chapter one IF THE APOCALYPSE COMES, START A PODCAST
Now might be a good time to provide the uninitiated with some foundational Buffy knowledge. Dear reader, into every generation a girl is born, imbued with preternatural strength, speed, and agility, and destined to fight evil. Any evil will do, but there’s a particular emphasis on vampires. This might be because vampires are more populous than other demons, or because they’re especially meddlesome when it comes to the safety of humans. It might also be because vampires are sexy.
The first season of Buffy finds our titular Slayer matriculating at Sunnydale High, having been unceremoniously ejected from her previous school in Los Angeles after burning down the gym, which was full of vampires.1 In Sunnydale, she makes some new friends (Xander and Willow) and frenemies (Cordelia and Harmony), meets a very hot, mysterious, and possibly-not-evil vampire (Angel—he’s not like other boys!), and is introduced to her Watcher, Rupert Giles.
In Buffy’s sophomore year of high school, also known as 1997, there is one particularly gnarly evil afoot in Sunnydale: an extremely ancient vampire known as the Master. This fellow looks like a cross between Nosferatu and a naked mole rat, and after many centuries spent drinking deep of the blood of the living, he has developed a serious case of fruit punch mouth. (Perhaps we should amend our earlier declaration to: most vampires are sexy.)
The Master is the first Big Bad that Buffy encounters, and his to-do list will set the tone for all the subsequent Bads she’ll meet in seasons to come. It looks a little something like this:
1. Kill Buffy the Vampire Slayer
As Buffy works to learn more about the Master (and how to defeat him), she discovers an ancient prophecy that foretells that the Slayer will face the Master and she will not survive.
At first, she attempts to sidestep the prophecy by quitting her slay job. In one particularly gutting moment, she looks to her Watcher and says, “Giles, I’m sixteen years old. I don’t want to die.”
But the next day, several students are slaughtered by vampires at Sunnydale High—students Buffy knew, in a room where she and her friends would often hang out themselves. Willow explains to Buffy that their world—the high school, their friends, the things that make up their lives—does not feel like it belongs to them anymore. Buffy responds to this terrifying revelation by doing something that will come to epitomize the heartbeat of her character: she just keeps fighting.
__________________
Just keep fighting, just keep fighting That’s what I’m supposed to do
If I just keep fighting, just keep fighting Maybe I’ll believe it too
__________________
Jenny
According to Google Maps, the shortest route from Brooklyn to Los Angeles is 2,789 miles. If you don’t sleep and you almost never stop to pee, you can make it in four days. The route that Kristin and I took was slightly more winding and scenic at 3,565 miles over eleven days. We’d both driven across the country many times prior—me as a touring musician, and Kristin as a university speaker focusing on LGBTQ issues—but neither of us had ever been to the Grand Canyon, so we made sure that we routed the trip accordingly.
Before we left New York, my father told us the story of an earlier westward journey. In 1955, my grandparents had driven him from Pennsylvania to California to attend the Rose Parade and visit Disneyland, which had opened just six months prior. He was eleven years old at the time, and when the Youngs family automobile pulled up to the yawning maw of the Grand Canyon on Christmas Day, he’d made a snowball right at the edge. This frosty detail wedged itself deeply in my mind, given the fact that we were traveling through the very same spot sixty years later, almost to the day. We did luck into some canyon snow, and I was able to carry out my ancestral duty; it was dry and hard to pack, but I managed to get two handfuls of powder for a photo that I promptly sent to my very proud dad.
Growing up in an unsung corner of New Jersey made up mostly of forests and farms, I could only ever imagine myself living as an adult in New York City. I loved spending time in the woods but longed to be closer to the thrum of music and art and culture and people, and the infinite possibilities that the city held. Once I got my license, I drove in as often as I could: to see concerts at venues ranging in size from The Living Room’s original Stanton Street location all the way up to Madison Square Garden; to catch an arthouse movie that wasn’t playing anywhere near my hometown; and to visit museums like the Met, MoMA, and my favorite place in the whole city, the American Museum of Natural History. I became an adult in New York. I started my career in New York. I fell in love, got my heart trashed, and drank to forget in New York.
It was the city where I’d started dating Kristin, where she’d first invited me over for Italian takeout and a viewing of the enjoyable—if not exactly romantic—Anne Hathaway film Rachel Getting Married. Together we made a home, and one million tiny memories: drinking hot buttered rum at our favorite neighborhood bar on a wintry night, stocking up the pantry in preparation for Hurricane Sandy,2 picnicking on blankets in Prospect Park during the free concert series every summer, getting married (not unlike Rachel herself!), experiencing the 2010 winter storm nicknamed “Snowmageddon” that was so sudden and intense that buses unable to move any farther were left stranded diagonally across intersections, and streets and sidewalks remained buried in snow for days.
My life—our life—was in New York. Leaving was scary. Leaving was exciting. Leaving was something I never thought I’d do until we were doing it.
When we rolled into Los Angeles on January 5, 2016, it rained. It rained for a week straight, in a way that it can only rain in the desert. After years of making fun of Angelenos for their precipitation dramatics, we were instantly humbled. The roads, not engineered to slant and slough off rain the way they do in the Northeast, pooled with water; driving was terrifying. We stayed indoors with Kristin’s sister, her boyfriend, and their menagerie of pets (totaling two eighty-pound dogs and one cat) while we scoured the internet for a place to live.
The house we found in Altadena was—and I cannot stress this enough—a house. After seeing the rental alongside dozens of other hopeful tenants, Kristin wrote a passionate cover letter to accompany our application, explaining to the owners why we’d make the perfect tenants. My natural tendency had always been to assume that absolutely no one would like to rent me a place to live, and that it is actually borderline rude of me to apply (let alone write a letter and expect them to use some of their very valuable minutes upon this earth to read it!). Thankfully, Kristin’s default setting is precisely the opposite: the landlords should be thankful to have us!
Later we discovered that the daughter of the owners had, upon learning of Kristin’s work with LGBTQ communities, insisted that we be the ones to get the place. Our wedding had been blessed with a queer cupcake discount, and now this?!
The rental was a three-bedroom ranch nestled in the Altadena foothills, with a lemon tree and a baby peach tree in the backyard. Three bedrooms were two more than we’d ever had, and on top of that there was a garage! The space meant that we had a bedroom for ourselves, a guest room to welcome family visiting from the Northeast and friends coming through town, and a proper studio space where I could host songwriting sessions and record music.
Once settled, I doubled down on my efforts to lure Kristin into making a Buffy podcast with me. “It will be fun!” I promised. “It won’t feel like work, and it will hardly take up any time!” She was wise enough to realize I was dead wrong about my latter claim (though my denial would last years), but the promise of “fun” had gotten its hooks in her. Four months after we moved into our California abode, my music studio also became our shared podcasting space.
At the time, I was listening to podcasts at all hours of the day; I’d go running in the morning with Death, Sex & Money, enthusiastically sweep out our new garage with The X-Files Files, and shout at Kristin about the most recent Game of Thrones facts I had learned from A Cast of Kings over dinners of roasted chicken and potatoes. The more hours I spent learning from—and laughing with—these shows, the more I felt a sort of familiar pull. When I first started learning to play guitar in junior high, and began tentatively combining bits of poetry (eek) that I’d been scribbling in my Five Star notebook with chords I’d just learned and melodies I barely knew how to pull together, I experienced an electric surge—half the buzz of creation, half the sensation of reaching toward the thing that inspired me—that made me feel all kinds of feelings. Taking the first step over the threshold into podcast host-hood transferred the same sensation of magic and possibility. I wanted to make a podcast for the same reason I had wanted to make music: because I loved listening.
While Kristin hated podcasts (remarkably, this remains true), as an Italian-born, Long Island–raised triple fire sign, she was well practiced at having loud opinions, and brought a masters in gender studies along with a robust history of public speaking to the table. At the jump, we both thought my love of the format and her enthusiasm for soliloquizing would be enough to usher us into the podcasting space with ease. Just as Buffy had once breezed into the hallways of Sunnydale High, excited to start over at a new school free from vampires, we too walked baby-faced into a new city, our new studio, and our brand-new, entirely conquerable careers as podcasters.
Cut to: Buffy encountering an exsanguinated body on campus her first day of school, Kristin tearfully sitting in a corner of the studio after our first recording, and me sighing heavily at my desk as I put down the fourteen pages of notes I’d taken on the series premiere.
After recording our first attempt at a pilot episode and then promptly dragging the file into the computer’s trash bin, we realized that this was going to be trickier than we had imagined.
We talked through the difficulties that emerged in our first taping (Kristin’s impatience, my attention to detail), and together we vowed to try our best to rein in our individual counterproductive tendencies. A few weeks later, we rewatched the pilot, took new notes, and sat back down in the same studio chairs to record our first episode for a second time. It was better this time around. We felt ready to share it with the world, despite knowing we still had a lot to learn.
I decided that in addition to recording a podcast each week, I would also write an original song from the perspective of Buffy Summers to pair with each episode.3 If Buffy was beheading a vampire with a cymbal (hey, it’s what was available at the time!), I would sing about it. If a new substitute teacher was seducing teen boys before morphing into a human-sized praying mantis and chomping off their heads, I would try to find the right melody to capture the mood. And, to make things even more complicated, I decided that I would write these songs with Kristin, who (as you may have gathered) was not a musician but (as you also may have gathered) definitely had a lot to say.
In the beginning, Kristin barely knew the difference between a pre-chorus and a bridge.4 There was a great deal of decoding that needed to occur, with me translating Kristin-speak into musician-speak and then back again. Kristin would say things like, “It just doesn’t sound, like, round enough to me,” leading me to launch a full-scale investigation into what that could possibly mean. Did the vocal need more reverb to soften its edges? Did I need to adjust the EQ of a particular instrument by shaving off some of the high frequencies?? If I applied tape emulation to the master channel, would it add warmth sufficient to appease Kristin’s discerning ear?!
If we’d been friends who had just started working together, we probably would have done a better job at drawing boundaries around when to voice our frustrations … and when to not. Between the upheaval of a cross-country move and this new, confusing space of sharing work without a shared language, we argued more than usual. Kristin likes to say that I think to talk, and she talks to think; this is a communication incongruence that leaves all kinds of room for conflict. During a recording, I might make a comment that was light on details, assuming she would be able to read between the lines. Kristin, never having met two lines that she cared to read between, would interpret my brevity as a personal slight. I would get annoyed with her for misconstruing my meaning, and she would feel hurt and start crying; I would throw up my hands. This kind of exchange occurred all too frequently and almost always ended in tears (which felt to me like the playing of some kind of emotional trump card, because how can you argue with the tears of someone you love?!). At the start, we’d often have recording sessions together where one or the other of us would get so overwhelmed that we’d have to stop the taping midthought and step out of the studio. Sometimes we would be able to talk it through, and other times we’d get so frustrated that we’d have to shut the whole operation down for the evening and come back to it all over again the next day.
At the same time, we were seeing an incredible response to our first few episodes. We both had large queer networks who sent out their various bat signals (“Alert! Alert! Two queers are talking about Buffy!”), and we were featured almost immediately on the iTunes homepage. Before we had even published our third episode, the podcast was included in the print edition of Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Weekly!!! (May she rest in peace.) We didn’t have a stenographer in the room when we found out about this particular milestone, but it’s safe to say that our dialogue went something like this:
Kristin: AAAAAaaaaAAAaAAAaaaaaahhh!!!!!
Jenny: HAJSHFJHSDJFHSDLJFHSDJ!!!!!!
I drove to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena and bought three copies of the EW issue in question.5 We posted a photo to our social media accounts of me, down on one knee, proudly holding up the page that shows Buffering featured in their Must List and grinning from ear to ear.
In Sunnydale, we followed along as Buffy moved to a new town (just like us!), enrolled in a new school, formed a new social circle, and struggled to accept her dual fates as Regular Teen and Chosen Slayer. As Kristin and I navigated the fresh terrain of Southern California, Buffy was trapping the essence of an evil witch inside a cheerleading trophy, reinstating order after her classmates were possessed by hyenas, and discovering that the gorgeous stranger who kept showing up with hot tips for how best to fight vampires was actually (gasp!) a vampire himself. Sure, there were the occasional rumblings that warned of a darkness rising up from below, but Buffy had a perfect record of kicking demon ass in her new town, and we had our shiny new podcast. We’d all be fine!
Kristin
I’m someone who has always instinctively tried to cram the square pegs of chaos into round holes of order. Nearly anything can be made into a tidy list! Spreadsheets are our best friends! If there is a plan, and a backup plan, and a backup plan for the backup plan, then I can be ready for anything. In December 2015, I desperately wanted my brain, body, and heart to be prepared for a cross-country uprooting. So, before Jenny and I moved to Los Angeles, I obsessively and meticulously packed every room of our Brooklyn apartment, one at a time, and documented each with a photo on Instagram.
December 14: A half-empty bookcase; a few candles and a holiday penguin Jenny made as a child on the top shelf; some graphic novels on the bottom shelf; “The Living Room.”
December 15: An old tour poster lying on the hardwood floor with a small plastic figurine of Dana Scully; an origami turtle; a pile of pens; “The Office.”
December 16: Me, kneeling on our bare queen mattress, giving the camera double middle fingers; “The Bedroom.”
December 17: A paper HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner draped across the doorway; a newly thirty-five-year-old me looking skeptical; “A Brief Respite.”
December 18: A taped-up cardboard box; the bottom half of my body perched on the tub; one bathmat; one towel; “The Bathroom.”
December 19: A selfie in one of my favorite shirts at the time—a gray long-sleeve covered in cartoon pizza slices—with dozens of drinking glasses and mugs lining the counter behind me; “The Kitchen.”
I was leaving the only city I had ever known as an adult person, and that required bringing outside order to a time that felt, inside, like an earthquake.
When we arrived in Los Angeles, I didn’t even have my own car—and LA is famously a driving city. In the span of a few weeks, I went from being able to walk out my door and scoop up anything my heart desired within a block or two to being stranded at our house on any day that Jenny took the car to a songwriting session. My first effort at quieting the increasing thrum of isolation inside my chest was to painstakingly unpack all our moving boxes. I hung artwork, I unrolled rugs, I tucked clothing back into dresser drawers, and one day I spent five entire hours arranging the display on our fireplace mantel. Once the last box was unpacked, I found myself at an impasse. Now what would I do to battle my growing feelings of loneliness and disorientation?
Where even was I?
What was this place?!
There was never a better time for me to say yes to making a podcast about Buffy with Jenny. Buffy has 144 episodes in its seven-season run! 144!!! Our Brooklyn apartment and our Altadena house only had thirteen rooms combined for me to pack and unpack—this new endeavor would surely carry me through the seas of life upheaval until, I reasoned, everything would settle into place, and I would feel like I was home again.
But 2016 had different plans for us all.
The marrow of Buffy’s first season is an impending battle: an ancient evil is prophesied to rise and wreak havoc on the world, and Buffy is tasked with averting an actual apocalypse. As their sophomore year churns forward, Buffy and the Scoobies6 grow increasingly anxious: What if they cannot win the fight? In our new California home, tension was also mounting as a different kind of evil seemed poised to envelop our world. While Buffy braced for impact in Sunnydale, we were anxiously watching the presidential election draw closer and grow uglier with every passing week. As Buffy learned more about the Master and his army, the fractures in our own world were revealing themselves to run deeper than many of us had imagined possible.
On top of my ongoing struggle to find comfort in a new city thousands of miles away from anything I’d ever known, the election was now casting a harsh light on the divide between my beliefs—my existence, even—and the beliefs of my conservative Catholic family.
My mom is one of eight sisters—remarkably, my grandmother had eight girls and not a single boy—and even though I have twenty-five cousins on my mother’s side alone, I remain the only out queer person in my entire family. When I first came out to my parents over Thanksgiving dinner in 1998, the news was not received well. In the weeks and months that followed, my mom cried often, and many of my aunts pleaded with me to choose a different path. Leaning into an instinctive (and survivalist) tradition among many queer kids, I learned to tuck certain parts of myself away to keep the peace; I participated in conversations where I could fully be myself and danced around the ones where I could not.
My mom, possibly because she was my mom, perhaps because she was married to my very logic-and-reason-based dad—or maybe due to the triple whammy of having a liberal husband, a queer daughter, and a second daughter who was also vocally in support of equality, science, and dinosaurs—came around. By the time Jenny came into my life—eleven years after that fateful Thanksgiving dinner!—my mom was not only comfortable meeting her but also delighted in her presence.
Over the years, Jenny and both of my parents developed relationships that were all their own. Jenny perfected a magnificent impression of my dad’s most effusive Italian hand gestures that she’d perform for him on our visits north; my mom learned all Jenny’s favorite coffees and would stock up on them before we arrived. My dad would pull Jenny into his office to tell her all about the newest music he was listening to (“Have you heard of Leona Lewis?”). My mom would sit across the kitchen counter and marvel at Jenny’s impeccable pancake making.7
I had been hopeful that, slow as it may have been moving, progress was also happening in the more distant branches of my family tree.
A year or so into dating, I brought Jenny with me to the house where my mom had grown up—a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house built by my grandfather and his two brothers right across the street from the high school football field.8 After my grandfather’s passing in 1994, one of my aunts moved into the house with her husband and six children, and they constructed an apartment on the first floor for my grandmother.
The house had always been magical to me, and I was excited to share many of its stories with Jenny. I took her on a full tour, showing her the basement, which housed the laundry room (can you imagine the amount of laundry?), as well as my grandfather’s old workshop—once full of collapsible yardsticks and rectangular-shaped pencils and even a machine that he used to forge two coins into my parents’ wedding rings (a quarter for my dad’s and a nickel for my mom’s). The supporting beams of the house still had pencil and pen etchings in them from the 1960s and ’70s that told tales of the many crushes my aunts had throughout their high school years.
We went out to that Long Island house on many occasions after that first visit, usually staying for dinner with my aunt, uncle, and cousins before riding the LIRR back home to Brooklyn. My uncle was a musician like Jenny (in fact, he was the one to introduce me, at age twelve, to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd), and after the dinner plates were cleared, they would sometimes play guitar together for the rest of us. On one of our visits, he and Jenny discussed their shared love of country music, and Jenny told him how she’d found herself unexpectedly bursting into tears when she’d heard Lee Brice’s “A Woman Like You” for the first time. The song is sung from Lee’s perspective, and he tells the story of his wife asking him what he thinks his life would be like if they’d never met. He details all the fun things he’d likely be doing in her absence, but then goes on to explain that, after all those things, he’d just be out there looking for her.
Several months later, when we went to see my uncle play at a local bar, he paused before beginning his next song and announced to the room, “This song is for my two nieces.” When he started singing “A Woman Like You,” we were both astounded. He’d meant us. He’d dedicated a love song to us—one he remembered had meaning to Jenny—and he’d called us both his nieces.
When our wedding invitations went out, we both figured that at least those who’d been in relationships with us would RSVP in the affirmative. We figured wrong. While four of my aunts were in attendance, three were not. That same uncle who dedicated a song to us did not attend. Adding insult to injury, he also asked all six of his children and their families to abstain, and they did. My maternal grandmother (and only living grandparent at the time)—also at the urging of extended family—did not attend.
Copyright © 2025 by Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs
