Latest / EST's "Truth Be Told" / "Whoopi & Me" by Jenna Jackson

Transcript

"Whoopi & Me" by Jenna Jackson · EST's "Truth Be Told"

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome to season two of Truth Be Told, Love and Theater.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: 14 new stories, each performed at Ensemble Studio Theater as part of Truth Be Told, a night of amazing, weird, embarrassing, profound, and completely true stories created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Season two draws from two sold-out nights: The Moment I Knew and The Theater.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Every Monday, tune in for stories of love and realization, and every Thursday for stories of the joys and madness behind the curtain.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And now, without further ado, from writer Jenna Jackson, a girl who has learned everything she knows about funny from the great black comics of the 80s and 90s, finds what she's missing and a new role model.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, how's everyone doing?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: We're good, we're good, we're excited, we're ready to hear some stories.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, good, good, okay, good.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, as a child, my sister and I had the privilege of being the entertainment for the adults at any family group or function.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like we were at a barbecue cookout or a post-Thanksgiving meal, and my uncle, grandmother, auntie, some adult would be like, hey, hey, hey, come over here, do that dance thing that your kids do.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Do the thing, sing, sing the song that I told you to sing.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Sing that, sing that.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I learned early on how to perform on cue.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: It might be why I'm really good at remembering random songs, jingles, quotes from movies, etc.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's material for the show that could happen at literally any moment.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: One of our frequent stages was Sunday dinner after church.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: We'd go to my grandparents' house after praising the Lord all the live-long day, and then we'd have an amazing meal cooked by my grandfather, and my sister and I would do the post-dinner show.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: That usually consisted of us singing, dancing, telling stories, or whatever would come to our minds.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I was about eight, maybe ten years old at the time.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: My sister was about 12 to 14, so you can imagine the stories that we shared didn't have a lot of depth or nuance.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Stories about mean teachers, playing freeze tag outside with no real through line or any sort of story structure.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: To save us from constantly having to mine our very limited life experiences, my mother came up with a solution: stand-up comedy.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And not just any stand-up comedy.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: At 10 years old, I was allowed to watch Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, and Bill Cosby.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I'm not talking about just some light edits.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about I watched Eddie Murphy Raw, Richard Pryor live at the Sunset Strip, and Bill Cosby himself.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Did you know that Eddie Murphy's Raw contained the F-word 223 times?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: It literally set the record count for the highest number of F-words for a full-length film, only to be surpassed by Scarface.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Stop.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: As you conclude, see, these are not necessarily age-appropriate shows.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever had that moment when you're watching something when you're older and you realize you're like, why did my parents let me watch that?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what were they thinking?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: But there was me and my sister not just watching, but studying these shows.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, committing them to memory.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And this would be the content that we chair around the dinner table with our grandparents after church.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So we would even do a rehearsal in the car on the way over so we knew which jokes could be somewhat appropriate or where to take out the curses.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Jokes like when Cosby would say, dentist, tell you not to pick your teeth with any sharp metal object.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Then you sit in their chair, and the first thing they grab is an iron hook.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Or when Eddie Murphy talks about wanting McDonald's, and his mother, instead of making him a burger that the neighborhood kids would get, they would sing and be like, Oh, we got McDonald's, we got McDonald's.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he would stand there with this big welfare green pepper burger that his mother made.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Or can you imagine me at 11, pretending to be Richard Pryor, having a heart attack, rolling around on the floor, and then being mad that I'm dying and waking up with white people standing all around me, upset that I've wound up in the wrong heaven, and then knowing that I would have to listen to Lauren's Welk the rest of my day.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even know who Lawrence Welk was.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: I had no idea.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So my sister and I would take turns saying these bitch, jokes, doing these voices, and my mom and my grandparents are cracking up.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's where I learned the euphoria of audience response.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: While finding more material, I stumbled upon a show that literally changed everything.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was Whoopi Goldberg's One Woman Show.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: There I was probably no more than 11 or 12, and there's this black woman on stage.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: She has presence, charisma, confidence.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Whoopi was like an adult, but not like an adult doll.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like she wasn't old, like Pryor was old or Cosby was old.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: She was kind of like, you know, closer to me.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: She was wearing leather pants and she had like these dreadlocks.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: I had never seen anything like that on TV before.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, most of the time for TV back then, black women were represented for people like Whitney Houston or Janet Jackson, you know, lighter, long hair, waves, curls, the like, not thinner and with dreads.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the thing: Whoopie wasn't just telling jokes.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: She was embodying different people.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: People I didn't even know could be black people.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you you mean to tell me there's black surfers with Valley Girls accents?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: To be like, I said okay, you said okay, we said okay, okay?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: That there are older Caribbean women who are having secret trists with wizened white men?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: She actually even played somebody who was kind of differently able-bodied, and told one of my favorite lines about the sound.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: She said, because I hate.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds like pigeons and tap shoes.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: She was surprising and funny and animated, commanding of the space, all of the things.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then she did a character who was a little girl with a white blouse on her head as her long, luxurious blonde hair.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: How she wanted it so that she could feel beautiful.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I froze.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: How did she know?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: Were there cameras in my house that I wasn't aware of?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: At 11, I too had put something on my head, a long white towel, because I too wanted long, luxurious blonde hair.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: I too didn't like the way that I looked.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was fat, I was bullied, and I wanted some validation of being normal or pretty.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: In that moment I felt seen, almost exposed, that she had spoken a secret experience that I thought only me and my bathroom mirror knew.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: By the end of the piece, the little girl had taken off the white t-shirt and she had learned to accept herself as she was.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: This wasn't just learning comedic timing or great storytelling or getting fodder for adults to laugh.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's the power that theater has that can unlock truth and bring you closer to yourself.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: It showed me that my experiences were worthy to be shared on a stage.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Seeing Whoopi gave me a glimpse of what I could possibly become.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have to tell someone else's experiences or someone else's jokes.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I can hold center stage as myself, giving life and breadth to my stories because they're worthy to be seen, shared, and told.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like right now.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I say thank you to Whoopi for showing me what's possible.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for showing me the way.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Jenna Jackson is a storyteller, writer, teacher, and performer who lives in Brooklyn.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: She currently works to amplify the stories of frontline healthcare workers at 1199 SCIU, the largest healthcare union in the nation, when not working on her plays and screenplay.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Jenna enjoys travel, cooking, soca music, and donuts.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Truth Be Told was created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick, and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Svagar.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends and keep listening.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: More stories of the Moment I Knew will be released every Monday and about theater every Thursday.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And do hit like and subscribe, it really helps.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time, remember, truth wants to be known.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yours too.