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
They're like so fun to put on and run and jump around in. I mean, the curls in the wig are high and tight and they bounce in the most obnoxious, petulant way. And the skirt is... so big and cumbersome and yet light enough that I can rip it around like I'm a Tasmanian devil in a tornado.
I want to unpack what it is about cabaret that Mary loves and maybe that you love, too. What sets cabaret apart from other kinds of performing? There are some things that are maybe factual about cabaret. You know, it's intimate. There's interaction with the audience. It's about personal storytelling.
It's about the story of the song rather than the singing mostly. And yeah.
Well, like Mary, you are a well-known cabaret singer. And you came up through this downtown New York scene with people like Bridget Everett and Murray Hill, who people might know from the HBO series Somebody Somewhere, among other things. Can you describe what that scene was like? This is the mid to late 2000s.
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 like how to perform and how to write for an audience. Yeah.
Well, there's footage online of you performing at the last show in 2012, which was kind of a celebration of the show coming to an end. Would you mind if we played a little bit of your performance?
I'll let you do that, yeah.
Okay, thanks.
That's Cola Scola performing in 2012. I love that performance. And the joy of you singing a Taylor Swift song, that's the Taylor Swift song, 15, about being in high school.
I mean, listening to that, I wanted to jump out of a window.
That was 13 years ago.
It was a long time ago. Look, I would have done that a lot differently now, and I would have done it differently knowing that other people would listen to it later.
Well, I will say that I would pay good money to hear you sing the Taylor Swift songbook. All the phases.
I'll see you at Carnegie Hall in a couple years.
Yes. Cole, can you describe where you grew up in Oregon?
Yeah, I grew up in a town called Klatskenai, Oregon. It's also the birthplace of Raymond Carver, by the way. So you will see a lot of similarities in our work. But it is a very rainy mill town. It's a gas station on your way from Portland to the coast. It's like 1,500 people, lots of trees, and nothing much else.
And that story that you tell on stage during your cabaret act, is that true? You were young. Do you have memories of that?
I do have memories of that. And I remember being excited that we were going to my grandma's because I didn't like the trailer where we lived. And I didn't like my father.
And you ended up living with your grandmother.
Showing 81–100 of 166 · page 5 of 9
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