Transcript:

[Joyce J. Scott] Hi, Marc.

[Marc Steiner] Hi, baby. How are you?

[Scott] I’m very well. So, you know, because of our years together and comedy, I thought the Ancestry and Progeny section might work because humor is involved in it, and it’s also like a kind of reassessing of a mixing of ethnicity and gender and all that stuff does makes us happy people, sad people and how I use it, you know.

[Steiner] Yeah.

[Scott] What do you think, you rascal?

[Steiner] It takes me back to the night that we first met, and I know exactly what it was. It was in 1979. At a party. We were in the kitchen. And we started riffing. And we started going from one character to the next, and from one accent to the next. From that moment, I knew this was a woman who could touch any culture, any place. Embrace it, understand it, create it, and laugh about it while being serious.

[Scott] Thank you for remembering that, because it’s coming back to me. And, you know, of course, that’s one of the things that we’ve always done together. Because I’m looking at these “Ancestry Dolls” with the African arms and legs, but a European face. And it talks to me about our inability to get away from who we are and our being so incredibly uncomfortable about it. Humor is one of the ways we try for comfort, but it’s also the thing that makes us so irascible with each other.

[Steiner] I grew up in the city of Baltimore. My mother was a Brit. She met my father in World War II. He’s a Jew. So I grew up in a very Yiddish, Jewish, British world. And I ended up in this all Black Boy Scout troop at the Faith Baptist Church, which led me into the civil rights movement, which led me to the street corner where I tried to be a white jitterbug.

[Scott] And you’re looking at him saying, “Did anyone ever speak to him about this?”

[Steiner] We’re talking about the amalgam here.

[Scott] When we talk about humor and our ease with each other, it is the way we play with each other’s cultural background. You know what I mean? There’s a piece here, of those “Ancestry Dolls,” and that one, to me is a complex one, because the arms and the legs are little European, you know, gentry. But they’re really made in Japan. So when we talk about conceit, the Japanese are making a white idea of whiteness. And now I’m mixing it with a Black idea. And, it’s the way we join each other, but also separate each other at the same time.

[Steiner] The African American soul which comes through the work that you do, is the soul of this country that glides through every culture we have. That part of your work, it makes me think about how racism is so real in this place we live in. But race means nothing. And the pain that comes through it. But so does the laughter.

[Scott] Or we’d be dead by now!

[Steiner] Oh yeah, we’d be dead!

[Scott] We would be dead if we couldn’t laugh at this! So, Mark, I’ve had a wonderful time talking to you—about me! It’s always great. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[Steiner] I’m excited for you, I love you.

[Scott] Take care. Bye bye.

[Steiner] Alright, you too bye!