Mobituaries with Mo RoccaLong before her turn as the sermonizing Aunt Esther on "Sanford and Son," LaWanda Page was dazzling Black nightclub audiences - first as the flame-swallowing “Bronze Goddess of Fire”. Then, following in the footsteps of her childhood friend and eventual costar Redd Foxx, she became a queen of raunchy, tell-it-like-it-is stand up comedy. (Let’s just say Aunt Esther would not have approved of LaWanda’s act.) In this season 4 finale, Mo reflects on Page’s influential career with entertainment icon Whoopi Goldberg and remembers the adults-only "party record' phenomenon with comedian Alonzo Bodden.
Muhammad Ali and Joe Frasier for the first time.
In Heavyweight Champions Tip Fiftray, we have two undefeated.
Fighters and they are Jimmy Connors and Bjorn boor Or.
Gets broken serve once again and leads four to two in the final set.
The Steelers versus the Raiders, good love It. The nineteen seventies saw some ferocious rivalries. But I know what I'd pick as the fiercest of them all.
Oh, Fred, please help us. My church is raising monify our youth program. We want to buy ween.
We'll let him have one of yours. Bet what it's something.
The show was sandford AND's son, and when junkyard dealer Fred Sandford played by Red Fox and aunt Esther, his Bible toting sister in law, began trash talking, it got ugly and hilarious.
If we were alone on a raft in the middle of the.
Ocean, I'd rather kiss the octopus in the knock.
I wouldn't want you to kiss me. I'd rather be kissed by Snaggertude Jagga.
The character of aunt Esther joined the series at the end of season two, and for many in the audience, the actress playing her Lawanda Page was a new face, an overnight sensation, but both Red Fox and Lawanda Page were veteran comics with big followings.
We'd bring to the floor the young lady that recalled the record that was so dirty.
So rough, built in black nightclubs and through adults only party records.
This record is so rough that you wouldn't even let your own mother in law listen to it.
And let's just say aunt esther would not have approved of this material.
You know what he said to Adam in the gardener eaton one day.
She looked at all his in his hand. She said, you got the whole world in yon.
Man saying things that weren't said would be even more shocked than coming from a woman. Lewanda Page wasn't seen as a woman comet. You know, she was a star. She was funny.
In her fifties, she became one of the most popular people on TV.
I've come a long ways.
If it hadn't been for Red, I wouldn't be in position that I'm in now. I wouldn't have a maid, I wouldn't have a chauffeur, I wouldn't have a gardener because I couldn't afford it.
I thought the still he.
Wasn't in a nightclub, a celebrity roasting other celebrities.
Now, let's see which one is.
Betty White. Get a bunch of you albinos on one days and you all look alike.
She was funny as hell.
And black women, they will tear you up. They will tear you up, they will tell you about yourself.
But I had one confirmation. I finally got.
That sucker to go to church within and child. It was a beautiful tu.
But if Lawanda Page's life is a book, mainstream America only knows the last chapter.
If you went to clubs, you would know who she was. And let's just call it what it was.
If you weren't black, you didn't know who she was.
I can't test.
I can attest from CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart. I'm Morocca and this is mobituaries, This mobid Lwanda Page.
Ladies and gentlemen. Here she is the Queen of comedy.
Lorwanda September fourteenth, two thousand and two. Death of a comedy queen.
Thank you, thank you.
I noticed on the platform formerly known as Twitter, a picture of this beautiful woman in a swimsuit and somebody said, does anybody know who this is? And I scrolled down because I thought she looked familiar, and somebody said, it's it's an estor from Sanford, and so I went Hodie smoked.
Oh yeah, no, that listen. Lwanda Page is stunningly beautiful. And what ends up happening often, particularly with women of color, no one knows anything about us because we weren't really part of the regular world because unless you knew about black performers, you didn't know about.
A lot of folks. I'm talking with comedian and actress and Egot winner Whoopy Goldberg, and it's true Lawanda Page had a long and surprising career in showbiz before Sandford and Son that white audiences knew little about.
We're a lot better now about it, but in the fifties, unless you were in the know, you were not hanging out in the clubs where Lewanda was.
People didn't know.
You know, she's like blackfire or something. It's just you know, and she was hot.
Once upon a time, there was a little black girl in the Brewster projects of Detroit, Michigan. At fifteen, she was spighted by an ebony fashion fair talent scout, and her modeling career took on You Better work.
That's Luwanda Page in the intro to Rue Paul's nineteen ninety three seminal dance hit Supermodel turns out Rue Paul is a Lawanda Page super fan. Now, Lawanda was not born in the Brewster projects of Detroit. In fact, she wasn't even born Lawanda Page. Her name was Alberta Richmond when she came into the world in Cleveland, Ohio, in nineteen twenty. As a kid during the Great Depression, she'd dance on street corners for spare change. I would dream about being in show business, Lawanda would later tell the Black Entertainment magazine Roots, like I was Cinderella in a storybook. I thought I'd reach it through dancing. When her family moved to Saint Louis, Lawanda went to Banneker Elementary School, where she became friends with her future co star, Red Fox. He was two grades below her. Lawanda grew up fast, pregnant, and married at fourteen. Her son died in infancy.
At sixteen.
She had a daughter. By nineteen Lawanda was widowed. By then, she was already working the clubs as she later told one reporter she made thirty six dollars a week as a shake dancer. The shaking part had to do with the fringe she wore. I shook the fringe, she said, My did I shake that fringe. By this time, she'd taken the name Lawanda, perhaps to keep her religious mother from finding out what she was doing. When the club owner decided that Lawanda needed to shake up her act, she had a flash, so to speak. I was sitting in the dressing room and my lighter fluid spilled on my hand, she recalled. When she proceeded to light a cigarette, her hand caught fire, so did her imagination. Lawanda was going to do a fire act at a club in East Saint Louis called the Blue Flame. Yes, the Blue Flame. A drag queen named Taboo showed her the ropes. It's in the breathing. Lawanda remembered being taught, when you put the torch in your mouth, breathe out. If you don't, you're done like a roast. And always keep moving. As long as you keep moving, the flames don't burn you. That's how I became the Bronze Goddess of fire, swallowing flames walking on hot coals. She even brought a snake into her act. It was perilous work. She burned herself and merely burned down a few clubs, but the act was good enough to take on the road. There's this quote from a drummer who worked with her at the New Deli Cabaret in Vancouver. She'd light her finger and go around lighting guy cigarettes in the club. Then the lights would go off and she'd light up the tassels on her pasties and spin them like propellers in opposite directions.
It was wonderful.
You gotta have a give.
It got ave a gammick.
Now.
Lawanda never wrote a memoir, but in her later stand up work she talked about her early days. Here she is from her nineteen seventy nine album Sane Advice, talking about the first time she saw a certain pioneering black star of the silver screen.
All the pretty women in the movies in magazine were white, and when a pretty girl came on the screen, the white men they were allowed to pap and whistle, but the black food sat tight and kept quiet.
Had to hunt it.
They had to do it. Then came nineteen forty three, nineteen forty three. Baby, I remember the day the movie was Kevin in the Sky and the pretty woman was Lena Home and Honey, when Lena came on the screen, all them black southerns Honda they screen, they whistle. How they taught tell the buffet the popcorn machine.
Oh man, they throw down to ricks.
The theater in Saint Louis. They say, we don't want to sit down, we want to get down.
And I don't blame him, honey, because Leedom was bright light and damn near white.
She was a black beauty.
And right then I made up my mind I was going into show business. I went straight down town and got me a job dancing. Yes did.
Born in Cleveland, growing up in Saint Louis. And she wants to be a star. She wanted to be a Hollywood star. Can you just even relate or imagine like what that burning desire is or yeah.
Because you're watching these movies and it doesn't occur to you that that's not going to be you.
It doesn't occur.
To you because I mean, I loved all those movies that they made in the thirties and the forties and the fifties. I had no idea you know. I'm thinking of the letter in.
Particularly Danny Davis.
Where she comes down and says, shooting the guy.
But all I hut, I still love the lad I killed.
And I'm thinking that's what I want to do. And no one ever said, no, You're never going to be Benny Davis. My mother said, yes, of course, sure, just don't shoot anybody.
But you could do that.
God bless your mother.
But that's such an interesting point because that's what dreaming is, right, a suspension of disbelief, right, Yes.
And so I'm sure it never occurred to Lawanda that she wasn't going to be one of those women. Never ocurred to her, and never occurred to me either, till someone said.
Oh, you know you're black, don't you.
It's like, yeah, of course, I know.
Was that I have to do with this, with wanting to be the starter And what my mother would say is it has nothing to do with it. They might not understand everything, but they'll get it. Somebody will get it if you're good enough.
Of course, Lawanda's path was limited by legalized segregation. She worked at the informal network of black nightclubs and theaters known as the Chitlin Circuit. Here she is again from Saint Advice.
I was one and excited girl, but I had no idea what was ahead of me. It was August child and hot hot hop hop hop, hunted forty people, best costumes. All it was riding and living in the same booth. Before we got out of Saint Louis, my sixth day, daughter, my pet had died.
Time traveling on a show is like no trip you ever took the cover.
Maybe if you hear loud noise in the back, it's the luggage trying to get.
Out and child.
I open my window and the fumes from that bus till the whole proper meat in camp.
You know, visually, in my mind, I could see her on the bus with you know, nine thousand people, all performers, playing cards, smoking cigarettes, just because they could only stop at specific places and they could only stay in specific places.
That's of a time. That's of a time.
You of course know what this is like.
It's not easy to get up there and hold an audience like that and not rush it.
Yeah, well, you know, she is breathing, do you know what I mean? She's up there and she's breathing. She's like and then this habit. Can you believe it?
Oh?
Wait a minute, and then this happened.
It's a stop of patter that you don't hear often, but you hear with black comics, particularly female black comics. You have a little bit of the South, and you just telling what happened.
And I love that you said just breathing, because that's a big deal because people who don't know what they're doing, they're not breathing, they're just going right through.
They're nervous.
She's in no rush.
She'd tell the story the stage of hers who she is, and it's kind of fabulous.
But Lawanda hadn't even tried to stand up comedy until the mid nineteen fifties, when she was in her mid thirties and had settled in South Los Angeles. She was still the Bronze Goddess of fire dancing at a club called the Brass Rail when some of her fellow performers noticed how funny she was. As she later told Jet Magazine, when I got too old to dance, I turned to comedy. She started working with comedic duo Skillett and Leroy Records.
But that's the very fabulous Lerii skillet and Lwanda.
Many of Lawanda's bits were drawn from her own life. She'd been widowed three times before she even started doing comedy.
I should have known it never work out for old John and me honey, because it was written in the stones. I was a Burgo and that sucker was a line of honey, can take no kind of John. That's the only man I know that ever went to the unemployment office and lost his place in land.
Lawanda would work black comedy clubs for the next two decades. Her humor was as fiery as her dancing had been. Coming up after the break Lwanda Page Red Fox and The Age of the Party Record. Well, now, some of those albums, especially Lawanda's earlier ones, they're really blue. I don't think I'm a shrinking violet, but they're blue even for today.
They are dirty as hell.
Yes, yes, our next guest is dubbed the King of the Party Records. Basically that means they're intended for laughs in the living room. He's made thirty four albums and they have sold in the millions. He's kind of a stranger to television and a stranger to me, frankly, but I'm very anxious to meet him. He's got an enormous cult of admirers. Here is Red Fox.
In nineteen sixty six, talk show host MERV Griffin. Welcome to comedian Red Fox. We're all party records.
You're playing in a party. You have never been a party.
Put the records on when it's kind of dull, and then wait, yeah, are the body starts naughty?
Yes.
In this act, we're going to talk about party records and the role they played, not just in Lawanda Page's career, but in the careers of many major black comics. Now, these records were not for kids, as Red Box all but said in that clip we just heard. In fact, many of the albums came wrapped in brown paper.
It's so funny now to look back, because we're not talking that long ago. But America has always had this kind of false morality, like, oh, we don't do that. You know, it's like porn. It's like, oh, there's a fifty billion dollar business that no one buys. That's what these records were.
I'm talking to my friend, comedian Alonso Boden.
Got a new iPhone. Got a new iPhone costs somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. I don't know how much it costs because Siri body.
Alonso broke through after winning NBC's Last Comic Standing. I've had the great pleasure of being a panelist on NPR's comedy quiz show Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me with Alonso for over a decade. Alonzo has faint but fond memories of the Party record era.
Everybody knew about them, and people loved them, and it was really the only way you heard these comics. Right, we didn't have the internet. Someone got the record. They told you about the record, You told someone else about the record.
As the name would suggest, these records became big at parties.
My father had a bar in the basement, and this is how they socialized, you know. They had bars in the house or pool table or something like that, and they put the kids to bed, and this.
Is part of what came out at that later night party.
Okay, I need you now, of course, to set the scene. This is the Alonso Boden biopic. You're a kid. I mean, set the scene. Your dad's bar is downstairs. What's going on?
So my dad's bar is downstairs. He has friends over. They might be a couple from the neighborhood, and then some probably from work. We had to go to bed. Of course, the funny thing about me and my brother's room. It was also in the basement, so we weren't too far away. You could hear the laughter, you could hear the glasses tinkling. You know, you know it was a party, really, I know.
I said, you ought to be careful at night time and pull your shades down. I said, because last night I saw you and your wife making love.
He said, you kidding all I went to You'm home.
How important is Red Fox to this whole party record scene?
He was the man. He was probably the biggest star in that genre. Red Fox's stand up was almost all on these party records.
The party started in eighteen fifty five when Los Angeles doo wop producer Dootsey Williams visited the Oasis nightclub and saw Red Fox's set. Williams ran a tiny label called Duto Records, known for recording Earth Angel by the Penguins.
Earthing Joo, Earthingjoo.
Will You Be Minde?
But the label had recently started releasing novelty records. About Red Fox. Williams said he was so outrageous in such a way that nobody would ever think of putting him on a record. But I thought this guy can sell. There was no doubt that Fox was funny. In his late teens, he had worked in a New York City restaurant alongside a future civil rights leader. Years later, in his autobiography, Malcolm X would refer to Fox as Chicago Red, the funniest dishwasher on Earth. Red Fox would go on to become one of the first black comedians to headline Vegas. He would open his own La nightclub. But back in fifty five, Red was skeptical about this whole party record idea. He later recalled it was a black thing in a sense. So I said I'd go ahead and record for my black brother because nobody else had offered me anything. For the first album, Dootsey Williams sat in the club with a tape recorder and recorded Red's raunchy act. In nineteen fifty six, Laugh of the Party Volume one came out.
The Good Housekeeping Bureau has just released some vital statistics very important to all smokers. Do you know that out of four hundred and forty six doctors that switched to camels only two of them went back to women.
The Low Fi recording was a big fat hit. Box was the first stand up comedian black or white to release album, and according to comedy historian Cliff Nesteroff, after Fox, it became abnormal if a comic didn't put out records. Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, they all came after Red Fox. Over the next six years, Dudo released approximately twenty five Red Fox party records. In just the first two years they sold more than a million units.
They did a record with Red Fox and they sold a ton of records, and they said, wait a minute, we're on to something. Who else you got, you know? And they started recording these other comedians.
Black comedians like George Kirby, Sloppy Daniels, even a ventriloquist and dummy act known as Richard and Willie.
Huggin Yeah, Peason, Yeah, Kiss in sixth All Candoise, Yeah, good gouda man who are going to be there?
Yes, you and me?
And then in the late nineteen sixties, Laugh Records entered and soon dominated the party record scene. One of the biggest names in comedy ever would find his voice on the new label A lot.
Of people don't know this that Prior initially was a clean comic and he was following in Cosby's footsteps.
Yes, prior to the nineteen seventies, Richard Pryor was g rated. Here he is on the Murph Griffin Show in nineteen sixty six.
People worry about everything about offending with the breath.
You worry about it, right.
You can tell when somebody's worried about because they talked through their fingers.
But then Pryor had a kind of awakening.
And he basically had a breakdown. He basically kind of snapped, and he came out talking and cussing and being who he really was, and the audience immediately grasped. The audience immediately loved the honesty and how raw he was and who he really was. And from there, you know, he never looked back and he became Richard Pryor.
It was on nineteen seventy one's Craps, a blockbuster for Prior and for laugh Records, that audiences heard the real raw Richard Pryor started starting Cocaine.
Had goodness too, because I.
Wake up in the middle of night state.
Whoy Is it fair to say then that his party record phase helped Richard Pryor become Richard Pryor.
Well, yeah, because where else were you going to hear it. The only place you were going to hear Richard Pryor was on the records. But the records became so insanely popular through word of mouth, one hundred percent word of mouth. There was no there were no TV commercials for Richard Pryor records.
You know.
Now, it wasn't just the content that raw. It was also the sound quality. And some of these albums the sound quality is not great.
Is that fair?
Yeah, sound quality was horrible, But.
I'm wondering if that added to the experience of listening at home when you've got friends over.
Absolutely, absolutely, there's a raw element to it. Also, it's the inside stuff, right. These records weren't Red Fox in Las Vegas, you know what I mean? And these were Lawanda Page before she was famous, when she was just in the club. So the feel of being an insider definitely added to it.
Lawanda Page recorded five solo albums with Laugh Records. The material is funny and especially on those early records, downright filthy. We'd have to bleep so much of it for this podcast. We can't do it justice. Let me put it this way. Bands of the late Bob Sagett know how different his stand up material was from the character he played on Full House. Well the Lawanda you hear on her nineteen seventy seven album Watch It Sucker is so blue it would turn aunt esther every shade of red. Do not miss her bit about the nurse and the woman in the mental ward who demands a certain remedy. My goodness. Here's one bit from her first album, nineteen seventy one's mother is half a word, where a their dwell husband has tried to cover up his drinking by eating sardines. And you can guess where this is headed.
So she says, you've been dragging?
No, may I swear damn I ain't been dragging night, Blow your breath to the keyhole, blows the bread to the keyhole. First, thank she smells them sartines. She said, you know good and asking mother fuck?
She says, though out breaking in one headed, you go and pick up a mother.
Sidebar. Laugh Records didn't only produce black comedy acts. In nineteen seventy eight, a young Allison Arngrem, best known as Nelly, on Little House in the Prairie impersonated first daughter Amy Carter on a Laugh Records album, Dad, Where did I come from?
Plains? Georgia Hunne?
You know that, No, Daddy, I mean, where do babies come from? I asked Uncle Billy.
He said, babies come nine months after you've had too much bear.
Alison Armgrim's mother, voice actress Norma McMillan had played Caroline Kennedy on the hit First Family Comedy album back in nineteen sixty two. That's the album that starred von Meter as JFK. Check out the von Meter obituary for more on his story. One of Laugh's last records was a song full of fish ponds called Wet Dream by white comedian Kip Adatta.
I walked over to a place called the Oyster Bar a real time, but I knew the owner who used to play for the Dolphins. I said, I Gil, you have to yell.
He's hard at herring.
But the label will always be best known for releasing black and blue material. Any thought on the legacy of these party records.
I think the legacy of these party records now is I would say more YouTube than Netflix, because it's more the self produced it's the clips from the comedy club versus the polished production show. And we've seen comics get famous. We've seen it happen where people go viral on YouTube or some other platform and become famous. I think that's the legacy of the party record.
Coming up next, the King and Queen of underground party records land squarely in the mainstream.
Oh you call me the.
How did not call you?
Dear?
It is like Bambi's father.
You Oh we the lad he the door.
In the early nineteen seventies, Lawanda Page was caring for her ailing mother in South Los Angeles when she got an offer that would take her career to a whole new level. NBC's Sanford and Son was the first network TV show with a predominantly black cast since Amos and Andy in the early nineteen fifties. In its second season, the show was already a hit, starring Red Fox as junk dealer and widower Fred Sandford. In real life, Red Fox's bo Thurs name was actually Fred Sandford. Lawanda was being called in to read for the role of Fred's Holier than Thou sister in law aunt esther. Here's Lawanda herself explaining what happened to interviewer Bobby Wygant.
Well, what actually happened. I was working in a nightclub in Los Angeles with a comedy team Skirt and Leroy that we've been together for twenty years, and Aaron Rubin, the producer, he happened to be in the club that night.
The producer was impressed by Lawanda and unaware of her shared history with Fox.
So he goes back and he tells Red. He says, that girl that you know I saw with Skirterton Leroy.
He says, I think she'll be the girlfriend esther.
So radas, oh, that's Lawanda.
I know. Well, I know Redd all my life because we went to school together.
Red Fox wasn't just bringing the comedy he'd honed on the Chitlin circuit to network television. He brought many of his fellow comics along with him too. Aaron Ruben, the Sanford and Son producer who'd seen Lawanda in the club, said, quote, Fox comes up with names like Tangerine, Sublet and Leroy and Skillett, consummate performers he worked with in the twenty five dollars a week nightclub days. The names befuddle the NBC casting department where they are totally unknown.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is somebody who understands that if he doesn't do it, it's not going to get done.
I'm sure Red said I need this character. I know exactly who can do it. This is what be Goldberg again, because he knew.
No one was going to call her unless he did. And that's kind of how it's always been. You call the folks, you know, and if somebody's having a hard time, you do the best. That's sort of bring them along.
TV was a change of pace for Lwanda Page, who was fifty two. Once she showed up on set. She was nervous the first week on the job, as she later told Sally Jesse Raphael, I.
Had never read a script before.
That's my first parent and I was reading the directions along with the lions.
Yeah, that's right for you to say. I say, watch it, Trucker, if you walk out the door.
The producers were planning to fire and replace Lawanda, but Red intervened. He reportedly said, if she goes, I.
Go well, because he knew what she could do, and it was meaningful if he said he was gonna leave you, because he would.
Leave about Lawanda Page. Red Fox reportedly said, you never heard of the lady, But the night that first show goes on the air, there'll be dancing in the streets of every ghetto in the United States.
Down not again, Hufrey, you would I beat today.
My sister married you, and you still a dead beat today. This nest now you know good and will today I married your sister. I was loaded, Yeah, you was loaded, all right. You were so drunk you fell on the preacher.
The sanctimonious aunt Estor quickly became a fan favorite at the height of her fame on Sanford and Son, though Lawanda Page was still living in South LA. The money is nice, she told reporters. It goes to mama, and.
I'm gonna take care of mama, and I don't care what happens. I'm taking care of mama. And God just fixed it. So he just opened the door for me for Safin's son. You know how to walk right in, and Red put my feet in the door. So it's up to me to keep it there.
In nineteen seventy six, Lawanda's mother died. The next year, the Sanford and Son series ended with the departure of Red Fox, but by then, Lawanda Page was a regular face on TV.
A lovely lady, one of them moms.
I loved her on the Dean Martin celebrity roasts. These roasts were like the Variety pack of entertainment comedians like Don Rickles, Ruth Buzzy and Nipsey Russell sharing a dais with Frank Sinatra, Jaja Kahboorr, Senator Barry Goldwater. Here is Lewanda roasting Red Fox.
Been after me since I was a kid, back in Saint Louis.
Honey, he was there the night I want a beauty contest.
Remember that red They gave me a silver cup.
Yeah, they gave you a silver cup. All right, give your teeth in.
You just keep quiet.
Your old fish had food. You ain't going to beauty. You should have seen his first wife, hon That woman was herdly.
Musy.
Honey. She was thought early if her picture was on a stamp, nobody.
Would live her.
The thing that I think about those roasts, those roasts were done with love.
You know, she was there roasting her buddy, her childhood friend.
But she also took shots at celebrities she didn't grow up with, like George Burns and Milton Burrell.
Hey, what you say at Milton burh.
Yeah, you lift the television. If you can steal her caps like you do jokes, you'd be a star in my neighborhood.
I asked Alonso Bowden if he thought Lawanda might have been intimidated in that company.
She came from clubs where you had to talk smack to the audience, where you had Heckler's, where you had trust me. She was fine, She had no problem.
She let them have it. They weren't ready for her.
She was battle tested like nobody else.
Yeah.
Absolutely, you think she's going to be afraid of a Beverly Hills ballroom.
This is a woman who had literally eaten fire for a stretch of her career.
Exactly exactly.
And it wasn't just that, it was also, you know, riding the bus from city to city and you can't stay at this hotel and all of that. She lived through and worked through and dealt with all of that. And now she's in a ballroom in Beverly Hills and she gets to make fun of Don Rickles and Milton Burrel and you know, Sinatra. I don't know, I don't know if anyone was brave enough. Other than Rickles, I don't know if anyone was brave enough to make fun of Sinatra.
But outside of that, in nineteen seventy nine, age fifty nine, Lawanda released her final album, Sane Advice. It was the cleanest of her party records and the most transparently autobiographical. On that album cover, she's wearing a gown, She's in front of a fancy car.
She's made it. But now she's got even more to say about that experience.
But Honey Page was alive today, he'd be sorry he ever cheated on me, Because here I am, Honey, famous, famous, Honey, a star. Honey, Honey got a wax figure of me on the East Coast and the West.
Coat in the Stars Hall of Fame.
And I got my foot prints on Hollywood Boulevard. At Grumman's Chinese Theater. I was sitting on the bus bench in a park.
This truck ran over my feet.
Show did her.
How I made it?
Baby? A side last, A side last, Thank God, Almighty.
I'm a start lest.
She had become a big star. She was one of the most popular people on television at that point. But she's still making a joke at her own expense there.
Yeah.
Yeah, because you want people to know you haven't become too big for your bridges.
And she wouldn't leave Watts.
She at one point she had a bit where she said people thought it said I moved to Beverly Hill. She said, I wasn't going to leave Watts and if she made all sorts of jokes about.
Living in Watts, but she wasn't going to leave there.
No, I ain't even wanted time.
I know it's the Lost Asses ghetto, and I know we got criming watch. Honey is so bad. If you ain't home by nine o'clock, you can be declared legally dead.
Listen.
You stick with what you know and you make it work. And nobody did that better than she did. I wish I had known her, Do you know what I mean? I wish I had known her.
In the nineteen nineties, Lawanda appeared on popular TV shows like Family Matters in Living Color and Martin, I'm.
The fourth person that's been hit in the past two weeks.
Go dang, well, what did the police say?
Move.
She spoofed her church lady image in films like Friday, where she played at Jehovah's witness. Meanwhile, lines from Lawanda's party records began being sampled by hip hop legends like Chupac Shakur and Wa and Two Live Crew. In nineteen ninety one, Lawanda Page's childhood friend, Red Fox died. At his funeral, Lawanda said, Red made me the star that I am. If it hadn't been for him, I'd probably be in the poorhouse. Read lived the life he loved, and loved the life he lived. By this time, Lawanda had been ordained as an evangelist in the Holiness Church. She was following in the footsteps of her brother, a Baptist minister, and her daughter, also a preacher. On September fourteenth, twenty oh two, Lawanda Page died of complications from diabetes. She was eighty one. Lawanda Page was many things. The bronze goddess, a fire a queen of comedy, and let me repeat, you must go listen to some of those party records. She was a wife three times over, a mother, a devoted daughter, a person of deep faith, and as RuPaul knew, she was fabulous.
Naoma Christie.
But I want to end with another musical clip of Lawanda. It's Fred Sandford and aunt esther enjoying a rare moment of warmth. Sort of imagine us bringing together again after all of these years.
Seems like only yesterday. Oh I remember, where was it?
Down by the old.
New stream.
It wasn't a stream, it was a lagoon goon.
Two legends of comedy who had come so far, enjoying the spotlight together.
It was.
New.
You don't know nothing that I loved you true.
I got to throw it. I was sixteen.
Al your shoes, I your really is queen Queen cong down bineyreat.
Thank you for listening to Season four of Mobituaries. We're a very small and dedicated team that puts this show together. I am grateful to work with such smart, creative, hard working people, and we're grateful to you for sticking with us. It would be wonderful if you would spread the word about Mobituaries to your friends and family, and reading and reviewing our podcasts really does help. You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter at morocca and check out Mobituaries. Great Lives Worth Reliving, the New York Times best selling book now available in paperback and audiobook. It includes plenty of stories not available on the podcast. This episode of Mobituaries was produced by Aaron Schrank. Our team of producers also includes Hazel Brian and me Moroka, with engineering by Josh Han. Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Our archival producer is Jamie Benson. Mobituary's production company is Neon Hummedia. Indispensable support from Reginald Bazil and everyone at CBS News Radio special thanks to Steve Razi's Rand Morrison and Alberto Rabina. Executive producers for Mobituaries include Megan Marcus, Jonathan Hirsch, and Morocca. The series is created by Yours truly and again thank you for listening.
