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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Today, Judd Apatow.
Before he was directing box office hits or launching the careers of comedy superstars, He was a kid writing fan letters to his heroes, collecting autographs and obsessively documenting everything.
He's now opened his personal archives for a new book of photographs letters, scripts and journals that shaped movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin Knocked Up and Trainwreck.
Also, we hear from Misty Copeland, who captivated audiences as the first Black woman to become a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater.
She also performed with Prince, who helped change her perception of herself.
He was my biggest supporter.
He showed me what it was to be one of a kind, to be unique, and to use that as a power.
And Ken Tucker celebrates 50 years of Patti Smith's album, Horses.
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
If you've laughed at a comedy in the past 30 years, there's a good chance my guest had something to do with it.
Judd Apatow directed The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Trainwreck.
He produced Superbad, Bridesmaids, and Anchorman.
And he executive produced the cult classic Freaks and Geeks, which launched the careers of Seth Rogen and Jason Segel.
He's written for comedy legends like Gary Shandling and Roseanne Barr.
And he mentored a young Lena Dunham, executive producing all six seasons of Girls.
But here's the thing about Judd Apatow.
He's also a collector.
Since he was 10 years old, autographs from his idols sealed in plastic letters he wrote as a teen to and from his favorite comedians, photographs from every movie and TV set and scripts covered in notes and journals documenting every high and devastating low.
And now, at 57, he's letting us get a glimpse of his collection, which he's compiled in a new book called Comedy Nerd A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures.
It's unlike any Hollywood memoir I've ever read.
It's part scrapbook, part confessional, part love letter to the art form of moviemaking and a glimpse into the psyche of a man who's been making people laugh for more than three decades.
Judd Apatow, welcome back to Fresh Air.
You've been here four times.
Happy to be here.
I feel like I'm Norman Mailer, putting those numbers on the board.
Yes.
Okay, this memoir, it's unlike any memoir I've ever seen, as I said.
Almost 600 pages.
And you write in the introduction that this isn't even everything that you've collected.
What made you want to put all of this stuff in a book?
I don't know.
You know, I was always a fan of these books like the Marx Brothers scrapbook.
And there was a Saturday Night Live scrapbook that came out in the 70s where they would have pictures and scripts and little notes.
And I just thought, oh, I think I have enough stuff to do that.
My family's always yelling at me to throw out all my hoard stuff from my hoarding like why do we have all this stuff?
Where do you keep it?
There's seven storage spaces around town and in my office and they're like why do you save all this stuff?
So I think I needed to prove that there was a reason to be a pack rat.
Wait, you have seven storage units.
At one time, was it all in your house, though?
Well, there was a lot in the house.
We have a new house now, and none of it is in the new house.
Okay.
But also it's not like normal hoarding.
It's not like there's a big mound with, like you know, catcher's mitts and kitty litter and magazines from the 70s.
It's, you know, it's all, it's a well-maintained hoard.
Organized.
Yes, it's an organized hoard.
As organized as it can be.
Did any revelations come to you going through some of that stuff?
Like things that in the moment you hadn't thought about.
But you're looking through these old scripts or these old bits of paper that have notes from freaks and geeks, for instance.
You know.
Well, all of it, I think, is working something out.
So if I look at my career, I think, well, I did something about having a baby.
I did something about going to high school, something about going to college, something about your first job, something about getting married, trying to make relationships work over the long haul, getting sick, your mortality.
So you could feel like oh, I'm just thinking through my point of view about the big things that happen to all of us.
Yeah.
I'm stuck on this word obsession because –
There's a story in the book where you collected Billie Jean King's autograph 13 times?
Yes.
I went to a tennis tournament at Hilton Head Island and we would go every year and I was 10 years old.
And all the tennis players were hanging around.
This must have been like 1978, 77, something like that.
And there would be Tracy Austin and there's Pam Shriver, and there's Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova and Dr Renee Richards.
Everybody was there.
And I would just run around on a bike.
They'd have a match.
I would sometimes watch the match and wait for them to come out.
And then I'd get their autograph.
And then the next day I would just do it again.
And if it was the same people, I would just get all their autographs again.
And I remember Billie Jean King saying to me, I think you have my autograph already.
I know, after a certain point, did you start to have conversations with them?
They're like, this kid is, you know.
A little bit, but it was just so fun.
I mean, it was just, it was like a weird hobby to go, can I get to Yvonne Goulagong today?
I mean, it's a weird hobby, but it also, why do you think you were doing it?
I think on some level especially like with trying to meet comedians I was trying to figure out is there a way to penetrate that bubble?
Like, can that become real?
You know, you see them on TV and people are so funny or they're great actors or actresses.
But can I meet them?
And if I can meet them, then maybe it's a real enough world for me to enter at some point.
When did that come to mind for you?
Not necessarily that you could do it and you could enter it, but like that spark of oh, these people are interesting.
I'm kind of fascinated by them.
Well, my grandmother was friends with this comedian named Toadie Fields.
And she was, you know, in that world. world of Joan Rivers type of self-deprecating female comedian.
And she was so funny.
And my grandparents talked about her like she was the coolest person in the world.
And I knew her since I was born.
And occasionally we would go see her.
And I think on some level, I saw her and thought, wow, she's a different kind of person.
And she's getting standing ovations and people love her.
It must have planted a seed at a time that I don't even remember.
Like, that would be a cool thing to be able to do.
Seeing the reaction to her action.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was a thing.
And someone who could talk about what was weird about themselves and how they saw the world and be rewarded for it.
To be embraced for discussing your imperfections.
Okay, you have to tell this story of you threatening Steve Martin over an autograph.
Well, you know, I was a little kid...
And I used to always ask my grandmother to drive by his house, because we knew which house he lived in.
And I couldn't believe he lived there.
This is in 1980.
So it's 45 years ago.
And, you know, I'm 12 years old.
And one day he was outside and I asked him for his autograph.
And like a normal human being would, he said, I don't sign autographs at my house.
Like for me, if someone knocked on my door, I mean there's a chance that I'd have a drone police officer get involved.
You know, there would definitely be a a different reaction than Steve Martin had, which was I'm sorry, I don't sign it at my house.
And so I wrote him a funny letter asking for an apology.
It was more than a funny letter.
I basically said you know you're the funniest man in the world, but you treat your fans like garbage.
And you wouldn't live in that house if I didn't go to all your movies and buy all your albums.
And so, if you don't send me an apology, I'm going to send your address to Homes of the Stars and you'll have tour buses passing by 24 hours a day.
And then, like six months later, in the mail I got a book of Cruel Shoes, this amazing short story collection he had written.
And in it, he wrote, to Judd, I'm sorry, I didn't realize I was speaking to the Judd Apatow.
And I was 12 years old.
And I thought, oh, I must have made him laugh.
And then now he's trying to make me laugh.
And I look back on it now, like it was very, very impactful on my psyche.
Yeah. that he sent that to me.
You know, almost an invitation.
And I'm sure he just is funny and probably did that to tons of people because he's a great person.
But to me it was like the person I think is the funniest person in the world thought it was worth his time to do that.
And so it probably gave me a lot of the confidence that I had to be insane to go interview 50 comedians from my high school radio station and work as a dishwasher in a comedy club.
It only like set the fire more profusely for me to try hard to figure out how to get into it.
I think of you as a 12-year-old to kind of threaten him to say like I'm going to give your address out to everybody.
I think that was just my Long Island rat attitude.
That part of it, you know, people ask about it sometimes, and I think I was just so obnoxious.
I just was like a...
I didn't quite know where humor was.
And being from Long Island, there was so much insult humor.
And we all gave each other such a hard time.
And so in a real annoying Long Island boy way, I thought that was funny.
Was it like that in your home where you guys would be with each other?
Yes, absolutely.
And with my friends.
I mean, it was certainly a world of humor.
Insults with love.
Yeah.
Did you ever get to talk to Steve Martin about that?
I did once we were in a meeting together and someone asked me to tell the story.
Then afterwards, they said, Steve, is that how you remember it?
And he said, how I remember it, I knocked on Judd's door.
Okay.
So it started with these autographs and then it extended to letters.
Like you had a whole process.
This was almost like an assembly line where you'd write letters to people.
Yes.
I realized at some point that if you wrote a letter to someone who was on television, a lot of them would send you a signed autograph.
I think I probably had a friend who got an autograph back in the mail.
I remember one of my friends got an autograph from Bob Hope.
I think it was my friend Josh Rosenthal showed me his Bob Hope.
And I'm like, I'm going to write to Bob Hope.
And then I did get an autograph from Bob Hope.
And then I did, you know, I wrote a letter to Paul Lynde.
And I got an autograph back.
So I wrote Paul Lind again.
He sent me another one.
I kept writing Paul Lind to see how many times he keeps sending me the photos.
So I have three Paul Lind autographs.
And I would just sit in my room at night with this Homes of the Stars book.
And on the back page, it had the address of every movie studio.
Wait, there was a real...
There was a book that had – so you could go see where Lucille Ball lived or – and probably half of it was inaccurate and it was their addresses from a decade before.
But the back of it was the addresses of all the movie studios and TV networks.
And so I would write Carol Burnett and, you know, the Saturday Night Live people.
I got an autograph from Andy Kaufman and he signed it on both sides.
That was what was so unique.
It said, you know, to Judd, thank you very much, Andy Kaufman.
But on the other side, he wrote a letter – that kind of said the same thing.
It just said, Dear Judd, thank you for writing that letter.
You know, Andy Kaufman.
So even that was in Andy Kaufman mode.
We're listening to my conversation with filmmaker Judd Apatow.
He has a new visual memoir called Comedy Nerd, a lifelong obsession in stories and pictures.
We'll continue our conversation after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
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Like things weren't so great when you were a kid.
Yeah.
There's also a pretty, you describe it as a nasty divorce.
Yeah.
With your parents.
Yeah.
Well, it's a very 1970s, early 80s thing.
I mean, now everybody consciously uncouples.
And people understand the effect it has on your kids when you're in conflict.
But back then, no one knew.
And it was like a bare-knuckle brawl.
And so things didn't get resolved.
And no one knew to check in. on their kids to see how it was affecting them.
You know, no one said to me, how are you feeling?
And so as a result, I internalized everything.
And I just thought, oh, I need to take care of myself.
And, you know, my parents, you know, are great.
My dad, like once my dad, you know.
I said to him like a few years ago, like you never talked to me about any of it.
And he said, yeah, I did.
And I said, no, you didn't.
You never like said, how are you doing?
And in fact the only thing that really helped me was like there was a book in the house called Growing Up Divorced.
And I looked at a couple of pages of it once and it, like explained some of the dynamics of what this conflict was about in a way I could understand.
And my dad goes, yeah, I left that book out for you.
And I went, what?
He's like, yeah, I left it on the coffee table.
I said, you left the book?
That's how you communicated with me?
And I said, what are you talking about?
He's like, it worked.
And I went, but you never asked me if I read it.
You didn't know I read it.
And so that was the 70s in a nutshell, in terms of communication, that even very nice people with the best of intentions, they didn't know from their families how to tune into each other.
And so as a little kid, it just made me confused most of all.
And I think part of that led to being fascinated by people like George Carlin and or Mel Brooks, who broke down society and broke down how families work and religion works and poked holes in things and challenged things.
And so I think that was part of the obsession.
Did you ever talk to your parents about your dreams?
What did they think about your obsessions?
They were so helpful and so supportive.
And they were the reason why I was into it, because my dad had a big interest in comedy.
And so the house was filled with Lenny Bruce records and Bill Cosby records and Woody Allen records.
And so they treasured that stuff.
And they also thought comedians were the coolest people.
And when I said I wanted to be a comedian, you know, they were like, great.
And so if I wanted to go to an open mic at a comedy club at 17, my dad would drive me to Chuckles and then come back two hours later in the middle of the night to pick me up.
Like they thought I would make it.
And so I think somewhere in me That gave me a lot of confidence, because when I talked to him about it it was like there was no chance that I wouldn't make it.
Tell me a little bit about your granddad, Bobby Shad.
You say he's basically one of the founders of the music industry as we know it.
He was a man from the Bronx.
And after World War II, he would take the money from his job and hire jazz players to record songs.
He would get them printed up himself and then go to the record stores and sell them by hand and then at some point got hired by labels to run their jazz and blues departments.
So he was, you know, one of those people who figured out how do you record jazz, where do the microphones go.
You know like.
He was, you know, a real innovator.
And he did uh, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
Dinah Washington.
Dinah Washington, Cannonball Adderley.
He produced the first Janis Joplin album.
And he was a real inspiration because he was a hustler and it made me think oh, you have to create your own path.
And, you know, he just did it.
And so it was always interesting to have someone in your family that there was this feeling about like oh, this is a really special person doing something really fun and important.
Yeah.
And I think I became obsessed with comedy in the way he was obsessed with jazz.
And I felt there was a connection because a lot of the comedians, like Lenny Bruce, started by performing in the jazz clubs.
And so it all felt very much part of the same world.
Were you listening to jazz too when you were young or was it around you in your house?
I would listen to it when I became a DJ for my high school radio station.
And so I was very excited to be a jazz DJ when I was, you know, 16 years old, and then I would put on all these records, none of which I understood.
You know, these Herbie Hancock experimental albums and Miles Davis records and Larry Coriel.
And I so wanted to understand it so I could connect with my grandfather.
But then he died when I was in high school, right at the age when I was just about ready to talk to him, to really ask him about all of it.
This high school radio station, I mean... they don't make these like that anymore.
There's nothing like that.
I don't even know anything like that.
What was it?
WKWZ.
Yes, it's still there in Syosset on Long Island.
And they're still there.
And it was run by this teacher, Jack DeMacy, who was very, very inspirational.
He was our Dead Poets Society guy.
And he basically pushed all of us to use the radio station to do whatever you wanted to do.
If you were into sports, use it to talk to professional athletes and learn how to report and do play-by-play.
If you're into music, a lot of people would go to concerts and write reviews and interview artists.
So my friend Josh Rosenthal.
He would go interview people like REM in the early 80s and he said oh, maybe you should try to interview comedians.
And so I created a show called Club Comedy and I got a tape recorder and I would go off and kind of trick comedians into doing doing interviews with me, which was easier.
How would you trick them?
I just wouldn't tell them it was a high school radio station and I would just call a publicist and say I work for WKWZ.
Does Mr. Leno have any time while he's doing rascals in New Jersey to speak with me?
And I would show up with some huge tape recorder from the school, the AV squad, and they would all tolerate me.
This wasn't just, like, a few people, though.
I mean, you interviewed, as you said, like, 50 folks.
Did anyone ever turn you down?
These are big names.
Well, there were people I couldn't get to.
I couldn't get to Dangerfield.
I couldn't figure out how to get to Andy Kaufman, who was down south wrestling at the time.
Oh, he was doing that.
So I would call the management office, and they were like, we don't know where he is.
We haven't talked to him in months.
But people like Howard Stern and Sandra Bernhardt and John Candy talked to me and Harold Ramis and they had good advice.
I mean, I was asking them, how do you write a joke?
How do you get on stage?
How do you write a movie?
And they would answer.
And I look back now and go, what a head start I had.
And a lot of it was just about work ethic, them just explaining what it takes to make it.
Like, it's going to take a long time and you have to find your voice.
Things that I had never heard about before.
Was there ever a moment that you remember that they gave you advice or anything that you were thinking yes, that has come back to you in real measure.
I mean, a lot of it did.
And just hearing about their failures and knowing that it was hard made me realize that the only way to make it is to be able to withstand an enormous amount of rejection and to be willing to work hard to get better, and that that would not be a short process.
So a lot of people said, oh, it takes like seven years to find your voice as a comedian.
Well, to hear that as a 16-year-old is good, because you don't think oh, it's supposed to happen now.
It's like becoming a doctor.
It's going to take a really long time.
So I think it set my timer in a good way.
And then they all talked about bombing.
So when I bombed, I didn't feel like I should quit the business.
I thought, oh, this is part of it.
I'm in it now.
And even Jerry Seinfeld told me about the first time he did stand-up and he said he got so scared that he just said the names of his jokes.
You know, just like, school, your parents, because he panicked.
But knowing that someone that I looked up to panicked like that, It gave me a lot of fortitude when I was bombing and when I was panicking.
Like, oh, this is part of it.
Judd Apatow, thank you so much for this conversation.
Thank you.
Judd Apatow's new memoir is Comedy Nerd, a lifelong obsession in stories and pictures.
Patty Smith is now considered one of the wise women of rock and roll, an eloquent chronicler of her life and music in a series of acclaimed memoirs.
But 50 years ago she was a scrounging poet who wanted to be a rock star on her own, very literary terms, and her debut album Horses, announced a unique artist.
A new anniversary edition of Horses, supplemented with previously unreleased music, has just been issued.
Rock critic Ken Tucker looks back at Patti Smith's Beginnings.
Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.
Mildred Patti Thieves Wild card on my sleeve.
Fifty years on, Patti Smith's Horses still sounds like nothing else before or since its arrival in 1975.
At the time, Smith had one foot in poetry, the other in rock and roll.
Her spirit animals were the French surrealist Arthur Rimbaud and the Doors demigod Jim Morrison.
Both bad boys who died young, they inspired Patti as self-mythologizing, rebellious innovators. but they also served as warning lessons in the self-control and discipline necessary to be a long-lasting, prolific artist, which the 78-year-old Smith has indeed become.
Consider however, what it was like to see for the first time the 28-year-old Smith as she struck an androgynous pose in a white shirt and black tie.
Cover photo by pal Robert Mapplethorpe.
And consider what it must have been like to first hear her tremulous croon on a song like Free Money.
Every night, before I go to sleep, Find a ticket, win a lottery, Scoop the pearls up from the sea, Cash them in and buy you all the things.
Every night, before I rest my head, I see those dollar bills girls swirling in my bed.
Music critics write about 1970s, downtown Manhattan, Patti Smith performing at CBGB's at Max's, Kansas City, but they ignore or aren't aware of the true crucible of her talent St.
Mark's in the Bowery, the Lower East Side Church, and Ground Zero for the New York School of Poetry.
This was the site of open readings, where Patti could rub shoulders with key influences like Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno and Ann Waldman.
Patti's print poetry was flatly derivative, but Smith's creative breakthrough came in collaboration with guitarist Lenny Kay.
Together, they set her poems to music, with Lenny plugging in to accompany her words at readings.
Very quickly, they were welding electric guitar to epic creations, as in this nine-minutes-plus opus combining one of her poems with a cover of Chris Kenner's Land of a Thousand Dances.
It's the song that gave the album its name.
Boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea from the other end of the hallway.
Rhythm was generating.
Another boy was sliding up the hallway.
His gold nerves merged perfectly.
He merged perfectly with the hallway.
He merged perfectly the mirror in the hallway.
The boy looked at johnny.
Johnny wanted to run, but the movie kept moving as planned.
The boy took Johnny, he pressed him against a locker.
He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in.
Johnny, the boy disappeared.
Johnny fell on his knees, started crashing his head against a locker.
Started crashing his head against a locker.
Started laughing hysterically when suddenly Johnny gets a feeling.
Patty quickly went full-on rock star, getting signed to Clive Davis's then-new Arista Records, alongside unlikely label mates such as Barry Manilow and Lou Rawls.
At once a punk and an artiste.
Smith had to grapple with the question of what it meant to be avant-garde when you also love the Marvelettes.
Every day things change And the world puts on a new face.
Certain things rearrange, And they're so.
That's The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game, a 60s hit for Motown's Marvelettes written by Smokey Robinson and adored by Smith, who has always had juicy taste in oldies.
The new 50th anniversary edition of Horses includes some alternate takes of songs from this album and others that would appear on subsequent releases.
The one previously unreleased song is called Snowball.
Oh, don't look behind me now.
I know what's coming Big white, hairy ball of late Looking like a snowball.
When it hits me, I'm so amazed.
When it hits me, I'm feeling crazed.
It's pretty easy to hear why Snowball didn't make the horses cut.
It's a more conventional pop song, one that doesn't possess the grand delirium Smith was going for.
Right from the start, she knew how she wanted a sound and reportedly fought with her producer, The Velvet Underground's John Cale, to achieve the sounds she heard in her head.
Car stopped in a clearing Reven of life.
It was nearing.
I saw the boy break out of his skin.
My heart turned over and I crawled in days.
Patti Smith is still touring.
She has a Substack newsletter to chronicle her dreamiest thoughts and has a new memoir called Bread of Angels.
The reissue of Horses fits right into her current context, sounding as urgent and immediate as it did a half century ago.
Ken Tucker reviewed the 50th anniversary edition of Horses.
Coming up, we hear from trailblazing ballerina Misty Copeland.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
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Want some good old-fashioned goofing around and stumbling to figure out what's going on?
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When Misty Copeland recently stepped onto the stage at Lincoln Center...
Golden confetti rained down as she took her final bow with the American Ballet Theater.
After a five-year hiatus from performing, she returned to dance Juliet one last time and spin through Twyla Tharp's Sinatra Suite, closing a chapter that began 25 years ago.
It was a farewell to the company where she made history a decade ago as the first Black woman promoted to principal dancer in ABT's 85-year history.
By ballet standards, Copland came to the art form late, at 13 years old.
It was the culmination of a journey that began not in a traditional ballet academy, but in a boys' and girls' club gym, where a shy teenager first discovered what her body could say through movement.
She rose through ABT's ranks to dance the roles that define classical ballet.
Odette O'Dill in Swan Lake, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and the title role in Firebird.
But her impact extends far beyond technique and tradition.
As a best-selling author, film producer and founder of the Misty Copeland Foundation, her goal is to build pathways for children who've never seen themselves reflected on the ballet stage.
Now, as Copeland steps away from ABT, she's turning her focus from performance to transformation, working to remake the art form that has, for many centuries, defined beauty through exclusion.
Misty Copeland, welcome back to Fresh Air.
And it's a pleasure to have you as you enter this new chapter in your life.
Thank you.
I'm excited to be here.
You never wanted a farewell performance, but you got one.
I mean, there's a 15-minute standing ovation.
How are you feeling now that it's over?
Yeah, it's so interesting to just kind of process all that I'm feeling.
I actually feel very calm now. and low.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
And it's a reminder too of kind of all the stages of recovery after performance that I feel like I forgot, because it's been years.
One of my favorite things about you know what I do is, of course, is going on stage, but then there's something so special that happens after the fact, you know, of kind of coming down and letting your body really feel All that you put into it to get to that point and then just being grateful for it after.
And I'm trying to let myself enjoy this kind of recovery process before I start to feel normal again.
You know, Misty, you always seem so composed.
And I got to watch the standing ovation at the end, the 15 minutes.
But in that moment, you were also dealing with a hip injury.
Yeah.
You were in a lot of pain.
Yeah.
I think it's just a part of what we are used to dealing with as performers and as dancers.
And so it just kind of comes with the territory.
You know, I was barely walking before and somehow muster up the.
You were barely walking before you got up on stage.
Yes.
I mean I found out in preparation for the performance that I have bone spurs in my left hip and a labral tear and loss of cartilage.
And my doctors.
They were just like.
I don't think this is a good idea for you to push for this performance.
And I said, well, I've already agreed to it.
And I'm definitely not going to wait any longer to get back on that stage.
So what can we do to make it happen without further injuring my hip?
So it's been a journey.
And I've been really good about pacing myself and in good health.
And then you know, about a month before, a couple of weeks out, I think, my hip was just like I can't tolerate anymore, anymore.
And it just got worse the closer I got to the performance.
And I actually was canceling rehearsals and pulling back on training up until the show because I was just trying to reserve my hip for performance.
Oh, Misty, every time I think about you, I think about the pain that you endure.
I mean, all ballerinas to a certain extent.
But yours, you've been so open about it.
You've documented it.
When did you first begin to understand ballet?
Maybe your relationship to pain, to control it rather than to let it control you.
I think that's something I learned as a child.
So many things in my childhood.
I feel like really, whether they're good or bad, they prepared me to be in this position.
You know I think about just always feeling uncomfortable sometimes, whether it was in the living circumstances that we were in, in my own skin, feeling so much shame around, not often having a home or food on the table, and so I didn't keep friends close.
I just felt like I was never comfortable and was always kind of dealing with that navigating but keeping a happy face on the outside.
I think anyone who knew me would say she was very quiet, but she was always very happy.
And, you know, I had severe migraines growing up.
And I remember I would have to leave school early sometimes, like to the point of vomiting.
And it was just like all this stress that I held inside but somehow was able to still remain like very pleasant on the outside.
I think also just watching my mom navigate life and raising six children on her own and dealing with you know a lot.
And so...
I feel like my relationship with pain, yeah, it started very early.
Like I can remember like seven years old probably.
And so coming into the dance world and experiencing just the – I mean leaving injury out of it, just the pain of what it takes to train in ballet and be an athlete, the mental strength, all of that, I think, was very innate, very natural for me.
I need to know.
You mentioned your son, your three-year-old son.
How –
How does childbirth compare to the kind of pain that you've experienced, that physical pain from injuries?
You know, I couldn't have felt more prepared for labor, you know, by being a ballerina.
I felt so completely emotionally, mentally and physically prepared to give birth.
And I still don't think that anything compares to swan-like labor.
Really?
Oh my.
Okay.
So wait, Mr. Copeland is saying Swan Lake is harder on your body than childbirth.
Oh my gosh.
And I know everyone has very different experiences with childbirth and there's no way to know what someone else feels.
I really enjoyed giving birth to my son.
Like, yes, it was difficult.
There were some complications that happened.
I almost had a cesarean, but My doctor pushed for me not to do it.
And I ended up giving birth without any pain medication in the end.
But there was something that was so familiar to me that I just kind of walked into.
And it was like oh, I know this feeling of preparation, of mental preparation, and kind of preparing yourself for the pain and breathing through the pain and just staying as calm as possible, that
It was so interesting because I hadn't been on stage, you know, in some years and I felt like I was preparing for a performance.
And when I gave birth to my son, I looked at my husband, I said, I want to do that again.
He was like, you're crazy.
You revealed to us some years ago that you've been painting your own pointe shoes for years to match your skin tone.
And now folks can find various different skin tones with pointe shoes and with the tights and everything.
But can you take us back to when you first started doing this, when you were doing it in those early days?
How were you actually doing it?
What were you even using to make them your color?
Yeah.
I think the first time I ever did it I must have been 14 performing with Debbie Allen in California, in Los Angeles.
She was a mentor of mine in her version of the Nutcracker, which at the time she was calling the chocolate Nutcracker.
And that was the very first time that I was understanding, like what the ballet shoe even represents and what the tights mean.
And it's an extension of yourself and your skin and it should be the same color.
I was wearing brown tights then and painting my shoes.
But I would continue to do that throughout the course of my career at ABT.
And I would just go to the drugstore and get whatever the cheapest liquid foundation and put it on my shoes.
I mean, it's not meant to be danced in.
It doesn't have the right like ingredients and consistency.
It's going to be very slippery.
But it's the first thing that a young dancer receives is their, you know, their leotard their, their ballet slippers and their tights.
And that's just right there saying for a black or brown dancer, this isn't for you.
You don't belong.
I want to ask you just a few questions about your relationship with Prince, because it was a pretty defining time period in your life.
You guys worked together for about six years on and off.
Yeah.
You know, he definitely came into my life.
You know, I guess it was in that same time when I was when I discovered Raven and Raven Wilkinson.
Raven Wilkinson, yes.
And was trying to understand how I can be my fullest and best self, how I can carry on these legacies of people who have come before me.
And It was just pretty surprising to find out that Prince was a fan and that he had actually followed my career since I was very young and had a vision for me to be in a music video of his and spent a year trying to find me.
I still don't really understand that story.
I know.
Where was he looking?
I don't know.
I don't know.
He says he reached out to ABT many times and that I was never given the message.
Maybe they didn't believe it was him.
I don't know.
But you know, when we finally did connect, it just made sense, you know, for him to come into my life at that time.
He was my biggest supporter.
He showed me what it was to be one of a kind, to be unique, to be proud to stand in his uniqueness and to use that as a power.
And I think, whereas before I felt, you know, like isolated and alone being the only, and he really saw it as the opposite.
He's like, you have such an advantage.
He's like, you're the only brown girl out there.
Everyone's going to look at you.
Now what are you going to do?
And then you know, and then just exploring my artistry by working with him, I think made me grow in leaps and bounds as a dancer.
You know though, I wasn't doing classical works with him.
He really challenged me to improvise, to be in the moment on the stages that he performed in.
And it really broadened my audience and appeal and brought people to ABT that had not been before.
And being able to show a whole new audience.
Maybe that had never seen ballet before me dancing on point on top of his piano.
It was an incredible opportunity.
I mean, he definitely had a vision for you.
And dancing on the piano, that seems like such a feat.
I mean, the stability in itself.
You know, it's interesting.
When we first started working together, so the first time that I toured with him, traveling through France and dancing on different stages.
And he just let me improvise.
He would say, like I'm going to, you know these songs you'll dance to tonight and you know I'll give you a cue to leave when it's time to go.
And then, as he was preparing for his Welcome to America tour, he really included me in the whole preparation for it.
I mean I was there at Paisley Park and he was working around when I could perform with him when I wasn't performing with American Ballet Theater.
So We decided on one song, and it was The Beautiful Ones.
And then he had a whole idea for choreography.
At the time, we were preparing to do Alexei Ratmansky's, he's the choreographer of ABT's Nutcracker.
It was a new version that he was putting together.
And so we would be performing it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music at BAM.
But we were rehearsing it at NJPAC, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
And so I would be with ABT all morning, all day, into the night and rehearsing the Nutcracker until like 10 pm.
And then Prince would come in a limo and pick me up from New Jersey and take me to either one of the theaters that we were performing at, or he would take me back to his hotel and we would have like a conference room and I would be standing on the conference table using that as my piano and we'd be working through the choreography until like two in the morning.
And I'm like, Prince, I've got to work in the morning so I've got to go.
You get to sleep in all day, like the rock star you are.
But it was very much this beautiful collaboration.
And then to be able to perform that song with him.
You know, night after night was so incredibly special.
And I feel like I just grew so much as an artist and just felt like I was very open from the time that I spent working with him.
You know, one of the things that I was curious about regarding Prince is that he had you in the video Crimson and Clover.
And it's a remake of What did you think about that choice?
And also in that video, you're sort of taking on a modern dance.
It's not ballet.
Yeah.
I mean, I liked the song before Prince remade it.
So I was like, this is cool.
This also feels very different for him.
And just listening to the lyrics, I thought it was like a really cool thing, just because we didn't know each other.
Like we met on the set together and um, there was no setup beforehand.
I mean, we spoke on, we spoke on the phone, like briefly, and then he asked me he's like do you, you know, are you interested?
Like we could fly you out this weekend and shoot it.
And so I, I did um, but we met on the set and um, and so it was just like this kind of tension, like we don't know each other, and so I thought that the lyrics and the I don't know it just kind of all worked and made sense.
And he just sat, you know, right next to the camera guy filming it.
He sat on a what do you call it?
An Apple box with his camera and was just taking pictures of me throughout the whole shoot.
What did that feel like?
That feels like a lot of shooting.
Yeah, it was kind of strange, right?
I mean, we would chat in between takes, but I was just improvising.
I mean, I had pointe shoes on and I was just kind of making things up and he didn't really give me much direction.
He just was like, I just wanted you to be in it.
Like, I envisioned you in this, and that was that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I thought the song made sense, especially for that time in our lives, like coming together and not really knowing each other and getting to know each other.
I thought it was cool.
Yeah.
What meaning did you put to the song?
What did it mean for you for that time period?
He had said to me you know many times that you know he actually filmed the whole video with another dancer and he was not satisfied.
And so that's when he started to look for me again.
But there's like a line in the song that's like I've been waiting to know her or something like that.
That I feel like just kind of sums up that time and that moment of just him wanting, really wanting me in his life and making that happen.
And I think it changed my life in so many incredible ways.
And so it was like, you know, meant to be.
Misty Copeland, this has been such a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Misty Copeland was the first Black woman to become a principal dancer in American ballet theater.
She performed her farewell with the company at a star-studded gala at Lincoln Center on October 22nd.
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