Lifestyle
Need a soundtrack for an L.A. stroll? There's a walking podcast for that
• In April, comedian Allan McLeod launched “Walkin’ About,” a podcast in which he and a guest stroll somewhere in the L.A. region.
• His walking companions have included actor Dan Stevens, Ed. Begley Jr. and comedian Jon Gabrus.
• Through his many adventures on foot, Mcleod has discovered that walking “can be really complex and profound.”
It’s hot when Allan McLeod and I meet up for a walk in Old Pasadena, but thankfully we’ve missed the early September heatwave that blanketed L.A. County with triple-digit temps. He’s no stranger to braving our county’s persistent heat. Since he began making his podcast, “Walkin’ About,” in April, his recording studio is often outdoors.
Even before he launched the series, walking was something McLeod was constantly thinking and talking about.
“I’m very annoying to friends and family,” he admits. “So I decided to put that energy into a podcast.”
Now in its second season, each episode features McLeod and a guest exploring a different L.A. location by foot, something he feels is both simple and profound.
McLeod takes a selfie with Sodaro at the disc golf course at Hahamongna Watershed Park. He uses selfies as cover art for each episode.
Most people might take the act of putting one foot in front of the other over and over again for granted. But for McLeod, walking enhances so many different aspects of life, creatively, mentally, physically.
“It’s great for problem-solving, for clearing your head,” he said. “It also makes me feel like I’m connecting with my community.”
Los Angeles as a whole is not exactly a city built for pedestrians. Our freeways and massive sprawl can sometimes act as a barrier to traveling by sidewalk. But McLeod is convinced that attitudes are slowly changing, and that if you look hard enough, there are communities of people all over who are enthusiastic about creating a pedestrian-friendly environment. And talking about it.
While our walk isn’t for the podcast, I’m excited to get a taste of what recording an episode of “Walkin’ About” might be like, having already powered through most of the 20 episodes available on walks of my own. We start outside Copa Vida Cafe on the corner of Raymond Avenue and Green Street. Old Pasadena is McLeod’s favorite area, given its preserved history and the fact that it just feels like it’s meant to be experienced on foot.
“[Walking is] great for problem-solving, for clearing your head. It also makes me feel like I’m connecting with my community.”
— Allan McLeod, comedian and host of “Walkin’ About”
McLeod, 44, dressed in a short-sleeve button-down shirt and a pair of Hoka Bondi 7s, spends most of our walk pointing out factoids about buildings gleaned from research he’s done ahead of time.
“I believe this is one of the first co-op buildings in California,” he says, stopping in front of the Moorish Colonial-style Castle Green apartment building that was once a long-term hotel for wealthy travelers who used Pasadena as a winter escape.
Across the street we pause at the old Spanish-style train station where major train lines like the Santa Fe used to unload passengers, including wealthy Castle Green guests. It’s now a Metro stop for the A Line heading downtown. The main depot room is a restaurant cleverly called The Luggage Room.
McLeod came up with the concept of “Walkin’ About” after meeting Harry Nelson, executive producer at Adam McKay’s production company, HyperObject Industries, at a party. McLeod was telling Nelson about a passion project he’d been working on, an audio tour guide of Old Pasadena. Nelson was intrigued. The two took the audio guide and reformatted it into “something that was a little broader, a little less site specific.”
Shadows are casts as McLeod walks and talks with Sodaro in Pasadena. Past guests have included Andy Richter and Dan Stevens.
The structure of the podcast is simple: Each episode, McLeod meets up with a guest for a walk through a different part of Los Angeles. While on foot the pair chat about subjects such as the history of the area, what they’re seeing around them or each guest’s personal relationship with walking. So far, McLeod has strolled through Barnsdall Park with Ed Begley, Jr., hiked the Arroyo Seco with actor Dan Stevens and traversed the Bunker Hill Pedway with comedian Jon Gabrus. If McLeod had a dream guest for the podcast, it’d be Rick Steves.
“He’s one of America’s greatest ambassadors,” McLeod says excitedly.
We head across Central Park and up Fair Oaks Avenue toward the One Colorado Shopping Center, stopping in front of the iPic movie theater. Here, McLeod points up to a painted sign advertising the old Clunes Theatre, which was a vaudeville venue in the early 1900s. It also showed an early screening of the 1915 controversial silent film “Birth of a Nation,” which might have led to the formation of the Pasadena chapter of the NAACP.
“There’s a tangential connection there, but I don’t know the exact story,” McLeod caveats. But it’s these kinds of facts and trivia that he likes to pepper into his walks. For him, that’s part of the fun.
A native of Alabama, McLeod has lived in Los Angeles for about 20 years, arriving as a fresh-eyed graduate of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In college, he’d taken an advanced production class led by the director Tom Cherones, who would later become his mentor.
McLeod and Sodaro on the Devil’s Gate Dam. McLeod enjoys including facts and trivia about the area he’s exploring in each “Walkin’ About” episode.
“Tom said to me, ‘You’re a writer, you should move to L.A.” recalls McLeod. “So that’s what I did. That’s all it took.”
Today he considers himself more of an actor-writer: “Acting is where I’ve had more success, professionally.” After years of doing improv comedy at Upright Citizens Brigade, McLeod has landed roles in shows like “You’re the Worst” and “Drunk History.” In the Hulu comedy series “Interior, Chinatown,” coming out in November, he plays Desk Sergeant Felix.
McLeod has a dry, slightly deadpan sense of humor and a gentle voice that can sometimes get lost in ambient traffic noise. If this were an episode of the “Walkin’ About,” we’d each have small DJI lapel mics — a tiny microphone that records audio remarkably well — clipped to our shirts.
“It’s a newish microphone technology that’s kind of amazing,” says McLeod. He wants each episode to feel as immersive as possible, which means including surrounding noise like buses honking, a busker singing in an alleyway or a volunteer asking if we have time for gay rights.
(As this is his first podcast, he admits it took some trial and error, and a lot of lost audio segments, to get the recording-while-walking rhythm down. He credits his team of editors at HyperObjects for helping in that department.)
Our final stop is the corner of East Colorado Boulevard and Raymond Avenue, across the street from another Spanish Colonial-style building. McLeod points out it’s one of the most haunted buildings in Pasadena. Supposedly it’s built on top of an old mission, which is never a good start.
Allan McLeod, right, with Sodaro, at Hahamongna Watershed Park.
“It was originally a bank, and there are stories of people dying in it — the bank manager’s daughter was found dead in the vault, a big robbery that went wrong, things like that.” Now it’s an AT&T store; there’s an escape room next door.
By the end of our time together, it’s clear just how much McLeod really does love walking. In the 50 minutes and roughly 1½ miles that we’ve spent together, I’ve learned more about Pasadena than I have in the last 10 years of living in L.A. And aside from my desperate need for air conditioning, I almost lament my need to get back in my car to head home.
Would our conversation have made for good tape? For McLeod, the key to a successful episode of “Walkin’ About” is finding guests who enjoy walking as much as he does.
“That’s the trick,” he says. “The goal is to have people talking about walking in different ways. Because the subject can be really complex and profound.”
Lifestyle
It was called the Kennedy Center, but 3 different presidents shaped it
President John F. Kennedy, left, looks at a model of what was later named the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC., in 1963.
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National Archives/Getty Images
On Thursday, the Kennedy Center’s name was changed to The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

By Friday morning, workers were already changing signs on the building itself, although some lawmakers said Thursday that the name can’t be changed legally without Congressional approval.
Though the arts venue is now closely associated with President Kennedy, it was three American presidents, including Kennedy, who envisioned a national cultural center – and what it would mean to the United States.
New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, is unveiled on Friday in Washington, D.C.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The Eisenhower Administration
In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower first pursued building what he called an “artistic mecca” in Washington, D.C., and created a commission to create what was then known as the National Cultural Center.
Three years later, Congress passed an act to build the new venue with the stated purpose of presenting classical and contemporary music, opera, drama, dance, and poetry from the United States and across the world. Congress also mandated the center to offer public programs, including educational offerings and programs specifically for children and older adults.
The Kennedy Administration
A November 1962 fundraiser for the center during the Kennedy administration featured stars including conductor Leonard Bernstein, comedian Danny Kaye, poet Robert Frost, singers Marian Anderson and Harry Belafonte, ballerina Maria Tallchief, pianist Van Cliburn – and a 7-year-old cellist named Yo-Yo Ma and his sister, 11-year-old pianist Yeou-Cheng Ma.

In his introduction to their performance, Bernstein specifically celebrated the siblings as new immigrants to the United States, whom he hailed as the latest in a long stream of “foreign artists and scientists and thinkers who have come not only to visit us, but often to join us as Americans, to become citizens of what to some has historically been the land of opportunity and to others, the land of freedom.”
At that event, Kennedy said this:
“As a great democratic society, we have a special responsibility to the arts — for art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color. The mere accumulation of wealth and power is available to the dictator and the democrat alike; what freedom alone can bring is the liberation of the human mind and spirit which finds its greatest flowering in the free society.”
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Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline were known for championing the arts at the White House. The president understood the free expression of creativity as an essential soft power, especially during the Cold War, as part of a larger race to excellence that encompassed science, technology, and education – particularly in opposition to what was then the Soviet Union.
The arts mecca envisioned by Eisenhower opened in 1971 and was named as a “living memorial” to Kennedy by Congress after his assassination.
The Johnson Administration
Philip Kennicott, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic for The Washington Post, said the ideas behind the Kennedy Center found their fullest expression under Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“Johnson in the Great Society basically compares the arts to other fundamental needs,” Kennicott said. “He says something like, ‘It shouldn’t be the case that Americans live so far from the hospital. They can’t get the health care they need. And it should be the same way for the arts.’ Kennedy creates the intellectual fervor and idea of the arts as essential to American culture. Johnson then makes it much more about a kind of popular access and participation at all levels.”
Ever since, Kennicott said, the space has existed in a certain tension between being a palace of the arts and a publicly accessible, popular venue. It is a grand structure on the banks of the Potomac River, located at a distance from the city’s center, and decked out in red and gold inside.
At the same time, Kennicott observed: “It’s also open. You can go there without a ticket. You can wander in and hear a free concert. And they have always worked very hard at the Kennedy Center to be sure that there’s a reason for people to think of it as belonging to them collectively, even if they’re not an operagoer or a symphony ticket subscriber.”
The Kennedy Center on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.
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Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Kennicott estimated it will only take a few years for the controversies around a new name to fade away, if the Trump Kennedy moniker remains.
He likens it to the controversy that once surrounded another public space in Washington, D.C.: the renaming of Washington National Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in 1998.

“A lot of people said, ‘I will never call it the Reagan National Airport.’ And there are still people who will only call it National Airport. But pretty much now, decades later, it is Reagan Airport,” Kennicott said.
“People don’t remember the argument. They don’t remember the controversy. They don’t remember the things they didn’t like about Reagan, necessarily. . . . All it takes is about a half a generation for a name to become part of our unthinking, unconscious vocabulary of place.
“And then,” he said, “the work is done.”
This story was edited for broadcast and digital by Jennifer Vanasco. The audio was mixed by Marc Rivers.
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In the 1998 World War II film “Saving Private Ryan,” Tom Hanks played Captain John H. Miller, a citizen-soldier willing to die for his country. In real life, Mr. Hanks spent years championing veterans and raising money for their families. So it was no surprise when West Point announced it would honor him with the Sylvanus Thayer Award, which goes each year to someone embodying the school’s credo, “Duty, Honor, Country.”
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