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  • 7 weeks ago
Alfre Woodard sits down with Essence Editorial Producer Danielle Young about Juanita, Working with her Husband and the overlooking of regular women.
Transcript
00:00Every woman has fantasies, and so her fantasy lover is Blair Underwood, and she
00:06calls him by his full name all the time. And he's trifling because a working
00:11woman can't get a break even in her fantasies.
00:16Sheila Williams wrote the book, Dancing on the Edge of the Roof, and she says
00:22to me that when she writes she keeps a person's face in mind as she's writing
00:27a character and that she always envisioned me as Juanita. Whether
00:31they're, you know, working in a skyscraper and in the boardroom,
00:35teaching school, whatever they're doing, it is a regular woman.
00:40I've been working at this place for nine years.
00:43You ain't got time to get down from Blair Underwood in my dreams.
00:46What I need to know is, can you fund me $50?
00:51What?
00:51She is the infrastructure that our economy and the way that the cities and the
00:59little towns run are on the backs of Juanitas, but nobody really stops and says,
01:06hey, what you thinking? What you doing? You know, celebrated people, learned people.
01:11Everybody wants to know, thinking about them when they're in the elevator.
01:13What she got in that briefcase? But nobody, she's the one we all look past on the bus,
01:19but those people have such richness and I wanted an even wider audience to meet and experience Juanita.
01:29So I asked my husband to get the rights for me. He did.
01:33And then, of course, I had to set about getting him to write it because he is a brilliant writer.
01:38And I knew that he would be able to define Juanita, a way that I could really inhabit her.
01:47It's like a dance partner. You know, you find that person.
01:50And also, in a marriage or in a project, it's generosity.
01:57It's making that effort more important than anything else.
02:02And that's, it's not about you being right about a particular thing.
02:07It's about what will make this, take this forward.
02:10All those things work when you, when you, when it's not about your ego.
02:16And what's great is that you end up with something even bigger and more satisfying than your tiny ego.
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