The Chair

Gerald Kern

Photographer, writer and food bank volunteer

Gerald is a photographer and writer whose work ranges from casting portraits to a hospice and end-of-life series, and he says his real goal is to make people cry, because tears are the purest review there is. He also chairs the advisory board of a privately funded community food bank in Fort Worth that serves hundreds of families every day.

In The Chair · September 28, 2026

Joan Affenit

Painter, Affenit Collections

For years Joan advised about thirty thousand employees of a defense and aerospace giant on federal contract regulations, and painted on her every-other-Friday off. When she moved to Texas ahead of her husband, her daughter and son-in-law bought her an easel, and a local art group talked her into her first show with three words: just do it. Now retired and painting full time, she is expanding her dancer series to dancers from around the world and has a new body of work about endangered species.

In The Chair · September 28, 2026

Madison Renz

Special effects makeup artist and cookie maker

For a high school history project on the plague, Madison chose to be a plague victim, practiced the makeup for days, and then wore it to school all day. Her teacher took one look and told her she could do that for film, and she ran with it: at twenty she does special effects makeup, with gore and prosthetics as her specialty, while majoring in business and running Chubbi Bunni, the cookie company she and her mom built on a family holiday recipe. Her advice to anyone who feels stuck is that it is never too late to change what you are doing.

In The Chair · September 21, 2026

Audra Allen

Real estate broker and community builder

Audra grew up in a Dallas church community that shaped her whole life, and when it closed she had to work out what community meant on her own terms. She found it in Lewisville: the city's Citizens University program with her newborn in tow, about a decade on the city's zoning board, and meetups that pulled people off the city's Facebook page and into the same room. A real estate broker who calls herself a bridge between people and ideas, she lives by one line: community happens on purpose, not by accident.

In The Chair · September 21, 2026

John Starks

Master trainer and bodybuilder

At sixteen John was one of the top fifty ranked tennis players in Texas, and he went on to spend more than twenty years at UPS, driving past the same gym for years before he finally walked in. Members kept asking if he was a trainer, so he became one, and when a coach in the locker room told him to take his shirt off, he won the over-50 division of his first bodybuilding show five weeks later. His rule for everything: "We can't wait until we feel like doing it. We do it so we can feel like doing it."

In The Chair · September 14, 2026

Mark Kirk

Theater designer, professor and film scholar

Mark has been a Wild West gunfighter and armorer, a theater designer and professor, and a film scholar who spent a sabbatical in Bhutan studying its young national cinema. A slip on a wet trail in the Himalayas, stopped only by the stranger behind him grabbing his rucksack, taught him not to waste a moment. After fifty years of working, he went looking for people in his new city and found The Chair on Nextdoor.

In The Chair · September 14, 2026

Sara Pray

Singer and open mic host

Sara has been singing since she was four, but for years people told her it was not practical, and she spent thirty-one years in telecom instead. In 2010 a routine checkup found cancer at the base of her tongue and doctors could not promise she would sing again; she got through it with humor and a community that showed up, and was singing at a fundraiser within months. Today she hosts the Sunday open mic at Guitars & Growlers and another on Thursdays in Lewisville.

In The Chair · September 14, 2026

Austin Olmstead

IT pro, bass player and self-taught sound engineer

Austin quit guitar lessons twice as a kid, then signed up for art class in high school, spent a week failing to trace his own hand, and switched to guitar class, where he practiced every lunch period. That persistence put him onstage playing bass for about seven thousand people at his very first gig, and it taught him audio engineering from YouTube. When a job he had worked hard for ended suddenly, he kept applying and started a new IT role the day after his night in The Chair.

In The Chair · September 7, 2026

Joshua Okpara

Speaker, author and pastor

Joshua was born in Nigeria, lost his mother when he was seven, and came to the United States as a child. For years he has told the story of the hardest stretch of his teenage life to rooms full of strangers, as a speaker, author and pastor who founded a church that grew out of informal gatherings where people could simply talk. His message is that there is a fourteen-year-old inside every eighty-year-old, and that you have more inside you than you think.

In The Chair · September 7, 2026

Hank Slaughter

Stuntman, Army veteran and filmmaker

A newspaper ad looking for cowboys in 1988 made Hank a stuntman, and a Chuck Norris kick on Walker, Texas Ranger cost him his teeth. He traded film for a steady Army career that took him from a touring soldier show to a U.S. embassy in Sierra Leone and a NATO post in the Netherlands. Years later he funded his own production company on a Discover card, and when he was laid off the Friday before his own red-carpet premiere, he told his wife, "This is what I do now."

In The Chair · August 31, 2026

Phil Oakley

Novelist and journalist

Phil left high school with three goals: write books, make movies, and work in radio or television. He got all three, as a journalist and news executive, director of the Louisiana Film Commission, and the author of eight books, and none of it came the way he expected. His latest, Austin Sunrise, began with a hundred typed pages his father wrote about riding freight trains as a boy, pages Phil kept in the original envelope for decades.

In The Chair · August 31, 2026

Jose Angel Hernandez

Self-taught 3D mixed media artist and curator

Jose Angel spent decades in the automotive business, and on a visit home to Puerto Rico at 43 he realized he had never done anything for himself. He started making art, and a rusted cowbell he picked up at an antique shop, then painted after an unwanted transfer to Los Angeles, launched his signature 3D mixed media style. What he first called a midlife crisis, he says, turned out to be a midlife journey.

In The Chair · August 31, 2026

Steven Rodriguez

Southwest painter

Steven's second-grade teacher hung his drawings on the wall, and years later that teacher introduced him to a working illustrator who mentored him from the age of fifteen. He set painting aside for about twelve years to be at every school event while his kids grew up, and now that they have, he is back at the easel with bold, modern takes on longhorns, coyotes and wild horses. He gives back through free workshops and public art for the City of Lewisville, where he grew up.

In The Chair · August 24, 2026

Lovie Baxter

Nurse practitioner, care home owner and podcast host

Lovie is a family nurse practitioner, a master's level social worker and a certified dementia practitioner, and for years she turned down the people who told her she had the heart to run a care home. Then, visiting a patient, she held a hospital cup of water while the woman drank every drop, and noticed the lunch tray nobody had helped her eat. That moment changed her plans: today she owns A Touch of Love Care Home and hosts A Touch of Love TALKS, a podcast about caregiving, dementia and the Sandwich Generation.

In The Chair · August 24, 2026

Mike Dawson

Marriage and family counselor

Mike spent twenty-eight years in the food business, and when the Fortune 500 company he worked for went bankrupt in 2003, he found himself spending his days helping worried coworkers find hope. He took that as his jumping point and has been a counselor for eighteen years, now running a practice with thirteen other counselors. Married forty-four years, he believes the best relationships rest on emotional connection and real friendship.

In The Chair · August 17, 2026

Asit Kini

Engineer, former Microsoft consultant and world traveler

Asit grew up in India, where he says the only choices were doctor or engineer, and came to Texas A&M with an engineering degree and five thousand dollars from his father. He earned a doctorate in cognitive psychology, taught at A&M, then spent years on the road six days a week as a Microsoft consultant before walking away to be home for his son's high school years. Now he keeps up his own rental homes with skills he learned crawling under houses as a student, and travels three to five months a year with his wife, Mina, on a very tight budget.

In The Chair · August 17, 2026

K.K. Mitchell

Entrepreneur and serial reinventor

K.K. started her first company at twenty-two, spent twenty-five years in real estate marketing and produced a weekly TV show for eleven of them. When the housing market was sure to crash, she went back to school, owned a hearing aid center for twelve years, and sold it before the pandemic. When a corporate reorganization threatened her role, the woman who coached clients got the best advice in two words, "coach yourself." She spent the next several years doing just that and now lives a life of purpose. Today her favorite day of the week is the one she spends volunteering one on one with people living with dementia.

In The Chair · August 17, 2026

Anil Sankaramanchi

Actor, producer, storyteller

Anil was born in India, raised in America, and grew up speaking Sanskrit at home. That became his work: he makes international cinema here in Texas and teaches ancient philosophy to teenagers by starting where they already are, explaining one of India's oldest systems of thought through binary code. His argument is that every culture is a wrapper around the same chocolate, and that almost everything we fight about is the wrapper.

In The Chair · August 10, 2026

Madison Zeigler

Photographer of forgotten places

She left home at eighteen, married young, and got herself out of an abusive marriage within months of arriving in Texas. At twenty-three she is finishing a public policy degree online, working in veterinary care, and photographing abandoned and forgotten buildings. Five days after she sat in The Chair she flew to Maine, a plan she had carried since she was a teenager and the first thing she says she has ever done purely for herself.

In The Chair · August 10, 2026

Cherie Meeks

Artist and therapy dog handler

Her father and grandfather told her she was going to be a pharmacist. Three years into premed she told her father she could not spend her life counting pills in the back of a grocery store, and then spent forty-odd years doing everything else: commercial real estate, a health food store, hospital consulting, sales training. About a year ago, standing in front of a room of artists, she said the words I am an artist out loud for the first time. She calls it living in dog years, and she still works a room alongside an eleven pound terrier named Emma.

In The Chair · August 10, 2026

Maria Theis

Home loans processor, Flower Mound Toastmasters

She came to the United States from Venezuela chasing the American Dream, and more than a decade in finance has taught her that every loan has a story behind it. A proud mom and a Toastmasters member in Flower Mound, she believes that investing in yourself is the greatest investment you will ever make.

In The Chair · August 3, 2026

Michelle Joy Brown

Abstract artist and writer, The Resilient Canvas

She spent her career as a psychotherapist helping other people rebuild. Then a stroke meant rebuilding her own life. She paints abstracts now, and writes about the grit and the beauty of starting over and refusing to stop creating.

In The Chair · August 3, 2026

Dave Woodard

Tattoo artist, Prairie Rose Tattoo

Twenty-two years putting other people's stories permanently on their skin. A hardcore punk kid from Tampa who turned a tattoo machine into a passport, working in Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and on cruise ships full of punk bands.

In The Chair · July 27, 2026

Tyler Donovan

Founder, Real Plastic Heroes

He had West Point all but guaranteed until a ninety second phone call ended it. Decades later he built a company that makes realistic figures of real post-9/11 veterans, each one with a QR code leading to that veteran telling his own story.

In The Chair · July 27, 2026

Isabel Espinosa

Funeral director and embalmer, now a flight attendant

Twenty years as both a funeral director and an embalmer, sitting with families on the worst day of their lives. Fifteen months ago she walked away, and everyone who loves her started telling her the same thing: you have never been so present.

In The Chair · July 27, 2026

Kelly Kidd

Historian, teacher, reenactor

Kelly is a lifelong historian and former history teacher who spent years bringing the 1800s to life through living-history reenactment. Give him a subject and the joy leaks right out of him. He makes the past feel like something you could walk straight into.

In The Chair · July 20, 2026

Susan Elbedeiny

Co-owner, Guitars & Growlers

Susan spent twenty-seven years at Chili's, rising from a college server to vice president, and built a women's leadership mentoring program that still runs today. She co-owns Guitars & Growlers, the neighborhood gathering place she and her best friend created because their community needed somewhere to be. She leads by rolling up her sleeves and doing the work herself.

In The Chair · July 20, 2026

Photo · Benjamin Mata

Kay Thibodeaux

Chocolatier and storyteller

Kay never planned to own a business. After decades of raising a family, running mobile clinics, and following the work wherever it led, she trained as a chocolatier and built a shop of her own. She will tell you a single bonbon takes four days to make, and that she is really a storyteller who happens to work in chocolate.

In The Chair · July 20, 2026

Photo · Benjamin Mata

Christina Hughes

Massage therapist, educator, mother of six

Christina was one of the most sought-after massage therapists in Dallas-Fort Worth, then built her own continuing-education company teaching other therapists their craft. She raised six daughters, one of whom is our own co-host, Jenna. Her whole life makes one quiet argument: you never start over, you only build forward.

In The Chair · July 13, 2026

Brooke Hunt

Realtor, industry leader, reader of people

Brooke has spent forty years in real estate and can read a room better than almost anyone alive. She led a hundred thousand Texas Realtors through the 2009 crash and is one of only two people in the country to receive her industry's highest honor. She and her husband, Mike, have built a life and a business together since 1988.

In The Chair · July 13, 2026

Carla Kidd

Actor, producer, retired therapist

Carla grew up wanting to be both an actor and a therapist. She chose therapy, spent more than thirty years helping people heal, and then reclaimed acting right at retirement. Today she is a working actor and producer, living proof that the dream you set down is not the dream you lost.

In The Chair · July 13, 2026

Photo · Travis Guba