Every day, from the basement of their Wisconsin farmhouse, Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus podcast their sex life for public consumption. In doing so, they’re changing the face of entertainment, inspiring 100,000 people to “iTune” in and turn on to a less-than-typical married couple.
Invasion of the Pod People
It’s hangover-brunch hour in a cafe in New York City, but Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus are ready to restart the party. Last night they were up ‘til 4 A.M. at a piano bar partying with a clan of underground circus freaks. Today, Dawn has a fresh idea. “Maybe I should milk Drew’s prostate!” she announces, causing other patrons to turn their heads. “I’ve never done that, but it sounds like fun.”
They have reason to celebrate. While corporate America is still waking up to podcasts — home-brewed audio broadcasts distributed for free on the Internet — Dawn, 29, and Drew, 34, a married couple of self-described “gutter punks,” have become the burgeoning medium’s breakaway hit. As hosts of “The Dawn and Drew Show,” a half hour of raunchy banter and songs they record five times a week in their 1895 Wisconsin farmhouse, they’re firmly rooted in the Top 10 podcasts on the Net.
Free from FCC regulation, Dawn and Drew chronicle their sex lives with unabashed glee. One show was devoted to female ejaculation. In another, they simulated sex. Once, Dawn brought out a mouth harp during a podcast and played it live — with her vagina. Although they surely aren’t the first Wisconsinites to lube each other up in a barn, they’re the only ones to podcast it. “We actually put the liquid on our genitals and described how warm it was,” says Dawn, who sports blue hair and a nose ring. “We don’t hold anything back. It’s just the life of a couple in Wisconsin who struggle like everyone else.”
Their quirky candor has earned them plenty of fans. An estimated 100,000 people download “The Dawn and Drew Show” daily and listen on their laptops or iPods. They come from all walks of life: gamers, bankers, doctors, and rockers. Some of Dawn and Drew’s most avid listeners are soldiers in Iraq. “They say it’s nice to hear people talking like their friends,” Dawn says. “It gets them out of the idea of being at war.” Fans show their appreciation by mailing in porn and cookies.
The only thing more unlikely than the success of Dawn and Drew is the story of the so-called Pod-father who made it possible: Adam Curry. Once known for his big-hair, heavy-metal show on the “old” MTV, he’s become the Bill Gates of podcasting, and he’s the key to understanding how “Dawn and Drew” went from underground phenomenon to over-ground sensation. “Adam’s such a glamour boy,” says Dawn, “but he’s been a forerunner of everything on the Internet. It has nothing to do with his persona on MTV.”
Thanks to Curry, their audience is about to get bigger. Under Curry’s newly minted deal, Dawn and Drew are bringing a weekly medley of their show to Sirius Satellite Radio. After a year of hosting their show as a labor of love, they can officially call this a full-time gig. “I literally quit my day job yesterday,” says Drew, who sports a goatee and is wearing baggy shorts and a Bob Marley T-shirt. The leap to satellite radio is the consummation of the power of this new medium, and the unlikely love story of its two biggest stars.
It’s nearing midnight, and Curry desperately wants to chat with somebody. For the past half hour, he has been riding alone up and down in the chandeliered elevator of Manhattan’s swanky Waldorf-Astoria hotel, fishing for conversation. It has not gone well.
A young guy steps inside carrying a toothbrush and a cell phone. “Toothbrush and cell phone!” Curry quips. “What else do ya need?” No luck. An Asian bellhop joins him several floors later. “Busy tonight, huh?” Curry says. “It’s all the American Forest and Paper Organization people, right? Are they nice? The paper people?” The elevator dings. “This is the lobby, sir,” the bellhop says.
The last time Curry was at the Waldorf, the conversation flowed freely. But that was almost 20 years ago. It was the go-go eighties, and Curry, one of MTV’s first veejays, was the king of Headbangers Ball. This was the pre-Nirvana epoch, when big hair was in, and none was bigger than his — Curry’s mane was so alpine, it was hard to tell whether it was frosted blond or capped with snow. “Everybody was fucking jealous of my hair,” Curry recalls.
Curry is 40 now, and his locks are long trimmed. Though he retains glints of flash from his glam years — Miami Vice pink lenses, an Ozzy-size, silver-tangled crucifix medallion — he slips back unnoticed into the hotel’s oaken elevator. But anonymity suits his plan. Curry isn’t here to simply make conversation. With a hidden lavaliere microphone and digital audio transmitter, he’s here to podcast it.
Curry helped pioneer podcasting in late 2004, and it has since exploded into an audio revolution of blog-like proportions. Named for Apple’s ubiquitous iPod, it allows anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and a microphone to create and exchange DIY radio. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that one in three adults who own an MP3 player in the U.S. have downloaded a podcast.
There are more than 10,000 podcasts, and the number is growing. There are casts by garage bands, gamers, bass fishers, drag queens, wine snobs, and Paris Hilton. Senator John Edwards, an early enthusiast among politicos, podcasts informally from his kitchen. Old-fashioned radio broadcast companies, from the underdogs, like Air America, to the overlords, Infinity and Clear Channel, are scrambling to catch up. The most popular podcast? “Catholic Insider,” a show by a Dutch priest with exclusive access to the Vatican. “You gotta love the Godcasts!” Curry says.
Tonight at the Waldorf, Curry is improvising what he calls an “elevatorcast,” snatching anonymous snippets of dialogue, like a lost track of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. “Usually, people just look at the floor or the numbers,” Curry whispers into his lapel. “But if you are really listening to what’s happening, you can hear some interesting stuff.” Or not. But who cares? This isn’t about perfect hair. It’s about the frayed ends. The cloying rebel who once personified the blow-dried media machine is now breaking it down. His cross-platform technology is not an endorsement of Apple or any regime, he says: “No one owns the pod.”
Curry’s journey from heartthrob to heretic is not as unlikely as it seems. As an American boy growing up in Holland, where his dad took a PR job, Curry was an outsider from the start. Unable to converse with the Dutch kids, he fiddled with a Radio Shack Electronics 101 kit instead. “I was a loser geek,” he says. But when he showed his classmates how he could broadcast David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” on his home-brewed transmitter, he earned instant cred. “This was my way to be cool,” he recalls.
Curry hustled a spot at a pirate station in Amsterdam called Decibel Radio and broadcast every Saturday night as “John Holden,” a 24-year-old Harley-riding hipster Yankee. “In reality, I was 16 and rode a moped,” he says. Before long, he was smoking hash under a glass with a young Madonna and other stars rising from the underground. Then, after he had dropped out of college, a seemingly more radical opportunity came calling: MTV.
One of Curry’s own podcasts, “MTV Chronicles,” is a dishy scoop on his days inside the network’s own surreal life. “There’s only so much of that shit you can take,” Curry says. One day in 1994, Curry quit on the air. “I think there’s something on this Internet,” he announced. “I’ll see you in cyberspace.”
It was a lucrative move. The next day, the network sued him for registering the MTV.com domain name, despite their prior approval. Curry took them to court, and parlayed the settlement into his own Web design start-up. Just before the dot-com bust, he sold his company for $400 million and pimped himself out in true headbanger style. Curry bought a castle in Belgium, learned to fly a helicopter, slept in, and toked up. “You’d find me in my bathrobe at two o’clock, checking my e-mail and smoking,” he recalls.
Then he got his paws on an iPod. “Apple marketed it as a jukebox,” Curry says. “But I saw a hard drive.” And hard drives could store more than just songs — shows, for example. While living in London, Curry became a fan of a Boston deejay who was recording street interviews and uploading them online as MP3s. Curry had an idea for a program he called iPodder, which would automatically feed MP3s right to the player. So he solicited the help of the open-source community: the obsessive coders who create, modify, and share free software online. Curry’s inbox was soon flooded with e-mails from pioneering geeks who began using iPodder to create their own reality radio shows. And two of the best were coming from a couple in a barn in the middle of nowhere. Their names were Dawn and Drew.
“Adam Curry sold his company for $400 million and became the Bill Gates of Podcasting.”
The only other thing unlikelier than Dawn and Drew’s raunchy hit show is that they ever got together in the first place. It’s a punk-rock Romeo and Juliet story — albeit with a happy ending, farm animals, and plenty of lube.
Dawn grew up as the outlandish and outspoken daughter of a custodian and a graphic arts designer outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While other kids tipped cows and rode tractors, Dawn was more like a teenage Courtney Love. “I was into all sorts of naughtiness,” she says. At 15, she was the lead singer of a local band called the Virgins. “It was sort of a joke name,” she explains, clicking her tongue ring between her teeth.
Several states away, in Burbank, California, Drew was also an aspiring rocker. But unlike Dawn, he had a considerably more conservative inspiration: religion. Though he listened to heavy metal and Howard Stern by day, at night he was the faithful young keyboardist in his brothers’ Christian rock band, Scattered Few.
When Dawn’s friends asked her to come see Scattered Few in 1994 in Milwaukee, she demurred. At the time, she sported dreads and nose rings, and expressed a budding interest in paganism. “I’m not into Christian music,” she says. But when her friends offered to buy her dinner at the show, she conceded. Dawn was working as a telemarketer, and money was tight. “I basically met Drew because of a turkey sandwich,” she says. The moment they met after the show, she fell hard for him, despite their different backgrounds.
Getting laid, though, was another story. “He wouldn’t put out,” she says. He had a reason: Just before the tour, Drew had been baptized in a backyard pool. Dawn tried rubbing her knee in his crotch, to no avail. “I was convinced it wasn’t right to hook up with a girl who wasn’t Christian,” Drew says.
He got over it. During a visit from Dawn on Christmas Eve, they finally got busy. “We made a little baby Jesus,” Dawn jokes. And Drew realized he was on the wrong path. “I was off track,” he says. “Christianity just wasn’t my thing.” The pair got hitched, and to celebrate their commitment, they got matching tongue piercings. Soon they bought an old farmhouse on five acres in rural Wayne, Wisconsin. Relishing the solitude and freedom of life among corn and cows, Dawn and Drew transformed the farm into their own skewed Neverland, spinning fire and banging drums at night under the stars. They began chronicling the local farm-punk scene in self-published zines. “One of them was called Pig Face,” Dawn says. “It was all about cops.”
Drew, a computer programmer by trade, discovered an even better medium: the Web. They played around with biogs and Web diaries, but when Drew heard about Adam Curry’s podcasting scene, he was intrigued. He hooked up a microphone to his computer and recorded himself improvising a love song for Dawn. The next day, he showed her what he’d uploaded. “This is lame,” he said, “but imagine the possibilities.”
She did. With podcasting, Dawn realized, anyone could have a voice and reach people around the world cheaply, easily, and, best of all — especially in an age of neoconservative culture wars — without regulation. “There’s no censorship,” Dawn says.
Dawn and Drew started sitting down regularly at the mike in their living room. They talked about their day, their farm, porn, chickens, and whatever else came to mind. One day, they simulated having sex. The next day, they found they were in the Top 10 list of podcasts. And, to their surprise, they quickly discovered that plenty of people around the world were listening.
During the 2004 BloggerCon, a convention for Web personalities, word leaked out that the hosts of “The Dawn and Drew Show” were in attendance. They had uploaded pictures of themselves beforehand, so people recognized the cherubic woman with blueberry-colored hair. “They kept coming up to me and saying, ‘Hey, are you the iPod girl?’” Dawn says.
E-mails poured in, as did gifts. During one show, Dawn mentioned that she liked Hello Kitty accessories, and soon they started arriving at the farmhouse. So did sex toys. “Someone sent me a pocket pussy,” says Drew. Durex, the condom and lube manufacturer, even sponsored their show.
But the podcasts aren’t just about sex. Without a script, they’d talk through the bad days, too. Dawn would bitch about her period cramps or, on the verge of tears, talk about her sick grandpa. They knew they were hitting the big time, or their version of it anyway, when the locals started tuning in. “One day an old neighbor came by on her ATV and said, ‘I like your pod show,’” Dawn says. And when they received a congratulatory e-mail from their stiffest competition, the “Catholic Insider,” Dawn and Drew realized that after years on the fringe, they’d really made it.
Here we are some 20 years later with Dawn and Dean apparently running strong again. Granted, they took some down time — heartily earned, we’d say — in 2021, but in January of 2026 they popped (podded?) back in with an update. You can still find them on Apple, iHeart, and various other common podcast places too. We should give you a warning, though: Even without knowing when they might return again for another update, if you listen to that most recent episode, you may well get hooked. Full disclosure, some of us mostly want to know what happens with Onion and Kirby.
