*SOLD OUT* "Keep It" Live with hosts Ira Madison III & Louis Virtel celebrating "Pure Innocent Fun"

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Join WBUR and friends for a new series of live tapings of your favorite podcasts. Meet the people who are shaping the podcast landscape and be the first to hear their next episode, get a sneak peek of audio left on the cutting room floor or dig deeper into the stories that captivated you.

Join us for a live taping of Crooked Media's “Keep It” featuring hosts Ira Madison III and Louis Virtel. Wherever pop culture and politics collide, Madison and Virtel are on hand to examine the gorgeous wreckage from their uniquely queer perspective. Each week, the “Princes of Pop Culture” unpack the latest controversies, laude character actress appreciation and all the shade that’s fit to throw.

In this special live taping, Virtel and Madison will discuss his new raucous essay collection “Pure Innocent Fun,” and the nostalgic aspects of 90s and 00s pop culture celebrated within. Madison offers readers a brand-new pop-culture manifesto. Copies of “Pure Innocent Fun” will be available to purchase from our bookstore partner Frugal Bookstore and Madison will sign following the conversation.

CitySpace Tickets
General: SOLD OUT
Student: SOLD OUT (must present a valid student ID upon arrival)

Ways To Save
WBUR’s Legacy Circle, Murrow Society, Sustainers and Members save $5.00 on general tickets to this event. To apply the discount to your ticket purchase online, you’ll need to enter a promo code. You can get your code by emailing membership@wbur.org.

Registrants may be contacted by CitySpace about this or future events.

About “Pure Innocent Fun”
In this nostalgic and raucous collection of sixteen original essays, Ira Madison III — critic, television writer and host of the beloved “Keep It” podcast — combines memoir and criticism to offer a brand-new pop-culture manifesto.

“This is the most fun I’ve had reading all year. Like Chuck Klosterman before him, Ira Madison III takes seriously and analyzes the pop culture detritus that took up hours of our lives,” Lin-Manuel Miranda writes.

You can recall the first TV show, movie, book or song that made you feel understood — that shaped how you live, what you love and whom you would become. It gave you an entire worldview. For Ira Madison, that book was Chuck Klosterman’s sex, drugs and Cocoa Puffs, which cemented the idea that pop culture could be a rigorous subject — and that, for better or worse, it shapes all of us.

In “Pure Innocent Fun,” Madison explores the key cultural moments that inspired his career as a critic and guided his coming of age as a Black gay man in Milwaukee. In this hilarious, full-throttle trip through the ’90s and 2000s, he recounts learning about sex from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer;” facing the most heartbreaking election of his youth (not George W. Bush’s win, but Jennifer Hudson losing “American Idol”); and how never getting his driver’s license in high school made him just like Cher Horowitz in “Clueless”: “a virgin who can’t drive.”

Brimming with a profound love for a bygone culture and alternating between irreverence and heartfelt insight, “Pure Innocent Fun,” like all the best products of pop culture, will leave you entertained and surprisingly enlightened.