Comedian and actor Dulcé Sloan just released her collection of uproarious personal essays, Hello, Friends! – Stories of Dating, Destiny, and Day Jobs.
“I was bamboozled, I was hoodwinked,” she tells me over Zoom. Sloan’s manager, Reg Tigerman, convinced her to take the meeting, then write the proposal, and before she knew it, she had been roped into writing a whole entire book., and the editor was like, ‘That’s not a good title.’ I thought it was hilarious,” Sloan recalls. I agree with Sloan’s assessment, but eventually they decided onSloan may have been duped into writing her memoir, but there are upsides to the project.
“That’s why I took stand up class, because she had a dream. And she said she didn’t understand the dream, like, ‘Why are people laughing at my child, what had happened, what you do?’” Sloan says. She was unemployed at the time, but Johnson believed in her so much that he waived the class fee: “He was like, ‘You’re supposed to be a comic. I’m not gonna charge you.’”
She put in years of effort working at random day jobs to get where she is now . In, Sloan delves into her employment history: As a kid she sold wholesale toys at the Florida City flea market, and since then she’s worked everywhere from Victoria’s Secret to used car lots. Sloan would punch the clock at a stucco supply company during the day, then at night would do stand-up, and sometimes at the weekend take on extra gigs doing crafts at kids’ birthday parties .
“She’s one of those comics that I would watch and just go, ‘Am I writing jokes? What am I doing?’ So she’s always been such an inspiration to me. And I just love her performance style because it’s very low key. She’s just an amazing joke writer, and I wish the whole world knew about her,” Sloan explains.