Dame Wilburn
speaker
208 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 14 Apr
Dame Wilburn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And if I speak about you to people, what I will say to them is you were formidable.
I was not an easy child to raise.
I was interested in everything and nothing all at once.
And I was a comedian and I was a charmer and easily able to
to get in and out of things.
What I thought I did was I had driven my mother to distraction.
In these later years, I've talked to her sister.
She said, your mother never talked to me or anybody else that I know of as if you were a burden.
And when I heard that, I started crying because my perception of how I had been as a child was not my mother's perception at all.
As I've gotten older, that's been of a real comfort.
I also was thinking about sending you the tattoo I have on my right arm.
It's the first tattoo I ever got.
And I hid it from her for like a year before she finally saw it one day.
And she said, what's that?
And it's a dragon.
And I said, well, I was going to get a heart that said mom in it, but they were all out of red.
So I just got a portrait of you.
That's good. So I don't know if you can tell it by looking at me, but I'm not necessarily an athlete. Now... If you back up to when I was in ninth grade, I was actually, if you can believe it, less athletic than I am now. My mother and I didn't really see eye to eye on a lot of things, and two of them happened to be the two things she was good at, which was school and basketball.
And I was terrible at school and anything that required movement. My school was a Detroit Waldorf school and they were trying to figure out how to assimilate us into the general population because they were getting ready to close the high school down and we had been an enclave to ourselves for a long time. So for whatever reason, Waldorf decided to form a girls basketball team. Now,
I didn't want to be on the basketball team. I just figured that I wasn't going to get A's in school, and I wasn't going to do homework ever. So maybe this was just another way of getting on my mother's good side. Now, what I planned to do was ride the pine. Like, I was going to join and get a uniform and then sit down. And then never... get on the court ever.
Showing 161–180 of 208 · page 9 of 11
← Previous
Next →