Most of what I know of Fortune Feimster comes from TV spots — most notably for me her stint as Colette Kimball-Kinney on The Mindy Project — and her Twitter feed. That cocktail is enough to get me on board for pretty much anything — and definitely a new Netflix special.
The intimacy of the open grasped me immediately — the establishing shot of what’s to come, I later learned. It wasn’t the timeline of photos set to This Little Light of Mine that drew me in. I’ve seen some version of that that in specials over the years, and it wasn’t even her mother announcing her. It was the few beats of music as Feimster steps on stage. You could barely hear it over the applause, but it was just loud enough to set a calming, almost touching mood. I often take issue with comedy special intro music. It’s so flashy and recently has become almost unbearable especially amongst young female comics like Jenny Slate and Ilana Glazer, both of who I admire deeply, and this is not a reflection on their special as a whole, but both opened their special my dancing for too long to some upbeat number. Feimster’s intro was everything that wasn’t: calm. Frill-less much like Feimster and her comedy. I got choked up. A little. At the intimacy of it all.
Usually, in a comic’s journey, you get their life in piecemeal. You get a special, let’s say, that’s about their childhood, that might skip to…
