Episode 160: AAPI History Month, Kate Elston Discusses Menstruation, and The Return to Sports
On this week's episode, Amira, Lindsay, Brenda, and Jessica honor Asian American Pacific Islander History Month by highlighting some AAPI athletes [6:04]. After that, Jessica sits down with Kate Elston to discuss her podcast Vicious Cycle and all things sports + menstruation [18:11]. Finally, they speak about all the attempts at returning to sports [35:35].
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile [54:25], the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Candice Lee [1:04:18], and what is good in our worlds [1:06:23].
Links
7 Asian American sports trailblazers who changed the games: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/7-asian-american-sports-trailblazers-who-changed-games-n1006201
Kanoa Igarashi: Why I now represent Japan and not the USA: https://magicseaweed.com/news/kanoa-igarashi-why-i-now-represent-japan-and-not-the-usa/10809/
The golden friendship between the two first Asian American Olympic champions: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/golden-friendship-between-two-first-asian-american-olympic-champions-n1006191
Asian American athletes speak out against coronavirus racism: https://theundefeated.com/features/asian-american-athletes-speak-out-against-coronavirus-racism/
Golf returned for a charity showcase, but women weren't invited: https://www.powerplays.news/p/golf-returned-for-a-charity-showcase
Tight schedule, turf present risks for proposed NWSL return-to-play tournament: https://theathletic.com/1831850/2020/05/22/tight-schedule-turf-present-risks-for-proposed-nwsl-return-to-play-tournament/
WNBA commissioner still optimistic that the league 'can have a season this summer’: https://sports.yahoo.com/wnba-commissioner-cathy-engelbert-hopeful-for-season-coronavirus-covid19-pandemic-222342407.html
NFL player sues United Airlines, claims he was sexually assaulted by woman on flight: https://sports.yahoo.com/nfl-player-sues-united-airlines-claims-he-was-sexually-assaulted-by-woman-on-flight-181956424.html
USA RUGBY PLAYER ON THE FRONT LINES OF A PANDEMIC: https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/29152006/usa-rugby-player-front-lines-pandemic
WNBA's Ndour In Senegal Helping With COVID-19 Fight: https://www.si.com/nba/mavericks/news/rice-sugar-wnba-ndour-in-senegal-helping-covid-19-fight
Former Cal All-American Chelsea Spencer Named Program's Head Coach: https://www.softballamerica.com/stories/former-cal-all-american-chelsea-spencer-named-programs-head-coach/
The 50 Most Powerful Influencers In World Football: https://www.sportbible.com/football/news-the-50-most-powerful-influencers-in-world-football-revealed-20200519
Vanderbilt makes Candice Lee SEC's first female, black athletic director: https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/29205275
Transcript
Amira: Good day, flamethrowers! I don’t know what time you’re listening to this, so good whatever time of the day it is for you. I don’t know when or where you’re listening to this, but I’m glad you are. I am Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies at Penn State University, and this week I am joined by my magnificent co-hosts: Lindsay Gibbs, my fellow gemini! It’s our season! WOO!!
Lindsay: Wow, I have none of your enthusiasm for that. [laughter]
Amira: Well, I have it for the both of us. Lindsay’s a freelance sports reporter and the creator of the incredible Power Plays newsletter. If you haven’t signed up, please go do that now – powerplays.news. She is based in Washington, DC. Good morning, Linz.
Lindsay: Good morning.
Amira: Jessica Luther, who is a Swiss army knife of excellence: she bakes, she lifts weights, she’s getting her PhD, occasionally makes cameos in music videos and, of course, she’s the author of the forthcoming much-anticipated book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back. She’s based in Austin, Texas. Hey, Jess!
Jessica: Hey!
Amira: And last but not least, Dr. Brenda Elsey, associate professor at Hofstra University, my fellow historian, academic, big sis. She’s brilliant and funny and most importantly she is done grading! Cue the Bad Bunny, it’s time to turn up. Brenda, how are you doing?
Brenda: I am so much better than usual. [laughter]
Amira: Shireen is not with us this week as she’s celebrating Eid and let me please take this moment to wish all of you who celebrate a hearty Eid Mubarak from all of us here at Burn It All Down. This week we’re gonna celebrate AAPI Heritage Month by highlight some stories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in sport. I’ve asked each of my co-hosts to highlight somebody retired, current, and share their stories. We’re gonna start from the top with that celebratory segment, then we’re gonna also have a segment where we talk about sports still somehow trying to come back and we’ll bring you the latest: where certain leagues are, who’s doing it well, who’s continuing to fail miserably. Plus, we have a very special interview: Jessica talks with Kate Elston, one of the co-hosts of the period-focused podcast Vicious Cycle about sports and, well, periods! They chat about some of the things Kate learned in doing what they call bleed-search for the podcast, why the stigma arounds periods refuses to die, and the consequences of that in sport – plus we even get Kate singing about all of this. That’s right! Songs about sports and periods, I am here for it. And then we will all talk about sports trying to come back. Still. In a pandemic. Still. [laughs] Of course, we’ll be burning some things, we’ll shoutout badass folks, and we’ll tell you what’s good in our lives.
But before we get started, if you weren’t already fatigued from the 10 hours that ESPN spent on Michael Jordan – and side note, if you want our full feelings on this, check our our special Patreon episode on The Last Dance and, if you’re not a patron, subscribe! $2/month gets you access to 45 minutes of us ranting about this documentary! But yeah if you weren’t already fatigued from that, ESPN announced a forthcoming 9-hour documentary on one Tom Brady. Listen, I’m one of the few people who would actually enjoy watching the game footage at least, and I don’t even want this. On Twitter folks were offering their suggestions about who they would much rather see, so, quick-hitter roundtable guys, give me names: who would you rather spend, if you had to spend another 10 hours on anybody in sports, who would you rather see? Jess?
Jessica: That’s a tall order, just in general. But my shortlist: Simone Biles, Diana Taurasi and, this is such a fangirl thing to say, but Andy Murray. [laughter] That’s the list.
Amira: I love it. Lindsay, how about you?
Lindsay: Literally anyone that’s not selling protect-immunity-blend supplements would be good! [laughing]
Amira: Mm-hmm, that part.
Lindsay: Anyone who’s not doing that during a pandemic I would choose right now, but honestly for me I’m dying for someone to do justice to the Gabby Douglas story, that’s just what I keep saying. Gabby Douglas, Gabby Douglas, Gabby Douglas! Because as much as greatness fascinates me, also people who struggled with not being the greatest after being the greatest, that fascinates me even more. So yeah, I want Gabby Douglas.
Amira: Yeah. That’d be great. Brenda?
Brenda: Almost anyone but Michael Jordon and Tom Brady. [laughter] I generally hate these things because they’re just hagiography. There’s no way you’re getting a real story, and I’m so uncomfortable with it. But I guess Sissi, Marta, Socrates…I guess I’m well in Brazil today.
Lindsay: Shocking, shocking. [laughter]
Brenda: Yeah, I know!
Jessica: I thought we were gonna get a Formiga outta you.
Brenda: Formiga in there…I would love a cohort documentary, one that took that generation and brought it up to what it is today, probably the twilight of Marta, that would be my ideal. Not one individual, but Formiga, Marta, Sissi, ahh, the trifecta.
Amira: Yeah, I’m with you. I’m first of all fatigued, I just don’t know if I could do it at all. But if you made a documentary about, like, the referee down the street who is mowing the grass at the field that my kids occasionally play soccer on, I would probably want to watch that more than whatever they would do. So, ESPN, folks, see? We just took 60 seconds, generated a lot of ideas. Get your research team on it, but your research behind it. Or better yet, somebody just give Burn It All Down a production company, ay, ay, ay. Alright, let’s get into the show.
So May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the United States, and we wanted to celebrate that by bringing you a segment about AAPI athletes. I think this is particularly important in this time when we’re seeing a rise in violence and racism tied to the coronavirus against Asian Americans and Asian people in general, and I think that if you haven’t already read UCLA basketball player Natalie Cho’s essay on this, also Katelyn Ohashi and NFL player Taylor Rapp and other Asian athletes are speaking out about this issue. There’s a great article on The Undefeated about their efforts, I really do encourage you guys to check it out. So I definitely wanted to make note of that. But for today however I’ve asked each of my co-hosts to highlight an athlete current or retired of AAPI descent, and I cannot wait to learn about some of these stories. Let’s start semi-chronologically and historically I guess, so, Brenda, what you got for us?
Brenda: I was looking into this and honestly there was so many to choose from, and it was hard to pick, but I picked Vicki Manalo Draves who medalled in both platform and springboard diving in the 1948 Olympics. She’s the first person to win gold in both of those – or first woman, sorry, to win gold in both of those. Also, national diving championship 1946, 1947, 1948. Obviously this is huge in the 1940s just coming off of World War II and the terrible treatment that Asian Americans experienced during the internments in World War II. She is the child of an interracial marriage and almost right away her coaches make her drop her name Manalo, which is her father’s Filipino name, and take her mother’s, whose last name was Taylor, and use that instead. In an interview with NBC a few years back, her son said, “When she was young, her mother would say to her and her two sisters, you guys look down at the ground, don’t look up.” Every time she used the public pool they drained the water after. Her son said, “This would really hurt my mom. She would actually go to a pool and compete, and after she got done with the meet they would always empty the water out of the pool.”
It’s just incredible to me, I can’t imagine what it takes to continue for that many years and experiencing that type of racism on a daily basis, and so connected to the very space that you’re in and the shame that they tried to throw on her. After the Olympics, she and her husband – she eventually marries her coach – she and her husband open a diving school. She’s inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1969.
Amira: Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, this is a little more recent of course, but when I think of Asian American athletes Mirai Nagasu really comes to mind. I think one of my favorite sports moments of the last decade is seeing her land that triple axel in the Winter Olympics team competition in…What year is that, 2018? I think that the reason her story is always so compelling to me is because of all of the ups and downs that she’s been through. She made it onto the US team for the 2010 Olympics and finished fourth, she was only like 19 at the time, I believe. Then 4 years later she finished third at the Olympic qualifying but was kept off the team even though 3 were allowed to make the team – there’s a selection process and she was left off the team so that Ashley Wagner who had not performed well at US Nationals could be put on it, and I think that for so long she was in the shadow of the Ashley Wagner and Gracie Gold and the American media’s desperation to have a white blonde figure skating superstar. I think Mirai often didn’t get the attention she deserved and was literally left off the team that she deserved to be on back in 2014.
But she didn’t give up. She kept fighting, and she made the team in 2018. Like I said, she ended up going in and in the team competition she helped Team USA to the gold medal when she landed a triple axel in her free skate, becoming the first American female figure skater to land a triple axel at the Olympics and the third woman from any country to do so. Another part of her story is that both of her parents are Japanese immigrants and they own a sushi restaurant in California and it’s very much, like, it’s a story we hear from a lot of immigrants, she grew up at that store. Her dad never takes vacations except to see her at the Olympics, and he jokes, but not really a joke, he says, “I’ve had to take two vacations because you made the Olympics twice,” kind of blames her for that. She’s actually been doing a lot of work over the past month…I encourage you to go to her Instagram and read how you can help her family’s restaurant, because she’s been working really hard to save her family’s restaurant during this COVID-19 pandemic.
Amira: I’ll go next. I wanted to make sure to center and talk about Pacific Islanders within this conversation, because sometimes the PI part of AAPI gets left out. When I think about Polynesian athletes, a lot of times my first thought goes to somebody who we’ve talked about on the show before, to Duke Kahanamoku who was a surfer, and I think about Duke who was born under the monarchy, under the kingdom, before the US overthrow of the monarchy in Hawaii. Then he went on to have this storied Olympic career, five time Olympian, he’s so decorated, but had to claw tooth and nail for every inch. In 1911 for instance, he smashed all of these swimming records. He bested the 100-yard freestyle record by more than four seconds which is, in swimming, huge. He broke the record in the 200 and equalled it in the 50, but the AAU refused to recognize this. They said the judges were using clocks and not stopwatches, or that the Hawaiian ocean currents aided him, or that it was saltier – all of the excuses possible. It wasn’t until many years later that they actually recognized him, and of course he popularized the sport of surfing. If you want to revisit those conversations we’ve had, on episode 71 Shireen has a great interview about the colonization of surfing with Bonnie Tsui and I think that that is where my mind first went.
Then I think a lot about, of course, football players, but I wanted to actually talk about the rise of softball among Polynesian women, and all too often what’s lost in that is the experiences of Polynesian women in sport. One of the really interesting growths in the game of softball over the last few years has been with athletes of color. In particular we’ve seen Asian American softball players increase their numbers by 27%, Latinas by over 55%, and then the other really significant number is that Polynesian and Hawaiian islanders have increased their numbers in Division I college softball by 43%, and that’s a huge growth of the game. There was an article a few years ago that talked about in the women’s college world series because there was like 7 Polynesian girls split between the teams and they had formed a kind of community, despite the fact that they played for different teams. There was this longform article about their bond, they call it the ‘unofficial 9th team’ at the college world series that was kind of this grouping of all of these different Polynesian women.
That’s kind of the focus that I wanted to do, and I wanted to give you a name to kind of be on the watch for, and that’s Dejah Mulipola who was on the 2020 softball roster, had a standout career at Arizona, and unfortunately of course the Olympics are cancelled or postponed or whatever the hell they’re doing with it, but yeah, I just wanted to shout out that name. She’s someone to watch. So it’s not necessarily a specific story, but a general rise of softball as a sport for Polynesian women who are really gaining around there, and I think we should keep our eye on it. Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah, totally piggybacking off of Amira introducing Duke, he’s one of the main reasons…He lobbied very hard to get surfing into the Olympics, which we were supposed to see this summer, and we will actually see whenever they hold the Olympics, possibly next year. Shoutout to Carissa Moore who qualified for the US. She’s a native Hawaiian, so she feels very much in the legacy of Duke. But I wanted to focus on a surfer named Kanoa Igarashi. He grew up in Huntington Beach, California. His parents moved there from Japan when his mother was pregnant, and I don’t know if this is like, you know, we tell these stories later, but I read that both of his parents were surfing fans, so when they were picking they picked “Surf City, USA” as a place that they wanted to raise their kid, so that’s why they moved to Huntington Beach. He qualified for the championship tour in 2015 at the age of 18; he was then the youngest rookie on the tour in 2016. Then in 2019 he won his first championship tour victory at the Corona Bali Protected meet. He’s currently 6th in the world by the World Surf League’s rankings.
Because his parents are both Japanese he has dual citizenship and he has chosen to surf for Japan next year. I was reading that the World Surf League site says he’s possible the biggest chance for gold for Japan at the Olympic Games – this is really exciting. His dad used to surf at Shidashita in Chiba, Japan, which is the site of the surfing, and there’s this story I read about how back in the day his dad used to use a machete to hack through the overgrowth to get to the beach to surf there, and how it’s really wild for him to think that his son will be surfing there for Japan. Kanoa has said about the Olympics, “The Olympics is my family’s only opportunity to watch me compete live. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, they watch me surf every event online and for them to see me surfing for the first time in person representing Japan makes it that much more special for them.”
Then I just wanted to read this quote; he has talked specifically about being both American and Japanese and what that means to him and how that affects him. He told this site called magicseaweed.com, “That’s one of the insights I have as a Japanese-American athlete. Americans are more competitive and are driven to take down their competitors as they see someone’s success as an attack on their own. Japanese are happier to see one of their own do well because it’s an island and the population is smaller, success feels shared. It’s good for me, having both.” So I’m excited next year to finally see surfing in the Olympics and I think watching Kanoa try to go for the gold for Japan will be really fun.
Amira: Up next, Jess’s interview with Kate Elston from Vicious Cycle.
Jessica: Hello flamethrowers, Jessica here. I’m joined today by Kate Elston. Kate is a journalist, producer, and editor. She was the lead producer on the political comedy show Newsbroke. She’s a longtime improv performer with The Ballroom and sketch comedy writer, director and instructor with Killing My Lobster. She’s also the co-host, along with Meg Hayes and Meg Trowbridge of the podcast Vicious Cycle, which is all about periods, menstruation, and cycles. Thanks for being here, Kate.
Kate: Hey, thanks for having me!
Jessica: So, let’s talk first just general terms about Vicious Cycle. Tell us what this show’s about, how do you describe it?
Kate: Yeah, we say it’s a podcast about periods and the people who get them, plain and simple. Meg, Meg and I are three best friends and comedians in San Francisco. We were talking one day just about how we don’t…We talk a lot about our periods to each other, but not to other people, and we actually don’t know that much about our bodies. We’re 30-somethings who are not quite sure what ovulation even really means. So we thought it was time to demystify, bitch about, and laugh at our periods. Half of the world goes through this!
Jessica: Right.
Kate: When you talk about it, you make it less shameful. There are times when I’ve edited myself in post-production a little bit more [Jess laughs] but for the most part I have no shame. We’re all going through this, we all have questions, and we all have weird things going on with our uteruses.
Jessica: I love the name, Vicious Cycle. How did you pick that?
Kate: We were brainstorming for a while and I think Meg Trowbridge came up with that one. We had a bunch, because we wanted to be funny we were trying to think of, like, should it be This American Period or There Will Be Blood [Jess laughing] …On The Rag was one we really wanted to do, but someone had that one! Someone had On The Rag.
Jessica: Oh, wow.
Kate: But it wasn’t a podcast about periods! So we were just like, that unacceptable. But yeah, Vicious Cycle worked out in the end.
Jessica: Yeah, and it just fits so perfectly. Are there specific episodes, if someone’s brand new to the podcast, that they should listen to? Do you just start with episode 1, or are there ones you think people should start with?
Kate: That’s a good question. Yeah, I think starting with episode 1 we kind of all get into it together, you know, a lot of this podcast is us just discovering things with the audience. One of the hosts will do research and present it to the other two, so it’s like, let’s go on this journey together. In that realm, I love our episodes where one of us just does a lot of research. My favorite one of those, one of my favorites, is do animals get periods? which I did research and presented. There was a funny dumb song at the end of it – we make up a lot of parody songs, so that one happened to be ripe for a song at the end. Then we have a lot of interviews with fellow bleeders, friends of ours and semi-famous people, people that come with their menstrual woes or menstrual tales. Friends of ours have come on the podcast to talk about endometriosis or bleeding while trans or having an eating disorder and how that affected her period, just a lot of fun topics and not so fun topics, but we try to make it fun all the time.
Jessica: So let’s turn to sports, since that’s what we do here at Burn It All Down. Are you yourself an athlete? What is your relationship to sports?
Kate: I was really athletic as a kid, was a big athlete as a kid. I’m still active today, I ride my bike everywhere in San Francisco and do that, yeah, full on. But I was nowhere ever near semi-professional or anything. I played soccer, lacrosse, I ran, I was a big recreational swimmer. Doing this podcast just in general, it’s make me obviously reflect on what my periods were like as a kid, and somehow down the line realized, wow, I don’t really remember them being that problematic in all those years I played sports, you know? There’d be times where I was playing 3 soccer games a week – I don’t remember my period ever getting in the way, even though I wore white shorts in a lot of my teams. Even today, I don’t really suffer when I ride my bike, I don’t feel like it ever holds me back. Since we started this podcast I started realizing, wow, every menstruator is so different, there must be people out there that have really different stories and experiences than mine when it comes to being athletic and having a period.
Jessica: Yeah, yeah. So at the end of last year you did what you all call on Vicious Cycle a bleed-search…You were so nice not to use that pun so far, so I got to give it to our audience for the first time. [laughter]
Kate: Yeah, it’s not a good one. [laguhter] We do a lot of puns, that’s not our best, but it is what it is.
Jessica: So a bleed-search about athletes and periods for a series of episodes. You were the one leading that and who did the research, so why did you decide to focus on that specifically?
Kate: In 2019 the Women’s World Cup was on; I’m a huge fan of the US women’s national team, I have been since I was 12 years old watching the 1999 team win. Highlight of my life – I was watching it at home, I wasn’t actually there, but it was still a big deal. When they won this news came out that Rose Lavelle who scored the 2nd goal in the final against Netherlands, she along with all her teammates were being tracked, their menstrual cycles were being tracked by their coaches. Rose Lavelle got her period the day after the World Cup, and they knew that was going to happen because they’d been tracking here. Even though it’s assumed that maybe the day before your period you’re maybe sluggish or your energy might be lower, they optimized this data to pump their athletes full of nutrition and good tips on how to exercise and how to be in different parts of your cycle, so it sort of optimized Rose and the rest of her teammates to perform at their best.
When I read that article I was like, okay, there’s so much that I personally don’t know about how periods affect athletes, so let’s look into it. It turns out that no one knows how periods affect athletes, because people that bleed aren’t in positions of power to research things in a lot of cases. So yeah, looking into this was really interesting because women and men are so different biologically and so much of women’s sports research up until now has just been about applying what we know about men to women, and it’s just so not the case. Our menstrual cycles really make us fluctuate in our performance. I’m a huge soccer fan, I watch a lot of men’s and women’s soccer, and the men, when they score a goal, a lot of times they’ll take off their shirt and it looks like they’re wearing sports bras, but they’re actually tracking devices that track their GPS, how far they run, their hydration levels, it tracks everything. Of course it would make sense that women have that, and they do, but it’s like, for the women’s national team, menstruation has become an extra data point for them.
Jessica: Yeah, which I think is so fascinating. One of the things I appreciate about the way that you presented it, which I think is just a reflection of how the team uses it, is that it’s just another data point, right? There’s so many things that people are constantly monitoring elite athletes for, and this just happen to be another one. It makes so much sense, yet like we’ve just talked about, it’s so rarely done. I told you before that I was trying to prep some genius question about this, and I don’t really have one, but what do you think…I mean, what is it gonna take for us to get there? Is the answer just that someone’s gonna solve sexism and then suddenly periods won’t be taboo anymore? How do we get there?
Kate: One, I think, talking about it. So podcasts of comedian friends, but also obviously news media and athletes and coaches talking about it, making it something that you can bring up to your maybe male coach. We had a lot of listeners call in or write us when we asked questions about this, saying like, oh, I grew up and I had a male coach my whole basketball career and I could never tell him I was cramping, or even if coaches are understanding it might not be on their radar, so, they might not think that if a girl steps off the volleyball court it might be that she’s going through some menstrual pain, it’s not that she’s not playing well because she’s a bad athlete or whatever. The other cool thing about all this that I read and that we learned from our interview with Amy Rodriguez who used to be on the women’s national team is that the US team has made their period data strategy known to other women’s teams around the world – their competitors, and also other sports. They want the world to know about this, they want other teams to adopt this strategy, which I think says a lot about women being the better gender [laughter] that they wanna share.
Jessica: Yeah.
Kate: And the women’s national soccer team has done this also in their contracts for their teams. Other countries have adopted what the US women’s team did when it comes to maternity leave and collective bargaining. There’s this sort of sisterhood among professional athletes, like, here’s what we did, here’s what we know, please take our examples and take our research and apply it to your team too.
Jessica: Yeah, yeah. All these under-resourced people trying to pool their resources. Give us another couple of things that you found surprising or interesting that you learned when you were doing your bleed-search.
Kate: So much interesting stuff…So, this one I always have a hard time explaining because, again, I’m still trying to understand how our cycles work. The first half of our menstrual cycle we’re pumped with estrogen, and research suggest that estrogen can increase join flexibility, which results in more damage to our knees. Research also suggests that ACL knee injuries are more prevalent in female athletes than men. So there’s a British soccer player named Jordan Nobbs who’s their star player, she couldn’t go to the World Cup last year because she twisted her knee the day of her period and she thinks that is has to do with a lot of estrogen in her body, and she’s really frustrated that no one really knows the answer. She says she has a lot of teammates and friends that have twisted their knees on the day of the period or on the second day, so, we don’t know for sure but there’s reason to think that if you’re an athlete, for the first half of your cycle to loosen up on the start and stop exercises because anything that could put pressure on your joints you should maybe not do so much.
Jessica: Wow. We need science on this!
Kate: I know
Jessica: That’s fascinating, though.
Kate: I bet you this is the stuff that the US team coaches and trainers know and I’m sure this is the kind of thing where they’re like, okay, it’s the first day of your period, you don’t have to run lines, you know? Maybe that’s what’s going on. But then the second half of our cycle we’re pumped with progesterone and progesterone can alter the body’s ability to handle heat, which means you might get more fatigued and feel hotter during prolonged exercise in that time of your cycle. So long-distance runners are told to maybe lay off going hard the second half of your cycle because you might not perform as well. There’s a long-distance runner I think from England who took this to heart and knew that on the first day of her period she’d not have as much progesterone as estrogen, and she won the Chicago Marathon or the New York Marathon that day. It was the first day of her period and she won it, and she attributes that to knowing that…Anyways, yes. The progesterone-estrogen divvy up, it affects different athletes different ways, and trying to optimize that to perform the best. So that was something really interesting that I learned.
Jessica: That is fascinating.
Kate: We always reiterate that none of us are doctors [laughter] so please consult your personal trainer. But that was just something that was so interesting, because Meg Trowbridge, one of the other hosts, she says her knees often hurt the first half of her cycle, and she never thought of it that way. She’s like, oh my god, me knees do hurt in the first half of my cycle more than my second half.
Jessica: That’s so funny. The listeners of this podcast will know that I go to the gym and I lift weights a lot, and I have terrible cramps on day 2 and 3, and always tell my blessed trainer who I love to death, whenever I go and I do squats on day 2 of my period, I’m like, “I want you to mark on my chart that I should get extra points today!” because it’s a miracle that this is happening right now.
Kate: Totally! It is a miracle that we can even do what we do with the shit that – sorry, I don’t know if you guys allow swearing–
Jessica: We absolutely allow swearing.
Kate: –the shit that goes down during our cycle. We deserve all the medals, and yet we’re still not told that we deserve equal pay? So like, whatever.
Jessica: That’s amazing, yeah. Well I want to let listeners know that if you want to learn more about periods and sports then you definitely need to check out episodes 46 and 47 of Vicious Cycle, and then on episode 48, like you said, you all interviewed US women’s national team player, World Cup winner, mom, current NWSL-er with the Utah Royals, Amy Rodriguez. That’s a great interview, episode 48, everyone should go check that out. I also wanted to point out that episode 77 of Burn It All Down which was back in October 2018, I interviewed WNBA and Team USA’s Layshia Clarendon and we talked about periods, and she actually sponsors Diva Cup.
Kate: Oh, awesome!
Jessica: So she talks a lot about that. So Kate, tell us where on the internet can listeners find Vicious Cycle?
Kate: Yeah, wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and also on Instagram we’re @viciouscyclepodcast. The Megs handle the content on that feed, and it’s really really awesome.
Jessica: Nice. Where can they find you, there?
Kate: There. [laughs] I have a personal website, but I need to touch it up, but yeah, I’ll do that later. You can also find us on viciouscyclepodcast.com and from there you can learn more about the hosts.
Jessica: Awesome. Thank you so much for being on, and we are going to now do a little treat for our listeners, which is at the end of your bleed-search episodes you sing a song that you wrote to Eye of the Tiger, and you’re very graciously going to share that with us now, so thank you, Kate, for joining me on Burn It All Down.
Kate: Thank you so much for having me, Jessica.
[Eye of the Tiger playing]
[singing] Rising up
Bleeding athletes
Kicking balls, winning medals
Went the distance and then you start to bleed
And a dumb man tells you hearth and home
So many times it happens in sport
You’re cramping at the Olympics
Don’t stop even if your tampon falls out
Knowing your uterus won’t explode
It’s the eye of the cycle
You free bleed when you run
Bleeding gymnasts and dancers are our idols
And the ones who kick ass for points and also our moms
Giving birth, setting records, the eye
Of the cycle
[Jess laughing]
Before you bleed you’re receptive to heat
Our bodies fill up with progesterone
Then bleeding starts, estrogen fucks our knees
And again this research could be wrong
It’s the eye of the cycle
You’re an irrational bitch
Rising up cause you all are fucking fighters
You bike, jump, ski and skate
And bleed without recognition
You grind but get less pay, it’s a
Vicious cycle.
Amira: Alright y’all, we’re in week a million of the pandemic and against lots of people’s judgment many states are starting to open up and sports are trying to come back still. They’ve been trying and they’re trying new ideas, some better than others. So here we are, here we are. We’ve talked a lot on this show…We’ve covered what seems like for months now the terrible terrible ideas, cough Dana White cough, that people have had to keep sports open and restart them, etc. I wanted to know, is there any sport that you think is actually well-positioned to come back or is making better choices, that you actually see being possible? Jess.
Jessica: Yeah, it’s a good question. I’m gonna answer you in the affirmative, but I do just feel generally, like, NO! [laughs] Everyone stop! But I am really interested in tennis, of course, that’s my favorite and I’ve been looking for it. The US Tennis Association is about to host later this summer, the US Open. Wimbledon, French Open, they’ve been cancelled…I guess the French Open is technically postponed, but we’ll see, okay. The US Open is something like 80% of the revenue for the USTA, so they are trying desperately to figure out what they’re gonna do. I think we may have mentioned it on here that the Billie Jean King Center was being used at some point to help with the COVID relief, like, they were sending patients there or something like that, so who knows about the physical space of it. According to the New York Times, they’re talking about moving it to Orlando where the USTA has a 100-court training facility or to the site of Indian Wells near Palm Springs, California.
Tennis is kind of like a little bubble…When it shows up at a grand slam, I mean, it’s still a huge bubble, so that part of it I just don’t understand the logistics of. But as far as the playing itself, tennis makes a lot more sense to me than, say, football or basketball, because there is distance on the court so you’re not up in someone’s face and spitting on them. So it makes sense to me that they could play in a way that is safer. Again, logistics of bubble things I don’t totally get. The other part of it that I wonder about with tennis is that it is international, so you’re gonna get people flying in from all over the place. Will people want to do that? Would you want to come to America right now if you were concerned about COVID? I don’t know. Then our players from who knows where the COVID hot spots will be a few months from now, but will players even be allowed to come? What will these things look like as far as the field of players that are able to participate…I don’t know. It still seems like a logistical nightmare to me but as far as actually playing the sport I can see it.
Amira: We’ve also talked a lot about the disproportionate effect that COVID is having on women’s sports, so when we think about these returns and building off what Jess was saying, Lindsay – what are the updates that women’s sports leagues…Where are they at in terms of coming back?
Lindsay: Yeah, so I wanna start with the LPGA which is going through a lot right now. Women’s golf has been completely left out of this string of charity events that golfers are having in order to raise money. I wrote about this for Power Plays. Female golfers who bring up this fact are basically being bullied off of social media, and it’s just been really gut-wrenching to watch. But beyond that, you have the PGA tour for the men and the LPGA tour for the women, and the PGA is actually on track to come back starting June 11th, whereas the LPGA is probably gonna be towards the end of July if that before they can come back, and I find that to be very interesting because there’s been a lot of talk – I have written about it for Power Plays – about how it would be great if women’s sports could come back sooner than men’s sports, and logistically a lot of women’s sports have it easier than some men’s sports, but the LPGA is actually the opposite. The LPGA are a much more global tour than the PGA. I talked to them this week and they said about 35% of their athletes and caddies are outside the United States, so before they get anything started they have to have everyone fully quarantined and everything.
Another big thing is the LPGA tour’s business really relies a lot on the in-person experience, so their personal interactions with fans and sponsors, the Pro-Am Tournaments, all of these things. If you talk to anyone who’s been to an LPGA event, which I was planning to go to this year and I hope I will still be able to at some point, but it’s all about the athletes being really accessible and it’s all about this personal thing, so they don’t get as much of their money from television contracts as the men’s tour. It’s a lot harder for them to return in a landscape where no fans are allowed, so they’re still hoping that they can figure out a way to do this where there’s some direct fan engagement. So that’s gonna be really interesting. Another thing is the PGA tour is using chartered flights and things like that – the LPGA doesn’t have access to those, it’s all commercial flights or driving, so that’s a big thing. It’s tough because these players on the LPGA are not on contracts. If they don’t compete, they don’t have a chance to earn any prize money, and most of these players are barely staying afloat anyways. Another thing that makes me sad is that this is the LPGA’s 70th year, so this was supposed to be a big celebratory year. Hopefully towards August there will be opportunities for the tour to come back in some ways, but I think that sport is really interesting, you really see the difference between how the men are able to handle this vs the women.
You’ve also got the WNBA which, you know, I don’t know if anyone’s noticed that there are NBA updates about 50 times a day and the WNBA updates are maybe once a week, and that’s been really frustrating. Honestly, a lot of that is because a lot of what the WNBA does depends on what the NBA does. They are once again kind of being left in the shadows and left as an afterthought as these organizations prepare. I’m sure they will benefit from a lot of the testing stuff that the NBA is working on, a lot of protocol stuff the NBA is working on. I’m sure there will be benefits to that, but goodness do I wish that energy was being put just towards a women’s sport, that would be really exciting. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has said that there are about half a dozen scenarios for the league to begin play this summer, possibilities of looking at one site, or maybe just a few home arenas. They’re not really going into specifics. Disney World has said, which is where it looks likely the men will play, the NBA have said; they have said they’d be interested in hosting the WNBA as well, so that could be a possibility as well. One benefit that the WNBA has is that they had scheduled a month off for the Olympics this summer so the whole calendar, there’s a whole month they can use that they were supposed to break but obviously they won’t need to use anymore. They’re hopeful they can use that time and still get in a full season, but it’s unlikely that there will be any fans in the stands.
Then you’ve got the National Women’s Soccer League which is looking at June 27th as a start date for this tournament in Utah [laughs] and it’s gonna be a group stage then knockout round and quarterfinals, semifinals, and championships. So, the last two teams standing will have played a total of seven matches and every team will have played a minimum of four. This would kind of be, it seems like instead of the season, what they would do, this month-long tournament in Utah, but as Meg Linehan reported at The Athletic, there are a lot of details still to be figured out and there are a lot of players it seems like, especially national team players, who are not excited about this idea, do not really wanna take the risk. I think there’s still a lot to figure out to make this happen and we’ve gotta see. The good news is the league appears ready to provide charter flights for the teams and single rooms for players in Utah, because of course it would just be the one flight, it makes it easier. But yeah, I dunno. Call me a little bit skeptical of this idea. Oh, it also involves playing on turf, astroturf, which of course is not good for the body. Yeah, it’s kind of all a mess.
Amira: Yeah, and I wanna pitch it to you, Bren. We saw Bundesliga return, it was a little weird. The NWSL is talking about round-robin in Utah. What is the state of global football in this time?
Brenda: It’s bonkers, to put it scientifically. It’s all over the map. Bundesliga came back and there’s really no coordinated effort…I’m surprised that FIFA, which usually loves regulating the shit out of soccer, hasn’t done anything to come back with some global protocols and measurements, but that would probably not be best for anyone either. So what you have is – and just about the NWSL and the astroturf, and by the way, that’s the end of June. It’s like 120 degrees on the astroturf, oh my god. Bundesliga came back and honestly the only reason it came back is the German healthcare system is national and it works and it functions. I don’t even know that it’s great. In one particular match…Well, all of them that I’m watching, the players are instinctively after a goal is scored going to hug each other, and you can hear the announcer be like, “Let go of one another, boys! Let go of one another, boys!!” [laughter] Like, really!? Really! It’s this hysterical, like, “Don’t hug!” And you see the players mid-way hug be like, “Ahh!” And they’re smashing elbows, which just is, like…
Lindsay: I would watch this on loop. [laughing]
Brenda: You should, you should! They’re like, “No, no, no! Boys!” Then they knock elbows instead of high-fiving and it all seems random. We know it’s risky, and yet they’re still out there doing it, so it’s so hard to say. The frustrating this is they’ve cancelled – and we had our badass woman of the week last week was Barcelona – they have cancelled the Spanish women’s league, but then announced today that June 7th they’re back, June 3rd the Primeira Liga in Portugal is back. EPL is trying to come back but has cancelled all the women’s leagues, so we’re seeing exactly what we thought. Except out of Germany where the Frauen are back at the very end of May, they have the green light. It’s still not scheduled yet but that’s there. So it’s pretty frustrating. I don’t think women should play just because men are playing if those women don’t feel safe, if those leagues decide that that’s a bad decision, then fine. But if the reason they’re not playing is because the male-run federation has just decided they don’t care, which is what I suspect, then it’s become a very frustrating pattern that we’re seeing across the board.
Amira: Yeah, and wasn’t there some solution about fans that a league had, [Brenda laughs] can you tell us about that?
Brenda: There’s been a lot of different ones. The Bundesliga allowed people to buy a cardboard replica of themselves–
Jessica: [laughing] That’s great.
Brenda: –which I thought was like, wow, Germans know how to make bank, right? Everybody wanted a cardboard replica of themselves for €17 or something like that. Then the most egregious and sexist example and just icky was the South Korean federation deciding to put sex dolls in the stand…So, all female…Could you call sex dolls “women”?
Jessica: Is that because, like, there’s a surplus of them? [laughter]
Lindsay: Or is is just that that’s the blow-up dolls they could find? That’s the blow-up figures they could find? I feel like that’s gotta be it.
Brenda: Motivating players? I don’t know. [laughter] I just don’t have the answer, and getting into the minds of men who run global football is always frightening. So that was the worst thing I saw as far as an idea goes.
Amira: Jess, do you have thoughts on fans?
Jessica: Yeah, I haven’t yet watched…So, Brenda I know has watched the Bundesliga that doesn’t have the fans in the stands, but I haven’t watched anything that’s doing that yet. But I think it’ll be really strange not to have the crowd noise. I think we’re all just used to it in a way that it will feel very weird at first. I think most people will probably be able to roll with it just so they can watch. I don’t know what it will mean economically of course for all of these teams and leagues and stuff. I do wonder what it will mean for the players themselves, I find that really fascinating. I’m thinking about what the crowd can do to lift up players at the end of a tight match, or they hit a major shot and it’s giving them momentum and part of what’s happening is the crowd is screaming along with them to push them forward. I think about what the crowd does in tennis, how much it can mean to an individual player who’s out there dealing with all the psychological stuff that they deal with as players on the court. I think it’ll be weird, I think people will be able to manage it as fans themselves, but I am interested in what it will mean for players.
Amira: Yeah. Linz – no, I lied. Brenda?
Brenda: It was interesting, I was in an event with Fare and FIFPRO with Anita Asante who plays for Chelsea, and this question came up to her and she was asked, well, as a player, how are you going to perform without fans, how would you? Even though, like I said, the British Super League has been cancelled. She said, “That is not an issue. Women are used to being devalued and playing in front of very few fans very often.” She’s like, “We do it for each other, we do it for the dedicated die-hard fans that will show up even if it’s not a national team match or something like that. We are used to motivating ourselves and putting out excellence on the pitch, regardless.” I thought that was just a really interesting interjection she made there.
Amira: Yeah, it is. I think Lindsay, you have a note of one sport that actually has been successful in coming back?
Lindsay: Yeah, NASCAR has actually pulled it off, and I think it’s funny because it’s a sport that’s made for something like this.
Amira: Exactly.
Lindsay: Because not only are the logistics like oh haha they’re in their cars or whatever, because there are pit crews and things like that, so there is close proximity. But for me the reason it’s really made for it is because they already do so much of their traveling in trailers, right? They can live in these trailers, they’re already this kind of insular community that packs up and drives their own cars with all these buses and all these transport things from city to city. Also, it’s the same group of people week in and week out. One of the reasons I liked covering NASCAR, I did it for a couple of years, is because it’s really easy to get to know the people and the characters, because it’s literally about the same 40 drivers every single week on a week-in week-out basis. So there’s not that many extra people coming in to their bubble, you know, which is I think another reason why it’s a sport that is kind of made for it. It is weird to see them with no fans in the crowd–
Amira: But a hell of a lot less confederate flags. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Lindsay: Yeah, a lot less confederate flags. But you do see though, the cars themselves create so much energy, the loudness of the cars. It’s not a quiet sport, which I think really helps watching it on TV. I mean, think about a lot of the noise you’re usually hearing when you’re watching sports is the crowd noise, but in NASCAR that’s not the case, so I think that helps the viewership experience, and also you’ve still got, like, players being mad and flicking each other off and crashing into each other, so that’s exciting no matter what.
Amira: Are we setting ourselves up? Is the fever-pitch to get sports back because we’re thinking of sports as we once knew them setting us up for disappointment when they return looking very different? Jess.
Jessica: Yeah, I’m wondering about what this will look like after months of not having access to trainers and gyms and practicing as teams especially, what will the quality of this be? I know we’re talking about, especially for pros, a lot of elite athletes who’ve been doing this for decades, and maybe they can just switch it back on. But I do sort of wonder what the level of play will be and how much COVID and all this distancing will actually have on that and I don’t know how to get a sense of that, at this point.
Amira: Now it’s time for our favorite segment. Yep, it’s time to burn some things. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, I’m gonna be quick this week. I’m gonna burn The Athletic and the select few people there who are convinced to continue to say that basketball = men’s basketball, not women’s basketball. They earlier this week released a list of the top 25 greatest college basketball teams of all time, and the list was all men’s teams. A lot of people on Twitter said, well, why don’t you just specify that this is a list of men’s teams? But they refused to do so. There was a lot of defensiveness, a lot of, “Well, this is what we write about anyways, so this is just how it is.” They did later in the week do a women’s list, which was great, but I just wanna burn in general the damage it does to women’s sports and just to people’s psyches to refuse to specify men’s sports and women’s sports, to continue to use men’s sports as the default and women’s sports at the other. It sounds like such a little detail, but the reason it’s a big deal is because it’s just four characters, and when you’re not even putting four characters in that will just acknowledge that something other than men’s sports exist, you’re continuing the marginalization of women’s sports.
There are a lot of great people that work for The Athletic; I worked for The Athletic, and I of course don’t want to bash everyone who works there, but as an editorial team this is something that they need to put in their style guide, that men’s sports will be referred to as men’s sports so then we have space to recognize women’s sports as well. Of course it’s not just The Athletic, although they were the culprits this week. I just wanna burn: men’s sports are not the default. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: I’ll go next, real quick. There’s news this week of a lawsuit filed by two men, one is an unnamed NFL player. They are suing United Airlines for failing to act on a sexual assault and harassment that took place on a flight. The lawsuit alleges that in a February flight from LA to New Jersey, a woman on the plane started harassing this NFL player about the face mask, the safety mask. The flight staff finally took action and removed her to a different seat, after complaints. Part of the issue is that when they asked United to rectify the situation, to protect them as passengers and to do something, the airline refused to give her name or anything that would have assisted them in filing a complaint them, and instead offered them $150 in airline vouchers. And that’s it. So my burn it actually a tri-fold. One, obviously: this is not okay, first and foremost. It’s harassment to pull of a face mask in the middle of a pandemic, and certainly fucking harassment to grab somebody’s penis, so don’t do that. I also want to burn the two reactions I’ve seen to this. One is expected and awful, which is this kind of like, “How is that harassment? I would like that.” That’s trash, and that’s one of the things that prevents men who are assaulted, it creates a stigma and it prevents them from seeking out help and raising the specter of that issue.
The second reaction is people saying, “Ugh, stop the double standards, because if this had happened to a woman he would’ve been arrested and this would’ve happened…” and yada yada. But the people putting forth this double standard argument are doing it to say that you shouldn’t treat men like that when women are assaulted, and that’s the wrong direction. You started to talk about a good point about double standards, and you just went left. The standard shouldn’t be that we don’t care about sexual assault, the standard should be that we care about sexual assault no matter who’s perpetrating it and who’s the victim of it. We should empower survivors, and this is not okay all the way around. And lastly, a $150 voucher [Lindsay laughs] is absolutely not sufficient for being groped on a plane. At the end of the day, if you’re groped on a plane a $150 voucher is not gonna erase that, so burn it down.
All: Burn.
Amira: Alright, Bren, what do you got for us?
Brenda: So there’s an ongoing case that Shireen burned originally last week that I wanna follow up on which is the federation president of Haiti’s soccer federation, Yves Jean-Bart, who has been under investigation. He has headed the federation for 20 years; both Human Rights Watch and The Guardian and other women’s rights organizations in Haiti, and I really wanna delve deeper into that because there’s a lot of grassroots action within Haiti among women’s organizations to work on this case. He’s accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault and forcing players to get abortions after impregnating them. They are underage, they were forming and residence in the soccer complex that actually received $500,000 just initially to rebuild by FIFA after hurricanes in Haiti. Basically I wanna burn the fact that FIFA has not suspended him and his close associates.
The women and their families have said that they are getting death threats following this. He is a very powerful person, it is very difficult right now in the current political climate in Haiti to get protection no matter what crime you’re reporting, much less this one. He’s incredibly powerful and they are not, and FIFA needs to suspend him until they can complete this investigation because otherwise these girls and women and their families are left completely unprotected. They’re launching, the Haitian Federation, an entire smear campaign against the people reporting. It’s not even clear who they are, and they’re trying to out them. So it’s all the retribution that we see happen when someone reports this kind of case, so I want to burn the fact that – so much of it, all of it, of course – but in particular what would be very easy to do, which is for FIFA to suspend him immediately and until further notice until that investigation is complete, so he has just one less resource with which to wield against his victims. So I wanna burn that.
All: Burn.
Amira: Alright Jess, take us home.
Jessica: Bryant-Denny stadium is where the University of Alabama football team plays in front of more than 100,000 people in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a town with a population of just over 100,000 people. Yes, the stadium can hold roughly the size of the town in which it’s housed. Only 38,000 students actually attend this school. It’s the 10th largest football stadium in the country. The latest edition is going to cost $107 million – that’s a lot of dollars! – and mainly they’re remaking a large portion of the luxury seating. They’re adding a tunnel from the Walk of Champions directly into the Crimson Tide locker room – I don’t know what any of that means – and they’re replacing the four video boards in the corners of the stadium. $107 million; they’re in the middle of construction right now. According to Inside Higher Ed, since the last recession in 2008 and up through 2017, tuition at public four year colleges in Alabama rose more than 60%. Late last year, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that Alabama has cut per-student funding at state colleges and universities more than any other state in the US. So that’s one thing about the stadium renovation that makes me want to grind my teeth.
It would annoy me even if we weren’t in the middle of this public health crisis and massive unemployment. Perhaps I could stomach it though if I imagine that there are people who have jobs right now building this unnecessary cathedral to a game that exploits the labor of students, but as I just mentioned we are in a public health crisis and it turns out going to work on a construction site with an infectious virus going around isn’t always the best idea. This week, AL.com reported that the construction site is now a coronavirus cluster after more than 10 people have tested positive for COVID-19. The site reported that the number could actually be much higher than that because, “The large number of positive tests means essentially everyone at the job site could’ve been exposed.” According to the reporting, the construction was briefly paused over the weekend to deep-clean but work resumed last week.
I’m feeling some way about universities trying to justify bringing back football players when they aren’t even sure if campuses will be safe places for faculty, staff and all other students. But they can’t even keep their construction crews safe, crews which in theory are already used to a lot of safety instructions and have a boss who can tell them to wear things like masks or wash their hands or keep away from each other. It seems though that the point is not really the health and safety of anyone or anything except the college football season. If that can be salvaged, who cares about anything else. And so good news on that front: the stadium is on track to be ready for Alabama’s first home game in mid-September.
Amira: Ridiculous.
Jessica: Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Jesus.
Amira: After all that burning, it’s time to shout out some badass women of the week. Honorable mentions: cheers and many thanks once again to the athletes on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. This week we wanna shout out US Rugby player Tess Feury who is a pediatric intensive care nurse at Morristown, New Jersey at the medical center there, and the Dallas Wings’ Astou Ndou who is donating essential bags of rice, sugar, and oil to families in Senegal through her foundation.
Also, shoutout to Chelsea Spencer, a former national champion with the University of California Berkeley’s softball team. She will now be the team’s head coach.
Also, Megan Rapinoe and Sharon Thorn who’s the chair of the Deloitte Global Board of Directors, and former Afghanistan women's captain and activist – and former guest on Burn It All Down, check out episode 43 – Khalida Popal, were three women included on a list of people from France Football who have been named as the “Most Powerful Influencers in World Football.” Congrats to you.
Can I get a drumroll please?
[drumroll]
Our badass woman of the week is Vanderbilt’s Candice Lee. She has been named the official athletic director after serving as interim director over the last few months. It makes her the SEC’s first female Black athletic director. We have a huge place in our Burn It All Down hearts for Candice Lee and we could not be more ecstatic for this historic appointment to this position. The chancellor of Vandy said of Candice, “She’s perfectly positioned to lead our athletic programs to new heights of success on and off the field of play, and she’s the living embodiment of our values and aspirations.” She’s just the 5th female athletic director among Power 5 schools. I could not be more thrilled for our friend of the show, Candice Lee, congratulations, you are our badass woman of the week.
Alright, what’s good in your world? [snapping] What’s good in your worlds? Brenda.
Brenda: Ha! End of the semester! End of the semester! End of the semester! [laughter]
Lindsay: Woo!
Brenda: It was sad, it was poignant. I am sorry to not get to put on my academic regalia gear and get out there and meet some parents and say goodbye to my wonderful students, but it is time for us to move on. It was a difficult semester, hats off to all of those students and teachers and parents that got through it. To those of you who wanna argue about your grades: go somewhere else. [laughs] And so that’s really good in my world.
Amira: Woo! Lindsay, what’s good with you?
Lindsay: Okay, this is a little old, I know I’m a little late to this, but I’ve been watching those videos that parents have been putting out, the #TemptationChallenge videos… [laughs]
Amira: Oh, I love them.
Lindsay: Where they put out the candy…Why have you not done one with Zachary?!
Amira: I know, we need to. [Lindsay laughing] Because we know he’s just gonna eat it.
Lindsay: He’s gonna eat it so fast. [laughter] But if you guys haven’t seen this, parents put out candy for their kids, their young kids, and say “You can’t eat any until I get back,” and they video what happens in the meantime. It’s so simple and so funny. It has brought me a lot of joy, and so that’s literally what’s good. It’s a good thing that came from the internet! It’s the best thing that’s come from the internet in a very long time. It’s very pure.
Amira: I love it. You have to see the one with Gabrielle Union’s daughter, because she gives no fucks at all.
Lindsay: She just goes!
Amira: She just goes! It’s hilarious.
Lindsay: The best thing is the kids who, even the ones who do it right are funny because, like, they talk to themselves, do you know what I mean?
Amira: Yes!
Lindsay: They, like, smell them, they’re just looking around…It’s so cute. [laughing]
Amira: Who’s kid was it who was like, “Have patience, have patience!”
Lindsay: That’s one of the first ones I watched!
Amira: It was so cute.
Lindsay: Just like, “Patience, patience!” [laughing]
Amira: The first one I saw which is still my favorite is when somebody had tweeted it with the caption like “he will never be caught by the CIA or whatever” because he’s edging over and reaches in and right as he puts it to his mouth he sees the camera, and he drops it right away and backs off, it’s like a hidden camera…[Lindsay laughing] It’s perfect, it’s perfect. They’re like, “He’ll never be caught slippin.” [laughs]
Lindsay: So good.
Amira: Jess, what’s good with you?
Jessica: So I stayed up late last night, which means I was up until 1am which is really late for me–
Amira: That’s adorable.
Jessica: –because Aaron and I were finishing The Great on Hulu. It’s in theory about Catherine the Great – don’t go there for any history! It’s basically all incorrect but I really enjoyed it. It is bloody, so just prepare for that, but Elle Fanning plays Catherine and Nic Hoult plays her husband, Peter III. They are spectacular and it’s so weird. It’s written by the same guy that wrote The Favourite, so if you’ve seen that it’s weird in the same way that The Favourite is weird, so I can definitely see people who won’t like it. We loved it, and so we finished it last night. Of course things that are good in my world are always baking, especially right now. I did make my lemon macarons, I think I mentioned that last week. They didn’t turn out quite as good but they taste amazing, and I did get the feet on them, so…A macaron, it’s like a meringue and when it’s in the oven it sets up and it gets what’s called “feet” on the bottom, and I had the feet and that’s a big deal. Then right now as we are recording, in my oven I proofing lemon rolls. My friend Lindsay Schnell sent me this recipe from the New York Times and it’s like cinnamon roles except you replace all of the spices and stuff with lemon flavoring, so inside is lemon zest and sugar, the cream cheese frosting has lemon in it, and the dough has lemon zest in it as well. I’m just a huge lemon fan, so I’m gonna go eat that after this, and I’m very excited.
Amira: That’s great. I’m still waiting on my Doubletree cookies too, you just reminded me. [laughter] All this baking! Where are my cookies! Yeah, it’s gemini season, heyyyyyyy! Yeahhhh, oooooh! I’m trying my best to be positive, it’s a very weird gemini season because we’re not people who are meant to be not out sharing our light with the world during our season, so it’s difficult. It also snuck up on me, my birthday’s next week. I don’t even know what that means. Nothing, really. But I’m still trying to have an air of positivity around it. Really I’ve just been obsessed with my Peloton, I don’t know what else to tell you. There’s a weird ESPN Peloton thing that I don’t quite understand, but what I do know is the women’s side of this weird special is stacked, like, Allyson Felix is riding, and I’m really into that. So that is my…And, like, Azarenka! It’s random! I’m trying to tell you it’s random. I’m getting a lot of joy out of…I’m not clear actually what any of it means, it’s very confusing. It’s like a special, and it’s unclear if they’re doing it so that everyone can ride like they did The Last Dance ride or whatever, but they have a men’s division and a women’s division. Men’s division is like, golfers, a few football players, whatever. But the women’s side is Allyson Felix, Dawn Staley, Kyla Ross, Monica Puig, Azarenka, like, that…What! Pff. I’d watch that. I don’t even know what they’re doing. Just riding the Peloton? Still tuning in.
So that’s basically where I’m at with that in my life. Shoutout to my sister in law Siobhan who turned 23! I remember when she was 9 and she didn’t have a formal graduation and she didn’t get to finish her college track career, but shoutout to you and happy birthday, congratulations, you did it, you’re a graduate! That’s what’s good in my world.
That’s it for this week of Burn It All Down. Burn It All Down lives on Soundcloud but you can find it anywhere you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, all of them. We always appreciate your reviews and feedback. Subscribe, rate, and please share it around. Let people know who don’t have us in their life yet and who might be into it! You can find us on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod and on Twitter @burnitdownpod. You can email us at burnitalldownpod@gmail.com. Check out our website, where you’ll find previous episodes, transcripts, a link to our Patreon, and show notes, all of the like. Also a link to our Teespring, our merch shop. Right now you can still use that code STAYHOME20 to get 20% off your order. We’re moving seasons for those of us who are not Jessica and don’t live in Texas! We’re finally getting some sunshine in our lives, so grab your tanks, your tees – STAYHOME20 for 20% off your BIAD merch. So there we have it! We wish you again safety and health and all the joy you can muster during this time. As Brenda says, burn on, not out, and we’ll see you next week, flamethrowers.