Bittersweet Infamy - #62 - Fight the Real Enemy

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

604 Podcast Network premiere! Taylor tells Josie about Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor and her infamous Pope-ripping Saturday Night Live performance. Plus: the Minnesota State Fair's bevy of buttery beauties, the Butter Heads.

Welcome to Bitter Sweden. I'm Taylor Basso and I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and indeed. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. Miction and I are very much enjoying your playlist that you made for us. Really? Oh my goodness. Okay, talk to me, talk to me. Taylor and Mitchell Basso, you really pulled it together. For Christmas, Taylor made Mitchell and me a playlist of Canadian hits that have not reached the American market. By and large. By and large.

One or two of them crossed over. Right, right. These are the artists who like the Canadian content, 10%, that's where they live. Beautiful stuff. Didn't make it across the border. And so when I make my reference to Faded by Soul Decision or Get Down by B44, a very infamous, have you ever, did you, I encourage you and Mitchell to watch the music video for Get Down by B44. Okay. Iconic, truly. Okay. It reads as a parody of itself. Kutspa to the nth. Like, you can't believe what these young men

are selling you. And yet they kind of, it's kind of fashion. Like, I'm like, yes, bitch work. Like, yeah, I get it. That's all I want written on my tombstone. On my head, Stoning just reads, Kutspa to the nth degree. Kutspa to the nth degree, dude. Some of the lyrics in there. I'm going to make you come tonight over to my house. Yes. Fabulous shit.

That's so good. No, there's some really good ones. There was one we were really vibing on and I've already forgotten who it was, but I've heard it before. She's a solo singer, kind of pop, dancey icon, kind of reminds me a little bit of Robin. And the song is like, oh, ah. What's that one? Is it Chiesa Hideaway? Yeah, it's Hideaway. There you go.

I'd seen the music video before because it's like one of those all one shots. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. You're absolutely right. I wanted to send a little New Year's gift to Mitchell and Josie. So I was just like, you know what? Well, it was specifically that I wanted to send them the song Wayne by Shantel Kravjazzik and be like, it's a great song to scream. Wait, wait for me. It's a great scream along song. I wanted to send them that and I was like, maybe I should send them this other song too because it's kind of, and then I was like, you know what, fuck it. This is a project. I'm in. I'm on.

Oh no, it was just off the dome. I was talking to my Canadian friends, my Suri Kenex. I put in some serial Joe in there. Wow. Yeah, all of it, all of it. Our Canadian numbers are going to skyrocket. Oh, they fucking better. Yeah, dude, talking about Canadian content, we are entering a new phase of bittersweet infamy. Very excited. As we are now part of the 604 label, specifically the subsidiary 604 podcasts. I guess like, first of all, hey, if you're new here, if you're checking out this podcast for the first time because of that. Welcome. Hello. Hi. Hi. Yeah.

Sup. Sup. Hi. Nice shirt. I'm really excited to get these opportunities, like reach new audiences, work with new people. Yeah. Mike and Isaiah have been really cool in helping us on board. Mike Noble, who's the podcast something or other for, oh God, Mike, I'm sorry. I really like you. He's the co-host for Where the Big Boys Game. He is the co-host of Where the Big Boys Game, which is also a sister. Can we call them that? Like a sister podcast, a sibling, a sibling show. He's one of their co-hosts, and he's also helps run the podcast network at 604. And then Isaiah is the network director. They've been super

duper cool in helping us on board. Oh, and for those who might not be coming from the 604 podcast, 604 is the area code for the Vancouver area. I have a 604, yeah. Yeah. If you're wondering, it's the old school area code. Taylor has it, loves it. Good work. I love like arbitrary area code-based tribalism is very at my alley. Oh, it's so good. So fun. Everybody does it. Bumper stickers, tattoos, 619. If you're new to the show, basically who we are, we're two writers. Josie's originally from San Diego. She now lives in Houston, but used to live in Vancouver, which is where she went to school, which is where she met me. We've known each other a long time and we tell each other

infamous stories. Yeah. And a little bit about Taylor. He's a writer, a video game creator, ace podcaster. Yeah. Wonderful entertainment on public transit, I have to say. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Yeah. It's because I got this loud fucking voice, so I better be saying amusing things or people like will not be stoked that I'm talking. I'm jealous of people who get to hear you for the first time. It's just that's genuinely moving. Thank you. Okay, so now I've got to lick your balls too. Okay. Josie Mitchell is a charismatic force of nature. No, Josie's, Josie's the realest bitch I ever met. She's so thoughtful and compassionate in the way that she approaches her stories. I think that's why we kind of resonate together as storytellers. I mean, I think this

week's story, like without tipping my hand too much, they already know what the story is because they click the link. Josie, you're the only one. That's the other thing, folks. Josie doesn't know what I'm bringing in here. And that's usually the case. I never know what's going on. Before I talk, though, Josie tells me the Minfamous, and the Minfamous is a little small infamous story that's just to wet your whistle. It's the appetizer before the main event. Or derves. Yeah. I, as you can probably hear, I have a little bit of a New Year's cold. They don't even know what your voice sounds like if they're new. Yeah. Doesn't sound like this. Sounds better. I do have a little bit of congestion, though,

today. I'm sorry. If you're new, that's what it sounds like. And I was doing my best to stay away from any dairy products because they, like, bungle up any congestion. But I'm going to talk about dairy, though, in this Minfamous. Okay. I didn't eat it. I abstained. I can't really, I'm in my 30s. I can't really do a lot of dairy besides dairy. Well, I lost milk. I lost milk. Because cheese, I'm fine. Ice cream, more than fine. Butter? Question mark? I can definitely fuck with some butter. Yeah, I agree. I'll take that stand with you. Yeah. Okay. How do you feel about butter sculptures? Provisionally positive. I am excited to hear what you're going to tell me. So, butter sculptures have been around since the dawn of butter?

Yeah. Yeah. Duh. Yeah. So much folk art is based around celebrating resources, right? That makes sense. Why? Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. Exactly. And I don't mean to be condescending by sorting butter sculptures immediately into folk art, to be clear. You asshole. Butter carving is an ancient craft. It can be found with ties in Tibetan culture, Babylon, Roman Britain has documentation of butter art. Wow. The Tibetan tradition of butter carving is actually still ongoing. For the Tibetan New Year, which is called Losar, there's a long held tradition of monks dying yak butter, a whole different slew of colors, like really brilliant and bright colors. Rainbow yak butter. Yeah. Well, because there's not as many cows in the higher elevation,

it's yak. In this tradition, they create super colorful and highly intricate sculptures of flowers, all different types of animals, various symbols from Buddhist teachings, it's really intricate, fine work that they do. And it's like each little pedal is like crafted singularly out of butter and then put together. And some images of like chrysanthemums that have like all these little, all these little pedals. Layers. Yeah. It's all butter. It's so, so cool. I love that. There's also a long held tradition in North America of using butter to carve not small intricate figures, but huge massive figures. Okay. Bigger is better, go bigger, go home. Yeah. The portion size has changed. We're flipping continents over here, getting bigger. The Iowa

State Fair every year will have a life size cow made out of butter. That's the staple, that's the yearly exhibition. It's always paired with an ever evolving kind of pop icon butter sculpture. Like Marilyn Monroe or Justin Bieber or whoever is Lucille Ball. Yes, exactly. But we're not stopping in Iowa, Taylor. I didn't think so. This was all a little too easy. We're headed to somewhere else entirely. Actually, not that entirely. It's still the US. In the words of singer-songwriter Ann Reed, it's south of Manitoba, east of North Dakota, it's Minnesota. Oh, baby. And they've got something rare. Expect no limitations. It's the fair. The fair. The Minnesota State Fair. I thought maybe. Also known as the Great Minnesota Get Together. That's quaint. Isn't that nice? Yeah,

I love that. I like it. It runs 12 days leading up to Labor Day. So it's kind of an August into September. There's a few famous sites to see. The Minnesota State Fair, a double ferris wheel. That year's largest pig will be always on display. How come it's always a different pig, question mark? That's for a different episode, isn't it? You can find anything that you would like or could possibly conceive to eat on a stick. This is how they get American politicians, too, is they make them eat these phallic stick-based foods that nobody looks graceful eating. And then they're like, look at fucking Pete Buttigieg. He's a monster. Yeah, because he fucking caught him mid-bite.

But the most impressive thing at the Minnesota State Fair has got to be hands down the butterheads. Okay. Taylor, let's make our way to the dairy building on the state fair grounds. Just the one. Where each day of the fair, 12 days, the finalists and the crowned queen of the Midwest Dairy Association pageant, and that crowned queen, her title is Princess K. of the Milky Way. Oh, my heart. Be still, my beating heart. I think I'm in love, please. Each of these wonderful women sit for their likeness to be carved out of 40 pounds of butter. What an honor. They sit in a spinning observatory space that's refrigerated to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. This little wonder is called the butter booth. These are the proud, the few, the hard-working

women folk of Minnesota, the butterheads. Wow. The pageant has been going on for quite a long time now. And you might be thinking, Princess K. of the Milky Way, oh, it's a beauty pageant. Contestants are not judged on their beauty, but on their ability to effectively engage the community and promote the dairy industry. Of course. Always comes back to big dairy. Big dairy's got something here. That's why you can't stomach them, I'm sure. Yes. Oh, good. That's good. The lies. It's not the indigestion, it's the lies. Although I guess there's not really any lie here if they're up front about it, so go on. There's a few rounds of the pageant, and they culminate in this late summer festivities at

the State Fair. The first day of the State Fair, Princess K. of the Milky Way is crowned with her four-inch tiara, and she engages in activities throughout the fair, and where she speaks on behalf of the Dairy Association, Big Dairy, if you will, and she talks about the humane treatment of cows and land management, the nutrition of butter, and all dairy products. But then, of course, the highlight of her time is getting to sit in the butter booth, imposing for her sculpture. Absolutely. The butter booth, as I mentioned, is always kept to 40 degrees Fahrenheit for the obvious reason that you don't want this butter to melt. It has to be at a certain consistency to properly be worked. The butter comes in huge blocks, and then the sculptor will slowly make their way

through the butter, carving out big shapes with a larger knife, and then slowly working down to finer tools for highest impact. Sculpture of that variety is the most unfathomable magic trick to me, to free David from the block of stone, right? Yes. It's just not the way my artistic mind works, and I'm in awe and envy of people who can do that with any material, but specifically, these butter people in this situation. And it should be noted that for the last 50 years, it's been the same sculptor. Wow. Linda Christiansen. Go, Linda. A native of Minnesota. Sounds like it, yeah. She started sculpting at the Minnesota State Fair in the butter booth in 1972. Jesus. Fresh out of art school, and the previous sculptor, he didn't like working in the cold.

It was too cold for him. So he retired gracefully. If you can't take, what is it, you know how they say if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen? If you can't take the cold, get out of the butter booth. Yeah, get out of the butter booth. She took over, not really thinking that it would be a 50-year career for her. She just thought, oh, I'll do it this year. Oh, and they asked me back. And then over time, bada bing, bada boom. Well, it's just one less thing to worry about, isn't it? Finding a new butter sculptor. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. She's doing a good job. She's doing a great job. Well, they're great. She starts with a larger knife. It's probably like an eight-inch blade. She calls it old faithful. And that's the initial tool that she uses to

shape. And rightly so. And rightly so. She has said that the butter has to be salted butter, because if it's unsalted, it gets too gummy. It mucks up her tools. Interesting. But the salt kind of keeps everything in line. She's able to move it around better. What can't salt do? It's true. It takes her about five to six hours to sculpt the bust. It's kind of hair to, you know, top of the shoulders. Princess Kay and the finalists, all finalists get their butterheads made. And she's doing them all. She does them all. My goodness. Yeah. It's a lot of work. 12 days of sculpting 12 busts in front of an audience, which is quite a lot too, in a spinning observatory space. Yeah. And it's cold. And the cold. And it's so cute, because you see these, it's like the

height of summer. But all these women are like in their parkas, wearing, you know, little headbands and fingerless gloves and sculpting on the butter. My goodness. Goodness gracious me. Yeah. I read some spectators have said that it's one of the few instances where you can see a sculptor at work. Yeah, I would love to. I would be kept out there. Having a personal invitation to their studio. Yeah. The butterheads sit there for their bust, and each woman who sits for her sculpture to be made gets to take her butter sculpture home with her. Do what with it? There's quite a few things that you can do with a butter sculpture, Taylor. If you don't have a walk-in freezer. Well, you buy one. That's what you do. For the butterhead. Yeah, that's true. There's like these long lines of female

family members who are like, well, my grandma was a butterhead, and now my mom was a butterhead. Now I'm a butterhead. One day my daughter too will be a butterhead. One consistent from 1980 says hers has kept up in tip-top shape in their walk-in freezer. Not a problem. Does nobody ever get tempted to come in one night with a Ritz cracker? Well, there are also some butterheads who they'll initially freeze it, keep it around, and then as time moves on, you need to start having butter parties. Butter parties for weddings and for big corn hauls. Thank you so much. Another jar of butter. It's been reported to you that some have sectioned out the butter and given it to food banks to use. That's a good use of a butterhead. Yeah, yeah. But it is a staple of the Minnesota State Fair.

And when Linda Christensen graciously retired in 2021, she passed her old faithful knife, literally, like within a ceremony on camera, to the next sculptor who goes by the name of Jerry Kultzer. He is a local art teacher and sculptor himself, and he apprenticed with Linda for a few years. But this last year, 2022, was his first year alone in the butter booth, working on these sculptures. Wow. Yeah. Cool. And they are beautiful. I bet. Linda described butter as being a very forgiving medium. You can always kind of work a little bit more back in if you shave off too much. She also described the color as being like this kind of lovely translucent, so there's almost like a pearlescence to it. Oh. Yeah. She never dreamed of being a

butter sculptor. It kind of just happened. Does anyone? You know. In 2003, she moved to California to spend her winters in California, but she would still come out to sculpt at the Minnesota State Fair. Good for her. Cool legacy. Super cool. And she says anytime that she's in Minnesota, people either will recognize her or if she tells them what she does, they're like, you sculpted my mom. Yeah. She undoubtedly runs into somebody who either she has sculpted or they know somebody who she has sculpted. She better not pay for any drinks when she's in town. Yeah. Every glass of milk she gets. When she goes into the Ludifisk shop, they better say it's on us. Here you go. Oh, it is on us, Linda. Don't you worry about us. Don't. Don't. I see a rummaging around

in your pockets. We don't want it. Your money is no good here. It's covered in butter. Minnesota, Minnesota, we are south of Manitoba. We are east of North Dakota. We got something really rare. It's fulfilling, entertaining. It's true culture you'll be gaining, except no limitations. It's the fair. Saw a friend from Wisconsin and he said, yeah, hey, I gotta see the crop art. It'll blow you away. Yeah, sure you bet, boy, they don't know when to quit. I'm going to see the butterhead you want to come with. Minnesota, Minnesota, we are south of Manitoba. Oh, jeez, dad, not the car again. No, happens all the time with old Betsy. Have you checked out Carvana yet? They have thousands of cars for under $20,000.

But do those thousands of cars have personality like old Betsy? Betsy is held together by tape and they're raccoons living in the engine. It's a family car. Uh, there are flames on the hood. Bad custom paint job. No, dad, the car's on fire. How many cars did you say Carvana had? Visit Carvana.com to shop thousands of cars for under $20,000. We'll drive you happy at Carvana. I brought something, Josie. I think you're going to like it. Oh, and I think that it's going to be something that the audience will respond to as well. What's the cost of standing up for your convictions? We all like to think that if the opportunity came, we would speak out on behalf of what was right, even at personal risk. Maybe we've had that chance in the past and it has or

hasn't gone the way we'd hoped. The larger your platform, the bigger your opportunity to get your point across, but the more you also stand to lose. There is a real calculation that celebrities, for example, make before they expose their views on any contentious issue. Okay. Up until very recently, celebrities were expected not to be on these subjects at all for fear of alienating fanbases that don't share their convictions. Now in the social media area, when we have unparalleled access to our famous people, it's the opposite. You're expected to do it. If you don't, it's kind of like what? You have, you have to have like public morals kind of. Yeah. And whatever they are, somebody will have something to say about it. Yeah. I'm curious not only about

the cost of conviction, but also about the ultimate value of vindication. If after 30 years of shunning you, people say, you know, she was right. What is that worth? It doesn't undo the trauma and the isolation of those three decades. It's great for your legacy, but at the cost of your actual lived experience, your relationships, potentially you're earning a living. And when the problem that you initially sought to draw attention to you has moved from controversial theory to commonly accepted fact, it came partially at the cost of your martyrship. Okay. Was it still worth it?

Canundrum. You just paint, paint by numbers. Canundrum. Yeah, it's true. This, but also that, you know, it never comes clean. Martyrship is a melodramatic turn, given that our subject is still in fact alive. Okay. But it captures the important religious context of today's story very well. One of the most infamous incidents in the history of American live television occurred October 3rd, 1992, on Saturday Night Live, when Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O'Connor tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II at the end of the musical performance.

Yeah, I did. I'm not even going to go any further. What do you know about this? So I didn't watch it live because I was four. I wasn't staying up until midnight to watch us. And now it's definitely one of those things that I know from watching like totally 90s shows. And it's like, what happened in 1992? Hundred craziest moments in music history. Yeah, it probably first came up that way. But then Sinead O'Connor, too, kind of being like this early 90s force and her shaved head and like badass, huge Doc Martens kicker boots.

Very nice. But also some of the most like lovely feminine dresses and pretty eye makeup you've ever seen. She had range. A lot of this, but a lot of that. Again. Yeah. And I think too, that was maybe a time when SNL was political, but not like coming down on one side or another political. I think it's done more of that in the Trump era. But this was a decidedly political action that I don't think SNL like as an entity had one side or another on it. You know, it's like it's the fucking Pope and we're not in Ireland. And you know, so it felt very trans transgressive, I suppose. And then it kind of shot down her career, right? Yes and no. It did a real number on her American career. But internationally, it didn't affect her the same way. Huh. That surprises

me. It was very much an American shunning, an American moral panic. So this act meant to protest the Catholic Church's role in propagating and covering up child sexual abuse. Deeply polarized the American public, leading to considerable backlash. While she didn't stop making music by any means, as we just discussed, Sinead's ascendant career as a mainstream pop star in the US was permanently laid to rest. Prior to this, she was on the she was just like on the come up as a cool edgy pop star. Yeah. And she's Irish. She could be a more political Lady Gaga, right? If we package her right. At the time, also important note, there hadn't been any broad journalistic coverage of the abuses within the Catholic Church, especially not in

America. For Sinead, this was a fact of life that had dictated the trauma of generations of Irish children, including herself and her family, but which nobody was willing to publicly address. For those unaware of that fact, this was some God hating a militant Irish girl with a shaved head, according controversy for attention. Yeah, on live TV, where no one can tell her not to. Yeah. And they gave it to her. There were booze. There were boycotts. There were bulldozers. Josie, bulldozers. Bulldozers. Oh, let me tell you all about it. And in the time that's passed the decades long career of this accomplished artist, as so often happens to infamous women in particular, has been distilled down to this one provocative moment. Was it worth it? This is the story of

Sinead O'Connor. Sorry, I'm the one that's... Busted into some surf rock because you love Sinead O'Connor. Bird's the word, bird. What do you know Sinead O'Connor's music? Nothing compares to you. I do know that one. That's Sinead O'Connor. Beautiful vocals. Can hit the highs, hit the lows. A stunningly accomplished vocal genius. You know what? Oh, wow. Really leaning into that authentic Irish brogue. Yeah, have fun editing that one so it's listenable. To kind of center us for a moment. Okay. This is a pretty complicated and at times quite intense and violent story. Yeah. We are going to be talking about child abuse of all kinds,

religious trauma, suicide, suicidal ideation, mental health, everything. And I mean like imminently from the very beginning and throughout. Yeah, okay. So use that information in the way that is most useful to you. Take care of yourself. Another kind of little thing to mention is that in the present day Sinead is Muslim and she goes by Shuhada Sadakat. Oh, I didn't know that. But she performs and is known as a public figure still as Sinead O'Connor. So I am going to be continuing to call her Sinead just because it's the name that listeners will know her best by. And it continues, yeah. It's like a stage name almost. It's a stage name and I don't think she would take events to that. Every time we do this

we put our sources in the end credits. I had a variety of them but the main two that I used to build my narrative were Sinead's memoir, Rememberings, which I checked out of my library as an e-book, and then also a documentary about Sinead that came out the same year 2021 I think called Nothing Compares. Yeah, a little bit easy. Our story begins in 1966 in Glenegare, a middle-class suburb of Dublin where Sinead is the third of four children born to Marie and John, which fun fact are the names of every couple in Ireland. As a child Sinead is fiery and mischievous and his nickname scamp by her grandfather. From early on she has a powerful, emotional, almost synesthetic reaction to music. She talks about ghosts in the piano and Christmas songs

make her weep so hard she needs to be carried to bed. And it's easy to like take this for lyricism but she seems like quite literal in her description of these things. Yeah. She also discusses being incredibly sensitive to touch. She says that her body won't work when people try to cuddle her and when they do she sees a mountain of wolves all covered in blood in her head. Damn dude, yeah. Poet. Sinead starts this book by very humbly doing her, you know, I am sorry for this book on account that I ain't got any learning and then proceeds to like bang out the most beautiful lyrical memoir you've ever read in your life. Yeah. Sinead's mother Marie is profoundly mentally ill and deeply abusive to everyone around her in a way that ends up consuming the lives of her

husband and children so this is gonna get quite intense shortly. We don't have exact diagnoses at being the 60s and all but later in her own life Sinead will be variously diagnosed with bipolar personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and complex PTSD, all things that sound relevant to Marie's behavior possibly as well. But I'm again that is I take that and whisper it into a wall and seal it over with mud because it's useless, I'm not a doctor. Okay. But I offer that in the spirit of being like hey this woman was ambiguously mentally ill, her daughter who exhibits similar behavior has these things which may not be the same things. Marie is a compulsive thief, she steals from the collection plate at Mass,

she steals all the newly planted bushes from the roundabout so like they just put in a roundabout and she's like sneaking out under the cover of nightfall to just take these bushes for what? Yeah, where are you gonna put them? Everyone's gonna know what bushes those are, they're outside. Yeah, it's a little rough. But this is brutal, her and Sinead get busted by the cops stealing cash tins from charity like they'll roll up and be like oh we're here to pick up the tins. And they would just steal them. We're doing some generational trauma shit, clearly. At one point Marie is hospitalized for threatening her son Joe that she would drive into traffic with Sinead in the car and then doing it. She did that. Sinead managed to not be injured but she

did do it. My gosh. Marie would lock Sinead in dark rooms and starve her, she'd beat the fuck out of her kids with any manner of household implement often nude sometimes targeting their genitals. Once when she's young Sinead is naked curled in a ball on the kitchen floor all covered in you know cereal and powdered coffee and shit while her mother beats her and during this assault she has a mental image of Jesus on a lonely cross and he tells Sinead that any blood her mother takes from her he'll replace with his own and this is very indicative of Sinead's intimate lifelong relationship with God for someone who's best known as a condemnation of organized religion. Sinead is intensely spiritual having studied theology been variously interested in Christianity and

mediums and Judaism and now feeling at home in Islam. She considers her activism a mission from God in like a very literal sense. Yeah, yeah. But she's also intimately familiar with the failings of the clergy. When she was a child Sinead went to Lorde's France with Marie for her confirmation and Marie had one of these awful episodes that she has and Sinead tracked down a priest to help because you know we're in Lorde's a miracle's coming. Right. The priest met with Sinead's mother briefly and then told Sinead upon leaving there's nothing I can do for her pray until you're 18 and then leave home unless you can leave sooner. Whoa. Just pray about it. Later on in life in her adulthood Sinead's quest for spiritual clarity will lead her to have an

affair with a married Catholic minister slash medium. Oh, okay. This affair ends when the man in question won't come help Sinead after a car accident because he's married and he doesn't want to be seen with her. Oh God. One of her mother's aphorisms that always stays with Sinead is the devil always dresses as a priest. Oh. And this quote perhaps explains why Sinead is able to somewhat forgive her mother or if not forgive her because I don't want to speak on Sinead's behalf on something that big. See her pragmatically and find a way to love her even while hating her. Yeah. She says quote what happened to me is a direct result of what happened to my mother and what happened to her in her house and in school. She said in another interview I had

spent my entire childhood being beaten up because of the social conditions under which my mother grew up and under which her mother grew up and under which her mother and her mother grew up. And here Sinead's referring to the Catholic church in its social and political influence in Ireland which left Irish women virtually without rights. Anything important needed the permission of a father or husband. Married women weren't legally allowed to work in Ireland until 1973. What? Which is within Sinead's lifetime remember she's born 1966. Yeah. Up until 1976 a man could sell or mortgage the family home without his wife's consent or knowledge. Oh my. Divorce 1996. Woo. Abortion 2018. I knew that one. That was a big one. Especially considering the US

situation. This inequality informs Sinead's complicated love for and hatred of her mother and has everything to do with why she'll be so politically motivated later on down the line and so contemptuous of the Catholic church. Yeah. Makes sense. Lines up. Okay. One of the things that Bond's mother and daughter is music says Sinead my mother was a beast and I was able to soothe her with my voice. I was able to use my voice to make the devil fall asleep. Sinead loves to pour over her mother's record collection. She says my favorite singer in all her collection is Barbara Streisand. Patron Santa bittersweet infamy. Miigot winner Barbara Streisand. Oh my god. Babs. She says I love to watch her movies. I love Hello Dolly and Funny Girl. She's so beautiful.

Her nails are so long and she wears cool eyeliner. I would love to sing in musicals one day and be like Barbara. I would also like to grow my nails. That is so opposite of how I like in a very, very loose popular culture way. No Sinead, O'Connor. Sinead is a soft baby. She wants her nails long. She wants to be in Hello Dolly. She's just the sweetest, most sensitive, a gobsite absolutely. Tell stupid lies for no reason. Yeah. All this other shit, right? That's part of the bitter in the bittersweet. That's part of this and then that. I don't know. But she's, I really like her. I really like Sinead. And she likes Barbara. Full circle. Yeah. But there's only so much of your mom's record collection of schmaltzy Irish show band tunes. Any burgeoning rebel can stand. So as the troubles rage

on in nearby Northern Ireland, Sinead escapes into what she calls non-square music. Like Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols. The greats. So by 1975, John, who for his part is cantankerous and fiery, but seemingly not erratic and abusive like his wife, leaves her to start a family with a nice woman named Viola. Given that divorce happened in 1996, I don't know what the legality of this arrangement is. Right, yeah. John and Viola get custody, but Sinead and her brother go back to the mom after six months because they miss her. Okay. You know, Stockholm syndrome's a bitch, man. Family's hard. Family's hard. Family's very hard and very complicated, says Sinead. At that point, I was nine. I stayed with my mother until I was 13. And then I went by choice back to live with my

father. I was unable to adjust after what had been going on in my mother's house. So toward the end of my 13th year, I went to what is politely called a rehabilitation center for girls with behavioral problems. And then she adds in parentheses, I think the whole world knows a refund is owed my father for that as it clearly didn't work. Oh, and while in this reformatory, she meets other young, big scare quotes, fallen girls. Right. One of whom is pregnant with a baby she dotes on until it's taken away from her because it's illegal for a single woman to have a baby out of wedlock. Oh my fucking god. Sinead often runs away both to busk and to work a job at a night club, which she gets by lying about her age and pretending to be 16. Sister Margaret at the

reformatory is generally a benevolent force connecting Sinead with a guitar and voice lessons. But one night after Sinead has run away one too many times, Sister Marge punishes Sinead by sending her to an adjoining hospice, which is populated by elderly women who had worked in the Magdalene Laundries. Have you ever heard of this term Magdalene Laundries? It sounds like it might be sex work. The root of it starts off with that. These were establishments that were run by the church to house, again, these fallen women who had lost their innocence in some way. And it did start out as you say as sex workers. So let's get them off the street and quote unquote give them a job, although this is not paid labor.

Yeah. Without mincing words, this is a form of slavery. And it started out as sex workers, but it expanded to any sexually active woman, and then just any difficult or inconvenient woman. So criminals, orphans, mentally disabled women, my husband won't stop touching his step daughter, so we'll put her away somewhere. Just the saddest and worst stories you've ever heard. Crucial information about these women, their identities, the goings on in these places have been lost to time as well as the secrecy of the religious institutions that have a vested interest in keeping these goings on private. Over the years, about 30,000 women, some beginning as young as eight, are believed to have worked under brutal and abusive conditions for no pay at these laundries,

many for their entire lives. Wow. Yeah, it's really, really heavy when you think of like the totality of humanity wasted by this horrible system. For more information on Magdalene Laundries, the BBC did an episode of Our World on it in 2014. I've never heard of this. This is terrifying. Yeah, you can find it uploaded to the YouTube channel Justice for Magdalene's. It's, what a shameful, disgusting story. Yeah. And indeed, she needs her own reformatory, and again we'll put quotes on that. Everyone seems to mince words about directly calling it a Magdalene Laundry. I think it might have been something just to the left of a Magdalene Laundry, but it sounds an awful lot like a Magdalene Laundry. Quote,

We worked in the basement, washing priests' clothes and sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. So Sister Margaret sends young Sinead to spend the night in this hospice, where all the old ladies who had worked at the Magdalene the whole lives were. Says Sinead, quote, I never ran away again after my night in the hospice. In the morning when I woke, I knew what Sister Margaret had been trying to tell me. The worst part was I knew she wasn't being unkind. She was being a nun I'd never seen before. She deliberately hadn't told me why I was to go to a part of the building I'd never known existed, climb a flight of stairs I would never have been allowed to ascend if I'd

asked to, knock on a door I would previously not have been permitted to touch, and enter such a scene with no staff present. She let me figure it out for myself. If I didn't stop running away, I would someday be one of those old ladies. Whoa. Yeah. At 15 Sinead leaves the reformatory for boarding school, but at 16 she runs away, she gets an apartment, she joins a band. Good. Good. It feels like a better path for her. Yeah. Her dad agrees to pay her rent but not her bills as long as she takes out her nose piercing. Oh, as I touch mine. Me too, me too. In the summer of 1984 Sinead puts an ad in a magazine thing. She's a singer looking for a band. She ends up with a group called Tauntaun Makut for about a year, and it's through this that she meets Karen Owens,

the guy who'll eventually pass her contact along to Ensign Records, which kicks off her career. Okay. But unfortunately her mother Marie is not there to see it. In 1985, while driving to mass, she hits a patch of black ice and is killed in the ensuing accident. Whoa. So in case there's not enough loaded religious symbolism in this story, she was on the way to mass when it happened. Geez. Although to be fair, rolling the dice in Ireland decent odds that everybody's on their way to mass at any given rate. Fair enough, yeah. The kids end up burning a mountain of her valium on the front yard. Imagine the smoke off of that thing. While going through her mother's effects, Sinead notices

the one photograph with which Marie saw fit to decorate her wall. A photo of Pope John Paul II. Yes, bitch. It's that same photo waving beatifully over a crowd during his 1979 visit to Ireland. First visit of a pope to Ireland. Yeah. Rude. One. He's beloved there. So rude. Show up earlier. Yeah, right. You kept your fans waiting. Yeah. Rude. To what? This is the photo? It's the same exact photo. The photo from her mother's wall. Jesus Christ. Doesn't that change everything about the way you see this? It changes so much. So, so much. It's the same photo. It's the first time a pope has ever visited Ireland and he famously declares, his big, his catchphrase. He says, young people of Ireland, I love you. And Sinead thinks that's

bullshit. You didn't care about the young people of Ireland. Nobody cares about the young people of Ireland. Nobody's ever done shit for the young people of Ireland. And she hates this fucking picture and the lies and abuse it represents. And she's like, I'm going to fucking destroy this photo, but not now when the moment is right. And from that day forward, she brings it with her everywhere she lives. She stockpiles that shit? She knew. She was like, this photo is important, and I'm going to rip it up in an important way. Whoa. And specifically, I think that somebody on the top of the pops or one of these music shows, when Greece was storming the charts, someone had ripped up a photo of, I think it was like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John

or something. And she's like, yeah, that's badass. I'm going to do that, but with the fucking pope. She's like, I know what I'm going to do this now. Yeah. Not intense enough. That's my note. Right. Yeah. One small note, go bigger. Yeah. We need to be ripping up the Catholic Church. I agree. Truly. Amen. And we'll get into it, but I think she's ripping up a lot more than that. No, that's- She's ripping up mom. All of that pain. All of her grandmother's pain. All of her great grandmother's pain. Like, that's all in that photo. Totally. Every woman who needed a divorce, she couldn't get every woman who needed an abortion. She couldn't get every fucking child who was touched by a fucking priest that they trusted. Yeah. Two weeks after Marie's funeral,

Ensign Records reaches out to Sinead. Fuck. We're doing phases of life very directly segmented here. We've got a two week transition, and then we are into pop star. And they say, hey, come record some demos. So this contact that she's made has passed her shit along. We like you. Come record some demos. She's able to get 100 bucks to jump on a plane to London, thanks to her kind boss at the Badass Cafe in Dublin, where she serves. We're in a t-shirt that says, nice pizza ass. She says she didn't get it until she was like 28. Oh, I love that honesty. That's good. That's good. She's eager to leave, quote, I hated Dublin. Everything reminded me of my mother. The shops were full of hats that she would have loved, but I could never now give her. Oh my god.

Doesn't that tear your heart out? Imagine having such compassion for someone who is so horrible to you. And the rap on her is that she's like heartless. Yeah. Right. Anyway, by coincidence on her plane to London, she ends up sitting directly across from Pete Townsend of the Who on the plane. So she's like, you know, this is a positive omen. Yeah. Says Sinead, quote, best day of my life was the day I first left Ireland and any other day I left Ireland was the next best. Whoa. Sinead fucking hates Ireland. That's okay. Yeah. Love what you love. Hate what you hate. In the complicated way that she's also very proud that she's Irish and she thinks that the Irish people are great underdogs and you know, fairly so. Yeah. And she returns to film her music videos there and she

references. So it's like with her mom. We got these complicated, these bittersweet love hates, totally. So Sinead lines in London where she where she eagerly embraces the large and diverse population and the musical opportunities and makes her demos and makes her hey, but not without resistance from the label suits who want her to have long, pretty hair and big clunky jewelry that you can't wear next to a microphone. And so naturally Sinead racks this by going with a barbershop and getting her head shaved. Much to the despair of the Greek barber who's like thinking your father, think your husband, what are they going to say? Just fucking shave my head, bro. Yeah. The look will become Sinead's signature. She loves it. She thinks she looks like an alien.

Beautiful move. Instantly iconic. She was the OG bald white lady, sets her apart. And every other pop star has hair. Facts. Boom. Bald chick. Right away. Bald chick who by the way also has like the most like conventionally stunningly beautiful face in the world. Giant pretty eyes. Totally. Little tiny mouth. Yeah. Sinead says she's done this to be herself. Like there's, that's the great meaning in this. I've done this to be myself. And when Chris Hill of Ensign asks why she can't just be herself and also have hair, she replies, so you can eat hair, you bald, the old fecker, not me. Why don't you let me help you find a doctor? Boom. Sinead starts to work on her first album, The Lion in the Cobra. She's not in control of

her own production, which rankles her. She says the producer, the label has chosen, quote, is a fucking moron and has absolutely no sense of humor. And he needs one given his terrible beard and how embarrassing he's making my record sound. I love the little dig on the beard there. That was snuck in. You gotta hit people where it hurts. So Sinead chucks the first attempt and starts again. One day she's recording a cover of the door's crystal ship and she can't hit a high note that she's always been able to hit. Oh no. She gets super pissed. She drops the ground and pounds the floor and as soon as her fist hits the ground, she realizes, oh my god, I'm pregnant. And she is. So she just has this like insane

connection with her body and her voice where the second she can't hit this high note, she's like, ah, fuck, I'm pregnant. And she's right. Oh my god. Oh wow, that's crazy. The father is John Reynolds, a session musician with whom she'll go on to have a lifelong creative partnership and co-parenting relationship that's ultimately more friendly than romantic. That's so sweet. Yeah. So she went to the doctor and guess what he told her? You're pregnant. He said, girl, you better try to have fun no matter what you do. But he's a fool because nothing compares to you. Really happy that went off exactly as I'd envisioned. Okay, good. So here's what the doctor actually told her. Okay. There's none of that.

The doctor told me that Nigel Grange, so Nigel Grange is, in addition to this other guy, Chris, Nigel is the head honcho of Ensign Records. Okay. And another one of these like Sinead, your hair, like one of these. Right, yeah. You look so beautiful. You should smile more. Yeah. Exactly. You're a little severe. The doctor told me Nigel had already called him and expressed the wish that he, the doctor, would impress upon me the following, which he, the doctor said in the following words, your record company has spent 100,000 pounds recording your album. You owe it to them not to have this baby. Furthermore, he informed me that if I flew well pregnant, my baby would be damaged. Anyway, if I was going to be a musician, I ought not have

babies because a woman shouldn't leave her baby to go on tour. And at the same time, you can't take a child on tour. I haven't cried so much in years. Yeah, totally. Fuck. What an impossibly difficult thing to do to a young person. Oh, God. So Sinead has a good crying. She decides she's doing it all. She's keeping the baby. She's going on tour. She's starting the album again, and this time she's taking full control of the production. Good. Get that guy with the scraggly beard out of there. Beardo is can kick rocks. Get fucked, Beardo. Go. I'm sure you're a lovely person as a background character in other people's stories. Not this one. Fuck off. But now she's 100 grand in hawk to the record company based on the terms of her recoupable

contract. So it can be she needs to make back the money and then some. Right. Yeah. So Sinead, with her bald head and her big pregnant belly and her white crop top that says wear a condom, puts her nose. Beautiful. No notes. Love it. Fantastic. Puts her nose down and grinds out her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, which drops in 1989. The European release cover features her boisterously screaming her song, but the American release features more Demir and Feminine album art. It'll sell better. Oh. Sinead is 20 years old when she has her first child, Jake, three weeks before the release of her first album. So we really are just doing it all at once. Your mom's dead. Yeah. Here's your music career. Also, you're pregnant. Yeah. Have the baby. Go on.

And you're 100 grand in debt, living in a living in a bed set with your baby daddy, who you've married, but you don't really love him that way. She'll go on to have three more children over the years, Roshin, Shane and Yeshua. And as of the writing of Rememberings to Grandchildren, she tells all her kids that they're her favorite, but don't tell the others. Sinead's four kids are by four fathers, only one of whom she marries, although she also marries three other men, none of whom she has kids with, including a seven-day Vegas marriage. Ooh. That sounds fun. That's her relationships and kids in a paragraph. Once she has to spend 20 minutes explaining to a suspicious German border agent why all her

children have different last names, before finally saying, look, I was a bit of a slut, and then she gets through. The first album comes out and is a hit. Sinead tours supporting an excess. She struggles with low self-esteem and imposter syndrome, is genuinely shocked. People want to hear her sing. Oh, baby. Yeah. When Sinead is informed that the lion in the cobra has been nominated for a Grammy, quote, I saw my life roll up as if it were a blanket and vanished. Quick as a flash. Like I was a dying person. I've never told anyone. I'm like Stevie Nicks. She keeps her visions to herself. Damn, dude. I left that in there for you. Thank you. Thank you. Sinead's not vibing as hard. She's a very uneasy. And this perhaps contributes to Sinead using the

1989 Grammys as an opportunity for protest. She performs her song Mandinka, inspired by the iconic 1970s TV miniseries Roots, and she has the logo of the rap group Public Enemy died into the side of her head because they didn't televise the rap category. I think it was the first year they've done the rap category and they didn't televise it. What the fuck? I know like Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff boycotted, Public Enemy, I assume boycotted. And so Sinead for her performance, where she's wearing this like little bra and she has the six pack that is unthinkable for a woman who just gave birth. Right. And she's got the Public Enemy kind of died into the side of her shaved head. It's a fantastic performance. Damn. Sinead goes on to the production of her second

best known album. I do not want what I haven't got. So named after a conversation Sinead had with her dead mother about forgiveness in a dream. So we're going there. Good, good. Nigel Grange from Ensign Rackard who didn't like her shaved head or a baby having he hates the album because he thinks it's too personal. He's like it's like listening to someone's diary. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what music is. You like can be you dumb fuck. We're all seeking different kinds of connection in art. You miserly capitalists. This album includes Sinead's biggest single, The Prince Cover. Nothing compares to you. Oh, it's a prince. It is a prince cover. Yeah. Prince wrote it. Yeah. And nothing compares to you has this iconic music video. Have you ever seen it?

I think I have. Is it black and white? No, but you could be mistaken for thinking so because it's like her face in high exposure in front of a black background and she's wearing like a black turtleneck. Okay, okay. It's just her singing directly to the camera and then other than that it's intercut with footage of her at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris stomping around kind of looking like a school shooter but like by choice. Right, yeah. The most arresting part of this music video is when Sinead who again is just taping this in the soundstage in London and when she gets to the part of the song that goes oh I'm not as good as her folks. When she gets to the part of the song that goes all the flowers that you planted mama

in the backyard all died when you went away. She taps right into her mom and her grief around her mom and you can see Sinead has the most beautiful micro expressions in all of music. Every quiver of a lip, every flare of a nostril. Again, there's no hair. It's just all face. It's all face, baby. And you can see her kind of look and kind of like her lip quavers and she goes back to the camera and these two perfect tears one from inside of each of the crooks of her eyes roll down her cheeks and it's I get goosebumps talking about it. I get goosebumps watching it. Yeah. And in Sinead's mind with her lowest self-esteem she's like I really ruin that take like I'm really glad we have to film all this shit of me stomping around this cemetery

because maybe they can like find something in there. Yeah like splash that out and put something else in. Yeah. And in the end this this video I think it gets like MTV best music video. This is kind of what like really really puts her on the map. Yeah. And it's a great video. Go and watch it. I highly recommend it. Yeah I need to watch it again. Yeah because it's been a while obviously. Back to Sinead. She says within months I do not want what I haven't got is number one all over the planet and Nigel hasn't had to do so much as lift a phone to make millions for himself. I'm pleased for him because an idiot can never get laid if he isn't stinking rich. She really knows how to like make it personal.

So Sinead's in a five bedroom mansion in LA living the pop star dream. Her video is getting massive airplay. She's an alternative style icon in the burgeoning years of the riot girls and she's torn between enjoying her meteoric rise to success because there's like regardless of whether it was what you set out to do or what you think you need. There's something very gratifying about going to number one all over the world and everybody is like looking at you and you know you're not the girl in the fucking Magdalen laundry anymore. You're a beloved pop star you know. And you made the decisions that you wanted to make to get there. You saved your head. You had the baby. You know what I mean. You produced your own album. Yeah. You bought now she's got creative

control in her contract. All these things that were really important to her. Yeah. And so she's torn between that and and then feeling like she owes it to her various causes racial equity feminism abuse children to use her new fame to make powerful statements like I said she like very literally explicitly is like God gave me this voice for this reason to expose these abuses to fight for people who can't fight for themselves etc. Yeah. Interestingly in 1990 she refuses to play SNL as a protest of misogynist comedian Andrew Dice Clay who's hosting that episode. Okay sir. I don't know that guy. Very like hey women nice to go back to the kitchen or all bop you when I don't fucking know. We're giving this man too much airtime. Point being

Shanae O'Connor and Nora Dunn who's a cast member they both know about this episode. Nice. The same year Shanae comes by a bit of controversy by supposedly refusing to play the American national anthem before her show. This is the first major brush between Americans. Notorious lovers of free speech. Amen. Many of whom boycott Shanae as anti-American. To hear Shanae tell it she says that two people who were basically like this was a sabotage. This was like a right wing sabotage. Two people came into her dressing room and were like do you want the anthem played before your show. And she was like you know better not. Shanae I think like me probably has some pretty strong opinions about nationalism. Right. And she was like and I didn't

think it would be a fucking big deal because like in no other country in the world would that be a big deal. Yeah. And then they took it and went to the press with it and smeared me with it. So to hear her tell it this is a plant. This is like a this is a right wing conspiracy. Yeah. They asked her opinion only to be upset with her opinion. Yes. Headlines screamed Shanae the she devil and shaved from the airways. MC Hammer offers to pay for her plane ticket back to Ireland. Frank Sinatra says he'd kick her ass to which her dad John responds at his age he couldn't lift his leg high enough to kick her ass. So she comes by it honestly. The dad's a firecracker too. Yeah. In 1991 Shanae refuses all awards for her second album including her Grammy award for Best

Alternative Music Performance as a means of raising the issue of child abuse again the same the same kind of issue. Yeah. Instead she spends the night at Eddie Murphy's viewing party where she says she was bullied by American men I guess who had an issue with her skipping the Grammys or whatever and she says her drink was spiked. So she's real real disillusioned by L.A. Stardom. She calls into a telethon. She donates her $750,000 mansion to the Red Cross for Somali Relief and she goes back to London. She donates her house via telethon. Shanae is the real dude. Shanae walks what she talks. It sounds it. So she returns to London. Okay. But not before a fateful encounter with the lyricist behind her biggest hit.

That's right baby. It's time for a clash between two of pop music's most cantankerous and unique geniuses. Shanae O'Connor and Prince. The artist formerly known as Prince. I think he would be the artist currently known as Prince at the time of this story. Okay. The artist currently known as Prince. For sure let's just call him Prince. Yeah okay. So one day Shanae gets a call from an impatient and effeminate voice asking for Shinehead. For Shinehead? Yeah actually it's Shanae. And it gets across it's Prince. Let's hang out. Shanae's like sure I'll hang out. Like of course. Why not? Yeah. He wrote her biggest song. They've met in a nightclub before in passing. A long black limo pulls up to Shanae's place. Shanae gets in and she's you know being typical Shanae

trying to just make a bit of a crack with the fucking driver right? Stone silence. No talking. Oh okay. She gets to the door and she gets greeted by Prince's silent servants who kind of cower around him. Everybody is kind of speaking in nods to one another. Totally. It's a system. It's like a Morse code of nodding. There's also a lot of windows covered in foil. The servants let her know that Prince doesn't like light. So yeah. So she gets led into this little like side room that has a breakfast bar in it. I don't even know what room this is. It's like a fucking rumpus room. Like I don't even know what room this is. Yeah we're not meant to know. But Shanae being Shanae and being fucking cheeky and her own worst enemy and can't help herself immediately is like I wonder what's

under Prince's sink. She opens this thing and just starts like moving his chemicals around. And then Prince of course walks in and busts her sleeping around in a shed. So like already we're just off to a bad start. And then he opens the bar and he's like do you want to drink. She doesn't drink alcohol by the way Shanae's allergic to alcohol but she asks for something non-alcoholic. And he's like get it yourself. And he puts down the whiskey glass and pours his whiskey. And she's instantly like okay I know exactly like I know what type of man you are. And she's like I'm not. No you don't. It's Prince. No one knows who Prince is. Well she remembers that she doesn't know where she is. And so she says this is a quote now. He commences stalking up and down his side

of the breakfast bar. Arms crossed. One hand rubbing his chin between his thumb and forefinger as if he has a beard. Looking at me up and down like A. I'm a piece of dog shit on the end of his shoe. And B. He's figuring out where upon my little body to punch me for the fullest effect. I don't like this. And I don't appreciate it. And I don't appreciate the assumption I'm easy pray. I'm Irish. We're different. We don't give a shit who you are. We've been colonized by the very worst of the spiritual worst and we survived intact. So now she's off on I'm Irish. Yeah. Accordingly when he shows me I don't like the language you're using in your print interviews. I say you mean English. Oh I'm sorry about that. The Irish was beaten out of us. No he says I don't

like you swearing. I don't work for you. I tell him if you don't like it you can fuck yourself. Fair enough. So this meaning is just not going well. No. No. In the moment to them it seems not entirely beyond the point of repair. So Prince takes her into his dining room where he has like a long I don't know like a Mr. Burns table a Dracula table an Adams family table like a really long narrow table for like a banquet but there's not a banquet. There's two people Shanae and Prince and they're on opposite ends. Oh my god. Oh my god. And prior to this Prince has like screamed into some enclave at the Butler to like bring us the soup right now. Right. Shanae doesn't want soup. She's not hungry. So this Butler comes in gets to hold it aloft the tray this entire time

of soup and serve Prince and then Prince will send him over to Shanae and Shanae doesn't want to participate in whatever this is. I love the way she describes it. She's like I was taught that the polite way to refuse food is to be like no thank you and then you pat your tummy like oh I couldn't I'm already full. I just thank you. Thank you. And so he turns back to Prince and Prince like give her the soup and he turns back and it's okay. You know I just I simply couldn't. Don't waste it on me. No thank you. And you can see this like the smoke coming out of this Butler's ears as he attempts to like figure out what to do in this situation and at some point Shanae must say something like you can't like it's kind of whack how you're treating this dude and Prince has

something effective. Oh I can treat him however I want. He's my brother. Right. Didn't see it coming. You're right. Didn't see it coming. And so of course Shanae starts in on this like you treat your brother like a fucking mule and the blah blah blah blah blah. Serve it. Somehow in spite of the Dwayne incident we've decided we're gonna give this one last crack and specifically Prince says hey Shanae let's have a pillow fight. Shanae's not having that. She is actually. Okay. She's like you know what fuck it. Who can say they've had a pillow fight with Prince. There's obviously a little aggression between us maybe we can get this out yeah. Basically what happens is Prince dummies his pillowcase. He slips something into it so he can beat Shanae with something in the

pillowcase. Oh my god. Like a stapler or like. I don't know. Okay. Another pillow. A stapler. That's good. A good pick. Interesting. Thank you. Office space. Okay. Shanae tries to escape through the front door. We're escaping now. Oh yeah she's she's running out of the mansion. The driver is asleep. She's like I'm gonna bolt down the lawn and I'm gonna scale the fence. Yeah. Prince gets a hold of her, orders her back inside. She acquiesces and after a little bit of time finally is like okay you can leave. Go wake the driver. And she's like I don't want to wake the driver. Can you just call me a cab. And Prince has a fucking meltdown. He's like I'm gonna drive you home. And she's like like fuck I absolutely not am I getting in a fucking car

with you. Prince you cannot drive. Everybody knows that. Nobody has proof but everybody knows. Oh that man has the soft supple hands of somebody who's never touched a driver's wheel. A steering wheel. It's called the driver's wheel shut up. So she bolts into the woods that kind of adjoin the property. Oh my god. She can hear him driving around screaming for her. Oh my god. Oh my god. And she's like I've just got to get the fuck out of the woods and escape a vengeful prince and like get to like some phone and he finds her. Oh no. He like drives up next to her and he's like get in and she's like suck my dick. So he gets out of the car and he starts chasing her around the car. Oh my god. She's like treating him like a final boss. She's like I need

to memorize his attack pattern. Like when I go around the car this way he has to like look to the left. And that's when I can bolt out in the other direction. And she manages to bail get to a house and she's like ring the doorbell just ring the doorbell. And of course Prince freaks out and leaves. There's nobody home but now Shanaid is safe. She can go and find a pay phone call her friends. They pick her up. And that's what happened when Shanaid met Prince. It speaks for itself. Oh my god. It really does. I'm speechless. It's a podcast and I'm speechless. Are you ready for the main event? All right. Main event me. Let's go. All right. October 1992 Shanaid is promoting her third album Am I Not Your Girl. And she is booked for a musical

appearance on Saturday Night Live. It's Remake Good right. The venerable American sketch comedy show. This episode is hosted by Tim Robbins which is like kind of funny because I think Tim Robbins and his wife Susan Sarandon had these reputations as these lefty left agitators. Yeah. And Tim Robbins in particular was I guess very anti GE at the time General Electric which is the parent company of NBC I think. So Lauren Michaels was really worried that Tim and Susan who is sitting in the front row were going to do some sort of stunt wasn't even looking at Shanaid. Oh yeah I gotta keep your eye on Shanaid. Gosh. Is this your first time? Are you a fucking amateur as they say in one of my favorite lines in screen three. What are you a reporter for Woodsboro High.

So by now Shanaid is living in New York City in a neighborhood co-mingled with Irish folks and Jamaicans. Shanaid has and has always had a strong interest in Jamaican culture and Rastafarianism. She loved Bob Marley growing up. Those early records yeah. She sees a parody between the Irish struggle and the Rastafarian one like she sees the the cultures as siblings in some way. Yeah a lot of reggae music is protest music for sure. Exactly and a lot of Rastafarian theology of that place and time was very fuck the pope burn the Vatican. So that suits her just fine. Shanaid's made buddies with a Rastafarian dude named Terry who runs a juice bar she frequents. Okay. And and she's made buddies with his buddies as well like they they've kind of

adopted her. Yeah all drinking juice getting healthy yeah. Exactly getting healthy and plotting to burn the Vatican. It's turned into like a kind of a mentor mentee thing if you like. Okay. And Shanaid has also been reading The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which she describes as a blasphemous and contrary in history of the Catholic Church. She's all fired up off of that and she's been digging through articles about Irish families seeking recognition and reparation from the church to no avail. Yeah. The night before Saturday Night Live Terry her Jamaican friend who runs the juice bar tells Shanaid that he's been involved in smuggling drugs and weapons. Specifically he's been using children as mules and someone just tried to drive

by him so he's going to get killed. Oh my god Terry. That's what she said. He starts giving his shit away to her to others. Shanaid is fucking livid with him especially that he's been getting children involved because you know how she feels about that. Yeah. And she's choked that he's going to get himself killed which Shanaid says eventually happens after that weekend. Oh my gosh. As part of her set list for Saturday Night Live which is two performances her second performance was already going to be a modified acapella version of the song War by Bob Marley. Okay. Cool. If you don't know this song the lyrics are pulled directly from a speech made by Ethiopian Emperor Hale Selassie before the United Nations General Assembly on October 4th 1963 almost exactly 29

years earlier. I don't know if Shanaid made that connection but I did. And Selassie is kind of an interesting figure in Rastafarianism because there are people who believe that he is like the Messiah. He's the second coming of Jesus. Here are some of the lyrics of the song. Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned everywhere is war until there is no longer first class or second class citizens of any nation then until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes I've got to say war. So like a really powerful anti-racist message anti-racist statement. Yeah. And Shanaid specifically alters the lyric that's originally about racism to name

the evils of child abuse. The entire rest of the song which is about racism is completely untouched so it's not like she's removed that component from the song. Okay. So now Shanaid is confronted by this situation which if I may do a little bit of armchair theme analysis I can't put myself in this young woman's head and hers is a beautiful and complicated mind and hers entirely her own entirely. It seems to me the situation presents a complicated mix of Shanaids own triggers around child abuse disillusionment crushing disgust in and loss of a parental figure lying and it's all simmer simmer simmer percolate percolate percolate and what comes out this is the moment that I've been waiting for to rip up my mother's cherished photo that awful catholic lizard and by extension

I'm ripping up all his kidfucker cronies I'm ripping up my mom ripping up the people trying to kill Terry I'm probably ripping up Terry too because I'm pissed at him. Yeah. I'm ripping up my grief. History remembers this photo incident as a very clear eyed denouncement of child abuse in the Catholic Church and it's definitely that 30 years later an enduring and powerful statement to that effect. Yeah. But it's also lain with all of this psychological importance and weight surrounding the things that are important to Shanaid the human independent of her specific cause because that's humans baby nothing means one thing everything means many things this or that and that and this and that and this that also and a little bit of that. So Shanaids got this very potent moment

of despair and this platform and this photo that she's had her ripping fingers itching for a while quoting Shanaid I bring the photo to the NBC studio and hide in the dressing room at rehearsal when I finish singing Bob Marley's war I hold up a photo of a Brazilian street kid who is killed by cops I ask the cameraman to zoom in on the photo during the actual show I don't tell him what I have in mind for later on everyone's happy a dead child far away is no one's problem I know if I do this there'll be war but I don't care I know my scripture nothing can touch me I reject the world nobody can do a thing to me that hasn't been done already I can sing in the streets like I used to it's not like anyone will tear my throat out so she's feeling yeah just like burn it down baby

the adrenaline is coming and she's like this is it I did not know that tidbit about her having another photo and like instructing the cameraman and like getting it cleared in rehearsal and then in the actual moment yeah so it's premeditated this oh totally show time comes Sinead is looking stunning in a beautiful white lace dress that she bought at a rock and roll auction it used to belong to Shade so that is quite a lineage on that garment whoa damn from Shade's beautiful curves to being the dress that Sinead wears when she rips up the pope oh baby wow that dress is rock and roll royalty yeah yeah she performs war acapella standing next to some candles she's framed from the waist up in what slowly zooms into

be a shot of only her face when the lyrics at the end of the song get to the word evil she holds up her photo a JP to she rips it up and she says fight the real enemy and she throws all the scraps in front of her the crowd is silent the applause sign is not activated Sinead blows out her candles and leaves the stage I'm worried about including the full performance for copyright reasons but I'll give you all at home the end I think that falls under fair use it's very relevant to our purposes here okay and uh Josie and I are gonna watch the whole thing now I encourage you to find it as well it's freely available on youtube and it's uh very hypnotic and powerful performance until the ignoble and unhappy regime which holds

all of us through child abuse yeah child abuse yeah subhuman bondage has been toppled utterly destroyed everywhere is war war in the east war in the west war up north war down south there's war and the rumors of war until that day there is no continent which will no peace children children fight we find it necessary we know we will win we have confidence in the victory of good over evil fight the real enemy whoa that is uh not your average like snl performance huh now dude now yeah you can like feel the tension in that room when she rips up that picture you can hear a little

like whispers of like don't like it's really captivating huh yeah and also maybe because i've heard it now but like that photo is not it's a worn and used an old photo and it's not like a like a beatific little like portrait it's not a glossy it's somebody's personal photo it's somebody's personal photo now i see that i don't think i could see that before there's a lot of questions like that that i wish that there had been someone curious enough around to ask i was stunned looking back on the in curiosity and self-absorption of every interviewer i saw speaking to shanado connor because they were desperately trying to prove some point to her yeah they couldn't get past the fact that she was bald why would a girl be bald fuck shut up who cares ask her a question

about her soul man you have a fucking great artist in front of you there was an interview where the interviewer goes this song black boys on moped's about the treatment of black people in britain very political shanaid and she responds well you can't really talk about racism without being political yeah and it's the most obvious thought in the world but people were so excited to like project upon and patronize this girl because she was mouthy and unfeminine and and exotic and foreign and whatever it was it was a time when political statements in the music industry shut up and sing yeah it was a shut up and sing kind of vibe i mean it makes sense why the rap section was like not aired right at the grandmas because like that was like no no no it's too political it's

speaking truth to power yeah yeah people hate that shit people say they like it but they fucking hate when you power like powerful people hate it and the fucking people that they've brainwashed hate it even more and now the time like our current time probably like a post trump era or yeah sliding into one is like you just pay lip service to that like you have to say something but you don't really ever back it up it's that you've got to post your black square you're a bad person right yeah yeah and shanaid as muddled as it is to inject a lyric about child abuse into a reggae song about racism and then rip up a photo of the pope without explaining the backstory behind the pope and expect everyone to get what you mean that was probably never gonna happen that that was my one

it's a very provocative and easy to simplify gesture right yeah though i understand like why should really that yeah matter when it's like yeah and i think you're right the media cyclone that kind of comes out of it was not at all interested in finding out any of those details no any of the nuance and i think that like does the backstory matter when the big point in the end was hey there are priests you know raping kids in ireland and magelyn laundry's and blah blah blah maybe we should do something about that and yep there were she had said that before that had been part of her platform before right yeah when she boycotted the grammies yeah again it's who do you believe the holiest of the holy rollers on earth this is pre spotlight we don't have this

extensive long form when shanaid gets up there to make her muddled point it's not like she can roll up there with a bunch of fucking articles in a wikipedia page yeah we can now she has to go up there and be like i just need to get people talking about the fact that i did this what she misjudged is she thought people were i think more empathetic than they were yeah it was very disappointing how how in curious the journalism was around it that's all yeah anyway yeah before shanaid performed war plenty of people were milling around backstage chatting with her hanging out when she's done guess what nobody's talking to her tumbleweeds ghost town nobody doors closed yeah locked yeah snl head honcho loren michaels he's ultimately supportive he encourages her to

come back out for the uncredits and later on he calls her actions quote the bravest thing she could possibly do and he specifically says on account of what she's been through oh by the way tim robbins does wear an anti g e t-shirt during the uncredits but no one notices her cares right because shanaid'll got her and that's tim robbins in this story folks tip your waiters all right so upon leaving 30 rock shanaid and her friend who's there with her they get egged by randos oh but they're able to catch up with the eggers they kind of chase them down and the situation ends up in laughter and good humor like once they get caught there's sort of this realization of like holy shit i got i just got egged holy shit i just tried to egg shanaid o'connor

and she caught me and they all just kind of laugh and they they get a cab kind of thing okay good good i like that great ending great ending shanaid goes home to watch the tv and finds out she has been banned from nbc for life oh oh oh for life for for for for life and indeed the nbc switchboards are lit up with calls from the pissed off catholics you know the catholic league is in there getting their wick in there yeah yeah okay the usual gang of suspects right right yeah the next week joe peshy hosts s and l he says he would have given shanaid such a smack and they everybody laughs and he holds up a the taped together picture of the pope to much applause oh god he said he would hit her frank sinatra said the same thing the sensation around her was like well if you're

gonna shave your head like a man and use your mouth like a man i can bop you like i mean like i think it's legit that yeah there are bulldozers crushing shanaid records in time square it's oh we'll donate ten dollars to blah blah blah for every shanaid blah blah blah crush send them to her that kind of shite everyone and their dog is issuing public comment writing in catholic new york john cardinal o'connor suggested that the singer had employed voodoo or sympathetic magic to physically destroy her enemy in the vatican so we've gone right to she's a witch yeah yeah wow that was medieval cool tight madonna she sticks her beak in she starts a little pop star if you was shanaid and then later on i think on s and l she rips up a photo of joey batifuko as a parody

of shanaid and joey batifuko was some sleaze you wouldn't like him yeah i i think i remember that i remember well i think there's been quite a few parodies of that so it's iconic it's iconic i mean she's an iconic moment in in television in music history yeah in an interview with time magazine after the fact it's like a month later shanaid clarifies it's not the man obviously it's the office and the symbol of the organization that he represents in ireland we see her people are manifesting the highest incidents in europe of child abuse this is a direct result of the fact that they're not in contact with their history as ireish people and the fact that in the schools the priests have been beating the shit out of the children for years and sexually abusing them

this is the example that's been set for the people of ireland they have been controlled by the church the very people who authorized what was done to them who gave permission for what was done to them in this article the interviewer janice c simpson seems skeptical of her motivations repeatedly doubting her statements indeed no american journalists seem to have followed up on her allegations in any way preferring instead to use their platform to depict the singer as a provocative loon right yeah the answer that i just read out of shanaids there is i would say typical of her candor during this interview you might agree or disagree with the way she goes about things but she's being very upfront about the way she feels there is no

mincing of word she says we are manifesting the highest incidents in europe of child abuse as a direct result of the fact that we are being abused by the priesthood there is no longer any ambiguity yeah she has said exactly what she needs right exactly yeah here are some of the questions you sound as if you're saying the church is the root of all evil don't you believe the church has done any good at all but if you want to get your message across isn't there a way to do it without offending people but how does this relate to child abuse that was what she said so the question was what connection do you see between the church and child abuse shanaid gave the answer that i just said about like the priests are kicking the shit out of kids in schools and sexually abusing and

that's how yeah and then she responds but how does this relate to child abuse that whoa wasn't there some other way you could have made your these leading questions shouldn't you have done this but shouldn't you have shut the fuck up but should you have grown out your hair but shouldn't you there's there's no fucking but shouldn't you be nice to the priests who cares who cares and she is sitting there explaining herself explicitly yeah she spelled it directly out yeah the fucking responses but what does that have to do with child abuse from time magazine incredible fuck him shanaid doesn't quite grasp the magnitude of the rage toward her until a week after s&l

when she's a performer at a concert in madison square garden celebrating the career of one of her musical idols bob dillon she's part of a lineup here yeah country musician chris christofferson makes the introduction i'm real proud to introduce this next artist whose name has become synonymous with courage and integrity ladies and gentlemen shanaid okay yeah very nice introduction very class introduction he comes out to gem in this story yeah shanaid comes out in her little turquoise frock she's very excited about because turquoise represents communication and mediumship and when she comes out to the stage she's met with a wall of booze and shanaid's like fuck they don't like the dress it hasn't even occurred to her what this is about yet yeah quoting shanaid then the other

half of the audience begins cheering to fight off the booers and there ensues a noise the likes of which i have never heard and can't describe other than to say it's like a thunder clap that never ends the loudest noise i've ever heard like a sonic riot as if the sky is ripping apart it makes me feel really nauseous and it almost bursts my eardrums and for a minute or two i'm not sure the audience members aren't actually gonna riot they're already clashing so badly with their voices how do i know what else might happen whoa everyone's booing or cheering to drown out each other kind of thing and shanaid is there and and we see the micro expressions again on her beautiful face her little mouth twitches as she's fucking talking to god trying to figure out what she should do

right now she's scheduled to perform bob dylan's 1976 gospel song i believe in you at a whisper one which will absolutely not be heard over the sky ripping apart no someone backstage gets antsy and sends chris christofferson out to get her offstage like go give baldy the hook basically i'm i'm paraphrasing fair and instead christofferson gives her a hug and he says don't let the bastards get you down to it shanaid who's embarrassed that you know this guy's like white knighting her a bit responds i'm not down she continues to wait out the booze she's just standing there she can see her just like trying to think out what she should do yeah her accompanist begins to play the song but she signals him to stop and turn up the mic a pinch because she's

gotten her answer from god she's to do what jesus would do and she begins to scream into the mic with all the rage she can muster in encore of bob marley's war whoa when she can go on no longer she collapses in tears into chris christofferson's arms she gags and covers her mouth like she's fully about to yak but chris just pulls her into this tight hug and bundles her off the stage in 2009 christofferson will release a song called sister shanaid as an old two o'connor's bravery whoa when shanaid gets backstage at the tribute concert she decides that this is bob dylan's fault for not wrangling his audience so she gives him like a pissy glare much to his confusion he's like whether who what fair enough well the next day she attempts to inform dylan and his manager about

the abuse in the catholic church and seek their support to no avail they're not biting on her oh and that is basically that for shanaid's mainstream american pop career she never went to number one again she never had her big hits again in america it's a misnomer to say that she threw her career away for her beliefs that's how some articles like to frame it right yeah not really she remained a successful and well-loved artist internationally and in her native ireland obviously but still faced a lot of cruelty and isolation from here uh kind of unfortunately shanaid broadly becomes known for her public mental health episodes hospitalization suicide attempts outrageous things she says on twitter she makes controversial statements about the i r a anal

sex miley cyrus white people she's retired and unretired many times she said a million provocative things only to explicitly retract them she falls in and out of touch with parents siblings children has been some custody shit oh she's catholic she's muslim she changes her name twice i think she's looking for a place she feels safe yeah but she also makes a million albums and raises her kids and records in all of these amazing places and goes to school for theology and records dagger through the heart for a dolly part and tribute album all these other cool things that are equally as important as the you know so-called bad things that she has become known for through infamy right unfortunately we lose a lot of detail here shanaid was smoking the weed and having the trauma and

has lost quite a bit of her memory from the bulk of her adulthood whoa in 2015 her mental health takes a very public hit after she has a hysterectomy due to suffering from endometriosis throws her hormones out of whack goes untreated by the doctors she's kind of living in various places in america here yeah she has this basically a years long meltdown she ends up in a in a new jersey motel room and her alarming facebook live video that she makes from there it makes its way into the hands of none other than dr fel oh no don't worry guys this story has a happy ending dr fel is here oh no i went to the doctor and guess what he told me he said shanaid i'm really worried about you dr fel

shanaids uh health care team at the hospital who know a bit better than her in this instance they beg her not to do it but shanaid wants weed and cigarettes and money so she's like fix my life fel she spills her guts to him and his goblins and like everyone ever she feels isolated and exploited by the dr fel crew unfortunately the whole thing ends up with her being taken back to the hospital traumatized ah thankfully after this with the help of her ex-husband john who is the father of her first child shanaid is able to get back to ireland where she gets hormone replacement therapy and is able to get back on a more even keel mentally hormones they are powerful dude whoo she ends up studying and converting to islam she wears a hijab and

changes her name as we've discussed to shuhada satakat in 2021 shanaids memoir rememberings came out to a claim i read it it's great and and this documentary also nothing compares came out serana we're on like a really good pro shanaid wave a new album was due to materialize in 2022 but very tragically shanaid's 17 year old son shane committed suicide oh i know he was precocious and charming and shanaid named him in her book as the child most like her oh i know i know my heart fucking is devastated for that entire family in january 2022 after expressing suicidal ideations on twitter shanaid was herself hospitalized that's last we've heard we love you shahada get up when you can

and on that horribly sad note and with my apologies we conclude the story of shanaid o'connor such as it has already been written it's not done yeah and we return to the question we asked at the beginning of our journey was it worth it shanaid was a pariah in america for decades she says the experience was incredibly isolating to have been treated like a mental case because of it offstage and on in private and in public even in my bed but even in spite of that pain she says she has absolutely no regrets about ripping up the photo an artist's job is sometimes not to be popular she says an artist's job sometimes is just to create conversation where conversation is needed i'm not at all sorry about it she holds no animosity

toward the american public for receiving her so poorly or being disbelieving of her message quote priests raping children jesus christ of course it was crazy to them but she resists the idea that the controversy created by her s and l appearance derailed her career if anything she says having a number one record derailed her career and ripping up the photo re-railed it oh yeah i wasn't comfortable with what other people called success because it meant that i had to be as others wanted me to be yeah after s and l i could just be me do what i love be imperfect be mad even anything i don't define success as having a good name or being wealthy i define success by whether i keep the contract i made with the holy spirit before i made one

with the music business i never signed anything that said i would be a good girl i have supported my four children for 35 years i supported us by performing live and i became if i may say so a very fine live performer so far from the pope episode destroying my career it set me on a path that fit me better i'm not a pop star i'm just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mics now and then i don't need to be number one i don't need to be liked i don't need to be welcome at the amas i just need to pay my yearly overheads get shit off my chest and not compromise or prostitute myself spiritually yeah damn that feels very true she's right she wasn't meant to be a pop star she's not a pop star she never she's a protest singer yeah like with range she can do standards she can do

show tunes she's got a beautiful voice yeah but what motivates her to music is this contract that she's made with the holy spirit that like this is what i want to do with my with my gift and my and my art right yeah totally in the end she says of the incident that was the proudest thing i've ever done as an artist they broke my heart and they killed me but i didn't die they tried to bury me they didn't realize i was a seed in 1993 a year after shanaid's snl appearance a mass of unmarked graves were discovered on the property of a former magdalene laundry in dublin in all 155 corpses were exhumed and cremated leading to much public outcry and re-examination of what happened in these laundries survivors of the magdalene laundries began to come forward and

share their stories and after much resistance and much advocacy in 2013 t-shirt and a kenny formally apologized to the victims of the magdalene laundries calling them the the laundries the nation's shame in the years that have followed thousands of cases of sexual abuse a galaxy of them too many to count i looked for a number and no one even tried thousands of cases of sexual abuse committed by and actively concealed by the catholic church have come to light and been verified among these were cases that by the vatican's own reporting pope john paul the second you good and god damn well about for most of these cases apologies and amends are forthcoming not like imminently forthcoming like we're still struggling yeah i don't know the value of indication

if there's any solace in being abused and rejected for years and then being acknowledged to have been right all along but for whatever it's worth the name shanaid o'connor in a modern context has become synonymous with vindication in my completely anecdotal experience just one guy perusing the comment sections online in 2023 public sympathy is overwhelmingly in shanaid's favor yeah says youtube commenter jal 7852 with the over 200 000 cases of pedophilia in france the indigenous residential schools of north america and so many atrocities that have been brought to light we owe this woman an apology says our tristrian as a gay man constantly being told by the catholic church that i'm going to hell because of my lifestyle this was iconic fight the real enemy and says

daniel mccarthy this was the greatest thing shanaid ever did this did not ruin her career even slightly it immortalized her forever as a voice for good over evil but let's give the final word to shanaid who wrote in her 2021 book rememberings if anyone truly wants to know me the best way is through my songs there is nothing i could write in this book or tell you that would help you get to know me it is all in the songs so everyone you turn off this episode go listen to some shanaid o'connor it's good fucking music nothing compares to you what do you think do you think that 604 will keep us around or do you think that that we fucked up our edition let's go shave our heads let's go piss them off nothing but ripping up pictures that nobody can see because we're a podcast

they're making a statement but i don't know what it is i can't see it that's all the all the podcast comments one star i can't see what you're doing i don't know what's happening thanks for listening if you want more infamy we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts if you want to support the podcast shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweet infamy but no pressure bittersweet infamy is free baby you can always support us by liking rating subscribing leaving a review following us on instagram at bittersweetinfamy or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it stay sweet

the sources that i use for the infamous you heard earlier was an article in atlas obscura princess k of the milky way butterheads minnesota state fair st paul minnesota contributed by lee chavez bush published july 16th 2018 i looked at the website for midwest dairy i watched a short interview with linda christensen on cbs sunday morning posted to youtube september 5th 2021 the video is entitled minnesota state fair buttersculpture ends her half a century ago and the song that you heard as the interstitial was and read song the fair written and performed by and read also a shout out to her podcast life gets real where and read interviews a series of women all of them over 60

the sources i use for this week's episode were geneto connor's 2021 book rememberings the 2021 documentary nothing compares the redemption of geneto connor by michael regresta october 3rd 2012 the atlantic 30 years ago geneto connor tears picture of the pope on snl by denis perkins october 3rd 2022 geneto connor is still in one piece by jeff edgers march 18th 2020 that's in the washington post vatican reports is pope john paul the second new about allegations against former cardinal by scott newman november 10th 2020 and geneto connor's performance of war from saturday night live on october 3rd 1992 host on youtube by sticky marks under the title fight the real enemy bob marley's war

performed by geneto connor the song you're currently listening to is tea street by brian steel sorry about the irish accents all of ireland you can do ours too let's check