To celebrate Black History Month, each day of the month I will share and discuss a Black person of interest in no particular order, both famous and obscure.
Black Icon #1. Danitra Vance
Danitra Vance was born in Chicago on July 13, 1954. In 1985 Vance became the first African-American woman to join the cast of Saturday Night Live as a repertory player and predated major Black SNL female cast members like Ellen Cleghorn and Maya Rudolph. To date, she has been the only openly Lesbian cast member of Saturday Night Live. Vance's tenure at SNL was an extremely frustrating one, often being delegated to playing a domestic, nurse, or a secretary roles in sketches and limited writing chances. Vance also hated being compared to other her comedienne comtemporaries like Whoopi Goldberg believing that "makes it seem as if there can only be one of us at a time."
Her two most memorable roles on Saturday Night Live was a parody of the tv series That Girl called That Black Girl; where she played Latoya Marie, a young Black actress trying to make it in show bussiness. Her other notable recurring character was Carbini Green Harlem Watts Jackson, a seventeen year old mother of two who dispenses advice. She also performed the song, "I Play the Maids," a parody of Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs" that expresssed Black actresses' dissatisfaction with being typcasted as "the help" in films in television. At the end of the 1986 season of Saturday Night Live, Vance decided to leave.
Where Vance was stifled creatively in SNL, she thrived on stage. She won an NAACP Image Award and Obie award in Spunk, George C. Wolfe's stage adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston short stories and later in Wolfe's Dramatists Guild Award winning play The Colored Museum. In 1990 Vance was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. She underwent a single masectomy, turning the experience into a critically acclaimed one woman show, The Radical Girl's Guide to a Radical Mastectomy. Sadly the cancer recurred in 1993 and died at her grandather's home on August 21, 1994 in Markham, Illinois.
Black Icon #1. Danitra Vance
Danitra Vance was born in Chicago on July 13, 1954. In 1985 Vance became the first African-American woman to join the cast of Saturday Night Live as a repertory player and predated major Black SNL female cast members like Ellen Cleghorn and Maya Rudolph. To date, she has been the only openly Lesbian cast member of Saturday Night Live. Vance's tenure at SNL was an extremely frustrating one, often being delegated to playing a domestic, nurse, or a secretary roles in sketches and limited writing chances. Vance also hated being compared to other her comedienne comtemporaries like Whoopi Goldberg believing that "makes it seem as if there can only be one of us at a time."
Her two most memorable roles on Saturday Night Live was a parody of the tv series That Girl called That Black Girl; where she played Latoya Marie, a young Black actress trying to make it in show bussiness. Her other notable recurring character was Carbini Green Harlem Watts Jackson, a seventeen year old mother of two who dispenses advice. She also performed the song, "I Play the Maids," a parody of Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs" that expresssed Black actresses' dissatisfaction with being typcasted as "the help" in films in television. At the end of the 1986 season of Saturday Night Live, Vance decided to leave.
Where Vance was stifled creatively in SNL, she thrived on stage. She won an NAACP Image Award and Obie award in Spunk, George C. Wolfe's stage adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston short stories and later in Wolfe's Dramatists Guild Award winning play The Colored Museum. In 1990 Vance was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. She underwent a single masectomy, turning the experience into a critically acclaimed one woman show, The Radical Girl's Guide to a Radical Mastectomy. Sadly the cancer recurred in 1993 and died at her grandather's home on August 21, 1994 in Markham, Illinois.
I must admit i don't recall her being on SNL. I didn't really watch it much in the 80's. But definitely a great post!
ReplyDeleteI felt bad that Vance's career, although very critically acclaimed missed out on the success of being a Black female member of SNL, like Ellen Cleghorn or Maya Rudloph did.
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