Actress Mo Gaffney was on the seminal show Absolutely Fabulous and rest assured she is absolutely fabulous. After launching to stardom with the off-Broadway show The Kathy and Mo Show (which she created with friend Kathy Najimy), Gaffney went on to: a) Win Obie awards for it; b) Make it into an HBO show; c) Work non-stop, on everything from That '70s Show to Friends to Mad About You to Mike & Molly to pretty much every other show you can name. It may be inappropriate to say this when you're writing about a recovery podcast but it's clear Gaffney was what's known as a fun drunk. Still, after becoming a mom and noticing, increasingly, how drinking was negatively impacting her life, she sobered up—joining five other siblings and her mom in recovery. In this episode, she and AfterParty's Anna David discuss martinis, pretending to take ecstasy, missing smoking and craving a companion to read with, among many other topics.
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Yoga and recovery expert Tommy Rosen is, despite his serenity, not a man who sits still very long. The Hatha and Kundalini yoga teacher (who's been sober for 23 years) has been one of the pioneers of the yoga-recovery model (in short, practicing certain types of yoga can help your recovery—a lot). He's also created a new movement called Recovery 2.0, which launched as an online conference series that featured such luminaries as Dr. Gabor Mate and Richard Branson (as well as AfterParty's Anna David). Now he's published the remarkable Recovery 2.0 book and is touring the world sharing the principles from it. He does all this, by the way, when not hosting retreats with his wife Kia Miller (also a yoga teacher). In this episode, he and David talk about getting addicted to sugar before drugs, discovering (and being saved by) the Grateful Dead and acting out in sobriety (girls! gambling!), among many other topics.
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Comic Lisa Sundstedt has not only written on and produced such TV shows as Girls Behaving Badly, The Chelsea Handler Show and Chelsea Lately but she’s also the creator of the longest-lasting all female comedy show in the country. Yep, that’s right; Pretty, Funny Women has featured everyone from Chelsea Handler and Margaret Cho to Natasha Leggero, Maria Bamford, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor and AfterParty’s own Danielle Stewart. But it’s not all pretty, funny performances for Sundstedt: she’s also a bipolar alcoholic who speaks openly about these issues (including the fact that she lost her Chelsea Lately job because of one of her bipolar episodes). In this episode, she and I talk about the way your scores can change when you take quizzes to see if you’re alcoholic, how depression and pot smoking is prevalent in the comedy community and being a non drug taking alcoholic, among other topics.
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