New reality show declutters 8 Kansas Citians’ homes. The first has, um, unusual taste

The world will meet Suzi Sanderson on Thursday when she stars in the first episode of Amy Poehler’s new reality series, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.”

In her first scene, the former lounge singer, is wearing a sequined, zebra-striped blouse and taking a deep drag from a joint, her eyes wide like Betty Boop.

“Meet Suzi Sanderson. According to Suzi, she’s a 75-year-old pothead with an appetite for adventure and men,” Poehler narrates.

As Sanderson watched the episode for the first time with The Star this week, she laughed and said, “I can’t believe in the opening I’m smoking a joint.”

It’s true, though. Sanderson, who lives in Johnson County, is a pothead from way back when she was a young woman eking out a living as a singing waitress at the iconic Crystal Palace dinner theater in Aspen, Colorado. She met a lot of famous people there, celebrities whose pictures used to hang on the walls of her spare bedroom before the invasion of the Swedes last summer.

The rest of Poehler’s introduction made Sanderson’s eyes go wide this week.

“Suzi’s house is a map of her memories, with trinkets from her travels everywhere you look,” Poehler continued. “Also penises. Lots and lots of penises.

“Suzi needs a death cleaning to unload some of these penises. Or is it peni? You know what? Let’s just call them souvenirs.”

That’s also true. But Sanderson didn’t expect producers to be that enthralled by her phallic memorabilia — gifts from friends who know her bawdy side.

“I just worry that the wrong people are going to watch this and get the wrong idea, you know,” said Sanderson, who is single and, thanks to the show, contemplating replacing her current long-distance relationship with a perhaps more fulfilling one.

The unscripted reality show comes from the creators of the hit Netflix series “Queer Eye,” who had filmed two seasons of that show in Kansas City. “Parks and Recreation” alum Poehler is a co-producer and narrates the series but isn’t seen on camera.

All eight episodes debut Thursday on Peacock.

Shooting “Queer Eye” here led the new show’s co-producer, Michael Williams, back to Kansas City for filming last summer, he previously told The Star.

The Kansas City Film Office had given “Queer Eye” royal treatment, “from what restaurant should we eat at to ‘I need a city bus tomorrow’ or ‘we need to close this street,’” Williams said.

“In other cities, when there’s a lot of other big projects, you can’t have that hand-holding … and we like to have our hands held. Everyone loved it. Crew members loved it. The cast loved it. Everybody had a great, great, great time.

“So when it came up to ‘Swedish,’ and the typical thing to save money is to shoot it in L.A., we just said absolutely not.”

What is Swedish death cleaning?

The show sent three experts from Sweden to help Sanderson and seven other Kansas Citians and families unclutter their homes and lives. “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” is inspired by the popular 2018 book of the same name by Swedish artist and mother of five Margareta Magnusson.

Viewers will learn about the Swedish practice of döstädning — dö means “death” and städning means “cleaning.”

In the simplest terms, it means getting rid of the stuff that you don’t want your loved ones to deal with after you die.

“For me it means going through all my belongings and deciding how to get rid of the things I do not want anymore,” Magnusson writes. “Just look around you. Several of your things have probably been there for so long that you do not even see or value them anymore.

“It does not necessarily have to do with your age or death, but often does. Sometimes you just realize that you can hardly close your drawers or barely shut your closet door.”

Death cleaning can take years. For the show, though, the first phase fills a one-hour episode in which the three experts walk each “hero” like Sanderson through a thoughtful purge.

The participants came from all walks of life on both sides of the state line — empty nesters, single folks, families. They each craved the peace of minimalism, but for different reasons.

One person lost both parents within two years and inherited everything they owned. Another participant with Stage 4 cancer didn’t want people going through her belongings and just throwing things away after she dies.

Wait, is this Carol Burnett?

Sanderson was camera-ready with a wide smile, throaty guffaw, sly humor and short red hair like her idol, comedian Carol Burnett.

She lives in a condo surrounded by souvenirs from her travels around the world — she collects hats, refrigerator magnets and shot glasses.

A friend nominated her for the show after Sanderson gave her some of the dozens of costumes, some dating back to the ‘60s, she had stored in the basement. Many of them she wore while running a singing telegram company in Aspen. She said she sang for the late John Denver every year on his birthday.

She didn’t expect the show to affect her the way it did. She didn’t even know what Swedish Death Cleaning was until her friend nominated her, and then she read the book.

Over the last couple of years nearly 60 of her friends have died, she acknowledged.

But when the production company rang her doorbell last year, “that’s when I gave them the line, ‘You know guys, I’m not ready to die yet. I’m still trying to get laid,’” she said.

‘Less is more’

Sanderson made a confession on the show that undoubtedly will resonate with others who live alone. (She has a cat.)

“I’m kind of a hermit, but I just noticed in the last five or six years I’m starting to get lonely,” she said.

She admitted she is a “prisoner of my possessions because nobody wants them. and I think they’re treasures. They’re priceless to me but it’s keeping me from moving on with my life.

“And I didn’t want kids but I’d love to have grandkids. So maybe I’ll find an old man who’s got grandkids and hook up.”

Magnusson preaches that the first step is pulling things out of storage. Then consider: Who do you think will take care of all that when you are no longer here? “Mess is an unnecessary source of irritation,” she says.

To help Sanderson and the others achieve less-is-more peace, the show sent a three-person Swedish army to their homes.

Sanderson was expecting “two very tall, robotic gentlemen with blond hair.”

Who she got: Johan Svenson, an interior designer. Ellinor Engström, an organizer. And Katarina Blom, a psychologist.

“Together they are a team of death cleaners.. Yes you heard me right … cleaning out your crap so others don’t have to when you’re dead. It’s a very Swedish thing. You’ll get it,” Poehler narrates.

When they walked through her front door the first time, Sanderson immediately hugged Svenson and asked him how he spelled his first name as Poehler, in her voice-over, observed: “Amazing flirt, like varsity level.”

Sanderson explained she is a vagabond who has “traveled all over the world and collected all these things. I’ve become very attached ... really that’s all I have now. Everything brings back a memory.”

She’s still traveling and gathering memories when she’s not holding down two jobs. She has been a real estate broker with Boveri Realty Group LLC for 20 years. She’s also a travel agent, a career she began in 1983 in Aspen, selling ski packages after wrapping up more than a decade of performing at The Crystal Palace.

“You see I lived my life in reverse and played the first 50 years when I was young and healthy, knowing full well that I would have to work till I fall over or go on that cruise to nowhere,” she told The Star.

Strong Ikea influence

It didn’t take the Swedes long to assess the condo, and Sanderson.

“Suzi is such an interesting character,” Svenson said during a coffee break on the show. “She feels very American to me. She’s loud, talks all the time, she’s funny, she’s outgoing. She’s a performer. I mean she’s everything like the cliche of an American ... I think it’s interesting that she won’t let go, she doesn’t want to let go.”

“I do think she needs this kind of lift,” said Blom. “She’s definitely gotten to a place in her life where she’s just stuck.”

Svenson told Sanderson a house should be the canvas of a person’s life, full of fond memories. But there’s a fine line between that and what the Swedes refer to as a “kingdom of death” that can make life feel heavy.

The show focused on two rooms: Sanderson’s cluttered home office — “where organization and manila folders go to die,” Poehler said — and the spare room decorated with old photos.

“You know how everybody’s got a room or a chair where they dump everything. And what I ran into, I have all these pictures over here, I ran out of room on the wall. … Everything I look at reminds me of a time or person, and some who aren’t here anymore,” she said.

“So I come in here and visit my friends. This is my friends room.”

“Suzi needs a death cleaning because she lives clearly in the past,” Engström said on the show. “She doesn’t think so highly about her future or even her current life.

“She loves having people around her, obviously, she’s so social. But her house is not very inviting for anyone, unless you want to have a penis in your face.”

The ‘red dot’ method

Engström had Sanderson put red dot stickers on things she wanted to banish and green dots on things to save. “The idea is to work through your stuff and see what serves you in your life right now,” the organizer said. “That changes over your life.”

The show sent Sanderson away to a hotel on the Country Club Plaza during the one-week makeover.

One of the first things she noticed in the reveal of her home office was the new, light-colored Pergo flooring that replaced the old carpeting.

Both rooms, post-transformation, have a spare, Swedish, modern-vibe with light-colored furnishings and, as promised, no clutter. Both rooms today still look like they did after the makeovers.

Sanderson got to keep all the new stuff for free. She’s not sure where the furniture came from, but because of the clean lines, she suspects Ikea. Likely.

She decided to mail all the photos that used to hang on the walls to the people in the pictures. In one of them she is standing next to Kevin Costner at a golf tournament.

Poehler joked how she’d love to see Costner’s face when he opened that package.

Svenson was particularly excited when he heard about the costumes in the basement. The jacket with a sequined American flag on the back. Shiny gold pants. A shimmery dress made of shiny silver discs.

He told Sanderson he had an idea where the costumes could have a new life.

On stage at Missie B’s

Boy was Sanderson shocked when she saw drag queens at the 39th Street bar Missie B’s parade onto the stage wearing her old costumes.

She loved it.

Then she got on stage and sang a song from her old days as a singing waitress. Missie B’s has since asked her back to perform. (Sanderson joked it would have to be during happy hour because any later is past her bedtime.)

The club is hosting a watch party for the show that begins at 4 p.m. Thursday. It’s open to the public.

The show lit a new fire under her. She’s now thinking about moving on from Kansas City, meet new people, maybe find a new man with grandchildren. She’s considering Mexico or Palm Desert, California.

She expects this next phase to be much more emotional.

“I knew you guys were going to declutter my life and my house. I didn’t know you were going to declutter my soul,” she told her Swedish advisers. “It’s good but it hurts. It’s letting go of a lot of stuff.

“I think you guys have opened up my life by getting rid of my life. Does that make any sense? It was like somebody kind of scraped off the barnacles of my heart.”