WanderWomen

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Two real women, lots of baggage, one edgy travel show…

“Wander Women” is a buddy travel show with attitude in which two real women at a crossroads in their lives hit the global road for some travel therapy, searching for answers and seeking out interesting and inspiring women from other cultures. Eating, shopping and girl-talking their way around the globe, hosts Taylor Holliday (an arts and travel writer for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal) and Judith Edelman (a Nashville recording artist and TV documentary composer) offer an entree into some of the most amazing places in the world, as well as an intimate view into the worlds of the women who live there. Edgy and real, “Wander Women” is travel on estrogen.

The Wander Women Demo

"The Seoul of New York"

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- Taylor and Judith

Not Just Another Guide...

“Wander Women” is not just another guide to the world’s tourist sites and hotels, but an experience in which the epiphanies of travel lead to epiphanies about life.

We begin as two hip-but-not-too-hip women at a crossroads in our lives. Aren’t we supposed to have it all by now? The killer job, the great husband, perfect family and closet full of shoes? Maybe not. We’ve done OK. But we still don't have the bank accounts, the dream house or the kids. And even if we could afford Manolos, they hurt our feet.

So what do we have? We’ve got baggage…and we’re not afraid to use it! Have baggage, will travel.

Not your perfect Stepford hosts who check their neuroses at the door, we’ll be packing our emotional baggage right along with our Samsonite. We’ll explore the sights and sounds and flavors of the world while stopping along the way to dish with women from other cultures and reveal the real dirt about women’s lives: sex, dieting, divorce, money, work, self-doubt, family.

Each episode will follow a subtle theme and story arc, the title giving a clue as to both the worldly terrain and the emotional terrain we’ll be covering.

In “The Girl From Ipanema Turns 40,” for example, we fearlessly cast off our bathing suit tops on a beach in Brazil and confidently strut, “The Girl From Ipanema” playing in the background. Suddenly, we start to notice the tan, toned bodies all around. As the music comes to a screeching halt, we realize that our boobs have headed south right along with us. Maybe we, like so many Brazilian women, should go under the knife to keep the jiggling to a minimum and turn back time. Should we at least get Botox to erase some years? Or should we just find a therapist and get over ourselves? Our quest for self-acceptance takes us to sultry Salvador, where our new, unenhanced Brazilian girlfriends show us how they survive in a surgery-mad world. They introduce us first to a famous female martial arts master, then to a voodoo priestess and finally, when all else fails, to a caipirinha bar, where, with the help of the national drink, we realize beauty is just a state of mind.

Everywhere we go, we’ll join amazing women—cooks, artists, housewives, farmers, power players—doing whatever they do, while the straight talk roams from shopping to sex to bad exes. We’ll let viewers in on unique and undiscovered shopping spots and guide them to authentic food and drink. We’ll cook with the locals, chill out at spas, groove to local bands while singer-songwriter Judith sits in and check out local art with arts journalist Taylor.

Though women-only travel is one of the fastest-growing segments of the travel market, television hasn’t caught up with this new interest in girlfriends’ getaways. "Wander Women" fills that void. It’s an eye-opening hour of globetrotting with the girls, for women everywhere who sometimes fantasize about making a break for it and embarking on an exotic adventure with their girlfriends.

Sample Episodes

Matriarchal Mexico, Where Women Rule

Wander Women discover the rarely visited Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. For centuries, women--dressed in traditional embroidered tops, voluminous skirts and abundant jewelry--have ruled the roost in this corner of the world. While women run the marketplace, men stay home with the kids; and it’s the women who give their daughters away at weddings. During frequent festivals, the women climb on roofs and throw fruit on the men below. We take gleeful part in the fruit-throwing festivities, dance with the women at the festival balls (in full costume), hang out with them in the markets (some of the most exotic in Mexico) and get their freely dispensed sex tips while learning all we can about their secrets for ruling with a feminine touch.

Geisha Temptations

In Japan, we visit the last of the geishas and try to learn the art of “entertaining” while envisioning life with a sugar daddy. Then we fast-forward to modern Japan and hook up with the girls to hit a male hostess bar, the hottest new trend among successful Japanese women, where we pay hunky young guys to fawn over us all night. We also go apartment-hunting with independent women who no longer wait for husbands to buy property but are lining up to purchase expensive condos in “female-friendly” buildings. To be taken care of or not to be taken care of?

French Women Don’t Get Fat… (Bitches)

Mystified by the “French Paradox” and curious about the French mystique, we put ourselves in the hands of a Parisian fashionista who will guide us through a day in the life of the stylish French woman. Can we mimic her seemingly effortless style? Can Judith keep her hands off every croissant that crosses her path? Can Taylor stick to just two measly glasses of wine? More to the point, if we do, will we get laid more? You promise?

Secrets of the Superwrinkley

In South Korea, we look for the fountain of youth in a mountain village where everyone lives into their 90s, learning that the answer is not the South Beach Diet, but less fat (boo!) and more rice liquor (yay!). We party with the superwrinkley, before we hang with some feminist youngsters in a country where 72% of women go to college, the highest rate in the world. We also seek out women architects on the cutting-edge of design in an art community on the edge of the DMZ.

Kiss a Frog, Find a Prince

How many men does it take to run a business? None! In Peru, we meet the women of Café Femenino, an all-women coffee farmers’ collective, and learn the secrets of their uniquely feminine consensus management style. Agreeing, though, that we still need men for some things, we go on a quest for the latest rage in aphrodisiacs, “frog juice.” Under its influence, Judith starts seeing princes everywhere and Taylor’s wedding band gets heavier and heavier.

It Takes a Village…To Cure P.M.S.

Bloated and cranky, we find ourselves singing the P.M.S. blues in Mali, just down the road from Timbuktu in the region some say is the womb of the Delta blues. We catch up with traditional tribal singers using their art to advance women’s rights and lose our blues at the lively Festival au Desert Timbuktu. It’s impossible to be depressed in a city named after a woman with a particularly large navel! In Bamako we dance to female-led wassoulou bands and satisfy our monthly cravings with the region’s spicy cuisine.

Marriage on the Rocks

In Iceland, Judith considers a second marriage just as we learn that marriage is totally passé in the progressive Nordic north. We then drool over the prospect of state-funded healthcare, childcare and work-leave as we learn to what lengths that government will go to keep up the world’s highest birthrate. We hang with a beautiful blonde former classmate of Taylor’s who anchors the nightly news there—and no, she, like most other professional women, hasn’t bothered to marry the live-in father of her kids.

Host/Writer Bios

Judith Edelman is the active, athletic type, smartass spiritual seeker and guitar-packing troubadour. A passionate baker and unashamed power eater, she’s been known to weep over a piece of cake. People are instantly drawn to her warmth and spark, while her inner New Yorker stands at the ready with a wisecrack and an attitude when called for. Judith has fully recovered from a cheating husband who left her for their friendly neighbor. Now she’s contemplating a second marriage with her devoted but workaholic boyfriend, while her biological clock ticks away….

Judith was born and raised in Manhattan, the daughter of a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist. Her first career was in economic development and aid work, culminating in a stint in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Back stateside, she took up guitar and forged a career as a singer-songwriter, evolving from a bluegrass Jewbilly into a navel-gazing songstress. Judith has three acclaimed CDs on Nashville’s Compass Records to her credit and composes soundtracks for TV documentaries including the PBS series “Nova.” She also contributes tracks to various CD projects, such as the Grammy Award-winning Stephen Foster tribute “Beautiful Dreamer,” the European compilation “Songs for Choice,” and Janet Reno’s musical history project, “Song of America.” Her fourth recording will be released in 2007.

Taylor Holliday is the journalist, culture vulture and daring eater who disdains exercise as much as she relishes all-night drink-and-talk fests in the local pub. She may be a born skeptic, but underneath the calm, cool exterior lies a sentimental romantic and a total sucker for new places, quirky people and happy endings. Taylor is newly married, having committed later than most after finally learning to steer clear of the certifiably crazy ones. Now she and her writer husband are torn between the financial and lifestyle sacrifices that come with parenthood and the desire to adopt a Vietnamese baby because they’re so darned cute.

Taylor is descended from a long line of Southerners and was born to bohemian parents in backwoods Oklahoma. Chomping at the bit to escape small-town life, her first career was as an international financial analyst in London, Paris and Basel. She then got a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University and spent 10 years as an arts and culture editor in New York for The Wall Street Journal and Wall Street Journal Europe. Taylor currently is a freelance journalist who has written about travel, food, drink, photography, art and architecture for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She has had Travel-section cover stories in the NYT about eating her way through Vietnam and sailing the Aegean coast of Turkey.