Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another edition of the Sunday Sit Down podcast.

My thanks as always for clicking and listening along.

I got a great one for you this week with someone who is truly a life force and a light in this world.

She is Cheryl Lee Ralph. She's one of the stars of

the hit series Abbott Elementary, where she plays Barbara Howard, the no-nonsense kindergarten

teacher who's seen a few things in her day while working in the Philadelphia public school system.

Hilarious show, getting all the acclaim and Emmy Awards it deserves, including one for

Cheryl last year. She won for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy, becoming only the second

black woman ever to win that award. And she's been through a lot. She's lived a lot in her life,

in her career. She has so much wisdom. She's so positive. She's so uplifting. And she talks about her

long road to this moment that she's finally having. I mean, just in the last year, she sang at the

Super Bowl. She was Mrs. Claus in the Thanksgiving Day parade. She's about to get her star on the

Hollywood Walk of Fame. And it does feel like Abbott Elementary is sort of this reward at the end of

almost 40 years of work, more than 40 years of work, actually. She got her first part on Broadway in

1981. She originated the role of Dina Jones in the original production of Dreamgirls. That's the

role that Beyonce later played in the movie version of it and had a lot of success and a lot of frustration between Broadway and Abbott Elementary that she gets into.

She's just a joy to be around, a joy to talk with.

And I think you'll enjoy spending a little time as much as I did with Cheryl Lee Ralph right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. It's such a pleasure. It's great to be here with you. Thank you for doing this. I've been looking forward to it. Oh, me too. Oh, yes. Me too. And especially in this sort of grand room, I think it's appropriate for you. Thank you very much. I did have the feeling that it has an intentional almost 80s feel to it. And then I imagined you've just done a performance of Dreamgirls in 1981 and we've come here for dinner afterward. So there's the fantasy. Oh, that's so sweet. That's so good. But I never went to dinner after the show.

Right. Too tired. Too late. Because that was a very long show. You know, you would get at about quarter to 11, which was at the time very long. But you know what? It would have been a great, it's a great fantasy. I like it.

What are your memories of being in New York at that time? And when you come back here, It would have been a great, it's a great fantasy. I like it.

What are your memories of being in New York at that time?

And when you come back here, do you feel that?

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