Welcome to Is This Real Life, a Bravo podcast that relates our favorite shows to our own lives in the world around us. I'm your host, Mandy Sleutzer. Let's get to it.

Hi, everyone. I hope you had a wonderful week. This week has been such a roller coaster for me. I don't know about you guys. There's just a lot happening all over the world. And we saw, you know, glimpses of peace in the Middle East this week. And obviously, you know, it is not certain and things are not perfect, but it was something I

thought I wouldn't see over the last two years. And I was filled with so much joy just to see

glimpses of hope. And then last night I was with my dog in the dog park, and there were these armed, you know, national guard members just patrolling my neighborhood.

And they've been here for a couple of months at this point.

And I found myself both kind of used to it and then very scared that I was used to seeing, you know, armed members of our military in our streets.

You know, when I moved to Bangladesh in 2009, it had recently had a caretaker government.

You know, you think about these things as happening in other countries and countries with more instability. We don't really think of

our own country as being so volatile and unstable that we need military parading up and down,

our blocks. And, you know, starting this summer and then, you know, into the fall, different towns have been inundated by immigration

enforcement that is very intense and violent and harming families and children.

And it's just, you know what, it's a lot.

And I just wanted to hold space for that today.

You know, one of my heroes is Rachel Goldberg-Pollin.

She's the mother of Hirsch Goldberg-Polin, who is a

hostage that unfortunately did not survive. And she talks about in Judaism, we learn to both

hold and embrace joy and sorrow at the same time, that joy and grief can co-exist. And I find myself trying to navigate

that existence right now, like where we are in the United States, in the world, you know. And then with

Bravo, honestly, Bravo is what has brought me so much joy. You know, that and, you know,

the protests this weekend, very much, you know, too exhausted to participate. But oh my goodness,

and I love all of the costumes. Seeing people in these blow-up animal costumes dressed like

Bronwyn on her way to greet Todd after a business trip at the

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