Miss America ‘68, women’s lib, and the politics of beauty

until the fall.

“That's why summer is a perfect time to make sure your news diet is calibrated.”

I mean, our team has, on a first we unpacked the three biggest stories every morning, so you can stay informed and get on with your day in fewer than 15 minutes. Follow or subscribe up first today wherever you get podcasts. This is fresh air, I'm Tani Mosley. There was a time when the Miss America pageant was the biggest show in America.

Hundreds of millions of people gathered around their televisions every September, and for years, it was the highest rated broadcast in the country. Today the Miss America pageant has become more like a relic. It doesn't even air on television anymore. But back in September of 1968, Miss America was a symbol of what a woman should be, and

the target of a burgeoning women's liberation movement.

“That year, one of the most iconic moments in American history took place.”

Theminists on the Atlantic City Board walk, setting fire to their bras. There's just one problem.

The bra burning never actually happened.

My guest today, historian Mickey McLean, writes in her new book "Liberation Summer" that the bra burning was a creation of the newspapers and then it before the protest even began. And that detail matters, because it meant the women's liberation movement was defined by a caricature before it could define itself.

The real story she says is bigger than the myth. That same afternoon, three groups of women took a stand. The menist protestors, contestants of the first ever Miss Black America pageant, and the women who came to defend Miss America herself.

McLean argues, "The fight that started that day never ended.

That beauty in America has always been a fight over power. When she traces through the rise of the religious right, the me too era, and what commentators now call Mara Logo Face, the strikingly uniform look of the women and President Trump's orbit. Mickey McLean is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.

Her previous book, "The Politics of Morning" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Mickey McLean, welcome to fresh air." Oh, thank you for having me. And thank you so much for this book, and I actually want to start with that remarkable detail from your book about this myth that these throngs of women were throwing their bras into

like a bin that was on fire on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. When you write, it was actually born in a newsroom days before the protest. Tell us how the press created the bra burner. The figure of the bra burning feminist becomes a character in newspapers. In the days leading up to the Miss America pageant protest, as the protest has been circulating

through the press, and as women's liberationists are using those stories to try to get more women to come to Atlantic City and protest the pageant. It is a comment, sort of a throwaway comment from one activist who says, "Maybe we could

even burn our bras," but that is never something that actually takes place.

It gets seized in that moment as the figure for headlines in syndicated stories across the country. So, it isn't just in the New York press, which is where these women are and where these stories originate, but UPI, the AP, all of these papers run versions of this story and this local newspaper copy setters and copy writers do headlines that say brazer burning will

be burning at the Miss America pageant. So by the time they get there, they are already bra burners. When in fact they throw bras into the freedom garbage can. Right, and they don't set them on fire, but that detail just becomes kind of like the mark of that moment.

It's the first version of history that then goes down in history. So take us to the protest. Can you tell us the three factions of women who were confronting one another adjacent to

“the boardwalk and on the boardwalk on that night in 1968?”

The first group of women, our women's liberationists who were there to challenge the pageant in its objectification of women in its relationship to militarism, its promotion

were trapped and were put to for advertising.

“The second group of people who were doing an entirely different pageant to challenge the”

racism of the Miss America organization and the exclusions of the beauty ideal that was represented there was the Miss Black America pageant.

This was the first time that pageant was held and it was held two blocks away in Atlantic

City to make exactly that point. The third group of women were pageant contestants from earlier pageants and pageant fans who challenged women's liberation representation of the pageant as being exploitation as being negative and challenged the vision of womenhood that the women's liberationists represented.

I want you to take us back because we're in such a different world today in the way that we think about pageants and we watch pageants. But help us understand what Miss America meant to the country in 1968, what was the story it was selling?

The Miss America pageant first happens in 1921 in Atlantic City and it's originally designed

as a vehicle for extending the summer season for an extra week beyond Labor Day weekend and as a way to keep crowds coming. So it's interesting to think about it as originally it's a marketing device and it's a marketing device that is selling women in swimsuits and the access to women's bodies. The original ones were much larger, they involved beach parades, there was a man who

played King Neptune he arrived on a boat that was covered with women and shells, a total spectacle. It is, it is complete, it's enormous and it actually gets really big over those first few years until the end of the 1920s when it seems to have, it has both been protested by different groups in the country but has lost its luster for the large hotel interest

that have been supporting it but as you move through the 1930s, 1940s during the Great Depression, it is largely reduced, it doesn't happen for a couple of years but it really becomes the Miss America pageant that we understand today in the 1940s in the post-World

“War II moment and Atlantic City itself is crucial both to mobilizing for war and then”

for the demobilization that occurs later because those large hotels and enormous convention center provide the institutional structures for processing enormous numbers of men. In the aftermath they provide hotel rooms for injured troops and for men dealing with really significant injuries from their war service to sort of transition into their lives back home. And so really it sounds like it was almost an act of patriotism and to bring

the spirits up of Americans and war heroes as they came back. Oh absolutely and a space that had been so identified with that, there's a story in a nationally circulated magazine around the time that says, "Now it's not just Miss America that's on the boardwalk but Mr. America is there too commenting on the fact that the city is now overrun with new inductees into the service." But in that moment the sort of military

patriotism, those associations that will then be so cemented and so powerful by the 1960s

are really coalescing in ways that the pageant had been popular, it had been the subject of films, it had been the subject of scandals, people have seen the pageant all over the country because in the 20s it's being shown in newsrails before feature films. So or they're listening to it live on the radio. But by the 1940s it really gets the association, this is representative of the United States and it is these beautiful young white

women that best identify not so much the subject of the United States but the objects to be fought over judged to be inspired by but less so subjects of their own lives

“in those moments. And that becomes a real struggle, I think, within the pageant, particularly”

as at the same time the scholarship feature becomes a big part of it. Right because a big part of it is the women are receiving scholarships, it's four scholarship money, the winner. 1968 in particular, it's one of the most documented years in American

it's so comprehensive that I mean you're really telling the foundational story of the

women's liberation movement, second wave feminism but you're telling us you're taking

us from the past to the moment to then the future and I was very curious about why you felt like you had to do that versus focusing in on the meaning of that particular time period.

“Did you feel like you couldn't really tell that story without telling everything else?”

Absolutely. There's so much there and there are so many people there because also you tell someone I'm working on 1968 and I think probably one of their first responses is really, do we really need more and what I hope people understand from this book is that there is so much more history there that needs to be told and that it's history that will transform how we think of the period and so what I've done by putting these three pieces together is just

taken that light that we shine on 68, that we shine on the 68 presidential race, right? Because this is very much a political history and that if you if you just shift that beam just a

“little bit there is this cast of women from various political positions from various places in”

the country who have central roles in making this moment who so often aren't included because of things like here's the standard chronology there was a burnt bra, aren't these pictures great hilarity a misamerica pageant but it really does a disservice. Here's a thing about that protest that among other things has real teeth so these women came to Atlantic City, these protesters, these activists armed with the language of the black freedom struggle, fires declaring slavery

exists they're chanting about liberation and they take in much of that vocabulary from black people without ever really seeing the black women standing right there and that is not a footnote

“although it has been for several decades that's kind of the crack in the foundation of the whole”

movement the one that never really got repaired really even to this day when did you when did you

realize this story was about that fracture? Yeah absolutely and in 2009 I read a book by the sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig and the book's title is "Anty of Beauty Queen" and it was about black beauty culture about connections between black pageantry and activism and the introduction to that book starts with the two protests that happen against the misamerica pageant that weekend in Atlantic City. Now by that time I'd been a professor of history I had been a professor of women, gender,

race and sexuality for four years worked on this in graduate school I was teaching lectures about the misamerica pageant and this protest right I was using it as a way to get at all of these things

and also to try to challenge the suggestion that this was somehow superficial. I had never heard of

the misamerica pageant. You didn't I haven't I have don't think I have ever had a moment of creator despair doubt in my abilities as a historian I am someone who has spent my career writing about the ramifications of representations of slavery or the misrepresentations of slavery over time and the effect that has on our politics I include them on my specialties African-American history, African-American women's history in particular and I was learning that that protest happened the same

day for the first time in 2009. Someone else with a long relationship to this world is President Donald Trump and you write that it's no coincidence that his path to the presidency actually ran through beauty pageants and it starts on that same boardwalk where this book begins, where this protest begins take us back to Atlantic City in the 1980s. A lot of us know this history but it has been erased from our memory because there's just been so much that has happened since

then with President Trump but how did his involvement begin? His involvement with the pageant begins as he starts his casino ownership in Atlantic City in the early 1980s Donald Trump starts developing casinos and becomes a real fixture of the culture there but particularly pageant culture

the publicity he will go on to be a judge in the Miss America pageant before then in the early

“90s he purchases the the Miss Universe pageant group that includes the the Miss USA pageant”

which was for you and the Miss 10 USA pageant there was for a long time the primary sort of for cultural prevalence the primary competitor to the Miss America pageant. Can you tell us very quickly the distinctions though between Miss America and Miss USA because because there are differences

I've always thought of them differently. Oh they're absolutely different and the Miss USA pageant

is the product of a Miss America challenging the both the pageant and the general culture in in 1950. Yolanda Betbezi said she was a she was an opera singer that was her that was her

“talent and she said she would not appear in public in a swimsuit after the pageant that there”

was no reason why she should be in a swimsuit talking to reporters and that she wasn't a body she was an opera singer and a talented person. The pageant stood by this because it fit the the vision of of of respectability and the kind of the kind of woman they wanted to represent the Miss America crown this investment in she's a college student she's she's a number of things and she's also beautiful but she's not only beautiful and Catalina swimsuits which was one of

the original sponsors of the pageant pulled out because if they weren't going to appear in swimsuits

“if they weren't going to appear in Catalina swimsuits then this wasn't it wasn't a good investment”

for them they started their own pageant which was the Miss USA pageant so it is it spins out of that moment and then the Miss USA pageant generally was more about body looks that there was a different aesthetic that was more even more overtly that overtly walked the line of sort of more eroticized than than the Miss America pageant. One contestant story became infamous it was talked about during the 2016 election and that is Alicia Machado she was Miss Universe 1996

and that was his first year as the owner and remind us what he did to her.

So after Machado won the Miss Universe pageant she put on some weight was not the size as she was representing Miss Universe was not the size she had been during competition which raises a lot of issues around trying to prepare one's body for a competition and then what happens when you're not spending all of your time preparing and and the health the health issues that are connected there and it became the the central focus for Donald Trump and his his his organization they wanted

her to lose weight they bought exercise equipment and forced her to use it in front of photographers he was on her constantly and then started talking about how you know she was and this came up in 2016 that she was a problem she was resistant so it's interesting how in that in that same already respectfully but he did not say it that respectfully I mean he used you know I mean like really terrible language describe her and he used terrible language to describe

her he also used language that that was characterning her as a Latina that that suggested that you know domestic work was what she should be doing so fundamentally sort of both suggesting that that that domestic work is minimal not valuable and somehow ugly but also suggesting that she wasn't fit to be Miss Universe and that she wasn't a fit representative and the his his treatment was

humiliating it was it was a public systematic humiliation and one that he of course was was never

never apologetic for and doubled down on in 2016 when it came up let's take a short break our guest

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my guest today is historian Mickey McLeoday her new book Liberation Summer revisit September 1968 when three groups of women converged on the Atlantic city boardwalk the minister protesting

the Miss America pageant contestants in the first ever miss black America pageant and women

defending Miss America herself McLeoday argues the collision that day created a politics of beauty that runs through the rise of the religious right the me two era and all the way to today she's a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and her previous book the

“politics of mourning was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize I think what's so fascinating in”

particular is you break down these individual characters and their roles and leading up to this liberation summer and what goes on to happen is the line between the politics of beauty and what we're seeing today with the Trump administration and I I think that knowing all of this history and understanding that Trump he stepped into this world in the late 80s early 90s and taking it farther back what were surprises to you when you see that it almost looks like a straight line it

almost seems inevitable that that we would be here I would argue that it is that in 1968 in this moment when these three different forces these three different forces who are all women come together in that geographic spot on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and come together around the Miss America pageant what is set off there is a politics of beauty where beauty is both highlighted as the terrain of power and female beauty is the currency of American politics and in 1968 you have

women's liberation is challenging that objectification you have Miss Black America pageant the organizers of the pageant and the contestants but you have the Miss Black America pageant arguing that to be objectified as beautiful in a white supremacist society is itself a kind of privilege and that the struggle over beauty isn't about rejecting the pageant but that to highlight Black

women's beauty is politically crucial and then you have the counter protesters who literally are

“holding signs with Nixon for president buttons saying the only thing wrong with Miss America is”

that she's beautiful and that she is our ideal and that sets off a political conversation that also saturates reactions to women's liberation that this is the moment that the new right and the Christian right are coalescing and coming together around these issues and women are using beauty as both their political power as their currency and they're they're challenging the limitations right so beauty isn't just it isn't just this set of oppressive beauty standards it is

the terrain of politics itself okay let's talk about the Black Miss Black America pageant

on convention hall another radical thing was happening in Atlantic City just a few blocks away

“at the Ritz Carlton and that one didn't start until midnight tell us what you learned specifically”

not just about the Miss Black America pageant but what it was responding to

so the Miss America pageant had never had a black finalist by 1968 it would not have a black

finalist walk the stage in the nationally televised pageant until 1970 and the Miss Black America pageant was directly focused on challenging that exclusion but highlighting that exclusion as the product of white supremacist beauty standards that did not did not include Black women and that that exclusion was both central to central to white supremacist power structures but

“also central to black people's understandings of their own value in in society I think one of the”

things that I learned while doing this research was the tension that's present in the organizers

it becomes mistakenly called an NAACP pageant this is a huge point of controversy within the NAACP and it is something that the national organization disavows the following year makes very clear we are not running a beauty pageant because I think the thing that is so upsetting to many in the NAACP is that it appears to be to them a separatist pageant that it is not about integrating the Miss America pageant but that it is about highlighting black separatism, black is beautiful

“and creating a completely distinct pageant and that to them feels highly antithetical and a real”

of betrayal in many ways to the NAACP's mission. I wanted to note that it started at midnight because that was a deliberate choice so that reporters could drop by after the white pageant ended and the woman who won that year the Miss Black America pageant Sandra Williams she was even crowned to like three in the morning so that the reporters could come and actually cover it but um you write about this moment that happened uh some years before 1955 this particular detail

stopped me cold the Miss America telecast debuts there she is um the song and bird parks is singing your ideal just days after the open casket funeral of a material and you say there's nothing coincidental about those two events sitting side by side in American life can you say more about what you mean you have the debut of there she is Miss America there she is your ideal at the opening listeners heard the lyrics many maybe familiar with the lyrics it's one of those

things that sort of lodged in certain generations minds because it was such a a central facet of the culture even if you weren't a pageant fan um and those lyrics say look upon your ideal here is our queen of beauty here is the perfect American girl but it is entirely an encouragement to look to desire to assess um the joke was that Miss America wasn't really Miss America until this man bird parks said there she is there is your ideal that song debuts

you have a national televisual event that is about look at these white women look at these women in swimsuits look at these um at these representations all white representations of beauty and just before that you've had a teenage boy who has been tortured and murdered for looking at a white woman for supposedly whistling at a white woman for expressing some kind of desire for a white woman hmm so take us to 1983

it at the probably one of the strangest spectacles yet Vanessa Williams the first black woman

crowned Miss America and president Ronald Reagan himself dials her up and says what a wonderful

the welfare queen he congratulated this beauty queen and what was the significance of her crowned

“beyond her being the first what was the crown actually doing for America and specifically having”

Vanessa Williams be it's it's queen when Vanessa Williams wins in 1983 she's in a pageant that has a number of black contestants and so partially you have all this talk that like maybe this is the year a black woman will win so you have this kind of all these women being sort of singled singled out but also in some ways I feel like that press sort of minimize some of the the individual work that these women are doing right it and when Vanessa Williams performs

Susette Charles is the first runner up to Miss America also an African American contestant

and she becomes when Vanessa Williams is forced to resign she she becomes Miss America right and to remind people 10 months into her reign penthouse publishes nude photos of Vanessa Williams and they were they had been taken years earlier published without her consent they were rushed to print to cash in on her being Miss America and the pageant at the time does not defend her they go on just a few years ago to to give a public apology but at the time this whole thing

devours her and I'm curious what you think what does that moment reveal about this larger story that you're telling immediately it suggests how tenuous that power claimed through that moment of integrating the pageant can be and how quick one really has to wonder if it were not

the first black Miss America who was confronting this situation would the pageant have been so

quick to fully reject her I was around five or six years old when this happened but I distinctly remembered it only comes from me meditating on it from reading this that after that happened with Vanessa

“Williams I remember thinking I felt so sorry for her I felt so scared but I also remember feeling like”

oh I have to be excellent I can't have I can't make any mistakes in this lifetime it wasn't a conscious thought it was just a feeling of understanding that oh like things can turn very quickly a mistake can ruin your life that's just a side note no and it but it that and isn't that sort of isn't that in some ways the whole horrific point right that this this is a moment of disciplining everyone to understand that yeah you can't you can't make one wrong move

let's take a short break if you're just joining us my guest is a story in Mickey Meckleier we're talking about her new book Liberation Summer the real story of the 1968 Miss America protest and how the myth of the broad burners came to define and distort the women's movement for more than half a century we'll be back after a break this is fresh air this week on shortwave the universal vaccine one vaccine that can protect against multiple diseases for years

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else is weighing you down it's just a good time with good friends and great tunes listen to all songs considered every Tuesday in the NPR music podcast are we doomed looks it big problems nobody would rationally want nuclear war that's not white per wreck how can we add friction

“but the launch codes inside somebody's chest cavity and you have to kill him to get them out”

are we doomed solving humanities biggest threats part of the NPR network listen wherever you get your podcasts today I am talking with Mickey McLean historian an author of liberation summer the moment that changed the women's movement in the future of American politics okay I want to go back one last time

throughout the hour and they showed up at the barricades with their own signs mis America is still

our ideal and one was a former miscreen bay wearing a Nixon badge can you briefly tell me about this small contingent of women and why does your book take them so seriously at the time because they weren't talked about as much as they were talked about the protesters themselves the

“activists yeah partially I think it's important to think about just what compels these young”

women to go out there and challenge the women's liberationists right they want to speak back

they make their own signs and one of them the one who is is wearing the Nixon for present button

while while she does this is terian musen who will go on herself later to be a mis America in the early 1970s will visit the Nixon White House and on a actually be very representative in in Republican politics later in the 1970s partially what drives them to go out there is they feel attacked as individual women they feel attacked by women's liberationists who are challenging their femininity they're right to be women in the way that they want

to be women it's something that that resonates significantly with the kind of discourses of grievance

that's so much drive our politics today what is also crucial is the the musen will go on

to be one of the leading faces of the Christian broadcast network she is a very very visible in the religious right and and very visible in evangelical politics but also it's that moment of reaction

“that is a part of this beauty politics that that develops um i think it's very important to”

think of Donald Trump as as just as much a product of this politics um as the various women particularly the women who are in his cabinet right that this is this is a political formation that is driving American politics not just the place of women in it and this isn't just circumstantial that this is of a historical development that had started in 1968 and is very much ongoing and that we're seeing sort of I mean it's kind of it's it's fascinating to to watch the the movements

of these things and and I wonder I think I think we may be seeing a new age of prominence for the Miss America page that's interesting because I mean Gretchen Carlson who went on to then run the Miss America page in herself I felt like she might be the entire book in a single life because she Miss America she was Miss America 1989 she was mocked for her looks back then seen as kind of the intellectual uh Miss America because um she had gone to Stanford then she became a fox

news cultural warrior she opposed the term feminism for years she sues Roger Ailes for sexual harassment helps marks me too and then ends up running the Miss America page in herself I'm wondering when you say that you see a resurgence of it you know it's it doesn't even run on television anymore it has as such a smaller audience so what gives you the indication that there may be a resurgence I mean one of the things that that I think is is fascinating is is this September 6 the

next Miss America will be crowned in West Palm Beach Florida now the crowned a convention center that is less than six miles away from our logo so the move by the Miss America pageant organization to to go there and to go there with the help of other major fundraisers highlights the ways in which you know that they are leaning in to the politics of beauty and power

“that that we see but if you want to watch live the crowning this year it you have to”

get a live stream from a subscription service that is dedicated just to pageants yeah but as we see the consolidation of media as we look at what happened with paramount as we think about what network television looks like in this particular moment and what it might look like I wouldn't be

and for this book thank you so much for having me Mickey McLeod's new book is Liberation Summer

“the moment that changed the women's movement and the future of American politics after a short break”

TV critic David being Kooley reviews steward fails to save the universe a new big bang theory spin-off series on HBO Max this is fresh air the fatal shooting of a teenager at a protest in Seattle has gone unsolved for six years this is open in your base to how are there no answers

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“inside somebody's chest cavity and you have to kill them to get them out are we doomed”

solving humanity's biggest threats part of the NPR network listen wherever you get your podcasts the big bang theory the CBS sitcom about a gang of lovable nerds ended in 2019 after a 12 year run but it's lived on thanks to a successful pair of prequels young sheldon which looks at one character's childhood lasted seven seasons on CBS and

to spin off of that sitcom George and Mandy's first marriage is still running after two years

on the same network and now HBO Max presents a new big bang spin off but it's a sequel not a prequel it's called Stuart fails to save the universe and our TV critic David B. and Kooley thinks it's terrific here's his review Chuck Lorion Bill Prady creators of the big bang theory have team with Zack Penn a writer on the Avengers movie to concoct a new ten-part HBO Max series which continues to follow a quartet of characters from that long running sitcom not the main

characters such as Sheldon and Leonard but some of the peripheral ones specifically Stuart who ran the local comic book store Denise who became Stuart's girlfriend in the final season of the big bang theory and two awkward brainy misfits burnt the large lunky geologist and Barry Crippky a scientist with an oversized ego and a pronounced speech impediment these are

supporting characters but the big bang theory always did great by its supporting characters and

cast giving them more prominence and substance as years went by and now these four big bang supporting characters are thrown into a whole new universe literally Stuart fails to save the universe has no laugh track and plays like an action adventure series but it's relentlessly inventively funny co-creators Zack Penn also co-wrote free guy the Ryan Reynolds movie about a background player in a video game who steps into the narrative spotlight and this new series

is a lot like that and just as playful many if not most comic book movies and TV shows these days are dark and brooding but not this one here's how it starts the setting is a post-apocalyptic Pasadena Stuart played by Kevin Sussman is still trying to run his comic book store which is funny right there bird played by Brian Posane is about to purchase a rare comic book bartering for it with canned vegetables and cat food when another Stuart from another universe

shows up out of nowhere to give himself some news Leonard Hofstatt are shelved and Cooper

“Howard Wallowitz remember them yeah real nerds hot kettle sure fair enough anyway”

they invented some kind of quantum entanglement thing and you were there when it malfunctioned both of us are just him doesn't matter it matters to me the point is it altered reality none of this is supposed to be by none of this you mean none of it the alternate Stuart gives the comic store Stuart a universe traversing device and a quest to save the universe as we know it or as he knew it the comic store Stuart sets off with his friends to

do just that but spoiler alert it doesn't go well actually that's not much of a spoiler since the title of the show is Stuart fails to save the universe the first new world they visit

an evil overlord and summoned before him when they're taken to him they realize he's very

“creepy played by John Ross Bowie who somehow is in charge Stuart summons the nerve to ask how”

with all two respects my leash how was it that you're the grand cowie cowliff of South Pasadena spoke we have time for a little backstory as a biopologizer you guys have heard this before when everything went screwy and civilization as we know it quaps a vacuum of leadership was created here at the university and as we all know nature of words of vacuum white oh so I see power got all the food the guns and the girls yeah end of backstory the writers and directors

of Stuart fails to save the universe take in anything goes approach that works beautifully

every opening credit sequence is different and even includes its own spoilers

“the theme music is by Danny Elfman and every episode visits a new multiverse one is devoid”

of greed or possessiveness while in another my favorite the people have cow-like digestive systems go to restaurants to eat grass and swallow their own cut I dare you to tell me you've seen that on TV before many of these alternate universes are populated by familiar faces from the big bang theory and even from lorries two and a half men the producers have asked the critics reveal no names but everyone who pops up in these 10 episodes is a delight like a hidden easter egg

come to life and some appear as more than one alternate character what could be more enjoyable how about this other actors and celebrities show up too presumably recognizing this for the

“giddy adventurer it is Stuart fails to save the universe ends with an ingeniously”

concocted finale but even so in this or some other universe HBO Max ought to keep it going David being cool he reviewed Stuart fails to save the universe now streaming on HBO Max the hit series hacks broke the record for the most immunominations for comedy in a single year with its fifth and final season next time on fresh air jean smart talks about the evolution of her

character devrevance from a power hungry famed chasing comedian to a woman finally finding peace

inside herself smart also talks about her direct connection to the Salem witch trials i hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews follow us on instagram and in PR fresh air you can also watch some of our interviews on our youtube page this is fresh air fresh air's executive producer Sam Briger our senior producer today is Roberta Sharot our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham our engineer today is Adam

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following the yuan the naira the krona and more every Wednesday this summer we're taking you on a world tour to meet the people trying new solutions to old economic problems let it many summer school perhaps in friends pack your bags and don't forget the sunscreen listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts on nPR's wildcard podcast country legend shenai twain says she wants to live to be 200 if i only think oh well i'm only gonna live to be 80 yeah if that's my production and i'm

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