Free I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight by Margaret Cho Page A

sweating, thinking of how if you hadn't done what you had done, the work you gave the world, the man you are—I wouldn't exist, not in the way I do now, not in the way I wanted to, needed to. I might not even have lived. Thank you for my life, along with all the other things I am trying to thank you for.
           I saw your movies. The first one,
Live on the Sunset Strip
, changed my life, my destiny. It was the first time I realized who I was, and what I would be. I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up because I never saw anyone that made me want to grow up, and then there was you. You were telling your tales, making motherfuckers helpless with laughter in the aisles. Black people, white people, everyone, right at the time when we all had a hard time sitting together, we came to see you, because you werebeyond race, you disarmed us, we couldn't hang on to our guns because we were trying not to pee from laughing.
           Historically, you were the bridge between the civil rights movement and the America that wanted finally to be itself. The stories you told were the ones that united the Black Panther and the "honky," the feminists and the pimps, the playas and the fools, the us and the them. There was no more race war/battle of the sexes when you took the stage, there was just you, sweating like Muhammad Ali, because you were a fighter, but also a lover too, as you stopped our fighting, and started us on the idea that we could love each other. Because we laughed at the same things, we realized we had a lot more in common with each other than we thought. I count you among the others that brought change to the world that so badly needed it, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, Rosa Parks—fuck it—Gandhi. You the man, Mr. Pryor. As important as any founding motherfucking father, any "Give me liberty or give me death" fool. You should have money with your face on it. It should be a big-ass bill, too. Like the $1,000,000,000,000 bill should have you on the front. Even that wouldn't be enough.
           Thank you for the truth you told, the bravery that you had, the big balls and the brains to make the ways you almost took yourself out, killed yourself, fucking funny as fuck. How did you make the fact that you were dying from freebasing, even set yourself on fire, burning like a KKK cross running down the street—funny?!!!!!The poet you are, the genius you are, the beauty you are—is worthy of shock and awe. You gave birth to the kind of comedy that is real, that is life, that loves the listener, loves the laugher, that has no bullshit, no front. You had the courage to be vulnerable, which nobody had, certainly not stand-up comics—maybe the dude that sang "If you're going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear flowers in your hair," whoever the fuck he was. He was vulnerable, but who gives a shit?
           You were talking about the things that hurt you in life, your lovers, your past, your addictions that were taking you away from yourself, big Jim Brown who helped you and loved you and made us all wish we were Jim Brown because you held him in such high regard and you made his voice and character so full of heart and help, your monkey that the dog ate, and the dog that was sorry about it, who would stop chasing you for that day, just to mourn the loss with you, and we could laugh and cry with you. Mudbone, who broke the stereotypes that were so long held by white people about the black man, who was a character, not a caricature, who was a man, not a cartoon, who was not in blackface but a man with a black face. Mudbone was a genius and a player, a hustler and an honest man, a joker and a sentimental fool. You changed the way we viewed race. You changed the way we laughed. You changed the way America looked at Americans. You gave us new glasses. We could see ourselves as we actually were, just human and no different from each other, regardless of what color we were, who we loved,