Joe Hart is the balm you need in these fractious times!

here are the original notes!

I’ve wanted to interview Joe Hart from the moment I started making this podcast as he has always exuded a powerful empathy for everyone around him even when things in his own life were clearly not going his way. He grew up in New York in a house his dad built with his own hands and eventually moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. And it was only after enduring a series of confouning drunken mishaps out on the road with a touring company that one of his colleagues came to him and suggested, “you don’t have to live like this.” It reminds me there’s help and there’s grace everywhere.

I have a new podcast. It's a storytelling podcast. It's called Mortonopoulis. You can check it out here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mortonopoulis/id1798342136

or visit it on substack where it exists as an essay writing exercise.

https://substack.com/@mortonopoulis?utm_source=user-menu

Lemme know what you think!!

Peace.

Lindsey Van Wagner grew up in and around Washington, DC and like so many of her contemporaries joined the federal government after college. But the nine to five slog really wasn’t for her. A gnawing sense that she needed something more drove her to act out with booze and relationships until she hit her breaking point and sought help through a twelve step program. Ironically, it was only once she was sober that she really felt the emptiness of the life she had made for herself and decided to walk away from everything she had built to start again from scratch in St. Croix. She’s recently published a new book, Spirit Vigilante, in which she shares her own experiences on her spiritual path and some of the tools and techniques that have aided her

Daniel Schwarzhoff discovered pretty late in life that he was not really a Schwarzhoff: that the man he had always considered his father was not his biological dad. It explained a lot. At least it gave a shape to the chaos that had marked his early life. He rose above that chaos with a career on Wall Street but brought a lot of it with him as well. When it eventually became too much, he found a twelve step meeting that really revealed how far gone he'd become.

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.

Frank Conniff has been a stand up and writer and producer for many tv shows like Sabrina the teenage witch but he’s probably best know for his role as TV’s Frank on the Peabody Award winning cult hit Mystery Science Theater 3000 where he also served as a writer.

I discovered Frank as one of the many members of my extended clan of Murray-McDonnell cousins. When I started doing standup, everyone in my family asked me if we had met each other so I started following him on Twitter and discovered he was, in fact, sober. I had his email address from a family group email and here we are...

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.