Felicitations, Meteor readers,

Hurricane Ian continues to move inland after tearing a path through Cuba and Florida, with its sights set on Georgia and South Carolina before (we hope) slowing down. Floridians are waiting to see how long their recovery will take, but at least they’ll have the support of local and federal agencies. It still remains to be seen whether the same can be said for Puerto Rico, another U.S. territory waiting for aid from the powers that be—who are, in fact, profiting off of the devastation of Hurricane Fiona.

We’ve got something very exciting for today’s newsletter: Meteor editor-at-large Rebecca Carroll sat down with the one and only Whoopi Goldberg last week at our #SaytheWord event to talk about her long-time commitment to saying that word: abortion.

But first, some news.

Paciencia y fe,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

AG on the run: No, this is not a John Grisham novel: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife actually fled their home earlier this week to avoid being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit. (Many of the state’s non-profits are suing to be able to help pregnant people receive abortion care out of state.) Paxton later posted on social media that he ran because he felt threatened by the server of papers. But I’m with Jil Filipovic: The reality is that Paxton, like much of the GOP, doesn’t really want to face the music of his draconian law-making and the fact that more than half of Americans are pissed as hell about it. The subpoena was dropped, but the cowardice still stands.

About damn time: Renowned flutist Lizzo performed at the Library of Congress with a 200-year-old crystal flute belonging to prolific enslaver (and rapist) James Madison. As you can imagine, she killed. “I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” she exclaimed to the crowd. While people who choose joy were celebrating this moment, other totally grown people like conservative columnist Ben Shapiro completely lost their shit. What exactly is “controversial” about a trained flutist and Black woman playing a former slave owner’s family heirloom, loaned to her by the first Black woman to run the Library of Congress? Oh, right, Ben—it makes you uncomfortable.

AND:

• Iranian women are adding music to the arsenal of ways they stand against their government. The World War II anti-fascist song “Bella Ciao” is now being sung in Farsi and it is incredible.

• An underwater gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea is now leaking methane after several acts of sabotage that officials believe were carried out by Russian agents. This won’t affect gas prices globally, but it does call into question the safety of NATO countries’ infrastructure as aggression from Russia escalates.

• Family members of Hae Min Lee, the woman who was believed to have been killed by Serial subject Adnan Syed, have filed an appeal with the court which recently vacated Syed’s life sentence. The family argues that the court “[violated] the family’s right to meaningfully participate” in the motion which eventually led to Syed’s release from prison.

• Ginny Thomas testified in today’s Jan. 6th hearing and she apparently still believes the 2020 election was stolen. Sure, Gin.

• Foundational second-wave feminist and author Meredith Tax died earlier this week. She was known for her class analysis of feminism and was the author of the recently re-released The Rising of Women.

SAY THE WORD

“Change the fucking playbook” 

Whoopi Goldberg can’t believe she’s still here fighting the same battles for abortion rights. 

BY REBECCA CARROLL

WHOOPI GOLDBERG ADDRESSES THE CROWD AT JOE’S PUB IN NEW YORK CITY. (IMAGE COURTESY OF THE METEOR)

Whoopi Goldberg has been making the personal political for a very long time. In 1983, she created her one-woman production The Spook Show because she hadn’t been unable to find acting roles as a Black woman. Combining razor-sharp humor and satire, the show featured five characters whose stories made poignant social commentary—a rehabbed drug addict with a PhD, a surfer chick, a physically disabled woman, a little Black girl who longs for blonde hair, and a Jamaican caretaker. The show started with a near-empty house until a rave review in The New York Times not only brought audiences in droves but landed Goldberg a Broadway production and TV special on a then-fledgling cable network called HBO.

I was 16 years old at the time and at the height of an intense relationship with my white birthmother, with whom I reunited at 11. One of the things we bonded over was our pure, unadulterated love of popular culture. But, the pop culture we most frequently consumed primarily centered white people. So it was oddly on the mark that when Whoopi’s one-woman show debuted, the character we honed in on was the (presumably white) teenage surfer girl.

The trill of Goldberg’s infectious voice, with its dizzying ease and unburdened youth (Uhkay, and I said Uhkay, and we said Uhkay, Uhkay?), buoyed the audience for a while until they realized what this story was actually about: abortion. And not just any abortion—a graphic description of a botched abortion.

Nobody with that kind of platform was talking about abortion in 1985, much less a Black female stand-up comedian. What Goldberg did in that sketch was elegant and genius: She made the subject of abortion nuanced at a time when the conversation around them was not.  Her now-iconic show left an indelible mark on my life as a Black teenager who grew up wishing she had long blonde hair (like the show’s little Black girl character who wears a shirt on her head), and who wanted desperately to see a Black woman express her love of Blackness while taking ownership of her resolute individuality.

So it was an honor to sit down and talk to her backstage at Joe’s Pub last week, where she was appearing in Say the Word, a night in support of New York Abortion Access Fund, about that sketch and this post-Roe world.

Rebecca Carroll: Your one-woman show changed my life. I just rewatched the Valley Girl sketch. And the way that it goes from this kind of beautiful lightness to this heavy-ass, harrowing wire-hanger description—I was not prepared, watching it again, to be so moved by it. What did it feel like to play that every night?

Whoopi Goldberg: Well, I loved her as a character. And for me, all of the work that I did was really predicated on stuff I wanted to talk about. And I knew I couldn’t talk about it without putting it in a context people could recognize, and they could recognize their teenage daughter.

And seeing the character go to the confession booth, and the priest says, “You’ve created a sin in the eyes of God.” And she’s like, “What are you talking about? I actually had a really good time.”

Yeah, because sex is really fun. If you don’t arm people with the information, they end up pregnant. And ss a little kid, I remember two women in Chelsea, where I grew up, at different times—one [being] taken out of a bathroom, and seeing…them pulling things out of the bathroom, and seeing them haul this bloody hanger. That’s how I know what it looked like.

The visceral reaction I had to watching it again, I just thought, “What must that have felt like?” Every time you acted it out, the slow untwisting of a coat hanger—this is, in a way, like what all actors have to figure out, what to leave behind and what seeps into your viscera and what stays with you. But to be here in this political landscape, what does that feel like for you?

Well, it’s annoying…because I did all this shit…so we wouldn’t have to again. But I realize you can’t be angry with people because no one ever thought this was really going to go backward…nobody thought people would cheat and lie and do the shit that they did because we weren’t prepared for that. Unfortunately…the consequence is going to be very, very bad.

Except that they’re so protected. 

Well, as it turns out, nobody’s protected… that’s the bottom line: When you have money, you can do whatever. But you know, you’re not as protected as you think. You can’t go and have a D&C now. You can’t even have your baby die in your body and get relief. That’s how much they don’t give a fuck.

Another thing that struck me about rewatching that sketch is that the language is the same [as it is now]—the shame, and the idea that “you have committed a sin.” How do we make new language?

Well, you change the fucking playbook. You get in a place of power where you don’t let that shit happen. You start to perform it, and you put it in the parts, and you do it on television, and you do it everywhere you can.

When you say “get in positions of power”—what are those positions? 

Become a mayor. Become a senator. Become a congressperson.

I’m trying to not be cynical, but do you still believe that those are positions of actual power?

Well, they were until everybody gave them up…I don’t know. I thought everybody was still kind of smart when Obama was in. And then suddenly, everybody’s stupid as fuck. And pretending that there are no civics lessons and that there are no morals that we all have to function with…

I often hold with me something that [the late civil rights activist] Julian Bond once said to me: “You find the ease in the struggle.” That’s all we can do. Because it’s hard to keep fighting.

It’s real hard. People talk about being woke. I always say, “I was never asleep”…because we [Black folks] always knew that nothing that has to do in particular with us is solid. Voting rights. Why can people fuck with voting? Why isn’t that sacrosanct? Why hasn’t that been made sacrosanct?

You know what’s coming, and yet you can’t find a way to get it together to make it sacrosanct.

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