Today we’d like to introduce you to Taisha Cameron.
Hi Taisha, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
While I never imagined myself flying solo in the world of podcasting all roads have led me here and I’m forever grateful. But I guess looking back over the years of my life, it makes sense. For me, podcasting is a way for me to experiment with storytelling. That’s what I’ve been terrified of and drawn to my entire life. I told my mom when I was around 3 or 4 years old, I wanted to be “in the TV.” My inspiration? Sesame Street. I could’ve hung out with Super Grover all day long if I had lived on that street. Between that show and seeing Cats on Broadway when I was 11 (my first Broadway show) I guess I knew at a young age I wanted to be an actor. Thing was, I was terrified of being seen. I’ve gotten more comfortable in my skin over the years and learned to be more outgoing in new or uncomfortable scenarios but I’m naturally a very shy person.
Finally, in college I declared theatre as my major having never been in a play. I told myself I wanted to be an actor and was going to go for it. I eventually started working professionally in the Baltimore/DC area in my early twenties which then led me to grad school for acting in New York. After finishing my master’s with all my big dreams of “making it” in the Big Apple, my husband and I ended up leaving the city and moving back to his old stomping ground, Boca Raton. For a few years, I did the audition circuit in South Florida but mainly for commercial or film work. Why I didn’t aggressively go after theatre down here, I didn’t know but I found some work here and there. Then four years ago, I became a mom and a lot of shifting happened for me on all the levels: emotionally, spiritually, mentally, all of them. So, after stepping away from theatre for years and being stuck home with a pandemic that had just started wreaking havoc on the world and a daughter that needed the best of me, I had a revelation. Everything I needed to raise my daughter I learned in grad school. And so, MFA: The Parenting Edition was born. I look at the lessons from my drama school training (my MFA) and examine them for how they can be of benefit for raising ourselves and our kids. So, my degree didn’t help me get to Broadway, but I utilized my skills and training every day.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Any person who says the road is smooth is either delusional or highly medicated and couldn’t even find the road for you. Everyone’s road is filled along the way with obstacles and struggles that have the potential to destroy or even just derail you from the life you want to live. Maybe it’s cause I’ve crossed the threshold over 40 that I can look at my struggles with more grace, forgiveness, and acceptance. Even gratitude…sometimes, just kidding, I do. I am who I am and where I am because of the life I’ve led and that is all the beauty, pain, fear, anger, joy – allllll of it. I remember telling a friend of mine in grad school that if having the career of my dreams meant I couldn’t have the family of my dreams then I’d take my career differently. And I have.
When I was pregnant, our family suffered a year full of tremendous loss, pain, and joy. It felt like every few weeks, we were grieving the loss of something or someone else. My husband and I also found out during our 20 week ultrasound our daughter was diagnosed with Dandy Walker and she then developed Hydrocephalus when she was born that summer. We lived in the NICU for ten weeks after she was born going through surgeries and recovery. I never thought I’d be running a parenting podcast but the journey I’ve been on through my acting career, becoming a mom, and learning how much I, personally, need to grow and evolve in the relationship I want to have with my daughter and husband have all led me where I am now.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller and at this point in my life, I’m learning how to tell my own stories. As an actor, I know how to use myself, my instrument, to help tell the story’s other people have written. As a podcaster, especially creating a solo show about parenting and theatre, I use my stories, I create narratives from my life or inspired by events in my life to connect to other mom’s and artists, whoever feels they want to listen and enjoy really but it definitely is geared towards parents. The lessons from the theatre for raising ourselves and our kids are all pulled from the work an actor does to get into a character. I try to approach parenting through the eyes of theatre from a place that makes us focused on building relationships with our scene partner (our children, our partners). I’m interested in how we need to learn what our true wants and needs are to build a stronger family dynamic by heightening our observation, listening, and tactics around how we honor who our children individually are with our own personality. That’s what theater is, how characters live in relationships with each other and overcome conflict.
When you look at parenting through those eyes, as I try to every day, we see how we can rewrite the story we are telling with how we change, adjust, and learn from each of the members of our ensemble (our family). We can always rewrite the story we are telling if it doesn’t serve our growth and the growth of our family. I also make sure to create my solo episodes to be roughly around the length of a sitcom and in a 3-act structure, cause well, I’m a nerd, and also because parents don’t have time to take in long podcasts episodes. So, I work to keep them short and sweet and defiantly not kid-friendly, I’m pretty sure there’s an explicit label on almost all episodes, but I’m not going to change how I communicate, especially in my own storytelling. If you can’t handle the occasional F bomb or someone breaking into random song then it’s probably not the show for you, and that’s okay. I enjoy what I’m experimenting with and creating and there are others who do, too. I also love the Raise a Glass series that’s part of the show, it’s my favorite. This segment examines the topic of the day through a lyric from Hamilton the musical. We’re big Hamilton fans in our home, we even named our daughter Angelica! It fits her perfectly!
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Acting, podcasting, or parenting? Because parenting has definitely been rebranded as an industry. I think what I want to do is continue to remind people that being a parent is being in relationship with your children and family. Parenting is the marketing spin that’s happened to make it a business that gets parents to feel they need to buy a million products and defer all their parental decisions through experts and all the internet to figure out how to do the “job” well. I hope to use the podcasting platform to encourage parents to trust their instinct and if they feel they can’t to get in touch with themselves at a deep level because we have to examine ourselves and how we are in relationship with others in order to be the parent of our dreams to the child of our dreams. And as far as podcasting goes, I think it’s going to continue to grow and attract more listeners so I’m excited to be a part of this community and look forward to seeing how it shifts and how I can shift with it.
Contact Info:
- Email: taisha@mfaparentingedition.com
- Website: https://www.mfaparentingedition.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mfaparentingedition
