Big Idea Interviewee of the week, part one: Amy Rourke Wasserman

Last Tuesday we finally interviewed midwife Amy Rourke Wasserman, an interview that has been over a year in the making. Sometimes getting schedules coordinated takes a lot of time!

Our new camera operator Jayson DeLeon came with us up to the northwest side of Chicago, edging close to O'Hare, to shoot our interview with Nurse Wasserman, who sat down with us in her home so we could ask her about her job.

Now before we get into our interview with Amy a little, let's go on a tangent, shall we?


We're not sure how many of you fine readers remember, but we are working on six episodes of The Big Idea, and each one has a theme. We mention these a lot, but we're not sure how many of you know exactly what we're talking about when we say, for example, we interviewed someone for our episode on Growth. This means we are interviewing them for one of the six episodes we are producing.
These themes are:
-Extinction
-Growth
-Angles
-Waves
-Nourishment
-Genesis
You might be wondering what these themes mean, and what they entail. Look back to our interview with Dr. Marsha Rosner, for example. Dr. Rosner is an expert on cancer research, so we related her work to the episode on "Growth". Some of the experts we interviewed we interviewed for multiple episodes -- for example, Mimi's Garden owner Amy Fowler we interviewed for "Growth" too, but we also talked to her about honey bees and what their extinction would mean to her as a gardener for "Extinction". These episodes have other features besides the interviews, but the experts discussing their areas of expertise is where the most interesting bits of the episodes lie. The animations, songs, and stories are the fun part!

So when we interviewed Nurse Wasserman last week, we interviewed her for our final episode, "Genesis". In Genesis, we get to the bottom of things. We explore origin myths and theories from around the world, from Pandora's Box to The Big Bang. We interviewed Amy so we could talk about where babies come from. What happens from conception to birth and everything in between. We learned a little about the world of midwifery, too, which is coming back into legitimacy in the medical world after years of being ignored.

We'll be posting some of Amy's interview in the next few weeks. Look out for more updates in the next few days, as we'll be talking about our visit to Revolution Brewing where we learned about the science of beer!