Many readers will know Faith Salie as a panelist on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me” and as an Emmy Award-winning contributor to “CBS Sunday Morning.” She is also an accomplished actor and writer. Her 2016 memoir “Approval Junkie” was adapted as a one-woman show by the Alliance Theatre in 2019, with Faith on stage here in her hometown of Atlanta. One year later, “Approval Junkie” was to have opened in New York at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. That would have been mid-March 2020, just as the world shut down. But there’s a happy ending to the delayed debut of “Approval Junkie,” it’s now available for you to experience as an Audible Original. Faith Salie joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to share her excitement and a few stories.
The thrill of staging her work and watching it grow:
“I grew up going to the Alliance Theatre as a child. To me, the Alliance Theatre is world-class theater, and to me, that was Broadway. That was … a theater in which I sat, and my heart was pulled forward,” said Salie. “I thought, ‘I don’t just want to do that. I need to do that…’ To have [Alliance artistic director] Susan Booth invite me to become a playwright at the place where the seeds of my professional and purposeful life were planted was a dream I didn’t even know to have.”
“I can now say how grateful I am for the year and a half it took to bring ‘Approval Junkie: Version Two’ to the stage because we all changed. Even those of us who have escaped the worst parts of this pandemic, some people have had such harrowing experiences, and even those of us who are lucky to emerge almost entirely unscathed, we are all forever changed. And I needed the time and self-awareness to express those changes, somehow, in the story of me that I got to put on.”
On choosing script revisions for the return of “Approval Junkie”:
“I found places in the script that I’m more aware of now. So, for example, talking about [my] high school pageant, it occurs to me now in a way it didn’t before — and especially now that my children are older and ask great questions, like ‘Why was there a pageant only for girls?’ — I don’t know how many public high schools these days have pageants. It feels very 20th century, and why didn’t we question that?” said Salie.
She continued, “I talk about how in the pageant and the question-and-answer portion, I was asked who I admired most and why, and I said, ‘Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,’ and I did, of course, admire MLK, but at 14, 15, when I answered that question, I didn’t really know about him. I didn’t know as much about him as a kid growing up in Atlanta as my kids do now in elementary school in New York City. And so, I wanted to explore how we now have a vocabulary. We have the word ‘anti-racist,’ that I don’t think most of us were using before the pandemic.”
You can’t pick your audience, but you can still read their emails onstage:
“I’m grateful as I enter my 50s that I get to do podcasts. Nobody really cares how I look,” said Salie. “Yet I still receive emails from strangers — and I just said ‘Emails,’ plural, not just a one-off — I still receive emails from strangers, or comments on social media, telling me, for example, that I need to get bangs. I’m 50 years old. Don’t you think it crossed my mind to get bangs probably every five years? These are usually from men, not always.”
Salie went on, “No matter what kind of audience we had, whether it was like a very laughy audience or a fairly quiet audience, the one part of the show that would always kill would be when I would read, verbatim, an email from Bob in Indiana telling me that my forehead is large enough that you could land planes on it, and it’s distracting.”
The Audible Original audiobook of “Approval Junkie” by Faith Salie is now available for subscribers here.
