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Alec Mapa honored at Outfest Fusion before screening of hilarious “Baby Daddy” movie – gives moving speech

I had seen Alec Mapa’s one-man show Baby Daddy when he performed it at the Renberg Theater so I was a bit surprised to be laughing even harder seeing it again on Saturday night in movie version at Outfest Fusion.

This man, is a scream. Such a talent and that talent is showcased wonderfully in the documentary Alec Mapa: Baby Daddy directed by Andrea James.

There’s some hilarious comedy about life with husband Jamie Hebert as the parents of a very spirited young son named Zion but I did not expect to be weeping at the end during a montage of photos of the day they legally adopted him.

Feels good to laugh and cry all during the same movie.

Tremendous stuff and the audience was loving every minute of it.

Before the screening, Alec was presented with the 2014 Outfest Fusion Achievement Award by his longtime friend Sandra Oh who he met in 1998 when they appeared together in a play at the La Jolla Playhouse.

‘We were both nine at the time,’ she joked. ‘Working with him was so much fun and became one of my dearest acting experiences and we became friends for life.’

After an impressive series of clips that showed his work on such TV shows and movies as Ugly Betty, Switched at Birth, Some of My Best Friends, You Don’t Mess Around With the Zohan, Half & Half and Connie & Carla, Alec began his speech with this joke: “This literally feels like I’m attending my own funeral.’
He then mentioned what Marc Cherry (The Desperate Housewives creator who is one of the film’s producers and was in attendance) once said to him: “On paper, my career is not supposed to exist and that it only existed through sheer force of will. From that clip reel, I think it’s pretty clear to see that you can’t kill me with a stake.”

“I’ve been working for 27 years as an actor and it’s really easy for me to feel like I’ve only been working for two of those years. But the truth is, I’ve always been working because I’ve always been telling my story.”

He then went on to tell the powerful reason behind why he’s been so determined to do so:

‘Twenty-seven years ago I was in Washington DC when they unfurled the AIDS quilt for the very first time. And there were 12,290 panels and each panel memorialized a person who had died from AIDS. And I walked (pauses to collect himself) … as I walked along the panels, you could see entire life stories in each and every panel. You could see that this person was a dancer, an artist or a devoted wife and mother. And I was looking at a panel of someone who had clearly been a drag queen because this one panel was crammed with more sequins that you could possibly have. It literally looked like Liberace had thrown up. And you could see from the care and detail devoted to this panel that this person was deeply missed and deeply, deeply loved. And I said out loud to the stranger standing next to me: “Why do they hate us so much?” And the person next to us said: “It’s because they don’t know us.” And at the time it did seem like no one knew us – we were sort of a shadow minority, that our stories outside of our friends, our families and the people who loved us – our stories outside of this quilt were not being told. I once read that it takes audacity to put yourself center stage but I think the truth is, it takes audacity not to put yourself center stage. Each of us has a story that is absolutely unique to us – full of heartbreak and triumph, experiences and perspective on what it’s like to be a human being on this planet.”

“So if you’re an artist, a dancer, a writer, a photographer – I urge you to tell your story. It’s valuable, it’s needed. People want it, people are longing for it.”

Alec concluded by saying: “Most of all, I would like to thank my son Zion … because he’s given me the best possible story to tell.”

FILE UNDER: Outfest

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