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“It’s a lefty podcast,” Francesca Fiorentini says of her weekly show The Bitchuation Room.
Recently surpassing 101 episodes (“that’s how many Dalmations there are!” her partner and occasional co-host Matt Lieb said of the milestone), Fiorentini’s podcast is part comedy, part politics, part determination to have at least one person funnier and one peron smarter than her in the room to riff on weekly political events.
Obviously, she hasn’t been able to have people in the same physical room for a year and a half, which is partly why, when Kickstand Comedy reached out to San Francisco-based Fiorentini to set up a one-off live recording night in Portland, she jumped at the chance.
“I just appreciate what Kickstand has been doing up here,” she says, via phone interview. “It’s been running shows outdoors all summer long and really trying to help, you know, make sure the comedy scene doesn’t disappear in times of COVID.”
Fiorentini also has a background in progressive journalism—in 2020, her hourlong documentary on the U.S. health care system Red, White & Who? aired on MSNBC. She carries a long résumé of appearances on shows that share her humorous, deep-dive values, like The Young Turks and the Behind the Bastards podcast.
“I am so curious and excited to better understand what’s been going on lately: Portland’s movement for Black lives, the Proud Boys, the white nationalists that have been roaming the streets, sort of unfettered and unencumbered by police,” Fiorentini says of the upcoming show.
Her guests are activist journalist Mac Smiff, a notable figure in Portland’s Black Lives Matter movement, and Western States Center executive director Eric K. Ward, two people many left-leaning local progressives look to for where the region’s movement for Black lives is headed.
The topic is so broad it’s hard to imagine pinning anything concrete down in a single episode, but it’s sure to be a fun, irreverent hour—especially when Fiorentini describes her style as “having fun while we’re talking about important things and not taking ourselves too seriously, which is sort of what the left always gets wrong.”
LAUGH: The Alberta Abbey, 126 NE Alberta St, albertaabbey.org. 7 pm, Thursday Sept. 2. $12, proof of vaccination required.