All Mothers Know (Ep. 78 - Clueless)

This Week's Guest: Jonathan Federico

Who can you trust to keep your secrets safe? Well that might depend on the secret. Jonathan Federico wasn't sure the people in his life could handle the truth about him, so he entrusted the truth to fictional figures, disappearing into alter-egos on stage. Occupying characters was comforting to him -- but it wasn't until well into adulthood that he was ready to discover how much better it felt to finally be himself.

This Week's Recommendation: Cole Escola and AB Soto

As for my recommendation this week, I don't even know where to begin so I'm going to give you options -- two queer artists Jonathan's worked with. The first is the mind-altering comedy of Cole Escola, who you might know from Jeffery & Cole Casserole, or his live shows, or a neverending cavalcade of strange and hilarious YouTube videos where he plays everyone from Bernadette Peters to someone's mom.

And then there's AB Soto, an incredible dancer whose music videos feature hypnotic visions of strange gyrating creatures. Watching him perform feels a bit like that moment right before you fall asleep and then wake back up and you're not sure if the thing you were just thinking about actually happened or was a dream.

Cole and AB are really really different from each other, but there is something that ties them together -- they don't just create characters, they create entire alternate universes. Cole's weird Joyce character cannot possibly exist in the same dimension as us, and the same goes for the AB Soto, whose entire life seems to be one big sexy exploding dance number.

And while they may seem to have singlehandedly created fantasy worlds of their own imaginings, that's not actually the case. Like Jonathan said, queer artists need help, they need support, they need each other to bring their ideas to life. Visionaries needs more than their visions -- they need an army of like-minded creatives behind them. So that way they'll be ready when there's an audience in front of them.

Clips of Things We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Little Mouse in a Big World (Ep. 77 - Furries)

This Week's Guest: Mouse

We all have alter egos -- most of us more than one. There's the person you are at work, the person you are online, the fun person you are when splashing around at the beach, the responsible person you are when your parents are visiting, and the unique kind of angry person that only exists when you're waiting for everyone ahead of you to get off the airplane.

But for some, those alter-egos aren't people at all. My guest this week is Mouse, a furry artist who never felt like he fit in with other humans. Fortunately, times being what they are, you no longer have to fit in with humans. There's a whole big wide world of cartoon animals out there you can join instead. And as Mouse found, sometimes those people who are animals are better people than the people who are people.

This Week's Recommendation: Pinocchio

Thanks again to Mouse for joining me, and also for the lovely illustration that he drew depicting me as a rabbit. As a slightly nervous, always listening, mostly-herbivore, no depiction could possibly be more appropriate. 

For more of Mouse's work, check out his latest project, Mice Making Love, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's at MiceMakingLove.tumblr.com. The art spans all genders and sexualities, kinks, partner arrangements, body types, and, just to warn you, there is one cat.

For my recommendation this week, I'd like to you turn your gaze to another character with large ears: Pinocchio. Specifically, give the Pleasure Island scene a watch. If you dare. It is full-on dark Disney, a fantastically scary form of body-horror that will stay with you whether you want it to or not.

I'm sure you're familiar with the scene -- Pinocchio and Lampwick and the other bad boys have found their way to an island where pleasures await, but when they indulge too much they're turned into donkeys and sent to work in salt mines. The scene where Lampwick struggles and screams as he changes is unforgettable, no matter how you interpret it, and it culminates in Pinocchio's body starting to change as well. He drank and smoked, and as a result our hero grows ears and a tail.

In the movie, this is depicted as horrifying, and yes if it goes any further and he's confined to bestial labor in the salt mines it is indeed a troubling fate. But Pinocchio's changes really stop at the ideal point: subtle enough that he can hide them in a hat or down his pants, but still an unmistakable badge of his adventure. A reminder that it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some fun, to go a little wild, and be disobedient -- just as long as you can keep it under your hat.

Thanks again for listening. If you're enjoying the show, I hope you'll become a supporter on Patreon -- it's quick and easy and your support keeps the show alive. Just visit SewersOfParis.com and click the Patreon button to sign up. And check out the shownotes at SewersOfParis.com to watch video clips of everything we talked about on this week's show.

Or you can support the show for free -- just tweet or facebook about it, or leave an iTunes review. I'm really really grateful to all the folks who have helped spread the word about The Sewers of Paris. Because of your tweets, I've booked some high-profile guests who saw online praise for the show and reached out to say "hey, can I be on the show too?"

Remember to head over to PlayingWithPride.com to find out when you can see the stories we've gathered from queer gamers. And say hi if you'll be at GaymerX in October.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Clam Diggers and Mussel Suckers (Ep. 76 - Coco Peru)

This Week's Guest: Coco Peru

What happens to fussy little boys who love musical theater and have lots of feelings? If they're lucky, they grow up to be fearless women. My guest this week is the fabulous Miss Coco Peru, who you've seen in movies like Girls Will be Girls, To Wong Foo, Trick, and as a guest star in the greatest cold open in the entire run of Will and Grace.

Like most sensitive boys, Coco grew up feeling as though she was on an island -- but in her case, it was literally true. Fortunately, she had records to keep her company, and occasional trips to the bright lights of Broadway.

In fact, it was while riding the train in New York that she discovered what she now calls the key to her career -- and her liberation.

By the way, if you live in New York, you can see Coco live at the end of September in her show "A Gentle Reminder: Coco's Guide to a Somewhat Happy Life." Head over to cocoperu.com for tickets.

And if you're in Seattle, you can see me live with my partner James. We're presenting a panel about LGBT gamers at the Penny Arcade Expo on September 5th. It's called "Playing with Pride" and we'll be sharing personal, intimate stories shared by queer gamers all over the country. If you enjoy the storytelling on Sewers of Paris, you'll probably like this panel. And if you can't make it, don't worry -- sign up for our mailing list at PlayingWithPride.com to get updates about our gamer interview project.

And one more announcement: I'm going to be at the National Gay and Lesbian Journalist's Association annual convention in Miami from September 8th through the 10th. If you're going to be there, or just in the area, drop me a line @mattbaume on Twitter.

This Week's Recommendation: Wigstock

For my recommendation this week, check out the 1995 documentary Wigstock. The entire thing is on YouTube, and it's a mid-90s snapshot of New York's gigantic drag festival that started sometime in the 80s and at its height drew thousands of people. 

It's an amazing artifact of the time, joyful and defiant and weird -- a testament to queer determination to throw a party. Remember, by the mid-90s the gay community was at the apex of a health crisis, enduring unbearable loss and years of mainstream indifference. 1995 was the year that promising new treatments emerged and everything started to change, and there's an optimism to everything the film touches that makes the epidemic seem like it was all a bad dream.

These days, Wigstock the festival is gone, and exists as an occasional modest cruise. Maybe things have been going so well that we now have time, rather than a party, to put distance between us and the hard times. And it certainly feels good to reflect on the progress that we've made over the 21 years since the documentary came out. 

But -- and I'm sorry to be a bummer here -- bad news is always lurking around the corner, as we've seen with recent politics. In the event that times get tough once again, and at some point they probably will, it's worth remembering how we coped with adversity in the past. With music, with dance, with each other, and with really big hair.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

 

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

A Gateway Drug to Fabulous (Ep. 75 - 80s Cartoons)

This Week's Guest: Ted Biaselli

How far can passion take you? My guest this week is Ted Biaselli, a TV development executive who's had a hand in shows from My Little Pony to Elvira's Movie Macabre. I've had the lovely pleasure of knowing Ted for a couple of years, and from our first meeting -- at a Dr. Who themed Halloween party that he threw -- it was clear this this is a man who lives to entertain. It's kids' shows where his passion lies, ever since he was, well, a kid. And when he moved to LA as an animated art-school gay, he brought with him an infectious enthusiasm for the weird shows he watched as a child. And now these days, the spirit of the shows that filled his youth are what animate the shows he puts on TV.

This Week's Recommendation: Kubo and the Two Strings

Adults love to complain that today's cartoons are nowhere near as good as the cartoons we had when WE were kids. Often we're remembering our own childhood shows more fondly than they might deserve. Not to mention, that grousing overlooks the truly wonderful, strange, risk-taking new entertainment that's still being made for kids today. And for this week's recommendation, please tell everyone you know to go see Kubo and the Two Strings. It's playing in theaters right now, and I've been describing it to people as The Wizard of Oz plus Alice and Wonderland as directed by Miyazaki. You just have to see it.

The movie takes place in a fantasy version of Japan, with monsters and gods and magic powers. The hero, Kubo, is a boy with a gift for telling stories. And as he tells his stories, they come true, sort of. It's a movie with a lot of ideas, but the one that I keep coming back to is the power that a good story has to shape the world around us. The mortal realm is messy and chaotic and disordered, and storytelling converts that chaos into -- well, not quite order, but sense. It gives the mess meaning.

Getting enough people to agree on the same story, the same meaning, can be a powerful force for good or for bad. But stories aren't just made to be told. They're made to be listened to. And its through listening that we find people whose stories complement our own.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

 

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The Women and the Monsters (Ep. 74: Drew Droege)

This Week's Guest: Drew Droege

Why do villains get to have all the fun? Surely you've noticed that Darth Vader has a better time than Luke Skywalker, that the Joker relishes his misdeeds, and that Skeletor lives in a party house. One of my favorite movie lines ever is when Magneto tells Rogue "we love what you've done with your hair."

Drew Droege may have come to your attention on YouTube, performing as the character Chloe, but he's been inhabiting colorful characters for years. In fact you can see Drew onstage in his new show, Bright Colors and Bold Patterns. It's running from September 16-18 at the Barrow St in New York, then Monday nights at Celebration Theater in LA starting September 26.

His whole life, Drew found himself unable to resist the devious charm of over the top villains, particularly women like Divine and Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. There's just something irresistible about the way they chew/claw the scenery, and when he moved to LA to be an actor, he discovered that he could put their colorful turpitude to use as inspiration in service of his career.

This Week's Recommendation: I'm So Beautiful

Thanks again to Drew for joining me. And don't miss him in New York and LA -- his show Bright Colors and Bold Patterns is running from September 16-18 at the Barrow St in New York, then Monday nights at Celebration Theater in LA starting September 26. The show's about a gay man who's scared that with the onset of gay marriage, he'll become respectable and boring -- the worst thing that can happen to anyone -- and if you're worried about the same thing happening to you, allow me to make a recommendation: head over to SewersOfParis.com and look for Drew's episode, which I'll be posting along with a very special music video.

The video's called I'm so Beautiful, and it stars Divine singing ferociously about her incredible beauty. Now, just to set the scene here: she is wearing a dress that looks like uncooked ground beef, a wig that looks like an albino tumbleweed, and the rouge on her cheeks is so emphatic it looks like a sunburn. And there is simply no way you could dress Divine that she would not be a strange sight. But she's made up her mind about how she looks: she is beautiful, as she sings over... and over ... and over ... in a tone so aggressive you don't dare argue.

The song's a nice little pep talk -- if this vision can determine that she's beautiful, surely so can we all. And what I love about it is that it's so sincere. Divine is definitely not the butt of the joke here, an ugly drag queen meant to be laughed at. No, her incredible boast, her flaunting of her body, and the room of mirrors she's in makes it clear that she knows precisely what she looks like and if you don't agree that she's beautiful, there's something wrong with you.

In all of her roles, Divine exhibits a power to create a strange alternate reality, and to then insist that you join her inside. She makes it so easy to play along, to agree, to be a part of her weird world. That's an amazing gift, because if you ever feel too boring or too respectable or too much of a stereotype, all you have to do is nod your head along to this bellowing drag queen, and agree, yes, you are beautiful, and suddenly you're as otherworldly as she is.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

We Were Our Own John Hughes Movie (Ep. 73 - Voyagers)

This Week's Guest: AK Miller

Would you rather travel the world to seek out new experiences, or create new experiences in your own home town? My guest this week is Chicago theater person AK Miller, who couldn't wait to leave his small town and find the big-city gay communities he'd always read about.

But before long, he discovered that being part of a gay community can go way beyond simply moving to a major metropolis. He could go even further, not just joining but creating a community, the likes of which he'd only ever read about.

This Week's Recommendation: Jobriath

Thanks again to AK Miller for joining me. You might've noticed that he mentioned Caffe Cino in New York, an experimental theater that changed performance in the 1960s. I interviewed one of the playwrights who worked there, Robert Patrick, on episode 66 of The Sewers of Paris. So if you'd like to hear about what it was like to be a gay playwright in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, just hop back a few episodes and listen to Robert Patrick's story. It's pretty incredible.

My recommendation this week is a Google search. Go look up a man named Jobriath and just start clicking and reading and watching and you will discover an incredible performer who was going to be the next David Bowie until he went too far, was too gay, and the world turned its back on him.

You owe it to yourself to learn about this man. Just click everything that comes up. Read his wikipedia article. Watch the few youtube videos that exist. Find the documentary that was made a few years ago called Jobriath AD. He was an amazing, groundbreaking artist, the first openly gay musician signed by a major record label, an early casualty of HIV, and for some reason we've allowed him to be almost completely forgotten by history. 

Well it's time to rediscover Jobriath. He was extravagant and strange and he created elaborate queer performances, such as a planned show where he would appear as "King Kong being projected upwards on a mini Empire State Building. This will turn into a giant spurting penis and I will have transformed into Marlene Dietrich."

He called himself "rock's truest fairy" and maybe it's statements like that that explain why mainstream audiences just weren't willing to embrace him. It was the 1970s, and gay musicians winked -- they didn't climb spurting penises.

But while his memory faded, his influence still lives: you can feel his fingerprint in the music of The Pet Shop Boys, Gary Numan, Siousxie Sioux, and Def Leppard. Morrissey cites him as an inspiration. So whether he's recognized or not, Jobriath's still with us. He's all around us. Like so many great artists, gay and straight, he gave us a gift when he was alive. And we're only just now figuring out how to unwrap it.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

A Bomb Went Through the Wall of the House (Ep. 72 - Sondheim)

This Week's Guest: Daniel Krolik

Is it better to hope for the best and risk disappointment, or expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised? My guest this week is Daniel Krolik, one of the hosts of the podcast Bad Gay Movies Bitchy Gay Men. On each episode he and his co-hosts select one bad gay movie to pick apart its flaws, and maybe if they're lucky discern some kernel of potential.

Finding flaws is a skill that Daniel unfortunately honed on himself, with a habit to be overly self-critical. Not too surprisingly, he found comfort on stage as an actor, where he could disappear into the personas of other people. That was a comfortable place for him to hide -- until the night that the character he was playing appeared in the flesh in front of him.

This Week's Recommendation: The Ladies Who Lunch

Thanks again to Daniel for joining me and for giving me any excuse to talk about Stephen Sondheim. For my recommendation this week, I want you to take a look at my two favorite versions of the Sondheim song "The Ladies Who Lunch." One is sung in  the movie Camp -- I'm not a big fan of this film but this particular scene, featuring a bitter, snarling little pre-teen Anna Kendrick accompanied by squeaky amateur band is so bizarre and uncomfortable it has to be seen.

But the other, and far superior version, was sung by Elaine Stritch in the 1970s, with a bitter acidic intensity that verges on terrifying. I'll have links to both at SewersOfParis.com. The reason I love this song is that it's both angry and forgiving; it's an indictment of the idle rich who waste their days, but also a resignation that they're never going to change. 

As the audience, you can read the song in a variety of ways -- maybe with smug triumph, looking down on the ladies. Or maybe by defiantly identifying with them, rising proudly with a swagger at the end, because after all everybody dies and you might as well have a meal and a drink before you go.

And that's a little disorienting -- do we want to be ladies who lunch or don't we? And maybe that's why, when I watch Elaine's performance of the song, the emotions that resonates most with me is fear. Not fear that the ladies are right and I'm wrong, or the ladies are wrong and I'm wrong with them. But fear that there's no way to know who's wrong and who's right.

Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Go and Love Some More (Ep. 71 - Harold and Maude)

This Week's Guest: Joe

Do you ever find yourself engaging in self-sabotage? Maybe you avoid important work or important people. Or you dismiss your potential. Or you lie about yourself to yourself. Or you surround yourself with people who undermine you.

My guest this week spent years working for Republicans, wavering in and out of the closet. Inside, he knew who he was. But he also desperately wanted to be accepted and to belong, even among people who might reject him if they knew the truth.

Eventually, Joe managed to shed those secrets, the sabotage, and self-medication that could have easily turned fatal. Now he's feeling a lot more free, and he works for nonprofits that expand freedoms instead of restrict them.

It's Joe's way of hopefully sparing others the pain he went through. And also working through his lingering guilt.

This Week's Recommendation: You Can't Take it With You

For my recommendation this week, I was at a bit of a loss. I wanted to find a gay movie -- or at least gay-adjacent movie -- where a character learns to kick loose and have a good time. For some reason, the only one I could think of was Overboard, with Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn. So I asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter for their ideas. 

By the way, if you'd like to be in touch and suggest recommendations for future episodes, you can follow me @mattbaume on Twitter, or under the same name, Matt Baume, on Facebook.

Unfortunately, when I put this question to the internet, the very first suggestion I got was the movie Overboard. But then dozens more came in, from Desperate Living to A Christmas Carol to Mame and Fried Green Tomatoes. I haven't seen Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day but so many people suggested it that I think I probably need to. Same goes for Now Voyager.

But it was friend of the show Alonso Duralde from the Lineoleum Knife podcast who nailed this week's recommendation: a wonderful and often-overlooked film called You Can't Take it With You.

The movie's based on a play by Moss Hart and George Kaufman, and as is so often the case, I do believe the book is better. But the movie's no slouch: it's the story of a quirky live-and-let-live family of weirdos who don't care about money and follow their dreams. When the story opens, the family's being pressured to sell their home so a millionaire can build a weapons factory in its place. Yeah, it's a little on the nose.

Jimmy Stewart plays the son of the capitalist, and because this is the era of screwball comedy, he falls in love with a company typist who just so happens to be a member of that household of crazy free spirits.

I love the movie and the play for the snappy comedy, both physical and verbal. But the meaning of it is what sticks with me -- and conveniently enough, it's encapsulated right there in the title. You can't take it with you.

Money and power sure is nice, and for some people it's all they need to be happy. That's fine -- in fact, it's a good thing, because if everyone was running around chasing their heart's desires, we'd be living in a hippie commune with no running water. We need big-picture power brokers to fight with each other over who can build the biggest, bestest infrastructure.

But for other folks, money and power just isn't enough. For them, gathering resources is meaningless if you can't spread it around, give it away, share it, and improve the lives of others.

The key is for there to be a balance of those two types: the big-picture power brokers driven to build the world up; and the folks who are happiest when they have happiness to give away.

Your job is to figure out which one of those is you. And if you realize you're in the wrong game, to find a way to switch sides.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I was Fresh Meat and a Hustler (Ep. 70 - The Kids in the Hall)

This Week's Guest: Brent

You know that saying about finding a job where you love what you do, and you'll never work a day in your life? My guest this week did just that when he became a country radio DJ and a sex worker in a tiny midwest town.

Brent was a fresh-faced young cub, just out of college, and somehow word got around to all the closeted married men that he was available -- for a price. And while the hookups were fun, it was a relationship he wanted. But he couldn't possibly have imagined the form that some of those relationships would take.

This Week's Recommendation: A Hairy Prone Companion & Brain Candy

Thanks again to Brent for joining me. And guess what -- in the time since we did this interview, he actually did start that podcast! It's call "A Hairy Prone Companion" and he shares weekly stories about fascinating kinky sex. You can find it everywhere podcasts are podcasted.

I should probably just warn you that A Hairy Prone Companion is an unflinchingly frank look into some particularly intense practices and undergarments, to the point that at times it may be challenging for those with a delicate constitution to listen. But I do recommend that you give it a listen, even if you're the type to clutch your pearls, because pushing your boundaries is how you grow as a person.

And that's why my other recommendation this week is for the movie Brain Candy, from the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe where the character Buddy originated. It's a brilliantly funny and woefully under-appreciated film about an anti-depressant drug that forces the brain to focus solely on the happiest moment of their lives to the exclusion of all else. But as it turns out, a constant good mood is not without its consequences.

The fear of feeling unhappy, or uncomfortable, or afraid can hold a lot of power over us. We'll sometimes go to great lengths to avoid those feelings, whether it's altering our brains in the movie Brain Candy, or trying a new fetish you heard about on a podcast, or how I will hide in the grocery store to avoid talking to someone. But those feelings only have power over us if we let them by ignoring them. Like a bad infection, negative feelings have a way of spreading out the more you ignore and avoid them.

And confronting those feelings -- doing something you don't want to do -- is the best way to rip up the roots of that weed. I'm not saying you should step outside your comfort zone because you might learn you like it. Chances are, you're going to suddenly enjoy being sad, or start sounding every night, or look forward to making grocery store small talk. If you think you're not going to like something, you probably won't.

But liking negative feelings isn't the point. The point is to get used to them, to lose your fear of them, to learn to control them so they don't control you.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

What's Gayer than Plinko? (Ep. 69 - Body Heat)

This Week's Guest: Dennis Hensley

One of the most generous gifts you can give someone is listening to them. It's a habit that some people just never picked up. But others have refined it to an art form. My guest this week is Dennis Hensley, who you might know from My Life on the D-List, from Girls Will be Girls, or from countless celebrity interviews in just about every magazine ever. These days, among his many hats, he hosts a podcast called Dennis Anyone, where he interviews creative folks about their work; and he's also the host of The MisMatch Game, a live gameshow fundraiser for the LA LGBT Center. The next MisMatch game is coming up, on July 23 and 24, and I highly recommend the experience of seeing a bunch of celebrity-impersonating comedians running circles around each other. 

As an interviewer, a listener, and a host, Dennis sometimes disappears behind the glitter of the people whose talent he's showcasing. That's a problem he's always been happy to have, whether interviewing Carrie Fisher in her bed or Celine Dion in her limousine. But these days, Dennis' industry is changing, and he's faced with a new challenge: stepping out from behind the luminaries and standing in his own spotlight.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

This Week's Recommendation: Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

It's always a pleasure, and also a little awkward, to talk to a fellow interviewer. Journalists are often accustomed to prompting, rather than talking; to steering conversation instead of just participating in it; and to analyzing people so we can explain them to others.

But then sometimes you meet someone who simply defies analysis. For my recommendation this week, check out the book Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. It's the book I was trying and failing to remember during my conversation with Dennis, the one about why people love Celine Dion and what Celine the phenomenon has to teach us about human taste.

This book had what seemed an impossible impact on me: it changed my appreciation of Celine Dion from ironic to sincere. How could such a thing happen? Well in part, because it's about much more than just Celine -- author Carl Wilson tackles such questions as "why do we like what we like?" and "is it ok to like it?"

Anyone who loves winking at camp owes it to themselves to give this book a read. We all carry around a lot of assumptions about what it's ok to enjoy, and more importantly what it's ok to admit we enjoy. Meeting Celine's fans, diving into her unexpected relationships with other artists, and the depths of schmaltz may not change what you enjoy. But it might change how you enjoy it. 

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/