I’m privileged today to have a friend of many years as a guest. Mimi Kennedy currently stars as Marjorie, the voice of reason and AA sponsor to Christie and Bonnie on the Chuck Lorie comedy Mom. Together with the laughs of this program, watched by as many as 8 million people each week, there’s a subtle welcoming invitation to many alcoholic viewers to become part of AA and its joyful and often humorous victory story. Joined with Mimi’s huge television hit is a long and successful career as a film star, play write and activist. Welcome, Mimi Kennedy.

Mimi: Thank you, Blase. It’s an honor to be on your program. 

Blase: Thank you so much. You know, on March 8 for the women’s march, in traffic bound LA, you gave a moving challenge to all of the participants. I’d like to ask if you would mind sharing that rap with us today?

Mimi: Yes, I’ll read something that it quite close to the speech I actually gave. “Every morning I wake up to the news, often on the KPFK show of Margaret Prescod of Sojourner’s Truth. For a moment I hold in my mind’s eye the image of a woman waking up in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan – facing another day of dread, or perhaps not waking up at all because during the night her life, her home and her family have been destroyed. Sometimes I imagine in my mind’s eye of some American sister who is waking with the knowledge that her son lay dead in the street, shot by police. I came of age as an American during the Vietnam War, and since then I’ve grieved and tried to atone for what I now our country’s government has done and is doing in the world. My activism is my rejection of passive complicity in the suffering of these women, and they are first in my mind every morning. (Read More)