Debra Haden and Mars Roberge Guest On “If These Walls Could Talk” With Hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss Wednesday, August 30th, 2023

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Who else but hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss could “spill the tea” on their weekly show “If These Walls Could Talk” live from Pangea Restaurant on the Lower Eastside of NYC, with their unique style of honest, and emotional interviews, sharing the fascinating backstory of celebrities, entertainers, recording artists, writers and artists and bringing their audience along for a fantastic ride.  

Debra Haden and Mars Roberge will be featured guests on “If These Walls Could Talk” with hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss on Wednesday, August 30th, 2023 at 2 PM ET live from the infamous Pangea Restaurant.

Wendy Stuart is an author, celebrity interviewer, model, filmmaker and along with If These Walls Could Talk she hosts TriVersity Talk, a weekly web series with featured guests discussing their lives, activism and pressing issues in the LGBTQ Community.

Tym Moss is a popular NYC singer, actor, and radio/tv host who recently starred in the hit indie film “JUNK” to critical acclaim.

Debra Haden is an “artistic tour de force” located in Los Angeles, CA. Haden has developed her talent in multiple areas throughout her life including acting, dancing, singing, painting, fashion design and animation. In her early years she relied heavily on her creativity and can learn new skills with ease. This ability to learn and adapt has made it easy for her to take on various characters in her acting career. After graduating a semester early from Kansas State with a B.S. in Clothing and Textiles, she moved to the east coast to work for a lingerie manufacturer. The design industry proved to be more technical than creative and Haden began to paint feminist paintings as an outlet for her artistic ideas. In 2005 she finally made her way to the west coast and started a female based arts collective called Feminine Oddities. Inspired by David Bowie’s “space oddity”, cabaret, sideshow acts, and the “female empowerment” aspect of the Burlesque revival at that time, her paintings were a tall pale alien-esque circus sideshow with flowing raven black Medusa-esque hair. The fashion figure-esque characters were beautiful, imperfect and distorted and several were conjoined twins because she was born a twin. This always made her feel like a stared at “oddity” as a child. It is at this time she began acting and performing at art shows she threw around Los Angeles. The shows fit the themes of her paintings and were considered provocative but layered with cryptic messages about society and politics. Left to interpretation by the viewer many got the hidden messages, others just saw beautiful women.

Haden’s breakout acting performance was in the 2017 indie punk film “Scumbag” which had its world premiere at the 46th International Film Festival Rotterdam alongside Academy Award-winning Best Picture “Moonlight”. The film reached critical acclaim and she won the Exceptional Emerging Artist Award at Hollywood Film Festival along with her co-star Princess Frank for their duet “Is This Real?”. In 2016, she officially formed her multi-media music project “Skunk in the Roses” and has since released the 2021 album “Rabid Perfume” (on digital and vinyl).  From this album, the catchy single “Sad Sad Vampire” made a splash in the movie “Mister Sister” at Dances with Films in Los Angeles, and people still approach her remembering the tune as it played between movies before the advertisements.  She has since released several singles and has performed live in Los Anglees, Toronto, and New York. The last several years, Haden has also appeared in several music videos from En Esch, Spookey Ruben, and Josie Cotton. With her degree in fashion, she enjoys designing original costumes and characters for live performances and uses them to be a muse at Disney and for various animators. She has also been the subject matter in photos featured by photographers in several art galleries such as Sur Le Mur at the Pacific Design Center. After being around artists and animators for several years she felt compelled to teach herself computer animation and in 2013 taught herself how to use After Effects. Using this new medium she created and voiced her own animations, many appear in her multi-media performances, as well as in the closing credits for the movie “Scumbag”. In 2016 she also took an interest in Augmented and Virtual Reality and began teaching herself Adobe Spark, Cinema 4D, and Blender. Haden still loves to perform live and was seen in “Branson the Sitcom” and “P.L.A.Y Noir”. Most recently Haden picture wrapped her third leading role in the feature film “Stars” in which she portrays an undercover homeless cop. In 2024, she is slated to be in an upcoming indie feature film that has not been announced and continues to tour while performing with the movies “Scumbag”, “Mister Sister” and the upcoming “Stars” at screenings and events.

 Mars Roberge is a Canadian-American dual-citizen filmmaker, born in Scarborough (borough of Toronto) and living in Los Angeles. A film production graduate of York University, Mars Roberge is a multi-award-winning director, producer, screenwriter and editor. U.K. press has called Mars a leading figure of the Hellawood film movement for underground filmmakers in Hollywood who create their art by any means necessary. Mars Roberge is responsible for launching a new film genre in 2016 which he calls “Rocktopia” and defines it as “an individual’s struggle against the ideals of a Utopian society where the only freedom of escape is to rock out.” When not making films, he moonlights as a successful underground disc jockey named “Die J! Mars” playing every major venue in Toronto, NYC and Los Angeles since the early nineties and runs a vinyl record label called World Domination Records. He has had exhibits of his work at ARS Gallery in Japan presented by Nakamura Keith Haring Gallery, Chashama Gallery (Harlem) and Sur Le Mur (Los Angeles).

After graduating in 1995, Mars found himself working in the Canadian music video boom-from being an editor at Black Walk Productions to being the original First Assistant Director for Jessy Terrero (Soulplane). It was during the 90s that Mars worked in every field of the film industry from commercials to features, from assisting art director Kenny Baird (Pee Wee’s Playhouse) to working as a grip permittee for I.A.T.S.E. to cleaning up exploding model buildings under John Gajdecki at GVFX.In the early 2000s, Mars moved to NYC and worked as a stylist for Patricia Field (Sex & the City) while pursuing the life of a mega dj (playing all the big clubs like Limelight, Webster Hall, etc.) and performing in various bands (Rise NYC, Tulips for Tina) as a guitarist, singer and programmer with releases on International Deejay Gigolos and Mogul Electro. While working for Patricia Field, Mars made his first feature film, a documentary about NYC’s underground drag and art world called “The Little House That Could” which had a world premiere in 2013 at Frameline and won the 2015 Audience Choice Award for Best Film at NewFilmmakers Los Angeles.

Mars moved to Los Angeles in 2011 and directed two more feature films under his film company, World Domination Pictures: the punk comedy “Scumbag” which had a world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2017 and the feel good dramedy “Mister Sister” which premiered as the official closing night film for Dances With Films in 2021. Mister Sister went on to win Best NYC Film in 2021 at Winter Film Awards International Film Festival where it was also the closing night film. In 2022, Mister Sister was the closing night film for the 27th Lower East Side Festival of the Arts and played at L.A. Punk Film Festival where it won Best LGBTQ Film.  Also in 2021, Mars won We Make Movies “Make Your Feature” international pitch contest for $25k + sponsorship where they completely funded his latest microbudget feature that he shot in March 2022: a black and white arthouse drama called “Stars” adapted from a play written by Doron Braunshtein about a group of NYC homeless women, starring Rah Digga, Sophia Lamar and Debra Haden. The film recently had a sold-out world premiere in February 2023 as the official opening film for Winter Film Awards International Film Festival, held in NYC at Cinema Village, garnering rave reviews from several film critic and then had a successful Canadian premiere at Revue Cinema in Toronto, followed by a west coast premiere at Marina del Rey Film Festival where it won Best Ensemble Cast Feature Film and another recent sold-out screening at Festival of Cinema NYC where it won Best Sound Editing and was nominated for Best Ensemble. This year, Mars also taught masterclasses on frugal filmmaking at NYU and Winter Film Awards.  Otherwise, Mars has started shooting a body horror anthology starring Freeway Rick Ross, he has finished 4 more feature screenplays, including an original biopic of a real NYC mobster, is currently writing a feature screenplay supernatural urban family comedy, and is still touring with his feature film “Stars” which is set to play at the world famous TCL Chinese Theatres in Hollywood on Sept.12th for Silicon Beach Film Festival followed by a screening on November 8th as the opening film for We Make Movies International Film Festival held at The Broadwater Theatre in Hollywood.

Watch Debra Haden and Mars Roberge on “If These Walls Could Talk” with hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss on YouTube here:

Subscribe and listen to “If These Walls Could Talk” on Apple Podcasts/iTunes here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-these-walls-could-talk/id1561221158