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Comedian "Moms" Mabley

Happy birthday to "Moms" Mabley.

I was surprised to learn that this pioneering comedian lived a life remarkably similar to the life of Celie depicted in Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

From Wikipedia:

Jackie "Moms" Mabley (March 19, 1894 – May 23, 1975) was an American standup comedian and a pioneer of the so-called "Chitlin' Circuit" of African-American vaudeville.

Mabley was born Loretta Mary Aiken into a large family of twelve children in Brevard, North Carolina in 1894. Her father, James P. Aiken, owned and operated several businesses while her mother, Mary, kept home and took in boarders. Her father died a sudden accidental death when she was eleven. By the age of fifteen Mabley had reportedly been raped twice and had two children that were given up for adoption. After being pressured by her stepfather to marry a much older man[citation needed] and encouraged by her grandmother to strike out on her own, she ran away to Cleveland, Ohio with a traveling minstrel show where she began singing and entertaining

She took her stage name, Jackie Mabley, from an early boyfriend, commenting to Ebony in a 1970s interview that he'd taken so much from her, it was the least she could do to take his name. Later she became known as "Moms" because she was indeed a "Mom" to many other comedians on the circuit in the 1950s and 60s. She came out as a lesbian at the age of twenty-seven, becoming one of the first triple-X rated comedians on the comedy circuit.

During the 1920s and '30s she appeared in androgynous clothing (as she did in the film version of Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson) and recorded several of her early "lesbian stand-up" routines, and was one of the top women doing stand-up in her heyday, eventually recording more than 20 albums of comedy routines. She appeared in movies, on television, and in clubs and performed at the Michigan Women's Festival shortly before her death in 1975.