Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio, Conversations about issues that matter.
Here's your host, three time Grasie Award winner, Shelley Sunstein.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
I don't know if you are aware, but October is
National Lesbian, gay, Bisexual, Transsexual Q Queer Month or LGBTQ Month,
as signed into law by President Biden. Before that, President
(00:31):
Clinton had signed into law, I think in nineteen ninety nine. No,
it was probably earlier, maybe ninety one, it was National
Gay and Lesbian Month. And so it is October, and
I want to introduce you to somebody you may recognize
the name from Broadway, Daisy Egan. She made or they
(00:56):
made Broadway history as the youngest ever to win a
Tony Award for creating the role of Mary Lennox in
the Broadway musical The Secret Garden. You were just eleven
years old.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, I know, it's bananas. My son is eleven now,
and I look at him and I'm like, how did
I do that?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
But well, they did not do that. Were you terrified?
Did you realize the importance of being on Broadway as
an eleven year old?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
No, not at all. I don't think I understood the
weight of it. At all. You know, the kids who
were in Harry Potter talk about.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Being unaware of this parade of incredible stars that they
were working with because.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
You're young and you don't understand, you know, history.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
So no, I really had no idea how impactful and
what a huge thing that was. And it's a good
thing too, because I think if I'd.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Known more, it would have been too much pressure.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Did you start? I assume you were doing like musical
community theater long before that. Had to get into it,
and then we'll get into why you're here.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Yeah, yeah, not really, to be honest, you know, my
dad It's a long story, but my dad had been
an actor and he stopped and then he happened to
be in something when I was turning nine, and I
saw it and I just was terribly bullied in school,
and so the idea of getting to like be somebody else,
you know, on stage was so appealing to me that
(02:26):
I told my parents I want to try it, and
they were really reluctant, you know, because of all the
like horror stories about kids in Hollywood. And the very
first thing I did was a big musical at Brooklyn
Academy of Music, and I got the lead role, and
then right after that I was in Layman's rub.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
It happened very very quickly, so I.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
Don't even think I had enough time to really know
what was happening.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
You know, why were you bullied?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (02:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
It was the eighties and I was short and I
was you know, I didn't have the right clothes.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
We didn't have money, so all my clothes were like
my sister's nineteen seventies hand me downs. My hair was
always in a ratted mess, and I was just weird,
you know, Like today I think i'd had well.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Who knows, it depends where you go to school. But like,
you know, kids.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
Are a lot more open and accepting now, but back then, I.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Was just a weirdo, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
So the reason Daisy Egan is with us today is
that Daisy has launched a remarkable new podcast network. So
tell us about that, Daisy.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, I'm so proud of this about I don't know,
two years ago, a year and a half ago, my
colleague Amber Hunt, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
She's responsible for.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
The Accused podcast with her podcasting partner Amanda Rossman, who's
also Pilitzer Prize winner approached me and said, hey, we
want to start a network, and so we just sort
of did you know, we kind of jumped in, you know,
held our breath and jumped in and decided, you know,
(04:08):
we wanted to do things differently than what we're seeing
with you know, podcasting, especially over the pandemic, suddenly became
this this sort of hollywoodized industry. It used to be
anybody could kind of break in, and now the gates
are kind of closed. And if you do a podcast
for a big network, the network.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Owns your property, it owns your IP.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
So you know, if Netflix or if HBO comes along
and says, hey, we want to make a TV show
out of this, it belongs to the studio. And we
decided that the people who create the content should keep
the content.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
So we're a Patreon based network.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
So for five bucks a month, it's it's like Netflix
or Amazon or any of the streaming services.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
You get all of our regular.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Podcasts, which is my advice column, Dear Daisy, a podcast
about secrets. Amber's true crime podcast, The Catalyst, in which
she tells true crime stories but she doesn't name the
perpetrator until the very end so that you're sort of
forced to look at it from a different lens. And
(05:15):
then I have a Love Is Blank recap podcast which
I'm actually on tour with right now called Shut the
f Up Nick Lache with my co host Ellen Marsh
who's also a Broadway sensation, which is just such a.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Goofy, silly fun time.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
And then we have quarterly shows, so we just wrapped
up more like Ancient Baaliens, which was an Ancient Aliens
recap podcast which.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
We might pick back up, We're not sure yet.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
And dropping today actually is The in Between with Mel Barrett,
which is a podcast looking at the Pam Smart trial
from the nineties and sort of re examining the role
that the media played and how women are treated differently
in the justice system than men.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
You know, I think we're all.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Kind of looking back at at the way we've the
way we did things in the past and going, huh,
now we see it from a different lens. So she's
she's sort of re examining that.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And then so but let me.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
All right, let me just interrupt here because I'm a
little confused. So grab Bag the Lab is described to
me as a female and non binary owned profit share
podcast Network. So it's not necessarily non binary or LGBTQ themed,
(06:39):
am I correct, it's exactly the ownership, that's right.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Amber and Amanda and I.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
I identify as a non binary woman, so I use
she and they and that's fine. And Amber and Amanda
are straight and sists and I'm queer. Yeah, So it's
not a focus on LGBTQ. However, we are.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Interested in giving voice to.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
People who don't necessarily get to have a voice, So
we're actively seeking out trans voices and voices people have
historically underrepresented communities for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Right I am speaking with Daisy Egan, who made history
as the youngest actress ever to win a Tony Award
for creating the role of Mary Lennox in the Broadway
musical The Secret Garden when she was just eleven years old,
and she's here today talking about the launch of grab
Bag Collab, a female and non binary owned profit share
(07:41):
podcast network, which if you want to have access to
you it's five dollars a month, right, Yeah, it's just.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Five bucks a month, and you get all of our
all of our regular content, and then you know, for
higher tiers.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
You get other things.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
We've got live recordings people sit in while we're recording,
which is super fun. At eight dollars a month, you
get everything, plus my true crime show Strange and Unexplained,
which is in its fourth season, and Amber's other true
crime show, Crimes of the Centuries. You get that early
in ad Free, which is a fun little bonus.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
So tell me about your journey. When did you come out,
When did you know, and what was this like for you,
this whole journey.
Speaker 4 (08:28):
You know, I started to wonder quite young, probably when
I was like twelve, and there was a lot going
on in my family life, so there really wasn't a
lot of time to sit and think about it.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And plus, you know, I grew up in.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
Musical theater for the most part, and in New York,
where it was certainly open and progressive.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
But it was the nineties, you know.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
I think it was ninety six that there was a
cover of New York magazine that was like, bisexuals is
a new thing. So people really didn't know, you know,
and certainly the idea that you could be a gay
woman and not fit into a very certain stereotype just
sort of wasn't out there.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
So I went in and out of the.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Closet for most of my life, really until probably my
early thirties, you know, struggling with well, if I'm with
a man now, then I must not be queer. And
so it was very confusing for me. And it really
wasn't until my thirties that I was like, oh, I'm
just queer, like, it doesn't you know, I don't. It
(09:32):
doesn't matter who I'm with, you know. And sometime around
twenty eighteen, to be honest, I noticed that whenever I
went shopping.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I felt very sad.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Like I would go into the women's clothing section and
I just sort of felt uncomfortable and sad. And I
realized that I'd been trying to fit myself into a
presentational box that just wasn't me and it wasn't comfortable.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
And you know, you can present however you want.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
There are high fem people who consider themselves non binary.
There are you know, very masculine, male bodied people who
consider themselves non binary.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
It doesn't have to do with that.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
But for me, I think allowing myself to sort of
shed the layers of like traditional femininity that never felt
comfortable to me was a big step in the journey.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
And you know, I cut my hair short.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Which I had been doing throughout my career, you know,
cutting it short and then being told I look too gay,
and so growing it again, and then cutting it again,
and I finally said, I just have to be me.
I can't, you know, I feel more comfortable this way.
So I cut it very, very short. And I got
cast as one of the first non binary characters on
network television in Good Trouble, and I was I was
(10:56):
so honored to be able to represent represent that community
as I was finding that identity in myself.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
You know.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I find it's so interesting that among kids this is
so much a non issue. Yep, it's very very you know,
it's it's just a generational thing. I mean, because look
at Stonewall back in sixty nine. I mean kids growing
up today would be like what I mean, they just
(11:29):
I'm talking about my grandkids, you know, they just don't care.
It's simply a non issue.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Yeah, And I think that it's important for them to
know the history.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
I think.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
I think kids today, I think, really are disconnected from
our history in a way that I think it would
really benefit them to know our history more and to
understand what our ancestors went through, you know, in the fight,
and it's very you know, we have a problematic history,
and we definitely have a history of cutting certain identities
(12:05):
out of our fight.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
But I think it's important for the kids to understand.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
Like, yeah, like when you went to a bar, you
had to wear the clothes that they thought aligned with
your gender, Like that's nuts.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
To think about today.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
And you know, and that the police had a right
to arrest you because you weren't wearing the right clothes.
And to have them understand the centuries in our culture
and you know, sort of white colonization, colonized culture of
people just walking around in boxes that did not fit them,
(12:43):
and how painful and uncomfortable that was. And I think
it's important for us to acknowledge that that struggle because
it's we wouldn't we would not be here without it.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Back to your podcast, For those who are interested in
raw not to listen, but to offer their own podcasts,
how do they reach out to grab Bag Collab.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
You just go to grab bag collab dot com and
we have a Google form that you can fill out.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
We send you a questionnaire that's very easy to follow.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
I found when I was pitching projects, I had no
idea how to pitch, and so it was important to
us to be like, let's just set it up so
they can they know what questions to answer and they're
not feeling like they're just stabbing in the dark. So
we'll send you a form to fill out and it
just says like, what's the idea for the podcast? What
kind of support might you need? We can order, but
(13:42):
we can offer some technical support in terms of editing,
sound quality, engineering, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Some people have all that done.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
They just need some script help or they need to
bounce ideas off of us.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
But yeah, you fill it out.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
We read every single one and I've actually we're pretty jazzed.
I think we're booked up through spring of next year,
but we're filling in our quarterly shows. And again, we
are actively looking for historically underrepresented voices. So you know,
if you represent the trans community, or the non binary community,
(14:21):
or you know, black women, whatever it is, we want
to hear your voice.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Okay, excellent, Thank you so much. Daisy Egan and congracts
with grab Bag Collapse.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
You've been listening to Sunstein sessions on iHeartRadio, a production
of New York's classic rock Q one O four point three,