SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast

Thank you all for an amazing four years.

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Alfred Hitchcock! bell hooks! The Ballad of Reading Gaol! The dramatic conclusion of our Pal Joey series finds Rabia, Felix and Henry bewitched, bothered and bewildered as they learn the end of Lorenz Hart's story and grapple with the very nature of love. In putting forth our dueling philosophies of love, can we get to the bottom of the thing that all of Sinatra's songs are about, the thing that h...

For the second part of our Pal Joey deep dive, Henry leads Rabia and Felix through what made the original musical so groundbreaking and what makes the 1957 Sinatra film adaptation so bad. We also finally learn what "The Lady is a Tramp" is all about. Who's the mouse with the built? website: suddenlypod.gay contact: suddenlypod@gmail.com donate: ko-fi.com/suddenlypod

ENDLESS HARMONY ENDLESS SUMMER STILL I DREAM OF IT BRIAN WILSON FOREVER 🎶🌊✨

For part one of our Pal Joey deep dive, we look at the life of gay lyricist Lorenz Hart. We explore Hart's writings, philosophy, and history as a closeted artist living a painfully contradictory double life. We also discuss the benefits of irredeemable  characters in art, setting the stage for a closer look at how the 1940 musical Pal Joey —and the 1957 Sinatra-starring film adaptation—came to be....

An emotional deep dive into the untold history of  The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the   Desert , a terrible, racist and transphobic film. Rabia looks at the lives of the three drag queens and one trans woman that it was based on (Cindy Pastel, Strykermeyer, Lady Bump and Carlotta) and the erratic behavour/Shakespearean motivations of troubled writer/director Stephan Elliott. Deep research u...

The third and final part of our series about "I've Got You Under My Skin" and the AIDS crisis, in which we watch the  Red Hot + Blue  TV special from 1990 featuring the Neneh Cherry version of the song. We look at AIDS messaging of the time, learning from its bravery and mistakes, and also confront its inadequacy to deal with the current Long COVID crisis and the need to move on in the present. So...

The second part of our series about "I've Got You Under My Skin" and the AIDS crisis, in which we watch the first two hours of a VHS tape recorded by Michael Aldrich from his Dope Tapes archive.  email: suddenlypod at gmail dot com website: suddenlypod.gay donate: ko-fi.com/suddenlypod

The first in a trilogy of episodes about "I've Got You Under My Skin" and the AIDS crisis. contact: suddenlypod at gmail dot com website: suddenlypod.gay donate: ko-fi.com/suddenlypod

This week, special guest Garrett Cash attempts to set a world record for the most preparation ever undertaken to appear as a guest on a single episode of a podcast. Meet Me in Las Vegas is a boring MGM film from 1956 set at the Sands casino in which Sinatra appears in a cameo as "Man at Slot Machine" for only a few seconds. You won't believe how far Garrett went to put this in its full context, sp...

It's a simple idea with a long history: Woman is told her husband has perished at sea, so she remarries, then the original husband turns up alive and hijinks ensue! An old-timey excuse to show a throuple and a natural premise for comedy, this concept stayed resonant for many years and was remade a number of times – including as a classic screwball 1940 film, that was later itself in 1947 adapted i...

We're off for Ramadan and will be back soon. In the meantime, here's a classic episode of Rocky Fortune  with a quick intro about some upcoming episodes. website: suddenlypod.gay contact: suddenlypod at gmail dot com donate: ko-fi.com/suddenlypod

Not just the 1992 "Is Elvis Alive?" conspiracy theory special The Elvis Conspiracy (a sequel to 1991's  The Elvis Files) . Not just the specific airing of that special from Channel 7 in Adelaide, South Australia on 26 May 1992. The  commercials from that airing . It's as granular as we've ever been, and we're joined by Adelaide's own David M. Green, host of VHS Revue , a show which specialises in...

In 1947, a musical premiered in which a conservative US senator is transformed into a woman by a farming commune of "rainbow people" in order to teach him a lesson. Brimming with queer and trans subtext, Finian's Rainbow is a difficult and exhausting watch today but it remains fascinating as an artefact of proto-feminism and postwar LGBTIQA+ history. Sinatra was originally slated to appear in an a...

I love my wife.  The "I Love My Wife" timeline: " I Love My Wife " (unrelated song from  I Do, I Do,  1966) Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969) I Love My Wife (film, unrelated to the musical, 1970) Viens chez moi, j'habite chez une copine (French play, 1975) "I Love My Wife" (Sinatra single release of title song from musical, January 1977) I Love My Wife (book of original musical, 1977) I Love...

As Los Angeles burns, Henry checks in with the show from a Motel 6 in Palm Springs. websites: henrygiardina.com suddenlypod.gay contact: suddenlypod at gmail dot com

We're back, ahead of schedule, with an emotional first episode of 2025 after a long and personally very traumatic few months. This week we turn to Sinatra's classic 1956 album Songs for Swingin' Lovers! and explore how the album title inadvertently became a double entendre in the 1960s. Placing this album in the inadvertent context of the "swinging" sexual revolution throws new light on it and sna...

Merry Christmas. I'm back. See you soon. - Rabia suddenlypod.gay suddenlypod at gmail dot com

Hi, Rabia here. I have Long COVID and am struggling. I need time to process things and figure out how to best use my energy. Podcasting is good for me but very energy consuming, and I need to work out how I'm going to manage this condition. So Season 3 will end here for now and we will pick back up at some stage in 2025. In the meantime, enjoy this episode of Rocky Fortune. Wear an N95, run an air...

Melbourne's Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR) in North Richmond opened in 2018. This was the result of a years-long grassroots campaign led by the local community, fed up with constant overdoses in the streets. The MSIR operates on principles of harm reduction which simply  work and urgently need to be applied throughout the world. The stigma around drug use, and the criminalising of drug...

In the final (?) part of our Wake Up and Live saga, Henry returns to the show to share his thoughts on Walter Winchell's legacy through the lens of the gossip landscape of 2024.  Sources for this episode: * John Mosedale - The Men Who Invented Broadway (1981) * Neal Gabler - Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (1994) * Snopes article on the Elon/Zuck kissing photo   * Better Offl...

For the last few months, Justin and Rabia have been co-hosting TCBCast After Dark , a deep dive into the seamy underbelly of the Elvis conspiracy world available only on the TCBCast Patreon feed. As they approached Part 6 of an exhaustive investigation into the truth behind the grifters who perpetuated the false "Is Elvis Alive?" conspiracy throughout the 1980s, and reached the infamous 1991 Bill...

This week, we continue to act as if it were impossible to fail in part four of our exhaustive deep dive into Wake Up and Live . Picking up the story from the end of World War II, we look at the legacy of Dorothea Brande's book and the essentially identical self-help scam that generations of grifters have perpetuated on the world ever since. Wasn't this podcast meant to be about Frank Sinatra? Sele...

The history books forgot about the 1944 radio adaptation of Wake Up and Live , a bizarre and disastrous production in which a fascist self-help book adapted into a comedy movie about duelling radio shows is adapted back into a radio show in which several other radio shows exist within the world of this radio show, and characters with real people playing themselves are altered back into fictional c...