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Behind Joey Parsons’ head, during our Zoom call, is a portrait of her from Blithe Spirit — a Noel Coward play she once performed in Santa Fe. It was theatrical, mysterious, and a little haunted. Fitting, because Joey herself is all of those things — minus the ghost part.
Joey is Dan Abbate’s co-host on the soon to be published podcast, thebigda : Podcast, but she’s also a working actor who has been making it happen for 25 years. Not the kind of actor who gets mobbed at Whole Foods, but the kind who has done theater in West Virginia, off-Broadway in New York, and makeup for opera singers in between. She has lived the kind of creative life that’s less about red carpets and more about resilience — carving out a career in the arts with grit, humor, grace, and a deep love for the craft, even when the hustle never quite lets up.
Her story with Dan begins in ballet class. Well, technically, it starts with Dan’s wife, Kelly. Joey and Kelly met in a Santa Fe ballet class when they were 10 or 12 and became best friends in high school drama class. Life happened, college happened, and they drifted apart, but during COVID, Kelly started texting Joey every day. Inspirational book covers and little check-ins. Eventually, Kelly and Dan bought an apartment in NYC, and Joey started spending more time with them. Dan wasn’t too sure about Joey at first, but a few minutes of conversation turned into deep discussions with the three of them, followed by furniture shopping in Florida. The rest is podcast history.
Joey is the kind of person who listens deeply. She’s fascinated by people — especially her fellow artists —
"I don’t know how we all are able to make a living."
She spent 20 years as a makeup artist for headshot photographers, working with actors and opera singers who were mostly unknown, mostly struggling, and mostly apologizing for their imperfections.
"Nine times out of ten," she says, "the first thing women do is apologize.”
Joey’s spent decades trying not to shrink herself. It’s a quiet rebellion — one she is still working on.”
Imposter syndrome has plagued her for years. Yale didn’t help. She got in, felt scrappy and interesting, and left feeling like she had to be everything. She is still unpacking that, and feels she is not alone in this. Fame, she has decided, is overrated. She got a taste of it during a festival in West Virginia — people would stop her at dinner to tell her how much they hated her character. “Let me tell you why I hated you,” they’d say. She didn’t love that. She would rather be the actor you recognize but cannot name, the one who disappears into the role and then into the crowd.
Joey’s favorite roles are physical, emotional, and maybe just a little bit quirky. Think Lucille Ball meets Julianne Nicholson. She loves characters with tics, secrets, and big comic swings. She has performed in God of Carnage, Shakespeare plays, Law and Order, and several of Kate Hamill’s play off-Broadway. She doesn’t sing (it intimidates her), but she dances. She walks everywhere because she doesn’t have a car (it doesn’t make sense in the city), but loves to drive whenever she has the chance. She meditates when she remembers to. She loves to write, but needs to have a deadline. She isn’t famous, but she’s unforgettable.
And now, she’s co-hosting a podcast that’s all about the human experience — the messy, beautiful, contradictory stuff that makes us who we are. Joey brings the artist’s eye, the listener’s heart, and the kind of honesty that makes you lean in. She’s not trying to be the star. She’s just trying to be real.
Which, in this world, might be the most radical thing of all.
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