May 11, 2018 - Sean Hannity Show
14:11
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| This is an iHeart Podcast. | |
| I always say that I'm mediocre at a lot of things, and I'm exceptional at puns. | |
| It's just something that my dad and I have a super freaky talent for. | |
| And I'm by no means a poet or a wordsmith in other ways. | |
| I have no idea why I have such a talent with puns. | |
| Marilee Grashin is many things. | |
| An illustrator, a flourishing author, a strong but modest woman. | |
| There's something effortless about the way she describes her career that could lead one to believe it's been easy. | |
| To be fair, it might just have been the day that I caught up with her. | |
| This was Marilee's 12th day in Los Angeles, recently relocating from New York City. | |
| And she's still wrapping her head around a few things. | |
| What began as spontaneous sketches during her early days bussing and waiting tables has developed into a small business called Greet and Potatoes, which produces humorous greeting cards and prints, featuring food and beverage themed drawings and puns. | |
| Merrile has also written and illustrated a book called Women's Libation, a whimsical celebration of women, history and cocktails. | |
| All of this in a fairly impressive window of time. | |
| But don't tell her it's impressive. | |
| I've just always drawn. | |
| I studied art a ton. | |
| I've studied art history and art, a lot of art theory and art for political change. | |
| But as far as skill, I'm always learning and getting better. | |
| By the end of the book, I had just picked up a bunch of new skills just in drawing. | |
| But no, I haven't, I'm not like trained really. | |
| On this edition of On the Job, I'm speaking remotely with Marilee Grashin to hear more about her career as an entrepreneur, a creative person, and her personal journey that has taken her to Los Angeles. | |
| By embracing opportunities and connecting her work experiences in the service industry, Marile has nurtured her raw talent as an artist to find herself in a favorable position of choosing what will come next. | |
| I've spent more than the last 12 years in New York City where I moved right after high school, kind of supported my way through college, working in bars and restaurants primarily. | |
| Actually just applied to one college out in New York and did the kind of typical liberal arts introduction. | |
| And then, you know, got like coffee shop varista jobs, a lot of serving, waitressing. | |
| And then I found my home in a restaurant and really learned about food and wine and just got really excited about it. | |
| It wasn't just a job. | |
| I was actually learning a ton about the history of this was a Spanish restaurant, so I learned a lot about Spanish wine, cuisine, but I also was finishing my thesis in college and working all the time and studying all the time. | |
| Naturally, Marilee was developing a love for food and wine while working in restaurants. | |
| But I was curious to understand where this crossed paths with illustration and art. | |
| I started interning with Just Seeds, which is a national uh artist collective of I think around 20 artists all over the country. | |
| But I was working directly with Josh McPhee, and he's a primarily printmaker, but he's an organizer and activist and teacher and curator. | |
| I learned a lot from him about the idea of passing around affordable art. | |
| And I was just kind of an intern, but I really learned a ton about kind of just the process, but also the history of making art for political change. | |
| So I was working a ton in bars and restaurants. | |
| I was studying and I was making my own art, but just doodles mostly, and then working with this really inspiring artist and organizer and activist. | |
| And it all just kind of came together, meeting the best people, and then who inspired me to keep making art, and then learning that wow, I don't want anything to do with the actual art world in the gallery kind of capacity, because it's just not accessible. | |
| It's just it's everything I don't believe in in terms of what art can be, because I worked with this artist who really taught me art is for the people, not something that shouldn't be accessible. | |
| Anyone looking through Marilee's body of work would find it evident that she's embraced this concept and aesthetic and made it into her own by never being overly precious or serious. | |
| At some of the bars and restaurants I worked, I would start drawing these little playful cards, just doodles. | |
| I would see a bottle of Aperol and write Aperol we've been through, or Fernet and say, Furnette About It or You've always given me a Riesling to stay, and then I'd pass out the cards. | |
| And I just started, I was I've always been a compulsive doodler. | |
| So I would just start drawing these cards and became a whole series that would just live in my handbag. | |
| I like to call them dad jokes. | |
| And I was drawing them a lot at work. | |
| There were different bars and restaurants I worked at and passing them out to friends and coworkers and patrons at the bar or whatever. | |
| And I my friends encouraged me to start a greeting card line. | |
| And that developed into a few years ago, I started a company called Greet and Potatoes, like Meat and Potatoes as a greeting card company. | |
| And they were all food and beverage themed greeting cards that were kind of for all occasions, but they were set from illustrations of mine. | |
| And I worked with my friend Emily uh Johnson. | |
| She's a Bushwick-based printmaker, making it something that was really personal, super playful, but affordable and something you could really literally just pass around and you know get for less than $10 or $5. | |
| So, you know, not a whole lot of money in that, obviously, but it was it was cool to know I could be doing it with people in my community, other strong women, and then a lot of stores started picking up the cards. | |
| There's a bunch of kind of independent uh brick and mortar stores around Brooklyn, and then some scattered around the US, and I started selling them online. | |
| So that was kind of how that started. | |
| And then two years ago, somebody picked them up and did a big Buzzfeed feature on them. | |
| And that was Alison Roman. | |
| She put that article out, and it totally changed my life. | |
| I got all these people in the publishing world and agents reaching out to me, like, what are you doing with your art? | |
| Come on, make some more stuff. | |
| And I'm guessing her agent, Janice Doned, was one of those people. | |
| She was just one of the most seasoned professional literary agents in especially in like the food and beverage world. | |
| And she sat me down and she said, I really like your art, and I know you have some more good ideas. | |
| Let's make a book. | |
| And I was like, funny you should say, I have this idea about ladies who also have funny cocktail names. | |
| And before I knew it, had eight to ten pages mocked up and was selling this idea to a bunch of publishers. | |
| Came out in the fall of 2017 called Women's Libation. | |
| It's a cocktail guide. | |
| Cocktails to celebrate a woman's right to booze. | |
| So it's all comes from my illustrations and kind of rips on classic cocktails. | |
| Each one dedicated to an influential woman in history or uh kind of landmark in the history of women's liberation. | |
| So that was kind of the last project I worked on in New York, and moving over here to LA, I've kind of started thinking about a lot of new projects, creative themed, not necessarily the same, but a lot of creative ideas. | |
| More with Merrily, the illustrator turned author after this. | |
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| Welcome back to On the Job in my conversation with Marily Grashin, who developed a small print card business while bartending and waiting tables in New York City and is now a burgeoning author. | |
| The journey of becoming an author artist. | |
| It's all been tied into these interdisciplinary parts of New York artistic life that come back to supporting yourself in a restaurant, working in bars and restaurants and hospitality. | |
| It's a well-known dilemma for artists, balancing the production of creative work and the business side of things. | |
| I asked Marilee how she was able to keep managing Greed and Potatoes while writing a book. | |
| I kind of shelved it for a bit when I was working on the book. | |
| I was still sending out online orders because as much as I love drawing and I love this company, I've loved building this company and the learning experience of it. | |
| I'm not really a business person at all. | |
| So So working on something like a book where I had a whole team of people doing not only like the business end of it, the editing and production and whatever the couple years where I was trying to figure out how much profit how much the percentage of profit and obviously not paying myself for labor. | |
| I would rather just be the creative. | |
| I'm better at that too. | |
| And the book was happening and I was kind of putting Greet and potatoes on hold. | |
| Clarkson Potter is in the publishing world but they do more kind of gifty kinds of art and print and they contacted me and we've partnered up and they are taking over production of Greet and Potatoes. | |
| We're launching a 12 card pack that'll be much wider distributed maybe even internationally distributed. | |
| You can just find it in a lot more places so it's not just me sitting on my living room floor stuffing envelopes we'll be able to get these cards out there to a lot more people. | |
| They're still printed really beautifully so it's really exciting. | |
| I'm excited to see where that goes. | |
| Merrilee identified her creative strengths and weaknesses and sought partnerships to help fill the voids and relied on separate teams for both her company and the completion of her book. | |
| I would not have been able to do it without them. | |
| And then my editor, she and I got really close and she's like a right-brained version of, or I guess a left-brained version of me. | |
| So she was my editor, so she would look at a piece of paper that looked chaotic and she would just make it make sense. | |
| She was like the oil to the machine. | |
| She just made it run, gave me the confidence to keep working and being creative. | |
| And she's inspired me to take all of these crazy jumbled ideas. | |
| ideas and talents I have and put them on paper and maybe hopefully make it into something that somebody else can relate to and put a book binding on it. | |
| Women's libation gracefully combines charming artwork with coherent cocktail instruction and is packed with so much clever wordplay and twists on established historical names like Vermouth Bader Ginsburg, Joan of Ark and Stormy, Florence Nightcap and Gale, all in the spirit of celebrating women who have impacted the world. | |
| My biggest achievement has absolutely been completing writing this book. | |
| Just the journey I went on from sitting in my agent's office and having this tiny idea for a book and her telling me to mock up a couple pages to, in less than a year, coming up with 75 recipes and accompanying biographical blurbs on these women and just the research that went into it and just getting really excited about something kind of silly, which is just like a cocktail book or kind | |
| kind of playful that a project like this can mean something and has meant something to a lot of people strangers, friends, friends of friends have reached out to me out of nowhere and just saying I really needed this book right now. | |
| It really felt like people were as excited about it as I was making it and makes me want to just do more stuff like that. | |
| And I'm not quite sure what yet but I'm excited to explore it. | |
| I'm sure fans and followers of Marilee's work are too is being in Los Angeles part of a new chapter in her own life? | |
| I'm thinking about this move to LA as an eventual bi coastal life that I'm not sure is achievable but that would be my dream something I've always wanted to do is open my own bar. | |
| I have a bunch of experience. | |
| I really know what I can really envision what would work for me at least. | |
| So that might be in my near future as well. | |
| But coming out here, it's on this like hiatus. | |
| Was in some part inspired by coming out with this book and realizing, okay, well, this is done. | |
| I want to keep this momentum going. | |
| Can I do that if I don't have another deadline set? | |
| And rather than waiting around, keep that momentum going onward, upward, try something new, shake things up. | |
| I left New York kind of heartbroken leaving New York. | |
| I'm in love with it. | |
| But I'm glad I left it that way where I can't. | |
| can come back any time. | |
| And I don't really mind being in cars, I can listen to podcasts. | |
| I'm Liz Regan, and that was Marilee Grashin. | |
| And that's all for this edition of On the Job. | |
| Find more at ExpressPros.com. | |
| And you can listen to every podcast this season at ExpressPros.com forward slash podcast. | |
| This podcast is produced by Decibel Studios in New York, iHeartRadio, and Red Seat Ventures. | |
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| See you next time on the job. |
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