Interview with Bernadette Wagenblast

Monika: Bernadette Wagenblast, also known as The Voice of the Subway, is an American transportation journalist, radio personality, and voice-over artist. She is the founder and editor of the Transportation Communications Newsletter and the voice of various transportation facilities in New York City, such as the AirTrain and the Subway. She was active in her college’s radio station, WSOU, where she served as the news director and station manager. She also appeared on several New York City radio stations over five years, including WINS and WABC. She later joined the New York City Department of Transportation, where she helped to establish the city’s first transportation communications center. Hello Bernadette! Thank you for accepting my invitation.

Bernadette: Thank you for the invitation, Monika!

Interview with Jackie Enx

 

Jackie Enx is a living embodiment of rhythm, rebellion, and reinvention. With sticks in her hands and fire in her heart, she has spent decades behind the drum kit powering some of rock’s loudest, grittiest, and most unfiltered anthems. As a founding member of Warrior and Rhino Bucket, Jackie helped define a sound that was unapologetically raw, unvarnished, and full of attitude. From the smoky clubs of Los Angeles to the world’s biggest stages, she has played with the kind of passion that makes drumming not just a skill, but an act of storytelling. Yet music is only one verse in her extraordinary song. Jackie’s fearless voice carried her into the world of broadcasting, where she became the co-host of The Queer Edge with Jack E. Jett, a groundbreaking radio show that was as irreverent as it was insightful. With her trademark humor and razor-sharp perspective, she dissected pop culture, poked fun at hypocrisy, and gave a microphone to voices often unheard.

 

She continues to inspire through her teaching, guiding young and old musicians alike with patience, humor, and the wisdom of someone who has lived every beat of her art. But perhaps what makes Jackie’s story truly extraordinary is the courage with which she has lived it. Her transition in the 1990s was not a carefully choreographed reinvention, but a leap into authenticity at a time when the world offered little understanding. She navigated the music industry, the media, and her personal life with the same fierce independence that once drove her drumming. Today, she stands as a testament to living honestly and loudly, to embracing identity not as a label but as a melody that never stops evolving. Jackie Enx is more than a musician, performer, or radio personality, she is proof that art, when lived fully, can become an act of defiance and grace at the same time. Whether on stage, on air, or behind the drum kit, Jackie continues to remind the world that life, like rock and roll, is best played loud, proud, and entirely on your own terms.

Interview with Britany Somers

A longtime radio professional in South Florida, Britany Somers spent two decades as part of the Neil Rogers Show before creating her own online program, the Boca Show, a general-interest program reflecting her broad range of interests and her frustration with the growing corporate consolidation of American media. For Britany, radio is not simply a profession, but a way of communicating, questioning conventions, and saying what she thinks, often with a sharp sense of humor. Her transgender advocacy has been an equally important part of her journey. Britany has worked with medical and public-health programs, served as a transgender liaison, participated in transgender awareness initiatives, and spoken to university students about transgender lives and experiences. She found these encounters particularly rewarding because they allowed her to challenge the stereotypes created by mainstream media and show students that transgender people are, above all, ordinary human beings with complex lives, personalities, ambitions, and dreams. Her experiences also exposed her to the institutional barriers that transgender advocates could encounter even when attempting to improve education and healthcare.

 

Britany’s approach to transgender issues is anything but conventional. She is fiercely critical of media stereotypes, skeptical of some aspects of LGBT community politics, and deeply frustrated by what she sees as divisions and a lack of collective action within the transgender community. Her answers are frequently provocative, irreverent, and deliberately humorous, but beneath the sarcasm lies a serious concern about representation, dignity, political visibility, and the need for transgender people to be understood beyond the stereotypes imposed upon them. Her own transition was surprisingly straightforward in practical terms, although it required considerable research and preparation. Britany approached her new life with characteristic determination, refusing to allow other people’s opinions to dictate how she lived. She also developed a strong belief in the importance of presentation and comportment, seeing every transgender woman as, in her words, a kind of ambassador for the wider community. In this interview, Britany talks about her radio career, her transition, transgender advocacy, the media’s portrayal of transgender people, politics, LGBT activism, fashion, relationships, and her plans to complete her book Living Abroad. Expect an interview filled with strong opinions, unconventional observations, plenty of humor, and a woman who clearly has no intention of making herself smaller simply to make other people comfortable.