The Good Road

Funding for The Good Road has been provided by-- There's a whole lot of good out there, wherever you look in our towns, in our communities, in the world, and Toyota engineers vehicles to help you discover more of it.

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So the next time you head out looking for more good, Toyota can take you there.

Toyota-- Let's Go Places.

[music playing] Can looking back, push us forward?

Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Billie Holliday.

Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

Absolute act of concern.

[music playing] New York City is big.

Overwhelming.

Full of life.

But with a population of over 8 million people, it can be a lonely little place to live.

It can be hard to connect.

So many turn to liquid courage.

[music playing] And with almost 4,000 bars and countless more restaurants, it's an easy choice.

I didn't grow up in NYC, but it's a choice I'm familiar with.

And having recently started my own sobriety journey, I'm interested in exploring the ways people address mental health and find community without alcohol.

We're going to meet three creative women who use their personal experience and craft to do just that.

They explore health, well-being, and community through riding, dance, and smoking weed.

And then writing about it.

[music playing] The Lower East Side, a bar Mecca.

We're better to take a walk with sobriety Author Tawny Lara.

Tawny writes and blogs about sobriety and her new book, Dry Humping, explores sober sex and dating.

I may not be sober and Craig may not be dating, but we figured we could learn a lot from New York's own sober sexpert.

I like to say that with my writing, the book and my column and the podcast, these are the resources I needed when I was newly sober, and they were just resources that weren't around.

How long have you personally been sober?

Almost eight years now.

Wow, that's a long time.

And I'm nine months, so I'm not hardly-- I'm just barely in.

I mean, that's enough time to have a baby.

You have, like, a whole new life.

Yeah, exactly.

Why did you make that decision?

I was a party girl, bartender.

I mean, you could picture it, dancing on the bars, doing all of the stereotypical things.

This was when I was still living in Texas.

I moved to New York the summer of 2015, and believe it or not, I quit drinking like four months after I moved here, which people think is wild.

But for me, it was-- I wanted to give my writing, my full attention.

I just spent four hours complaining that I don't have time to write, but I was drinking the whole time.

And so that next morning, I was like, OK, I'm not going to drink for a week, two weeks, three weeks.

My 30th birthday was coming up and I was like, what if I just don't drink for my 30th year and I blog about it.

And it worked.

Wow.

[music playing] Why is it that people feel like this is such a big deal?

Liquid courage came up so much in my story, and in a lot of the stories of people that I interview.

I thought I needed alcohol to be more confident in myself, on dates, in family situations, and my relationships, friendships because I didn't accept the real me.

My story is a little different.

It was the big party, and not being able to experience the big party for me after 30-something years of that, that terrified me.

So what do people not know is on the other side of sobriety?

Confidence, really embracing, cultivating their own intrinsic courage.

And that helps you show up more authentically on dates, in the bedroom, and just in life.

You don't need alcohol to have a good time.

I'm going to go down a path that I don't know that I want to go down.

I'm excited.

I'm going to do it.

So your father is also so?

Yes, yeah, he's a heavy metal musician, seeing all these long-haired, tattooed rock stars chugging whiskey from the bottle and normalized that.

Our relationship has gotten so much better since both of us have gotten sober and we're working on ourselves so then we can actually work on repairing our relationship.

I have the same story, but I'm the dad.

And my daughter is the one who is taking it so hard.

So what do you say to young women who have dads like me who just couldn't stop drinking?

Talking to your daughter and young me right now, it's not your fault.

He'll take care of himself.

He has to take care of himself.

And it's not your responsibility.

And you're being the change.

You're being the example for her.

[music playing] So you have a book that's come out called Dry Humping.

I thought that the target audience was going to be fellow sober people.

People that read my book, read my column are all across the alcohol use disorder spectrum.

Maybe they want to drink a little less.

Maybe they're mindful drinkers, sober, curious, or they're 20 years in recovery, who knows?

But we're all having this conversation culturally of, what role does alcohol play in my life?

I mean, that's been my journey on this short part of it, is that not only was it about stopping alcohol, but being aware of my body.

And I mean, the fact is, I've lost 50 pounds.

And I lost a friend.

Just kidding.

No, you gained a friend because that's really common.

People think that drinking is just this isolated thing that we do, but it can lead to other destructive behaviors like you're talking about.

For me, it was acting out like hooking up with people that didn't care about me.

This is again, where the mindfulness comes in.

Are you drinking this glass of wine because you genuinely like the taste of it, or are you wanting this elixir to make you a different person?

And I don't judge anyone who still drinks like, good for you.

Have a drink for us.

There is this level of being intentional, instead of drinking to black out.

[music playing] Getting to know who you are without alcohol and spending time alone, so you know what you're bringing to the table when you're in a relationship.

I call it dating yourself.

What are some of the things that people just don't realize?

If you're drinking alcohol to numb anxiety or to make yourself feel better, this isn't happening in a vacuum.

You're also numbing your other senses and you might not be experiencing maximum pleasure if you are having intoxicated sex.

You live in New York City.

I mean, it feels like there should be some resources out there.

What are some of the ways that you can connect or create community or get support?

There are so many resources here.

I mean, obviously there's AA meetings all over the world.

AA was not part of my story, though.

I did meet my partner in an AA meeting, so I got what I needed.

Yes.

There's also a lot of non-alcoholic bars popping up all over the country, non-alcoholic bottle shops.

Even just looking up, hashtag sober, hashtag sober curious.

Find your people.

[music playing] Tawny, if there's one thing you could do through your work, there's one thing you wish you could accomplish, or-- I want more people to listen to this conversation and question their relationships with alcohol and dry-hump.

It's just dry hump.

I do feel like these conversations are important.

And I love the way that you take an approach that is kind of novel.

So again, thanks for the work that you're doing.

Yeah.

Thanks for spending some time with us.

And we look forward to dry humping.

And for somebody newly sober, it means a lot that you care so much about the rest of us who have gone that path.

One day at a time, right?

One day at a time.

Exactly.

[music playing] Sober sex is scary enough.

But how about dancing sober?

Meet Mickella Mallozzi, the creator and host of Bare Feet With Mickella Mallozzi, a public television show that explores the world and culture through the power of dance.

Although not a sobriety story per se, it does intersect with the themes that come up again and again as people explore what sobriety can look like in their life.

Not the least of which is confidence and community.

So being in her home town, we relish the idea of spending a little time with our fellow public television family.

Mickella, thank you for meeting us here in your hometown.

This is fun.

We're in New York City.

This is my neighborhood.

This is where I live.

These are the people that I love and my neighbors.

New York is a million different things, but this neighborhood is what?

This is the East Village.

But in particular, these few blocks that we're walking around is Little Ukraine.

You'll see Ukrainian flags, beautiful posters and pictures depicting Zelenskyy.

There's a lot of pride for being Ukrainian-American here.

And we actually did an episode here for Little Ukraine.

Oh really.

No kidding.

But to be clear, you're not Ukrainian.

I'm not.

I'm not.

But I feel like I'm really part of this community.

And that's the best part of New York City.

Like, you can get what you need in, like a two-block radius.

I live here, I eat here, I go out here, I do my shopping here.

Right now, it seems, at this moment in history, very not hopeful for the people of Ukraine.

Obviously, it's been horrific what's been happening in Ukraine community.

Welcome to New York.

Not only has it been that the community itself has come together, but everyone outside of the community has really rallied to come and support the small businesses here.

That's been the amazing thing.

Bare Feet thrives at the intersection of identity, culture, and community.

So I like to say I make new friends by dancing with strangers.

So in every destination, I learn the dance music of the place that I go to from the people that are there.

I know you guys speak a lot of languages.

I speak only one other language but-- Ukrainian?

No.

Italian.

Italian?

I speak Italian.

My family is from Italy.

But dance is a universal language.

So I found that when I was travel around the world and dance with people, there was this immediate connection that happened with people, and I thought, this is the best way to travel.

But what I love is we've been doing episodes here in New York City, and so we can travel the world without even using a passport.

I've traveled through all the five Boroughs, dancing my way through New York City.

And New York is a center of arts and culture, really, for the rest of the world.

When people think of dance, they think of the big institutions.

So what we want to show is dance is accessible.

Music is accessible.

It's an entryway into a culture.

Now, everyone needs the same thing-- food, shelter, clothes on our backs, family, friends and a little bit of dance.

I mean, you get people up and moving.

So we've started doing in Downtown Brooklyn, where I bring the local community together.

All of these incredible cultures are right here.

They're your neighbors, they're your friends, they're your teachers.

And it's a really beautiful way to inspire people to get up and dance and move, because, as you know, what do you feel when you're dancing?

Embarrassed.

Yeah.

Awkward.

But that's a good-- that's a good feeling.

Me, too, because I want to show that it's OK to be vulnerable.

It's OK to mess up.

People need that invitation.

And I'm always the first person up at a wedding.

I think that's kind of my superpower, is to make people feel comfortable enough to feel vulnerable.

You're kind of the dance ambassador, right?

I guess.

Yeah.

Kayla, I love your backstory because I didn't realize you didn't come from a dance family.

I think growing up in an immigrant community myself, I was always sort of an outsider.

Our foods were weird.

And then when I met other people, they're like, our foods were weird, if they were Indian-American or Chinese-American.

And I was always drawn to these other immigrant communities because of that bond that we have.

Dance is a transmission of story, of idea, of culture, family.

A lot of people that I interview, it's intergenerational musicians and dancers and passing on their traditions, plays.

And I think that's so special.

There is that transmission of story, but also memory, and history.

What do you think that people see in you?

What is it that they really like about this?

Dance brings people together, all cultures and religions and ages.

And that's what's amazing, too, is I get to see our fans are just as diverse as the people we feature on their show, and that's what I'm most proud of.

They don't all look like me.

When you're dancing and showing off a culture's dances, they're heard.

It's another way to be heard.

I've realized-- and you're going to make me cry.

I always cry.

I need this, I think as just as much as everybody else does.

Dance is healing.

My show is not about me.

We need to give voice to the people that are always underrepresented and never heard.

And Bare Feet has always been about diverse voices, BIPOC voices, the disability community, the aged community, the LGBTQ community.

Tonight, we're dancing with Cesar Valentino, who is an icon in the voguing world.

He was one of the first people to dance on live television doing voguing in the '80s.

It's our responsibility as storytellers to give platform to people who aren't always heard.

And with something as universal as dance, it's more accessible.

And then people are like, I want to try that.

I want to go to little Caribbean out in Flatbush.

I want to go to little Sri Lanka in Staten Island.

I didn't know it even existed.

Now I'm going to go there and try the food and take dance classes.

That's the goal of Bare Feet.

And soon we'll get to experience that first-hand.

Later, we're headed to the e series for an event for Pride Month.

And if you ever want to see Craig and I embarrass ourselves, you will not be disappointed.

But first, we head to one of the aforementioned sober bars.

Hekate, in Alphabet City, is a newly opened booze-free elixir bar with vaguely occult overtones.

The perfect backdrop to sit down with writer and journalist Sophie Saint Thomas.

Sophie made a name for herself, writing about sex, drugs, and witchcraft for publications like VICE, Playboy, and Harper's Bazaar.

She has written six books with titles like Weed Witch and Glamor Witch.

Her most recent, Reproductive Rights-- Hunts in the Centuries-Long Fight for Abortion, explores reproduction justice and covers 4,000 years of history in a jaunty literary nonfiction kind of way.

In the Virgin Islands, the drinking age is an unenforced 18, so I first had alcohol in middle school.

And then in ninth grade, I was like blackout drinking.

So I got a lot in under my belt.

For a long time, it was like really fun.

Unfortunately, underneath everything, like I just have depression, and drinking just took me to a dark place.

I've seen what it looks like when people who turn mean or sad keep drinking and it's usually a bad ending.

And I feel very thankful that my ambition kind of stepped in.

It just kind of woke up one day and was like, I'm done with this.

I haven't looked back.

So I actually just had my 10-year anniversary, and I actually completely forgot about it.

Cheers.

Congratulation.

And you probably had those moments that I had when I was really, really drunk and I'd go to the bathroom or something, look in the mirror, and I'd be like, I hate myself.

I have screamed, I hate you to myself in a mirror.

Yes.

I just couldn't do that anymore.

I can't imagine myself doing that anymore.

Like when I think about it, it sounds like a different person.

Now I'm, like, cocky.

[laughter] Yeah.

Earl and I, we spent many years drinking together.

And when I made the shift-- sorry, I'm getting emotional.

After I talked to my wife and family about it, I talked to Earl.

And Earl was, the first thing he said is like, let's get you in a program.

Let's do it right now.

Let's do it right now.

He wouldn't let me off the hook.

Just to know that you're really closest friends and the people who love you and you love, having them be a support was critical.

And one of the things I love about New York is there's so many different types of people that no matter how weird you think you are, like you can find your community.

You're doing a lot around kind of wellness, overall.

For about two or three years, I was sober, sober.

Part of the reason that led to my bottom was that I was sexually assaulted by someone who ended up stalking me-- and I'm not going to get into it all-- but it was messed up.

And I was having nightmares every single night.

It was messing up with my dating life.

At the time, they just put me on so much benzodiazepines.

I'm not against Western medicine at all.

I just felt completely, completely sedated.

And then I learned like through my doctors that THC actually can suppress dreams.

That's part of the reason why it's often given to people with PTSD.

I was very hesitant at first.

Basically, I just tried it and it worked.

My relationship improved, like I was able to have sex more comfortably again.

The nightmare stopped.

I think I just looked at it very logically, like this comes with fewer side effects.

It's less addictive.

So I use it for anxiety and I have zero, zero guilt about that.

I still check in with people, all the time.

To my partner, to my therapist, I'm like, is like cannabis messing anything up for me?

And they're like, no, take more.

It makes you nicer.

[laughter] I think, in general, sobriety needs to be so much more multi-dimensional because I think right now, there are very select avenues to do it, and I just don't think a one-size-fits-all model makes sense.

You didn't empty your bucket and there's nothing left.

You're filling it with other things.

And you're still taking this exploratory path through some other-- But I also grew up in the Caribbean where-- many friends I had whose parents were Rastafarians, where cannabis is viewed as a sacrament.

And it is just a whole different way of looking at the plant.

The FDA just released guidelines on how to do clinical trials on psychedelics.

The vets successfully got cannabis into the latest financial bill that pays for the VA.

It's so accepted to be like, I'm on Lexapro or I take Zoloft.

Look at the figures.

They just don't work for everyone.

I'm one of them.

I have gotten ketamine infusions for PTSD and depression.

Ketamine has shown tremendous success for people with treatment resistant depression.

It's not like you go to the doctor and like the first line of treatment is like ketamine infusions.

Yeah, Yeah.

But if you've tried like 12 different antidepressants and then you find a psychedelic medicine that works for you, because like Nancy Reagan said, it's bad, I'm supposed not to accept that mode of healing.

There is a valid argument to be made that they need more research.

It's hard to research things when they're illegal by the federal government.

But the studies are just rolling in and I think the potential far outweighs the risk.

I love the thought that wellness is more than not doing stuff.

Wellness can be a great many things.

It can be.

I mean, those things can be a tool of spiritual searching, of course.

There's also the whole harm reduction movement, which, again, I don't want to make you relapse, but is basically like, if this isn't causing any harm in your life and it's preventing you from using something that does, then that's OK.

I'm honestly, I know this sounds like cocky or whatever, but I'm not worried about relapsing, because everything else in my life felt really good.

And so once that was out of my life, for me, I didn't need it for other reasons.

And I felt guilty talking to people like you who've had some traumatic experiences and things.

Everyone has trauma.

I don't believe you.

Yeah.

And that's probably something I'll discover.

When you quit drinking, you have to deal with what's underneath.

Yeah.

My first year I tried to quit drinking, I relapsed twice.

Just being around people I loved and trusted who were like, just cut back.

Like, you're taking it too far.

I'm not saying it's going to happen to you, but I'm saying if it should happen to you or me or anyone, what's that Bruce Springsteen line, like, I took the wrong turn and just kept going.

Something like that.

Right.

Yeah.

You don't have to do that.

It's OK to mess up.

Be easy on yourself in sobriety.

Yeah.

And I love, love, love.

Just the exploration of wellness.

Well, cheers.

Thank you.

Yeah, and cheers for-- Cheers to your sobriety.

Thank you.

Cheers to yours.

And I'm sorry.

Cheers to my sobriety.

I'm sorry.

You've been drinking non-alcoholic.

I love it.

Is that good?

It's amazing.

I never thought I'd have chardonnay again, but here I am.

Finally, we're off to Downtown Brooklyn for the Bare Feet Brooklyn Summer Dance series.

It's Pride Month, and tonight, the series explores voguing with the one and only Cesar Valentino.

I can say this is one thing I never thought we'd do sober.

Happy Pride.

Woohoo.

It is the end of the month.

We are so grateful to be here tonight and with voguing icon Cesar Valentino.

So please, round of applause.

Cesar is going to give us a lesson in voguing, the history of voguing.

And this is our dance party.

This is our dance floor.

We want to fill it with joy and love.

And it is open for everyone.

A lot of people don't realize that voguing is a dance that's based on posing.

It's a dance of self-expression, self-love, self-appreciation, and it's something that should be accessible for everyone because everyone and anyone can benefit from voguing.

It doesn't matter your gender, your size, your ability level.

Everyone should be encouraged to feel good about themselves.

So to get a little understanding of the history, the concept of ballroom started in slavery.

The slaves had what they used to call a cakewalk and they would compete at night to win a cake.

That's the concept of ballroom.

Fast-forward to the Harlem Renaissance.

They became more of a masquerade.

In the '60s, it became more pageantry.

It was just more drag Queens and anything else.

Fast-forward to 1973.

So it no longer became about an audience of drag Queens.

It became about everyone being able to participate.

Voguing routes are poses I can photograph.

Be mindful of that, so you're not like this.

Let's go.

Pose.

3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Make up your own poses.

Don't copy mine.

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

And Shake it out.

Shake it out.

Shake it out.

Shake it out.

Here we go.

Here we go.

5, 6, 7, and 1, 2.

Health and wellness is a journey.

And for some, that may include sobriety.

Five, six, face me.

One.

And on that journey, we need community, friends, and people who are willing to completely embarrass themselves in front of us.

To get out your comfort zone.

Dance is one way to break down barriers to friendship and community.

And I can say from experience, it's important to know you're not alone.

And there are resources out there if you're ready.

Who's ready?

Who knows it?

Who got it?

And posed.

Funding for The Good Road has been provided by-- Can, looking back, push us forward?

Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Billie Holliday.

Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

Absolute act of concern.

[music playing] What makes a good road?

Blazing a trail, making a difference.

Being unafraid to take the path of most resistance.

Toyota has a beyond zero vision for a carbon neutral future that lets you find your own good road with Toyota's electrified lineup, including battery electric, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and fuel cell electric vehicles, designed to get you where you want to go, from work to school or wherever your adventures take you.

Toyota is all about paving good roads.

Proud sponsor of The Good Road Toyota-- Let's Go Places.

[music playing]