Before cannabis, Stacey Rusch spent years learning how to hold an audience, whether the room contained yoga students, morning-news viewers, QVC shoppers, or a table full of Real Housewives.
There is a 2021 résumé still circulating online that explains Stacey Rusch better than most reality-TV biographies ever could.
It is from years before SHAYO and before The Real Housewives of Potomac turned her particular cadence, optimism, and pearl-clutching composure into Bravo fodder. Under “Skills,” Rusch lists sales experience, improvisation, storytelling, live performance, health and wellness, and the ability to make guests comfortable on air. Her work history jumps from Washington television to QVC to yoga instruction. Among her former yoga clients: the White House Athletic Center, American University, the CIA, and NASA.
Read five years later, it feels less like an old TV résumé than a blueprint. Rusch has spent years learning how people connect to a person, a product, and a story. Now she has brought those skills somewhere considerably messier than a television studio: cannabis.
“The joy of connection!” Rusch tells High Times when asked what connects the various versions of her career. Later in the same answer, she puts it another way: “my passion is and always will be making a positive connection.”
That may sound relentlessly sunny. With Rusch, relentless sunniness appears to be part of the point.
Before the Housewives, There Was the Pitch
Selling something on live television is a strange art. There is no edit to save you, no dead air to disappear in post, and no room to suddenly discover that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Rusch’s résumé says her QVC work was live and unscripted, requiring detailed product knowledge and the ability to improvise.
In a 2025 interview with Vulture, Rusch described the machinery behind that ease: hours …
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Author: Holly Crawford / High Times
