Norma Jean Darden

speaker

93 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Norma Jean Darden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Moth · All Dressed Up: The Moth Radio Hour · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

So lovely.

And I don't remember another thing for three days.

And I lost my cover, and because of the operation, I was no longer able to be a fashion model.

And this, for me, was just devastating.

My dream was gone, but everyone knows that modeling is a rainbow career, and you don't expect to do it forever.

But the next thing was, what to do?

So I took a job as an assistant working backstage in fashion, and I was asked to do a tango with John Haggins, who was the designer who had hired me, and he wanted us to tango out and then to...

do his show.

So he didn't want to get the white runway dirty, so we couldn't practice.

So when the day came and he was so excited, the Vogue editor had come, the Harper's Bazaar editor was there, and we got out to do our tango, and the stage collapsed.

And we fell into the laps of the Vogue editor.

Needless to say, the show was not quite a hit, but he had asked me to bring some goodies to serve people after the show.

And when I did, they liked what I brought, and Channel 13 was there, and they asked me to be a caterer.

So my sister and I didn't know anything about catering at all.

And they said, we're going to pay you $5,000 and you're going to bring the food for the grandmothers and the grandchildren affair.

And we said, yes, we will.

So that turned out to be quite successful, and at that point, and we were in our 30s by now, we had found out that our grandfather was born a slave.

We decided that we would interview our relatives that were then in their 70s and 80s, and find out about what it was like in their time.

And we managed to create a memoir

cookbook called Spoon Bread and Strawberry Wine.

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