Restful Rainbow

Two artists in love fought an army with tissue paper, and signed each note "the soldier with no name." Tonight we travel to the island of Jersey to meet Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: partners for forty-five years, makers of some of the most startling photographs of the twentieth century, and a two-person resistance during the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Along the way: a granite house above a wide, pale bay, a Paris studio full of masks and mirrors, a cat walked on a lead through an old churchyard, the soft tap of a typewriter on a rainy evening, a square of paper slipped into a coat pocket, and a length of thread carrying three words through a prison wall. Good night. Courage. Love. Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep. Tonight's episode is shared in partnership with Learn to Knit. Founder Alice O'Connell has taught knitting since 2005, slowly and kindly, to students around the world. Learn more: https://learntoknit.nl ☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

They cut her hair and dressed her as a man. Her chief told the agent to leave. Her answer never changed. Tonight we travel to the northern plains to meet Osh-Tisch of the Crow Nation: a badé, neither man nor woman in Crow tradition, the finest lodge-maker of her generation, a healer, and a warrior who earned her name at the Battle of the Rosebud in 1876. Along the way: the cool, honey-colored light inside the largest buffalo-hide lodge the Crow ever raised, wild roses along a creek in June, a war party riding home singing, a mirror held in a photographer's studio, a green canvas tipi tied with blue ribbons, a chief who would not look away, and an elder in a calico dress telling a general, "That is my road." Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep. Tonight's episode is shared in partnership with Learn to Knit. Founder Alice O'Connell has taught knitting since 2005, slowly and kindly, to students around the world. Learn more: https://learntoknit.nl ☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

In 1867 one man stood before 500 German jurists and said it out loud. He was shouted down. He was also heard. Tonight we travel to Germany and Italy to meet Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: a judge who lost his career for loving men, a thinker who decided on his own that he was born this way, and the first person known to stand up in public, under his own name, and ask the law to leave love alone. Along the way: larks over the flat green fields of East Frisia, a new word with starlight in it, brown paper parcels of forbidden booklets, hundreds of letters from men who thought they were the only one, a bright August morning at the Odeon in Munich, the soft rain of silkworms in a Stuttgart room, and a stone town in the Italian mountains where an old man sends a little Latin journal called Larks around the world. Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep. ☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

A red wool poncho. A single guitar. A blue house. A mountain that answers back. Tonight we travel to Mexico to meet Chavela Vargas: born in the coffee hills of Costa Rica in 1919, a street singer in Mexico City, a guest in Frida Kahlo's blue house, and the woman who took ranchera away from the trumpets and sang it low and slow, in trousers, to women, without changing a word. Along the way: coffee flowers on a green hillside, sawdust and lamplight at the Tenampa, torchlit divers at Acapulco, fifteen years of silence, a small cabaret in Coyoacán where she came back from the dead, Almodóvar kissing the stage in Paris, Carnegie Hall at eighty-four, and the year she finally said the word "lesbian" out loud. She was eighty-one. Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep. ☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

A lamp in a dark doorway. Four thousand years of color. Two men, nose to nose. Tonight we travel to Saqqara, around 2400 BCE, to meet Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep: royal manicurists to King Niuserre, royal confidants, and the two men who built one tomb together and had their names carved as one above its door. Inside, they walk hand in hand, feast beside harpists and dancers, and embrace in the innermost chamber in the pose Egyptian art uses for a kiss. Khnumhotep stands where a wife would stand. A wife was erased from the banquet wall. In 1964, Egyptologist Ahmed Moussa lifted a lamp and saw it all for the first time in forty-four centuries. Brothers, twins, or a couple? The men are silent. The embrace is not. The story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses to ease you into sleep. Along the way you'll see the Nile spreading brown over black fields, alabaster jars and scented oil in a palace at Memphis, painters mixing copper blue by lamplight, and a door sealed with care and opened with wonder. Perfect for falling asleep, ancient Egypt, LGBTQ+ history before the words existed, archaeology lovers, and anyone who needs a calmer story tonight. Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported. If these stories help you rest, you can support the show at https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way. Related episodes: Hatshepsut · Hadrian & Antinous · Sappho · Sacred Band of Thebes · The Cut Sleeve