Tag: JFL NorthWest

Girls funny, open and smart

Girls Gotta Eat co-hosts Rayna Greenberg, left, and Ashley Hesseltine have created careers they love. (photo from JFL NorthWest)

To say it’s a podcast about dating and relationships doesn’t begin to describe Girls Gotta Eat. Co-creators and co-hosts Rayna Greenberg and Ashley Hesseltine invite their guests to talk about pretty much anything, and pretty much as explicitly as they’d like. Recent topics include creating successful online businesses, avoiding toxic partners, managing depression, the health benefits of masturbation, and having sex with famous people – and that was on just one show.

Girls Gotta Eat celebrates its first anniversary this month, and Greenberg and Hesseltine will be in Vancouver for that milestone. The pair has two soldout performances at JFL NorthWest, which runs Feb. 14-23 (jflnorthwest.com). They were scheduled to do just one show initially, and the demand would have sold out a third, no doubt, and probably even a fourth. On Instagram, Girls Gotta Eat has garnered more than 69,900 followers in less than a year. (By the time you’re reading this article, that number will likely be more than 71,000, as the account gained 300-plus new followers in the space of two days last week.)

In addition to Girls Gotta Eat, Greenberg and Hesseltine each have other ventures on various platforms, including websites, Twitter and Facebook, but Instagram is where their celebrity status is most remarkable. At press time, Greenberg’s One Hungry Jew had more than 350,000 followers on Instagram; Hesseltine’s Bros Being Basic, more than 915,000, and her Fashion Dads, another 186,000. It is no wonder that a good chunk of time on the Girls Gotta Eat podcast is spent promoting advertisers’ products, mainly cosmetics and fashion. These women have worked hard to secure an enviable target market – their 30-something peers who have money to spend.

While Girls Gotta Eat generally focuses on one topic or guest, Greenberg and Hesseltine try to cover a range of topics and have different guests for the live version, as well as make the show an interactive experience for the audience.

“We typically try to have a guest that has already been on the podcast,” Greenberg told the Independent in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, where she and Hesseltine were performing.

“It’s rare,” she said, “that we go to a new city and invite somebody we’ve never had on the show. Just because our audience is so invested in the show and they love it, it’s so exciting for them to be able to also see another person that was on the show.”

The weekly podcast now averages well over an hour. In its first several months, it was about 45 minutes, the approximate length of a commute to work, said Greenberg.

“As we had more and more guests, the show just became really fun. We want guests to feel like they can cover a range of topics and we don’t want to truncate the show, something that’s great,” she explained. “We don’t want to hold ourselves to 45 minutes if it’s great content, so it’s just gotten a little longer. There was no day where we woke up and said, let’s do an hour-and-a-half. So, it just depends on the guests; some episodes are going to be 45, some are going to be an hour-and-a-half, we’ll see when the guests come in.”

For Greenberg, the podcast was a huge departure from what she had been doing before.

“I’ve worked in restaurants, I went to culinary school and then I really worked in tech startups for a long time,” she said.

The Girls Gotta Eat podcast was Hesseltine’s idea initially.

“She is a comedian herself and she really wanted to do a show about dating and relationships, and wanted to find somebody that would be open and honest about their own lives and also could be funny,” said Greenberg. “She and I met on a press trip because we both have very large Instagram influencer accounts, and we just really hit it off. We had a great time with each other, we became friends over the course of a few months, and then she asked me if I’d be interested in doing this.”

As soon as the idea came up, said Greenberg, “I decided, and she decided with me, that it wasn’t going to be a hobby or a side project, this could be what we do. So, we focused on it as a business: we built a website, we had professional photos taken, we devised a way to market this. From Day 1, there was definitely a strategy of let’s make this a business, let’s expand it.”

Greenberg had already monetized her food blog, One Hungry Jew, by doing ads for brands. “For example, a company like American Express will come to me if they’re looking to attract a younger audience that has money and they’ll say, OK, we want to create a campaign that is designed to encourage people to use our AmEx Travel and they’ll give me an idea of what they’re looking for and, obviously, a budget, a price, and it can be something like, hey, we want to encourage people to sign locally, so go to a restaurant, take a photo of yourself at the restaurant, write a caption, and they pay me for something like that. It’s clearly an ad, it says ad. That’s how, personally, I make money through social media.”

One Hungry Jew started “as a silly hobby,” said Greenberg. “I would never purposely have named a business One Hungry Jew…. I’ve always enjoyed food, I’d always worked in food, and I was in the tech startup world and I didn’t have much of a creative outlet, so I started taking photos of food with my cellphone. It’s something I always spent money on anyways, it’s what I enjoyed, and I just put them on Instagram because I wanted somewhere to put the photos. It’s just as simple as that.

“There weren’t a lot of food blogs back then…. I was one of the earlier people that started posting continuously. I had really good content, and it was really ‘right place, right time.’ It was certainly a time in the world where marketing and PR were shifting heavily to social media…. And I started getting invited to all these places for free, for a free meal in exchange for a photo.”

Working at Amazon at the time, Greenberg said she was splitting her focus between her job and the social media account. “I was obviously doing a bad job of both of them and I had to make a decision, so I chose. I left my job two-and-a-half years ago to pursue this full time and I worked really hard. I reached out to every single PR and advertising agency in the United States. I introduced myself, I said this is what I do, this is what makes me unique, I’d love to find time to meet. So, just like the podcast, I tried to make it into a business as opposed to a silly hobby.”

While not religious, Greenberg said, “I am exactly who I am because I was brought up in a Jewish family, I was brought up in a big Jewish community. A lot of my social activities as a child revolved around that, so I had a really nice upbringing because I was brought up in this Jewish community.”

Though her parents divorced when she was 4 years old, she said, “I have an incredibly supportive family from both sides.”

She could always talk about sex with her parents, and said her mom is a psychologist, so “we’ve always explored my feelings.”

“My mom bought me a book about puberty when I was like 11,” said Greenberg. “She wanted me to understand my body and what was happening.”

Nonetheless, she admitted to being a little nervous when she and Hesseltine started the podcast, as the pair does talk openly about their sex lives.

“It was a real struggle and a real choice that I wrestled with, how much do I talk about myself and how open am I going to be? And we both, Ashley and I, made the decision that, if we’re going to put ourselves in a public light, then we have to be honest and open about things in our life, and we both really are. And I think that’s what makes our show really good, is that people really feel like they know us, they really feel like they understand our pitfalls and our successes.”

Over the course of the year, Greenberg and Hesseltine have interviewed a wide variety of people. “We’ve had the founder of Hinge, which is a dating app, on the show; we’ve had a sex therapist; we’ve had a psychotherapist; we’ve had matchmakers; we’ve had comedians, actors and artists and all these different people. And everybody brings such a different, unique view of their own life and other people’s lives, and I feel so lucky to have amassed this huge knowledge of dating and what other people go through,” said Greenberg.

The podcast, she said, has “helped me be more calm and not so emotional, not take everything personally all the time. It’s helped me to realize that people are people and they make mistakes…. And I think that lots of people are looking for love and, just because you’re not the person they fall in love with, it’s not insulting, it’s not personal.

“It’s helped me to relax a little bit and be happy with my own life and realize that I should do other things besides focus on dating, which is funny because I do a show about dating. But, the advice I always give girls is focus on your job, focus on hobbies and friends and family and all these other things that bring so much joy your life, and that can be really fulfilling. And love will come and dating will come. And, if you’re a more whole person, it allows you to let in love in a really beautiful way.”

Kindler in JFL’s lineup

Andy Kindler (photo ©Maljan)

Actor, writer and comedian Andy Kindler is one of several Jewish community members on the Just for Laughs NorthWest roster for Vancouver. He’ll host The Alternative Show at Yuk Yuk’s Feb. 21-23.

Kindler spoke with the Independent from Montreal, while on a shoot for the dark comedy feature film The Fiddling Horse, in which he co-stars as Barry Bitterman.

“I’m a bitter ex-jockey and it’s perfect for me,” said Kindler. “I’m five, five-and-a-half, so I almost look like an ex-jockey, I’m not too tall, and it’s just fun.”

Kindler has a ton of acting credits, including Bob’s Burgers, I’m Dying Up Here and Portlandia, as well as Everybody Loves Raymond, Maron and But I’m Chris Jericho! But standup came first, he said, “although I did acting in college and in summer camp – I played Elwood P. Dowd, the lead in Harvey, when I was 12. But, any acting that was filmed to be seen by others, that happened after standup. Standup, if you’re doing it right, is a good rehearsal for acting; it is just being yourself.”

Before standup, Kindler was a musician. It was his pursuit of a music career that took him to Los Angeles “many, many, many years ago,” but he “couldn’t make a living.”

“I was in my 20s,” he said. “I was very insecure, I kind of hated myself, like many kids that age, unless you have a tremendous amount of confidence. So, I just happened to stumble into standup comedy. A friend of mine – we were working at the same stereo store together – he said, you’re funny, let’s try it, so I actually was in a duo for a couple years and that was really a good way to start.”

Kindler played guitar. “I played classical violin when I was a kid, but I didn’t play very well … and I still took it for another 12 years, even hating it, because I had issues…. I started playing guitar in high school, which was the greatest. When I grew up, people wanted to be the Beatles. We didn’t want to be necessarily [comedian] Shecky Greene. Now I want to be Shecky Greene but, back then, all my heroes were musicians, except for Richard Pryor. But, I didn’t know much about comedy.”

While he learned to do comedy in Los Angeles, he said he wouldn’t recommend that people follow his example, “because it’s kind of a frightening thing. But I lived in L.A., so the only way I wouldn’t have been able to not start in L.A., I would have had to have moved out of town.

“I put my name in the hat, did all the open mic things, and that’s how I started and it just, I don’t want to say, took off, but I’ve been making a living since ’87.”

Despite his long career, Kindler has spoken in interviews about only recently becoming comfortable with doing standup.

“A lot of people, they see comedians and they say, how can you do it? Well, when you start comedy – unless you’re a person who really has no fear – you’re scared for a long time because you can be funny off-stage, but you still can’t do it under pressure or it’s not necessarily that you can produce it at anytime. That’s where the technique comes in,” he explained. “The technique basically for standup comes from doing it over and over and over again, until you either hate it or it becomes something you love. So, I felt like, after 10 years, oh, I’m really good at this but I wasn’t…. There are still nights I don’t feel comfortable, but it gets better.”

Kindler faces challenges that most comedians don’t: he has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. When he was younger and just starting out, he said, “At that time, you didn’t hear a lot about OCD and so I thought I was losing my mind, because I never got help until a couple of years ago for it…. And when I was first starting comedy, it was like a whole year where I would say to myself onstage, I am holding the mic in my right hand, I am gesturing to the crowd with my left hand, I am walking two steps – I couldn’t get out of my head and I didn’t even know I was officially OCD.”

While knowing that he has OCD and ADHD hasn’t changed his act, which he describes as “so stream of consciousness,” it has helped him in other ways. “I feel better about myself now,” he said. “I’m more calm.” And he has learned ways of coping, he said, recommending the book Delivered from Distraction. “I don’t make any money on the sales of the book,” he said, “but they give you tools for dealing with OCD.”

Kindler has been to Vancouver often, including with JFL’s The Alternative Show.

“The Alternative Show started in Montreal at that festival,” explained Kindler, “and it started in the late ’90s when you actually needed to have a show called The Alternative Show. A lot of people probably don’t remember there was a big comedy boom, comedy got very generic and everybody was like, what’s the deal with this thing? It started to be very homogenized and so there was kind of a movement in L.A. and New York in the mid to late ’90s, or even earlier, for the core of alternative comedy. And now, the good news is, that comedy is better than it ever was, everybody is doing interesting things. So, I don’t really need to have a show because almost the whole festival you could call alternative, but one thing I do like to do is have people working on new stuff and hopefully taking chances, so it’s not like them doing their honed five minutes.”

Generally, Kindler brings five or six comedians onstage during the night. “It’s usually a combination of two things: other people in the festival and local people,” he said.

Kindler has been coming up to Canada in one form or another since the late 1980s. He worked Yuk Yuk’s in the west, he said. “So, I know a lot of the comedians and the comedians in Canada are hilarious. I think Canada has the best comedians per capita in the world. What I’m doing in my act, which is commenting culture, all Canadians do that naturally because you’re next to American culture, but you can comment on it and feel separate from it.”

Being Jewish is a large part of Kindler’s routine. While he sometimes thinks that, in his act, he’ll just do a few Jewish jokes and move on to other material, he said, “I just can’t stop it because I feel so Jewish. It’s so much a part of me. I used to make a joke about how Jewish people are funny even when they’re not trying to be funny. Like, when the Whitney Houston song ‘How Will I Know?’ came out, I was with this Jewish friend of mine, and she’s singing, ‘How will I know?’ and my friend yells at the radio, ‘You’ll know, Whitney, you’ll know. Believe me, you’ll know.’

“And this is just how all Jews are, even when they’re not trying to be funny. So, I feel very, very Jewish, but it also could be a member of any oppressed group that responds to being oppressed with humour and self-deprecation. I love to make fun of the fact that I’m Jewish.”

While he doesn’t have any topics that he won’t talk about in his act, Kindler does shy away from certain words and thinks about whether his material is unnecessarily offensive.

“I get very angry when comics say they never apologize, because everybody makes mistakes,” he said, giving the example of having used, early in his career, a joke that referenced the Holocaust. Two audience members approached him afterward, upset because they felt he was “gratuitously making fun of the Holocaust, and I decided that I wasn’t in that particular case, but also decided it’s important for comics to think about what they’re saying because, when you’re onstage, you can say something in the moment and then you have the right to not want to say it later. There’s no specific red lines, but I do think about why I’m doing the joke and whether it’s worth doing it and who’s the subject of the joke.”

Kindler said being a comic is a “kind of a miracle, or a magic thing” and “like a dream come true because I really, really, really love standup and a lot of people get sick of it after awhile. I just haven’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t get sick of it temporarily, but it’s still the thing I most love doing, it’s the thing I feel most natural about doing and it’s just I feel it is a dream come true.”

The Alternative Show is at Yuk Yuk’s Feb. 21, 10 p.m.; and Feb. 22 and 23, 11 p.m. For tickets and the full JFL NorthWest lineup, visit jflnorthwest.com.