Tamara Yajia, Susan Rice, and Anna Tivel
Live Wire with Luke Burbank
This episode of LiveWire features a diverse array of human-interest stories, ranging from the cathartic 'Scream Club' to the personal memoir
Key takeaways
- Tamara Yahia discusses her memoir 'Cry for Me, Argentina,' detailing an unconventional childhood involving moving between the U.S. and Argentina.
- The 'Scream Club' in Chicago provides a structured way for participants to release tension through collective shouting.
Main topics
- Scream Clubs and emotional release
- Dairy farming innovations
Notable quotes
I was a failed child star.
Conclusion
The episode offers a heartwarming blend of humor and resilience, highl
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:02) Hey there, welcome to LiveWire. I'm your host, Luke Burbank. Today on the show, we are going to be talking to the very funny Tamara Yahia about her failed pursuit of childhood stardom. Meanwhile, she was very successful at having an unusual childhood, including moving between Argentina and the United States multiple times, and at one point, illegally living in a retirement community as a seven-year-old. She will explain how this all went down. Then we are going to hear some comedy from the very funny Susan Rice. She'll talk about the challenges of dating as a 73-year-old and why she thinks her nieces need to calm down a little bit about how worried they are about her ingesting microplastics. Then Anna Tivel will dazzle us with a song, which she always seems to do when she comes on the show. You do not want to miss it. Stick around. We've got a great episode of LiveWire coming your way starting right after this. Speaker 1 (1:00) This episode of LiveWire was originally recorded in December of 2025. We hope you enjoy it. Now let's get to the show. Speaker 4 (1:08) From PRX, it's... Speaker 7 (1:19) Comedy writer Tamara Yahia. She said, ugh, I'm talking to the failed child star again. And I was like, wow, she's so right. I was a failed child star. And suddenly all the wheels started turning in my head. And comedian Susan Speaker 6 (1:34) Rice. Honest to God, I spent three days on the phone with my Medicare provider just trying to sign up for hospice, for God's sake. Speaker 4 (1:43) with Speaker 5 (1:44) music Speaker 4 (1:44) from Speaker 5 (1:45) Anna Tivel and our fabulous house band. Speaker 4 (1:48) I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now the host of Livewire, Luke A. Speaker 1 (1:58) Thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thank you, everyone, for coming out to the Alberta Rose Theater. We have an absolutely fabulous show in store for you this week, but we've got to kick things off the way that we always do, with a little segment we call The Best News We Heard All Week. Speaker 1 (2:21) Here's the premise of this segment. It's that most of the time the news is absolute trash. And we like to remind folks here at the Alberta Rose Theater and out in listener land that there is in fact good news happening in the world. Some weeks it's harder than others. This week we didn't have to dig as deeply. Okay. Speaker 4 (2:39) But Speaker 1 (2:39) we wanted to present a couple of good news stories to you. Elena, what is the best news you heard all week? Speaker 4 (2:43) Okay. I want to tell you a little story about a gentleman named Manny Hernandez, a recent... Yes, I Speaker 1 (2:50) see we have some Hernandez heads here. It Speaker 4 (2:53) would be really cool if that was true. But Manny is a life coach and a breathwork practitioner in Chicago. had a kind of a tough summer and knew from his work in holistic healing that sometimes it feels good just to kind of get that emotion out, Speaker 5 (3:10) get Speaker 4 (3:10) it off your chest. And so he and his partner, whose name is Elena Soboleva, they went down to Lake Michigan with a couple of friends one Sunday and just screamed. They just let it rip. And they were like, oh, that feels really good. Why don't we do this again next Sunday? One Sunday after another, Sunday after another, they have invented this thing called Scream Club. It is now, it's like a club that you can buy a charter for in your town. There are Scream Clubs that meet weekly in California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Colorado, Texas, and Arizona. The closest one is in Seattle, in Lincoln Park. Speaker 1 (3:55) Okay. But Speaker 4 (3:56) that's Speaker 1 (3:56) a Speaker 4 (3:56) little far. I was thinking maybe we could start Scream Club here, but no, no, no. I went on the website, and it costs $250 to charter your membership. We're Speaker 1 (4:05) not allowed to start our own Scream Club without paying the proper fees? Speaker 4 (4:08) Yeah, to be official. And there's also a really lengthy vetting process. But I know how good this feels. I know how good it feels to scream. I know how good it feels to let something off of your chest, even though... In these austere times, our public radio show cannot pony up the $250 for a charter membership. I have invented something called the Shouting Society. Okay, Speaker 1 (4:31) that's... Speaker 4 (4:31) And I think, you know, this is our first streaming show ever. It's the anniversary of the first time I ever screamed on LiveWire. I feel like we all need to have just like a five-second... collective shout for the shouting society. Okay. And just to see how that makes us feel. Okay. So when I say, I'll say one, two, three, and then we'll all just let it out. Sound good? Yeah. All right. Everybody at home listening, hopefully you're shouting too. Here we go. Shouting society commences. One, two, three. Speaker 1 (5:15) Does anybody have a cigarette? Speaker 4 (5:19) I feel better. I don't know about you. I feel much better. Wow, Speaker 1 (5:22) that was very freeing, very cathartic. Excellent Speaker 4 (5:25) shouting, Portland. Speaker 1 (5:26) Wow. Speaker 4 (5:27) We're going to get that charter soon enough. Speaker 1 (5:28) The best news I heard all week, actually, I read about it at Minnesota Public Radio, the NPR news site, talking about the town of Corcoran, Minnesota. Okay. Where back in 1958, there was a guy who started a small family dairy farm. He had like, I think he had... 20 cows and a horse. But he loved it. He just loved the dairy farming lifestyle. And so when he eventually couldn't do it any longer, he gave it to his kids. And then they gave it to their kids. And their kids are named Quincy Schmidt and her brother Caleb Sherber. They've grown the operation to like about 120 cows. They say they're not in it for the money. They just like they love, again, being part of the dairy community. There is a problem, though, which is that there is apparently the price of milk. is cratering right now. You have more milk than people need for some reason. So there's more supply than there is demand, which means the price goes down. They talked in this NPR story to an economist at the agriculture department at Cornell University, a guy named Christopher Wolfe. He said, inflation is still being kind of stubborn, and everything that's happening right now doesn't look like it's going to do much for curbing inflation, to which I say, no s***, Sherlock. Like, I could be an economics professor at Cornell with that kind of... Speaker 1 (6:44) Incredible insight. What they're doing right now is not curbing inflation. So they're trying to figure out what to do because they don't want to lose the family dairy farm. It's been in the family for generations. And so they were, according to this article, reading a dairy newspaper recently. Yeah. Speaker 4 (7:00) Which Speaker 1 (7:00) is the first I'm hearing of that. Speaker 4 (7:02) That sounds very Minnesota. Like, Speaker 1 (7:05) what is the sports section of the dairy newspaper? Speaker 4 (7:09) Probably something involving like a pasture, like a bingo card and where the cow poops. Speaker 1 (7:14) I'd read that. You Speaker 4 (7:15) know? Speaker 1 (7:15) They were reading in a dairy newspaper and there was a dairy farmer in New York who had gotten this idea for how to like supplement the income while the price of milk is down. And what this guy had done is he turned his calf nursery into a cow cuddling business. Speaker 4 (7:31) Yeah. Speaker 5 (7:33) Which Speaker 1 (7:33) is exactly what Quincy and Caleb have decided to do. with their four of their cows that are, I believe calves actually, May, Mandarin, Zaley, and then Maui. I believe we have a photograph of Maui. Speaker 3 (7:48) For Speaker 1 (7:51) $25, you can cuddle Maui for 30 minutes. Speaker 1 (7:58) That's less than a dollar a minute. Also, there's a group rate for $100. It's all the cuddling you can do Speaker 5 (8:06) for 30 Speaker 1 (8:08) minutes. All the people that you can bring to cuddle Maui or one of the other cows. You can brush them. You can feed them hay. Apparently, a cow's heartbeat is much slower than ours, and they think that there is something about putting your head kind of against the cow and its heartbeat kind of regulating you a little bit that people find very comforting. Speaker 4 (8:28) I love that your story about coping in these hard times is about cuddling a big soft mammal and mine is about screaming your head off. Speaker 1 (8:35) You know, we all process trauma in different ways, Elena. Speaker 5 (8:38) That's right. For me, Speaker 1 (8:39) cow cuddling in the Midwest, that is the best news that I heard all week. Speaker 1 (8:53) All right, our guest's journey to this stage this week, it kind of sounds like a fever dream, but it is all very true. A grandfather who sold recreational drugs, multiple moves between the U.S. and Argentina, and then successfully pulling off a jaw-dropping Madonna tribute performance in front of an audience of rabbis. And this was all before the age of 12. It's all detailed in her fascinating and very funny memoir, Cry For Me, Argentina. My Life as a Failed Child Star. Booklist calls it crass, cringe, and absolutely hilarious. Please welcome Tamara Yahia to Livewire. Speaker 1 (9:44) Tamara, welcome to LiveWire. Speaker 7 (9:45) Thank you. I'm so happy. I'm so happy Speaker 1 (9:48) that you're here. I started following you on Twitter long, long ago, back when it was still called Twitter officially. Speaker 5 (9:56) And Speaker 1 (9:56) I just thought you were so funny. And then backstage we were talking and you said that basically your Twitter following and your work on Twitter is sort of how you got the book deal? Speaker 7 (10:04) Yeah. A literary agent found me. Because I would tweet a lot about my family. I have a very strange family. And I would say things like, my dad's hemorrhoid this. Or my mom, well, we'll get into my mom later. But he was like, you have a story to tell. And I was like, I do? And we sold the book about my life because of tweets. I mean, Speaker 1 (10:31) it is such a fun read. And I mean, I grew up in a pretty, not as chaotic as yours, but a fairly chaotic family environment. So there's so much in here that really resonates with me. Let's kind of start, though, at the beginning of the book. You write that you had like just you're about to turn 40, maybe. And you're sort of struggling with this question of like, do you want to become a parent or not? And so you're like rich aunt says, I have. a great therapist for you, but she is in Argentina and she is in her mid 80s and has a very limited understanding of how Zoom works. Speaker 7 (11:02) But the sessions were only $20 per session because she was in Argentina and the currency exchange and on Zoom. And I was like,