Joe Piscopo left SNL two years before Jackson started, but they became friends and performed stand-up acts together. She said Franken walked away and stopped speaking to her. "I told him maybe I am overcompensating because everybody here is going to hell and I'm supposed to tell them about Jesus." Jackson responded that her voice was the result of a unique throat condition called congenital palatal deficiency. She recalls SNL as a highly competitive environment in which she felt insecure.Ĭast member Al Franken - now a Democratic senator - once told her he and some other cast members didn't buy her "ditzy act," she said. Ultimately, it was her helium voice and impeccable handstands that took her to New York for a spot on SNL from 1986 to 1992, a show she had not seen until college. She quit Auburn in her senior year and went to Hollywood anyway. She knew nothing about acting, made a D in speech class and was told by a professor she had a "terrible voice" and "could never be an actor." It would foreshadow virtually every role to follow.
Undistracted by television - her family didn't own one - she made straight A's in school and was allowed to skip seventh grade.Īfter stints at Florida Bible College and Furman University, she ended up at Auburn University, where she changed her major to theater after landing her first role in a school play as a ditzy Roman slave. She speaks little about her mother, Marlene, a retired nurse once quoted in the media saying she liked President Barack Obama.
Her dad preached the Bible to neighbors whom he said drank too much alcohol. Her dad turned their backyard into a gym, and she could perform a handstand at age 4. The daughter of Jim Jackson, a physical education teacher and gymnastics coach, she was required to practice gymnastics five days a week and go to church three. Her political ideology was influenced by her own upbringing in a highly conservative Baptist household in a poor part of Miami.
She persuaded Wessel to allow her to go back to Hollywood in 2007 to play another role as an airhead in a sitcom, but it never materialized. Shortly after, she married Wessel, her high school sweetheart.Īfter living out her 30s and 40s as a suburban housewife in Miami, she decided to make a last-ditch effort at show business. The divorce from her first husband, fire eater Nelson "Nisan" Eventoff, cost her much of her SNL money. "He said, 'anyone with an R next to their name.' I said, 'Oh, are they Christians?' He said, 'No, but they are closer to the Bible than the D's.' And so that was my whole political education until I was in my 30s."Īfter leaving SNL in 1992, she struggled to find steady work as an actress, landing roles in films that went mostly unnoticed and working stand-up comedy gigs with former SNL cast members. Before that, she recalls her only previous inquiry into the democratic process at 18, when she asked her dad about voting. She registered as a Republican but now believes the party has moved too far to the left.
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She voted for the first time at age 37 - to vote against President Bill Clinton - and asked her husband how to vote. Jackson said she stumbled into political activism in 2007 after spending most of her life oblivious to government and politics. "Nashville has two of my favorite things: Jesus and show business." and New York, I felt like I was Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace, and living here I feel like I have died and went to heaven," Jackson said. "Living in Miami, I felt like I was in a foreign country.
Wessel is back in Miami wrapping up a 35-year career with the Miami-Dade Police Department, from which he plans to retire this year.ĭuring an interview in her home after her morning ritual - a Frappuccino from the Spring Hill Starbucks - Jackson was friendly and naturally witty, but scornful of those who don't see things as she does. One of her daughters is a conservative writer, and the other daughter attends Trevecca Nazarene University. Jackson's son-in-law is a pastor in Spring Hill, Tenn. Her husband, William Paul Wessel, has sisters who married local guys.
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