The Drunkalogues

Patti Clark grew up in Redwood City where she overcame a childhood marked by absentee parents to graduate high school and attend a good college. A sort of divine intervention shaped the trajectory of her life and then a tarot card reader helped her recognize her own addiction. She spent 13 years sober, determined to raise her own children in a way that was different from her own upbringing, but then - after 13 years sober - started drinking again. But she's sober now and has a new book out - RECOVERY ROAD TRIP - which is part narrative and part work book - a compendium of weekly exercises to chart a more fulfilling path of your own. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

My original notes... Jamie Niven is the son of international movie star and academy award winner for best actor, David Niven. But I really knew him from my parents crowd of waspy New Yorkers spending the summers out on Long Island where he was always the life of the party and where growing up I had rarely seen any of his set get sober. He had a career in finance before becoming an entrepreneur and then spent 20 years at Sothebys where he eventually rose to the position of Chairman of the Americas. He has a long career in philanthropy and currently chairs the Partnership to End Addiction.

John Machado struggled wiht addictoin for years before a doctor's visit necessseitate a meeting with an addiction specilist who helped get him into rehab to begin a long process to recovery.. They say relapse is a part of the process of recovery but this convesation made me think that maybe the road to recovery is paved with all kinds of experiences some of which form the building blocks of a healthy life. John has published several books including his most recent works BRONZE JAZZ and JOHNNY BLUE AND THE RIGHTEOUS SPIN.

Keep seeing Eric in my social media feed, and he is always just so frikken funny, innovative and original. Impecable delivery. Check him out! He talks here a lot here about what it was like to grow up as a gay man in the mid-west! Eric Hahn is a stand up comedian who grew up in a steel town in Ohio where he started drinking at age 12. He narrowly escaped a career as a butcher before finding his way to Los Angeles via a lucrative career in the restaurant business which was upended when his employers saw his first stand up set on YouTube. I realized Eric was sober via his hilarious twitter feed, and he shared with me here some frank and very very funny stories about coming of age as a gay man in the mid-west.

Nick Jonsson grew up in Sweden where drinking beer was kind of a way of life. His drinking escalated when he moved to Australia for college and then got out of control when he started working in advertising and PR in Southeast Asia where the ex-pat community thrived in a lively and inexpensive bar scene. His life was turned upside down after a couple job losses and he soon found himself drinking just to make it through the day. Eventually, he was hospitalized and managed through phamaceutical intervention and twelve steps to get sober. When a friend and colleague lost his life to suicide, a message Nick posted on line went viral, and he now divides his time between his work running an executive peer support group and his work as a writer and speaker. He has a new book out, Executive Loneliness, that is available everyhwere.

I came across Tom Vaughan on twitter and started following him for his helpful screenwriting tips, and then one day he tweeted something about his sobriety and I reached out to see if we would be interested in coming on the pod. He graciously agreed, and I imagined some sort of quasi-scholarly discussion about story structure and sobriety. Little did I realize, Tom and I had crossed paths in my most formative Hollywood years and shared so much in common... not least of all being our penchant for pre-pubescent car theft! You can tune into his many screenwriting resources at storyandplot.com

Sometimes I do a podcast and by the end of the conversation my guest and I are friends for lise. Such was the case with Jenny Aurthur! Original notes: Jenny Aurthur grew up in a somewhat nomadic family - traveling in a large bus to organize neighborhoods for the Communist Labor Party, and while her parents never married, they maintained a strong family dynamic. So it was especially traumatic when she lost two members of her family to suicide and then - in sobriety - grieved as her closest friend also took his own life. Despite all that her joy remains in tact and reverberates thru this convo.