Bill Cosby comes to Auditorium Theatre
Bill Cosby to headline two shows at Auditorium Theatre
You hear the voice and immediately think: “I know this guy.” It is a comforting feeling. He is the fellow in the warm sweaters on The Cosby Show, the Jell-O spokesman, the throaty “Hey, hey, hey” of Fat Albert, the man who dared to bring New Coke to America.
If you’re a little older, you may remember him as the first African-American to play a lead role on a TV drama, I Spy, or from the children’s show The Electric Company, or from his string of seven Grammy-winning comedy albums. “Why is there air?” he’d ask, his voice a mixture of wonder and dumbfoundedness. And the answer was so obvious: “There’s air to blow up basketballs, air to blow up volleyballs …”
In his familiar, genial manner, Cosby immediately took charge of the interview in advance of his two shows Saturday at the Auditorium Theatre. I never had a chance: During a generous, hour-long phone conversation from Los Angeles, he spoke for about 55 of those 60 minutes. “I’m with the FBI,” he says mysteriously, in the opening moments. “We’re trying to find out why people keep looking the wrong way.”
Good luck. What can a 72-year-old comic add to the national conversation these days? In recent years, Cosby has challenged African-American young people to embrace standards of self worth and achievement that he says are all but lost in today’s society. Some have applauded this point of view. Some, such as hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, have accused Cosby of being out of touch with the times.
Cosby meanders about in an easygoing, grandfatherly stroll, frequently stepping into tangents. Start with the coffee percolator. The story is from Cosby’s childhood, an era of kids making scooters out crates decorated with bottle caps, and a Cosby family so poor that they often could not afford a Christmas tree.
“My mother loved coffee,” Cosby says. “She would get the coffee out, put it in a strainer, pour the boiling water into it, and it would go innnnn-toooo the cup.” There’s something about Cosby’s speaking style that turns “into” into the most-important word in the sentence. Picking up on his mother’s coffee ritual, Cosby explains how he saved his money — “$20, I thought I was rich” — and went into Stern’s department store to buy her a Christmas gift. “It was electric, it was black plastic and stainless steel, it was a percolator, and it cost $18,” he says. “The lady, a nice woman, I told her it was for my mother, and she did a special wrapping for me. And she gave a card for me to give her and I wrote, ‘To mom, all the love a son can give.’
“Christmas comes, I don’t remember what I got. I do remember we had a tree that year. These trees, if they were human, they would be happy to have us, as pitiful as they looked, they probably didn’t imagine they would ever brighten a family.”
He presented the gift. She loved it, but … “she never used it,” Cosby exclaims. “She put it up on something in the living room, like a trophy.”
Such stories are often such warm homilies from the old days, illustrated with precisely remembered imagery. Yet Cosby doesn’t actually live in the past. Each vintage vignette is a thread binding his life’s work.
“Look at the TV shows that I do, that I’m in charge of,” Cosby says. “You see education standing way out in front, the importance thereof.” He extols the influence of teachers and counselors, “to control the sadness and the problems that so many kids have in being homeless, of not living with their biological parents. We just need people to lead. There are certain programs in the neighborhoods that are there to help people in the lower-economic areas, and people are crying out for this.”
We cannot look away, says Cosby, who holds a doctorate in education. He recalls a recent conversation with a friend whose talented son is turning his back on college. “His girlfriend was afraid that she would lose him if he went away,” Cosby says. “So he’s going to stay and she’s going to have a baby, he’s gonna get a job. My friend just shook his head. Some of these kids, they stop in the middle of the road.”
Cosby’s comedy, and his philosophy, draws from his own life. He recalls nights sitting on the floor in front of the radio as a kid, listening to Jack Benny. He remembers seeing Benny years later onstage in Vegas — offering many details, including the precise phrasing of the gag, even how Benny held his violin as a prop. Then Cosby again leaps forward, to when he and Benny are sitting together on The Dick Cavett Show, and Benny is laughing so hard at something that Cosby said that he literally falls out of his chair. Cosby won the Mark Twain Prize for Humor last month, presented to him at the Kennedy Center. Yet he ranks getting Benny to fall out of his chair in laughter as equal to that honor; he owed Benny that laugh.
Kids sitting on the floor, listening to an old radio, starts as a cliché, until Cosby adds the extra layer of returning the favor of laughter to Benny. These clichés are weighty. Growing up poor, “I understood there was no money,” he says. “But we never put on anything dirty or soiled, even if we wore it four days in a row. My mother would come home from work, as a domestic, and wash.
“These are the things to remember, and that enabled this career,” Cosby says.
“In my mother’s time, she was born around 1912, she was very, very academically bright. But her family was not of the mind to think of her becoming a doctor or an engineer or a school teacher. They pulled her out of this high school, called Girls’ High in Philadelphia, founded for girls with high IQs. My mother’s father and my mother’s mother needed her to work with them, take in clothing and do sewing.”
Now Cosby seems to move on to another story, of a woman named Mary B. Forchic, “a white Russian Orthodox woman who was a school teacher, who became my sixth-grade teacher. I was 45 years old before I was told that when she — my mother — brought me to school that day, she had told Mary B. Forchic to watch over me. I never could understand why that woman was following me around.”
Then he carefully collects the threads that connect Forchic and Anna Pearl Cosby, two tough women, both a mere 4 feet, 11 inches tall, former classmates at Girls’ High. But Forchic, Cosby says, “graduated from Girls’ High, went to the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from there at age 19, and made an announcement. She was not going to medical school, she was going to teach poor colored children in downtown Philadelphia.”
Cosby pauses. Not for a breath, but for dramatic effect; he is a storyteller.
“They threw her out of the family. They threw her so far out of the family, when she died, when the police found her, they called me. They call me. She was my sixth-grade school teacher.
“I went down to the apartment building where she lived, a nice middle-income apartment, 90 percent population of black people. They all knew her. They said she always talked about how Bill Cosby was one of her students. No one from her family would respond. She stayed in the morgue for about a week. As proxy, I said, ‘OK, cremate her.’ A cousin showed up later and took the bank books.”
Just like his mother’s coffee percolator trophy, the praise of his freshman college professor and getting Jack Benny to laugh until he fell from his chair, Mary B. Forchic telling people that Bill Cosby was once her student was a validation for Cosby. It was someone telling him, he’s looking the right way.
JSPEVAK@DemocratandChronicle.com
If you go
What: Bill Cosby.
When: 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Auditorium Theatre, 885 E. Main St.
Cost: $37.50 to $57.50.
For tickets: Theater box office or Ticketmaster, (800) 745-3000 or www.ticketmaster.com.
