Interviewing strangers over a meal since 2008 (as featured in the Washington Post)
Bernie Clifton, 82, is a legendary British comedian and singer, perhaps best known for a slapstick routine running around on stage in a goofy ostrich costume while he cracks punny jokes. But I recently learned there’s much more to his life story, from his early handyman jobs through to recent…
Next month, the DC Central Kitchen will mark 30 years of taking donated wasted food and turning it into meals for the homeless and non-profits. That’s just one of many services the organization offers, such as a culinary training program for jobless adults so they can get work and “leave…
Mark Bucher is co-owner of Medium Rare, a restaurant business with four locations in the Washington, DC, area offering a very simple menu: bread, followed by salad, then two servings of steak frites. It’s simple yet successful. Medium Rare frequently appears on local and national “best of” lists for steakhouses….
Late last month I was in Brooklyn and had the chance to interview Alex English. He’s a young comedian, writer and actor building his career in his adopted hometown of New York after moving there from Detroit without really knowing what he wanted to do with his life. In 2012,…
Last Friday I uploaded part one of a two-part interview with actress Donna Lynne Champlin, talking about how her discovery of metaphysics helped shape her career. Here’s part two of the interview, in which she charts the course of her career that started at the age of three when she…
Donna Lynne Champlin is an accomplished stage, television and film actress whose most recent credits include the role of Paula Proctor on the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Hortense Bellacourt on Comedy Central’s Another Period. She’s also great company for lunch. Earlier this month, during a holiday to Los Angeles, I met Donna…
Meet Pierre Phipps and Terrance Wilson, also known as the rap duo Freaky Boiz. They’re gay artists who met in a high school dance class in Chicago, and went to college together in Illinois. That’s the time when, just for their own amusement, they made a video rapping verses about…
Demetrius Harmon calls himself a “normal” 20-year-old. On a regular day, he wakes up, calls his friends, plays the video game Fortnite, he might make the occasional YouTube video or get on Twitter to share his thoughts. Pretty normal. Except he has more than a million people listening to him….
New Orleans has many famous dishes, and that includes poor boys. Poor boys, or po’ boys as they’re also known, are sliced loaves of French bread stuffed with mounds of shrimp, or oysters, or roast beef with a thick gravy known as “debris,” or ham and swiss, or many other…
The 107th interview is finally online! Last week I met actor Erick Lopez in New York, at the end of his visit from Los Angeles to promote the film Flavor of Life. In the drama, he plays an estranged grandson who reunites with his grandfather and has to help him save…