Dame Wilburn - Dragon Wings

 

My father died the sophomore year that I was in college. And this made me the sole focus of my mother, the Dragon. [audience laughter] Now, she got that name, because she wanted me to be a free spirit, but she was never prepared when I did free spirited stuff. [audience laughter] She would always respond to these moments with volcanic levels of fury that could only be described as dragonesque. [audience laughter] 

 

She was 5’10” in heels. She kept her talons sharpened. She would wear $2,000 worth of power suits and accoutrements, and she would smoke under no smoking signs for kicks. [audience laughter] She also once sent a man, a pink slip. He was in a coma and she sent it to the hospital and had his wife sign for it. [audience laughter] 

 

This is the woman whose eyes are boring into the back of my head, as I sit at my graduation with my diploma holder trembling in my hand. This holder, and I have a secret. And we learned this secret about three months ago when my counselor said I was a few credits short of graduating. [audience laughter] I was 15 credits short of graduating. 

 

Now, if you don't go to college and don't understand what that means, that's a semester. [audience laughter] So, I had somehow managed to be in school for five years [audience laughter] and still be a semester short of graduating. [audience applause]

 

Thank you. Some of y'all did it. It was also at that meeting that she told me that if you weren't graduating until the fall, you could walk in the spring. And that's when it started. 

 

I began to come up with a plot that would extend the time between the time I graduated and the time my mother, the Dragon, found out that I hadn't graduated, [audience laughter] which means I've got a problem. While I'm sitting here in this chair-- Now, I don't know how many of you have run a con, but [audience laughter] if you're running a con, evidence is bad. [audience laughter] Holding it is worse. And I'm holding something that's empty, so I need a Hail Mary pass. That's when I look to the young lady next to me and I see that she has a form letter that says, the reason she didn't get her diploma is because she didn't pay her last bill. I take this out of her hand, put it in my diploma holder, throw my hat up into the sky and celebrate my graduation. [audience laughter] 

 

Now, I walk outside and I get into the parking lot, and my mother makes a beeline for me and snatches that holder off from under my arm, because she can smell blood in the water. [audience laughter] She opens it up, reads it and says, “Makes sense.” And we go off to dinner. [audience laughter] And baby, it was beautiful. I now have little time on my hands, but here's one of my issues now I can't go home, because under her direct gaze, I'm going to crack, okay? [audience laughter] So, I told her, “Well, I'm going to work campus security for the summer. And then when I come home in the fall, I'll get a job.” [audience laughter] 

 

Now, the key to a good lie is that it's got some truth in it. I'm a cabin security officer. At least I was until I had an administrator and a police officer knock on my dorm door. Okay. Now, the word they use is embezzlement, [audience laughter] but I feel like that word is too big. [audience laughter] Okay, stay with me. [audience laughter] At the time, I had access to the charge account for campus security at the school bookstore. And apparently, I had run up a charge of about $700. Exactly. [audience laughter] So, the admin informed me that I had two options. “You can quit your job, pay the money back.” Or, “We can fire you, you can pay the money back plus court costs, and you can go to jail.” The officer informed me that embezzlement has a 15-year jail time. And I thought about it. [audience laughter] 

 

Now, the reason I thought about it, much to the bemusement of the officer, was I was pretty sure the Dragon was never going to get her talons through those jail walls. [audience laughter] And I might actually be safer with the cops than I was at home. But I also knew I couldn't really go to jail and tell my fellow inmates that I had embezzled $700 worth of pizza flavored combos. [audience laughter] So, I took option one. 

 

Now I find myself in another, little problem. Because as a campus security officer, I could stay on campus for the summer for free, but I don't have that job, and I owe the bookstore $700. And to stay on campus, I've got to pay a grand. Can't ask the Dragon. So, this is where modified con number three comes in. [audience laughter] Okay, hold on. Stay with me. We got this together. We're going to be all right. So, I called my godparents and told them that my mother had fallen on hard times. My mother hadn't been on hard times since she was two. [audience laughter] I said she'd fallen on hard times and I needed them to pay this bill, because I didn't want to ask her for the money. 

 

Okay. Now we got it. We have tied up all the loose ends, everything is gravy, I've got the whole summer to figure out what I'm going to say to her. Well, while I was doing all that plotting and thinking, I had forgotten to get myself enough money to eat. And that's when I started reading magazines, I started reading the newspaper, I started watching the news and I turned myself into one hell of a dinner guest. I've got good shoes, I've got good manners, I know how to talk to people. I'm witty and urbane. [audience laughter] I was raised right mostly. And people love to have me over. I'm good at getting myself invited to things I'm not supposed to go to. 

 

But the end of summer, it snuck up on me pretty quickly. And my buddy came in from New York, and I told him everything I had going on. And he said, “You know, you might be some evil genius. [audience laughter] I hope one day you're going to use your powers for good.” [audience laughter] And that's when it all hit me. I'm out of lives, I'm out of people, I'm out of time, I'm out of chances. I got one more card to play, and that's the truth. And it dawns on me. I got to call the Dragon. 

 

Now, I'm not going to call her and talk to her. Absolutely not. So, I waited till she went to work, and then I called home and left a message on her answering machine. [audience laughter] And the message I left was, “Hi. It's Dame. I didn't graduate and I'm actually 15 credit hours short. The school says I got to pay $1,500 by end of business on Friday, so that I can register for the fall semester. If you've got it, great. But if you don't, let me know. Thanks. Bye.” [audience laughter] 

 

Now, you got to understand, I don't know how many of you have ever run a four-part con, but the key to doing it is to not talk to anybody. So, I hadn't answered the phone in four months. Because talking to people is how you give up, what evidence. Once I left that message for her, I shut off the ringer on my phone, turned the answering machine volume all the way down and took a three-hour nap. [audience laughter] When I woke up, my answering machine light was blinking at me angrily. It took everything in me to press that button. But I played the message and this is what it said, “I will be at Siena Heights at noon on Friday. I expect to speak with you in person. Click.” It's not terrifying at all. [audience laughter] 

 

So, when I told my counselor everything that had gone on, I came clean to her, she said, “I think it's best that you two not meet in private.” [audience laughter] I think you should meet in the music room, and I'm going to be in my office and we're going to leave all the doors open. [audience laughter] This woman had met my mother one time, [audience laughter] but she knew what I was up against. And that's how I ended up clutching a music stand, staring into the eyes of the Dragon. 

 

Now I'm waiting for the speech, “You know, you're a liar, you're a cheater, you have a chronic lack of ambition. You know, the speech I've been getting my whole life.” But she starts crying and she says, “Do you know what it's like to not know where your child is? Do you know what it's like to leave message after message and not get it returned? Do you know that I contacted the Michigan State Police Department and tried to have you declared as a missing person, but they informed me that I couldn't do it because you were 24 years old and you were an adult and you didn't have to call your mom?”

 

Now, my mother didn't cry at her mother's funeral. So, I'm touched and moved by this. However, the hustler in me was thinking about how the Michigan State Police Department got my back. [audience laughter] I am an adult. I don't have to talk to my mama. The Popo is on my side. [audience laughter] And that's what gave me the courage to tell her, “Do you know what it's like to be the singular focus of a very focused mother? Do you know what it's like to have no control over your childhood and see that it's going to spill into your adulthood? Do you know what it's like to get a diploma you don't really want in a degree you don't really want for somebody else?” 

 

And then she asked me a question for the first time in 24 years. She said, “What do you want to do next?” I said, “I want to finish.” We walked over to the business office and she wrote a check. We walked outside, and that's when the sun hit and she pulled up to her full height, and you could hear the leathery edges of her wings snapping in the wind. [audience laughter] And she unclenched her talons and put one right up against my jugular and she said, “You need to get the hell out of this school, because I'm not paying one more dime for your education.” 

 

I thanked her and she drove off. But I didn't need her pep talk. I already knew what I wanted to do. I walked off that campus with the highest GPA of my entire educational career, a 3.0 - [audience cheers and applause] -and my own set of leather wings. Thank you.