As 2025 comes to a close, the staff of OPB’s “Think Out Loud” look back on some of their favorite conversations from the past year. Producers Sage Van Wing, Gemma DiCarlo, Rolie Hernandez, Sheraz Sadiq, Riley Martinez and Malya Fass join host Dave Miller in conversation.
Multnomah County’s ‘Everybody Reads’ author, Javier Zamora, discusses his memoir, ‘Solito’
Grants Pass grapples with how to balance needs of community, both housed and unhoused
Portland artist wins World Fantasy Award for her woodcut prints
A rock opera about the Columbia Gorge watershed comes to life
Portland band Karaoke from Hell has been backing up karaoke singers live since 1992
Women tell stories of their abortions for Idaho’s Pro-Voice Project
City official, nonprofit leaders on why Portland’s traffic deaths have fallen
Outreach workers talk with people living on the street for Vancouver Point-in-Time count
Portland nonprofit Nutrition Inside aims to improve nutrition at Oregon prisons
A day at the Oregon State Fair
Food Court 5000 brings 1980s aerobic craze to mall walkers in Portland
How Lincoln County residents are approaching Oregon’s housing crisis
Portland Alzheimer’s advocate uses personal story to help others
Portland nonprofit helps fulfill ‘musical last wishes’ for people at end of life
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Today, I’m joined by TOL producers Rolie Hernandez, Gemma DiCarlo, Sheraz Sadiq and Sage Van Wing. Hello, everybody.
OPB Staff in Studio: Hello.
Miller: This is one of my favorite shows of the year every year. We call it “Producer’s Choice.” We have all chosen moments from the show that stayed with us for any number of reasons, because they made us cry or laugh, or both, or just made us think about our worlds in a different way.
Senior producer Allison Frost could not join us today, but we will hear some of her work. Later this hour. We’re going to be joined by our newest producers, Riley Martinez and Malya Fass. But let’s just jump right in.
Sage, you have the first clip.
Sage Van Wing: Yeah, so back in March, we talked with author Javier Zamora as part of our partnership with Literary Arts, where we bring authors into schools and talk with them in front of an audience of high school students. This one was in front of students from three different high schools who all came bussed to McDaniel’s High School. There are about 300 or so students in a giant auditorium. Zamora was talking about his memoir “Solito,” which is about his immigration journey to the U.S., as a young child alone. It’s a harrowing book and it was particularly harrowing to read and to listen to him talk about it this year. We told students that if they were more comfortable they could ask questions in Spanish. So here’s one student.
[Recording from an interview with author Javier Zamora playing]
Julia [student audience member]: I’m Julia. Tengo una pregunta. ¿Por qué elegiste escribir la historia desde la perspectiva de nueve años?
Javier Zamora: Gracias por la pregunta. Creo que era necesario escribir desde el punto de vista de ese niño porque yo necesitaba aprender a amarme a mí mismo o amar a ese niño de nueve años que por casi veinte-un años en este país, los politico, los presidentes, todo mundo como no querían que comenzar a verme a mí mismo ou empezar de entender a ese niño.
So the question is why did I choose to write it from the perspective of a 9-year old kid? And I think I needed to learn to know that 9-year old kid, because for 20 years, politicians, news outlets pretty much told me that I should be ashamed of that 9-year-old kid. And by embodying or speaking through my 9-year old self, I think I genuinely learned for the first time to love a 9-year old kid, meaning me.
[Recording ends]
Van Wing: Some of the teachers, multiple teachers came up to me afterwards and said that they had seen students ask questions who had never asked questions before, who would definitely not have asked questions if they hadn’t felt comfortable speaking in Spanish. Zamora himself thanked us for allowing him to speak to the students directly like that. And it was really the first time we’ve ever done anything like that on the show or have so much in multiple languages. It felt really rich, personal and true to me. And I was just really glad that we had the opportunity to have those kinds of conversations on the show.
Miller: I remember hearing also, after that, from some of the adults who’d been involved, that the experiences that Zamora writes about, that some students that they’re familiar with had done the same thing. They, too, had been unaccompanied minors. So this was not a foreign concept, that this was something he had written something that some of these students themselves had literally done the same thing and experienced that.
Rolie, what do you have for us?
Rolie Hernandez: Yeah, so back in April, our beloved former producer Elizabeth Castillo produced this community event in Grants Pass. It was all about homelessness in Grants Pass, and it came roughly a year after the Supreme Court decision. We actually gave audience members a chance to share their thoughts, and a man named Lionheart, who was experiencing homelessness himself, kind of shared what he was thinking.
[Recording from a talk about homelessness at Grants Pass High School playing]
Lionheart [audience member]: This is a very important conversation. And I think there’s a voice missing from this conversation. I think it’s the voice of those experiencing homelessness. And I think if they were to be here and to hear the talk about the J Street encampment being unconscionably torturous, I think that the response might be that things are significantly worse without a place to legally exist. And without that space, and even if it’s well intentioned, even if you’re trying to foster a situation where people are going to hit rock bottom and hopefully respond positively, unfortunately you’re creating the circumstances that are just so torturous that sometimes people turn to self-medication, turn to the very drugs which are perpetuating the cycle.
Last summer, when it was over 110 degrees in the J Street encampment and over 120 degrees inside a tent, and you’re not allowed to put up the means to thermoregulate with shade, you’re making it impossible for people to survive, let alone thrive to move back into a community that seemingly doesn’t want them to exist.
[Recording ends]
Hernandez: This was a fantastic hour that Elizabeth, I believe also Allison Frost helped produce. And it just really kind of reminded me of the importance of all of these community events and hearing from people. I don’t think we’d ever get the chance to do something like this if it wasn’t for that open mic.
Van Wing: It’s so important to the team at Think Out Loud to travel all over the state. We’ve traveled to lots of different places and the chance to go and be in a community for a while and talk about things that matter to folks in that community is really important to us. And Grants Pass has been dealing with this issue for so long. Everywhere in Oregon has been dealing with homelessness, but Grants Pass has been sort of the center of a national conversation. It felt really urgent to have that conversation there, at that moment, in front of community members who could participate.
Miller: I remember that really well, when he started talking and just how important it was to actually have his voice be a part of this conversation. So it wasn’t just we were talking about people experiencing homelessness, but we could hear specifically from somebody who at that moment was going to be sleeping outside.
Sheraz, what do you have for us?
Sheraz Sadiq: Back in October, I produced a conversation about romance scams. So romance scams typically take place online by fraudsters who are increasingly these days part of an international criminal syndicate. And what they’ll do is they’ll adopt a fake persona with a backstory, and they’ll find their victims on places like Facebook or on dating apps. And they’ll express romantic interest, which is fake. And they’ll also, at the same time, start gradually making increasing demands for money. They’ll start off small, they’ll be innocuous. “Hey, can you give me $20 for an Amazon gift card?” And then they’ll grow ever more elaborate and with large sums of money, we’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars.
What sparked my interest in this was this article that appeared in The Colombian in October, and it quoted Sergeant Jay Alie. He is a sergeant with Vancouver’s Property Crimes Unit. That’s the unit that investigates these romance and cryptocurrency scams. And he said something that I thought was just really shocking. He said that on average, victims in Vancouver who fall prey to these romance scams lose an average of $112,000. That’s a staggering amount of money, especially when you compare it to the amount of money that’s lost on average to other types of scams, which in Vancouver is about $20,000.
So I invited Jay Alie to be on our show, and here he is explaining why it’s so hard to stop these romance scams or fall prey to them, even if you had already fallen victim to them before.
[Recording from an interview about romance scams with Sgt. Jay Alie playing]
Sgt. Jay Alie: These types of scams are really hard to avoid. They are specifically created to pull on human needs, that if they find you at the right time of life, you wouldn’t recognize it. I like to kind of compare it to watching a magic show. If you’re sitting in the crowd, if you’re the target audience of this magic show, you see what’s happening and you see things disappear. You don’t know how it happened. If you were in the wings, objectively watching this, you might see how the process works. But for the person in the audience, it’s not real clear. So when I talk to people, and especially people who’ve been victims, they’re like, “this will never happen again.” I would bet 90% of the time, it happens again.
Miller: Wait, 90% of people who were victims in the past are revictimized by another version of a romance scam?
Sgt. Alie: Yes.
[Recording ends]
Sadiq: I love this conversation. He was such a great guest. I learned so much from it. I actually reached out to Sergeant Alie to see if he could share with me any updates. He said the holidays are upon us. It’s a time of year when people are gonna feel more in a giving mood. They’re gonna want to help out, and these fraudsters are very savvy. That’s not lost on them, that it’s the holidays, and they’re gonna try to take advantage of people. They’re gonna make requests like, “if you can send me just a couple of thousand dollars, I could buy a plane ticket and we can finally meet in person.”
Interestingly, he said, given all the immigration enforcement that we’re seeing nationwide, ICE is also being invoked as an excuse. “Hey, I’ve been arrested and detained. Can you give me $5,000 so I can post bail?” Or, “I’ve had my jewelry held up in customs. Can you give me some money so I can get my jewelry and my wallet back?” It was fascinating. I’ve learned so much from this conversation.
Miller: My turn now. In February, on the 3rd anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we talked to two Ukrainian Americans from the Portland area. Tatiana Terdal was a returning guest. We’ve talked to her a couple times about the war. This time in February, I asked her about the decrease in coverage and interest in the war that I had seen among Americans and in the American press.
[Recording from an interview with members of the Ukrainian American community, Tatiana Terdal and Yulia Brockdorf, playing]
Tatiana Terdal: I can see that there is definitely much less news about Ukraine in the media, and that is understandable because there are a lot of things happening in the world. For us Ukrainians, we are keeping up with this, you know, every day. I have an app on my phone that tells me every time there is an air raid alert in Lviv. And it’s happening all the time. So I am, of course, immersed in that, but Americans are not. At the same time ...
Miller: Why do you have that app? You live here. You’re not physically in danger from those air raid sirens or possible rockets. Why do you have that app?
Terdal: Because my family and friends are there. I also have meetings with people in Ukraine and I need to know when they need to go into the air raid shelter. Also, it’s a time for me to basically even check in with my family or friends. “Are you OK? Have you survived?” So I think I’m not the only one. Many, many Ukrainians have that.
[Recording ends]
Miller: I was so struck by that. And it reminded me of other conversations we’ve had over the years, or recently about Gaza or other wars or conflicts, where even if they’re happening thousands of miles away, there are people who live in Portland, Madras, or anywhere in Oregon or Southwest Washington. And it’s as if they, too, are involved, are a part of those wars, those conflicts, partly because of technology. There weren’t apps 50 years ago, but it’s partly just the human reality of if your loved ones are somewhere else that is under attack, that a part of you is there as well.
Gemma, you’re up next.
Gemma DiCarlo: We talked to Liv Rainey-Smith last month. She’s a woodblock artist in Portland who designs covers for fantasy books, and she recently won a World Fantasy Award for Best Artist, which is a very big deal. So many exchanges in this conversation jumped out at me. She’s a very interesting person, but this one in particular, really struck me. She was describing how her open heart surgery as a kid influenced the kind of macabre imagery that she’s drawn to now.
[Interview with woodblock artist Liv Rainey-Smith playing]
Liv Rainey-Smith: I still have a, I think it’s 1983 National Geographic magazine that had an article about the Aztecs that I glommed onto as a tiny tot because there was an illustration in there of a human sacrifice with a heart being taken out of a chest. I related to that because I knew I was going to be having heart surgery.
Miller: How old do you think you were when you saw that?
Rainey-Smith: Probably about 3 or 4.
Miller: You saw that before you’re going to have heart surgery?
Rainey-Smith: Yes.
Miller: And did that sort of meld in your mind that, in some way, that’s what was going to happen to you, your heart was going to be taken out of your body?
Rainey-Smith: Yeah, it had a sense of familiarity to it.
[Recording ends]
DiCarlo: Like, what? [Laughter] That is the most metal thing I’ve heard all year. And she went on to talk about how her sleep paralysis demon kind of helped her befriend her creatures that are part of her award-winning body of art. I don’t know, it was just a really delightful way to think about facing your fears and making them a part of you, rather than trying to fight them off.
Miller: Yeah, I remember, I think I asked something about, like, “You don’t seem scared by this. Was it scary at the time?” She said, “Oh, no, it was very scary.” She has just spent a lot of time sort of processing that fear and turning it into art, but she did very much deal with terror at the time.
DiCarlo: Yeah, and just got comfortable with it over time.
Miller: Yeah. Sheraz, what do you have for us?
Sadiq: So, this is a conversation I produced back in April about The Watershed Rock Opera. What the heck was it? It was this multimedia extravaganza that featured live music, singing and video to create this opera about the Columbia River Gorge. It unfolded in five movements that traced and showcased the unique history and ecology of the gorge, and people whose lives have been indelibly shaped by this unique region.
It also featured the talents of 20 local musicians and performers. People like Leila Kaneda. She is a talented musician who lives in Hood River. She was the rock opera’s musical director and percussionist, and she faced a number of challenges with this epic production. One of which was on Movement 3. Movement 3 was all about the life cycle of a pear, from growing it, to harvesting it, to getting it to market, and all the work that the orchardists do to do that.
So, Leila had the tough job of taking all this information and translating it into percussive instrumentation. Here she is describing how she did that, thanks to a visit to an orchard and the musical inspiration that sparked from that visit. This orchard is owned by Lesley Tamura. She’s a fourth-generation Hood River orchardist. Why don’t we take a listen?
[Recording from an interview about The Watershed Rock Opera, with guests Leila Kaneda and Lesley Tamura, playing]
Leila Kaneda: And so we go, and we’re walking around, and Lesley’s like, “Here is this piece of equipment we use. This is how it’s used in the orchard. This is a family heirloom that’s been here for generations and we pass it down.” And I’m standing there like, “Are you sure I can hit this? Are you sure it won’t break?” And she’s like, “Go ahead.”
Miller: So you brought drumsticks with you with the idea that she would give you a tour and you would hit sticks against things to see what they sounded like?
Kaneda: Exactly. Everything.
Lesley Tamura: She climbed inside my fruit bin, sat in it and drummed on different parts. Everything I showed her, she just drummed it to see what it would sound like.
Miller: Honestly, I mean, this is a side, but it seems like one of the great things about being a percussionist is that anything can be an instrument.
Kaneda: It is exactly that. It’s no matter where you go, if you have your hands or you have a couple of things to hit with, it’s an instrument. This microphone even.
Miller: But please don’t do that. [Laughter]
[Recording ends]
Sadiq: I should say that Lesley narrated Movement 3 and also Sarah Fox is an amazing talented producer. She’s a total visionary. I mean, this rock opera would not exist without Sarah Fox. So, she produced this and she also, by sheer force of will, her powers of persuasion and her charisma, recruited people like Leila and Leila’s husband Eric, who composed the music. But also, countless numbers of other folks, a veritable army of people who volunteered their time, their talents, their money to make this production a reality. You know the African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child.” I guess you could say, “it takes a village to raise a rock opera,” at least one about the Columbia Gorge.
Miller: Gemma, what do you have?
DiCarlo: So this was one of the last pitches from beloved former producer Elizabeth Castillo, and I’m really glad it made it to air and we didn’t forget about it. Just this week actually, we talked about Karaoke from Hell, which is the live band that’s been backing up karaoke singers at Dante’s in Portland for more than 30 years. Band members Dawn Panttaja and Brian Saunders were talking about how they picked new songs for their catalog to learn and have people sing. And this exchange just cracked me up.
[Recording from Karaoke from Hell interview, with Dawn Panttaja and Brian Saunders]
Dawn Panttaja: It has to be something that people will want but not overdone. Some songs, they need a rest.
Miller: What’s one that you don’t want to play again for 10 years?
Brian Saunders: She doesn’t like to admit …
Panttaja: Yeah, we sort of have a rule. You’re not allowed to say that in the band because we don’t want our customers, our fans, our singers, our friends to ever think, “gosh, can’t pick that song because they don’t ever want to play that song again.”
Miller: OK, so you won’t tell us.
Saunders: They’re good songs. They just seem to need a rest, like “Creep” by Radiohead is one that we just took off the list. “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes. Yeah, we’ll still do it.
Panttaja: We know how to play it, but we just do it less.
Miller: What if someone slips you a $20 bill? Does that help grease the system?
Panttaja: Oh yeah. Totally.
Saunders: Yeah, we’ll play anything for $20. [Laughter]
Miller: Only $20?
Saunders: Yeah.
Miller: OK.
[Recording ends]
DiCarlo: [Laughter] $20 gets you in this economy.
Miller: The way I said it, clearly, I think I could have lowballed them a little bit. Like she said yes so quickly that maybe you can get a song they don’t want to play for like $5, $7.
DiCarlo: Yeah, definitely. But as someone who goes to karaoke frequently, this was insider info I needed to know – which songs are tired, which songs need a break.
Also, Elizabeth covered a lot of serious issues for us. I mean, we just heard homelessness. She did a lot on the Klamath Dams, wildfire and different climate issues. But she was always finding cool stuff like this, too, and I know she loves live music herself. So I just wanted to shout, check that one out.
Miller: And just one other thing – and I think this came up in the segment – this was ostensibly a movie explicitly about karaoke, but it ended up being so much more than that. It ended up being so much about how Portland has changed. And in our guests’ views, especially one of them who was here in the early ‘90s, how free, and creative, and how much possibility there was, so much tied to the cost of living, that she could basically live a creative, art-filled life. A life filled with art making because she could afford to do that in ways that are so different now …
Van Wing: And bring that joy of being a live band backing for karaoke singers. It’s not very often you have the opportunity to do that. You could be free and joyful, and bring that to other people as a part of your gift to the city.
Miller: Yeah, there was a real sense of community and of giving to, on the part of the band.
We are joined now by the newest members of our team, Riley Martinez and Malya Fass. We’ve all chosen clips from the last year that we wanted to hear again and to give to you again.
I think I’m up right now for this next one. In February, we talked to a woman from Idaho named Desi Ballis. Last year, she was in her second trimester with her third child, when she found out that he had a fatal condition. But because she lives in Idaho post Roe v. Wade, she could not get an abortion in her home state. She had to go to Utah basically immediately. I asked her what would have happened if she had not taken an emergency trip there.
[Recording of an interview with Desi Ballis and Idaho’s Pro-Voice Project]
Desi Ballis: Well, I guess the reality is that I might not be here today. Because doctors are so fearful to act and they don’t know when to act based on the current legislation, I would have had to have been significantly far along in either sepsis, losing blood or any other kind of infection before doctors could legally act to support me and help me.
Miller: Was your doctor able to even say that to you, that if you don’t go and have an abortion in a state where you can, you might die in our state?
Ballis: No, not at all. In fact, I think that was his driving force for just being so firm. He grabbed my hands, and just told me multiple times, and looked me dead in the eye, and just kept saying over and over and over again, “I need you to get to Salt Lake. I need you to get there. Do you understand this? This is very serious. I need you to get to Salt Lake.”
[Recording ends]
Miller: I should say that conversation was produced by Allison Frost, who I mentioned earlier, could not be here today, but it’s still a gigantically important part of our team. I was so moved by this conversation and just to hear this personal story of this one woman. And having a doctor who was trying desperately to save her life, to make sure that she would stay alive, who was forced to speak in code, who could not say some basic things about why she even needed to cross state lines to get this care, because he was hamstrung by Idaho’s laws. It’s a powerful conversation that has really stayed with me.
Riley, you’re up next.
Riley Martinez: So this one was one of the first segments that I produced for my time on the show. And this was just earlier this month, we spoke with three folks working pretty closely on transportation and pedestrian safety. And that conversation sort of sparked in my mind after the Portland city administrator released a report showing that traffic deaths in the city were substantially down since they were during the pandemic, and that was rather surprising to me.
One of our guests, Sarah Iannarone, the executive director of The Street Trust, the transportation safety nonprofit, made a really interesting point that I hadn’t considered before, and that was that the pandemic really fractured our society at the system level. And, I think I took for granted that transportation itself is a system, and so it makes sense that we saw declines in traffic safety the way that we did. And what I especially found interesting was the way that Sarah and others in this conversation, which included Zachary Lauritzen from Oregon Walks and Dana Dickman, the program manager of Vision Zero in the city of Portland, they focused on what we can do to mitigate the consequences of the kinds of behaviors that we know lead to accidents. And that includes things like speeding and drunk driving.
[Recording from show on Portland traffic deaths, with Sarah Iannorone, Zachary Lauritzen and Dana Dickman playing]
Sarah Iannorone: We also know that there are people who are drinking and driving, and we can design streets that even if your wildest neighbor makes it home alive at the end of the night, then we’ve done our job, right? Human behavior we can’t control. But the designs we put in, whether those are guard rails or streets where people can’t go fast, or plenty of access to transit and walking so you can walk to the neighborhood pub instead of driving – all of those things help for control for bad human decisions. And then we’re using our infrastructure investments and our design investments to make sure no matter what anybody’s doing, we’re all getting home to our families at the end of the night. So Dana’s point about the investments on the front end, that really does tie to human behavior.
[Recording ends]
Martinez: I don’t think I fully appreciated at first, just how important street design is before this conversation. I grew up in Southern California, and I didn’t grow up in a city with good public transit, and it wasn’t walkable, and people didn’t really ride bikes, and it was all cars, and it was the sort of street design that Sarah was talking about that leads to some of these problems. So I really came to this topic focused on the individual level, on the driver, on cars.
But Sarah’s point was, how can we build infrastructure so that such individuals who are imperfect, that we can’t control, who inevitably make mistakes, don’t get seriously hurt or killed. And I just didn’t realize how deep that rabbit hole goes, from pedestrian-level lighting, to street width, to what kinds of vehicles can drive on the street and all of that. I just found that really illuminating.
Miller: Rolie, what do you have for us?
Rolie Hernandez: Yeah, so I think we all know what the Point-In-Time Count is. It’s a snapshot of what homelessness looks like in a given area at a given time. It’s federally required every other year, but the state of Washington requires it every year. So Dave and I had the privilege of following some outreach workers with Vancouver’s Council for the Homeless back in February. We saw them as they provided resources, but this is a clip when a surveyor was asking someone what their experience was like on the streets.
[Recording from interviews with the Council for Homeless and people experiencing homelessness in Vancouver playing]
Brian Starbuck [surveyor]: And is this your first time being homeless?
Hailey: No, I’ve been fighting it ever since my mom passed away when I was 16. I started at 17, but it’s gotten to the point where it seems like I can’t move anywhere because of my domestic violence that I’m in. So I don’t know how to get out.
Starbuck: OK, so you’re currently fleeing domestic violence.
Hailey: Yes, currently. He is actively in jail.
Starbuck: So how long have you been in your car without a place to live?
Hailey: I’ve been in – this is his car – for four years.
Starbuck: And have you stayed in a shelter at all in the last three years?
Hailey: No.
Starbuck: How long have you lived in Clark County?
Hailey: Going on six years.
Starbuck: And the zip code for your last permanent address?
Hailey: It was just literally right down the road, so I think it’s 98682. Do you know where the state patrol is?
Starbuck: Yeah.
Hailey: Right over there on 48th Circle.
Starbuck: Some of these questions are a little touchy. Are you actively in addiction or anything like that?
Hailey: No
Starbuck: Do you have any health conditions, chronic health conditions or anything like that?
Hailey: I mean, so, so. I have a weak immune disorder so if somebody’s sick and comes around me, I’m [beep], I’m screwed.
[Recording ends]
Hernandez: I could confidently say that this is the earliest I’ve ever woken up for any kind of work-related thing. I think it was like waking up at 4:30, Dave and I meeting at 5. And it definitely was worth it. I think it was such a kind of honor to be able to kind of go with these outreach workers as I kind of did this kind of one-day event. That was a lot to handle.
DiCarlo: Definitely, yeah, and it’s kind of like you said earlier, just the importance of being able to go out in the community and speak with people out there. So often, we’re inviting them into our space and to have conversations here in the studio. So it’s really, I don’t know, resonant when we’re able to go out and talk to people, and see where they’re at. I really like that aspect of it.
Miller: This is something, too … I’ve been hoping to do this for years. And we’ve talked to people, we’ve gone on various reporting trips in homeless encampments, talked to people experiencing homelessness on the street, but we’ve never been a part of the Point-in-Time Count, even though for years we had talked about the numbers that came from these counts in the Portland area or in other places. So it was really important to see how they’re actually done, how the numbers are arrived at and the lives behind those numbers.
Malya, what do you have for us?
Malya Fass: So this was a conversation we had with a couple of people from Nutrition Inside, which is a Portland nonprofit that launched last year. It’s a nonprofit that aims to improve the quality of food for adults in custody in Oregon prisons, and they connect surplus food with correctional facilities, things from orchards and farms. So we’ll hear from Aidan O’Connor, who’s the founder of the project, and a little later in the clip, you’ll hear from Noelle St John, who was formerly incarcerated at Coffee Creek Correction Facility and she now works as an advisor for the nonprofit. I just loved this interaction.
[Recording from an interview with Nutrition Inside’s Aidan O’Conner and Noelle St John playing]
Aidan O’Connor: So we’re getting donations of blueberries, blackberries, loganberries, persimmons, avocados – all of this really fresh food.
Miller: [Speaking to Noelle St John] I’m not sure which fruit that he mentioned made you say “mmm,” but was it avocado?
Noelle St John: Yeah, it’s like gold in there. The minute I was released, I bought like 15 of them and I only ate avocados for a whole week.
Miller: Have you been inside a prison to see some of the women or men who are the recipients of the food for this project? I mean, have you seen the reactions among adults in custody?
St John: No, but being in the garden program and being a gardener that got to grow some of the food in the women’s prison, I got to see people’s expressions when they got a tomato for the first time that year. The change in their faces was just incredible. It was like their whole demeanor changed like they were just reliving every moment that they’ve had something delicious in their life. And you can just see it changed their whole day – just a tomato, a small thing that you see every day in the supermarket and stacks.
[Recording ends]
Fass: So in a conversation I had with Noelle prior to her being on the show, one thing that she said to me multiple times and just stuck out to me so much was, you get out of prison and you go to the store, and you just see piles of fresh food everywhere. That was just such a stark image for me and it made me look at fresh food so differently. And now, it was like a flip switched in my head. I walk into the grocery store now and that image she painted with her words just comes to me every single time. I’m so much more present with my food after all those conversations that I had with Noelle and hearing her talk to you, Dave, on the radio.
Miller: I think it’s my turn now, and a little bit of a tonal shift. We talked about so many serious things for so many good reasons on the show, but we do have some fun conversations mixed in as well. I spent a whole day at the Oregon State Fair in Salem this summer on the very first day that it opened. I just wandered around, with a microphone and a camera talking to anybody who would say yes when I would stick a phone in their face, to folks who had entered things into various competitions for making jam, or chutney, or quilts, or yarn. I talked to goat raisers, and funnel cake makers, and kids who are doing rides or going into the haunted house. A lot of people were selling things because I was fascinated by a lot of them.
This is part of my conversation with a guy named Joshua Hawkins. He was not currently, but he is the operator of the mechanical bull. He was waiting for folks to show up to ride it. Apparently, that happens more often at night when people have had more to drink, so it made it so I could actually ask him some questions.
[Recording from interviews at the Oregon State Fair playing]
Miller: What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve seen someone do?
Joshua Hawkins: [Laughter] I’ve seen some people wearing some loose clothes and maybe their pants don’t stay up very good. They dismount and it’s not very pretty and something might slide down sometimes. So yeah, that’s embarrassing.
Miller: Do people ever go up to try to impress their girlfriends or boyfriends?
Hawkins: Oh, 100%.
Miller: Then they just totally don’t?
Hawkins: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, all the time … more of the boys.
Miller: I would assume that.
Hawkins: Sure, the guys get on.
Miller: Let me show off to you, baby.
Hawkins: Yeah, they want to show off and then yeah …
Miller: And then it just doesn’t work.
Hawkins: I give it to him though because I want to embarrass him a little bit. And the crowd loves it. Everyone loves it, so yeah.
Miller: Do you ever ride it?
Hawkins: No.
Miller: Why not?
Hawkins: If you do not do it, it is usually in a totally different set of muscles that you’re used to using, so the inside of your thighs get very sore. Like, you wouldn’t think that you could get so sore in 20 seconds.
Miller: Oh, I would. I think this would kill me.
Hawkins: It’s just a whole different group of muscles. So, have I done it? Yes. Do I do it? No, I don’t.
Miller: [Laughter] You’re too smart.
Hawkins: Yeah, I’m smart.
Miller: All right, well, thank you.
Hawkins: Yeah, absolutely.
Background Voice from a Loud Speaker: We’re demonstrating the Wonder Chopper, the only manual food processor on the planet with three speeds. It has four blades and six cups. We’ll start out with the dreaded onion.
[Recording ends]
Miller: [Laughter] I kept that there. I mean, obviously, I could have just ended the clip with the mechanical bull, which is the whole point of that excerpt, but I love that practiced salesman patter. I’m fascinated by it. It’s such an old skill that it still exists in certain places like a fair. So I had to have a little bit of that.
Van Wing: I love the show so much and I’m really sad that you didn’t choose your encounter with a woman trying to convince people to get sugar gliders as pets, because it was one of my favorite moments of radio I think from the entire year. I learned so much about sugar gliders that I didn’t know that I needed to know, including about their poop. And I think everyone needs to listen to that exchange.
Miller: Yes, listen to it and then do your own research to see if you trust what this salesperson was selling, in terms of the almost magical qualities of these marsupials.
Sadiq: I think it’s also nocturnal. So you also have to be willing to put up to all that ...
Miller: Yeah, when you go online, you will find a lot of reasons why you should maybe at least think twice before you go all in on your own sugar glider adventure. But yes … Well, the other thing, Sage, is that it’s good to have other reasons to go back to these shows. So there were probably eight other moments from the State Fair show that I would have been happy to listen to again, but the mechanical bull is what it turned into.
Rolie, what do you have for us?
Hernandez: Yeah, so for the past decade, personally, the soapbox I’ve had is if we close the malls, where will the mall walkers go? The mall is a great place to exercise. They have bathrooms, AC. It’s fantastic. So when I found out about the Food Court 5000, back in July, it’s like a 1980s-themed mall walk hosted by Krista Catwood. There are plenty of rules if you join: you have to pump your arms, you have to wave hello to everyone you pass by.
So this is what Krista had to say when Dave asked her about what her experience at the Lloyd’s Center has been like over the past few years.
[Recording from the Food Court 5000 interview, with Krista Catwood, playing]
Krista Catwood: I think the Lloyd’s Center is in a magical, very, very, very special era that is totally unique to her. It’s a state of transition.
Miller: She’s definitely a she?
Catwood: In my head, she’s a she. I call her a she. I don’t know how she identifies, but we’ll call her she.
Miller: Her name is Lloyd.
Catwood: Her name is Lloyd! [Laughs]
Miller: And she is she. Yeah.
Catwood: And she is special because, like you mentioned earlier, the anchor stores are largely gone. It’s filled with nonprofits, local businesses. There’s very few chains left. There’s lots of empty space that you can rent for about $350 for the whole day and hold events there. So that means there’s all of this space and room to expand. And it’s changed and it’s evolved into a more of a community center, sort of focus mindset, feel, vibe. Since we started the walks, I now know most of the shop owners and we all support each other. It just feels like a third space that’s accessible for whoever really wants to get in there – and that’s really unique.
[Recording ends]
Hernandez: I love this clip just because, one, it was silly, and I also love to anthropomorphize places, things, ideas. But beyond that, when I first moved to Portland, there was so much talk about the Lloyd’s Center. And when I went, it was kind of a bust. Over the years, it seems like it has gone through this kind of little renaissance that I’ve really loved to see grow. And it has a special place in my heart now, because that’s like the first place where I met some of my friends that I have today.
Miller: One of the things that sometimes cracks me up when we listen back to these clips, for the most part, the show happens and there’s the next show the next day. I’ve so rarely listened back to Think Out Loud, but there, she talked about the pronoun, her understanding of the Lloyd Center’s pronouns. And when I listened to it, when she said that, I thought, “huh, ‘her’?” Then the actual me in the interview asks that question. It’s like our brains don’t change that much. The reactions that we have in the moment are the ones probably that we’ll have nine months later when we re-listened to something that we experienced.
DiCarlo: Yeah, I literally, I think, said “her” in the studio as we’re listening to that clip right now, so it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Miller: Gemma, you’re up next.
DiCarlo: Yeah. Over the summer, we went to Newport, Oregon, to talk about some solutions to the housing crisis on the coast. We also talked about aging, but where we went out and spoke to people, one of the places we visited was Surfside Village. [It’s] a mobile home park where the residents, who are all 55 and older, banded together to buy the land that their homes sit on so that no one can come in and raise the rents or kick them out, which is particularly important for people who are aging.
We came across this couple while we were just kind of walking around the complex. Their names are Bonnie and Tom, and they had been living there for 25 years. And Tom explained really well to Dave what the new arrangement means for them.
[Recording from interviews in Newport about the housing crisis on the coast playing]
Miller: Has your life changed since you became an owner of the land that you live on?
Tom Good: Absolutely. I mean, the threat of having the land sold from underneath us, which I now call carnivore capitalism, is no longer here. As long as we pay our mortgage and pay our rent, everything’s going to be just fine. And I would say it’s moved me from a survival level to a more compassionate level that there were people, CASA, that were able to put us into this position and that there are good people out there that are trying to move the world forward. And we’re a product of it.
Miller: That’s interesting – from survival to compassion, meaning you feel like you have more compassion for other people in the world because you’ve been the recipient of this help.
Good: Absolutely, yeah.
[Recording ends]
DiCarlo: You just really can’t get a better summary of what stable housing means to people, how it allows them to grow and just the security that it offers. And after this, Bonnie and Tom sent a lovely, handmade card to the office and I keep it on my desk because it makes me happy.
Miller: There’s also something sort of profound about hearing how one aspect of your life changes the way you think about the rest of your life, and how gratitude can lead to more openheartedness. I don’t know, it’s like the thing you’d most hope for in terms of one good deed leading to another or positivity spreading in the world.
DiCarlo:Yeah
Miller: I don’t know, but there are so many examples of the opposite. It’s nice to hear the way this worked. I love just walking around. It’s like a very contained version of the State Fair show where we just walked around this RV park that has become much more of a community than it was in previous years. And so many folks, some of them knew we were gonna be there, but some of them didn’t and they still said, “yes, I will talk to you.” It was fascinating walking around there and getting to meet people. I’m always so struck by people’s generosity and willingness to tell their stories, and to share them with thousands and thousands of people.
I think I get to play my last clip now. This is from a recent conversation, one that Malya, you produced, just within the last couple of weeks … or is it maybe just last week. Time is confusing to me. It’s with a woman named Christy Scattarella who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease last year and has been telling her story to combat stigma and shame. This excerpt is from near the end of the interview. It starts with one of my questions – not a question that I had thought about in advance or that I’d planned to ask. Actually, I was a little bit apprehensive about asking it. I wanted to be respectful and not to be sort of digging for trauma or pain, but it came from legitimate, real curiosity in the moment. So let’s have a listen.
[Recording from an interview with author of “Optimist’s Guide to Alzheimer’s, Christy Scattarella, playing]
Miller: How much do you let yourself think about the possibility that, at some point in the future, you wouldn’t be able to have the kind of conversation that you and I are having right now, you wouldn’t be able to have all of this in your memory necessarily or speak with such eloquence, that one of the real powers you have, your language, could be diminished significantly? Is that something that you let yourself think about?
Christy Scattarella: I make short visits there, but I don’t book a room. I don’t think it does me any good. And the more I fill myself with those good hormones, and experience joy, and fulfill what now is my life’s work of making sure other people can feel this way too, and that those who are shying away from those with Alzheimer’s, instead of pulling away, what if they leaned in? Because what I want you to know is that no matter where we are in the journey – beginning, middle, or end – we all are still worthy of your time, attention and respect. And you know what? We can continue to enrich your lives, too.
[Recording ends]
Fass: I remember watching this conversation and seeing you even ask that question that you were feeling a little apprehensive about, and maybe taking a little bit of an inhale myself, and thinking, what is her response going to be? And I think that her illustrating this point of visiting that place but not booking a room was so, I don’t know, whole in my own experience. And even the way that she kind of talked about experiencing those scary feelings, but then coming back to a place of just presence and optimism, and living every moment exactly how she would like to in that place of joy and optimism, was really beautiful. And I think that the way that she kind of balanced that in that conversation, this was a really beautiful way to kind of sum that up, too.
Hernandez: Yeah, I do remember back in January, Geoff hosted a show about Alzheimer’s and we had a few calls. And a lot of the calls were about shame, so it was really impactful to hear this one, too.
Miller: Sheraz, what do you have for us?
Sadiq: In early July, I produced this conversation about Swan Songs Portland. Swan Songs Portland is this amazing nonprofit, this organization that launched last year. It’s the first local affiliate of Swan Songs. That’s a nonprofit that started in Austin, Texas 20 years ago with a very simple but powerful mission to provide musical last wishes for people who are dying. They do this by hiring local musicians to perform these small, intimate concerts for these folks and their loved ones.
Swan Songs Portland does the exact same thing. They hire local talented musicians, people like Ben Grace and Karyn Thurston of the local folk music duo Story & Tune. Ben has performed several concerts for Swan Songs Portland now, including one they performed this past spring for Betty Hale when she was in Hospice. That concert was requested by Betty’s daughter, Terri Burton.
Here’s Betty describing the power of that concert, what that concert meant for her and her family. It starts off with Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor. Chopin was a favorite composer of Terri’s mom.
[Recording from an interview with Swan Songs Portland playing]
[Ben Grace playing Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, Opus 28 No. 4 on piano]
Terri Burton: The thing that our family didn’t realize is that this was a way to say goodbye without having to use the words. And then even when my mother started kind of getting a little impatient because she didn’t feel well, we didn’t want it to end.
Miller: That seems like a hard moment to navigate.
Burton: So the nice thing was, the whole family was together, but we didn’t have to say anything. And we could just have that together-feeling. And like I said, I have tears in my eyes right now because it really was wonderful.
[Recording ends]
Sadiq: I should add that it was Ben Grace performing Chopin’s Prelude. And also, Terri gave this lovely description of her mom and her mom’s flamboyant personality. She said that she was the president of the local Sherlock Holmes Society. She had this trunk full of costumes, like Victorian-era costumes. She had a library with 4,000 books, all of which she had read.
And an amazing thing happened just minutes after we aired this conversation. I got this email from this listener who said she was listening to it with great interest. And that based on the description Terri gave of her mom’s flamboyant personality, she was pretty much certain that she was describing her dear friend, DJ, with whom she worked in the ‘80s. She described her as a singularly delightful person.
So, I read this and I thought, “oh my gosh, I got to share this with Terri.” So I forwarded this email to Terri. Terri got back to me and she said, “yes, sure enough, this is someone who used to work with my mom.” And she also shared with me what it was like, that experience of reconnecting with this person who worked with her mom so many years ago and considered her to be such a close personal friend. She said, “She went on about how fun and sometimes outrageous she was, and knew it could only be her. She spoke with much love and fondness. It made me happy to know that.”
I think that’s also really a testament to the power of our show and also to the power of radio, the ability to connect people.
Miller: Gemma, you have the last clip.
DiCarlo: Back in the spring, we talked about “Juniper House,” which is this big old house in Southeast Portland that actually served as an end-of-life care home for people dying of AIDS in the late 1980s. The house is now on the National Register of Historic Places, and the person who made that happen is Cayla McGrail, who at the time was working for Portland’s LGBTQ+ Historic Sites Project. Cayla’s about my age, late 20s, so they didn’t live through the height of the HIV epidemic. But they were talking about how they still feel the repercussions of that in the queer community and what it means to carry that legacy.
[Recording from an interview about Juniper House, with Cayla McGrail, playing]
Cayla McGrail: I try not to get emotional, because it’s true, I have so many community members that lived through this and I feel really proud to be a steward of this history. I look back to this time because it’s such an amazing moment of activism, community, changing and being organized. And there are a lot of threads of that happening today. So, as you mentioned, I didn’t live through this. But knowing that I can elevate these stories of the people who aren’t here, who are here, who have shaped Portland, that’s one of my greatest joys.
[Recording ends]
DiCarlo: It’s hard not to get emotional listening to that just because it’s a really potent reminder that history is never all the way in the past. And it deserves to be remembered, especially at a time where a lot of that history is being erased or there are attempts to erase it.
Miller: Gemma, Malya, Riley, Sheraz, Rolie, Sage, thank you all.
All: Thank you.
Miller: Thanks as well to Allison Frost, who couldn’t be with us for today’s show, but is a huge part of our team; and to Elizabeth Castillo, who was a part of our production team for five years, but made the decision this year to pursue new adventures. Finally, a huge thanks to our amazing engineers, Steven Kray and Nalin Silva, and the newest member of our engineering team, Laila Isbell. There would be no show without our amazing engineers.
I have to say that working with this entire team of creative, passionate, fun, kind people, day in, day out, continues to be the greatest gift of my professional life.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
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