Madge Weinstein

Madge Bertha Weinstein (1949 March 30) is an Internet personality who maintains Yeast Radio, one of the most notorious, bizarre and groundbreaking podcasts on the internet [1], which has developed a rabid cult following. Weinstein is the creation and alter ego of underground filmmaker Richard Bluestein. Although Weinstein is a persona with a fictional character history, the majority of her opinions, social-political commentary and oblique characteristics of her personality are clearly reflective of Bluestein's own. In essence, Weinstein is both an extension and distortion of Bluestein's actual personality [2].

Fictional Character History

Weinstein is an outspoken breast cancer survivor and opinionated Jewish lesbian activist, Vassar College graduate, co-founder of the Lilith Fair and a "woman of Luna." She is well known for her advocacy on a variety of women's issues including her long tenure as a spokeswoman on behalf of women suffering from vaginal yeast. Weinstein is the daughter of Irving Weinstein, a funeral director and owner of Weinstein & Schlump Funeral Homes. She grew up in the Grand Concourse in the borough of the Bronx in New York City. In her youth, she once performed oral sex on Nancy Reagan, which she now regrets. She is also the former lover of Ethel Merman (although she tends to exaggerate the details of their now infamous 1967 tryst during Ethel's daughter's funeral) and has had affairs with Martina Navratilova, Ellen DeGeneres, k.d. lang, Melissa Etheridge and Rosie O'Donnell. Weinstein is the self-professed "Margaret Mead of podcasting" as she is an amateur cultural anthropologist who, in her free time, studies the sordid sexual activities of homosexual men. Weinstein was in a long term relationship with Gussie Iscowicz (the alter ego of Bluestein's partner Juan Montealegre), an elderly hairdresser living in Miami, Florida who suffered from Alzheimer's. Weinstein resides in Chicago, Illinois with her Italian greyhound Trotski where she managed the grrl band, "Goddess Riot Juice."

Biography

Weinstein co-manages the sister site, Insane Films, which features personal video blogs of Madge's alter ego, Richard Bluestein, as well as features by underground filmmakers and miscellaneous visual content. Insane Films is one of the earliest videoblogs ever created, originating sometime in 2000, but Madge Weinstein's fame grew largely from her indie podcast Yeast Radio, which began in late November 2004. Weinstein gained notoriety for her short film, Cooking With Madge: Lesbians On Acid, which featured a disheveled Madge and her unstable, ambiguously gendered friends attempting to cook "les beans" while high on LSD. A pioneer of the podcasting medium, Adam Curry, helped promote the show in its early life and continues to be a huge supporter of Weinstein.

In late April 2005, Weinstein created an interesting counterpart to her original podcast in Yeast2, a free-form experimental channel in which anyone can contribute to "the strange, ugly, pretty macabra [sic] and surreal."

In early July 2005, Weinstein became one of the first members of Adam Curry's PodShow and is featured heavily in the program, which airs on Sirius Satellite Radio from 6-10 p.m. EST on weekdays. Madge Weinstein co-created Eat This Hot Show, a collaborative podcast featuring five notable members of the ever-growing "queercast" community: Weinstein, Ragan Fox, Wanda Wisdom, Fausto Fernos and his partner Marc Felion. However, Fausto and Marc were expelled from the show after ten episodes due to internal conflicts with fellow hosts, and the three now have a weekly guest instead. Madge Weinstein and Wanda Wisdom also co-created the online community, Qpodder.org, which collects gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered podcasts. Its sister site NellyGator.com allows listeners to subscribe to a single RSS feed containing all podcast episodes from the members of Qpodder.

In mid October 2005, Weinstein, a self-described "pioneering lesbian," began heavily promoting the medium of queer videoblogging to coincide with the advent of the video iPod. Her new endeavor Faggregator.com does to videoblogging what Nellygator did for podcasting, and features a single page which houses all the video material submitted by members of the Qpodder community.

Bluestein experienced two personal losses in 2006. Juan Montealegre passed away on 2006 February 11, after a battle with cancer. Not long thereafter, on 2006 May 2, his 14-year-old dog Chauncey also died.

On 2006 September 27, Richard Bluestein announced on Yeast Radio that he was retiring the character Madge and taking over hosting duties himself due to creative concerns. Madge was reported to be in a hospital in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she received adjustable gastric band surgery for her ongoing weight problem. The surgery went horribly wrong, leaving her in a critical condition [3]. Madge eventually recovered and returned to the show on 2006 November 6 [4].

Weinstein's rebellious, queer punk ethics and her podcast's unconventional content, strong, coarse language and stream-of-consciousness structure have made her an endlessly controversial icon within the more conservative podcasting community [5]. Her tenure on the show serves as an ongoing protest against censorship, the commercialization of mainstream radio and the continued marginalization of gays and lesbians by the growing monoculture [6].

Notable Guests

Weinstein features a variety of crude and eccentric characters on her show:

• Norm Augustinus, the eccentric and unstable cult icon who performed humorous anecdotes and contributed absurdist prank calls on the show. He has since stopped contributing to the show to focus on his own comedy.
• Berbacia Clemons, a Los Angeles-based "big, black, bloated, bisexual, bipolar, overweight blacktress" who sporadically guests on the show to "peel open the pussy lips of Hollywood", allowing the audience to have a "peek inside". She is often delusional and obsesses over certain celebrities, in particular Star Jones [who she views as her stalker and "only competition"] and her "close friends" Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor. The character recently returned to the show on 2006 December 30 after more than a year long absence due to personal conflicts behind the scenes.
• Dace, a handicapped teenager with a bizarre inverted penis condition which when erect grows seven inches.
• Jihadist Jerry, an Iranian terrorist with extremist leftist leanings who threatens American politicians and pop culture starlets. He refers to himself in third person and speaks in broken English. Regularly appears on Madge & Cheryl's Friday show.
• Victoria LaMarr, a schizophrenic transgendered crackwhore with multiple personalities who appeared in Weinstein's infamous Lesbians On Acid trilogy. She went on to play a larger part in the Feast Of Fools podcast.
• Ali Mahajani, also known as Ali My Vagina, an Indian man who enjoys mutaliating and sticking unusual objects in his urethra. He is estranged from his amputee wife after a complication with stump to uretha sexual intercourse. Regularly appears on Madge & Cheryl's Friday show and soon went on to play a large role in Cheryl's Whorehole podcast and is part of the That Is Real Good Tech podcast with Rob Average Penis.
• Andy Melton, a kind hearted, morbidly obese boy living in Tennessee who Madge constantly abuses.
• Cheryl Steryl Merkowski, a beautiful 25 year old woman, smoker and owner of three fourths of a lung, paedophilic with a croaky, frightening voice, the results of lung cancer. She speaks candidly about her vagina, bodily fluids and the children at the daycare centre that she runs. She also tans obsessively to the point that her skin has become very leathery. She is the alter ego of a man known as "Puffy Blubber Cunt". She is said to sleep in a tanning bed in Mr. Blubber Cunt's closet.
• Roger Smalls, an obsessive and socially inept British man who regularly leaves strange voicemail messages on Weinstein's hotline. He has also threatened to stalk podcast personality Adam Curry.

Weinstein has also interviewed political activist Cindy Sheehan, Wigstock founder Lady Bunny, Democracy Now! reporter Amy Goodman, pioneer of the transgressive art movement Nick Zedd, collaborative documentary filmmaker Kent Bye of The Echo Chamber Project, provocative multimedia performance artist and world cake-eating champion Shishaldin Hanlen and the experimental, underground filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Kristie Alshaibi. The show frequently features original compositions from Taylor E. Ross (described as Madge's "cunt doctor"), the mysterious "Mr. Zeeche" and Dave from the Chub Creek podcast.

Because of her prominence within the community, Madge regularly features fellow queer podcasters on her show. In early episodes, Fausto Fernós of the Feast Of Fools podcast acted as the token "self-loathing minority" and Weinstein's own "Robin Queefers" before their friendship ended. Performance artist Ragan Fox of the Fox & the City, Minneapolis-based drag queen Wanda Wisdom of Lucky Bitch Radio, quirky pre-op transsexual woman Rebecca Nay of the Tranny Wreck podcast and dominatrix Pizza Babe of the PizzaBabe Goes Global podcast are main fixtures and appear regularly. Madge's chemistry and banter with gothic performance poet and feminist Rachel Kann of the Eat Bird podcast is very popular with listeners. Madge regularly makes jokes at her expense, nicknaming her "Rapechel", mocking her deep "masculine" voice and referring to her in male pronouns.

External links

• Yeast Radio
• Yeast2

This article is based on a GNU FDL LGBT Wikia article: Weinstein Madge Weinstein

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