HOUR ONE:
Author Alice Randall shares her book Soul Food Love: Healthy Eating Inspired By 100 Years of Cooking in a Black Family. She studied under Julia Child and currently lives in Nashville writing country songs. "I'm proud to say I live to eat, but I also want to eat to live." She continues, "I'm grateful to my husband... no matter how big I got, he seemed to think I was pretty and beautiful."
She also comments on her editorial in The New York Times, Black Women and Fat. Randall says that reducing body weight by 5% reduces the risk for cancer. Reducing the body weight by 10% reduces the risk for diabetes.
Randall comments, "How many white girls prayed for big thighs?"
"I love our red bean and brown rice creole salad," Randall says, "These are accessible ingredients that we turn into wonderful food."
She worked with Glen Campbell on country music.
Whitney Vann joins us from WBRZ to discuss her career and her new Sunday program. "My dream job was to design my own television show."
"Baton Rouge was the trailblazer for every bus boycott before Rosa Parks," Vann says. That was in 1953.
"I've had four co-anchors, but Leo Honeycutt was my first," Vann says.
"I got to hold a hummingbird in the palm of my hand," she says, "can you imagine?"
Vann comments on the recent Brian Williams scandal and asserts that she feels the network behaved appropriately.
HOUR TWO:
Author Dr. Garry Wills shares his book The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis. He was a Jesuit seminarian. "The order was oppressed one time by the pope and when they came back they became super conservative in their training methods," Wills continues, "That was a lesson to me that the church often gets stuck at a certain point."
"It <the Catholic Church> changes constantly," Will asserts.
"It's like being an American, there are great historical sins in our past... but we still love America... the same thing is true for the church."
"The only original thing America has done is the separation of church and state," Wills says. He recalls an interview with the Dalai Lama in which this was discussed.
Paul Marks Jr. discusses his article in The Advocate about Mike the Tiger's reluctance to get into the cage to travel to games. He was the caretaker of Mike the III from 1963 to 1965.
He shares a story from when he was caretaker in which he took Mike the III from his habitat in the travel cage to his own home in the garage to save Mike from Ole Miss fans determined to harass the tiger the night prior to a game.
"Nobody's trash talked about Mike that's for sure," Marks comments. Tiger stadium is one of the only stadiums to be named not for a donor but for the mascot.