Follow Your Dreams

I’m having an amazing time on my Beautiful tour, with killer back to back shows this week in Portland and Phoenix, and I was thinking back on how all this got started.

When I was a kid, my family was one of the first on my block to have a VCR. It had wood on it and stuff! Remember when electronics would be encased in wood?! That was really weird. Like they were trying to disguise it as furniture. It was a huge machine, and would open up its big metal mouth so you could insert a tape. We rented movies at this cheap video store two blocks from my house, and my favorite movie to watch was Richard Pryor’s “Live on the Sunset Strip.” He was so amazingly funny to me, even though I didn’t fully understand all the jokes because they were mostly about sex and drugs and I had yet to experience those things. The other film that completely changed my world was Eddie Murphy’s “Delirous.” As a standup, Eddie Murphy was my ultimate hero. I laughed at that show so much I almost got sick. The “Ice Cream” bit was my favorite. I wanted to be like him. I knew that I was going to be a standup comic. That was going to be my life, and I didn’t care about anything else.

I think that we all have the potential to be anything we want to be, and I am living proof of that. I was just a kid, and yet I was able to make my dreams come true and I continue to do so every day. If you love something, I think you have to just do it. Don’t worry about what people will say. Follow your dreams, because there is a reason why you have them. They are the path to your destiny.

7 thoughts on “Follow Your Dreams

  1. I’ve always had a desire to be successful, but being famous holds little appeal to me. I am a single father, and raising my daughter trumps anything I could ever pursue in life. I’ve always been a comedian, but I just never got paid for it, that’s all. All my life, I have always made my friends laugh with my observations, and I really think that I’ll never stop. I have a blogsite where I publish parodies of songs that I have written new comical lyrics for, but the comical ditties have not earned me a dime despite them receiving favorable reviews through a community parody website that I frequent. I am perfectly OK with this because I just love to make people laugh. Fame would make me nervous about the effects on my daughter, and the loss of privacy would not be worth it IMHO.

    On the VCR craze, back in early 1981, my uncle in Alberta, Canada went to an estate auction and got involved with another gent bidding on a brand new VCR. It was just like a poker game with each raising the bid. Only after the other guy raised his paddle and said he wanted to bid $1000 did my uncle back off. Uncle Jim has passed on now, but God rest his soul, my uncle probably sailed into the afterlife laughing his ass off. It turns out the thing was a Betamax.
    We never had a VCR, and I didn’t have one until the late 80s, when I was in my mid 20s. I remember Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy’s videos though. Eddie’s “Raw” was funny as hell too. Thanks 4 the laughs Margaret. Take care.

  2. Very well said Margaret. Glad to hear your tour is going well and thanks so much for checking out Transamerican Love Story. Very cool of you.

  3. I was at your show last night and I just wanted to Thank you for making me laugh harder than I have in years – it was fantastic!

  4. Ahhh those memories I remember seeing “Delirious”. I love the Elvis impersonations that he did too. I manged to see Richard Pryor’s last stand up movie in the theater. This was way back in the early Eighties. I never laughed so hard.

  5. Right now I feel like I’m at a bit of a crossroads, where I can take a path towards my dream, or stay stuck in my day to day… it is a tough decision to take that path less traveled. I’ve always told other people that when a decision is difficult it isn’t because you don’t know ‘what’ to do, it is because in your heart of hearts you know what to do but are too chicken to do it. I hate having to take my own advice!

  6. I remember my first VCR. That shit was HUGE. The remote sucked. Half the tapes you put in it didn’t work. I tried to set the timer on it to record my shows and it NEVER worked. Ahh, I also remember the 2 TV sets we had when I was child that were COMPLETELY cased in wood. There were definitely trying to make it look like furniture. My parents are good with changing with the time so when the last set broke they hunted day and night like I HAVE TO HAVE A WOOD TV! haha, they finally made the decision not to buy one from an antique store and bought and entertainment center. haha.

    ps – happy 420!

  7. …less than six hours after being fortunate enough to experience your Grand Prairie performance only four rows away from the stage, I feel confident in confirming that your calling is blessed…

    thank you for consistently making us recognize the depths of our beauty

    Signed,
    QBM w/a song about eating out stuck in his head

    *wink*

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