Welcome! I’m Mark W. Schumann, long-term friend and loyal sidekick to Dr. Katherine H. Clark. You can think of me as playing Willow to her intellectual-flavored Buffy. I don’t know a lot about the show, and my ignorance shows up pretty well in the podcast, but that’s okay–Dr’s been calling me “Idiot” (as a pet name, I think?) for years now.
Dr’s a pretty solid Buffy fan of long standing. She’s also wicked smart and has a Ph.D. in mystery literature.
I, on the other hand, am completely new to the show. So Dr said “Hey, let’s watch Buffy together and podcast about it!” and of course I played along. (See “loyal sidekick” above.)
So here’s what we do. Most Wednesday nights, Dr makes a fancy vegetarian dinner. We gorge ourselves in her living room while watching an episode and taking notes. Then we spend thirty to sixty minutes talking the episode to death over Indian Death Tea–which is what you get when Dr uses about three times the recommended quantity of Assam–and the resulting caffeinated conversation is edited later because nobody wants to hear all my babbling.
From time to time we’ll have bonus episodes on special topics like witchcraft and dreams. We’ll often have special guest podcasters, like Dr’s little sister Becky and the bass player from The Julie Ruin. (I can dream.)
This is fun for us! We hope it’s fun for you. Please keep coming back–we’re trying to release new regular episodes every couple of Mondays, in order.