Hi, I'm martha stewart and I want to tell you all about my new podcast. I'm often interviewed now, I'm asking the questions. Conversations with people who intrigue and inspire me my friend and business partner, snoop, dogg entrepreneurial powerhouses like a rod and kris jenner, and that is just the start. We cover the personal and the professional everything from family to fun to building empires this into the Martha stewart podcast wherever you get your podcast welcome to stuff missed in history class a production of I heart, radio happy friday, everybody I'm coming frying about tracy, bewildering, tracy he met at a time when we are both doing costume thing, we sure did so this. What makes all the sense on earth to me

do you remember, though, I'm not sure how in but I know you are involved a lot with the local costume group here in atlanta, but I have for a long time been involved with a lot of costume being message boards and do you remember when the term cause play in lieu of costume eying got brought up in fan groups and like the massive debates and arguments over a year after the debate that I recall were about whether there was a difference between costume, ing and cosplay, and there was argument that if you were in cars play, you were roleplaying as a character, not just wearing a costume correct that came up Why am I think, a lot of it too? Was an old guard thing right, people that they had been in it for a long time doing

a communal, whatever fan groupie costume, there was also a tendency to see cause as an a largely autonomy thing and nine another more main stream pop culture things. Way. I remember how heated those discussions got and now I just looked back and go. Who cares? None of that was important. Why did we waste v? you valuable life energy arguing about whether this word was appropriate for people to use or not sought a gate keeping involves. Oh, of course, who was a cause player and who, with a serious costumer right yeah, you know, went, have fun doing your thing. That's all that matters. Life is short grab your swat of everywhere you- can get sluggish you're, not hurting anybody else. Go crazy where things act like the character. Not I don't care. I support you whatever you do I am I, of course, love costume

I love the costuming community. I met my very best friend on a star wars, costuming forum, twenty three or twenty four years ago. So it's one that's close to me and I actually met through several years ago. He mentioned in our interview that dragon con twenty nine team, he was taking some of the pictures and doing some of the interviews and research for the book, and he and I met to just like- have a drink there and catch up cause. We, kind of known of each other, and so I met him. Then, when he was working on the book- and I remember thinking it was a great project, and so I am glad that, despite the many setbacks in many projects that have happened due to the pandemic, that this book is finally coming out and ready for the world, there's a lot of really good history and imagery in it, and it's a really like. I was kind of blown away by how deep into history he goes nice night, especially because cosplay is, as we said in modern times,

Hmm I at first was like I would love to have you on the show, but I really need to read the galleys. This actually feels like a a natural fit, and it really does that and Jules Verne's party that he talked about. I was obsessed with when I was reading that chapter so nice, I loved it's a very fun read if you like, if you like clothes and costuming, and also just if you like you, know the history of how people

or have taken on different visual persona, says tat is to say things in beef ina. We talked about protest, costume, ing in in that conversation and how long that has been going on in just you know all the ways that people kind of change their perspective by does dawning indifferent outfit that is outside of their norm. I love all that stuff. I love the psychology of it. I love the workmanship, it goes into it. I love, you know, I'm a close worsens be honest. So am I am so grateful that that andrew and I gotta have a conversation in an reminisce about many things

talk about how star wars, brats fracture fact about mother, rebecca fact, jackson this week in the community of predominantly black shakers that she has savest in philadelphia, which is not a place, but you would normally think of them. In like a shaker village villages as usually what goes along with the word shaker in the context of places that people lived. Yes, You talked about in the episode how how most of the the places where Shakers had Gathered were will ya. Philadelphia, not rural at all, not at all and said. only one one active community still remaining, that has had two or three members over the last several years.

A lot of the other places that used to be active, shaker communities are now shaker museums. There are several shaker museums, scattered around the. U s that folks can go to. There is also a museum at this one that is still active in maine, although I'm assuming because of covert the museum, is not currently open. One of the interesting things that I found out about rebecca Cox jackson is that she wrote so much about dreams that she would have and visions that she would have, and these experiences that she would have to her, where just like, intrinsically holy and involves hearing something. She felt directly from god, and all of that is incredibly personal right, but at the same time they will work late, like they were written about and write them about them in an introspective way. So we live

don't necessarily know what her feelings were on things like what thought process led her to make particular decisions, it was sort of like I had this vision and that this is what I decided to do so. People who have written about her have had the kind of speculate about. You know why. Why did she decide to do this? One particular thing and one of the sources of speculation is that, as we said, the shakers had as a core belief that people were equal, so this included racial equality. At the same time, though, shakers in the nineteenth century did not really conceive of themselves as like citizens of the united states, so things that were legal matters or matters of citizenship within the united states, like slavery, slavery,

something that's shakers objected to on moral and ethical grounds, but it there wasn't like an outwardly facing. We have to go. Get slavery abolished like that. Wasn't that that wasn't really part of the world view that was going on as there has been the speculation that may be one of the reasons that rebecca Cox jack then wanted to leave and be somewhere else that she could do more. Direct outreach was so that she can have more direct influence and empty. on these kinds of things that were seen as like, more mundane, northern spiritual matters that that most of the shaker community would not have been personally involved in right. It's like the difference between belief in activism. Re write down right. There is a core belief that everyone was equal with the king,

heavy eyed that shakers, like everyone else, had been raised in the same society that everyone else had been raised and which was a racist society, so surely there would have been people who still had implicit biases ends. You know attitudes that they may be needed to reexamine for themselves, but, like there's a difference between that and actively saying, ok, we have got to work to abolish slavery for the rest of the country. Now I will say that, as we mention in the upper soon life in a community such as that sounds incredibly difficult, yeah, so yeah, The one village that still actively operating is called sabbath day. Lake is in maine, they have a website and they have a lot of videos from one of the folks that is still actively living there as a shaker, and he has also done interviews and things like that are interviews and videos and other

on texts and one of the things we ve talked about that I did not have time to go back and explore very thoroughly is that there was a period. We're shaker leadership, made an intentional choice to sir not focus on recruiting more adult members, but to instead focusing on like adopting children and raising them as shakers with the hope that then, as they grew up, they would continue to be shakers which did not really like. There were some folks, like some children that were adopt, at her fostered or whatever, who did continue to be shakers, but a lot of people left and sort of making the point that the way of life was so difficult and so specific in what was required that you could only keep this going if you continue to have more people coming in and if you weren't actively converting people to come in, it was inevitable that the membership was going to dwindle in the communities are going to start

eating away. Basically, I'm resisting the urge to make this a discussion about Jed. I have now that you mention it. I can see that there are some parallels first sure yeah, I think the of life, definitely I'm sure, sounds as alien to many of our listeners as it does to me, and I don't mean that to sound pejorative. But it sounds. A completely different from the way most of its live our lives, that it is very hard to parse and imagine oneself living in that manner. So I'm I kind of could just sit here marveling I also for the record could not live as a jet I so you know it's a cycle of having no force abilities her, but it sam

its fascinating to me. I there is part of me that's lake, but if ye recognise that there is an inherent lead towards your membership, falling back in numbers, are you sure that it's what a divine being would want right? But that is my ignorant self talking. So I have no idea who have difficulty imagining a life of my own. Apparently I think all of us have that do at least. I am extent- and as I was as I was researching this then I was reading some of her writings. She reminded me a lot of in a lot of ways of some of the medieval religious women that we have talked about on the show like christian mistakes from the medieval period, I felt they had some parallels there. Oh yeah, I did not do this

our, but but when we were in italy, there was this little church in this little medieval town that we went to that all this artwork and there was monuments to a young woman who had died. and during the medieval period- and there was a little pamphlet about her and I started reading it and it was, you know it started off talking about how she had been very devout and she was very beloved by her community and then she became very ill, and I had this moment where I was like. Oh I'm I'm about to learn about a lake very obscure, mystic her hand that same prior and tradition, and then it turned out. That was that it was a much more straightforward and sad story. She'd she became very ill and then she passed she died. So that was the sort of the end of the story. Then you know her memory became the thing that that people connected To this end, I was like how I had hoped to have another.

Article or another podcast or research along those lines, groups that out and then I got home and was looking for something that was not related to italy at all, because I had just written the marino, full euro episode and stumbled onto this name somewhere and then was like all this by total coincidence, winds up being sort of some of the things that my brain had been mulling over. While we were in italy I was not able to read every single passage from her writings while I was working on this because there are quite a lot of them, but I still have that book from the library. Usually get to the end of an episode. The thing does not get like. Unless, unless we do, our He way step on the episode and I'm like uh. Oh, I think I messed something up. I gotta go look that up like I don't return to the subject matter, but in this case I think I might.

Continue. Reading the things that sea wrote and her journals and and and rebecca, perhaps journals just because I find them interesting, they are very different from my own experience in the world and I'm glad she wrote them all down if you would like some definite where history podcast that I heard radioed ends with his bright eyes. So whatever is happening on here, we can hope it's good a man will be rack saturday, we decided classic and then next week with brand new episodes stuff, you must, in history class the production of iheart radio for more plug gaps. I heart radio visit the iheart radio, app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite, shows.