By Clare Duffy – Staff Reporter, Portland Business Journal
Sep 28, 2017, 12:54pm EDT
She has a kids' science show on YouTube, which she's pursuing full time now that she's quit her Wieden+Kennedy job. She's working on a book. She recently won more than $10,000 at the annual Pitch Black competition. She's going to be featured once a month on KGW doing six-minute science projects.
She's Crazy Aunt Lindsey – a.k.a. Lindsey Murphy, 33, who is in the process of turning her passion for doing science with kids into a business called The Fab Lab. We talked with Murphy about science, representation and what she loves about Portland:
Tell me about your project, The Fab Lab. I have a kids’ science show, it takes science concepts and turns them into DIY projects. It’s a show that currently lives on YouTube, but I have so many more plans for it that I don’t know that it’s necessarily just a YouTube show. For me, I always made it with the thought of having it on television.
What brought you to Portland? It was just a God thing. I just knew that this was where I was supposed to be. It was just like: Portland. And I came. I had never heard of Portland before but in 2008, I had a friend in high school who passed away. I realized while I was at her funeral that I had not seen Laura since I graduated from high school, and so much of life had happened. I decided that I was going to intentionally reconnect with people that I still felt very close to but hadn’t seen in shy of a decade. I had a friend named Chelsea who was living in Portland. I had been reading in a magazine about this dessert at Le Pigeon, it was a corn cake with maple ice cream and bacon bits on top, and I was like, I need to eat that. I stopped here in Portland just to have dinner, and I fell in love. We went and had dinner at Le Pigeon and just had a wonderful time. That was in 2009. And then I went back to New York and didn’t think about Portland again. But one day I woke up in 2013 and was just like: Move to Portland.
Where did the name Crazy Aunt Lindsey come from? Well, I’ve been an aunt since I was 18 months old. So I was always Aunt Lindsey. I’m the youngest girl – my dad had 6 kids, my mom has four kids. I’ve always been this free-spirited, off-the-cuff personality, and just sort of endearingly, people would be like, ‘That girl’s crazy.’ And then when I became a babysitter, I would do things like say, ‘Ok guys, we’re walking home from school but we’re going to walk all the way like a duck!’ So I would always hear things like, ‘You’re crazy, Aunt Lindsey.’ So when I decided to do the show, I was just like, it’s got to be Crazy Aunt Lindsey!
What are the next steps for The Fab Lab? Just producing more content. I have a lot of ideas. I’m working on a book that has 150 projects in it. I would love to have that ready for holiday 2017 – I just don’t know how possible that is. But I’m working on 8 episodes right now that we’re shooting. I hope to have the next season ready to go in October.
How did you get into doing science? I definitely grew up with the cliché story imparted on me that science wasn’t for girls. My brother, who didn’t have any interest in science, was the one always getting the science kits, and the mystery kits, and the spy kits. I would always tag along with him, with his little science kits. And then by the time I was 12 or 13, just like the statistics say, I was pushed into things that were “pretty.” With science and math, I got to a point where I believed those things weren’t for me and I wasn’t good at them.
What changed? When I started the show, it was just “Doing Things With Crazy Aunt Lindsey,” purely a kids’ activity show. And in the second round, I thought I would do categories: I’d do a book club episode, I’d do a science episode, I’d do an arts and crafts episode. And then 3-6 months later I get a phone call from Danielle Lee, who’s known as the urban scientist, and she was like, ‘I love your science show. That play dough episode is a science project and that recipe project is a science project, it’s all a science show.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have a kids’ science show!’
Why do you think it’s important to do this show? At the base of it, I think it’s important because kids in the age group I’m targeting need constant engagement. Studies will tell you that by the time a kid is 5 or 7, their personality is in place, by the time a kid is 12 years old, their self-confidence is in place. And I look at a kid’s flexibility and mental agility and mental hunger as a huge opportunity. So that’s really what the show was about: creating an awesome opportunity for a lot to happen in a short time for busy parents. And then on top of that, you add on the representation piece. But I didn’t realize the significance of being a black woman doing science with kids until I was well into my second or third year of doing The Fab Lab. You start talking about gender equality, and you start talking about racial equality, and it’s like – wow, this is just one big ball of goodness.