Bill Cosby Bringing Funny 'Stuff' To Honeywell Center
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
On the road, legendary performer Bill Cosby is used to eating food like pizza. Wednesday, however, he was looking forward to eating some corn from his family’s fields. During a telephone interview, when asked how he was doing, Cosby said it was a beautiful day in Massachusetts. The grandchildren were happy and “Grandmammy” was happy. He said she loves to take the grandchildren through the cornfields. “They pick the corn and that’s their corn, and they bring it all back,” Cosby said. The corn is grilled and then boiled for a moment. It’s dressed up with olive oil and other ingredients. “It just tastes delicious,” Cosby said. “It’s going to be very nice. I eat that, and then I go on the road and eat pizza.” Cosby then started talking about age and how people see growing old as a bad thing. “I hear people paying attention to the negative,” he said. “As they approach the ‘0’, they say, ‘I’m approaching the Big 4-0’. For them, it’s not a distraction, but, ‘I have to go outside and think awhile.’” He recommended young people go talk to someone older, like 75, and walk around with them. Ask them about their life and the beauty in it. Try to have some fun. A 40-year-old person looking at an 80-year-old person should keep their mouth shut about growing old, he said. Cosby doesn’t use the word “jokes” when talking about his stand-up performances. He prefers to say “my stuff.” On Sept. 11 at 7:30 p.m., Cosby is bringing his “stuff” to the Honeywell Center in Wabash. Tickets are $27, $47, $67 and $100. The date being the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, is not lost on Cosby. “People are buying tickets (to laugh), not tickets for me to come out there and dedicate it (for the anniversary) the whole time,” he said. “They’re buying tickets cause they know Bill Cosby causes laughter. “There was a time during the whole Bush thing I had to go (and perform). I wasn’t afraid to put things in their proper place. I went out and told people, listen to this woman sing and we’ll have a moment of reflection for those killed and I will be right back,” Cosby said. He would walk off stage and have the sound guy play a recording of “Ave Marie” by Marian Anderson for two minutes. When it was over, Cosby would walk back on stage and just say he wished them a safe passage. For the rest of the time of the war, he kept that theme going on. Time eventually passed where Cosby just stopped it. While the war in Afghanistan is still going on, the main issue now is the economy and people are feeling very sad, Cosby said. He recommended a poem by Langston Hughes called “A Dream Deferred.” The United States for years and years, he said, has had its ups and downs. “From my viewpoint, I’m listening to John F Kennedy say, ‘Ask not what you’re country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’ While there are many people out of work and looking for jobs, what can you do? Go to the community college and have a meeting with the community college people about yourself. They can maybe come up with something you like,” Cosby said. “I don’t like to use the terminology ‘reinvent yourself’,” Cosby said, but it may be good to do that now in these times.This weekend, depending on if Hurricane Irene doesn’t reschedule it, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is being dedicated in Washington, D.C. Cosby said he can’t be there because he has several shows scheduled in Lancaster, Pa. “The thing that I would love to see on TV, while I’m backstage, is, I imagine they’ll have large screens with photos of him (King) with all kinds of people. I’d like to see at the piano Roberta Flack singing ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’. Not a dry eye in the place. I would love to see that,” Cosby said. The King memorial will be next to the memorials and monuments of former U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. The dedication tentatively for this weekend is King’s moment, Cosby said, but also “our moment.” “We have it now,” he said. “It’s here for other people from other countries to read his thoughts, his mind, to look at this and see.” For the Sept. 11 show at Honeywell, however, the audience will see and hear Cosby’s funny “stuff”. “My job as Bill Cosby is to make smiles, laughter and, what’s good about ‘my stuff’, is when I’m finished and when people leave, they’re still talking and laughing about it,” he said. Cosby said in his shows, he talks about things people can understand and he is a storyteller. There’s no profanity and he doesn’t take off his clothes. “It’s a good, old-fashion fun time,” Cosby said. If a person remembers Cosby from his 1980s hit show “The Cosby Show,” Cosby said, “That’s me. That’s Bill Cosby. The same storyteller who makes you fall off the sofa.”
