The Egg Factory

Hello dear Listeners! We’re on our way back after a wintry hiatus. This week we’ll be back in the studio with one of our last guests for Season One. By summertime you’ll have three fresh eggs in your earbuds to enjoy.

While you wait, please listen to this week’s delightful Selected Shorts readings of Alice in Wonderland -- start at 38:00 for Dan Stevens aka Matthew Crawley reading Humpty Dumpty.

I met our ninth guest at a Korean restaurant one Friday night. Sarah Richardson sat next to me while we waited for our mutual friend to show up, and small talk quickly made way to discussions of feral cats (and feral cat ladies), poop jokes, and feminism. I knew I had to get this lady on the Egg Factory! So I tipsily subscribed her phone to the podcast (our primary method of recruiting new listeners) and emailed her the next week.

Sarah chatted with us from Boston, where she was volunteering as a judge for a giant international synthetic biology competition. She’s a biologist who, on top of pushing the frontiers of computational biology, spends a lot of time and energy recruiting the next generation of scientists.

We loved her vivid, analogy-studded explanations of microbiology and her candid description of working as an ultra-minority in her field. Hope you do, too! 

Dr. Sarah Richardson is a post-doctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where she was recently awarded a Woman @ the Lab award. They wrote up a great Q&A with Sarah that has even more philosophical advice on being a scientist.

Hi Eggers, we have been quiet for a while--lost in other work--but we have a special episode for you! Last week, I (Shara) went to see Margaret Atwood in Redwood City and IT WAS SO DELIGHTFUL. Atwood’s on a book tour for her new novel, The Heart Goes Last, and Peninsula Arts and Letters, the non-profit partner of Kepler’s Books, brought her to the Fox Theatre. During her Q&A, I turned my phone recorder on just for the hell of it, and then I thought, “This is so Egg Factory.” So your earholes now have access to it with permission from Peninsula Arts and Letters!

First of all, I need to tell you that I love Margaret Atwood like I love the scented candle I just bought--I didn’t think that I needed her but now I can’t live without her. Walking into the auditorium, I felt like I knew everyone even though they were all strangers. They were my people: a bunch of cute, nerdy women, who love books, scarves and Margaret Atwood. Most of us were clutching brand new books that we had bought from the table in the lobby--either our favorite Atwoods or new ones that we had yet to read. 

Atwood’s books have a huge range of style and subject matter, and one of her most recent trilogies, the MaddAddam series, imagines the world before and after a pandemic. In the theatre, I imagined what a post-apocalyptic society would look like if the only survivors were the people in this audience. We would flounder at first, perhaps, losing a few of the weaker ones. But guided by Atwood’s books and her actual presence, we’d rise to the challenge--ripping off the velvet seat coverings for warmth, looting the surrounding restaurants for non-perishables, and hot wiring the cars to drive to San Francisco. 

And then when Atwood walked on stage, I teared up! I couldn’t believe it. I have always been fascinated and perplexed by people who start crying when they see a beloved celebrity, but now I understand. I was just so happy to see her in front of me, human and smiling. Like seeing my sister for the first time after two years. And when, over the course of the evening, I learned that she was hilarious, my heart did another little jig. 

If you haven’t picked up an Atwood novel, then I highly recommend The Blind Assassin as a starting place. And even if you are not a fan of Atwood’s novels, you may fall in love with her during this Q&A so please sit back, enjoy and save the animals. 

Our Eggy Factoid of the week: Terry Gross got her start in radio on a feminist show called Womanpower!

Gleaned from this delightful profile by Susan Burton.

Hello, Eggettes! Our weekly podcast has puttered into a greater-than-monthly-but-not-much one, but we want to let you know: We’re still here! We’ll be bringing you four more eggs to round out our first season, and here’s the latest.

Hope Boylston is a retired Spanish teacher in Pennsylvania with a surprising past. When she was in her twenties, she drove through South America with her pal Toody and ended up spending much of the next decade living in Chile, participating in a revolution and eventually leaving the country under pursuit by the secret police. Really! 

She documented this story in her memoir Hay Locos. We chatted with Hope about the process of looking back on her intense time in Chile, and how her sense of self has developed over the last six decades. Enjoy!

Thanks to listener Luc Weiss for introducing us to Hope!

We’re going to an improv show, doo dah, doo dah, we’re going to an improv show and maybe you’ll come too.

Top of the morning to ya, Eggers! This week, we talked with one of Diane’s former lab mates, Hadiseh Alaeian. She is a physicist from Tehran, Iran, and she truly loves science more than most people–or scientists for that matter–we’ve met. We learned about how she approaches scientific study and how she views the relationship between science and Islam. It’s a super enthralling episode so enjoy! 

Egglings, we have made a VIDEO!

Here’s a little timelapse of Shara and Diane working real hard behind the scenes to plop out another interview this week. Come back on Thursday to hear what we were so diligently transcribing!

Ooo, we got a great egg for you this Thursday! Lisa Rowland is a professional improviser and improv teacher in the Bay Area. She muses about the intersections of improv and daily life, science and gender, and her voice is like smooth honey. 

Hope you enjoy the episode, and if you live in or near San Francisco, you can see Lisa perform with Improv Playhouse, Awkward Dinner Party and the BATS improv company. I always leave her shows gasping for breath because I laughed/felt so much. Seriously, so damn good. 

But we’re back this Thursday with a fresh interview -- here’s a clue!

Photo by Katy Scoggin. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

“She is so gutsy--she's made films about really serious national and global-level issues, and she's just a really powerful lady.”

Good morning, Egg Factory! Today, we have an interview with Natalie Ruiz Tofano. 

A close friend of our first interviewee, Jenna Tonn, Natalie lives in New York City and works as a producer at a film company.

She brought us a hilarious and thoughtful chat on gender and filmmaking, and left us with some solid life advice.