*In case you missed it, here is Tyler Perry’s buzzed about acceptance speech for the TV Academy’s prestigious Governors Award during Sunday’s Emmy telecast, including the introduction by Oprah Winfrey, featuring an appearance by Chris Rock.
The mogul’s heartfelt speech was about a quilt given to him at age 19 by his grandmother. “It was something that I didn’t really care for, and I was quite embarrassed by it,” he said when it was first given to him. He would use it for household chores, including a rag when he changed the oil in his car. Later, when he noticed a similar quilt in an antique shop, he learned about its origins. And suddenly his grandmother’s quilt hit different.
“It was made by an African-American woman who was a former slave,” the salesperson told him. “Each patch in the quilt she put in represented a different part of her life. One part was from a dress that she was wearing when she found out that she was free. Another part was from her wedding dress.”
Perry said he realized he “dismissed her work and her story because it didn’t look like what I thought it should.”
Expanding the metaphor, he said, “Whether we know it or not, we’re all sewing our own quilts with our behaviors, our experiences and our memories.”
Winfrey said in her taped introduction, “He dreamed the impossible dream.”
“He did it all by himself,” Rock added, noting Perry’s arrival as the ultimate Hollywood outsider. “He’s both talented and crazy.”
Watch Winfrey’s introduction and Perry’s full acceptance speech for the Governors Award below:
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