Brother Russell Podcast

For everyone who has been asking, the person who was featured on Ellen DeGeneres recently doing the voice of an “88 year old lady from Austin TX” named Gladys Hardy who “loves Jesus but drinks too much now and then” is not me. It’s apparently some stand-up comic guy in Austin. I will keep his name under my hat, but he has apparently been doing his own old lady schtick even longer than I have. The influence of the great Jonathan Winters lives on. I suspect that Gladys Hardy and Melba Jackson are both partly inspired by Winters’ twisted character Maude Frickert. I think Gladys Hardy is largely inspired by the Austin comedian’s grandmother, whereas Melba is inspired by 20% my own grandmother and a bigger percentage of this crazy old battleaxe that lived next door to us in Garland, where I grew up. One of those old ladies who is so disagreeable and prone to rants that even her own children have nothing to do with her any more. God bless the old ladies of the world, there’s a little of them in each of us… http://www.austin360.com/tv/content/tv/stories/2007/01/25gladys.html