Alchemizing Grief into Purpose

0:00I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, on a botulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

0:31Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. I've been in and out a lot lately for work, press and photo shoots, the usual whirlwind.

1:08And I was just thinking about how much I love settling into a real home when I'm on the road. There's something special about staying in a space that feels lived in and welcoming. It makes the experience feel more connected to the place. When I book a stay on Airbnb, I can make simple home cooked meals, have a few friends over and ease into a rhythm that feels more grounded than being in a hotel. And it's such a simple, practical idea for anyone heading out of town. You can host your home on Airbnb while you're away. Your place would be sitting empty anyway, and hosting can bring in a little extra money to put toward future travel.

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2:09Don't hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it, want it, let it come from the intention of real truth for you and then let it go. For me, our soul is like it's unbound. It's limitless, but we will use words to limit ourselves. When people stop believing that somebody's got your back or Superman's coming, we turn to ourselves and that's where you become empowered. Courageous participation attracts positive things. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow and this is the Goop podcast, where we bring together visionaries, scientists, healers, artists, and seekers. I'm so grateful that I get to interview these extraordinary thought leaders and share their wisdom with you.

2:58And I love listening to the conversations that are led by my co-host and dear friend, Cleo Wade. Cleo is a beautiful poet and author. I deeply admire her and the way she keeps her heart open to the world. Together, we believe that engaging in open-minded, honest, and sometimes difficult conversations has the power to change our lives. All right, over to Cleo. Hi, this is Cleo Wade, co-host of the Goop podcast. Today's guest is my very best friend, and I am so lucky that she said yes to being my first ever guest here on the pod. Sade Lithcott is the CEO of the National Black Theater in New York.

3:40It was founded in 1968 in Harlem by her mother, the legendary Dr. Barbara Ann Tier. Sade's mother and Sade are two people I have long admired, not only for the women they are, but for the mission they embody. As Sade will tell you in this episode, she comes from a long lineage of movement makers, and that is where our conversation begins. We talk about ways that she has alchemized grief into purpose and what it's like for her to continue her mother's dream and legacy. Sade explains how grief has pushed her to harness her courage. She also talks about the root of courage, the power of art, theater, community, and storytelling.

4:31She tells us a little of how being honest and owning our unapologetic truth can be a profound tool for self-nourishment. I am constantly learning from Sade, her beautiful words and her wisdom. This conversation is exactly what I hoped my first pod would be. I'm so grateful. So let's get to it. I feel very lucky that my best friend is joining me. I really wanted the conversations that I have on this pod to be ones that I could feel we learned through intimacy and these really intimate conversations. And there's so much wisdom and knowledge I feel that I get to learn every day from my closest girlfriends.

5:24And so I do feel that, yes, sometimes we're learning from the person that's very far away. And then sometimes we're really learning from the person whose arm we have linked in with. So Sade Lithcott, thank you so much for joining me on my first ever pod. Yay! It's such an honor to be your very first pod guest, Klee. What I want to do, because I really love this, I think that there's this amazing power of people claiming and reclaiming their story when they're asked, tell me a little bit about your life, or can you kind of give me your life in a timeline? And so I would love for you to share with us your kind of bio, according to you.

6:15You were born and raised in New York City. Yep. Born and raised in Harlem, New York City to two artists, radical artists. My mother is the founder of the National Black Theater. My father was a photographer turned actor. And, you know, I was born into a radically free Black space that was committed to the evolution of our community and people through the theater arts. And so my worldview really has always been steeped in being free and how to get other people free. And that's translated professionally for the last almost 15 years as being the current CEO of the National Black Theater, which is, when I tell you, a tremendous privilege and honor to be helming the oldest Black theater in New York and one of the longest theaters in the country helmed and continually helmed by a woman of color.

7:16There's two things you just said that are so incredible, which is that you're the longest run Black-owned theater in the city and one of the longest running theaters in the country run by a woman of color. Because of that, those two things, I know that you must consistently walk into rooms being the only person who looks like you. And I think in a post or during, or I'm not sure where we are in a lot of our movements right now, but after a Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter, I think sometimes we think that because there's a lot of visible work having been done as a result of these movements, that behind closed doors, things look the way they might look on a TV show or in a movie.

8:07And so how do you walk into these rooms? Because I do think that people are in their day-to-day lives moving through that, where they are the only woman in the space, the only person of color in the space, the only person of their identity or orientation in the space, what is that like to work in that probably I'm sure daily? And how do you, I guess, cultivate the confidence and bravery to consistently do it so that you can push forward your institution? I think for me, I love the word courage because, you know, the root of that word is core, the heart. Courage is one, a faculty that is a fundamental tool is that in every space, we have to harness our courage.

9:04That heart space is actually a courageous space. And so I walk into rooms rooted in courage and rooted in the knowledge that none of us are ever alone. And I say this because what I am clear that any one of us has the opportunity on a daily basis when we walk into any room is to support completing the sentence of our ancestors unfinished sentence thought or dream and so we're never alone because we're always standing on the shoulders of generations of ancestors who weren't able to complete their sentence that we get the privilege to do. And so, you know, between, you know, harnessing the courage and being really rooted in the clarity that we are never alone and that who's with us is rooting for us, right?

9:57Like they literally are our roots and they are rooting for our liberation through whatever our form of expression is. So I never feel alone. I actually feel like it is the ultimate party that I get to walk in, the bigger the room, the more intimidating the opportunity, the more like, we're doing this y 'all, you know? So it feels joy filled to be stepping into spaces that weren't necessarily kind of codified for being as black as I am, as much of a woman as I am. It's an opportunity to introduce everybody to my ancestors. So I'm always like very psyched. I love that. And the world does not tell us this.

10:39And I think maybe on purpose, because I think if every time you were the only person who looked like you and walked into a room and felt that you have this kind of energetic surrounding of all who came before you and all who want you to complete, finish, or extend a dream, people would be loose in the world with courage. We would be all over the place. And so what I wonder is, is this the teachings of your mother? I'm obviously a longtime fan of your mother's work and her writing and her speaking and her performing and her producing. Even the way that she chose to move to the world and create in the world is so singular.

11:21Would you say that this idea kind of stems from her being your mother? Is this her? We are all our mother's children. So, So much of how I see my worldview has been shaped by my mom, who was Dr. Barbara Antir, a woman who coined an artistic practice called ritual theater making. And so, so much of my business practice or my life practice has been geared around ritual, which is as old as time for Black women in particular. So it is like singularly my mother and it is universally Black women since the beginning of time, creating and holding space, making ways out of no way, creating and nurturing the energy of the possibility of tomorrow.

12:18I mean, I think Black women from day one have always taken the word impossible and like imbued it with I'm possible, you know? And so I think it's that dichotomy that I was raised in that absolutely was my mother's testimony and lives through me in a contemporary lens as I translate the world through my work. And we hear that in the Beyonce album. Yes. That was the shock of the week. Or so I want to tell you the story is that when Beyonce's album came out, the most recent one and when Renaissance comes out and the whole world erupts because Beyonce has made this beautiful, mesmerizing disco album and I'm listening to it.

13:09of course, the day it comes out, I am a part of the hive and I hear your mother, one of your mother's most famous speeches. I mean, it was kind of a talk she was giving is the context of which I've heard it and understand it and actually listened to it again recently. And it is so amazing. I mean, I wish Beyonce would have, I wish you would have just wrote it out to the end because the part where she tells us to learn to love ourselves, really, it kills me. But your mom is all of a sudden in Alien Superstar. This is not the point of this conversation at all, but as a fan of your mother and Beyonce, both equally, can you give me a little breakdown?

13:54What happens? Does Beyonce's team call you and say your mom is on her new album? kind of no so the funniest thing is so the great Beyonce sampled my mom Dr. Barbara Ann Tears a long-form interview that she did in the late 70s on Black theater and it is a part of the Smithsonian's archive and kind of lives on YouTube as a long-form 20-minute interview and the interview was supposed to be about theater. And my mother takes 20 minutes to tell how theater or the vehicle of storytelling is a vehicle that teaches us how to learn to love ourselves more. And it's kind of one of those B-sides that lives in the internet and like, you know, you would really be hard pressed to discover it.

14:47And Beyonce did. So every so often, you know, scholars find it or they quote her for different books in the Smithsonian will get in touch with us to see if it's okay if, you know, they license the interview to an outlet, but it's usually very academic. And then this one time we got a call from the Smithsonian folkways that were like, we can't reveal very much. It's time sensitive. And can you get on the phone? And I do have to say that the people from Ivy Park approached sampling Dr. Tear's words with so much diligence and care. And the thing that was so kind of ironic, and I know this is not what we came to talk about, is, you know, my godmother was Maya Angelou.

15:32And so this song, that verse that leads into my mom's sample was really like, we were talking about rituals and ancestors. it it it splices together a Maya Angelou poem a phenomenal woman it takes pieces from Maya's neulogy of my mother upon her passing and then drops in the sample and so when I say that black women you know generations past and generations to come are mistresses of ceremony of holding space for our healing and pathways forward the culmination of that sample and that song was all of that, you know? And so it was the biggest honor. It also, it freaks me out walking down the street and just hear my mom's voice bumping out of cars.

16:18I imagine it's kind of a ultra version of finding an old letter from your mother or something like as someone who I turn to whenever a friend of mine is moving through grief. I always ask you once I had a friend move through really tragic grief almost two years ago, and you were my first call, you know, what do I say? Can you talk to me a little bit about how you move through the grief with losing your mother And then also what it feels like to have her voice surround you kind of culturally for six months. And now we're, this album is about to tour and your mother's voice is going to be in stadiums all over the world and a loud speaker.

16:56What is that feeling? I'm just curious because we've never talked about that. It feels like divine guidance. You know, it's the breadcrumbs of your life that point you into the right direction. I have been blessed with an innate ability to listen actively to the world around me. And that world around me is both visible and invisible. So when things like this happen, it's actually like the breadcrumbs that point me in the direction of where I'm supposed to be doing, right? It's that sign. It's that gut intuition that says, keep on going, right? Like the work that you're doing or the life that you're building, the gifts that you're sharing are resonating.

17:48And they're not just resonating here from the kind of tangible space of labor, but they're resonating with your ancestors in a long lineage of movement makers. And I think If anything, we are all work in the continuum of something. And life is constantly pointing us into a direction or sprinkling breadcrumbs, you know, for better or for worse, where we're headed. And so when you get that kind of a validation, you understand it helps to soothe the grief because it is righteous. You know, when your grief turns into a conscious, righteous calling, it serves you in ways that you're clear about. And I think that that's what the Beyonce sample was.

18:41Like all of a sudden my grief was incredibly righteous and in service of someone else's grief or love or whatever you are taking from it. And that's the beauty of art, right? It holds a mirror up to both like your beauty and your pain. And it grabs you by the heart and hand and says we can turn this into something beautiful. And so that's what it was for me. It was really this alchemy of my grief into something productive and beautiful and of service to others. Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.

19:25Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache.

19:55Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. It's incredible how service has this power to alchemize pain into something purposeful. I do think that whenever we are taking the hardest things that have happened to us and turning it in somehow to an offering to help others or any part of our lives.

20:38And friendships are like that too. When, when your friendship is a relationship rooted in offerings, service, selflessness, you see the, the kind of fruits of the, of those types of seeds are so sweet. And, and it's also interesting because I think that a lot of the times we often talk about being on our ancestors' shoulders. And I think also these people that came before us are kind of whispering in our ears. And it's really interesting when their whisper becomes louder and louder because it is a guidance and I think, and can also be an affirmation. I was also saying this to someone earlier today, what you constantly remind me of is we typically look at Black history as something that has happened before our time.

21:27And we don't think of Black history as something that is being made right in front of us in our communities. And you can't really believe it. And around the time of this, your mother kind of claiming an affirmation right before your eyes in front of the world in this really big way, you were, I think, maybe more in the midst of, not in the beginning stages of, but producing, creating, bringing to the world bringing to this, the masses, this history making play that you've discovered in a way, right. And produce called fat ham, which is coming to Broadway, April 12th. We are in previous right now, but oh my God, I can't believe it.

22:11Yeah. So fat ham is it's a Pulitzer winning play. And I said this to you earlier, I fell in love with the theater because of you and because I know it, but I'm not the theater person. I wasn't like, oh, I'm going to bring Sade on the pod as my first guest because I think everyone loves the theater. I know that the theater is a hard place to get to. And I know that it's not in all of the communities. You and your mother really made a point to put theater in community in the center of Harlem in Black space, but I didn't, you know, grow up going to see plays or theater in that way. And so I, everything I know about theater, I know because I know you and it really, and in the history of how your mom really transformed theater is what made me really love the art form when it's done in the kind of specific way that the National Black Theater does theater.

23:13And so I'd love for you to kind of walk us through theater, what the theater does, and then how you discover or create the space for a playwright to come into the world and then win a Pulitzer and go to Broadway. Well, I can't take responsibility for all of that. I will say, you know, theater for me is the most powerful, one of the most powerful mediums on the face of the earth because stories are the most powerful medium on the earth. Storytelling really at its heart is a conjuring of our biggest hopes and heartbreaks. It humanizes all of who sits in front of it and relates to stories. So storytelling is so powerful because you can change the hearts and minds of the world through the way people are represented on stage and how those stories are told.

24:12And so for us at National Black Theater, we use the medium of storytelling to shift and change the worldview and the perception of Black culture in the most radical, unapologetically creative way. Because it's the truth of our experience as opposed to the media's interpretation of what our life and lifestyles are. And so our work, as much as it's about theater, our work is about right sizing our own humanity, like reclaiming our stories, reclaiming our narrative, making space for us to be whole and holy. And so Fat Ham is written by James Iams, who won the Pulitzer for this incredible play directed by Saheem Ali.

25:03And they're amazing, amazing James. I love him. Amazing artist. They actually met almost a decade ago at National Black Theatre when we produced a world premiere show that James wrote called Killmuth Paradise. It was a powerful show. And actually, I think James said the other day, one of his most produced plays is this wild play that meets these five young African-American men at the moment their lives were taken from them by state violence. And the whole play takes place in purgatory. And the play was so powerful because in the emergence of Black Lives Matter and the controversy, if there is any controversy where there shouldn't be, around Black Lives Matter as a movement where the humanity of Black folks gets transformed into hashtags that, you know, in their memory also strip us of our humanity.

26:14MBT thought the show to produce was this one, this one that gives the life and the wholeness back to the characters and says, even in the face of so much tragedy and trauma, that we can still be in pursuit of Black joy because any one of these young boys whose lives were stolen or taken are remembered by the most traumatic moment and not the trail of joy that they left in their loved ones throughout their life. And so that was the story we wanted to tell that season that brought these artists together. And fast forward, last year, James Sahim, National Black Theater and the Public Theater got together and produced the New York premiere of Fat Ham, which is a Black, Southern queer loose adaptation of Hamlet, thus that ham.

27:08So amazing. It's the first time I've ever left a play that has anything to do with Shakespeare and then elated with joy. I think all of our friends went to see it. We just were high. I mean, I felt as if I'd had three shots of tequila and was dancing on a table. I was flying high leaving. And that was the experience of everyone I know who saw this play. Well, that means so much to us because, you know, here's where the resistance comes in, right? So the righteous grief is that during the endemic where, you know, African-American people, especially in rural environments have some have lost one or both of their parents, where legislation is being passed where you can't say gay, or drag story time is being banned.

28:05Like the antidote to all of that erasure, all of what we see the pendulum as moving backwards is art. And if we, in these moments of darkness, can talk about it and then infuse it with joy and laughter, which is so disarming that it becomes the revolution, that it becomes the resistance. And you're sitting shoulder to shoulder with people who may not believe what you believe, may ascribe to these legislations, may ascribe to not having been exposed to some of the richness of our culture, are disarmed with joy and laughter we're tackling and we're saying gay when it's being legislated against. I think it was like, it's the perfect play because it gives you an escape hatch from how heavy the world can be, but it's also pushing you to think outside of our little boxes and bubbles and boundaries to see the world more holy with a place at the table for each and every one of us.

29:14And I always find that the more specific in art you can be, the more universal the message is. That's the science and secret to soul. That is the science and secret to art that resonates past genre or race or color or gender or sexual orientation. And so Fat Ham not only is just I think people have a great time, but it's really the kind of art that we all need to be making and seeing and telling folks about. This holiday season, choose gifts that feel thoughtful and practical with Omaha Steaks. Whether you're hosting or gifting, they deliver the world's best steak experience, and it makes you look like you planned way ahead.

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30:34And for an extra$35 off, use promo code T-Bone at checkout. Terms apply. See site for details. That's omahastakes.com, code T-Bone. It's also interesting because you said earlier that art has this power to change hearts and minds. And if you can change a heart and a mind, that's also how you change policy. I mean, this is how we change these laws. I don't know a single person who doesn't feel oppressed or disgusted or upset or a myriad of almost tied down emotions, unfree feelings with the legislation we are all currently living in and around that is kind of, you know, popping up, whether it's the book banning or the language restriction.

31:28restrictions and living in the midst of a constant flow of gun violence. And I think you really tap into something because I think sometimes people are like, just go to the hill, screw art. And your mother, especially someone who founded the theater, you know, on the heels of what, what, what year did they just, did she found the theater? 1968. 1968. If you look through the history of America, you will find a million books just about the year 1968. They call it the year that disrupted the world. It is one of the most critical points in our history, especially in race relations and class relations, everything.