Game changer

Giana DeGeiso and business partner Jamie Rosler founded Broadly Entertaining as a female-owned and operated entertainment business in New York City. In December, Reno native DeGeiso moved back home for a few months to establish Broadly Entertaining locally. On Saturday, March 23, the company is hosting an event called “Reno Party, Period” at the Loving Cup, 188 California Ave. Multiple bands and DJs will perform. The cost for this menstrual-themed party is a package of feminine hygiene products, a package of unopened underwear or $10. Donations will benefit Safe Embrace. Learn more here: bit.ly/2SPRoLV.

Broadly Entertaining—it’s punny.

Yes, it totally is. … My business partner and I met, I think, in 2011. I was directing her in a play in a theater company that she was a producer for and an actor for. After that, she invited me to do this improv group. … While we were in that improv group, she invited me to be a trivia host for this company she was working for. She was on a TV show called The Chase. She’s also been on Jeopardy and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. She’s a trivia badass. … She invited me to be a trivia host with her because I’m a bit more of a song-and-dance-man. … From then on, we got sick of working for this one particular company and this one particular dude—white, male, dude—who was just the worst. And we noticed also that the content that we were representing wasn’t representative of the customers in front of us. It was just like our history books, kind of skewed white male. … It’s just how it is, but it isn’t representative of the audience at all—at least not of what we were seeing in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where we were working at the time. So we just kind of said, “Fuck it. Let’s do this our way.” … Most of our company is run by women. My husband helps out by DJing from time to time, but it’s a woman-run, woman-operated business that we’re really proud of and that’s committed to diverse hiring in all sorts of ways. But our content puts women and people of color, people with disabilities, the LGBT community—we put them in equal light with everybody, and that’s not what the trivia was that we saw. … And it’s gotten us into trouble in some places, which is a major bummer.

Wow. Where?

We got in trouble from one venue saying that our questions were too political, just because we decided to ask a question about the first gay congressman. When we asked for more clarification—we were at the time doing a charity event, something we do every month … and this month it was Black Girls Rock, which helps black girls get into the entertainment community. … So we decided to write a trivia round called Black Girls Rock. It was just 10 questions about black women who are awesome, and that was considered too political.

Talk to me about the party. The paper did a writing contest we called “Stories, period.”

Oh, that’s great! Dude! I’m going to have a “cuntfessional,” so people can tell their period stories and put them on the internet. … The period party originated in Brooklyn, with our number one Broad—our first hire, basically. She was like, “I want to throw a period party. Would you guys want to help us do that?” Jamie and I were like, “We don’t know what you’re talking about, but that sounds awesome.” It turned out to be a partnership with #happyperiodnyc. … We threw a dance party in a bar. We had three bands, two DJs, something like that—and a dance crew called the Tailshakers come through and flashmob the place in red glitter. And price of admission was an unopened package of underwear, menstrual products or 10 bucks at the door. … It all went to #happyperiod. We ended up making close to a thousand dollars for them that night, in cash donations alone, and a giant pile of period products to distribute.