Pandemic Listen to Episodes

Our guest today is the incomparable Pat McCorkle, head and founder of McCorkle Casting and a Covid survivor! As actors, we understand the frustration of the industry during the pandemic, so we were eager to hear Pat’s point of view from the other side of the table. Rather than talking about zoom fatigue, we discuss its advantages and how it creates more opportunities for people to be seen. We also talk about how scripts have evolved over the last year, her personal experience with covid, and mov...

Jeffrey Omura is an artist, activist, and labor leader running for City Council in District 6 of New York City and we could not back a better candidate! Jeffrey was recently elected to his second term as an officer of Actors’ Equity Association after he helped create and lead #FairWageOnStage, a grassroots movement and campaign demanding higher wages and fairer contracts for Off-Broadway stage managers and actors. As a response to the pandemic, he helped create the #BeAnArtsHero Campaign to orga...

Welcome to Season 3!!! (Whaaaaat!?? Can you believe?!) This season we’re focusing on something that’s near and dear to our hearts: the arts industry. We’re kicking off with a bang and Frank Harts is a barrel of laughs. He just completed two seasons as series regular on the hit show Prodigal Son for Fox/Warner Brothers Television. Raised in the Midwest, Frank is of mixed heritage with Southern roots on the African-American side and Brooklyn roots on the Irish side. Frank went directly from traini...

We’re closing out Mental Health Awareness Month with Dana, an introverted oncology nurse & parent - all this to say, she’s got many reasons to be fatigued. In a time where we’re more isolated than ever, Dana has experienced the opposite: she goes to work and is surrounded by people, she comes home and she’s surrounded by people (her husband and three adorable children we might add). With all of these humans around, there’s no opportunity for her to recharge her batteries. However exhausted she m...

Continuing with the theme of Mental Health Awareness Month, this week we spoke to Chelsea, the Volunteer Resource Connector for L.A.Work’s TeleSocial Program — a program that our very own host Raymond started! What is TeleSocial, you ask? The L.A.Works TeleSocial Program is a great way to connect isolated & lonely seniors to buddies who will call and check in on them once a week. “During this time of self-quarantine, it is very easy for social distancing to become social isolation…especially for...

TW: death & grief This week we connected with Victoria Noe, an award-winning author, speaker and activist. She is the perfect candidate for Mental Health Awareness month because of her contributions to the AIDS community & her writing about grief, particularly her Friend Grief series which recognizes the importance of friendships in shaping our lives. A little background about Viki: her HIV/AIDS activism led her to write Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Communi...

Welcome to Mental Health Awareness Month! We've got a series of interviews we really think you'll enjoy. We begin with Kate, a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, specializing in complex trauma and complex PTSD. Some of her work includes the Crisis Intervention Team for the Knoxville police department which involves helping EMT service, fire rescue, and police sheriffs. We describe her as "the helper's helper" and take comfort that there's someone out there to aid our first responders....

Surprise: we’re our own guests this week! Both of us share our vaccine stories and experiences. At this point Raymond has received both doses and Caroline has gotten her first. (Hashtag Team Pfizer.) Unrelated but after staying home for a year with unlimited access to your toilet, has anyone else noticed their bladder’s capacity significantly decrease? We discuss that at length lol. We also talk about why we like our podcast and what we’ve learned from it, and we want to hear from you! What do y...

We've found a common theme among our April episodes: pivoting in the pandemic. This is exactly what our friend Jason has done (and quite well, we might add!). He owns The Long Room, a friendly neighborhood tavern in the Ravenswood Community of Chicago. Inspiration struck when all the bars & restaurants needed to close down, and he began selling bottled-up cocktails to go, which is not only cool but has kept his business thriving! It's also a great way to keep his staff safe which is a top priori...

Our guest this week is Jill, a compassionate & determined woman with a big heart and too many emotions for one person to contain. Her big heart led her to a position as an early childhood special education teacher in St. Louis, which has taught her a lot about herself: particularly that she's capable of pivoting on a dime to provide the education her students' need and protecting herself and other teachers in the process. She says, "It goes without saying that all of the success with virtual and...

Are you having difficulty locating a vaccine appointment? Do you wish there was a website that contained information for ALL your local pharmacies instead of having 20+ individual tabs open for each one? Well look no further! www.vaccinespotter.org is the one-stop shop for all your vaccine appointment needs! "A tool to help you track down COVID-19 vaccine appointment openings at your state's pharmacies. Updated every minute. Rather than searching around on each pharmacy's website, we'll automati...

We round out our Parosmia Series with Gemma who experiences parosmia and it's equally evil twin: phantosmia. For those who don't know, phantosmia is an olfactory hallucination that makes you smell things that aren't there. For Gemma it's a persistent smell of cigarette smoke (which was one of her least favorite smells to begin with). It makes mealtime unbearable and alienates her from sharing that time with her beautiful family. However, she's brilliant at turning lemons into lemonade: when she ...

In our fourth episode, we talk with Anissa - the self-described "cook of the family" who can barely bring herself to eat anything besides peanut m&ms. She spoke to us about how parosmia disconnects her from the rest of the world: she can't eat enough to keep up her fitness regimen, celebratory & holiday meals once full of connection and memory are uncomfortable, and she is left with the question "am I stuck like this?" In spite of her frustration, she has found a wonderful outlet: photography. ...

Fatigued Podcast was born out of two friends getting Covid and sharing their experiences. Listen to learn more about this project, who they've interviewed, how it's helped, and where it's going from here. Full episodes and links to your favorite podcast players at www.fatiguedpodcast.com

Caroline and Raymond (and an awkward little-sounding voice) say goodbye to Season One. Our cohosts give updates on their personal Covid stories, tell us about what's coming up in Season Two (launching March 9th, 2021), and why this shift has them excited and not fatigued. In just 3 months, we've built out a one-stop-shop website and social media pages and Fatigued Podcast has reached thousands of listeners across every podcast platform playable. We would not be continuing without the supportive...

This is our final interview for Season 1 and it's our biggest one to date: we got a chance to interview Dr. Keith Gagnon, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at SIU whose lab has uncovered a U.S.-specific coronavirus variant that accounts for about half of the cases in the nation! He has been featured on many major news outlets as more information about this mutation is uncovered. We were so honored he took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us and frankly he filled us wit...

We can all agree we're in need of a feel-good story right now, so meet Harriet! She has been dedicating her time and energy to helping elderly people navigate the world of technology so they can receive the vaccine. "Anybody would do the same when you hear the people on the other line," she says. From family to strangers, she's helped so many get access to the information they need so they aren't left behind. She also details her hints, tips, and suggestions on how to look for vaccination access...

This week we got to interview Dr. Erik, an anesthesiologist who was deployed in the Middle East when the pandemic broke out last March. His deployment had already come to a close but he was detained for a few more weeks before he was allowed to come back to the States. He's grateful to be reunited with his family again and we spoke and mused about many different topics like healthcare accessibility, Covid bubbles, and the reliability of masks. Because of his medical background, he went into deta...

After months of devastating loss, Louis said "fuck it" (literally) and enrolled himself in the Pfizer vaccine trial. Louis, a self-described "big ol' meat shield," was more than happy to take this risk, especially because he knows we aren't going to get anywhere with this virus until we start finding some answers. He goes into detail about why he chose to participate, how it went, and what happened after injection. If you want to find out whether or not he received the vaccine or a placebo, tune...

Last March Maria spent nineteen days in the hospital with COVID-induced double pneumonia. Can you even imagine? From the CPAP machine to rash and bed rest, she experienced the full gamut. We are so lucky she lived to tell the tale, no matter how gruesome it may be. We're even luckier she was so sunny and sweet at 6 in the morning when we captured this conversation...oh wait, it was six OUR time, 2 in the afternoon her time. Ohhh, no wonder she was in a much better mood than us! She also didn't n...