Melissa Diaz 'Splains Herself

Diaz started out young as a performer after my own heart: lurking on the sideline, feeding concepts and jokes to the class clowns and those with either greater confidence or lesser sense of comedy. Every actor wants to direct, and every comedy writer wants to be on stage. Close by, anyway.

Diaz landed a full ride to Columbia University via a scholarship program, and had the chance to pursue a Master's in International Affairs. After realizing the program was, in effect, a recruiting pipeline for the Department of Homeland Security, she knew it wasn't for her. While Diaz's new love, standup comedy, had her heartstrings, she knew it was a risky option, but threw caution to the fetid NYC streets and followed her dream.

For all the misery brought by COVID ("It was terrible", Diaz recalls), it did leave us with some long-term side effects that are net positive to the world. When the virus drove the world inside, Diaz found herself reviving a former love, reading, which gave us Melissa 'Splains the Classics. Tackling the Harvard Classics line-up, she's not only rediscovered her old passion, she's spreading it through podcast (no vaccination needed). In creating the website for the project, Diaz realized she had a feel for front-end web development, which led to a new skill, and a new day job.

The New York scene is known to audiences as one of the finest, and to the performers as one of the most grueling. "I'm a lot more chill than a lot of New York comics," Diaz notes, and the Austin comedy scene (and audiences) are far less focused on the grind, and always "being on", looking for what's next. It's given Diaz a chance to "be myself a little bit more", and not feel like life is one big networking-event-crawl.