June 9, 2008 Show

Our featured guests

SEDGE THOMSON

Host and creator of the nationally syndicated live radio show West Coast Live,  Sedge Thomson is well known to Bay Area audiences for his sly wit and fresh approach to the idea of the radio variety show.  He's described the radio as "magic," and with his show -- which broadcasts weekly from various locations, including the San Francisco Ferry Building -- he's truly made a special kind of local magic.  Although Sedge grew up in Los Angeles and the Northwest, he's a die-hard Bay Area denizen: he lives a few blocks from where his grandmother ran a boarding house in Berkeley (and her uncle, Samuel Willie, chose the spot for the UC campus and built the first house in town).  West Coast Live has been described as the "anti-Today Show"  for its combination of in-depth conversations and mildly subversive fun.  Talk Show Live is delighted to have the chance to turn the tables on one of the Bay Area's most accomplished interviewers!

DR. SUSAN RAEBURN

Berkeley clinical psychologist Susan Raeburn has spent the last  twenty years working with writers, artists, and musicians (including rock bands) in addition to writing about musicians’ mental health.  Susan's a pioneer in the field of rock music psychology, with not only some of the earliest academic work in the field to her name (her doctoral dissertation was the first academic study of occupational stress and coping in professional rock musicians), but also having presented papers and chaired  panels at all the coolest music industry conferences (such as South by Southwest, North by Northwest, NARAS, the Future of Music Coalition, The Experience Music Project and E! Entertainment TV. She comes by her specialty honestly, having been born into a professional music family (her parents were the popular Big Band musicians Boyd Raeburn and Ginnie Powell, and her brother is the curator of the Hogan Jazz Archives at Tulane University ).

Creative Recovery, Susan's new book on addiction (co-authored with creativity coaching expert Dr. Eric Maisel) will be published by Shambhala Press in October 2008.

BABETTE PINSKY

World renowned fashion designer Babette Pinsky is celebrating 40 years of unprecedented success in the notoriously fickle fashion world.  Babette made her name by reinventing the pleat in the 1960s, and has always been known for her use of creative, innovative and high-tech fabrics.   A native New Yorker, she graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan in the early '60s, moved to San Francisco, and began her own fashion business in 1968.  In the early 1980s, Babette hit it big with a signature polyurethane-coated pleated raincoat with a metallic sheen that put her on the fashion map.  In the 1990s she was one of the first American designers to see the future in Japanese artisan microfiber materials, using it to make every kind of pleating pattern imaginable.  Today, the Babette line -- produced locally in her Oakland factory -- is sold throughout the country in independent fashion boutiques (as well as in her own Babette boutiques, including in San Francisco). 

Babette's new book, Babette - Designing a Vision, will be available in June 2008.