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Talking with Lucy Lawless

Welcome to our series Talking to a Famous Person. In this series we publish our conversations with high-profile nonprofit founders, actors,…

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Hillary Newman

By  Hillary Newman
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Welcome to our series Talking to a Famous Person. In this series we publish our conversations with high-profile nonprofit founders, actors, and everyone in between.

Known internationally for her role as Xena in Xena: Warrior Princess, Lawless has had a diverse career onstage, behind the camera, and working with organizations to help children in need around the world. Lawless was named one of the “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” by People magazine in 1997, the same year she first appeared on Broadway in the remake of Grease. Her long career spans music, television, film, and the stage. In addition to working on blockbuster films like Bedtime Stories and Eurotrip, she has also appeared as a guest star in episodes of The Simpsons, The X-Files, Just Shoot Me!, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Burn Notice, Less Than Perfect, Flight of the Conchords, and Battlestar Galactica. This year you can catch Lawless on Spartacus.

Beyond the studio sets, Lawless is involved in a number of different charities, many in her home country of New Zealand. Read on to learn more about Lawless’ charity work, her views on climate change skeptics, and the strangest Xena fan request yet (hint: it involves an axe).

GOOD: You are perhaps most involved in the Starship National Children’s Hospital in New Zealand, having recently jumped from a building to raise money and awareness for the new Puawaitahi center for investigating alleged child abuse. How did you get involved with the Board and what is your involvement like on a day-to-day basis?

Lucy Lawless: After reports of a particularly vicious child abuse case, I and a few other highly visible New Zealanders got involved to say “No more.” Sadly, the reality is that child abuse is never going to be expunged totally but they are finding that getting trained assessors from the police, social workers, and doctors under one roof dramatically improves communication and efficiency in catching kids before they fall through the cracks. Letting battered and sexually abused kids “fall through the cracks” is in itself an obscenity. Anyway, the idea of multi-agency centers is so sensible, you’d think they would be the model in every town in the world.

As as actress there is no role for me in a multi-agency center. Families there require dignity and privacy and what celebrities do is help create noise and attention. However I do sit on the board of the fundraising arm of the Starship Hospital which means showing up to the board meetings once a month. Really, I just do what I’m told. They are an amazing organization.

G: You’ve been involved with a variety of different charities, all over New Zealand and the world, how do you find out about different causes? Do organizations approach you or do you prefer doing independent research and seeking them out?

LL: People seek me out. They want me to do everything from rep autism to lobby the government about free left-hand turns. I try not to jump on every bandwagon. There’s a lot of need out there but I believe it’s important to be more effective in fewer areas. So I stick to the few things I desperately care about.

G: What is one under-the-radar charity or nonprofit that you’re involved with that you think everyone should know about?

LL: They are not under-the-radar but I think NGOs like World Vision are fantastic. They have learned through much trial and error the psychology of not just being helpful but of being helped. They know that if you don’t give a community ownership of a project, so that their own sweat is in the building of that road/well/school, there will be no pride nor ownership after the fact. They also cooperate very well in the case of natural disasters to divvy up the work so that doubling-up precious resources is avoided. Don’t believe that propaganda about them selling several photos of the same child. I won’t say it is impossible that such a mix-up has occurred, but on my trip to Bangladesh I saw there is no end of children in poverty!

G: After Climategate and other reports questioning climate change science, many people worldwide are still skeptical about global warming. What would you say to disbelievers to get them to change their minds?

LL: I think the people running climate change denial campaigns are sociopaths. They don’t want you to get off the grid in any sense because then you’d be autonomous and they couldn’t make you buy their poison.

G: Since your Xena days you’ve done concert tours and you have also been involved in Broadway productions. If you could play a part in any Broadway production which would it be and why?

LL: Annie in Annie Get Out Your Gun. Dumb-ass story but great, great songs.

G: A lot of your charity work is focused on helping young children. What is one story that exemplifies why you continue to stay so involved? When working with sick or underprivileged children, what is the one thing you hope to leave them with?

LL: I noticed that many of the street kids I met in Bangladesh were abandoned at the age of four where (and I am only guessing here), a child individuates from the parents, who themselves were born into material and emotional poverty. Often the mother would put her four-year old on the roof of a train with no food or money and send the kid off to god-knows where. If they don’t fall off, they may end up at the end of the line at Dhaka Train Depot, living under concrete benches, beaten by the police with a length of hose and being preyed upon by sexual predators. I saw an eight-year old girl shot up with heroin.

What can I hope to leave with them? All I can do is support programs in their area. World Vision was amazing. I believe it was started as a Christian organization but the people working there were Hindu and Muslim and Christian all mixed in together. They are fighting poverty and ignorance. I visited one convent where nuns are teaching women’s health and baby care-not converting the natives. They live in danger all the time because banditry is rife but they love their people and will not abandon them.

G: Xena, the Warrior Princess, has attained a cult status. What has been the weirdest request from a Xena fan? Be honest, do people ask to fight with you?

LL: No one asks me to fight. I am being honest. What else is there to be?

A guy in a wet raincoat asked me to sign his axe once. I was a bit creeped out by that.

G: What is one thing everyone can do that would have a huge impact on our environment?

LL: Plant something! Anywhere you can, plant something! I am digging up my tennis court and putting in native trees to encourage the native birds to come in. We have bees which I highly recommend. Makes the garden go off.

I know we don’t all have tennis courts to dig up, but we can all plant a window box or a tree. Just consider the kind of light and drainage and the mature size of the tree. Make sure you can live with it in the long term.

Photo by Sign On

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    Photo credit: LisaStrachan/iStock via Getty Images – Fear not: There isn’t anything that needs saving.
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    Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

    Why “bad” English is nothing new.

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    Valerie M. Fridland

    Valerie M. Fridland

    As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.

    While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.

    Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”

    The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.

    In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.

    From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

    The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.

    Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”

    While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.

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    Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.

    Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.

    Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”

    Evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”

    Embrace the change

    Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.

    But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.

    So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.

    This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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  • 10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild
    Photo credit: Canva – (L) Kids wrestling in the yard; (R) young children playing chess
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    10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild

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    9-year-old girl asks Steph Curry why his shoes aren’t in girls’ sizes. The response was perfect.

    “… it seems unfair that the shoes are only in the boys,” Riley Morrison wrote, starting a chain reaction of positive change.

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    Adam Albright-Hanna

    Nine-year-old Riley Morrison from Napa, California is a huge basketball fan. She roots for the Golden State Warriors and her favorite player is four-time NBA champion Steph Curry. Morrison loves to play basketball so she went online to pick up a pair of Curry’s Under Armour Curry 5 shoes, but there weren’t any available in the girls’ section of the site.

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    “I wanted to write the letter because it seems unfair that the shoes are only in the boys’ section and not in the girls’ section,” Riley told Teen Vogue. “I wanted to help make things equal for all girls, because girls play basketball, too.”

    The letter got to Curry and he gave an amazing response on X (formerly Twitter).

    Many might be surprised that a megastar like Curry took a nine-year-old’s letter seriously, but he’s long been a vocal supporter of women’s issues.

    That August, Curry wrote an empowering letter that was published in The Player’s Tribune where he discussed closing the gender pay gap, hosting his first all-girls basketball camp, and what he’s learned from raising two daughters.

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    Curry clearly practices what he preaches because when a nine-year-old girl spoke up, he was all ears.

    Steph Curry and Under Armour didn’t just fix the girls’ sizing issue, they launched a special edition Curry 6 “United We Win” co-designed by Riley, created a $30K annual scholarship for girls, and shifted to unisex sizing across Curry Brand shoes.

    Since then, Curry has stayed active in promoting gender equity: he’s hosted girls’ camps, added girls to his elite training programs, mentored players like Azzi Fudd, and launched the Curry Family Women’s Athletics Initiative to fund 200+ scholarships at Davidson College.

    Riley and Steph bumped into each other at an event where they caught up and took photos. She is now a high school athlete at Vintage High School in Napa, still playing basketball. And yes, still rocking Currys.

    This article originally appeared seven years ago. It has been updated.

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