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
Yeah. And my grandmother and I shared a bedroom. And she taught me how to read. And yeah. Yeah.
Well, you said that you loved to hear your grandmother's stories. Yeah, yeah. What were some of your favorite stories that she would tell you?
She told this story a lot about her 10th birthday when she found out her dad had a stroke and died working in some sort of mine in Canada. And then there was also a story about how She really couldn't see. Her eyesight was really bad, but her family couldn't afford glasses. But then one day a doctor came to town and gave her a free pair of glasses. These aren't great stories.
It was always the way... that she told them and the details and the way she, you know, she disappeared into the story and the, in the telling of it, like, um, um, and I, you know, we didn't have a lot of money. We didn't have a lot of money. And mom made $3 a month, $3 a month, six kids and $3 a month. And the, the, just the seriousness. I mean, I'm laughing cause I'm just now realizing, um,
It was a cabaret act. I never put that together. That was my first exposure to cabaret, was hearing my grandmother with Alzheimer's retell me stories about her childhood in Alberta, Canada.
Well, I read that you used to stay at home on Mondays because on Mondays your grandmother would have lunch with her friends and you really wanted to hang out with them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would go to lunch with them. I don't know why my mom – I'm sure she knew. I mean it was literally every Monday of second grade that I would say, I'm sick. I need to go to grandma's. And we would go to this burger joint or the diner with my grandma, Irene, and her friends, Ruby, Grace, and Shirley.
In your comedy, you often do characters that are middle-aged women, like Mary and like these women that you're speaking of. Do you think your appreciation for women of that certain age sort of began with your grandmother and her friends?
I mean, undoubtedly. I wanted... I mean, I wanted to be with them. I wanted to be them. I just they were and they because they also loved me. They loved I was so precocious and they were always just shower. I mean, after my grandmother, her Alzheimer's got really bad and she had to move into a nursing home and the
You know, the sort of group of gals split up and all went their separate ways because of health issues. I started going to church by myself. I was like 11 years old because I needed that validation from – I needed someone, you know, brewing coffee for the group to look at me and say, well, aren't you just so polite? That was life to me. Yeah.
Did you actually become religious then or were you in it for the social? No shade either way.
No, no, no. A little of both. I mean, I definitely remember in that period I was praying a lot to God to make me bisexual. I knew my attraction to men was so strong. I knew I was like, well, there's no way even God can take that away. I'm not asking you to take anything away. Just give me, please, an attraction to women and I will only act on that, I promise.
which, you know, in retrospect is, of course, sad, but also now that I'm safe, it's amusing.
My guest is comic writer and actor Cole Escola. They're nominated for two Tony Awards, Best Play and Best Leading Actor in a Play, for the Broadway show Oh Mary. More after a break. I'm Anne-Marie Baldonado, and this is Fresh Air.
When did you find performing? I think your first play was when you were 11?
That was my first professional acting job. But when I was, I think, five, we didn't have performing arts in our town, in Klatskanai. But there was this company called Missoula Children's Theater. And every year, two adults from this theater company would come to town for one week. And in that one week, they would do auditions on Monday, and the show was on Friday.
And I just lived for that one week, a year. But then, yeah, my first professional acting job was in a production of Grapes of Wrath. I played Winfield Jode. And it was in a town 30 miles away from Klatskanai, where I grew up. And... During that time, my grandmother lived in a nursing home, and it was much, much, much closer to the theater than where I lived.
So some nights after rehearsals, I would stay over at her nursing home.
What was it like being a kid in the nursing home?
Well, I wasn't sure that I was allowed to be there. I knew I could visit. I was pretty sure I wasn't allowed to spend the night. But I did anyway, and it felt... It was weird. I was lying to so many adults just so that I could be in this play. I think I lied to my mom and I told her like, oh, no, the play feeds us.
Showing 101–120 of 166 · page 6 of 9
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