Is You Okay? (10 page)

In 2006,
The Tonight Show
was still being hosted by Jay Leno. Jay was a clean comic like me, and he made millions of people laugh like I wanted to, every single night.

Tina was onto something. I'd always been a Leno fan, ever since he started at
The Tonight Show
by guest hosting for Johnny Carson in the late '80s and early '90s. Maybe he could be a role model to learn from as I tried to break into the business.

With that in mind, the next week I went to my first taping. The show filmed in Burbank, just down the road from where I lived in Studio City, so it was easy to get there. The whole
day was the coolest, most Hollywoody thing I'd ever done. I was on the VIP list; I got to go backstage. If there had been a special reserved parking space for me, I might have moved into it.

Looking back, there was no single reason for what was about to happen, but I decided to
literally
take Tina up on her offer to go as often as I liked. I went back the next day, and the day after that, and then a fourth time the day after that. I spent the whole week there in Burbank, fascinated by the entire experience. Even standing in line hearing what people were talking about was fascinating because they came from all over the world. I paid attention to what they laughed at (and didn't), and I would try to use those observations to my advantage in my stand-up.

I went to
The Tonight Show every day for the next two years
. Neither Tina nor I could have possibly known at the time what might become of her kind gesture, but it would end up being a turning point in my career. Between 2006 and 2008, I went to
six hundred
shows. I was a fixture at the studio, behind the scenes, and on the street. On a typical day I'd get there before 10
A.M.
and leave after the show taped, about 5
P.M.

Malcolm Gladwell says you're supposed to practice something for ten thousand hours to become a master. Well, I stacked up at least half of that being at
The Tonight Show
. If you count
up the time I was also putting in onstage, I was getting pretty close to the mythical 10K. But for
what
?

About a month in, with the encouragement of one of the pages (a page is like an intern for the TV network who gives tours and ushers the audience at tapings—think Kenneth on
30 Rock
), I started writing a blog called
glozelllovesjayleno .blogspot.com,
where I interviewed people in line for the show since I knew Jay never got a chance to meet anybody in line.

At the time, I didn't even know what a blog was, or why you'd have one. And as I'd find out later on, the pages didn't really know why I should have one either. They were just trying to suss out who I was, and what I was writing in my notebook. Nobody had any idea what I was doing there or why I was at the show every day, so they were probably a little paranoid. Maybe they thought I was Jay's secret spy, like a mystery shopper.

On the blog, I also taught my readers the ins and outs of coming to see a taping of
The Tonight Show
: how to get seats in the front row, how to get tickets if you didn't have them already, what usually happens on Mondays versus Thursdays, how to get food and not lose your place in line, how to get a picture with Jay, everything. Nobody was doing that, and I figured if it made the experience better, it would make the show better, and everyone would be happy. Eventually, it got
to a point where the blog developed a large, loyal following, and people would come to see me as much as they were coming to see
The Tonight Show
. We built a community in the comments section of the blog. They were the first GloZellots, or GloBugs, or GloWorms. (We hadn't figured out a name yet.)

As all this was happening, something else was changing too, first slowly then all at once: I stopped doing stand-up comedy regularly. In the beginning, it was because I felt like I didn't have the time, but that wasn't true. I had the time, I just didn't have the desire. Now I had a more fun outlet for my creativity. And I didn't have to beg for stage time to get it.

Tina's opportunity hadn't been a lifeline after all—or, at least, it wasn't
just
a lifeline—it was the beginning of an entirely new path. At first this new path ran alongside the stand-up comedy path, so I could do both. But it wouldn't be long before the
Tonight Show
path started to diverge and go off in a different direction. I could try to keep straddling the paths, but the further they diverged, the harder it would be for this girl to keep her footing. I had to have faith and make a jump. It was something, at the time, that I did instinctively, without a net. But since then, it's an idea I've heard a lot about from, of all people, the comedian and
Family Feud
host Steve Harvey.

What a lot of people don't know about Steve Harvey is that after every episode of
Family Feud,
he likes to talk to the audience for a few minutes. He is a stand-up comic by training, and a great one, so doing crowd work like that comes naturally to him. After one show, he got to talking to the audience about life, and recognizing your gift, and needing to jump with it if you ever want to truly live. What he didn't know was that the cameras were still rolling, and soon the video made it online and went viral. It is so inspiring—I must have watched it a dozen times; you should check it out.

“God when he created all of us, He gave every last one of us a gift at birth,” Steve started. “He never created a soul without endowing them with a gift. You just have to quit looking at gifts as running, jumping, singing, dancing. It's more than that. If you know how to network, if you can connect dots, if you draw, if you teach, some of y'all fry chicken better than anybody else. Bake pie. Some of you cut hair, color hair. Some people do grass.”

Those gifts Steve was describing weren't just talents, they were all the different paths someone could take. Then he told a story:

“I got a partner who never wanted to go out with us because we stayed out too late. ‘C'mon come out with us, man.' And he'd say ‘Nah, I've gotta get up early tomorrow and cut Miss
Johnson's grass.' We kept laughing at this dude. ‘Cutting grass? How much they pay you for that?' Today, he's got a landscaping company in Cleveland worth $4 million. All he did was cut grass, but he was gifted at it. You have
got
to identify your gift.”

What Steve said next puts it all together:

“Standing on the cliff of life, when you see people soaring by, doing remarkable things, have you ever thought that maybe those people haven't just identified their gift, but they are also living in that gift? The only way for you to soar like them is to take that gift that is packed away on your back like a parachute, jump off that cliff, and pull the ripcord.”

I'd done exactly what Steve was talking about—I'd identified my gift, a long time ago in fact. I could make people laugh, I could entertain people.

So why had I come to feel so stuck and unsuccessful?

Being an entertainer is really just a job title—it's what I put down on my taxes. Making people laugh is how I do that job, and jokes are just the tools of the trade. If I really look inside at my true self, the honest truth is that my gift is the ability to make people happy.

Unfortunately, I'd lost sight of this true self in the years leading up to the fork in the path I was now straddling.

Since marrying Tike in 2000 I had tried to change myself so his family and friends would like me. He told me it wouldn't work, that they would never like me, but I still tried. I made myself small and quiet and invisible (hard to imagine, right?). I didn't want to draw attention to myself because it would draw attention away from him, and I knew whatever attention I received would be judgmental and negative. Even my relatives got in on the act—they liked having someone in the family married to a
doctor
. They'd say, “Don't make waves, GloZell. Be grateful for what you have.”

When we split up, you'd think that the true me would burst out like a jack-in-the-box with a curly weave. But that's not how it works. If you squish something down long enough, sometimes it stays squished, and you have to work hard to stretch it back into its normal shape.

After the divorce was finalized, I started to see glimpses of my true self onstage and, later on, in line outside
The Tonight Show
with people I helped or interviewed or met from the blog, but I still hadn't fully reconnected with my true self or recognized my real gift. I certainly never let it rip.

When I did finally let it rip—when I jumped like Steve Harvey begged his
Family Feud
audience to—guess what happened:
I found YouTube. It was yet another path opening in front of me, even if I didn't know it right away.

Today YouTube is my home, not Florida or California. If my true self had a passport, it would list YouTube as my official “Place of Birth” on the first page. But in late 2006, two months after I started my
Tonight Show
blog, YouTube was just another company Google had bought for a billion dollars. And it was another two years after that before I even started posting videos on my site.

At first the process was straightforward, if not a little slow. I would create a video from the day, then post it directly to Blogspot and
voilà,
I was done. But then Blogspot started moving really slow. I don't know if it was more people starting blogs, or more people doing video, or both, but upload times slowed to a crawl. The experience was like watching a video of a sloth eating vegetables, or a sloth crossing the street, or just about
any
sloth video. My best friend, Jacqui, suggested I upload my videos to this site called YouTube, and then copy and paste the links directly into blog posts as a workaround.

So that's what I did.

It was so easy—I started making multiple videos each day and throwing them up on YouTube. I didn't think about it as my
channel;
I just copied the links to the videos I thought would be good for the blog and pasted them over there.

You have to remember, I'm talking about early 2008. YouTube was still relatively new and much different than it is today. It wasn't a “platform” then—heck, I don't know if that word even existed, except to refer to the thing you stand on when you're waiting for a train (or the thing I stood on, waiting to slide down a fireman's pole).

Before long I started getting pretty good at making videos, though. I learned how to do an intro, how to conduct an interview while holding the camera, how to sign off. And then over about a month's time—between April and May of 2008—I did three videos that outperformed my average daily video by like 1,000 percent. One even did more than a million views. Not that I knew this—I never paid attention to how many views I got (which is another pro tip: the more you care about some random thing like traffic or impressing people, the less fun you'll have, and the work will suffer).

I didn't even have a cell phone or a camera—I had to borrow a computer just to post stuff (I'd use the one at my church from time to time as well). The only “hot spot” I'd ever seen was the big yellow one in the sky that burned Patrice when
we were kids and all the white people standing in line for
The Tonight Show
who forgot to bring hats. The idea that I could track my video views, or that I
should
? C'mon now.