SARATOGA LIVINGThe City. The Culture. The Life.

I feel like anyone who’s a fan of Saturday Night Live (SNL) has that particular time period or cast that brings back fuzzy (and very funny) memories. For me, it would have to be the cast that starred on the sketch comedy show from 1990-94. Even though I was only in grade school at the time (I later caught up on VHS), this era produced some of SNL‘s most memorable sketches such as “Wayne’s World” (which spawned two successful movies) and “motivational” speaker Matt Foley (whose main motivation was reminding others that he “lived in a van down by the river”). These seasons also featured some of SNL‘s best new talent in years such as Phil Hartman, Chris Rock, Chris Farley, Adam Sandler and, one of the performers with the longest tenure on the show, Tim Meadows.

Before SNL, Meadows got his start with future SNL colleague Chris Farley at Chicago’s illustrious comedy and improv theater, The Second City. Both later moved over to SNL, and in his decade working on the show (1991-2000), Meadows portrayed and spoofed an impressive array of real-life figures from Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson to Oprah Winfrey. In 1993, along with the show’s other writers, Meadows received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program. After leaving the show, Meadows has performed in a long and diverse list of movies and TV shows, from acting alongside Tina Fey (another SNL alum) as Principal Duvall in Mean Girls (2004) to writing and starring in his own feature length comedy, The Ladies Man (2000). Meadows also recently reprised his role of Mr. Glasscott (now Principal Glasscott) in the new series Schooled, which premiered last month and is a spinoff of the popular sitcom, The Goldbergs.

As if this weren’t enough, Meadows added standup comedy to his résumé nearly a decade ago. Capital Region fans are in for a treat as the writer, actor and comedian will be coming to The Comedy Works in Saratoga Springs this Friday and Saturday (March 1 and 2) to perform three shows of his own standup. saratoga living had a chance to chat with Meadows about his standup career and his days on SNL and at The Second City.

You’ve had a very long career in comedy and acting, but standup is newer for you. How did you get into it?
I started doing standup about 8 years ago. It was sort of an accident that started with two friends of mine doing three-man improv. We were performing in Chicago, and the first night we had our show my two partners were late. I had to begin the show on time, so I just went out and started talking to the audience, and I told a few stories that I knew were funny, that I had used on talk shows. After that night, [my friends and I] stuck to that format where I would go out and talk to the audience before. Then I started preparing material and jokes, and at a certain point, after maybe a year, I had 25-30 minutes of standup. And then I just started working, going out and doing standup in LA and Chicago, and I would discover new material every time.

You’ve worked with a lot of legends, one of them being the late Chris Farley. Talk about your relationship with him.
I was already in a touring company at The Second City, and when I wasn’t on the road I would still do improv in Chicago. I improvised with Chris’s group of students one day, and we hit it off really well. He was a very likable person, and if he liked you, he let you know it. He auditioned at The Second City probably after I was there for a year. I remember talking to him before he went into his audition, and he asked me if I had any advice. I said: “Have fun. And if other people are performing and you’re watching in the back, still laugh if you hear something that’s funny. Don’t let them think that you’re just this selfish performer who only cares about his own material.” But he was so funny already, there was no doubt he was going to get hired.

Having worked with him for so long, you have to have a crazy Chris Farley story.
All the ones you’ve heard, probably I was there for. But I think about Chris every day. My son’s middle name is Crosby, after Chris, whose middle name was Crosby. When we were together in Chicago working on the Mainstage of The Second City, we would often spend our days together, go see movies and eat lunch and then go back to my apartment and watch TV. I would fall asleep on the couch, and he would fall asleep on the floor and I would get a blanket and pillow for him. We both would sleep until we had to do our show at The Second City that night. He was just a blast. And he was my best friend.

But one of my funniest memories was just how lucky I was to be in the Matt Foley sketch [at The Second City] and watch Farley perform it. I played in that sketch as the son, and his goal every night was to make all of us laugh at one point while we were performing the sketch. He would do all kinds of crazy stuff to make us laugh, and he got it almost every night.

And then you both went from working at The Second City to SNL. Talk about that experience.
For the first month that I was working there, I was expecting somebody from the network to come in and fire me, to be like: “What’s he doing here? Five years ago he was an office manager in Detroit.” So I had paranoia until I felt like I fit in. But it was just a remarkably fun time. Some of my closest friends are people I worked with on that show, people I have no qualms about telling them I love them, because we have been through so much and known each other for so long. And the other great thing was being able to see all these great performers while I was working there: Paul McCartney, Tina Turner, David Bowie, Nirvana, Tupac and Dr. Dre. It was a great time being on the show.

Now you’re back on TV with a new show, Schooled. Did you ever think you’d be reprising the role of Mr. Glasscott from The Goldbergs?
Honestly, from the very beginning [of The Goldbergs], I did it thinking it would be a one-time appearance on the show. However, [creator] Adam Goldberg told me early on that they were going to be doing a lot of episodes at the school, and I was always surprised when they would bring me back [to shoot]. After a couple of years they said they were thinking of doing a spinoff about the school [where Glasscott worked]. It just so happened that when that was happening, I was being offered a couple of other shows. I had never had that before: Three different offers for network sitcoms. I decided to stick with Adam and The Goldbergs because I trusted that show and its writers, and I also feel like they put their faith in me a few years ago, and I wouldn’t be getting those other offers if it weren’t for my appearances on The Goldbergs. So I stuck with them, and I’m glad I did.

African American History Month has always been a personally significant time for me, because I grew up just outside of Birmingham, AL, one of the focal points of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In high school, I remember reading and being moved by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s groundbreaking Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And during my first semester at Birmingham-Southern College, the only required reading for orientation was Four Spirits by Alabama author Sena Jeter Naslund, a novel about the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which generated national support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It all happened right there where I grew up; I was surrounded by African-American history.

Then, when I first moved to the Capital Region, I remember reading about Saratoga’s pivotal role in the American Revolution and just being amazed at how much history there was in the area. I had no idea about its close connection to African-American history. In fact, the Capital Region had played a pivotal role in leading thousands of African Americans to freedom through routes along the Underground Railroad. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find that this area has many amazing connections to African-American history, too.

In honor of African American History Month, saratoga living has created a list of seven incredible African-American figures, all of whom have Capital Region connections, and ended up making their mark on the nation as a whole.

(1) Agrippa Hull
The American Revolution’s Battle of Saratoga saw 300-400 African-American soldiers fight alongside white soldiers in integrated units. Following the revolution, the US wouldn’t see integrated units again until the US Army made them official more than 150 years later. One of the soldiers who witnessed the English surrender after the Battle of Saratoga was Agrippa Hull. Born free in Northampton, MA, Hull lived a long and fascinating life. At just 18, he enlisted in the newly formed Continental Army and was soon made assistant to Thaddeus Kosciusko, the esteemed Polish military engineer and architect of the Continental Army’s victory at the Battle of Saratoga. Hull and Kosciusko became close, turning Kosciusko into a lifelong abolitionist. Over the next six years, Hull would be Kosciusko’s right-hand man in many of the most important engagements during the American Revolution. At the end of the war, Hull had his discharge papers signed at West Point by General George Washington himself.

(2) Solomon Northup
More than 150 years after it was first published, Solomon Northup’s harrowing memoir, 12 Years a Slave, was made into an Academy Award-winning film of the same name in 2013, hoisting the book out of relative obscurity to international acclaim. Born free in Minerva, NY, Solomon Northup was a professional violinist and farmer, who moved to Saratoga Springs in the 1830s to look for more work as a musician. In 1841, two men approached Northup on Broadway and offered him wages in a traveling musical show heading down to New York City and then Washington, DC. However, once in DC, the two men drugged Northup and sold him into slavery. Northup spent the next 12 years in bondage on plantations in Louisiana before finally being found and rescued by Henry B. Northup, a member of the white family that had owned and freed Solomon’s father. In 1853, immediately upon making it back home, Solomon wrote and published his memoir, 12 Years a Slave, in part, to bring his kidnappers to justice. Though the two men, Alexander Merrill and Joseph Russell, were arrested for the crime, neither was convicted. In 2002, in honor of Northup and his achievements, Saratoga officially made the third Saturday in July “Solomon Northup Day.”

(3) Frederick Douglass
Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland and later escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad, which in the early 19th century had a major route running through the Capital Region. After gaining his freedom and publishing The Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, a combination autobiography, slave narrative and abolitionist treatise, Douglass visited Albany for speaking engagements many times, including a large convention held in honor of the Emancipation Proclamation at Albany’s First Israel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1863. While Douglass was abroad talking about his book, he entrusted his six-year-old daughter, Rosetta, to two Albany abolitionists, Lydia and Abigail Mott, who taught the young Rosetta reading, writing and sewing. Douglass even made his way up to Saratoga County a few times, including an 1849 speaking tour, which had on its itinerary Schuylerville, Quaker Springs and Dean’s Corners.

(4) Ella Robinson Madison
Born in Saratoga in 1854, Ella Robinson Madison was an early, influential African-American stage performer and singer, and a relative of Solomon Northup’s (Ella’s eldest sister, Victoria, was married to Northup’s son, Alonzo). In 1869, at the age of just 15, Madison relocated to New York City where she landed her first acting gig, auspiciously, at New York City’s Grand Opera House, playing the role of Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Over the next 20 years, Madison toured extensively both in the US and in Europe, performing throughout the 1890s with banjo player and recording pioneer Charles Ashbury. Later in life, Madison experienced a career resurgence when she was cast as Annie in a play based on DuBose Heyward’s short novel, Porgy, about a crippled African-American beggar living in Charleston, SC. Madison even contributed an original scene to the play, part of a spontaneous collaboration between her and another actor. Porgy would later be adapted, serving as the inspiration for George Gershwin’s operatic masterpiece, Porgy & Bess.

(5) Henry Johnson
During World War I, the first American recipients of the Croix de Guerre, one of France’s highest military decorations, were two African-American soldiers, Needham Roberts of New Jersey and Robert Johnson, who, before the war, worked a number of jobs in Albany, including as a redcap porter at Union Station on Broadway. Both men were members of the 369th Infantry Regiment, better known by the name German soldiers gave them, the Hellfighters (or the Harlem Hellfighters, formerly known as the 15th New York National Guard Regiment). The unit served a total of 191 days in continuous combat on the front lines in France, more than any other American unit during the war. While on sentry duty one night in May 1918, Johnson and Needham singlehandedly fought off a raiding party of two dozen German soldiers, despite both men receiving serious wounds. Johnson’s heroic defense was reported on by the New York World and The Saturday Evening Post, bringing the former Albany porter international attention. Though denied the Purple Hurt within his lifetime, Johnson was posthumously awarded one in 1996 as well as a Medal of Honor in 2015.

(6) Wendell King
If you ever participated in college radio or just enjoy tuning into WSPN at Skidmore College, you owe a big debt to Wendell King, class of ’24. Born in Troy, King was a radio whiz when that technology was still fairly new to the country, creating one of the Capital Region’s first amateur radio stations from his home when he was just 12 years old. King is also credited with engineering the first-ever college radio station broadcast in the US, and it happened right here at Union College in Schenectady. As Union noted in an August 2017 post about King, “At 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 14, 1920, Union’s student-operated radio station conducted a historic broadcast. Using a 150-watt transmitter from a studio in a shack behind the electrical engineering building with the antenna strung between two trees, the half-hour broadcast opened with tenor John Steel’s ‘Tell Me Little Gypsy.'”

(7) Bernice Johnson Reagon
Bernice Johnson Reagon played her first unaccompanied gig as a singer at Caffè Lena. Her second one? At the vaunted Carnegie Hall in Midtown Manhattan. Born in 1942 in Georgia, Reagon is best known as the founder and one of the singers of the Grammy-nominated African-American a cappella ensemble, Sweet Honey in the Rock. But before founding this supergroup of singers in 1973, Reagon was a student activist in Albany, GA and, after being suspended from college, found her way to Saratoga Springs where, for a time, she waited tables at Hattie’s Restaurant. One day, a regular customer heard Reagon humming while she worked and introduced her to Lena and Bill Spencer of Caffè Lena, who immediately gave her opportunities to perform at their club. One day, Reagon got a call at Lena’s from Bob Shelton of The New York Times who, coincidentally, had heard Reagon singing during mass meetings and protests down in Georgia. Soon after that, Reagon had a gig singing solo at Carnegie Hall, and in 1963, joined the Freedom Singers, an African-American student quartet that meshed gospel singing with protest songs. For their first national tour, the Freedom Singers performed in Albany, Schenectady and, of course, Saratoga at Caffè Lena.

Skidmore alumni and faculty have had an auspicious year already. Earlier this month, Skidmore alum Emily Lazar made history by becoming the first woman to win a Grammy in the Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical category for her work on Beck album Colors. Now, with the 91st Academy Awards telecast set to air on Sunday, February 24, jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, who’s taught at Skidmore over the years as a guest artist and faculty member, is up for Best Original Score for his work on the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s most recent film, BlacKkKlansman.

The veteran jazz musician and composer has a long relationship with Skidmore College. In 2008, Blanchard was invited by then Dean of Special Programs Don McCormack to teach on campus as Skidmore’s McCormack Artist-Scholar-in-Residence. Blanchard’s residency was part of a special program of study for the 2008 incoming class’ First-Year-Experience, which centered on New Orleans’ recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Blanchard’s album, A Tale of God’s Will: A Requiem for Katrina, which was a Grammy-winner that year, was assigned “reading” for the students. “It was a really remarkable experience, and we did a great concert at the end of my residency there,” Blanchard tells saratoga living. He was so impressed by his experience with the students that Skidmore even brought him back as a commencement speaker at that same class’ graduation in 2012, where Blanchard, himself, was awarded an honorary degree. “I love that college,” Blanchard says. “I talked about that experience for the longest time. Those students had some brilliant questions, and it felt like the experience was more for me than for them.”

While Blanchard is up for his first Oscar, he isn’t new to the awards scene. Earlier this month, on the same night Lazar won her historic Grammy, Blanchard won his sixth for Best Instrumental Composition for “Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil),” also from BlacKkKlansman. Blanchard wasn’t able to accept his Grammy in person, because he was at the BAFTA Awards at the Royal Albert Hall in London the same night, where his soundtrack for BlacKkKlansmen had also been nominated. The film is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth (portrayed by John David Washington), the first African-American detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. Stallworth infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s by posing as a white nationalist over the phone. It’s been one of Lee’s most critically acclaimed films in years.

Since Jungle Fever in 1991, Blanchard has been Lee’s go-to composer, completing scores for 24 of his films and documentaries—everything from Malcom X to the moving documentary series When the Levees Broke, about Blanchard’s hometown of New Orleans being devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Blanchard tells saratoga living that he got his start with Lee as a studio musician for one of Lee’s soundtracks. “Spike Lee says it’s fate,” Blanchard says. “One day he heard me playing something on the piano and wanted to use it. He asked if I could write a string arrangement for it, and even though I had no idea if I could, I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ And here we are.” Three decades and two dozen Spike Lee collaborations later, and Blanchard is looking at his first potential Oscar win this Sunday.

Blanchard will be attending the Oscars in Los Angeles on Sunday night. BlacKkKlansman is up for a total of six golden statuettes, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Update: Blanchard didn’t win the Oscar for Best Original Score (it ended up going to Ludwig Göransson for Black Panther). However, Spike Lee did take home the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, his first Oscar career win.