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CO Bites: Pretty, Dangerous
13 Plays1 year ago
In this week’s episode, host Ben Miller speaks with Sarah Margolis-Pineo about a turning chair prototype made at the Mount Lebanon Shaker community. But don’t sit in it. Looking like a Wendell Castle sculpture avant la lettre, its bird-bone-thin spindles and threaded metal swivel mechanism are too delicate to support the weight of a full-grown adult.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Curious Objects'
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Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
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I'm Ben Miller.
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This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Vibrant Shaker Furniture Colors
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Here's a fun fact.
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When you think of the Shakers, you might think of restraint and simplicity and utilitarianism.
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But did you know some of their furniture was actually painted in vibrant, eye-catching colors?
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They used iron oxide and copper sulfate-based dyes to achieve these brilliant reds and blues.
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Speaker
Because yeah, being devout doesn't mean you can't paint the town red.
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Or at least your chair.
Spotlight on a Unique Shaker Chair
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We've got a curious object's bite coming your way today.
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This is a quick and dirty episode where we dive straight into the story behind an object.
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And this object happens to be a shaker chair.
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though I'm sorry to say it's not a painted one, but it is maybe the most surprising piece of shaker furniture I've ever seen.
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And when I want to talk about shaker furniture, there's one person I want to talk to.
Guest Expert Sarah Margolis-Pineo
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That is Sarah Margolis-Pineo.
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She has curated Shaker Museum Collections.
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She's worked as a dealer in shaker material.
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And you've heard her on Curious Objects before in our two-part episode on shaker sewing desks.
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But Sarah, we've got something very different to talk about today.
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And I think it's going to
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bend some listeners' brains.
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Shall we dive in?
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Yeah, let's get to it.
Misconceptions and Unique Designs of Shaker Chairs
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Okay, so the thing about shakers is, you know, there are so many preconceptions and misconceptions.
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And I think when people picture a shaker chair, their mental image is probably something pretty traditional.
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You know, it's got four feet and slats and spindles, and maybe it's a rocking chair.
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But this is something completely different.
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So tell me what this shaker chair looks like.
Standardized Production in New Lebanon
00:01:51
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So I did select this object to upset the notion because probably the most iconic shaker object within the canon of shaker material culture is, of course, the chair.
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And we do think of the slapback upright, most likely production chair produced by the New Lebanon, New York community.
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And this piece, too, was produced by the New Lebanon, New York community, which was really famous for standardizing shaker chair production.
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And so they actually built a series of chair factories to standardize and in a way mass produce shaker chairs.
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Towards the 1860s, they even had to trademark these shaker chairs because they became so popular among other furniture makers in the region who wanted to bootleg the design.
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And so as a result, even today, when we think of the shakers, we think of we often think of a chair.
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This chair is something called a turning chair or a revolver.
Revolving Chair Design and Challenges
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It is essentially a prototype.
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We see many of these chairs in private and public collections, but every time you see this revolving chair, it is always a prototype because these never actually went into production.
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And so stylistically, the top you begin with a spindle stool seat.
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It's fit onto a turning base.
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It's generally a threaded iron component that goes into a turned sort of champagne bottle formed standard and with a base of two bent wood lappers.
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They're sort of these curved arch lappers that form the base.
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And so the form of it is very surprising.
00:03:35
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I think, Ben, you responded with a mid-century Scandinavian.
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Yeah, it honestly looks so mid-century.
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It's like, you know, it's almost like a bar stool out of some fancy midtown cocktail place.
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That's absolutely the vibe.
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And it was, it was essentially created to be an office stool.
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I think, um,
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In the 1870s and 1880s, when these were being experimented with out of the new Lebanon chair factory, or by that point it was Mount Lebanon chair factory, they were, the shakers were creating furniture for office spaces, essentially.
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work had transitioned from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
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And as a result, work was a little bit more stationary.
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And so to accommodate that, chairmakers began producing these chairs, which could go up and down and could be outfitted to different types of sort of more stationary work, whether you're at a shop bench or at a trustee's desk, you could sit at one of these stools.
Structural Weaknesses of Shaker Chairs
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But you'll notice what's peculiar about them and the reason that they never went into full production is because the design, albeit beautiful, is not quite sound.
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It, yeah, I mean, it's a very delicate piece.
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It looks like a beautiful piece of kinetic sculpture, I think, to our eyes today.
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But if you can imagine a full-blown adult sitting on that thing, it wouldn't,
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go too well over time.
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And so what's interesting on the secondary market today is that we see a whole number of breaks and repairs that have that that have affected these chairs.
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And so
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I've seen one recently where the spindles, because they're so thin and delicately turned and then steam bent as well, they'll often break.
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And so I've seen pieces of wire used to repair those.
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The iron spinning mechanism just was never totally worked out.
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There's a giant bolt that exists in the middle of that standard.
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And that often fails.
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So we send that actually, we have a specific conservator who makes these operative for us again, who can conserve that component.
Brother William Henry Perkins' Repairs and Influence
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And on this chair is a particularly compelling repair because one of the steam bent lappers on the base has actually been replaced.
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And if you invert the chair, you see the initials of the craftsperson who did that repair in the 20th century.
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And so it's initialed WHP.
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And we know that is brother William Henry Perkins of the Mount Lebanon community.
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Yeah.
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So that's super interesting that we actually know the specific person who was involved with one stage of the life of this chair.
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And I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about who this guy was and where he came from.
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Sure.
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So Brother William, he actually was born in England and came to the United States.
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He immigrated over here to specifically to join the Shakers.
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And we over time, especially in the Mount Lebanon community, there have been a number of very prominent English born Shakers.
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who joined throughout the 19th century.
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And Brother William was definitely in that tradition.
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He came to the States seeking this community.
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And he was a woodcarver, woodworker in England.
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And when he came to Mount Lebanon, he arrived in, I believe, 1914, was brought into the North family initially,
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before being transitioned to the South family where the bulk of the woodworking was being done.
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And so within a year, by 1915, he and his cohort, Sister Lillian Barlow, had actually taken over the Mount Lebanon chair making operation, which by that point was called the Mount Lebanon Woodworking Company.
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And so not only were Brother William and Sister Lillian producing their own 20th century version of a shaker chair, which has a really distinctive finial at the top of the chair, but too, he was repairing and restoring a whole number of antique shaker chairs as well.
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And so this is an example of that.
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Was that a friendly takeover or a hostile takeover?
00:07:54
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It was definitely friendly.
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I mean, the 20th century, I mean, from the Civil War forward, these were the waning decades of the Mount Lebanon community.
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And so I would imagine that the Mount Lebanon Shakers were thrilled to have such a skilled worker come into the community so late in the history.
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He had really wonderful wood carving skills, and there are some very fun examples of his carved work in the collection of Shaker Museum Chatham.
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in upstate New York, he would this is very atypical for Shaker.
00:08:28
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Again, it's very surprising, but he would actually decorate the tops of oval boxes, for example, with these elaborately interlocking carved initials and give them as gifts to his fellow Shakers, actually people in the community
Diverse Influences on Shaker Design
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and out.
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So there's a great example, actually, of an LB box for Sister Lillian Barlow, who was, of course, his cohort.
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in the church.
00:08:48
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Yeah, yeah, it's very sweet.
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And he was already, you know, about 60 years old, right?
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When he when he joined this community.
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I mean, did he immediately change his woodworking style to sort of match the Shaker norms and traditions?
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Well, I think what's that's a great question.
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And what's really interesting about it is I think actually his experience speaks to sort of shaker craft throughout the history of the community and that individuals you were never born a shaker.
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you only ever joined the community.
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And so many people did come in as children.
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They were sort of indentured by their parents to be cared for and educated by the Shakers.
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And when they became of age, they could decide to stay, sign the covenant or decide to go off to the world in which they were given many blessings and, you know,
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funds to start that life with or people came in as adults.
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And when they came in as adults, they came in with a whole spectrum of worldly tastes and skills with them.
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And so we often it's a misconception to think of Shaker design as being created and made in a vacuum.
00:09:56
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No, these people came in by way of Portsmouth and Boston and New York and very established furniture traditions at the time, specifically, I mean, federal style in the at the turn of the 19th century.
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And so, too, I think Brother Williams experience speaks to the fact that he came in with a knowledge of material.
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He had a preference for oak as the English do.
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And we can see that in the base of this chair.
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And two, he was a carver.
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And so he began carving.
00:10:26
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There's a funny story that actually Jerry Grant, who's the director of collections and research at Shaker Museum Chatham, told me recently that Brother William had a vision that he was to carve roses on the front door of the Mount Lebanon church family dwelling.
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to honor and lead.
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He had a vision and then he took the door and he carved these roses into it.
00:10:47
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Yes.
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Of course, the rose being a very explicit sign in the English as well as of England.
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And so that building was destroyed later in the 20th century.
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But there is a rumor that that carved door with the roses exists in a home somewhere in New Lebanon, New York.
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So really out there listening knows about it.
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Please let us know.
00:11:09
Speaker
Wow.
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I love a good mystery and I love a good hunt.
00:11:12
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Yeah, but he was contributing to the community aesthetically in many, many ways, I think.
Sculptural Value of the Shaker Chair
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Speaker
So have you sat in the chair?
00:11:20
Speaker
That one, no, I wouldn't dare.
00:11:23
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And in fact, every time we have one on display, I've seen people sit in them because when you're at shows and it gets chaotic, that's what happens.
00:11:32
Speaker
And that's part of the reason that we collect antiques in the commercial world.
00:11:36
Speaker
We're not a museum.
00:11:37
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You can engage with the pieces.
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Speaker
But these, we recommend, are purely sculpture just because they are so prone to fail.
00:11:44
Speaker
But yeah.
00:11:45
Speaker
So where is it now and where do you think it's going next?
Viewing the Chair at John Keith Russell
00:11:48
Speaker
So this piece, you can come visit it.
00:11:50
Speaker
It's in the gallery of John Keith Russell in South Salem, New York, which is in Westchester County, just north of the city.
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And so anyone can make an appointment, come visit it, come spin it.
00:12:03
Speaker
I will have to make a video for you of it being spun, Ben, so we can put it on social media because.
00:12:07
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Yes, please.
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It does.
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It's fully operative.
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It goes up and down.
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And again, it's just it's such a surprising piece.
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It speaks to so many things in the evolution of shaker design from the evolving economy and ways that they are working to their love of ingenuity and new techniques and materials.
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to craft, and as well as just their meticulous and generations old and imparted craft-based techniques from steam bending wood to turning out those standards and
Closing Remarks and Gratitude
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spindles.
00:12:42
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It's just, it's a really wonderful, wonderful piece.
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So thank you for letting me talk about it.
00:12:47
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Well, Sarah Margolis-Pinia, thanks so much for joining me and come back again soon.
00:12:51
Speaker
Anytime.
00:12:54
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And listeners, as always, you can see pictures of this chair at the magazine antics dot com slash podcast.
00:13:01
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Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Lotti with social media and web support by Sarah Blotta.
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Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
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Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
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And I'm Ben Miller.