Part Two of the conversation with Nina Lorez Collins about her mother, the late filmmaker, playwright, and writer Kathleen Collins.
Nina talks about THE TRUNK, what it was like to be the shepherd of the many works her mother left behind, and the instrumental role Nina played in seeing to it that her mother's big talent find its rightful place in modern American literature.
Katie and Nina also play film and literary critics with a small selection of Collins's complex and highly autobiographical work.
Nina runs TheWoolfer.com, a social platform for women over 40.
A note to all: For the audio word montage that starts each episode, please record one word to describe your mother. Send your one word as an mp3 file to ourmothersourselves@gmail.com, and we'll include it in the audio montage.
And here's the visual word montage, reflecting the thousands of words people have chosen to describe their mother: www.katiehafner.com/word-cloud/
Part Two of the conversation with Nina Lorez Collins about her mother, the late filmmaker, playwright, and writer Kathleen Collins.
Nina talks about THE TRUNK, what it was like to be the shepherd of the many works her mother left behind, and the instrumental role Nina played in seeing to it that her mother's big talent find its rightful place in modern American literature.
Katie and Nina also play film and literary critics with a small selection of Collins's complex and highly autobiographical work.
Nina runs TheWoolfer.com, a social platform for women over 40.
A note to all: For the audio word montage that starts each episode, please record one word to describe your mother. Send your one word as an mp3 file to ourmothersourselves@gmail.com, and we'll include it in the audio montage.
And here's the visual word montage, reflecting the thousands of words people have chosen to describe their mother: www.katiehafner.com/word-cloud/
My mother was a woman of tremendous integrity. My mother was curious, sensitive, compassionate, honest, always there for us, unflappable, loyal, complicated, she is devoted, resilient, dazzling, giving, vivacious extraordinary.
Nina Collins :You know, it's been over thirty years now since she died and she's become a public figure. It's very disorienting. Sometimes I think, like, do I even know her anymore? I don't know.
Katie Hafner :Hello, and welcome to Our Mothers Ourselves, a weekly conversation about one extraordinary mother. I'm Katie Hafner, and I'm your host. In a minute, we're going to get to part two of Lost Love - my conversation with Kathleen Collins' daughter, Nina Collins. But first a little bit of housekeeping. The podcast opens every week with an audio word montage. People using one word to describe their mother. So I wanted to ask you to record your word to describe your mother, and send it to me at ourmothersourselves@gmail.com and I'll work it into the word montage. Okay, now to part two of Lost Love with Nina Collins about her mom, Kathleen Collins, who died at the age of 46. She was one of the first black women to make a feature film. Last week was super personal. This week is, how should I put it, analytical. Twenty years after her mom died, when Nina was 36, she went through her mother's writings, none of which had been published, and she got two films remastered, distributed, and she went through the laborious and emotional process of compiling her mother's work into two volumes. So in this, part two, Nina and I are going to discuss the film Losing Ground, and two short stories. One is called Nina Simone. And the other is called Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? You might remember that we stopped last week with a question that I had asked Nina. And she got to answering the question, then forgot what the question was. And that's where we're going to pick up part two. So my question was, did your mother ever say to you, "I want something done with my work posthumously?" That was my question.
Nina Collins :Right. She didn't say it to me. No, she must have, she surely said it to my stepfather, to Alfred. She didn't talk to me at all about anything except for my brother in terms of her dying, and it was just that you need to take care of him.
Katie Hafner :I'd like to start by talking about the trunk. I have a friend who once said to me many years ago, that she thinks there's one object that sums everybody up. There's one object in everybody's life. She said this in the context of an object she thinks sums my life up and sums me up, which is a pillow. I did a needlepoint pillow back when I was seventeen years old, took me a year to do and it's a very intricately designed pillow with roses around the border. Instead of "home sweet home," it's the first line to Kafka's Metamorphosis.
Nina Collins :Hmmhmmhmm.
Katie Hafner :Yeah, so, and Kafka was my first and really enduring love in literature. And so when I was seventeen, I did this pillow, which she said, my friend said, sums up my nesting instincts, but also my sort of dark ironic side and also my literary love, which is Kafka. So this trunk of yours, I want you to tell me about the trunk, and tell me its history and its journey.
Nina Collins :Sure. And what's funny about this as you talk about an object that summarizes yourself, I actually no longer have the trunk and I think that says a lot a lot about me. I decided I had to get rid of it. When my mother died when I was nineteen. I had a stepfather, she had recently remarried about a year before she died. And he and I did not really get along. I was just turned nineteen and I had a younger brother who was fifteen. And so in those kind of months after she died when we were all living in my mother's house that she had recently bought with Alfred the stepfather, it was very tense. And there was a lot of tension around her stuff. And I, when I decided to move out a few months later, I gathered everything I could find in the house that was hers that I wanted to take with me. Photographs, and a copy of her movie, and just really mounds and mounds of paperwork, and I stuck it in this old, old trunk that had been sitting in a closet full of like old sporting equipment. And it was like musty and gross and it was kind of a big, black old trunk. And I threw everything in there and I took it with me. And basically this trunk like lived, you know, it was like a coffee table in like the tiniest apartment ever in the West Village, followed me around, kind of move to move as I grew up. And then then my, and I really almost never opened it. I would say once or twice I would add something to it, people would send me a packet of letters that my mother had written to them, or I would find an article about my mother. But I never went into it and took stuff out.
Katie Hafner :And then twenty years later, you started reading everything, right?
Nina Collins :Yep, that's right.
Katie Hafner :So were you just blown away by her talent?
Nina Collins :Um, I knew already how talented she was, I think. You know, having seen some of her plays when I was a kid and Losing Ground and kind of, I mean. I was, I was a child who was I to evaluate her talent, but I think I grew up with this strong sense that she was really unusual and talented and smart. So I wasn't so much blown away by her talent as much as I was blown away by the content, in terms of her writing is really all autobiographical. So for me reading those stories, particularly in my late thirties, and it being the first time I really tried to understand her whole life, I was suddenly given a ton of information. And because her writing is so good, and kind of emotional and moving, it was like, not boring information. You know, it wasn't like kind of factual stuff. It was written in this kind of beautiful context. And so yeah, it kind of blew me away. The stories really still have so much power for me all the time.
Katie Hafner :So how did you make the decision that you wanted to try to get these things published?
Nina Collins :Well, once um, once Losing Ground was released to all this surprising acclaim. Basically, when I read the stories, I thought no one will publish these, like, they're amazing and interesting, but she's dead. And she's an unknown black woman who had no success, like I wouldn't be able to get them published. But once Losing Ground was successful, and she had like places like the New Yorker and the New York Times writing all these amazing things about her, I thought maybe someone will publish these stories. And I actually, it wasn't actually really me so much as there was a woman named Bridget Hughes, who's the editor of a really great literary journal called A Public Space. And Bridget wrote to me in the fall of 2015, and said, "I'm doing a special a special issue on forgotten women writers and I wonder if your mom has any writing that hasn't been seen?" And I said, "Why yes! I have a whole trunk of writing that doesn't-"
Katie Hafner :As a matter of fact! Oh my god.
Nina Collins :So I helped her choose them. Like anyway, it was after Bridget did that that I was like, I can probably get these published. And so I spent a couple of months trying to figure out an order, and figure out which ones I should leave out. And I created a manuscript and decided to title it Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Because I just thought that was probably the best title for a collection in this moment, and called my literary agent, who's an old friend of mine, Heather Schroeder, and we sent it out. We got I think nine or ten rejections, we got an offer, a very small offer from Echo, part of Harper Collins.
Katie Hafner :So let's back up and talk about Losing Ground, because it sounds like that's what kicked off this whole thing. You had it restored. And then you heard it was going to be the opening film at Lincoln Center in 20- 2015.
Nina Collins :Yeah.
Katie Hafner :And then it got incredible reviews. Let's, let's talk about the film itself, which I watched very recently. And let's assume, as you say, that all your mother's work is autobiographical. The protagonist is a professor of philosophy at a small college in New York.
Nina Collins :Yeah. And it was filmed at City College where my mother was a professor. So it's, it's essentially City College. Yeah.
Katie Hafner :Got it. So the protagonist is Sarah Rogers. And she's married to an artist named, she's married to Victor whose last name is... I don't know.
Nina Collins :Yeah. Come to think of it. I don't know. Probably, yeah, I don't know.
Katie Hafner :And they have, it would, it kept striking me over and over again. And knowing what you had said about your own parents' relationship was that these were two people who actually really loved each other, but they just were not connecting. And one of the most poignant and saddest moments in the film for me is when he started up this flirtation, an affair with a woman who he's dancing salsa with, and they all, everybody's sort of dancing together in this kind of group thing that's happening at their house. And the character who's this buttoned-up Sarah Rogers, who really knows how to let her hair down, which we find out, but he doesn't know it. She starts sort of dancing. And then he comes up to her and says, "Oh. I always forget you don't know how to dance."
Nina Collins :Yeah, yeah, it's, I'm glad that you, um, but yeah, that is a brutal moment. And it is very much for me like a family moment. And in that I'm a terrible dancer. And you know, as a black person, you would hope, think that you'd be able to dance, but I'm not a good dancer. And my mother was not a particularly good dancer. And my father, who was white, right, unlike the protagonist, the male protagonist in the film who's black, in real life, my father was white. That is exactly the sort of thing he would have said to her, to me, in exactly that kind of nasty way. So it's a good sad moment,
Katie Hafner :Just to give people a sense of the plot. So there she is. She's this true, literally buttoned up professor. She wears these high collar blouses. And you'd think this woman doesn't have a sensual bone in her body. And she's, that's all she is. That's my sense of her. And there's, but there's, and there's something very sensual about the way she even approaches her philosophy. I mean, I could just be reading too much into this, but-
Nina Collins :No, no, I think it is a movie about her, as she refers to it in the film, as Sarah does. It's- In the movie, there's an intellectual pursuit of a static experience. And then in real life, in the movie, right. There's a movie within a movie. She goes on this journey to kind of experience a static expression herself, as a, as an actress in another movie. It's fascinating. It's a great story.
Katie Hafner :Fascinating. And then there's there's her humor, which is kind of an overlay on the entire thing. At one point, Victor, the husband says to her, "What's wrong? Did Hegel and the boys let you down?"
Nina Collins :Haha, that's a great-
Katie Hafner :I love that line. She's so good. What an incredible tragedy that she didn't live longer to make more films.
Nina Collins :Yeah, I know.
Katie Hafner :So Losing Ground was received with high praise. And then the stories, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? and then-
Nina Collins :Notes from a Black Woman's Diary. Yep. Let's-
Katie Hafner :Let's start with um, actually, I was gonna start with Interracial Love. But let's start with Nina Simone. And are you named after Nina Simone?
Nina Collins :I am, yeah.
Katie Hafner :Aha.
Nina Collins :Yeah, I am.
Katie Hafner :It's kind of like I had to, like hit myself over the head!
Nina Collins :And actually funny, like funny little gossip detail, which is that Bill Gunn, the male lead in Losing Ground, was a very good friend of my mother's, and he was, he was gay. He was the lover of Sam Wayman, who's Nina Simone's brother. And Sam and Bill lived near us in Rockland County and we're around a lot, and yeah. So I was named after Nina Simone.
Katie Hafner :Got it. So onto the story, Nina Simone. So why don't you tell me about that story.
Nina Collins :It's very upsetting, again about the male protagonist. So it's, um, it's written in three perspectives. So a DJ who works at an uptown radio station, my mother's perspective, and my father's perspective. And my parents are newly together in this story. They've been together like a year and a half, and they don't have children. And the female protagonist, my mother, is like a young writer in her late twenties. And she thinks that as a way of getting started, she should start trying to write some articles or essays. So she gets this idea to go uptown to this radio station and try and do a story about Nina Simone. It's a very short story, right? It's three or four pages. She goes up to this D, this radio station, she meets this DJ who she has this flirtation with. And the story is about her flirtation with this guy. She ends up going to his apartment, you think maybe they're going to sleep together. My father, it goes into that between his, her perspective, the DJ's perspective, and my father's perspective. My father's at home, their apartment. She comes home looking kind of scared and uncertain. He's noticing this change in her, nudges her, pushes her to say what happened, something happened, are you okay? She finally admits that she had had this kind of flirtatious experience and got flustered and left before anything happened. And my father's character, it's so awful. He says, wait have to read this. He says-
Katie Hafner :Oh no, please read it.
Nina Collins :He says, "I know that's when I began to love her less. I'd wanted her to have him. I'd wanted her to come back all frisky and playful and let me take her after him. But she ran before anything could happen. Pretty soon after that it was over for me." And that's kind of the story.
Katie Hafner :Yep. That's the end of the story.
Nina Collins :Yeah.
Katie Hafner :Awful.
Nina Collins :It's also just there's so many things in here that just kill me. Like, I don't, you don't notice this- I mean, I didn't notice it until just this last time I read it, and I've read it a million times. But she says, she says all these things that are autobiographical, right? She's a Pisces, she has good legs, she has a heavy laugh. These are all my mother. But then she says it was her idea to go up to this radio station. And then you go to her husband's point of view, and he says it was his idea that she go up to this radio station, and that he encouraged her to do this. And it says, "I'd always encouraged her to write and I thought it was great. She was beginning to start projects on her own." It's so patronizing. And it's so exactly, if I- I don't speak to my father anymore, but if I did speak to him today, he would tell me that, you know, she became a filmmaker because of him. And she became a writer because of him. And so I just thought it was super interesting that even in this story, the same thing exists and that she was aware of that dynamic. I just love it. It's just fascinating.
Katie Hafner :It is. It's a, it's a, it's a masterpiece. Because imagine how hard it is to pull that off. Three different points of view within like three pages. It's so short. And there's this one thing I have to read, this is from the DJ's point of view: "The next time she came, I picked up something childish about her. And I knew she was married white." Oh my gosh, right?
Nina Collins :Oh, yeah. I love that.
Katie Hafner :What does, what does that mean?
Nina Collins :Um, I underlined that too. Well, you could tell she, I don't know. I mean, I guess he could see a, maybe it's he's saying he could see a sort of bourgeois middle class. I don't know. I don't know exactly. But I agree. It's a good line. Yeah. I love also where she says when she's writing from the husband's point of view. Well, first of all, he says, "I didn't like being married, but I was happy with her. Color had never been much part in it, I don't think." But then he says down below, "I know I was like a god for her." She says...
Katie Hafner :It's a real send up.
Nina Collins :It is. It's good.
Katie Hafner :Do you have any idea whether your father ever read any of this?
Nina Collins :I'm sure he did. I mean, actually one of the things that makes me... You know, I've accepted that my father and I are estranged. We haven't spoken in around ten years, and it's really probably for the best. And it's sad, but it's, it's, it's okay. But it does actually really make me sad and also kind of angry that he's never reached out to me about the success of her work. Because I'm sure he's probably proud of it in a way, even though he does get sent up quite a bit and some of her work. I mean, he was there when she was doing all this work. So it's surprising to me he's never acknowledged it at all. But yeah, I'm sure he's read them.
Katie Hafner :Before we go on to Interracial Love, I want to ask you about when you were busy. And it's a lot of, I mean, people just, you hear the words, "Oh, I compiled it put together manuscript." This is a lot of super hard work. So you you became your mother's editor, you put the title on the book, you figured out the order the stories would go in. You had to actually decide which ones you, I'm sure there are a lot of darlings that you have to kill. But also there's this kind of bigger, more profound thing. I told you that I, Kafka is like my crush for life.
Nina Collins :Yeah.
Katie Hafner :And the famous story of Kafka telling his friend Max Brod to, you know, burn all his writing. And we're all forever grateful that Brod didn't do that. And after Kafka died, Brod took it all, all of Kafka's writing, with him to Palestine, and everything got published. So versus, just to pull a random example out of a hat, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The burning he did of her work that made him look bad.
Nina Collins :Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a good point. It's a very good point. Yeah, I mean, for all I know, maybe my father is, I don't know. Maybe he does feel ashamed or embarrassed or- I mean, then also I talk so frankly about him and my childhood. I don't know how he feels. It's sad for me, because of course, he's the one person. I mean, well, because I think in a lot of ways with your parent, you're always still the child, right? So as much as I can kind of understand what's gone on between us, there's a part of me that is always going to be the little girl who doesn't have her father's love or approval. Or, you know, he's never told me he was proud of me. And if, if any, if anyone should be proud of me for anything, it's probably what I've done from my mother's work.
Katie Hafner :Oh, absolutely. What an act of love. And you think she'd be happy that you did it?
Nina Collins :Oh, my god, she'd be so happy. In fact, I just got some news this week. It's still a secret, but there's some things that are pending with a couple of her plays. And like, she'd just be so happy.
Katie Hafner :So on to Interracial Love. Again, her, well, why don't you give us a little prece? This is much longer.
Nina Collins :Sure. Yeah, so Interracial Love is a, is a much longer, more complex, more kind of daring structurally story. It's why I chose it as the title story besides just the good title. It's, it's different from any of her other stories in the way that the kind of form, the way that it's written. It's a little more experimental. And this takes place a little earlier. This is when she had just graduated from college. So she went to Skidmore, as I said earlier, and graduated in '62. And her best friend was a white woman who went to Sarah Lawrence. So my mother and Kathy took an apartment on the Upper West Side on West End Avenue in the 80's. And it was right after graduation, she had spent the summer, my mother had spent the summer before working for Snick and had been arrested in Albany, Georgia. And she and Kathy were both very involved in the Movement. And they were living in this apartment, and my mother used to tell me about this apartment. It's where she started to write fiction. And men from the Movement would come through the apartment. I mean, Martin Luther King was there sleeping with white women. My mother used to describe this to me, long before I read the story. So the story is about that summer. It's about a white woman and a black woman, best friends, living in an apartment. And these, the white woman is dating a black poet, which is true. And my mother is having a love affair with a white Civil Rights activist, which is also true. His name was Ralph Allen. So she had had this love affair with this white guy, and they were engaged to be married. And he broke up with her because supposedly his family didn't want him to marry a black woman. And so the story is about this young woman who's dealing with this all the activity in her apartment, and the Civil Rights Movement, and- But in the story, she experiences this heartbreak, this this man breaks up with her. And she's also talking about her father and her father's feelings about her work in the Movement, which was always a real source of tension in the family. And her parents were very unhappy when she went down south, they were really scared. She was in jail. There was a lot of violence obviously at the time. So that's kind of my summary of the story. And she does this stylistic thing where after she refers to every character, in parentheses she'll say white or black. So you get this sense of all these, all these different racial identities.
Katie Hafner :So I'm gonna read one sentence, just because I love the way she put- It's her humor, and just the way she can build a sentence. And then I'm going to ask you to read right after that, well, it's on page thirty in my, on my iPad, so I don't know. But let me read the sentence: "Every Wednesday at five o'clock, she sat for an hour and unburdened herself on a very sleepy psychiatrist, whose continual dozing was a sure sign that not only was she boring, but that any life dissected too closely was boring, and could only make you fall asleep."
Nina Collins :That's good. Very her.
Katie Hafner :It's very good! So then, then the next paragraph, do you see it? The paragraph right after that.
Nina Collins :Ok. "She wished her father would forgive her lapses. Her racial ones as well as her sexual ones. After her first night in bed, she was astonished. That was what the fuss was all about? That was why her father watched her with lock and key, scrutinizing every date as a potential enemy, for that? That particular slipping and sliding that occasionally provided a momentary gasp? A strange, slight convulsion? And then what? How could her father think she was going to the dogs because she slept with one man and was about to marry another one? White true, and what of it? She wished her father could talk, but he didn't just lie there and stare at her like she was really colored. Like, like now she had turned into a colored woman and was beyond salvation. That was the real bug."
Katie Hafner :Yep.
Nina Collins :Yeah. Yeah.
Katie Hafner :There's so much there. And I was, I was going to ask you how you felt being her daughter, reading your mother, who wrote a lot about sex, and very openly and graphically?
Nina Collins :Yeah, I mean, to me, it was just the way we grew up. So like that line about slipping and sliding is very her. That description of sex kind of makes me laugh.
Katie Hafner :Mhm.
Nina Collins :I mean, she's funny. She was very open about everything. The truth is when I, when I did have sex and told her that I had had sex, she was completely shocked and could barely speak to me for a few days. And so there was also kind of a primness to her.
Katie Hafner :Did she, when she was alive, did she submit stories to the New Yorker, or-
Nina Collins :So I have a rejection letter from Ms. Magazine. From Alice Walker, saying, "You're right, the people who tell you that you're good are right, you are good. But these aren't right for us right now." So she did submit to Ms. Magazine. And that's the only evidence I have of submissions.
Katie Hafner :You said that you had gotten rid of the trunk. So what made you do that?
Nina Collins :Um, well, let's see. I, you know, I took out the trunk for the basement when I was probably thirty seven. And I'd say maybe ten years later, so about five years ago, I just felt, I felt burdened by all of it, Like I needed, and it was taking over. You know, I'd spent years at this point doing all this work. Like when I was compiling the stories I had, you know, they were all the original written, a lot of them were handwritten. So I had piles of her work all over my apartment. And I also started to worry like, I'm super practical. And because my mom died in her forties, I've always kind of been afraid that I would die young. And I thought, what if I die and so I ended up reaching out to the poetry editor at the New Yorker who also runs the Schomburg. That's the Schomburg Center, which is the Research Center for Black History. It's part of New York Public Library. I kept copies of obviously everything that I wanted, but the Schomburg has her entire archive. And, and then I threw away the trunk. It was, I don't know, it felt... It wasn't particularly pretty. It smelled. The paper in it was falling apart. It made me a little sad. I started to feel like my whole life, like I was ready for my life to not be so completely defined by my mother, I suppose.
Katie Hafner :By your mother, her work, the trunk.
Nina Collins :Yeah, by all of it. I just felt very dominated by it. And I think it's timely. Like I think, and you know, when I think about it, you know, it was about five years ago, I was forty six or so. I was the year, the age she was when she died. And I think I started to feel like my mother needs to be not behind me, but that I need to move. I need to focus on my, learn how to really been my own adult.
Katie Hafner :Who do you think her literary heroes might, who would she really admire today?
Nina Collins :I wonder if she would like Zadie Smith. I think she would certainly like Zadie's Smith's persona. There's a, there's an energy and a funniness to her work that I think my mother would respond to. But I don't know. My mother was nothing if not surprising. So you know, like, she loved, one of her favorite films was Scarface. And she loved Prince. I remember seeing Purple Rain with her. I mean, she was a little like I am. There was a kind of high-low quality to her tastes, or like Broad City, I think she would have liked the Broad City girls. No, and I wonder like what she'd think of Issa Rae, for example. Like my daughters adore Issa Rae, you know, her HBO show. And Issa's optioned a piece of my mother's work, but who knows. I mean, also, it's like a cultural, you know, she's had been dead thirty five years, the world is so different, you know, there's just no answering these questions.
Katie Hafner :And now that you've put your mother's work, given it its rightful place of honor, you are your own person. So I just want to end by talking a little bit about what you do.
Nina Collins :Oh, that's nice of you. Um, well, so you know, I had a long career in book publishing. And now it seems a long time ago from- In my twenties and thirties, I was a scout for foreign publishers and film companies and then I was literary agent. And then after I got divorced and started working on my mother's work, I decided to- I closed my agency and I went to graduate school and got a master's in something called Narrative Medicine. And also became a life coach. I got interested in kind of really, because of my mother's life, I got interested in thinking about transitions of loss and aging and death for women really, and divorce and kind of all the ways that women experience loss and how they get through it. And I ended up, completely serendipitously, oddly creating a Facebook group, which I called What Would Virginia Woolf Do? Which was a dark joke, like the idea was I wanted to talk about aging in a kind of funny, private way with women, kind of like-minded women my age. And so the joke was Virginia Woolf killed herself in her fifties, should we all just kill ourselves? Are we kind of done? And the Facebook group got very popular, unexpectedly. It just kind of struck a chord. And it grew and grew, and I ended up writing a book which is called "What Would Virginia Woolf Do, and Other Questions I Ask Myself As I Attempt to Age Without Apology." And I started a podcast called Raging Gracefully. And then I took the group off of Facebook. So I now run a social platform for women over forty called the Woolfer, which is what the women in the community call themselves, Woolfers with two o's. And it's basically like a smart girl club. But we're, we're mostly at our core, kind of like a private Facebook for women over forty, where we talk about health, sexuality, relationships. So I'm a community leader, and definitely at heart kind of an entrepreneur. Film rights were recently optioned to the Woolfer community, and to a memoir I've been working on for a long time. So you know, who knows what will happen? But it's, it's been an interesting process.
Katie Hafner :Well, I wouldn't have expected the daughter of Kathleen Collins to do anything uninteresting. So Nina Collins, I'm going to say thank you so much for taking the time. And thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing the work you did on behalf of your mother.
Nina Collins :Oh thank you. No, it's, it's been a real treat obviously, it's been a huge part of my life, a really rewarding part of my life. And I think it's also really helped me, my feelings about my childhood and my parents. So it's been a great thing for me too.
Katie Hafner :And that's it this week for Our Mothers Ourselves. Our theme song was composed and performed by Andrea Perry. Paula Mangin is our artist in residence. Elizabeth Kaye is the show's producer. And again, for the word montage that opens the show every week, make a recording of one word to describe your mother. Do it in one second, or two seconds, or go crazy and use three seconds. And send it to me at ourmothersourselves@gmail.com. Our Mothers Ourselves is a production of Odradek Studios. I'm Katie Hafner and I'm your host. Have a great week everyone, and stay safe.