The Hopeful Locals #1: A Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman
STORIES by Lea Thau
Lea Thau
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This is the prologue to my new series, The Hopeful Locals, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. The story continues on Friday.
Huge thanks to Dengue Fever, Paul’s band, for letting me use the recording from their live show at The Chapel. They have two very special shows coming up on May 15 and 16 at Gold Diggers in LA, a more intimate club than they normally play, and you can also find them in other cities this spring and summer. Big thanks to their drummer and my true love, Paul Dreux Smith, for making the music for this episode and mixing it.
Enormous gratitude to my associate producer, Vix Jensen, who has been my rock editorially, practically, and emotionally over the last year; my project editor, Christina Thyssen, who has helped give the stories shape and make them better; and our resident artist, Pernille Clifforth, who has illustrated this episode and every episode in the series. Also big thanks to Avi Odenheimer for making The Hopeful Locals logo.
And thanks to all my supporters on Patreon and Substack for making my work possible, especially my Inner Circle. In the Inner Circle, we support each other’s creative work and commiserate about life through special meetings on Zoom and a private Discord. We’d love to have you if this sounds like fun, and I’m offering a discounted price on the upper tiers through the end of this month. Or join at any level, and I’ll be so grateful for your support. If nothing else, become a free subscriber on Patreon or Substack and get invited to our next Community Hangout tomorrow, Wednesday, April 21 to celebrate our public launch.
Questions, comments, story pitches, feedback? Email us at stories@leathau.com or find us on Facebook and Instagram.
See you Friday!
The entire back catalogue of Strangers can be found at STORIES by Lea Thau on Patreon and Substack, where you can also find my new work in its entirety, all of it ad-free. You can join as a free or paid member, so come be part of my community! Or follow my new work in my new public feed, STORIES by Lea Thau, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Leah Tao, and this is the first installment of The Hopeful Locals, which is a series about a reporting trip I took last year that I've been doing for my paying subscribers on Patreon, and now I'm ready to share some of it with you. |
| 0:16.4 | Today's episode is The Prolog, and I'm calling it a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman. |
| 0:24.2 | Spoiler alert, that's me. |
| 0:26.2 | And for those of you who followed me for a long time, it'll be a bit of an update as to where I am now. |
| 0:33.3 | And for those of you who are brand new to me, it'll be a little bit of an introduction, I guess. |
| 0:39.6 | When I decided to do this project, Trump had just been re-elected, which made me want to tell some stories that could counter the darkness we were facing. |
| 0:48.0 | And then the big freelance gig that I thought would be my bread and butter last winter suddenly went up in smoke. |
| 0:53.4 | So I had a little extra time on in smoke, so I had a little |
| 0:54.3 | extra time on my hands, and I had a list of people I'd been wanting to interview. |
| 0:59.7 | Some of them were local journalists, some were nonprofit leaders, and some were community |
| 1:04.2 | organizers. |
| 1:05.9 | They weren't high-profile people who had changed things on a global scale, but they'd |
| 1:10.3 | given their lives |
| 1:11.2 | to making things better in their corner of the world, and they'd inspired me by who they |
| 1:16.7 | were and what they did. |
| 1:19.4 | They lived in some of the most economically depressed areas of this country, but they |
| 1:23.3 | had chosen to stay close to home to help lift up their communities, instead of leaving for a |
| 1:28.4 | more lucrative life somewhere else, as many of their peers had. Personally, I'd spent my adult |
| 1:33.9 | years in Paris and New York and LA, mostly pursuing my own interests, and I wanted to know what |
| 1:40.8 | drove these people and what had made them and why they seemed so much more |
| 1:45.5 | hopeful than me. So two weeks before Christmas, more than a year ago now, I emailed a handful of |
| 1:53.7 | them and asked if by any chance I could come visit them in January, and the next day a couple of them |
... |
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