [upbeat sitcom music starts] and everyone knows that all the girls who have publicly promised to save themselves for marriage are giving lots of head and taking it up the ass. [hopeful sitcom music continues]

I'm not saving myself for marriage. I'm saving myself for college, where I imagine that I'll have many, many lovers and get to act out the sexual fantasies I started practicing for in middle school. [upbeat sitcom guitar fades out]

I'm not just waiting for sex. I'm waiting to feel wanted and to have the social currency, the power that comes with that. 

I don't really need my first time to be special. [indie country singer] Despite growing up in the Bible Belt, I know that virginity is a bullshit social construct. I just want to get it over with on my college campus. We celebrate sexuality at the annual coming out ball on something called Sleaze Week. Third wave sex positive feminism is rampant. [Man's voice: How does a woman have sex like a man?] And it demands that women have as much sex as we want. 

[Woman's Voice quietly: Conveying sexual interest or readiness?]

[Man's Voice: Who seriously thinks that this makes sense?] 

NK:

As much sex as men. 

[Woman's Voice: His cup runneth over]

It demands that we get off and suggests that if you aren't getting off, that there's something subordinate about that

[Samantha from Sex and the City: I mean I just spent the last two hours with no finale]

like an orgasm is a political act

[Dr. Laura: had been raised in a highly sexualized environment]

NK:

In college, I relish finally being free to talk about how often I think about sex, how sometimes I sit in class daydreaming about the next time I can touch myself. 

My college friends call me the Virgin Slut. 

The summer after sophomore year, I broke up with my first boyfriend, the first person I have sex with, cut all my hair off and prepare to spend my entire junior year in Barcelona.

[horns triumphantly announce, drums kick in- salsa rhythm]

It's my first time in Europe. My first time ever leaving the U.S. I'm 21. I've never lived in a city before. I've never learned to speak a language. Barcelona is beautiful and romantic and sexy. And I feel more free, more myself, more excited to be alive than I ever have before. [salsa fades out]

Most weekends I go out with friends from my study abroad program, sometimes to the high end clubs in La Rambla, or all the women are in heels and there's always a cover. Sometimes dive bars in the Gothic quarter where college students drink cheap red wine. 

And sometimes to seedy clubs in Puerto Olympico. The kinds of places where every night is ladies night, which means no cover for women and free shots, go-go dancers and lots of dudes. Wherever I go, I stand out. 

Usually when men approach me, their opening line is, where are you from?

[Where are you from echoes in a drunk dudes voice]

And when I'm with men, I watch myself have sex, like how I used to watch porn, like I'm watching myself play out these scenes in different locations with different men. And if the guy's hot and if the setting is hot or sexy, then I'm like, the scene is hot. My friends joke about my sexcapades. My slut adventures. And I feel like I'm getting away with something. I had a ton of one night stands where I refuse to tell men my name or refuse to give them my number. Or if I did give them my number, I wouldn't answer when they called or I would answer, but refuse to meet up with them again. 

It was... fun, like a, fun adventure, and I felt like my powers were growing like every dude I fucked and then forgot about [quietly: or pretended to forget about], every dude I blew off. I'm like a vampire for their masculine power. I'm just taking it into myself and I like the narrative that I'm creating. I like this version of myself. 

At my small, private, affluent, very white liberal arts college in the US, I usually feel lonely and invisible, but in this context I feel desired, really desirable. 

For the first time, and I don't yet have a critique of what it means when they call me exotic. 

NK:

One night in Barcelona. I'm out with my friends at a warehouse. [pulsing bass echoes like how it sounds when the music is so loud at a club you just hear the vibration] We like to go to. There are three or four floors with different rooms and different deejays. And in the room, I like to go to this D.J from Madrid plays electro dance mash ups of indie rock songs like Dance Remixes of Radiohead and Block Party. On the dance floor, this guy approaches me. [sexy synth quietly enters]

At first we shout to be able to hear each other. And then we give up. He tries to pull me closer and I push him away. But I don't mean it. He plays along. [quietly: I'm 10 times more likely to fuck someone who says he's an artist] we make out on the dance floor. He tells me his name and I make no effort to remember. And then we make out in the cab. We make our way back to his studio apartment. It's not long before we move to the bedroom. 

I'm the aggressor. I'm in charge. I'm in control. I want this to happen. I don't care what he wants. He's on top, he's inside me. I can tell he's about to come. 

At the moment that he orgasms, he says: you're....

so....

Black.  [Black, Black, Black the word black echoes, the sound of breathing in and out]

...and I freeze. 

I'm mortified. [breathing in and out] ...I'm soo mortified. I'm just aghast. [NK’s voice echoes in her head quietly: it's fine, it's fine, it’s fine], in the past when white men have said... dumb things to me. I have just laughed it off. I laugh it off. It's fine. It's fine It's fine. [quiet whispers: sexual trauma transgression it's fine]

It's not usually grounds for me to [it's fine] it doesn't usually dissuade me from wanting their continued attention. Ultimately, they get away with it. 

But I can't... laugh this off. 

I also can't make a big deal about it. I get dressed and I leave. 

And I don't tell anyone about that.

I tell many stories about many of my so-called sex capades in Barcelona, but I don't tell anyone about this for... years. The memory resurfaces occasionally and I feel the same sense of shame wash over me. I keep this to myself. I just keep it kind of buried. It's deep. [NK’s voice echoes in her head quietly: It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.] It's like a reminder that I don't have power, that I am constantly just reduced to a body, a black body, a black femme body that I am also just like a screen [Melissa Harris-Perry: jezebel] onto which [Melissa Harris-Perry: hot, lascivious, oversexed black woman] a lot of things are constantly being projected. [Melissa Harris-Perry: rooted in the experience of American slavery] 

You can't really look too closely at like what an experience like that means. It's like, you know, intuitively deep down. But it's it would mean to acknowledge it. To name it would almost mean like I have to do something about it. 

Even though third wave white feminism told us that if we fucked around like men, we'd be able to share in their power. 

By the time I'm out of college in my late 20s, I know that doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't change anything. Men aren't changed by being treated in the same patriarchal ways that they have treated us. They don't learn anything. I spend most of my 20s writing thinly veiled fiction about women who are deeply dissatisfied with the men in their lives and the expectations of heteronormativity in general. But I'm 30. Before I do anything about it. Mostly by having a lesbian separatist phase and then a first girlfriend and a first serious queer relationship. 

But even in that relationship, I'm not getting off. 

I get desperate to try anything. I go to an erotic embodiment workshop where you get naked with strangers in a dark room but are forbidden to make eye contact with anyone. It's basically a glorified circlejerk. It doesn't help. [a quiet voice reads out a list of fears]

It's like my past experiences are encoded, are part of me. With a queer partner who I love having sex that makes me feel authentic and in my gender, fully allowed to express myself fluidly, I still can't get out of my head. I can't relax. It's not just that it's hard to center myself, which it is, or that it's hard for me to receive, which it also is. It's that the idea of surrender is too intensely uncomfortable to entertain. It's that I don't know what will happen if I let my guard down. 

NK:

After this night at Oilcan Harry's, I start fantasizing about a performance, a persona. A reparations domme, who's like an alter ego in thigh high boots. 

I've been a version of her before as the host of a dating game where all the questions are designed to expose the fraught historical relationship between Black women and white cis-men. 

The audience had laughed while my unsuspecting bachelors had squirmed uncomfortably. [canned game show laughter]

So now I imagine myself leaning into that, humiliating a cis-white man who's begging [slapping noise] for my abuse. Except [slapping] this time they thank me for it. I look into renting a dungeon in L.A. and write an a post on Tinder: Black femme dominatrix, seeks straight white men for slaves. I fold a belt in half and slap it hard against the palm of my hand and I imagine how good it will feel to press the sole of my foot against some white dude's face. 

But then on a whim, I Google reparations domme and find Mistress Velvet, a Black femme dominatrix with a reputation for making her white submissives read Black feminist thought. 

Mistress Velvet:

Um I think I'm well known for having clients read Black Feminist Theory and Liberation Text and Marxist and Leninist stuff. Ultimately, it's for people to explore themselves intimately, sexually, physically, in ways that society doesn't allow us to do. 

NK:

When I arrive at Mistress Velvet's house in Chicago, she and her partner are having brunch. I'm in town for a wedding and they tell me that at the end of their own wedding, they hosted an orgy in their hotel room as a way to subvert the institution. 

Mistress Velvet:

Fuck, this is amazing. 

NK:

That’s hot. 

Mistress Velvet:

Yeah. It was really great. It was really great. 

NK:

Mistress Velvet knows that what she's doing doesn't amount to structural reparations for Black folks. Reparations domme was a label given to her by the media. But it does have a personal benefit. The same kind that I was looking for. 

Mistress Velvet:

I feel like I've been used and erased by white man and I just kept finding white man after white man to help me feel good about myself until I learned that that's not where I was going to feel good about myself. 

NK:

But unlike my misguided sexcapades in my early 20s, Mistress Velvet is actually teaching her partner something.

Mistress Velvet:

It is much harder to work with white men. 

When I get to work with folks that are like people of color and queer in the dungeon, it's really beautiful in a very different way from when I get to work with white men who are so honestly so used to just receiving. But it's still like really challenges their, their like fundamental parts of their identity that has grown up with privilege. And I have to then deconstruct that for them and let them see things in different ways. 

NK:

So we talked for about an hour and I'm surprised to find out that we have a lot in common. 

Mistress Velvet:

By the time I was in high school, I had really internalized being the oreo, which is a horrible slam to my academic performance and attributing it to whiteness. 

NK:

We both grew up in the South,. 

Mistress Velvet:

Promiscuous sex. 

NK:

We talk about fucking around in college. 

Mistress Velvet:

I need to have lots and lots of sex because I had left a relationship and was really finding myself. 

NK:

We talk about being Black and queer and compulsory heterosexuality.

Mistress Velvet:

It turned out to not be fulfilling. [laughter]

NK:

We talk about the ways being Black, queer and femme have contributed to our anxiety and other mental health issues. 

Mistress Velvet:

Oh my gosh, this could be a whole ‘nother episode in and of itself. What Mistress Velvet is like in therapy um [laughter...talking continues in the background ]

NK:

She's researching the connection for her Master's thesis

Mistress Velvet:

I think I want to preface this by saying I find that a lot of the people that I read about have very similar...  [Mistress Velvet inhales and exhales slowly] Upbringings or experiences to me, and the folks that I've been reading about are also like struggling or coming to terms with or coming into themselves around their queerness. And I'm just like, this is not an accident that so many of us like. Basically, I'm like reading these articles about Black, Black queer femmes that have borderline. And it's like they all use the same language that I'm using around, like self-worth and um and finding your worth and navigating a society that, that hates our existence and hates our bodies. And I'm just like, fuck. [punctuated laugh] You know, when I find myself sighing and letting my breath out in the dungeon... 

NK:

[in conversation] Yeah, Sameeee... [laughter] I find myself holding my breath a lot.  

Mistress Velvet:

Yes!

NK:

[in conversation] I have had a lot of similar experiences that you describe as far as like how I grew up. And I also had a lot of traumatized responses to Black folks as a result of that.

Mistress Velvet:

mmm hmm, yes.

NK:

[in conversation] And so what I'm doing right now is like intentionally I might actually, like, be super purposeful about prioritizing Blackness by surrounding myself with Black imagery. I like prioritizing relationships with Black folks, being in Black spaces that honestly have felt really threatening to me because of things that happened to me when I was like 12 or something. And I've learned about this sort of like way that emotion is processed and the brain processes like that really small things can become traumatic experiences

Mistress Velvet:

Yes!

NK:

That your brain reacts to almost instantly and forms a defense response to, this memory like rejection, I think —

Mistress Velvet:

Yes.

NK:

Is in my body.

Mistress Velvet:

Yes.

NK:

But I guess what I was getting to is I had was I had read that like if you introduce yourself an experience as previously traumatic or traumatizing or threatening, your body and your brain will learn like, oh, this is no longer a threat. It will have a different reaction. 

Mistress Velvet:

I think um sometimes I think about my work as a domme, as I'm putting myself in like almost like exposure therapy because — similar to what you said — as I've gotten older and I have like like redeveloped my relationship with Blackness, I am very intentional. And looking specifically for folks that look like me, spaces that are just for us, like I need that. And it's not something I've had growing up for a lot of reasons. But also, I didn't shame myself for not having that feeling of worth. Internally, I'm like, it makes sense that I have a I struggle a lot with my self-worth because this is what society has taught me. But it's also why it's so important now, like why relish and being in Black spaces, which which used to be a space that I would not find myself in. Now it's like, oh, I don't know how we'd be surviving and thriving without these spaces where we have like a commonality and a shared experience that is like so deep, you know. Yeah. 

NK:

[back to narration] For a while I've been interested in the ways that kink creates a space for consensual relationships that play with power and narrative, historical narrative. A lot of the media attention on Mistress Velvet focuses on what the white men who seek her out get from the experience. But what I want to know is what the role reversal does for her. What kind of historical or generational trauma is being worked out in the dungeon? 

Mistress Velvet:

Sometimes in the dungeon is the only time that I am like around a white person or specifically a cis-gender white man. It is much harder to work with white men than when I work with folks of other races and folks of other genders. That's where I get the most challenge in the dungeon. It's like I go in there with the pre assumption that I have. I am a complete being with so much value and worth more than they will ever have. My clients come in as my submissives and they're like they are defaulting to me. They exist in those moments for my pleasure, almost like the opposite of what I've experienced.

NK:

[in conversation] I think that I had assumed before, because I was interested in like expressions of rage, that is also a big part of this. And I think I was like, oh, this, that's why reparations domme came to me as a performance idea, being like, how can I look like abuse white man or whatever as a way to for me to feel something. Is that really at play for you? 

Mistress Velvet:

That definitely is there. I don't [pause] want to erase that. I mean, but this isn't, you can't use this space to completely just process everything as much as it is very enticing. That's not what the space, the space isn't fully for us, 100 percent in that way. You know, we have to care for the people that we're that are there with us. Yeah, and that's hard. Yeah. Because you're coming in with so much of these feelings. 

NK:

Well, I wonder if that required mutuality is why. It's part of why it's healing as that like. It's very enticing to sort of like want to just take your rage out on white men or subjugate white men in the way that they have done to us. But that's ultimately not that's just a replication of what they've done. I think this model that you're describing, it feels like a larger metaphor for a kind of collective care and consciousness should feel like needs to take place.

Mistress Velvet:

Yes, absolutely I could not have said it better myself. That's exactly how I feel about it. Yeah. 

NK:

That's incredible. [laughter]

Mistress Velvet:

Yeah, it's, um. This work is beautiful and it's so complicated.  

[drums and brass]

NK:

A few months after meeting Mistress Velvet in Chicago, I spend my birthday with friends in New Orleans. As a surprise gift, they write an address on a piece of paper and tell me what time to show up. They haven't told me exactly what the appointment is for or who I am meeting with. But they've told me to think about my intentions for the year. I've been thinking about the Leo in my chart and how I want to embrace fire, by which I mean ask for attention and then receive it. 

I'm expecting a really in-depth tarot card reading or something witchy, since this is New Orleans and I'm vaguely into that kind of thing. 

When I arrive, another Black woman opens the door and she tells me her name is Aisha.

Aisha:

Where is the energy flow and how can we like better —

NK:

[narrating] And when I step inside, she tells me she's a bodyworker. A healer.

[Aisha and NK laugh, and speak softly: and your intuition. Amazing. a lot of people have like it's blocked…]

NK:

[narrating] The way you go to a massage therapist for a worn out muscle. You go to Aisha when there's something more intangible going on. 

Aisha:

And then on the other side of our body, we're like control it. But not like actually let it be a source of information. Or like a place of inspiration.

NK:

[narrating] She asks me what things she can help move through my body, what history, what experiences can she help release or expel? I tell her that when I think about trauma in my body, I think of sex. 

Aisha:

Where in your body… I wish I had brought my other cards… um, [knocking on hollow wood sound] where do you feel like that story is in your body? 

NK:

[in conversation] Which, the, my relationship with Black women?

Aisha:

Yeah. This Yeah. 

NK:

[narrating] And I don't know what stories, what information my body is still holding.

[in conversation] Well, ok, two things come to mind, one is when I was little...

NK:

[narrating] She takes me into a back room where a massage table is. She puts on Nina Simone. Earlier she told me about how Nina Simone and Lorraine Hansberry were lovers. She tells me to bring Black women into the room with me. And I think about Saidiya Hartman and the women Saidiya Hartman is writing about. I think about Toni Morrison, who's recently passed. I think about my mom and my grandmother and my sister. My eyes were closed. But we talk. It's not exactly like a massage. I'm not necessarily trying to relax. I'm thinking about my intention for myself, for my birthday, for the next year, for the next 10 years. 

At one point, she asked me to roll over and she's cradling my head in her hands. 

At this point, my eyes are closed and I'm starting to tell her about my sister. But for some reason I stop mid-sentence. 

Nina Simone is singing a cover of a Bob Dylan song, Just Like A Woman, [Just Like a Woman plays in the background quietly] which is a song that I used to like, like in college when I liked Bob Dylan and like other like white bro music. But somehow I like hearing Nina Simone sing this song, like and imagining her singing it to another Black woman, like imagining her singing it to Lorraine Hansberry just kind of stops me. [Nina Simone singing]

I'm really intent on the song until I'm not. It's almost as if I'm transported like I, leave the room, like I am physically there, but mentally I'm just, I'm somewhere else. I don't know how much time passes. It seems like minutes go by and then suddenly I'm just like sort of abruptly back in my body. I'm back in the room. [Singing begins again]

And I'm gagging, I'm choking, I, I have to open my mouth. Because I can't — there is like a lump in my throat. And normally I would try to swallow it. But in this case, it's so big that I'm gagging on it. It's a familiar feeling. It's the feeling that I get. When there's something that needs to be expressed or communicated that I just can't access. 

I feel it there. But this was so intense. It was. I couldn't close my mouth. I had to open my mouth. I had to even stick my tongue out to, like, let it out. and Aishas cradling my head and she's telling me to breathe, to breathe in a certain way, so I can loosen it up. 

She tells me it's like soaking a pan. Like some things are gonna come out. But not everything. And there's no need to scrape the pan. You can just soak it. Give it time. But some things are going to come out right now. 

I don't know what things, I don't feel anything else physically, I just feel, I just have the gagging sensation. But after a minute or so, it goes away. I can breathe again. I can swallow. It's fine. 

She asks me if I feel any other physical sensations, and I tell her that my right ear. Is burning. It's really, hot. Not uncomfortably so, but just really hot. And then my left ear. There's kind of a high pitched whining, like almost electronic. It's also not uncomfortable just to kind of… [NK makes a high pitched humming sound]

And the same Nina Simone song, the Bob Dylan song is still playing, like it hasn't even been that long? It feels like so much time has passed, but it hasn't been that long. 

And then shortly after our session is over, she leaves the room. She leaves me to get dressed. And I feel completely spaced out. I'm just kind of amazed, like, what the fuck just happened? I have no idea what happened. I don't know why it happened, but I feel amazing. I'm just like, so relaxed. But also. I leave. I walk a block or so down the street to City Park. This beautiful park, it's through these huge old ancient trees just with Spanish moss hanging down and swaying in the wind. [breathing in and out] Spanish moss always reminds me of... Georgia. And it's really humid and I sit down in the grass just to kind of collect and gather my thoughts, and I feel like I feel called to return to the South. I feel like I need to be back there. It's something about these giant trees and all of New Orleans that feels like so... erotic. It's like I can just feel the, the history of that place really palpably. And I feel really confident about the work that I have to do, about what I need to say and why it's valuable for me to say it. In a way that I can't always tap into. 

[Nina Simone sings “Just Like a Woman” quietly: a long time curse, and what's worse, Is it's baaaaaad, yeah, I can't stand it...please don’t let on, that you knew me when, I was hungry and it was your world...]

Kaitlin:

This episode was written and produced by Nicole Kelley. The series is edited by Chiquita Paschal. The heart is Nicole Kelly, Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi, Chiquita Paschal, Jen Eng and me, Kaitlin Prest. You can follow the heart on Instagram at the heart radio. You can follow me at Kaitlyn Prest. There were many, many people involved in the making of these episodes. 

You know who you are. We thank you. 

The Heart is a production of the Mermaid Palace Arts Company. If you want to check out other Mermaid Palace shows, go to mermaid palace dot org. If you love this show and you want to support it with your cash dollars because you like to pay for good art, we would greatly appreciate it. We rely on donations to make this work. 

You can donate at Mermaid Palace dot org. Slash the dash heart. Thanks for listening.