(Michael Hogue)
Every Thursday morning, while I get ready for work, I eavesdrop on two best friends chatting about their lives — college sports and kitchen appliances, the merits of under-eye patches and comfortable shoes, shows worth binging and the importance of traveling with a box fan. Melanie Shankle and Sophie Hudson have been sharing their friendship and opinions via podcast for 17 years. After you’ve listened for a while, it’s easy to imagine they’re your friends, too.
Most weeks, they record the Big Boo Cast from their homes — Shankle in San Antonio and Hudson in Birmingham, Ala. — as they catch up on each other’s lives and offer commentary on a wide range of topics. They occasionally go on the road, and this week they’re hosting two live shows in Dallas, at the Texas Theatre. On Thursday night, they’ll be joined by Christian evangelist and writer Beth Moore, and on Friday night, they’ll welcome blogger-turned-lifestyle queen Ree Drummond, also known as the Pioneer Woman.
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Tickets have been sold out for months, purchased by women of a certain age who, like me, listen weekly and follow Shankle and Hudson on social media. (Combined they have about 80,000 followers on Instagram.) We can’t wait to see what they’re wearing and what they talk about. Mostly, though, we can’t wait to celebrate the power of friendship, community and middle-aged women.
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Shankle and Hudson are both empty-nesters, each with a young adult child in college. They are published authors (at least 15 books between them) who support each other through the writing process. They are Christian women who don’t preach, though there’s no question about their beliefs. They avoid talking about politics, but you know exactly where they stand on SEC sports. (Shankle graduated from Texas A&M, Hudson from Mississippi State.)
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At the live shows this week, I expect to be surrounded by my people — women who appreciate their takes on makeup and menopause, leadership and Little House on the Prairie. We’ve lived long enough to see fashion trends come and go and come back again. We are the mommas who were raised on secondhand smoke and without seat belts, who grew up to serve on PTA and booster club boards, who figured out how to parent while social media was invented and evolved, who discovered that no one properly warned us about what to expect as our estrogen declined.
We’re a group that gets stuff done, and we’re thrilled to find other women who are going through similar experiences and are open to sharing.
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“There’s a reason Gen X women started the whole mommy blog movement,” Shankle said during an interview. “We’re more open about everything. We want to share our experience, we want to talk with other people about our experience.”
Shankle and Hudson were both mommy bloggers in the early 2000s — weren’t we all? — and they struck up an online friendship that evolved into phone calls that eventually became their podcast. They were early adopters, recording their first episode in 2007, before they ever met in person and when their kids still took naps. Today their podcast library has 414 episodes.
“I feel like Gen X, we’ve tried to parent very openly, we’ve tried to have a lot of dialogue, we’ve tried to let our kids know that their feelings matter, and I think we’ve addressed the next phase of life in a similar way,” Hudson said. “I love that we talk about it. I can’t imagine how isolating it would be to feel all these very strange things and just keep it myself. There is so much encouragement that comes from a community, and that’s been true for me in parenting and also in empty-nesting and true, strangely enough, in menopause.”
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Their weekly show is a reminder of the value of authentic friendship, especially as some of the arbitrary relationships built around our children and their activities diminish.
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“Vulnerability feels lower risk because we’ve all been through so much, we’ve all lived through so much,” Hudson said. “There’s nothing new under the sun. There’s a sense of being kind of settled in my own life that makes friendship sweeter. Friendship has been richer to me in my 50s because of the depth of honesty that has permeated it.”
The depth that Hudson and Shankle share with listeners kind of sneaks up on you while they share favorite products, recipes and reality shows. They weave in thoughts on love, grief and gratitude with an ease that comes from almost two decades of conversation.
“What a gift. We are two people who randomly met on the internet, and we are such good friends and such good business partners,” Shankle said. “We’ve been able to make it work and really thrive. God gives you what you don’t even know you need.”
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Damm: A friendship that became a podcast for Gen X moms
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