‘Postmarked & Tipsy’ May Just Be Your New Favorite Listen on the Way to Work

Kara Nadeau, left, and Jessica Girouard — shown with unofficial researcher DJ Nutz — host Postmarked & Tipsy, a podcast about historical postcards. Photography courtesy of Kara Nadeau and Jessica Girouard

Kara Nadeau and Jessica Girouard have questions.

Why did a daughter ghost her mother on Easter via postcard? Were the polar bears at a Cleveland zoo real polar bears or just people dressed in polar bear suits? And perhaps most importantly, who’s Kibby?

These are just a few of the queries Nadeau and Girouard try to solve on their lighthearted history podcast, Postmarked & Tipsy, where they read vintage postcards and try to decipher the stories behind the handwriting from a tavern room in Nadeau’s Lincoln home.

Each episode features a postcard plucked from the past paired with a special libation mixed by Girouard, and cold readings of postcards chosen at random from a vintage letterbox. Recent shows involved a 1994 postcard of the Blackstone River Explorer riverboat with a Rhode Island Iced Tea cocktail featuring local Rhodium vodka; a 1943 New Mexico postcard written by roving vacationers with a Chimayó cocktail; and the famous Kibby postcard (circa 1939) paired with a Sidecar.

The show, which you can find at postmarkedtipsy.com, on YouTube and on most podcast platforms, got its start in January. Nadeau, who always enjoyed frequenting antique stores and looking at old postcards, bought a collection on eBay when inspiration — and an idea for a podcast — struck.

“We said, ‘We need to do a podcast on this’,” Nadeau says. “We were like, ‘Let’s put this out there and think what people think, because we think it’s fun.’”

Photography courtesy of Kara Nadeau and Jessica Girouard

They started poring over postcards, choosing the juiciest ones, and began recording episodes in March. Soon after, representatives of the Boston 2026 World Expo — the Super Bowl, if you will, of the philatelic and postcard world — came calling to ask if they’d be interested in broadcasting from the show in May.

“You tend to think of stamp collectors as old fuddy-duddies with their magnifying glasses, but I think there’s a desire within the philatelic community to open it up to other people and other generations,” Nadeau says.

The friends both have day jobs: Nadeau is a writer and Girouard a professional pet sitter. They release new episodes every Friday, usually taping several at a time in Nadeau’s home tavern. Unofficial researcher DJ Nutz, a taxidermy squirrel Nadeau picked up at a Maine antique store, and a photo of her great-great-great grandfather Peter Wood, a Civil War veteran who was found dead in a roadside ditch in Vermont after a night of drinking, look down from a shelf.

Nadeau likes to think he’d be proud of their efforts to bring the hidden histories of everyday people to light through their irreverent and rollicking episodes. As they dive deeper into their newfound hobby, the pair keep discovering just how much they have to learn.

“We just keep learning about postcards,” Nadeau says. “We keep saying over and over again, we don’t know anything. We’re just two women who thought postcards were kind of wacky.”