(From left) "Love in the Time of Coronavirus" podcast hosts Amy and Evie (Photo courtesy Amy Baker)
The “Love in the Time of Coronavirus” podcast opens with the Talking Heads song “Home,” which for former Richmonder Amy Baker currently means an older apartment building in the northern end of Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown.
Baker, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at George Washington University, shares living quarters with her roommates Evie, a nascent architect, and the off-mike Sean. What started as an inside joke became a homebrew podcast released on Sundays through Spotify.
Baker performed on Richmond stages as a critically acclaimed actor, but her interests shifted to social and cultural psychology; she studied in London and Brussels and recently volunteered with the Lighthouse relief organization assisting refugees living in Greece.
The aim of the podcast is to discuss the peculiarities of its namesake predicament rather than yammer on about the cause itself. Subjects include the ups and downsides of Skype-built relationships and the vagaries of dating sites, working at home, books, day-watching romantic films, close-quarters relations, fitness regimens and contending with free-floating anxiety.
Like the time she was making an Alison Roman recipe for caramelized shallot pasta and the required anchovies fall through a hole in the pantry into the empty apartment below. “I had a big tantrum over it,” Baker recalls. “I was devastated.” The roommates strung together a chain of Mardi Gras beads attached to a chip clip “to fish out my anchovies,” she recounts. Evie wondered if the dish could be made without them. “No, Evie, you idiot!” Baker jokes, “the recipe requires anchovies!” They laugh, and Baker summarizes, “That’s when you have to take a deep breath and go, ‘Is this really about the anchovies? Are you panicking and having a full meltdown because anchovies?’”
Baker explains that there aren’t many podcasts geared toward her millennial age group, “and some of the ones that are out there are made by people I wouldn’t want as friends,” she says.
A recent guest by phone was Richmonder and New York-based Broadway performer Mary Page Nance, who, besides speaking about the lights going out in the city’s theaters and how entertainers are supporting those affected and afflicted by the pandemic, gave a humorous interpretation of a safe-sex directive offered by the New York City Health Department.
“We started this mostly for friends and family,” Baker says. “If others can gain emotional sustenance from what we’re doing, we welcome them.”
