Cole Escola
speaker
166 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Cole Escola’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You are not going back to that. It has a name. It doesn't deserve one.
Say it.
No.
The thing I love more than anything on earth is cabaret. Yeah!
Just another ploy to keep me from drinking and tucked away in the drawing room where no one can see me.
Contrary to what your paranoia tells you, I'm not some evil mastermind conspiring to keep you miserable. When you keep me off the stage, you make the whole world miserable. God, for God's sake, Mary, how would it look for the First Lady of the United States to be flitting about the stage right now in the ruins of war? How would it look sensational?
Thank you for having me. I couldn't have put it better myself. That is exactly who I am.
She's one of those people that everyone just has sort of background knowledge of, you know, like Mrs. Claus or like, you know, toasters have two slots. It's just things you accept online.
And those kinds of things and people are what interest me most because I guess comedy relies so much on expectation that if I know there's a shared expectation by the wide audience, then it's easier to subvert it.
I don't remember what sparked it. I just remember walking around Lincoln Center and I had the thought, what if Abraham Lincoln's assassination wasn't such a bad thing for Mary Todd? And it was just an idea that tickled me so much. And originally, in my mind, it was the seed of an idea for, like, Mary's second chapter. Like, sort of Nancy Meyers-style divorcee rom-com.
Like, what did Mary Todd Lincoln do after? You know, like... She fully leaned into herself. And then, yeah, slowly over 12 years, I kept having other little ideas that eventually added up to the play.
And I'll say it again. This play is very personal.
Yeah.
This play is about... A woman with a dream that no one around her understands. A dream that the whole world is telling her is stupid and doesn't make any sense. And I feel that way.
It's about the story of the song rather than the singing mostly. And yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was this monthly cabaret show called Our Hit Parade at Joe's Pub. And it was 10 different cabaret or musical or performance artists performing the top 10 Billboard songs of the month, doing their own interpretations of those songs. And it was a monthly show, usually, you know, like... over half of the same people and then a few, you know, special guests.
And we did that every month for like three years. And I was a regular guest. And it's truly like, I didn't go to school, but I feel like that's where I cut my teeth, so to speak, and learned how to perform and how to write for an audience.
I'll let you do that. Yeah.
When I was three, my dad chased my mom and me and my little brother out of our trailer because he thought the government was after him. They weren't. But we ended up going to my grandmother's anyway. Actually, we made a pit stop at my mom's AA sponsor's house, but that's for a different show.
And I remember when we got there, I was really scared and confused because I wasn't sure, are we living here now? And... I remember going to my mom and telling her that I was really scared and afraid. And she gave me the best piece of advice that I've ever received. And she said, Cole, go away. And 15 years later, I did. I moved here to New York City. I followed, yes.
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