SYMHC Classics: Lucille Ball

This 2017 episode covers Lucille Ball, the grande dame of American comedy. The famed star worked in modeling, radio and film, but she really made her mark in television, and her work set the standard for the TV sitcom. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 2:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. Lucille Ball got a name drop in our Dorothy Arzner episode, so our episode on Lucille Ball is today's Saturday classic. This episode, which I had no memory of until re-listening to it just now, also talks a bit more about the movie Dance Girl Dance, which is the film that Arzner directed. This was a sponsored episode when it first came out for CNN's documentary miniseries, The History of Comedy. I don't know if that's available to stream anymore, but there are clips of it on the CNN website. At the beginning of this episode, we also kind of muse over the fact that it was our 900th episode, and we talk about how maybe we should figure out

• 2:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  when our 1,000th episode is going to be and do something special. We did do that. We had some sort of casual events online and on our social media, and we also did a two-part episode on Sadako Sasaki's 1,000 Cranes. Those two-parters came out February 26th and 28th, 2018, so enjoy.

• 3:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 3:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So we have a couple of housekeeping notes. We do. First, in the interest of full disclosure, this episode is sponsored by CNN. They have a new miniseries coming up called The History of Comedy, and they approached us and asked if we would like to do an episode that might tie into that. I love comedy and comedy histories, and I already had many people on my list. We were like, here is a giganto list of things that we have wanted to talk about for a long time. Yeah, so this was a very easy kind of fit, and it made perfect sense. This is probably an episode that would have happened regardless, but in this case, it is sponsored by CNN. We are going to talk about

• 4:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  the grand dame of American comedy, Lucille Ball. She, you know, was incredibly famous. She worked in modeling, radio and film, but of course, really made her mark in television. And her work really set the standard for the TV sitcom going forward. We also have a little bit of a milestone on this one. Hmm. It's the 900th episode of this show. Yes. We haven't been on all of those episodes. Not remotely. And a very, very few of them, very tiny few, uh, from way back in the archive are reruns, but 900. Is a lot. Is a lot of episodes. It makes me realize that, you know, in less than a year, we will be at 1,000 and we should plot something.

• 4:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  I know. I have, I have thought of this also. And now I've put that into the universe and I'm going to feel stupid when we're in the studio and I go, oh crap, this is the 1,000th one, isn't it? And I haven't planned anything. Oh, well. But we're gonna, I put it in the universe, so I won't forget. Maybe after we record, I should do a little math, figure out exactly when that's happening. It'll be about a year from now, minus a week, right? Ish. Uh huh. So do you want to just hop into Lucille Ball's story? Yes, because I love her. Me too. Lucille Desiree Ball was the first child of Henry Darrell Ball, who went by Had, and Desiree Hunt Ball, when she was born on August 6th of 1911. Her family

• 5:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  was not wealthy and Had, who was an electrician, moved them from place to place looking for work. When Lucy was still a small child, he found a position in Michigan, working for Michigan Bell Company as a lineman. But the stability that the job offered the family was really short-lived and completely undermined when Had died of typhoid fever in February 1915. This undoubtedly jarring event was recalled by Lucille Ball later in life as her first memory. And when she talked about it or wrote about it, she would literally go into great detail about like, the things that were on the wall and a bird that was, that she saw at the time. Like, she remembers that moment so clearly, or remembered, I

• 6:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  should say. Uh, and in addition to the loss of Had, Lucille's mother, Desiree, was also dealing with the fact that she was pregnant with the couple's second child and she was facing a really uncertain financial future. And she decided to move back to Jamestown, New York, which was where the Balls had been living when Lucille was born. After the birth of Lucille's brother Fred, Desiree started working in a factory to try to make ends meet. She also met and started dating a man named Ed Peterson. Peterson and Desiree got married, but once again, what seemed like a situation that might offer the family some stability, instead ended up causing deeper fractures in the family. So Ed did not want to be burdened with children.

• 7:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  And so he and Desiree moved to Detroit without Lucille and Fred. And the children didn't even get to stay together. Fred moved in with his maternal grandparents and Lucille moved in with Ed Peterson's parents, who were basically strangers to her. And the Petersons were very, very poor and they were really pretty strict with their new step granddaughter. After several years of this arrangement, Desiree and Ed moved back to Jamestown once again, so the children had their mother back. And Lucille really always wanted to be in show business. I saw one thing, I think it's part of the package of her Kennedy Center honors, which we're going to talk about later, that said that every springtime she tried to walk from their house to Broadway.

• 7:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  And of course, didn't make it. But at the age of 15, she left high school and she started drama school in New York City at the John Murray Anderson, Robert Milton Dramatic School, after begging her mother to consent to let her do this. But though it's hard to imagine the legendary redhead, which is not her natural color, and we'll talk about that as well, struggling to stand out, she really did not fare well at drama school. She was a little too nervous and really struggled to make a name for herself. Later, she would describe this time of her life saying, quote, "All I learned in drama school was how to be frightened." The school even wrote to Desiree to let her know that her daughter was really way too shy for the stage.

• 8:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  As a point of trivia, Betty Davis was at school at the same time. Yeah, yeah. Lucille Ball was definitely in awe of her. So you can imagine, if you're already a little uncertain, and then you have Betty Davis, who was by all accounts a powerhouse, you kind of probably don't feel like making a really big move to try to stand out. But while Lucille did leave drama school, she chose to stay in New York, and she adopted a new stage name, which was Diane Belmont. And less than a year after her failed start at drama school, she was booking modeling jobs. She modeled clothing for the Vienna-born designer Hattie Carnegie, who I would love to also do an episode on

• 9:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  at some point. And later, Chesterfield Cigarettes booked her for modeling gigs, including rather large-scale campaigns, which got the attention of Hollywood producers. So after a few years working as a model in New York, she decided to make her way to Hollywood to transition into acting. She also changed her hair from its natural chestnut brown to blonde. Just as she had managed with her modeling career after leaving drama school, Ball began to book acting gigs rather quickly, although many of them in her early career were uncredited. Starring in 1933, she worked at times as a Goldwyn girl. And this was a stock group of young women who danced and entertained to appear in and promote new films for Samuel

• 10:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Goldwyn. So in '33, that movie was Roman Scandals, which is a picture with a plot about a young man from West Rome, Oklahoma, dreaming that he was in ancient Rome. And the Goldwyn girls in this particular film were featured as Roman slave girls. Other uncredited work included appearing as a showgirl in the 1934 Moulin Rouge, as a nurse in Carnival in 1935, and as an extra in the slapstick version of The Three Musketeers, starring the comedy team The Ritz Brothers. And Lucy continued to take small parts. She had a reputation for never saying no because she knew she had to make ends meet. And she finally got a more substantial part in 1937's Stage Door, which was a story about a group of aspiring actresses living together

• 10:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  in a boarding house. Also featured in that cast were Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, a couple of, you know, people no one's heard of. No, they're not famous at all.

• 10:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1940, Lucille played the role of Bubbles, third build after Maureen O'Hara and Lewis Hayward, in a picture called Dance Girl Dance. While the movie is far from her most famous work, it did have a significant impact on her life. The movie's story centered around a troupe of dancers. And while Judy, played by Maureen O'Hara, longed to become a ballerina, Bubbles' act was burlesque. The two were also rivals in love, and the two actresses enjoyed playing up their competitive but friendly relationship. Yeah, when it came time to film a fight scene between the two characters, the production actually allowed an audience to attend, and they charged admission, but they donated that money to charity. And after the fight was over,

• 11:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  the ladies went to the studio commissary together for lunch, because they really were friends. And it was there that Lucy met Desiderio Alberto Arnez, Desi Arnaz. And she would later say of their meeting, "It wasn't love at first sight. It took a full five minutes." The actress and the Cuban bandleader appeared together in Ball's next movie, Too Many Girls. And their time working together on the picture sped their courtship along. Those who were close to Lucy advised her to stay away from Desi. Those pieces of advice were completely pointless. Arnez, who was just 23 at the time, had a reputation for dating a string of ladies. But Desi and Lucy fell in love and got married within a year. Their wedding was on November 30, 1940.

• 12:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  And it wasn't long after the marriage, in 1942, that Lucille Ball dyed her hair. The signature red that she would be known for the rest of her life, having done so at the suggestion of movie studio MGM for her role in "Dewberry Was a Lady." The shade, however, would shift, not from that original red, but to a more apricot tone, though not for several years. Before we get to the next big step in Lucy's career, we're going to pause for a word from a fantastic sponsor.

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• 14:59Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:44Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  While Lucille Ball had been relatively successful in film, she felt that her career wasn't really reaching the level that she wanted. Her starring roles were mostly in B films rather than big budget films, and so she expanded her work into radio as well. She quickly landed a role in the comedy My Favorite Husband, and it was that work that led to CBS offering to develop a series along the same lines with her. This seemed like great news, but things did not go well in negotiations. Lucy wanted to develop a show with Desi starring alongside her, and CBS was not interested in him, in part because of his accent, and the talks quickly ended.

• 17:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  But the couple's desire to create a husband-wife show together eventually developed by the two of them into the form of a vaudeville act. And as they toured this stage show, they garnered a lot of attention. It was actually a huge hit. People found it so charming that the two of them were singing and dancing together, and they were very funny. And it was so huge a hit that CBS wanted to talk to them again. And this time, because they had this reputation built around them and the two of them as a pair working together, Lucy and Desi were in a position to make some demands and have those demands met. As "I Love Lucy" was in development, the pair decided they did not want to shoot the show in New York, in a move that separated them from most other TV shows in this still pretty young medium.

• 17:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  They opted to set up production in Hollywood. They also wanted to shoot on film, despite protests from CBS that Kinescope would be a lot more cost-effective. But they really wanted film, and they decided that they would sacrifice some of their pay to get it. And so they renegotiated their deal, and they also made sure that they would retain rights of ownership of the project. And they formed Desoloo Productions as the umbrella company for it. Everything changed for Lucille Ball and her husband in 1951. They had their first child, Lucy, in July of that year, and then "I Love Lucy" debuted on October 15, 1951. The show became a national success, and this mix of comedy and examination of common

• 18:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  social issues really struck a good note with the viewing audience. Yeah, it blew my mind when I realized that she had her kid while they were in development for a major TV show. Like, that just seems like a lot to be juggling. And yeah, it was just months from the time she had the baby to when they went into, like, full production schedule. And Lucy was, based on anything you could ever possibly read or hear about her from her colleagues, absolutely relentless in her pursuit of creating the most perfect possible production. Her standards were incredibly high, and she would rehearse even the most casual lines of the show until she felt that they were the absolute best they could be. She took comedy very, very seriously, and it's one of those things where people always

• 19:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  think a lot of the show was ad-libbed, but she really rehearsed almost everything to the point that it was just perfect, and you could not tell that she was not in the moment. Well, and...

• 19:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Another mark that it paid off is that when you say to someone, oh, we're working on a show about Lucille Ball, often the things that come spilling out of their mouth are all kinds of lines from this TV show from literally more than half of a century ago. Yeah, I mean, it's been, it's been on in syndication forever, but it's, people still watch it and laugh. Yeah, it was the thing that I watched, one of the things that I would watch in the, in the morning while I was getting awake and ready to go to school. Like my mom would be making me breakfast. It would be on and syndicated in the time slot before the morning news. Either that or the Andy Griffith Show, because this was North Carolina, you gotta

• 20:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  have some expectations. I've probably seen every episode of it. Anyway, I Love Lucy ran for six years and led all shows in the US ratings for four of them. It would be broadcast in 78 countries. When the show aired an episode in which Lucy gave birth to little Ricky in 1953, which aired on the same day Desi Arnaz Jr. Was born in real life, thanks to a scheduled Caesarian section, it set ratings records, surpassing audience numbers for the Eisenhower inauguration. Yeah, it's the first instance where an actress's real life pregnancy was part of their fictional story. And while it seemed natural to write their real life pregnancy

• 21:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  into the show, and their sponsor, and this seems odd now, of course, through the modern lens, cigarette company Philip Morris, was behind the idea, the decision to do so really ran into some hurdles at CBS. The network was first deeply uneasy about the idea of showing a pregnant woman on TV. They thought people might find it vulgar or distasteful. Though CBS eventually did go along with the plan and they consulted various experts and felt like, no, this would be okay. They did forbid the use of the word pregnant on the show. So they could never say Lucy was pregnant and they would say she was expecting instead. And there were also titters about how Desi pronounced the word.

• 21:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, and they had, they had to name it Lucy is pregnant, but they used the French word for pregnant so that even though the titles never appeared on the show, that's one of my favorite episodes. If you've never seen it, the whole episode centers around Lucy trying to tell Ricky that she is pregnant and he's kind of dense and not catching her hints for a long time. I love it. And everybody knows, Fred and Ethel both know, like the whole, everyone connected to them already has it figured out, but he just is not getting the message. And she does this, I don't even want to give it away because it's so sweet, the way that she eventually tells him in the end is through his own song. He just doesn't know it's happening to him initially, and it's lovely. It's making me tear up a little bit. Me too. I love it so much.

• 22:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  During the run of the sitcom, Lucy's hair also hit the shade that would become her trademark for the rest of her career. According to hairstylist Irma Kuzly, who worked on numerous Desily productions, quote, "Lucy's hair was a golden apricot color, and she used a henna rinse to achieve it. She met a very wealthy sheik who had heard about her problem in getting the right coloring. He said that he would send her a lifetime supply of henna, which he did. We kept it in my garage, locked away in a safe."

• 22:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, you'll sometimes hear that sort of told as a slightly different story where her hair color formula was secret and was kept in a safe, but according to her stylist, no, it was just the boxes or the whatever format, the tubes or whatever that the henna was in. The other significant event of their lives while I Love Lucy was running was a scandal around Lucille's political history. The White House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Ball due to the fact that in 1936, she had registered as a member of the Communist Party. In sworn testimony before the committee, Lucille Ball testified that she had registered with the party in 1936 at the request of her grandfather, Fred Hunt, and that it was

• 23:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  nothing more than a gesture to please the elderly patriarch. Her mother and brother had apparently done the same thing. Yeah, there was also, there were also stories that she had hosted some parties at her home, some get togethers for people interested in communism, but she claimed she did not realize that that's what they were doing. She thought they were just like friends getting together. And when she was asked by a member of the press if she thought the matter would damage her career, Lucy responded, "I have more faith in the American people than that. I think anytime you give the American people the truth, they're with you." And in her case, she was right. Her fans sent cards and telegrams of support, and she and Desi told the press that they were in fact happy to have the whole thing out in the open.

• 24:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  I love Lucy ended in 1957, but Lucy and Desi continued at the helm of Desilu Productions. The Untouchables and Star Trek were produced there. But while they were having commercial success, their marriage didn't thrive, and they divorced in 1960. There had long been rumors of infidelity and rocky times between the two of them. But even after they called their marriage quits, they remained friends and colleagues. They also made some movies together in addition to the TV show. Yeah, when she switched to TV, when they switched to TV, it wasn't as though she stopped doing movies altogether. She did them on and off throughout her career when, when good projects came up. And she also did theater, which is how she met her second

• 25:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  husband. She remarried Gary Morton not long after her split from Desi. She had at the time been in New York to star in the Broadway show Wildcat, which ran at the Alvin Theater, and that was when she met the comedian. And they were married on November 19th of 1961. So just a little more than a year after the divorce. In 1962, Lucille Ball bought out Desi Arnaz's interest in Desilu Productions. After running the company for six years, she sold it in 1967 for $17 million. The person company, Gulf Western, which also owned Paramount Pictures, renamed the studio Paramount Television. Lucy founded a new production company, smaller and scaled than Desilu, called Lucille Ball Productions.

• 25:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  While she was done with running her big production company, Lucy certainly wasn't done with comedy. That's why she started her, her second smaller production company. She starred in two series in the 1960s. The Lucy Show ran on CBS from 1962 to 1968, and it featured Lucille Ball as a widow living with her divorced best friend and the two women's children. Vivian Vance, who had played Ethel on I Love Lucy, as well as several writers from I Love Lucy, also joined the production. After The Lucy Show ran for six years, Lucille moved on to another sitcom titled Here's Lucy in 1968. She was once again playing a widow, but this time, her two sitcom children were played by her actual children, Lucy and Desi Junior. Here's Lucy continued until 1973.

• 26:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Lucy's last two projects were in 1985 and 1986. So in 85, she took a role that was a significant departure from the comedy that had really made her career. She starred in a TV movie, which was titled Stone Pillow, in which she played a homeless woman. And after that, while she got good reviews for her work on that, it wasn't a particularly successful film. And she once again moved into sitcoms because that is really what people wanted of her. So she worked with CBS one more time, and she premiered Life with Lucy in 1986. But unlike her previous three sitcoms, it was a flop. It only lasted for eight episodes. In April 1989, she underwent an eight-hour open-heart surgery

• 27:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  at Cedar Sinai Medical Center after experiencing chest pains and being diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm. After the procedure, she initially appeared to be recovering well, but then she experienced another aortic rupture, which claimed her life. She died on April 26 of 1989. And next up, we're going to talk a little bit about Lucy's legacy. But before we do, we're going to take a quick break and hear again from a fantastic sponsor.

• 27:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 28:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:49Speaker 02

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• 30:01Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 30:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  So over the course of her career, Lucille Ball was honored with many awards. We could never list them all, but we will talk about some of them. For one thing, she won four Emmy Awards. Best Comedienne in 1952, Best Actress in a Continuing Performance for I Love Lucy in 1955, an Outstanding Continuing Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series, which is a mouthful of a category, for The Lucy Show in both 1967 and 1968. She was given two different stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for her work in film and the other for her work in television. And while Here's Lucy was on the air, Ball received the International Radio and Television Society's Gold Medal in 1971.

• 31:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  That made her the first woman to be honored with that award. In 1978, she was honored with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Cecil B. DeMille Award.

• 31:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Lucy was honored by the Kennedy Center on December 7th, 1986. It was a bittersweet event because Desi had died just five days before. During the ceremony, actor Robert Stack, who had starred in The Desilu Show, The Untouchables, read a remark that Desi had written. "I Love Lucy had just one mission, to make people laugh. Lucy gave it a rare quality. She can perform the wildest, even the messiest, physical comedy without losing her feminine appeal. The New York Times asked me to divide the credit for its success between the writers, directors, and the cast. I told them, give Lucy 90% of the credit, divide the other 10% among the rest of us."

• 32:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  As it concluded, Lucy was the show. Viv, Fred and I were just props. Damn good props, but props nevertheless. P.S. I Love Lucy was never just the title. After her death in 1989, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And in 2001, Newsweek named her the top female entertainer of the 20th century. If it were not for Lucille Ball's incredibly skilled and dedicated comedic work on I Love Lucy, we might never have had other women-led comedy shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Laverne and Shirley, the many shows that make me ask, why are we still talking about whether women are funny?

• 33:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  But her influence goes a lot deeper than that. She really spearheaded the style of comedy, as we said at the top of the show, that developed into the sitcom. And that's a format that continues to be a TV standard today. I Love Lucy was also the first show to use three cameras in production, rather than just one stationary camera. And that was a major innovation at the time. As the head of Desi LeW Productions, Lucy became the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio. So she was not only a trailblazer as a funny woman, but also as an executive and a savvy businesswoman. She was employed in Hollywood for more than 50 years continuously, something that not many people can boast. She once said that she wasn't funny, she was brave. And while she had started

• 33:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  her career as a model and was in fact a great beauty, she set herself apart through her willingness to do crazy stunts and look foolish. Being pretty, it seems, was not as important to her as being funny. She was willing to do broad physical comedy at a time that it was still considered the territory only of men. And in doing so, she opened up the door for women who came after her. Also, during her Kennedy Center Honors presentation, Robert Stack said, quote, "It will always be remembered that you established a place in television for women." And to bring up kind of an interesting source, according to Arnold Schwarzenegger, writing in his autobiography, Lucy once gave him the following advice about working in Hollywood, although I think it is pretty good advice for almost anything in life.

• 34:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Quote, "When they say no, you hear yes. Someone says we can't do this movie, hug them and say, thank you for believing in me."

• 34:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  I love that so much and I can so hear her saying it. Fantastic. Uh, I know it's very subtle, but I'm a Lucille Ball fan. Yeah.

• 35:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  I love the long, long trailer. It is both a movie starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. And they might be giants song called Everything Right Is Wrong Again. I really love, uh, DeBerry Was A Lady. And I, I will say this, I have one beef with the I Love Lucy show. Oh, yeah. It's so specific and nerdy and dorky and weird to dressmakers. There was an episode where she was trying to make her own dress. And she, the, the gag was that she accidentally, she had it laid out on the floor and that she accidentally cut out the carpet along with the fabric, which one, if you've ever cut out fabric, you know,

• 35:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  that would be hard to do. But two, when they lifted it up, it was for sight gag appeal, but it looked like the outline of a dress. It didn't actually look like a piece of a dress pattern. And I remember as a kid seeing that and being like, that's not how you make a dress. So that was my pedantic moment as a childish seamstress. Both a child seamstress and a childish seamstress later in life. Yeah.

• 36:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 36:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life With A Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio Partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs and quick hellos

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