Speaker
Audrey Pleasant
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
After being humiliated on the dance floor by Tommy Johnson, Audrey Pleasant spent an entire month secretly practicing slides, splits, and dance moves in her bedroom before returning.
Audrey Pleasant was just 13 years old when she was pulled onstage at the Apollo Theater to perform alongside the Coasters, launching a career that took her to Harlem's legendary venues.
At 13, Audrey Pleasant watched Tommy Johnson dominate every dance floor while she shuffled side to side. One night, humiliated enough to act, she went home, tied a belt to a doorknob, and started practicing slides, shakes, and splits for a month straight — coming back for revenge.
After the ride, threats poured in and her parents fled to her sister's house. Then Bushra Al-Fusail opened Facebook and watched solidarity posts roll in from Egypt, Canada, New York, DC, and London. Hundreds of women cycling in support of Yemeni Women Bike. Her mother, quietly trying to balance a bike in the covered backyard, said it all without a word.
Nadia Bolz-Weber hauled a cotton candy machine, cases of soda, and burgers for 80 people to Rally Day — and 26 people showed up. She snuck downstairs to pray away her fury before the service, confessing she hated the people who didn't come so much she couldn't appreciate the ones who did.
While Nadia Bolz-Weber fumed over empty seats, her congregation was feeding hungry strangers at a park and handing cotton candy to every car at the stop sign. A 2 AM wake-up — what she calls a 'bitch slap from the Holy Spirit' — finally made her see all the grace she had been too resentful to notice.
At a pastors' conference, Nadia Bolz-Weber confessed her Rally Day breakdown — the bitch slap, the cotton candy, the resentment, all of it. The room stopped seeing her as an expert and started treating her like a colleague. Her conclusion: virtues dazzle, but jagged edges are what people can actually hold on to.
A crowd formed a tight circle, as it does in Harlem when something spectacular is happening. Tommy did his splits and slides. Audrey let him. Then she slid up to his face — and showed the room she could move like James Brown. She threw him a kiss on the way out of the circle.
In 2015, Bushra Al-Fusail woke to her bed shaking and her father screaming to go to the basement. Saudi coalition airstrikes had begun. It was the first time in Yemen's history that its citizens had been bombed from the air — and it would confine the entire city indoors for weeks.
A young queer woman in Nadia Bolz-Weber's congregation traveled to her parents' church and was barred from communion. Stuart, the church drag queen, didn't skip a beat: 'We'll just have to take her communion to the airport when she gets home.' Ten people showed up at Denver International with bread, wine, and a chauffeur sign reading 'Rachel Pater, Child of God.'
Men screamed from car windows. A checkpoint loomed. But once Bushra Al-Fusail started pedaling, she felt the breeze in her scarf and forgot entirely about the siege, the rebels, and the bombs. For two hours, 11 women on borrowed bikes experienced something that hadn't existed before: freedom.
Walking down 125th Street near the Apollo, Audrey Pleasant heard James Brown blast from the Record Shack and couldn't help herself. A crowd gathered. A man stepped forward and handed her a piece of paper with a time and a stage. At 13, she performed with the Coasters — and then James Brown himself walked out and called her 'Lil Mama.'
Nadia Bolz-Weber grew up in a strict conservative church with too many rules and no room to be herself. So she founded House for All Sinners and Saints in 2008, a congregation designed around minimal rules, maximum fun, and radical inclusion — complete with a velvet Elvis at the door and a minister of fabulousness.
The Houthi rebels are stronger now and women's rights in Yemen have retreated. But Bushra Al-Fusail says the ride was absolutely worth it: women across Yemen now know that biking is possible — and when the rebels lose control, that possibility will be remembered. It was worth the risk. It was worth the fear. It was worth doing.
Women in Yemen weren't legally banned from biking — society had just decided they couldn't. During a 3-day ceasefire, Bushra Al-Fusail gathered 5 borrowed bikes and 11 women on a bombed-out Sana'a highway. Threats poured in. But photographs of abayas flying behind bicycle wheels spread from Yemen to Canada to London.
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