Overnight, Carolines had national attention. Hirsch started booking more then-unknown talent, like Seinfeld, Sandra Bernhard, and Billy Crystal. She found other ways to bring people in, too, convincing editors at The Daily News and The New York Post to come write about this burgeoning comedy scene. Business was booming; within a few years, the club had outgrown its Chelsea space. They moved to a new venue in the South Street Seaport in 1987. But in 1992, after outgrowing even that space, Carolines moved into its current Times Square location.
Hirsch describes her role at the time as…”everything.”
“I’d be on the phone with the agencies, I’d be paying the bills, writing checks…I did everything,” she says. “It was the best way to learn. We didn’t even have Google then. [People say,] ‘Oh my God, how did you live without Google?’ You just had to figure it out.”
Hirsch with Jerry Seinfeld.Courtesy of Caroline Hirsch
When I ask Hirsch if there was anyone to guide her or offer advice, she gives an adamant no. “I had no mentor. I’ll tell you right now, there was never a mentor,” she says. “Never, OK? Never. No one helped. No one really helped. I had to figure it out on my own.”
She’s not so much resentful as proud. And forget not having a mentor to show her the ropes—Hirsch also was without female peers. She tells me she could count on one hand the women she worked with during that time, though she didn’t realize how unique she was in the moment. “We were just onto something so new,” she explains. “I never went through this industry thinking, ‘Oh, poor me—the woman.’ I just took it for granted that I could do whatever the guys did. And I’d do it better.”
Now, almost four decades later, Hirsch has tracked the ebbs and flows in the business, surviving each new trend and turn of tide. When Comedy Central launched in 1991, for example, it transformed the business. “[Channels like Comedy Central and Ha!] were just getting developed when they saw what was really happening at Carolines, because we had so many people come in,” Hirsch says. “They used to always be there looking at the talent.”
And in 2019, Carolines on Broadway continues to be an incubator for new talent, booking with a sixth sense for what will resonate outside the traditional stand-up act—YouTube stars, podcast hosts, influencers like Jonathan Van Ness and the like. Even in that diverse roster, Hirsch insists that the best talent has one thing in common.
It wasn’t a glass ceiling, but something big shattered this week in Miami: every single stupid idea we have about what it means to be “electable,” to look “presidential,” to command a room.
At the first Democratic presidential debates of the 2020 presidential season, the women won. Yes, all of them. On the first night, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) dominated the stage. On the second, Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) electrified the audience, instantly conjuring the image of her up against Donald Trump in the general election. In a debate match-up between them, as one person on Twitter noted, she would mop the floor with him.
And Warren, the New York Times’ Frank Bruni observed, “aced the first democratic debate,” with a presence and affect that “was crisper than most of her peers.”
The second debate threw the same dynamic into even sharper relief. It wasn’t just that Harris ran circles around the competition; it was that she did what a man couldn’t. Earlier in the night, Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) tried to launch an attack on supposed front runner former Vice President Joe Biden with a quote from a speech Biden delivered in 1984. “I was six years old when a presidential candidate came to the California Democratic Convention and said, ‘It’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans,’” Swalwell said, referring, of course, to Biden. The quip was meant to show Biden as out of touch and too old for the Oval Office. But the move backfired. Later Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) complained that Swalwell’s comments were “ageist.” And within a matter of minutes, the internet was flooded with memes of Swalwell…depicted as a torch. Pro Tip: you haven’t won when you’ve become a meme. With Swalwell floundering, Harris picked up the slack. She took Biden on not with forced humor or “cleverness,” but with simple, straightforward candor.
“I do not believe you are a racist,” Harris said, addressing comments Biden made about his work with segregationist senators. “But it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. It was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing, and there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.”
When many women get ready to go for a run, their prep looks something like this: put on favorite running shorts, lace up shoes, pick a playlist, grab a weapon, head out the door.
You read that right. Headlines about women being attacked by men (or even animals) while out for jog are a steady drumbeat in the news cycle; for women, running safety is often top of mind and for many, that means running with products that could help them stay safe in the event of being attacked while on a run.
In a twitter thread posted earlier this week, women began sharing the things they carry to help them feel safe when they run—everything from running with dogs to running with knives—and it’s getting a ton of attention on social media. “One of my mom groups has a thread that is just women listing and recommending which kind of protection they take when them when they go out running (i.e. pepper spray, alarm necklaces, whistles, etc.) in case you wondered what being a woman is like,” writer Amanda Deibert posted earlier this week before asking: “Also, women: what do you use when you go out running?”
The thread prompted a flood of responses from women that are infuriating and heartbreaking—women are carrying knives in the pockets of their running vests just to feel safe while out for a run. But their recommendations are also incredibly practical. “I won’t wear headphones so I can be more alert to my surroundings,” one woman wrote. “Would be nice to listen to music though.”
Here are some of the best running safety products for women recommended by women (and where you can get them).
Safety whistle
“The whistle I use is called the Whistles for LIFE Tri-Power Whistle,” one woman recommended. “I have yellow because I feel it’s more visible then red.”
“I use two,” one woman shared. “One in each hand.”
Self-defense keychain
“My daughter starts 6th grade in August and will need to use the school bus for the first time. The bus doesn’t come to our house, meaning she’ll need to walk and wait at the end of our road every morning,” one woman wrote. “She now has a cell phone, rape whistle, and one of these. She’s eleven.”
“I like that it’s really only a partial glove and that I don’t have to grip/hold the pepper spray the whole run,” one woman said. “I definitely feel safer running with it.”
When I first heard two years ago that Beto O’Rourke, a relatively unknown Texas congressman from El Paso without any flashy national legislative wins, was running against swamp monster Ted Cruz for the latter’s Texas Senate seat, I had a similar reaction to a lot of people: Go for it, dude. Why not?
And like a lot of people, when I saw the lavish magazine profiles and never-ending Facebook Live videos and sweat-soaked blue button-downs, I got excited. Texas needed this win. Democratic organizers in states put for decades in the “Lean Red” and “Solid Red” columns needed this win. And with so much on the line in the 2018 midterms, progressives nationwide needed this win. I believed Beto O’Rourke’s message could inspire action from generation of activists and voters for years to come. And even after he lost, I hoped we’d see him again in the future.
As a candidate in the Texas Senate race, O’Rourke radiated promise and optimism, an avatar for Democrats who’d had little to cheer for in such a historically conservative state. As a candidate on the national stage, however, he looks a lot less like the future we’d hope for. Even against just the other white men in this race (or about to get in it) like former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, it’s hard to say what Beto O’Rourke brings to the table other than potentially a Best Personality™ superlative.
It’s hard not to be skeptical, too, about O’Rourke’s personality-driven bid when former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum are putting their post-election efforts towards initiatives like rebuilding Georgia’s entire election system and creating a voter registration group in Florida, respectively. (Abrams may yet announce a run for higher office, but if and when she does, it’ll be backed up with clear policy objectives that she’s detailing now.) If O’Rourke truly wants to do the “greatest good” for America as he claims, why not focus on uprooting structural inequality on the ground and making it easier for the most vulnerable Americans to have their voices heard and their needs met? What does running an ambiguous presidential campaign achieve?
There’s a big difference between O’Rourke running unopposed against Ted Cruz, one of the more unpopular members of Congress, and O’Rourke running against a slate of candidates in one of the most diverse primary fields—both in terms of identities and ideology—in presidential campaign history. Against Cruz, the common criticism that O’Rourke was low in ideological direction, policy proposals, and legislative accomplishments faded into the background. Now it’s unmissable. To his credit, O’Rourke has tried to better define where he stands—but his platform seems mostly to draw on the ideas that more liberal-leaning peers have put forward, with few signature ideas of his own. He’s supported a few more progressive efforts like the Green New Deal and ending narcotics prohibition and legalizing marijuana, though he’s also rescinded his support of single-payer healthcare for a more moderate option called Medicare for America.
Some see this mix-and-match politics as a positive. “Him being so focused on talking to people, listening to people, and inspiring people at the start of this campaign in combination with sharing those policies is an important balance for me,” says New York-based editor Olivia, who asked not to use her last name. “I can see how it is energizing young people in the party and even people beyond the party and that excites me—I feel like that should be something we’re all cheering on, whether he’s our number-one choice or not.”
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a little surprise for the audience at a town hall meeting in her state on Saturday: She made her first public announcement that she was considering running.
“After November 6, I will take a hard look at running for president,” Warren, a Democrat, told the crowd, according to CBS.
Previously, Warren’s denied reports that she was thinking about making a bid for the executive office. According to CBS, in August, she said that she’d be looking to keep her Senate seat during this year’s upcoming midterm elections rather than run for president.
She, along with former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. and 2016 candidate Bernie Sanders, are thought to be the Democratic frontrunners for the 2020 race. Trump has infamously referred to her repeatedly as “Pocahontas” during his term, in the same way he refers to his election rival, Hillary Clinton, as “Crooked Hillary.”
During the town hall, she also referenced the Kavanaugh hearings—particularly the way Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had been treated since she came forward with allegations of rape against the potential Supreme Court Justice.
“Today I am angry, and I own it,” she said.
She also expressed her anger in an interview with Glamour on Thursday as Blasey Ford gave her testimony against Kavanaugh.
“The fact that Republicans want to go forward treating this woman and other women who have come forward as if their claims don’t matter is an insult to every single woman in this country,” she said. “It is fundamentally wrong.”
We meet 12 months into her gubernatorial bid, but Gwen Graham has not tired of the political rigmarole.
Graham proffers a firm handshake. She peppers me with questions—and listens with such attention to the answers that I feel like she’s prepared to be quizzed. In a deep blue pantsuit, with her warm attitude, she exudes the same calm command that the best CEOs and leaders (and moms) do. And like the most successful of the women who assume those positions (hip to the realities of what it means to be female in public), Gwen Graham is prepared to tick off her (extensive) credentials.
A prominent gubernatorial candidate in Florida, Graham was born in the state she seeks to represent. She has lent her talents to three progressive presidential candidates and worked in her local school district. In 2014, she ran for a seat in the United States House of Representatives and won it, becoming one of the few Democrats nationwide to beat an incumbent Republican that November.
But it’s her tenure on the cutthroat PTA that she seems most proud of when we sit down earlier this month. “I was the president!” she tells me. She leans forward and whispers, like she has a secret. “Some people think that’s the hardest job I’ve ever had.”
For over a decade, Graham was a PTA mom, a band mom, a school pick-up and let-me-look-at-that-homework mom. Until she had her first child—up to the minute, in fact, given that she went into labor at her desk—she’d worked at Andrews Kurth, a law firm in Washington, D.C. But with an hours-old infant in her arms, she decided to become a full-time parent. It was a “position,” as she puts it, that she held while she raised two more children.
When she did return to the workforce, it wasn’t law that drew her back; it was politics. In 2003, with her children grown, she became an advisor on her father’s presidential bid. (She is the daughter of former Florida Gov. Bob Graham.) When he dropped out of that race, she volunteered her services to candidates Howard Dean and eventual nominee John Kerry. After a stint with her school district in Tallahassee, Graham decided to run for office with her own name on the ticket, much to the bewilderment of most people she knew. It was 2014, one of the grimmest election seasons for new Democrats nationwide.
“I’m a mom, first and foremost,” she insists. But the time she spent at home wasn’t a complete break with her career. As she tells it, it was a kind of leadership bootcamp. She’d become an expert dealmaker, a person both able to stand on principle and prepared to compromise. She knew how to balance interests that sometimes competed for attention and resources. She’d come to feel like she’d mastered one of the secret skills motherhood—the ability to be in several places at once.
PHOTO: Gwen Graham.
Graham and her daughter, Sarah.
“It was an asset,” she concludes. And in 2014, the constituents who elected her seemed to feel the same. Her success meant, perhaps, that the public didn’t need to “see past” a woman’s choice to become a stay-at-home mom. It was motherhood as a bona fide for public service, and Graham isn’t alone in her intention to tout it.
All across the United States, mothers of small children, some of whom work from home or not at all, have decided to run for office to noticeable effect, despite studies that show that some voters don’t believe women with children can balance their public and personal responsibilities. (On the heels of the 2016 presidential race, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation released a report in which researchers found that voters still express deep concerns over how women candidates with small children would fare in elected positions.) The task ahead of them is formidable: re-enter the workforce in a position that doesn’t offer flexible hours or any kind of a structure that lets staff work from home—instead, these women will be on the trail, as candidates for public office.
But whatever the odds, these moms want in. “Maybe there’s a little bit of an initial obstacle to overcome,” allows Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List. But mothers who run for office, she continues, have a unique perspective to share in political races. Motherhood can be a boon to female candidates because it gives them an authoritative voice on all the issues that matter most this election season: health care, education, the opioid crisis, student loans.
These are women who’ve taken their kids to hospitals, lost children to violence and addiction, served in the armed forces or supported spouses who did. From the women who compelled us not to drink and drive, to the ones who want to overhaul gun laws, mothers command moral attention. And “relatable,” that exhausted, but still essential buzzword in politics, is a descriptor mothers earn with relative ease, Schriock explains. “These women have the lived experiences that families and communities in their districts and states care about. You just can’t overlook that.”
For Kristina Lodovisi, a candidate for the Michigan State Senate and a combat veteran, her children—three and one, along with a 10-year-old stepdaughter—are central to her pitch to voters. When she meets with people in her district, she explains how it was her armed forces experience that prepared her for motherhood, and her time at home with her children that drove her into this race. In Afghanistan, she tells them she learned to wake up in the middle of the night, to make decisions fast, to prioritize. With little children, she realized what it means to be a role model, and moreover, what it means to be an advocate.
PHOTO: Kristina Lodovisi
Kristina Lodovisi and her children.
Hers are transferable skills, and she didn’t have to hone them in the traditional political machine. “It helps, I think, to come at this from a different perspective,” Lodovisi adds when I reach her over the phone. “A lot of these career politicians, other moms don’t feel aligned with them.” When she looks around her district, she sees women like her, who want a better education for their children, more resources, fewer potholes. It’s a simple calculus, familiar to listeners of bedtime stories nationwide: “It’s up to moms to save the world.”
From the women who compelled us not to drink and drive, to the ones who want to overhaul gun laws, mothers command moral attention.
Lindsy Judd didn’t have quite so grand a scale in mind when she started to take her kids out for walks in Reno, Nevada, where she is now vying to be county commissioner. She just wanted somewhere to sit. In an effort to clean up downtown Reno, the city had just passed new laws to fend off loiterers and trash accumulation. As a result, when Judd needed a rest, there were “zero benches, not one.” She decided to look into it, and the more she learned about the ordinances that had been approved, the angrier she became. A city, she explains, should be built with real people in mind. She started to feel like her representatives didn’t have a keen sense of what women like her needed. Or for that matter, what their children needed. A progressive, she started to drop into local Democratic Party confabs, but was disappointed to find that no one else had children with them. Her kids are one and three; they’re loud. More than once, Judd remembers, volunteers would shush them in the halls.
PHOTO: Lindsy Judd
Lindsy Judd and her son.
“It’s hard,” she admits. “You don’t want to be a disturbance, but at the same time, shouldn’t Democrats want people in their twenties and thirties in the room?” The more time Judd spent with local officials, the more she’d have to call her own mother to have her pick up the kids. There was nowhere for them to sit. The room was too hot or crowded. People wanted them to quiet. She wasn’t offended, exactly. Just bemused. How could the people she voted for be so out of touch with middle-class families? No wonder so few of them seemed concerned about the crisis in access to childcare. The issue didn’t even touch them. She mulled it over: What if she ran? “I realized I wanted to be a representative for people who felt like they couldn’t participate, like there was nowhere for them in the room.”
Both Lodovisi and Judd have attended VoteRunLead summits, all-day events that train women to run for office. The last time VoteRunLead held a national session, 41 percent of attendees were moms. The sessions impressed upon Judd in particular that if she wanted to win, she’d need to be honest about the challenges of full-time motherhood. It’s true, Judd concludes, that she has to endure different and more personal queries than her opponents. She’s noticed that people are more skeptical. They want her to prove that she’s up to the responsibilities of this office. But Judd isn’t fazed: “It means I research a lot more to compensate. I tend to pull out more facts and statistics. I like to surprise them with just how much I know.”
But the hurdles that full-time moms have to clear in elections aren’t just political. As Lodovisi knows, the simple coordination (not to mention the financial responsibilities) of childcare becomes a serious impediment. A recent Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision could ease at least that burden.
Earlier this month, the commission ruled that a congressional candidate in New York could use campaign funds to cover the cost of childcare for her two children. Over two dozen members of Congress and Hillary Clinton had written letters to support the petition, in which Liuba Grechen Shirley contended to the FEC that her childcare-related expenses were the direct consequence of her bid for elected office. After the FEC approved her bid, she said she wanted to see the decision drive more mothers, especially those that are responsible for the care of small children, to run for office. Our government, she said, is “desperately” in need of women “who understand firsthand what it’s like to balance a checkbook while raising children.”
Gwen Graham’s children are older, but scores of her supporters are still in the throes of new motherhood. A few months back, a woman came over to meet her at an event in Fort Lauderdale. She wanted to tell Graham that she was and remains a Republican, but that she intended to vote for Graham in the gubernatorial race. (To reach it, Graham will first have to win a competitive primary contest in late August.) The woman, a stay-at-home mom herself, was tired of the current political deadlock and repelled by the message it sent her kids—that to get ahead, they should shut down people who don’t agree with them. She told Graham she saw her vote as a teachable moment; “that in this next election, we will elect people who are committed, who want to break through this negative environment.” Graham, who declares she has “a genetic predisposition for optimism” and boasted of her daughter’s impressive position in the school band (drum major, thank you very much), promised the woman she shared her aims.
“Well,” the woman said, “then I can’t wait to vote for the first female governor of Florida.”
