All Episodes

December 1, 2021 13 mins

Lungowe Zeko and Leesa Charlotte

 

While nearly everyone knows the musical ‘Chicago’, we love the way Lulu and Leesa shed new light on the story. This podcast uses the allure of the glamorous, slick world of ‘Chicago’ to tell a thrilling story that doubles as a deep examination of class, race, and gender in the 1920s. As trained media professionals AND ‘Chicago’ superfans, this podcast is well researched and is delivered in a way that is both intriguing and informative. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Season two of the Next Great Podcast. My
Heart Radio and Tongle have once again teamed up to
bring you another round of amazing and unique voices. We're
excited to share these ten incredible podcasts with you and
need your help crowning the winner. Check out the pilots
and be sure to vote for your favorite at Next

(00:23):
Great podcast dot com. Today's entry is The Murderouses of
Cook County Jail and it comes from lugan Wa z
Echo and Lisa Charlotte. Well, pretty much everyone knows the
musical Chicago. We love the way Lulu and Lisa shed
new light on the story. This podcast uses the allure
of the glamorous, slick world of Chicago to tell a

(00:45):
thrilling story that doubles as a deep examination of race, class,
and gender in the nineteen twenties. As trained media professionals
and Chicago super fans, this podcast is well researched and
delivered in a way that's both intriguing and informative. We're

(01:07):
Lingo and Lisa from New York via Zambia and Australia,
and you're listening to the pilot of the Murderesses of
Cook County Jail podcast as part of the Next Great
Podcast One competition from I Heart Radio and Tongo. Chicago

(01:33):
is the longest running musical revival and the longest running
American musical in Broadway history, and the two thousand to
film adaptation one six Academy Awards. But did you know
the characters were based on real women? I'm Lingo is Echo,
and I'm Lisa Charlotte And Welcome to the first episode
of the Murderouses podcast. Each episode will take a deep

(01:54):
dive into the real life stories of the women of
Murderous Row, from Sabella Neti, the first woman sent to
to death in Chicago, to the real life of Velma
Kelly and Roxy Heart. This first episode, we're going to
be setting the scene in Chicago. But to start lunga way,
what is your Chicago story? Ah? My Chicago story, I
gotta admit Katherine Zeta Jones was kind of the catalyst

(02:16):
to get me to the Chicago space. She was my
gateway drug and a good one at that. I saw
in Zoro and I'm like, she's incredible, she can do anything,
and that she did all the choreography in Chicago was like, girl,
you better Velma and just the aesthetic and just the
the sassiness, like she keeps serving face. She gives great face.
But what is your Chicago story, Lisa? Well, I feel

(02:38):
like Chicago has kind of always been there for me.
It's one of those musicals that I can't remember not knowing.
So I'm a singer, which makes it. You know, Chicago
is a very fun to sing. I did record myself
so I could two thousand three singing all that jazz
and my own backup vocals. So baby Lisa really doing
the most. She brought it. She did, and I also

(03:01):
performed self block tango. In my senior year. We had
six singers in my class. One of them was Hungarian,
basically made for us dance on a chair in fishnet
stockings as you do as a sixteen year old. Totally
messed up my American accent on the word arsenic arsenic.
I did perfect American accent, and then the end it
was like, you know, some men just can't hold their arsenic.

(03:24):
I said, can't as well. I was like, Lisa, you
had it. You had it one job, baby got it, So,
you know, lots of lots of fun Chicago stories over here.
I thought it might be fun to throw in a
little Chicago musical fact at the beginning of our episode,
seeing as we are both fans of the show. So
unfortunately this is never something that we can witness. But

(03:45):
apparently Usha was in the Broadway show in two thousand
and six. I think us Usha Hure was it BA Chicago. Okay,
he played Billy Flynn. There is one video I found
online and he is ecstatic. He looks like he's just
had all his dreams come true playing Billy Flynn. I

(04:07):
just wish I could go back in time and watch that,
all that razzle dazzle. It's so cute. You don't ever
be the same. It wold he really won't, but I mean, hey,
he's got the range here for it. I mean I
like it. Diversifying that portfolio early two thousands was an
Usher moment. It was he was all over the place
you wanted and what did he want to do? Like
Billy finnam Broadway because that's on the bucket list. You know,

(04:30):
I'm here for it. Usher on Broadway a musty. Definitely
gonna be doing a lot of research on that after this.
But in this first episode, we're setting the scene for
what life was like for women in the nineteen twenties
in Chicago and the United States more broadly. So let's
picture this windy city. You got Chicago, a big American city,
most open to change, a cultural hub from the eighteen

(04:51):
nineties to the nineteen twenties, attracting a lot of artists
and writers. And they were fleeing, fleeing the rest of
the Midwest. I mean, things were happening in the Midwest.
Shade to the Midwest, no shade at all, but it
was the time. And I think this was the first
northern city to embrace the jazz, all of the jazz,
all that jazz, all that jaws. Unlike what you did

(05:14):
their babe, I'm here for it. And of course it
became the headquarters of bootlegging, especially Gin. We love Gin.
Another important thing about the twenties for women, such as US.
August eighteenth, all American women won the right to vote,
and over eight million women voted in the November elections
that year, so that's pretty exciting. Of course, the softwa

(05:34):
jets were focused on specific women. Yep, we're just we're
just gonna touch on it. We're not going to go
into it. We don't have a lot of time. I
think we all know which women they were focused on.
We'll just we'll just keep it there. But I mean,
I mean to be fair, but most of this freedom
was largely elusive and you know, like you said, reserved
for a very select group of women. So it was

(05:55):
often inaccessible to women of color, older women, and poor women.
And an important now to make life for any women
who living in rural areas was a bit stagnant and domestic.
So yes, so while women were moving to cities and
joining the workforce, it was still doing all the housework too,
of course, but in Americans lived in cities as opposed

(06:16):
to now where people in America live in cities, which
is a wild fact that I only learned. Well, we're
researching this episode. What a what a trip, what a time.
And cities had some really cool things like co ed facilities.
They had dance holes, cabarets, speakeasies, all kind of co
ed which is pretty exciting back in the day. I

(06:38):
love it. And of course, when it came to the
work zone that women were in, we're thinking like towards
the end of the nineteen twenties, a lot of women
were getting work, but most of them were very like
feminine roles. So just think store clerks, nursing, teaching, like,
are they feminine roles? Are they just roles that women
do that we call feminine? About it again, let's table

(07:02):
that discussion for another time. And speaking of conversations to
be tabled for another time. The average weekly wage for
men and five cents, which is about half of the
cost of brunch, and for women it was seventeen dollars
and thirty four cents, which is about sixty cents on
the dollar. So what I'm taking away here is that
in a hundred years we've made ten cents more on

(07:23):
the dollar. So I guess we can look forward to
equality in another three years. Her take care, where's your quality?
Maybe we keep going at this pace. What a time?
What a time for sure. But of course, with the
earning and consuming more women did start participating in individual pleasure,

(07:44):
you know, with things like radio and TV. You know
you're going somewhere else then well you know, we could
go cars, you know, just a broaden their freedom a bit,
let's put it that way, which also changed their relationships
between men and women. Gave women a bit of a
higher expectation of what their husbands might do. It changed
the morality around sexuality. Again, the rich white ladies had

(08:06):
access to birth control, so that changed family dynamics for
those women. The rise of urbanism also gave rise to
a more vibrant gay culture, which was good for the
sexual freedom element, but was bad because the women that
had kind of like just being unmarried and lived with
their best friend and maybe had a cat called Sappho,
they became more scrutinized. And so these same sex relationships

(08:28):
which were kind of under the radar before people kind
of figured out that they were maybe more than just
friends and roommates. And so that wasn't as as good
of an outcome as the increased visibility. Whose visibility comes scrutiny,
it's kind of part of the catalyst of life. I
guess there was kind of a sense of containment though,
because almost all women still ended up marrying and most

(08:49):
of them quitting their jobs once they got married. Well,
I mean a whole set up. It's a whole set up,
but let's stop talking about that. Talk about it was
more fun stuff like the aesthetic, So we have the flapper,
the bob hairstyle, which I'm sorry Katherine Sada Jones, not
the best hasty of your face. She's beautiful, you know,
she's beautiful. It did nothing cigarettes, alcohol, lipsticks, short skirts.

(09:12):
It's amazing. It sounds great. Surrounded by male suitors. It
just seems like a great Saturday night out. Honestly, I
mean the entire setup just works for me. I think
you know, she introduced the gascon look, you know, with
the high ham lines, and it's leeveless tops and lighter undergarments,
eliminating the corset or anything very tight or constricting around

(09:33):
the waist. I mean, similar to what we've done in
these roaring twenties. Yes, we have eliminated type things around
the waist. Nobody has time for that in a post
pandemic life at all. And just think of that aesthetic,
the mindset, the attitude, the focus was a bit more
you know, young, reckless, fast talking, not attached to one
particular man. All these things sound great, and of course

(09:54):
this is all written by you know sco Fitzgerald think
gets being all of that drama with the parties or
St Clair Lewis. That was the setup for a lot
of different activities to happen. It sounds like a great
time one thing I'm not so crazy about is the
fact that there was prohibition at this time, and these
guys were like, you know what, we will ban alcohol.

(10:15):
It'll make people behave, it'll create more temperate societies. And
you know what it did, It just got people to
be more creative about how to get alcohol, because you
know what, people are going to get that ship anyway,
you may as well make tax dollars off of it.
We had bootlegging, we had speakeasies, we had smuggling, we
had private liquor production which is dangerous as hell, and

(10:37):
al capones out here earning sixty million dollars a year
from this. I mean he felt he saw an opportunity
and he ran with it. It was a lucrative business.
I mean, okay, So prohibition came into question around the
time of the Great Depression. Of course, so drunk there
were a lot of things going on. I mean it
was in full swing nineteen thirties, like things were getting chaotic.
It did create a lot of jobs, but you knew

(10:58):
it was a bad idea as soon as Fdr Rand
for president and his platform included ending prohibition, like he
saw yeah, he was like, we can make tax money
from this, we can create jobs with this, yes, and
we'll be drunk, yes, which would be way more fun
in a depression. It's just all adds up. Let's go
of course about Amendment to repeal. And all states ended

(11:23):
the band by ninety six, so somewhere enforcing it to
six sucks to be those states. Really, what are y'all
doing so many restrictions? Well, I feel like we've effectively
set our scene here. So in our second episode we're
going to continue this story. We're going to discuss the
real life Murderous Row, which actually existed. This is the

(11:44):
background to that. You've got these lawless women out here.
They're dancing, they're drinking, they're smoking, they're wearing short skirts,
and of course, naturally murder happens. Next. Thank you so
much for listening to this first episode. We would like
to say a big thank you to Jacob Johnson, Thea Smith,
and Ellie Bridgetta for their assistance in bringing you this pilot. Yeah,

(12:05):
there's so much more to discuss in this season. Like
Maureen Dallas Watkins, the woman who covered the women of
Murderesses Row. Now she wrote the original story that the
movie Chicago was based on. Which false. He tried to
buy for years and she refused her entire life, and
he only was able to buy the rights after her death.
I mean disrespect. It is a dick move. I mean dick,

(12:28):
but hey. We'll also discuss how these events shape the
judicial system in the US, and of course get into
the real stories behind the women in the movie. So
much to look forward to, so much and if you're dying,
get it to learn more about the murderouss of Cook
County Jail. Please vote for us to be I Heart
Radio's Next Great Podcast. Hi, this is Sienna and Lea

(12:53):
from Tossed Popcorn, last year's winner of the Next Great Podcast.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and
be sure to go vote for your favorite at Mixed
Rape podcast dot com. M
Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

I Do, Part 2

I Do, Part 2

From Executive Producers Jennie Garth, Jana Kramer, Amy Robach, and T.J. Holmes. Did you think you met the love of your life and marry him, only to realize it was actually “thank you, next?" Did this jerk cheat on you and leave you feeling alone and hopeless? Don’t make the same mistake twice... Get it right THIS time! Is it time to find true love…again?! If you loved the Golden Bachelor, SILVER just might be your color. Older and wiser, 50 and Fabulous, and ready for a little sex in the city. Everyone has baggage, but you’re not bringing it on this trip. Second Times The Charm. I Do, Part Two. An iHeartRadio podcast...where finding love is the main objective.

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

The Bobby Bones Show

The Bobby Bones Show

Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.