Home » Fresh Black Girls, Long Live the Colored Race!, The Black Archives

Fresh Black Girls: T’Keyah Crystal Keymah

Thembi Ford 11 June 2009 5 Comments

tkeyahkehmah“Underrated” is one of the more overused words on this blog but I have to fight the good fight and salute ridiculously underrated performers like T’Keyah Crystal Keymah. We know her best from television where she demonstrated her strength in comedic timing and impressions on sitcoms and sketch shows such as In Living Color, Cosby, and That’s So Raven. T’Keyah also has a particular talent for cartoon voices, which has led to her extensive voiceover career (Pinky and The Brain, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child). T’Keyah also wrote Natural Woman/Natural Hair, a black hair guide especially intended for black women transitioning away from chemicals to their natural hair, as well as Some of My Best Friends, which she turned into a one-woman show. Speaking of theater, T’Keyah as done a bunch of stage work and is on her fourth one-woman show T’Keyah Live. She specializes in impressions ranging from Katherine Hepburn to Whoopi Goldberg (in fact, do you remember her as Whoopi on In Living Color?). Finally, she’s a motivational speaker and has provided her wisdom to young women about how to realize one’s potential, to black folks about the meaning of black tradition, and to the black professional performance community about how to stay ahead in Hollywood. So basically, there’s not much this woman doesn’t do, and her Freshness Files are bursting with contributions to black culture as a whole. She’s so official! Her comedy reel is below and luckily itI also find myself sitting around laughing at one particular turn of hers on In Living Color all the time – as a contestant in the Miss Black Person U.S.A. pageant. T’Keyah was a real-life Miss Black America first runner-up, so I guess that’s why she nails the line “feline feminine fanatstical I am,” like that around 2:05 to 2:45. She crazy…classic stuff!

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

5 Comments »

  • Dara said:

    Wow this made me realize something:

    Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child rolled HARD in our household for about 3 months. That was a great show!

    # 11 June 2009 at 4:53 pm
  • Fresh Black Girls: T’Keyah Crystal Keymah said:

    [...] Source:Fresh Black Girls: T’Keyah Crystal Keymah   [...]

    # 12 June 2009 at 7:30 am
  • Malcolm said:

    When I think of T’Keyah, one of the first things that comes to mind is her impersonation of Whoopi on “In Living Color” and how she was saying “sha boing boing boing”!

    By the way, T’Keyah exchanged emails with me several months ago after she was part of a Common Bonds question on one of my pop culture quizzes.

    # 16 June 2009 at 7:29 pm
  • fernando lusaka said:

    eu gostaria muito de ir no seu país e encontrar com você (CRISTAL) um beijo de uma pessoa que te ama

    # 27 July 2009 at 2:57 pm
  • ntngale said:

    my favorite role by her was on “in living color” as miss black person USA. that song she sang is my theme song- i am woman- woman am i- woman! woman! woman!wo-o-o-man fantastical, phenomenal, feline- priceless!

    # 15 September 2009 at 10:52 am

So what do you think? Please be respectful to other readers!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.