Downloaded from YTS.MX
[ALL CHEERING]
KENDRA: That's it.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
That's really the only reason I do this stuff, you know.
To get a whopping round of applause when I enter the room.
Thank you for coming. I got a little dressed up for you guys tonight.
Thank you.
[LAUGHS]
Normally I'm in like a baseball cap and a hoodie very layered.
It's almost like I'm dressed for a defensive game of strip poker.
If anybody was to take me up on my challenges, you know.
But I'm wearing what I want to wear.
I feel like finally, after all these years, my affirmations are working.
Yeah, thanks. I've been doing, honest to God,
I've been doing affirmations for like 20 years,
and you know, I love and adore myself.
This too shall pass.
Sometimes I feel like I'm brainwashed.
Like the other day I went out to lunch alone, which I never do
because I always feel like I get into something with the hostess, you know.
She's always like, "Table for one?"
I'm like, "Yeah, but I'll be ordering for four." [CHUCKLES]
If I can get the six top in the corner,
I'd like to have all my food laid out in front of me like a Grecian goddess.
Do you have a private party room 'cause I'd like to eat in my underwear?
And, uh...
that'd be reflected in my tip.
But I've been, I've been doing all this affirmations
that I feel like I'm almost brainwashed,
like the waitress came up to me and she said, "Are you ready?"
And I said, I'm totally ready.
No one can stop me. I'm big, I'm strong. I move fast.
I'll take the pasta special.
Thank you.
I started doing all these affirmations.
My mother, my parents were getting divorced.
My mother started doing all this stuff and I wanted to be like her.
I was like in the ninth grade reading Codependent No More.
You know, erogenous zones.
By the time I graduated high school,
I had the vocabulary of a well-read divorcee.
Honest to God, but I loved it.
I loved all the like, the one liners, you know,
the like Dr. Wayne Dyer would say like, "Change the way you look at things,
and the things you look at will change."
Oh, so deep, right? I know.
I remember. I tried out for a cheerleading squad and I didn't make it.
And my friends were like, you'll get it next year.
And I was like, this too shall pass.
Very, very emotionally disconnected for a 14-year-old.
You know what I mean?
I did. I've been doing them for a long time.
I feel like, my mom,
when my mother started doing them, she was like, I wanted to be just like her.
She was always my mother.
When my parents got divorced, we were so lucky to have her
because she was like one of these people.
Very charismatic, always dressed to the nines, you know.
Some people might even say she was overdressed.
Overdressed, overdressed for every occasion.
I feel like her favorite look was like the captain of a ship, you know.
She loves to wear like starched pants
with a fitted blazer, some sort of gold emblem on it, you know.
She's walking like she's in charge of something.
You know, everyone at TJ Maxx thinks she's in the corporate office, you know.
She's got that sort of...
She got that sort of power about her.
But I think that is the only thing
that her and my father ever had in common was they both like to get overdressed
because he was always sitting around the couch in a three piece suit.
You know, just in case a pall-bearer dropped down at the last minute.
He could get over there and save the day.
But they were, they were very sophisticated looking couple.
You know what I mean? Like you would see them and you'd be like,
ooh, maybe they go home at the end of the day to a well set table,
you know, maybe some Chicken Coq Au Vin
or some roasted potatoes, you know, uh, a dry French red.
But in actuality, my mother was making like catering dish sizes of
chicken Broccoli Ziti that we'd eat for three weeks, green bean casserole,
which is like canned green beans, cream of mushroom soup
and free dried, freeze dried onion rings.
[STUTTERING] If you're unfamiliar. Yeah, thank you. I know.
If heaven forbid, someone would should forget
the green bean casserole at a holiday,
that's all people would talk about to the next holiday.
They're like, nobody better fucking forget the green bean casserole.
But the best was my grandmother.
She liked to make dump cake, which I don't know
if you guys know what dump cake is, but it's basically, yes,
okay, so it's like you know, you get a sheet cake pan, put canned pineapples
and then Duncan Hines' cake mix with nothing added, just dry.
Put that on top, slabs of butter.
Stick it in the oven for like 20 minutes.
Take it out. Cool whip.
And then you're like, oh, the dump cake's ready.
My grandmother would later go on to live in a 55 and over community.
Leisure Woods, rock the Massachusetts and they put,
they would put other people from Leisure Woods here.
Oh, my God, that would be, that would be bananas.
See a little Leisure Woods bus, uh...
But she, she...
they had, they had, like every year they had,
they did a recipe book, you know and every year my grandmother put, uh, dump cake,
Catherine Cunningham, and we thought that was the coolest thing,
and then we found out like she didn't create dump cake.
You know, like, just like my family to claim something that, like,
with embarrassing credentials, you know what I mean?
It's like, oh yeah, I created that dump cake.
But anyway, I was, I was reading all these, these self-help,
self-help books and everything when I was in high school.
But it wasn't like I didn't feel like bad as a kid,
I wasn't like a shy kid.
I thought, I thought, I liked myself.
You know, I just wanted to be better, you know.
And as an Irish Catholic, you never say you want to be better,
because whoever you're talking to is, like better than who?
Better than me?
Better than your mother?
We've been doing this way a long time.
Let's not rock the boat.
But I was, I was, I feel like I was being,
you know, as a and also as an Irish Catholic, you want to be good,
but you just want to be good for the sake of being good.
You don't want a showboat about it.
You know, you just quietly go along.
And I was going to an all-girls Catholic high school, so I was being good,
Monday through Friday, uh.
And then on the weekends, I was wearing my leopard jumpsuits.
But I feel like going to an all-girls Catholic high school,
I feel like it was really kind of like social development isolation,
you know, because like the girls who went to the Public high school,
they always had a good idea
what was going on with boys, you know, they'd be like that guy's flirting with me,
or that guy's a dickhead or whatever, they knew.
But as a girl going to an all-girls
Catholic high school, you never saw the boys
until they were around the girls from the all-girls Catholic high school,
and they were acting crazy because they thought we were desperate,
which we were.
And I just had no idea what to make of them.
I remember once I was in high school
and the guy I had a crush on, came streaking,
you know, through the, through the cafeteria, four, you know, teenage boys
ran through naked and I was like yes, I'll go to the prom with you.
I was like, I don't understand how this works.
I really don't get it.
I was doing all this stuff and this is the thing, I feel like,
so I didn't have a good litmus test for men.
You know, my father was a little bit of a strange man.
You know, I always like to say my mother's Irish Catholic
and my father's Asperger's, you know.
But he, he was one of these guys like, he would come home at the end of the day,
and all he really wanted to talk about was how much he looked like Paul Newman,
you know, that was really his big topic of conversation.
But when we were kids, he would have us,
you know, on the weekends, he was a regional handball champion.
He'd, he'd, I know he'd be very happy I mentioned that.
And...
Notice I put regional and not national.
But anyway, he was a, no he was, he was,
he was a a champion of sorts,
and he was very much into working out.
So on the weekends, you know, sometimes when he was in charge
of me and my sister, he'd be like, he would,
he would have us out in the front yard
running military sprints, wrapped in garbage bags
so we would lose our water weight faster.
Me and my sister would be like, petrified.
We'd wake up Saturday mornings hiding in our room.
He's like, "Get down here and read the dictionary."
We're like, "Right after we finish making
these license plates, Dad" like, it was terrible.
He is crazy.
Sometimes on a Saturday, he'd say to my mother,
"You go out for the day, I'll take the kids."
And so me and my sister would get in the car with my father,
we're on the front seat, no seat belts.
And we'd be like, "Where are we going, Dad?"
We're so excited and he was like, "Oh, you'll soon find out",
and like 20 minutes later, we'd pull into the dog track.
And... he'd have me and my sister place some bets.
I'm eight. She's five.
And then he'd like, get so mad,
if we didn't win, he'd be like, "What happened?
That dog didn't win a place this show."
What do you base that pick on?"
I'm like he had purple in his name.
I don't know.
Are we getting pizza?
But no, he wasn't like a loser.
He had a job. He was a lawyer.
My mother was, my mother had a cafe
and then she went on to be a teacher and real estate
like, they knew how to make money.
They just don't know how to keep it.
I feel like every, but I've been here for like,
my family's been here for, like, 300 years,
I'm like a third generation Cunningham,
we're all still acting like we just got here.
You know, we're working two jobs, trying to get paid under the table.
No one owns any real estate.
I'm like, who had the great idea to come over here?
If we were in Lithuania, I'd have a farm house right now, you know.
I even said to my, my relatives, I said, did our ancestors have a plan?
They have a vision? They want to be pizza people?
Fashionistas. What was it? Where did we go wrong?
They all said the same thing.
They said, I think we just came here because everybody was doing it.
Great.
Third generation follower.
Fantastic.
To my father, he wasn't so good with money.
And he and he wasn't so good with kids, either.
He, after my parents got divorced, he would sometimes, like,
just, like, disappear for like two months.
But he wouldn't leave the 20-mile radius.
So like me, mother and my sister would pull into a Burger King
drive through and he'd be in the car in front of us...
waving in the rearview like, he just met us at a cookout a couple of days ago, you know.
He was an odd guy.
Anyway, I was doing, so I was doing all these affirmations for years,
and I just I really wasn't applying them to myself,
like I always like to apply them to other people.
Um, but never to myself.
Like my family.
One of the like, the only thing they...
we can all agree that we love to do is eavesdrop.
So when we go out to eat, nobody says a word.
Everyone's just like this with their eyes darting around,
trying to listen to the conversation behind them.
The waiter that comes up, like, "You guys ready to order?" and we're like, "Shh."
They're getting in a fight in the booth over there.
Something about a Christmas party. Come back, come back.
But even to this day, I want to do it
like if I'm out, you know, at a bar and I'm listening,
and the couple next to me,
like the girls talking about some great bargain
she got at, like, TJ Maxx
and he he's, like, completely zoned out,
and then he just goes to the bathroom without saying a word.
I have to stop myself from, sliding into his seat
like this guy's not listening to you. All right?
He has no idea about the mandarin collar.
I do.
I think you better think about this. He's coming back.
I really do have to stop myself from doing stuff like that.
But I did. I feel like I was,
I didn't understand men and often in high school,
I feel like I often like, confused
lack of interest for shyness.
So like a guy wouldn't be interested in me, and I'd be like he's so shy.
Oh, my God.
He doesn't even look at me when I talk to him.
He must come from abusive home.
I mean, I'm going to have to work really hard at this.
But I did. I feel like I always picked men who didn't really treat me
the way I wanted to be treated?
And how did I want to be treated, you might ask?
Well, I wanted to be complimented, adored you know,
I wanted to have conversations about self-development.
I wanted guys to be honest with me.
I wanted them to say, you're too good for me.
You're out of my league.
But I always, I always wanted to help people.
I wanted to be better. I wanted other people to be better.
When I ended, when I went to college, I said I'm going to be a psychologist.
I went to the University of Miami, ready to become a psychologist.
And then I met all these Jewish American princesses,
and they were rich and flashy, and I liked it.
Like in Boston, you never knew anyone was rich until you found out they had a boat.
You'll be like, they have boat money? Oh!
I'd no idea.
These girls were proud of their wealth.
And I was like, I was like, I want to be like that, you know.
I wanted to trade in my Liz Claiborne blazer
and pearl necklace for rhinestone covered visor.
You know what I mean?
Where's my second hand tour at?
I'll take it. But they don't let you in that easy.
But they were never broke. They never said I don't have any money.
I can't go out. I could have no money for three days before my father
would like FedEx me cash He was like one of these guys.
He was always trying to get rich, quick scheme.
And one time he drove from Massachusetts
to Florida to buy lottery tickets that weren't available in Massachusetts,
so that he could drive them back up and sell them at a premium.
And got back to Massachusetts and thought there might be
a winner in here and kept them all.
So this is like, this is what we're dealing with, you know.
So, yeah, these girls really turned my mind around
about wanting to have some money,
and I got out of college.
I ended up working at Fidelity...
It was a Fidelity Mutual Fund company, and I was in a call center.
Basically, I wore a headset, took incoming calls all day,
telling people about their accounts,
you know, that have cash, mutual funds, whatever it was.
I thought it was very interesting because I don't think we ever talked
about the stock market growing up, so I was like, oh, this is cool.
We didn't have trust funds in my family.
You know, we barely had trust.
One time I actually asked my grandmother, I said, what's nepotism?
And she said, "Oh, I think it's like goat."
We don't, we don't even know the vocabulary.
That goes along with being wealthy.
Anyways, I really, I liked this job.
I liked learning. I liked, you know, I liked seeing all these people
with all this money. I could never be a financial advisor.
But I could certainly be a spending adviser.
I was like, you've $450,000 here.
You know what you could buy with that?
I do.
Let me send you a list.
But my favorite part about that job was my boss. I had a female boss.
She was the only female manager in that department.
And she was a bodybuilder. Remember that.
And I remember she was going to go on vacation with her boyfriend,
and like, a week before the vacation, they broke up,
and she went on the vacation anyway.
And I was like, oh, I want to be like that.
She was like very,
she was nurturing me like she wanted me to be more like her,
like, she was trying to get me to take the the different licenses.
I ended up getting my series 6, my 63 Mutual Fund licenses,
but I was also working at a at a restaurant as a hostess.
And I liked that job better. Like I liked. I could wear what I want.
I could flirt. I could drink. I wanted to be a bartender, you know.
That's what I wanted to be.
You know, now 20 something years later, I'm like,
I had a guy come in the other night, he was like,
"I have $7. What should I get?"
I'm like, I don't know, a job.
Some, some financial advice, perhaps.
Go buy a banana, make a phone call.
I can't help you here.
When you get out of college, you don't do what you want to do.
You do what you're supposed to do. I kept, I got the job, benefits, all that stuff
and I worked part time, always in a restaurant.
And I got to say, a lot of my friends at that time and my early like 20s
were getting married, and I was never that girl.
I was never the girl, like, I want to get married,
like, I was always like, against the customs.
Everyone did the same thing. I wanted to be different.
Especially bachelorette parties.
I always had a hair across my ass about bachelorette parties.
Because I feel like, it's not fair,
like, bachelorette parties, guys will go to like a strip club,
they'll go skiing, whatever, they don't self-identify
as being in a bachelor party.
They're not wearing like a king's crown with a robe, with a velvet robe
taking like, shots of tequila, out of vagina shaped shot glasses.
They don't have to do any of that, you know.
But we're supposed to, you know, you see these girls
on their bachelorette parties with like, sashes and, you know, dick water guns
and ball bag mugs and, you know, making fools out of themselves.
But I actually went. The last time
I went to a bachelorette party was here in New York.
I went to a male strip club, and I had this great idea.
I was like, I'm going to get really dressed up,
and I'm going to trick these strippers into thinking I'm a sugar mama.
And I don't know where this idea came from, but I, but I acted on it,
and I wore I wore like a black pantsuit,
minimal makeup, low, you know, low ponytail,
and I went to meet my friends, who clearly looked like
they were going to a male strip club.
They had like high heels,
low cut shirt, drunk and...
and we go into the club.
Right away, I have these two strippers,
like on either side of me, you know, humping my thighs.
You know, and I'm like, kind of like, stoically looking off like...
What would a rich lady look like with two sets of balls on her thigh?
And then, it occurred to me that I had, like, $17 in my bag.
And I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to keep up this sugar mama facade
for very long and as I'm thinking this,
one of the guys like gets in front of me
and he leans in and he goes, "Mother of the bride."
[LAUGHING]
I know. Fail, fail.
I was like, I'm the rich one.
Idiot.
But I do, I do.
But honestly, like whenever I get invited to a bachelorette party,
I always go because I've never been married,
and if I don't go, they might think I'm jealous.
And I'd rather spend 350 bucks doing something I don't want to do...
than have someone think I want what they have.
You know what I mean?
I feel like that's money well spent.
Thank you.
So, yeah, I was, I was trying to figure out what to do like next with my life.
I was, you know, here I was,
my friend's getting married. I'm working two jobs.
I really didn't have any, like, big, I didn't know what to do.
And no one in my family had really, like, uprooted themselves in a long time.
My great great grandmother was the last one to really, like,
move away from the rest of us.
I mean from her family,
she moved from Lithuania here.
And she would just, like, sit in her overstuffed living room chair,
looking out the window, ragging on people. You know what I mean?
I was like, you could have done that in Lithuania, you know what I mean?
So I was trying to figure out you know what to do with myself.
Everyone in my family always like complained
we didn't have connections.
And every once in a while, someone would be like, I met someone.
He's a good connection, you know.
And then it would turn out to be like a lateral connection.
It was just like he couldn't really do anything for us,
just like drag us along quicker.
But every once in a while, my father would think, you know, he had,
he was like a big swinging dick.
And in high school, he would give,
once in a while he'd get me, like tickets to a concert
or a or a sporting event, and he'd say, he'd give me the tickets
and he'd be like, make sure to tell him,
you're Cutsy Cunningham's daughter and nine times out of ten,
they'd be like, "Who the fuck is Cutsy Cunningham?"
They had no idea who he was.
Cutsy was my father's nickname.
Why? We don't know.
He claimed that, he claimed that he worked at a butcher shop
when he was young, but my mother knew him since he was like ten.
She never knew him to work in a butcher shop, but we didn't ask any questions.
We just called him Cutsy, you know.
And in his, and in his defense,
my grandmother was like a little bit of a wild lady.
And she was like, you know, divorced three times
when nobody got divorced, she was, you know, I guess,
she would say she was a feminist, you know, she worked 40 years
in Shawmut Bank as a manager, and she kind of fancied herself a man hater.
She would, she always wore like nightgowns with matching robes,
she got her hair done every Saturday.
She'd sit at home, sometimes drinking a whiskey sours
complete with, like, the cherry in it and everything.
And I know and she would go my,
she had a brother who was gay and they would go on gay cruises
way before they would even, you know, call them that.
So, she was, she was like a hot shit.
So every once in a while, and she loved horror films.
So every time, like every once in a while
we'd go and stay over there on a Saturday night,
me and my sister and she'd be like drinking a whiskey sours in her,
her nightgown and robe and she'd say like, all right, time for bed
and we'd follow her up the stairs, her robes swinging back and forth.
She had a bookcase outside of her bedroom,
with all the book covers turned inside out.
Nobody ever asked.
We go, we go, we get in her room.
She has, like these big velvet curtains
that act as blackout curtains, pulls those shut.
Her big, huge, like armoire size TV turns on a horror film.
King size bed, single woman and uh... we'd all like, jump into the bed
and like not even 10 minutes later, she'd start to fall asleep
and she'd turn to me and my sister and be like,
"Now, don't wake your grandmother up."
And me and my sister would be lying there stiff as a board.
We don't know if it's morning, noon or night.
Like the 17th person just got murdered on the TV.
So the next morning we'd like be running back home
and our friends would be like, "I went to my grandmother's.
We made chocolate chip cookies."
It would be like we saw a bride get beheaded on the TV.
Did you know you can't trace cyanide?
I have to say, you know, I never really realized
how cheap my family was till my grandmother passed away.
We all went together to the funeral home
because it never, we had never had to do it before.
We wanted to see how it all went down.
And they started going through the charges. They're like,
it's going to cost $750 to break ground.
And my mother was like, "Uncle Jimmy's got a snow shovel.
I think he can..."
They're like, "No, you got to use our guys."
And then they got to the coffins, $2500 baseline.
Everyone in unison was like, she really likes sleeping bags.
She was always in a sleeping bag.
It'd be a shame if we didn't bury her in the Winnie-the-Pooh sack...
she liked to nap in.
No, it's terrible. She was definitely
my favorite family member, you know.
You know that she was kind of like a dirty old lady, you know that,
old wives tale.
If a man has big hands, it means he has a big dick.
Just my family? Okay.
All the guys with small hands are like, that's not necessarily...
But my grandmother would take like any obvious
physical characteristic of a man and correlate that
into meaning he had a big dick.
So it should be like, see that guy over there in the wheelchair?
You know what that means, don't you?
Me and me and my sister will be like, "Grandmother, guy's got no legs."
She's like, "Exactly."
He probably cut off his own legs to highlight that big dick he has.
That's what happens to guys with big dicks.
They go crazy.
She was a trip.
But no, every once in a while, you know, I have to say,
as the years went on, after my parents were divorced,
I wouldn't talk to him for long periods of time.
And I remember I was 18.
I hadn't talked to him in six months.
I wasn't calling him because basically out of spite, you know.
And I needed a car, and my mother was like, "You got to call him."
And I called them and I said, You know, I need a car,
and he was like, "Oh, I have an extra car for you."
We don't come from a family of fleets, you know.
And I was like, oh, God, like, all right, well, what,
what's the story with it?
And he said, it's in a lot in South Boston.
Go over there, tell them you're Cutsy Cunningham's daughter.
And...
And I was like, I really wasn't doing that anymore.
But I wanted the car.
So I went.
Two of my friends drive me. This was, like, way before GPS.
And we just had it written down on a piece of paper, and we're driving around.
It's like nothing. You can't see anything.
There's no stores, there's no people.
It's just like industrial lots of...
No car lots and, and then we see one little lot
in the, in the distance that has, like a hut with a light on.
And I'm like, oh, God, what is this?
So we pull up and my friends are like, "We'll wait here."
And um... and I guess I get out.
I hear the car doors like lock behind me and I start going.
I'm like, it's is all garbage.
It's like you know, old tires, TVs, all this crap.
I'm like, is all this stuff
my father's stuff? You know, like Cutsy Cunningham's junkyard?
And I would always be surprised because as kids,
if we were driving down the road and he saw a trash bag
on the other side of the road, he would pull a UE
to go and see what was in that bag.
And if it wasn't decomposing, it went in the trunk.
Me and my sister would be like, "What are you going to do with that, Dad?"
He's like, "Sell it at a yard sale."
And you know, in his defense, we do come from a long line
of unsuccessful yard sales.
Every, every year, every year, someone wants to give it one more shot, you know.
And I just feel like yard sales are just like a public admission
of being like I don't know what trash is.
Let me pull all this stuff on the front lawn.
Let the general public decide.
That's like, "Oh, no, that's not garbage. That is a price tag on it."
Yeah.
Three hours from now, when I pull it four feet that way, then it'll be trash.
Right now, it's my inventory.
But if you don't go to yard sales,
you know, they have lingo in the yard sale world.
One of the, one of the terms is called an early bird.
Thank you.
And basically, it'll say on the thing,
"Yard sale, ten to noon. No early birds."
They don't want people showing up
cherry picking the good stuff at 9 AM.
You know, but my mother is an early bird,
and she doesn't care what they say on the flyer.
So we'll go to the yard sale.
And she'll send me up to try to see what's going on,
and I'm like peeking in the windows.
Looks like a bunch of junk, ma.
And then I get back to the car only to find it were the wrong address.
And...
Pull off in a puff of smoke.
Anyway, so here I am. I'm in this like junkyard,
trying to retrieve a present from my father.
And...
I go up to the to the booth and I tell him,
I'm Cutsy Cunningham's daughter and he's like, "Oh, it's the only car in the lot."
"Straight to the back. You'll see it."
So I'm walking back there.
I don't see anything. Nothing that looks like a car.
It's just all junk.
Like, I don't know what the fuck is going on around here.
And then I see, like, what might be like a roof of a car,
but like low to the like, not car level.
I'm like, is that, I'm getting closer and I see it's just like,
bird shit, dirt, everything. It is.
It's the roof of a car.
The car is on like forced into blocks.
I'm like my father gave me a car with no wheels.
I love and adore myself.
This too shall pass.
But I was like, I was like, embarrassed, you know.
And I went back to my friends and I was like, oh, I think it needs a tune up.
I'll pick it up next week.
And I went home and I called my father and I was like the car has no wheels.
And he was like, "Well, I guess you'd better put some wheels on it then."
Like, oh, the bad connections just keep getting worse.
So that was when I was 18.
Now I'm like, you know, in my mid-20s, I'm in Boston, working two jobs.
I don't have a man. I'm like, I want to do something.
I want to, I want to get up and go.
And my friend who I went to college with was living here in New York,
and she called and she was like, "Oh, my roommate moved out.
If you really want to move to New York, this is a great time.
All you have to do is pack your stuff.
You have a place to stay, you know, you know people."
And I was like, all right, I'm going to think about it,
and she was like, "You've been talking about moving to New York,
you know, for years and were you just like blowing smoke?"
And so I packed my bags and I moved.
And I like to think I moved to New York because Monica called my bluff.
But, uh...
But I was like, nervous to come here.
I was excited but I was nervous. I was really afraid that I was going to be promiscuous.
Because I was, I was... listen, I'm, I'm a horny girl.
Uh, but I'm not promiscuous like I don't even like to have sex with the lights on.
You know, my motto is, you want me, you can grope around and find me.
[LAUGHING] I'll be...
I'll be in the second closet to the left...
with every item of clothing I have on.
But I was nervous because I had this vision of New York
being like all these James Bond type characters
who like prey on the newcomers, you know,
and I had visions of me waking up and, like sparsely decorated lofts
and being sent home in a black car, you know, never to see this man again.
I feel like I was very much in fear of having, like a rich man affair.
You know, I'm like, what was the problem, Kendra?
But I, I, I, I came here and I really, in the first year
that I was here, I really didn't meet
a lot of men. I was very surprised
because especially in my 20s, I was pretty aggressive.
Like, if a guy gave me his card, I would give him a call.
If he didn't call me back, I'd shoot him an email.
I don't think it's a crime for a woman to pursue a man.
You know, maybe I'd stop by his place of employment,
drop off an application, you know.
Not against the law.
It turns out it is. Yeah, it's called stalking and harassment.
Very easy to get convicted in that crime.
I was here for, like a year, and I was like, I remember I was
in my room on Mulberry Street and I was making a list.
They always say, you got to have a list
of what you want in a partner, you know, and invite it in.
And every once in a while I'll be like I don't have a list.
That's my problem.
So I was writing, you know, cute, smart, funny, short list.
And I started thinking about this guy
that I had made out with a couple of times back home,
and he hadn't called me since I moved
and I hadn't called him and I was like, you know,
he's probably intimidated, you know, he's...
He probably doesn't know exactly what to say to me.
I moved to New York. He's living in his parent's basement.
I'm going to give him a call.
And I called him and I was like, hey, what's up?
And he was like, "You going Macca's party?"
I'm like, I live in New York.
I moved to New York like a year ago.
Twelve months, 360 something days, you know,
and he was like, "That's too bad because Macca's party's going to be sick."
And I hung up and I was like, I didn't feel good, you know,
and I was, like, disappointed in myself.
I was like, here you are. You know, you packed up.
You moved. You want to do something different,
and now you're like, reaching back and,
and, reaching out to people who don't care about you anymore.
Well, maybe never did.
And I started looking up therapists.
And I found a therapist, 10 minute walk from my apartment.
I picked her based on proximity because I wanted help.
But I didn't want a fucking hassle, you know.
I just moved to New York.
I just had a big hassle, you know, I wanted something to be easy.
So I went and I got to say, I really liked her.
She was stylish.
And that was one of the things when I came here that I really wanted to do.
You know, I wanted to be stylish.
I wanted to have, like the courage to be stylish that my mother had and,
and you know, she was, I always paid her in cash.
That was my big thing.
I didn't want, like a paper trail of my...
of my menial gripes.
Um, but I like to call it my hush money.
And after every session, I'd stand up
and I'd count it out and very dramatically say,
"This ought to help you keep your mouth shut."
Anyway, I was in ther--
So I was in therapy with this woman, and I didn't realize
how many like defense mechanisms I had in place, you know, like, whatever repression and,
and projection, intellectualization. That was my big one.
I love to talk about this stuff,
but I didn't actually, like, feel it.
And she was,
she was always trying to steer the direction like,
of the conversation towards my father, and I knew what she was doing.
Analyzing me.
So obvious.
But the thing is, I didn't want to have Daddy issues.
You know, I wanted to be fucked up in a different way.
I want, I, I did.
I wanted her to be like, I've never seen a case like this before in my life.
You're very interesting... and unique.
We didn't study this in therapy school.
I'm not sure I can help you.
There's one man in Austria.
Lives in a mountain.
You have to hike there barefoot.
Follow the doves.
But I really, I did. I- I didn't want to,
I didn't want any of my issues to have anything to do with my father,
and a lot of times I would even start my sessions like,
this has nothing to do with my father.
But I would just tell her factual stories
that I could tell she thought were more deep than they, than I did.
I like I told her like, we had, when I went
to the University of Miami, I lived in a house off campus
with three of my friends when we graduated,
we can have a big party and have all our families meet each other.
And so my, my father drove, flew down.
My mother flew down, separate.
My sister was already, going as an undergrad,
and we had the party.
And so everyone comes back.
My father drives up in his rented car
and proceeds to park outside like he's on surveillance.
And I don't ask any questions.
You know, I'm bringing them pizza,
bringing them cake and my therapist is like, foaming at the mouth.
She's so excited, you know, She's like, how do you feel?
I was like leading question.
No, but, no we, we, we never really had,
we never confronted anything in my family, especially anger.
It was like, you want to sit down and talk for five minutes
about something you did that pissed me off.
I think I'll opt for the act vaguely uninterested in you for five to seven years option.
See if you ever wear the same prom dress as me again.
But at this point, like, in in my time
with my therapist, I hadn't talked to my father
in a couple of years and I feel like going there,
I wanted to go in, like on a Tuesday at one
and leave at two and be like, "Thank God I took care of that."
But it was, you know, therapy, got to go on for a long time.
Very gradual.
You know, I feel like during the course of
seeing her, I started wearing, my vintage numbers.
No one would ask me questions.
I was picking better guys.
I will say, like I remember, at the time, I had been involved
with a guy that like, ghosted me.
They didn't have that term then, and I had been dating him for like, three months.
And then he disappeared.
Showed up, like, a month later at the bar I worked out,
and acted like nothing ever happened.
And I was like, oh, really, we're going to date for three months,
you disappear, you show up at the bar, I work at like, nothing ever happened.
You know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to make sweet, sweet love to you.
Yeah.
Teach you a lesson.
[LAUGHS]
But I did.
I started staying away from guys like that.
I felt like, you know what,
I think I was over, like, I was over therapy,
but I didn't know how to address it.
And I noticed I started bringing like my lunch with me to my sessions.
And it's hard to like, really get deep
while you're eating a meatball sub, you know what I mean?
So eventually, we had a discussion about it.
No more eating.
And I said, let's just call it quits.
And, but I was happy with, like with the services I got there,
and all that stuff and like two years later, after all that,
my father passed away and, and I was like, oh, should I call her?
We spent a lot of time talking about him.
And then I was like, no, she might think I had something to do with it.
Just let it go.
But the truth is that he had, he had a heart attack.
He had gone and gotten a hip replacement.
And then he left rehab early against doctor's orders,
went to my grandmother's house with his girlfriend.
We found he had a girlfriend and keeled over.
And the girlfriend claimed that moments before he keeled over, he proposed.
Yeah. Everyone in the Cunningham camp was like, that sounds a little fishy.
I was like, oh my father promising you something you want really bad
and then finding a weird loop hole to get out of it.
I don't know.
Sounds a little calculated.
But I didn't want to go,
I didn't want to go to the services, you know.
I hadn't been back in Boston. I had been living in New York for long,
I never really saw people that, I wasn't running into people a lot,
that knew my history with my father.
When you meet people as an adult,
they don't ask you, what's relationship like with your father.
I really didn't want to see all these people
that knew the back story and have to, like, face it.
And I didn't want, like, I felt like,
I had always sort of had this idea
that he was going to call me and be like, "Why don't we go to pizza
and I'll explain all this", and it'll be very logical explanation
and would go on and also it was sort of very final, you know, like...
now I was like this girl who hadn't talked to her father in years when he passed away.
And I didn't identify as being like that
fucked up, you know. So, and I don't want to deal with it.
Like any good Boston chick who doesn't want to deal with her feelings,
I grabbed a six pack of Sam Adams,
and a pack of parliaments.
And I sat in the funeral home parking lot, drinking beers and smoking butts...
until my mother came out like, "Get in here."
But I wasn't. I will say the wake wasn't that bad.
My mother and my father, like I said, knew each other since they were kids.
So we go into the funeral home.
My mother's like holding court.
She's been divorced 20-plus years, and she's wailing how she's a widow now.
Very, very sad occasion.
The supposed fiancee
is there wearing sunglasses indoors.
And everyone's like, "Ooh!
What? Does she have a lazy eye?"
Was she blind? Turns out she doesn't have a lazy eye.
[STUTTERING]
Some people thought she was blind. She wasn't blind.
She wasn't friendly either.
She had made all these collages, picture collages of her and my father
in, like, tropical places.
So he had like, Hawaiian shirts on and she was in a bikini.
It was all tons and tons of pictures of them.
Then, like one picture of me and my sister,
when we were chubby little kids and a picture of my mother
faced down by the bathroom.
I was like...
But, but honestly, my father did a very good job of keeping up
the, the idea that we were in touch
because everyone seemed to know, like what was going on.
People are asking very normal questions.
Do you have a job? Do you have a man?
And at that time I was bartending and I was,
I was dating a guy who had no bed.
I just found out that he had no bed.
Like I'd gone out with him like five times and went back to his apartment.
Anyone in the other room. And I heard this weird... [MAKES WHIRRING SOUND]
and I look in and he's inflating an inflatable mattress.
I'm like, okay, now I know on date one or two,
I need to ask, do you have a mattress?
And...
Is it inflatable?
Because that's like a deal breaker for me, you know.
But I feel like he should have asked,
"Hey, do you like to fool around on square balloons, you know?"
No.
Namaste.
Good luck with your journey.
But I won't go like, you know, play by play of everything
that happened at the wake and the funeral.
But I will say a woman who worked at the dog track...
a woman who worked at the dog track won the most visibly distraught award.
And nobody complimented me on my vintage
Diane von Furstenberg tunic.
I know.
Terrible. But I was going back
to New York after that, and I was like, oh, maybe this is it.
Maybe it was like a cathartic symbolic time.
Ding dong, the witch is dead.
You know, I'm going to get back to New York, and all my, all my men issues
are going to be gone and...
I got back to New York and I really didn't date anybody for a little while.
And this is the thing. I feel like I was...
I wasn't a man hater, you know.
I'm definitely not even to this day a man hater. I like men.
If men were pets, I would have one.
You know... [LAUGHING]
I might even have two or three of them, you know.
I feel like I'm the type of woman who'd move to the country
so my men could have more room to run around, you know.
I'm selfless like that.
I just think, you know, I think guys can be stupid.
You know, I had a guy come up to me after a show
and he was like, "I'm really into thick chicks."
I was like, oh, too bad. I'm not into honest guys.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
So anyways, I was back.
I was back from there and I was in New York and I wasn't really dating.
But, like I wasn't really dying to get back into dating,
but I felt like every once in a while I was like, oh, I'm a little horny.
And I remember at one time I was like weird places, too,
like I was on the subway and packed in like sardines, rush hour.
The couple next to me starts making out.
I could have touched them if I wanted to.
Now it's like two, three stops later, they're rubbing each other up and down,
grabbing each other's buttocks, you know.
I tap the girl on the shoulder.
I was like, Hey, hey, hey. I'll take it from here.
I like where you're going with this but...
I see a different ending.
And I started shooting my mouth off
to my friends, I'm like, I just got to get into a relationship.
If I'm not in a relationship by this time, like in the summer, I'm going to go out
drinking alone with a low cut shirt, with the big dildo up between my tits.
And and I'm going to walk around going,
"Hey, this could be you."
But my friends were like, my friends got sick of me complaining,
and they were like, you got to go on the apps,
and I didn't want to go on the apps.
Because I still, you know,
I felt like in my 20s, I could go out and get drunk and hook up.
And I was I was like the front runner of that movement, you know.
But my friend said to me, she said, "Listen,
if you were going door to door, dropping off your resume,
trying to get a job and they said, hey, we don't do it like this anymore,
you got to go online.
Would you continue to walk around dropping off your resume?"
And I understood the analogy.
And then she was like, "How about this?
How about you tell me about the last time you went on a date organically."
And I was like, all right, I went out with this guy. He was cute. He was funny.
That's all I knew on my list that he qualified for.
But he asked me out to dinner, which I thought was, you know, good.
So we were going to meet 7 o'clock for a cocktail
and then go out to go out to dinner, so I get dressed.
I wear like a vintage maxi on with flats to make it look more casual.
And I go to the bar, I order my drink and I get a text from him.
And he's like, "Hey, I'm running late with my weed guy."
"Can you meet me at a bar closer to the restaurant?"
And I'm like, all right, cool, you have a weed guy,
but not so cool he's taken precedent over me.
But I was dressed and I was hungry.
So I said, I'll meet you there.
I go to the next bar and I'm walking through the door and I get another text.
He's like, "Hey, just meet me at the restaurant."
I'm like, what is this, a fucking scavenger hunt?
I'm like, am I supposed to like, carry his picture around like,
hey, this guy said he was going to feed me. Have you seen him?
Yeah, and I did.
I went on the apps, and I got to say first 24 hours, I had like 47 guys,
saying they like me. I'm like, how am I gonna deal with this?
I was like, all right, well, I guess I could figure out,
I'm trying to figure out
how I'm going to narrow it down as to who I like,
and then, like two days later, I realize nobody's asked me out.
Nobody's messaged me, they're just playing this
like a video game, and I deleted it.
I'm going to come home drunk some night
and then just copy and paste 47 times,
like you fucking pussy, you fucking pussy, you fucking pussy.
You guys, you guys are good.
I was like, I should have,
I should have saved it because they were all in my neighborhood, you know.
I could have found them.
I could have been like, Hey, you, Mario!
Yeah, you said I was cute but you don't want to buy me a drink?
Kick him in the balls.
Be like the first, be the first serial ball kicker of Brooklyn like...
App scorned woman kicks 47 men in the balls.
Thank you.
So, yeah, I quit the apps.
They started coming with other apps.
Ones that were very specific, like the woman needs to contact the man.
Or, you know, if you like to rock climb, but you don't have a big toe
or whatever the hell. Yeah, very, very specific things.
And...
And I went back on and I did, uh...
I believe it was Happn, H-A-P-P-N.
And it was at the time I was working
an office job and bartending, so I picked
people, it would tell you who was in your vicinity of one of those places.
So I said, office job.
I want to get someone who has some money.
And so this guy you know, likes me,
and then he asks me out right off the bat,
like impressive and uh, and I go and he's there.
I didn't, I didn't, I didn't have to find him.
And he was cute and funny and nice.
And he had a bed and check, check, check, check, check.
And, and, like, almost like, just a year later,
we moved in together.
Thank you.
I know. Thank you. Thank you.
But I got to say like, you know, I didn't realize
how independent I was till I moved in with him
because before he was there, 10:30 on a Tuesday night,
I'd be watching Lifetime, you know, some, you know,
some woman trying to seek revenge on her
ex-husband who had a kid with her sister or whatever and...
and I'd be like 10:30 at night, and I'd say,
I think I'm going to have a Manhattan, you know,
and I'd get up, get dressed and go and have a Manhattan.
And now it's like, he's there.
If I get up, on a Tuesday night at 10:30.
I'm getting dressed. He's like, "Where you going?"
I'm like, can't a woman go get a Manhattan around here?
You know like...
It's just...
That's a strange attitude to have.
So I was like, you know, I wanted to maintain my independence,
but I want to be in this relationship,
and I was having a tough time figuring it out.
So I didn't want to fuck it up.
So I went back to therapy and I picked a new lady and she was good.
She was quick and I said, you know, I just moved in with this guy,
first time ever living with a man, and I don't know, I want to be independent,
but I want to be in this relationship, and I'm trying to figure it out.
And she was like, "Did you talk to him about it?"
And I said, no.
I thought we could just figure it out behind his back.
Is that not what you do here?
She was like, no, you gotta, you gotta talk to him.
So, yeah.
Three years ago, I initiated my first vulnerable conversation with a man.
Thank you. I know. I know. I know.
It turns out, you know, you can ask for stuff.
They can say no and the relationship continues.
But I'm very lucky.
I got a good guy. He's big and he follows me
on this journey of self-development.
I have him doing affirmations now.
His are different than mine.
His are I love and adore Kendra.
But I, but it takes a long time for those things to sink in, you know,
and this is the thing I feel like even though you can be as happy
as you want in a relationship, it always takes work.
Sometimes I think we should be,
it'd be easier if we just had animal mating rituals.
You know what I mean? Like when a cat's in heat,
it simply lays its head on the ground
and sticks its butt in the air and wails uncontrollably.
And cats from miles around come to service that cat.
I just think that'd be great, like on a Friday night,
you don't really feel like going out.
Around 11 o'clock, you start feeling a little frisky.
Unlock the door, drop the draws.
But not all, not all animals do it like, I saw baboons, you know,
when a female baboon is ready to mate,
her ass gets red and swollen.
I was like, I think I have a little baboon in me.
But the clincher is when the male baboon
is ready to mate, he grooms the female.
I'm like, "That's nice. She's horny, her ass is swollen
and he's like, let's get a mani-pedi first?"
I don't want to fuck a skank.
But I did. I, like, I said, 20 years ago, I'd never been on stage.
I only had five vintage shirts, and now I have 51 maxi dresses.
Thank you. That's not, yeah, That's not counting the tunics.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I started doing my, my new affirmations.
So 20 years from now, I could be a rich bitch.
I want to be, you know, read some tarot cards by the beach smoking butts.
I even, I would even be a shaman, you know.
You know what a shaman is? Spiritual adviser.
People pay them to give them advice.
Yeah, it turns out, like a good shaman makes like, a $160,000 a year.
I know. I'm like I could be a shitty shaman and still make a good living.
You know?
I give like, mediocre advice.
Still get my roots done.
But listen, guys, if you don't do affirmations, I left affirmations
on all the tables for everybody.
Start doing them now.
Twenty years from now, you could be on stage.
[INAUDIBLE] Thank you!
Let's go... [INAUDIBLE]
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
MAN: Ladies and gentlemen, Kendra Cunningham.
But I noticed guys checking out my beer belly, you know,
and I'd be like, hey, my tits are up here.
Let's focus on the positive.
If you don't mind.
I, um...
I'm sweating my ass off.
I feel like this is a perfect example
of realizing like, that water weight is really just weight, you know.
I can't sweat off the cellulite, unfortunately.
I did. I'll tell you guys, an old joke.
I joined a running group.
It turns out it turns out I'm a very ugly runner.
You know, I get like beet red.
I'm... people are actually stopping me on the street like, "Are you okay?"
"Do you need help?"
Looks like there's something very wrong happening here.
But it's true. I feel like when I run, I cause other people to run.
Like they see me coming and they just throw their shit
in the air, they're like, I don't know what the fuck is going on.
But this chick looks terrified.
The guy who ran my group.
He always said, you know, everything you put in your body
should be fuel, and he knew that I didn't feel the same way.
So he's always trying to get me to stick with it.
You know, he'd be like, you know, Kendra,
Olympic runners eat four to 5000 calories a day,
and I'm like, well, I got that down.