Sighs and Whispers

This week on Sighs & Whispers, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with fashion designer, actress, writer and all-around creative Tere Tereba. As a teenager Tereba began designing for Arpeja, the largest LA-based multi-brand fashion company who owned Young Edwardian, Young Innocent and many others. Quickly making a name for herself, over the next twenty years Tereba designed fo...

Meryl Meisler is an acclaimed photographer known for her street and documentary work. Meisler began photographing in the mid-70s, focusing on the Jewish community in her hometown on Long Island as well as the nightlife scene in NYC. After becoming an art and photography teacher at a public school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, she continued to shoot the world and people around her. Following her retiremen...

Carole Bell Ford is an educator, historian and writer. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1934, Carole’s choices led her away from the narrow options available to her in Brownsville at the time, eventually leading her to get her master’s and her doctorate, live in Europe, start writing and launch a whole new career. For many years she worked at Empire State College, a SU...

Penny Arcade is a performance artist and provocateur. “A runaway at thirteen, a reform-school graduate at sixteen, a performer in the legendary New York Play-House of the Ridiculous at seventeen, and an escapee from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene at nineteen, Penny Arcade emerged in the 1980s as a primal force on the New York art scene and an originator of what came to be called performance art.” She...

Charlie Morrow is a sound artist, composer, musician, producer, conceptualist, performer, magazine editor and former jingle writer. He joins host Laura McLaws Helms to discuss all aspects of his life, work and creative process. A true multi-hat, his creative projects have included chanting and healing works, museum and gallery installations, large-scale festival events, radio and TV broadcasts, fi...

Barbara Nessim is an artist, teacher, and creative visionary. She joins host Laura McLaws Helms to discuss all aspects of her life, work and creative process. From the personal—her childhood in a Jewish neighborhood in the 1940 and 50s, through life as a single woman making her way in New York in the 60s and 70s, a later marriage and her decision not to have children—to the artistic—her inspiratio...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with dancer, choreographer and director Martha Clarke—known for transcending dance and theater to make deeply evocative moving spectacles of beauty steeped in history. After studying at Julliard, dancing with Anna Sokolow’s company, having a baby and moving to Rome, Clarke became a founding member of the highl...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with Veronica Vera. Opening up about her multifaceted career as a sex journalist, porn star, erotic model, prostitutes’ rights activist, co-founder of the first porn star support group, and the head of the world’s first cross-dressing academy, Veronica is incredibly insightful about the effect that her sexual...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with photographer and filmmaker Robert Farber. Rising to prominence as a nude and fashion photographer in the mid-to-late 1970s, Farber is known for his signature soft focus aesthetic which he developed by experimenting with different films, filters and development processes with the goal of creating a painter...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with makeup artist, hairstylist, interior decorator and gallery owner Rick Gillette. Passionate about beauty and transformation, Rick arrived in NYC in the late 1960s. In great detail, Rick vividly brings to life the many worlds of New York—from downtown hip salons to luxury fashion magazines to the gay scene....

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with illustrator and doll creator Mel Odom. An acclaimed illustrator known for utterly captivating and totally unique drawings suffused with a beauty and mystery that were unmatched, Mel worked extensively in the 1970s and 1980s for publications like Playboy, Time, Viva, OMNI, and Blue Boy. In 1995 he launched...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with photographer and filmmaker Willie Christie. A wonderfully gossipy conversation, Willie discusses his career from photo assistant to photographer to commercial director to screenwriter to today. Full of interesting stories and memories about his time as a fashion photographer in the 1970s when he was marri...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with make-up artist Barbara Daly. Barbara’s long and illustrious career includes working with such photographic greats as Helmut Newton, Barry Lategan and Norman Parkinson, in addition to designing the makeup looks for two of Stanley Kubrick’s films, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Barry Lyndon.’ She then went on to...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with acclaimed photographer Tony Vaccaro. Now 96, Tony Vaccaro is a legend in the photography world. Drafted into WWII at age 20, he brought his 35 mm camera with him to the frontlines in Europe—vividly capturing all aspects of an infantryman’s life: the chaos, the boredom, the destruction, the death. Tony sta...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with acclaimed fashion journalist Marylou Luther. Opening up about her seven decades writing about fashion, Marylou discusses her leap from small-town Nebraska to covering fashion for the Des Moines Register, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times and McCall’s, meeting Christian Dior, her friendship with Edith Head...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with graphic artist David Lance Goines. Incredibly multi-talented, Goines is an artist, calligrapher, typographer, printing entrepreneur, and author, yet he probably best known for the posters he illustrated for local Berkeley businesses, which have been reproduced and sold worldwide. Most notably would be the...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with pop artist Mel Ramos. Sacramento native Mel Ramos was a progenitor of the pop art movement in the early 1960s – alongside his friends and contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, he was one of the first artists to use comic book illustrations in his art. Ramos gained fame and notoriety for his pai...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with graphic artist Sandy Dvore. Originally from Chicago, Sandy Dvore left advertising to move to LA to become an actor in the early 1960s. Several years of failure and a chance encounter resulted in him becoming a highly successful graphic artist in the entertainment world. For many years the highly coveted b...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with model, actress and yogi Ingrid Boulting. One of the most memorable models of the late 1960s and 1970s, Ingrid Boulting was raised in South Africa and England. Starting as a ballerina she fell into fashion, where she became a favorite of Richard Avedon, David Bailey and Sarah Moon, and appeared in Vogue (a...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with fashion designer Anna Sui. Born in Detroit in 1952, from a young age Sui became obsessed with fashion, music and New York. Sui achieved her dream when she moved to NYC to study fashion design at Parsons, but left after two years to work as an assistant designer at a juniors’ sportswear label. In 1980 she...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with photographer and filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg. Originally from the Bronx, Jerry became intrigued with photography while working at his family’s fur business after WWII. He started as a photographer’s assistant in the mid 1950s, before striking out on his own and shooting for Vogue by the end of the decade....

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with fashion designer Vicky Tiel. Vicky Tiel started designing clothes as a pre-teen before studying fashion at Parsons in New York. Alongside her college friend, Mia Fonssagrives, she moved to Paris at age 20 in 1964, where they quickly became the toast of the town. Snapped up to be costume designers on the f...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with model, Playboy Playmate and journalist Marilyn Cole Lownes. From a small seaside town in England, Marilyn got her break as a Bunny at the Playboy Club in London in 1971 before becoming the January 1972 Playmate of the Month and 1973's Playmate of the Year. A notorious beauty, she enjoyed the finest excess...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with legendary television producer Russell Morash and his wife, Marian Morash. Working at WGBH in Boston since 1957, Russell Morash’s programs have been integral to the success of PBS – he produced Julia Child’s ‘The French Chef’ and ‘The Advocates,’ before creating ‘The Victory Garden,’ ‘This Old House’ and ‘...

This week on LADY’s After Hours, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with legendary fashion designer Norma Kamali. Opening up about her life, work and creative process, Norma is incredibly insightful about the choices and decisions she has made throughout her career in order to maintain her independence in the fashion industry and also discusses what continues to inspire her af...