Norma Kamali
speaker
117 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Norma Kamali’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Being afraid is real, but trying to mitigate the seriousness of what's frightening you is key.
I got married so young. The relationship was very abusive. I mean, he never touched me, but it was verbally abusive. He'd been dating the sales girl, and I'd fired her several times, and he rehired her several times. And when she came in to tell me that she was going to start designing, I said, oh, okay. And I packed up my things, and I walked out. I had $98 to my name.
Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
It's really interesting. It's a great question because I actually was just speaking with Twyla Tharp and we were talking about our childhoods. And I remember growing up in Manhattan in a neighborhood with a lot of kids, and we would always be out on the street playing and doing stuff together. And when we didn't have something to do, I felt that I had to come up with something.
So I would make up these games. and make up stuff for everybody to do. And they would ask me, what's next? And I would make up more. And she was saying the same thing, that she would organize these things. And she didn't know why, but she was just organizing them. And I think that for anybody in your audience who is one of these people,
who as a child, and we recognize that it's realizing that it is a childhood action that really identifies the core principle of who a human's going to be or what they're going to do. So I'm still... coming up with games for everybody to play, and she's coming up with things for her dancers to do.
And we were really laughing about it, but I think that's the best telltale sign as to what your path is going to be, even more than if you know what you're going to be doing. But there's a character trait that obviously is defined very early.
One of the things is that I think about is when my parents were divorced, it was very rare that this happened. And I grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood, and you might have gathered that I'm not Irish and that we were a little different, but the church was very involved in the neighborhood. So it was a big disgrace and...
My mother really showed great resolve and determination to be a single mom when nobody else was a single mom in the neighborhood or that we knew of. And she just got a job. a simple job in a factory. She had to support us. And I saw this incredible strength to do everything she could for the family, for my brother and myself. And I remember I was around 11. She said to me, Norma,
I want you to keep in mind, you have to be your own person. You have to learn how to support yourself. So the man you marry has to be the man you love, not the man that you want to take care of you. And I did not understand what she was talking about. I was like, okay, mom. Okay. It sounds good. And I thought, I don't know what she's talking about here, but then, oh, okay. I get it.
And it made an impression on me. And I really appreciate that she was so honest with me about the importance of being able to support myself and be independent at the same time.
It was the role that... You raise a family. And now, when I was 11, it was 1956. So put us in context of that time. Nobody had TVs, very few people, and not everybody had telephones. I mean, it's an incredible thing to think of. And my mother is talking to me about being an independent woman. So... Really, we are talking about somebody who is very unique.
And like I said, I didn't know what she was talking about until later on where I could appreciate.
I think fear and anxiety is a modern phenomena. I think people can be afraid of the dark and of ghosts and of things they don't know in my world in growing up. But the word anxiety... You don't even use that word in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. You're like, what the hell is wrong with you? These are words that are very self-indulgent if you come from the childhood I came from.
You would just think, what is wrong with you? Get over it. And you got over it. And most people got over it. And if you didn't, nobody would attribute it to all of the things we think about now. And I'm wondering if maybe some of that isn't a bad idea because you learn survival skills. And you learn things about yourself when you have to just deal with it. Just deal with it.
Nobody would say, and nobody would complain about it. If you complained, you were like, shut up.
So I think the fears, of course, my mother probably, as an adult, had more concerns because could she afford to support two children and have what we needed, not anything more, but just to make sure we had what we needed. We also had a great neighborhood where everybody took care of everyone else. The community idea was very important.
In an Irish neighborhood, there's usually five to ten kids per family. So there was such a camaraderie and community and friendship. one big family, really. We went to camp together. We did everything together. And if my mother wasn't home, somebody else's mother would make sure we had something to eat when we came home from school. My mother would do the same for somebody else's kids.
So New York was an extraordinary place to grow up on the streets, learning about life. And really, I have to say, even though I didn't have a lavish sort of childhood where you had everything you could imagine. We had very little, but we had such a close, bonded family of a community that you can't
Imagine the talk about the strength in that and that you always felt protected by the numbers of people that were looking out for you.
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