Donny Makower is a business leader and marketing veteran who realigned his personal and professional endeavors around plant-based living. He is the CEO & Co-Founder of RDCL Superfoods, an innovative new brand that makes plant-based superfood products, and he was previously the President and Co-Founder of RED Interactive Agency, a premier digital marketing agency that he successfully sold. Donny is also a passionate public speaker and the Chairman of the Board of the Gentle Barn, a national nonprofit organization specializing in the rehabilitation of abused and neglected animals.
Madeline is a US Figure Skating triple gold medalist and an experienced professional figure skater working in sports and entertainment. As a performing artist, choreographer, speaker, and ice skater, she has travelled to over 30 countries worldwide performing in shows for Royal Caribbean International and Cirque Du Soleil as a principal soloist. Her most recent work was creating and performing one of the original main characters of Cirque Du Soleil's first show on ice, "Crystal."
She is a licensed personal trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, a Precision Nutrition certified wellness coach, pilates instructor, as well as holds certificates from McGill University in public speaking and New York University in visual, written, and oral storytelling. She loves to speak and share her experiences as an athlete to help others manage their personal wellness to sustain high performance.
Please click the contact link below if you would like to inquire Madeline for coaching, speaking events, or performances.
The Homance Chronicles is a storyteller podcast hosted by Nicole Bonneville and Sarah Andonian. They have a ‘homance,’ the female equivalent of a bromance. They’ve been friends for a decade and have gone through some crazy times. They share their unbelievably entertaining and slightly embarrassing, yet relatable stories about dating disasters, poor choices, sex stuff and other homance adventures.
For more go to Amazon to purchase the book or Kindle eBook of “The Untold Secret to My Transformation: A Spiritual, Sexy, Financially Freeing Journey”
LEGENDARY GUITARIST
R O B I N
T R O W E R
SPECIAL GUEST
ON
INTERVIEWING THE LEGENDS
with RAY SHASHO
Robin Trower has been heralded as one of the most influential Guitar players to come out of the British Blues Rock scene. Though other names may come to mind, none have the "signature sound and style" of the man who was tagged by the press with the nickname of "The White Hendrix" back in the 70's. Robin was in the audience during a performance by Jimi Hendrix those many years back, and he readily admits that the Experience changed his approach to the guitar. It is obvious to anyone who ever listened to Robin's music that he has taken the ethereal sound that Jimi first introduced to the world and created his own unique way of expressing himself through the guitar. The result is a unique style of music all his own - NOT an imitation of Jimi at all, and a career of considerable merit.
Robin is known for his incredible talent as a guitar player and his inspirational style of soloing, coaxing sounds from his Strat that seem to emanate from beyond this world. To be among those who have experienced Robin performing live is to be forever changed by this masterful Artist as he takes you along with him on one musical masterpiece after another.
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'UNITED STATE OF MIND'
Featuring
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Maxi Priest
& Livingstone Brown
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Dorie Ladner was “born a rebel against oppression.” A native of the Hattiesburg, Mississippi community known as Palmer’s Crossing, she spent her childhood fighting back against the oppressive racial norms that governed the lives of Black people there. Her mother taught all of her eight children that they “were as good as anybody.”
Accommodating to white supremacy was not in her makeup. One day when she was twelve, Dorie was reading an issue of Jet Magazine at a convenience store, when the store’s white clerk “slapped [her] on the behind.” “I turned around and started beating him with the bag of doughnuts,” she recalled. When she told her mother of the incident, her mother replied “you should have killed him. Don’t ever let any white man touch you wrong.” So, explained Dorie, when she and her sister Joyce became part of the Movement, they were simply “doing what they prepared us to do.”
The Ladner family was close to Vernon Dahmer and his family. Dahmer was the president of the Forrest County branch of the NAACP and a vocal proponent of voting rights. Dahmer helped the Ladner sisters form an NAACP Youth Council in nearby Hattiesburg. Clyde Kennard, another older activist who attended school at the University of Chicago, agreed to serve as the youth council’s advisor. Pretty soon, Kennard and Dahmer were bringing the Ladner sisters to Jackson for statewide NAACP meetings. “I’m so grateful that I was exposed to people who at the time had vision,” remembered Dorie Ladner.
Both Dahmer and Kennard were killed because of their leadership in civil rights struggle. Both deaths profoundly affected Dorie and her sister.
The Ladners met Medgar Evers on one of their Jackson trips, and he also became an important mentor when they enrolled in Jackson State College. “Every Wednesday, we would go over and talk to him about freedom, which was abstract; all we wanted to know was about our freedom,” Dorie explained. In 1961, with Evers’ guidance, Ladner joined the protests of the “Tougaloo [College] Nine,” a group of students from Tougaloo who were arrested for trying to integrate the public library in downtown Jackson. As a consequence of her activism, Ladner was expelled from Jackson State. She and her sister later matriculated at Tougaloo College, which was known for its liberal stance towards student activism.
Emma Bell, Dorie Ladner, Dona Richards, Sam Shirah, and Doris Derby outside 16th Street Baptist Church funeral, September 1963, Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement 96-97, dektol.wordpress.com
When Evers was assassinated in June, 1963, it was especially hard on Dorie and her sister. The anger that had been building up after every murder and lynching, especially those of Clyde Kennard and Emmett Till, reached its boiling point the next day. The day after Evers’ murder, Dorie ran up to two white police officers sitting in front of the Jackson’s Black Masonic Temple (which also served as the NAACP’s headquarters) and shouted at them, “Where were you last night? Why are you here now? Shoot! Shoot! Shoot us in the back like you did Medgar Evers.”
Despite her family’s insistence that she get an education, Dorie dropped out of Tougaloo three separate times to work for SNCC full-time. She once told her sister Joyce, “I can’t stay in school and know my people are suffering.” In the summer of 1962, she started working on SNCC’s voter registration projects in the Delta. Three years later, she became SNCC’s project director in Natchez, Mississippi.
Although Ladner was raised never to let fear prevent her from doing what she knew was right, she understood the constant possibility and danger of white violence. Upon entering Natchez with former SNCC chair Chuck McDew and field secretary George Greene, McDew handed her a gun for protection. Despite never needing to use it, Ladner was certain she would’ve if she needed to. She once said, “I didn’t think about the ramifications of anything like that; it was save yourself, survive.”






