Coming up 12/19/22 at 9:00am pst - Irina Maleeva, a true multifaceted international sensation talks about her journey into acting, and her role in the upcoming series Paul T. Goldman - streaming January 1st on Peacock

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IRINA MALEEVA 

Star of stage, screen, television, cabaret and the world of music, Irina Maleeva is a true multifaceted international sensation. The daughter of a famed Bulgarian stage actress and an aristocratic Italian statesman, Maleeva first established herself as a child performer in her native Bulgaria -- and from there her career and talents would bring her to the glittering global stage. The world of Irina Maleeva jettisoned into the cinematic spotlight when she was discovered by the legendary Federico Fellini at age 15 and would go on to perform in three of his highlyacclaimed movies: Satyricon; Spirits of the Dead; and Roma. 

Later Maleeva was chosen for the lead part of Jessica in the film, “The Merchant of Venice” playing opposite Orson Welles’s Schylock. The film was also directed by Orson Welles “This was the best time of my life”, remembers Irina. For many years part of the film was lost. When finally recovered, it premiered in Los Angeles at the Egyptian Theater in 2017. Adept in seven languages and with degrees in painting and set design from the historic Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, plus studies at Cinecitta Drama Film School and the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, one could say that Maleeva is truly a Renaissance artist in her own time. Says Maleeva, "It was inevitable that I was born to be an actress.There was nothing else for me but the theater and the movies. Painting and playing the piano wasn’t enough for me. I needed to express myself with my voice and my body. What motivates me is the need to act." 

Included in her motion picture accomplishments: studying and working with iconic Italian directors Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini and starring in more than 30 leading roles in European and American films opposite such luminaries as James Mason, Valentina Cortese and Terence Stamp, plus notable actors Susan Sarandon, Charles Grodin, David Duchovny, Anthony Franciosa and Klaus Kinski, to name a few. For her portrayal as a demented countess in the cult crime mystery film Union City, Maleeva appeared opposite rockers Debbie Harry and Pat Benatar and for her memorable role in this film she was awarded at the Toronto Film Festival. Later she would play the part of Mrs. Hasadan in the screwball comedy of errors Wasabi Tuna. 

Among her other acting achievements are the lead in the Italian-French television series Poly in Venice and The Girl without Identity. American television roles include appearing as a guest star on Days of our Lives, The Gilmore Girls, Pensacola, Just Shoot Me, Six Feet Under, Angel and Threshold. Maleeva was a principal recurring actress on the television series Cracking Up and the award-winning soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. She has also guest starred on American Body Shop and the critically acclaimed science fiction drama series Heroes, not to mention appearing in the role of Ruba in the HBO-produced show Twelve Miles of Bad Road. Maleeva has co-starred opposite Susan Sarandon in the comedy-drama film The Meddler and guest-starred in the television crime drama series Aquarius with David Duchovny, The Night Shift and the comedy Jane the Virgin. It is not surprising to learn that over the years Maleeva has brought her unique singing voice to the stage and to recordings as well, which has enabled her to travel the world with her onewoman musical comedy shows from New York to Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo. 

The shows Passion, Pain and Occasional Vodka Tonic and Irina Abroad were presented at the Matrix Theater in Los Angeles and the famed Cinegrill at Hollywood's Roosevelt Hotel. "The best part about acting," notes Maleeva, "is that I live many more lives through the parts I play. And my life becomes richer with more knowledge and experience. I also love to make people happy through my musical comedies." Of note is the release of her CD Illusions produced by music industry greats Michele Brourman and Stephan Oberhoff as well as creating and co-writing the stage show Illusions with renowned Broadway director and writer Randy Johnson which ran at the Hudson Theater in Los Angeles for two consecutive years. And now, she is currently at work writing a screenplay for an upcoming film. 

In 2017, Maleeva was bestowed the South East European Film Festival's SEEfest Life Achievement Award -- an honor that was presented to her by the Mayor of Beverly Hills -- in addition to kicking off the SEEfest festival in 2018 with a live performance of her musical Gypsy in My Soul directed by Carlyle King at the WACO Theater Center in the colorful North Hollywood arts district. Balancing her acting assignments and her singing engagements with her personal life is imperative for Maleeva, but more importantly, her life’s long dedication is as an avid activist in the fight for saving the elephants and rhinoceros through The Wildlife Trusts in Africa. Her life priority is being a strong advocate for saving lives of innocent animals through her charitable Irina.inc organization. She loves to fly, cruising around the world, playing with her beloved dogs Romeo and Juliet and sharing quiet times at her Beverly Hills home with longtime husband Nathan Goller.

Paul T. Goldman is streaming January 1st on Peacock: https://pck.tv/3XWOJ5I Synopsis: Paul T. Goldman is a mind-bending series from the director of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and the producers of The Disaster Artist. It’s a project that director Jason Woliner has been shooting for over a decade and a story that continues to pile on jaw-dropping new twists. In the style of Woliner’s work on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the series is a groundbreaking project that mixes fact and fiction to tell a bizarre and incredible tale. #PeacockTV #PaulTGoldman #OfficialTrailer 

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Coming up 12/12/22 9:30am pst - Garen Staglin Chairman and Founder, One Mind | Leading a Global Impact on Mental Health, Founder & Co-Chairman and Interim CEO Healthy Brains Global Initiative (HBGI), and Proprietor Staglin Family Vineyard

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Meet Garen Staglin

Garen's Italian heritage has always influenced Staglin Family Vineyard. Born in 1944, he learned early in this life the importance of wine to the quality of life from his father, Pasquale Stagliano (later changed to Ramon Staglin when he was naturalized) and his mother Darlene Guilliams. Family dinners with relatives and friends were almost always accompanied by wine, and Garen often got a little glass of wine with club soda to taste. As he grew up in Southern California, Garen started to learn more about wine through books and importantly, numerous tastings. After graduating from UCLA with a degree in electrical and nuclear engineering he was fortunate to be accepted to Stanford Business School in the late 60's. While there, he and Shari would take day trips to visit the vineyards in Napa back in the days when surprisingly there were only six wineries in Napa! They were so impressed they felt that it was one of the greatest places on earth, and someday they had to find a way to come back and make their life here.

When he finished Stanford with an MBA, Shari and Garen were married and they traveled to Japan where Garen served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and fought in the Vietnam War. After a year, he was transferred to the Pentagon and worked in the Systems Analysis Group under Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. While in DC, Garen's passion for wine was cultivated by frequent trips to the main wine shop in DC where favorable import taxation allowed him to purchase 1st Growth Bordeaux for less than $10/bottle. When he was discharged from the Navy, they headed north to New York City where Garen began what has become a lifelong career in venture capital and investments. Frequenting New York's finest wine shops became a Saturday morning tradition. As Garen searched for bargains he found himself experimenting with new varietals to extend his knowledge.

Garen remains active in the world of venture capital and private equity investing, serving on public and private Board of Directors. He couldn't be happier balancing his time between investing, philanthropy, and helping with the wine business, all the time enjoying a wonderful marriage and family, and the pride of having his family all working together at Staglin Family Vineyard.


Chairman and Founder One Mind Institute
Leading fund raising organization to find causes and cures for mental illness, principally depression, schizophrenia, and bi-polar. Since founding we have raised directly and through follow on grants over $515 Million. Initiated One Mind at Work for workplace mental health best practices globally. Initiatied 10 year documentary series with Ken Burns/PBS on Brain Health/Mental Health and celebrity campaign. Formerly known as International Mental Health Research Organization and One Mind Institute.


Founder & Co-Chairman and Interim CEO Healthy Brains Global Initiative (HBGI)
The Healthy Brains Global Initiative (HBGI) is an umbrella set of financing mechanisms developed by global leaders in neuroscience, policy, and finance to fuel an unprecedented increase in brain science breakthroughs, from basic research to implementation, that will change the lives of those living with mental and neurological disorders and bend the unsustainable $3 trillion global cost curve borne today by low, middle, and high income countries. Currently service as Acting CEO while global search for new CEO is completed.


Proprietor Staglin Family Vineyard
71 Acre estate in Rutherford, California dedicated to producing limited quantities of Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Sangivovese that compete with the finest wines in the world. Family partnership also owned by Shari Staglin (CEO), Brandon Staglin, and Shannon Staglin (President). Our motto is "Great wines for great causes."

Coming up Monday 12/12/22 9am pst - Barbara Becker, author of Heartwood: The Art of Living with the End in Mind and Winner of a Gold Nautilus Award

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Winner of a Gold Nautilus Award

“We can do extraordinary things when we lead with love,” Barbara Becker reminds us in her debut memoir Heartwood.

When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die?

With a keen eye towards that which makes life worth living, Barbara Becker―a perpetual seeker, a mom, and an interfaith leader―recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways. She volunteers on a hospice floor, becomes an eager student of the many ways people find meaning at the end of life, and accompanies her parents in their final days.

Becker inspires readers to live with the end in mind and proves that turning toward loss rather than away from it is the only true way to live life to its fullest. Just as with the heartwood of a tree―the central core that is no longer alive yet supports the newer growth rings―the dead become an enduring source of strength to the living.

With life-affirming prose, Becker helps us see that that grief is not a problem to be solved, but rather a sacred invitation―an opportunity to let go into something even greater…a love that will inform all the days of our lives.

In her 2022 Nautilus Gold Award-winning memoir, Becker, an ordained interfaith chaplain, sets off on a quest to find the answer to the question: can we live our lives more fully knowing someday we will die?


Talking points:

How to cope with the first holiday season after losing a loved one
The one question we should ask ourselves in order to live a more purposeful life
Simple advice to help family caregivers cope with caring for loved ones with Alzheimers
How Barbara’s work as a chaplain and in hospice has impacted and informed her feelings about death·
A surprising twist when the author turned to her own book for advice on life and death when she was diagnosed with breast cancer
What we can learn about coping with death and grief from religious traditions outside of our own



ABOUT BARBARA BECKER
Barbara Becker has dedicated over twenty-five years to partnering with human rights advocates around the world in pursuit of peace and interreligious understanding. She has worked with the United Nations, Human Rights First, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, and has participated in a delegation of Zen Peacemakers and Lakota elders in the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota. She is an interfaith minister and has sat with hundreds of people at the end of their lives. Through writing, she explores what it means to live a life of meaning. Barbara lives in New York City with her husband and two sons. More at barbarabecker.com

PRAISE FOR HEARTWOOD

Gloria Steinem, Author & Activist:

"Life is an adventure of following our curiosity—that is, the voice of our true self—into the unknown world around us. In Heartwood, Barbara Becker tells the story of her own journey into understanding loss and love, and so inspires us to follow our curiosity into a world that is both universal and a source of our uniqueness. And what could be better than that?"



Mirabai Starr, Author of Caravan of No Despair and Wild Mercy:

"Heartwood is a luminous book. The language is simple, tender and wise, the story-telling riveting, and the presence of the narrator both dignified and authentic. I have rarely read a book that left me feeling so fundamentally blessed. Highly recommended."


“Becker debuts with a stirring chronicle of the events, moments, and stories that led to her reconciliation with mortality…Becker’s eloquence is a salve for confronting a difficult topic…This will be a comfort for anyone contemplating their own mortality, or those in search of advice for others.”

—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“A graceful meditation on divine deliverance. Once firmly entrenched in our “death-shy” contemporary culture, the author is now a reassuring advocate for peace and interreligious understanding, and she views dying as an opportunity to seek enlightenment and give thanks, regardless of one’s preferred spiritual path.”

—Kirkus

“…an invaluable resource in living a life filled with meaning and purpose. A resource filled with wisdom and one that readers will find themselves returning to often in both good times and bad.”

—Shelf Awareness

“An affecting and informative memoir about the lessons we can glean from life as well as death.”

—Library Journal

“This insightful, quietly moving book is not just for the grieving or those who comfort them.”

—Booklist

For more info on the book, please check out the release, Q&A, praise sheet, and previous media coverage.

Coming up 12/5 LIVE on KUCI - Victoria Garza, author of forthcoming memoir THE FIELD

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Victoria Garza, author of forthcoming memoir THE FIELD (on sale: November 15; JackLeg Press) "the song of the sister who died by the sister who survived" (Barbara Cully, author of Desire Reclining). Focusing on themes of coping, loss, healing, the metaphysical, the Mexican-American diaspora, queer identity, and more, Garza's memoir is a story of emotional healing--for anyone who has experienced loss in any form. Each section of the memoir introduces a literary verse that has allowed Garza to unpack her grief in a new way and contextualize the story she is telling.

Kirkus Reviews writes: "The author illustrates, in observant, poetic prose, the reverberating effects that grief can have on a life, and the many ways that her family has coped with it. As she does so, she examines her protective mechanisms and peels back layers of guilt and sorrow to tenderly uncover revelations about herself." Beth Alvarado (author of Jillian in the Borderlands and Anxious Attachments) writes: "A tender and deep evocation of Mexican American culture."


Additional Advance Praise for THE FIELD:

This book is the song of the sister who died by the sister who survived. It is a distillation, a documentary whose milestones are marked by St. Teresa, Dickinson, Neruda, Dante, the Gospel of Thomas, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. If you want to know how a family touches grief tenderly and respectfully as loss drills its terror, if you want to know how a ten-year-old confronts darkness, conducts a life, and delivers her heart back to its origins whole—read Garza's testimony, where a simple field in Ohio vibrates with the knowledge that the important matters weed themselves out and one is left with the essential nature of one's love.
—Barbara Cully, author of Desire Reclining, The New Intimacy, and Shoreline Series

At its Norse root, haunt, or heimta, means "to lead home." That sense of loss and longing infuses Victoria Garza's profound journey to make sense of a childhood tragedy. Grappling with guilt and trauma through vignettes as sharp and luminous as stained glass, The Field opens a space between memory and dream where angels walk among us and death becomes a door. Garza reminds us it's emotions that matter' and that grief is not an affliction, but a deep, abiding expression of love.
—Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, author of Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between.


About Victoria

For most of my professional writing career, I’ve written journalism, screenplays, documentaries, and multimedia content. Although an excerpt of The Field was published by Kore Press and won a completion grant from the Elisabeth George Foundation, I consider myself a new author and The Field, my first book. Accounts of death have, of course, a rich literary history. I believe my audience is the same audience moved by Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Elisabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and the stunning French book, The Disappearance, by Genevieve Jurgensen, to name the ones that have moved me most.

I hold an M.A in Media Theory, History and Criticism from University of Arizona and an M.F.A in Film Production from the NYU's Graduate Institute of Film & Television. Currently, I'm a senior writer for Apple.

I live in the Bay Area with my wife Lisa, and our two children, Augustin and Dakota.

Victoria Garza
www.victoriagarza.net

Coming up 12/5 9:30am LIVE on KUCI - UCI students Sandra Quintana and Marissa DeGeorge

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to today's show featuring 

UCI students Sandra Quintana and Marissa DeGeorge

Meet Sandra! She is a 4th year
Psychological Sciences major at UCI

Originally from los angeles, Sandra now lives in riverside. She is a fourth year transfer student at UCI. Sandra has always been interested in people and the way relationships work. She decided to major in psychology and hopes to make her career surrounded in making an impact in the education and mental health space. In her free time, she loves taking photos and going out with friends. Her favorite thing is going to concerts! Fun fact: She has been to one every month this year. Sandra also loves watching movies, especially in theaters.

Meet Marissa! She is a 4th year at UCI
studying Psychological Science and Criminal Law

Marissa DeGeorge is a double major in psychological science and criminal law. She is very passionate about learning and would like to go to graduate school. Marissa  decided to major in both of these fields because she is eager to learn more about our minds and behaviors individually and socially. The topic that interests her most would be neuropsychology! I am excited to explore, learn, and grow through this journey!