Tasha Smith

Tasha Smith: Born Again
Growing up with neighborhood drug dealers and pimps as her friends, Tasha Smith could have ended up dancing her life away in strip clubs. Instead, the rising star found religion, got saved, and changed her destiny
By Tasha Smith as told to Wendy L. Wilson

I never believed I would make it past 30. Growing up in Camden, New Jersey, I didn’t have any hope. That’s why I dropped out of high school. I thought, I’m never going to make it to college, so I might as well just quit right now. My twin sister, Sidra, and my younger sister, Ch’e, and I attended a Seventh-Day Adventist Church with our grandmother, but I didn’t really connect to that. All I wanted to do was hang out with my friends in the neighborhood. Most of them were drug dealers, pimps and people who worked in the clubs. I didn’t realize that they weren’t the icing on the cake of the world. All I knew was that these people bought us school clothes and groceries and looked out for my sisters and me when our mom was too busy freebasing cocaine.

My father wasn’t around, and my mother would spend whatever money we had on drugs. My sisters and I knew what it was to eat pieces of fried bread with sugar and butter and call that cake because that’s all we could afford. We moved every six months. I don’t know if my mom understood how much turmoil she put us through. I grew up thinking she didn’t love me, so I tried to find love wherever I could. I lost my virginity when I was 14. I was completely sex crazed because that’s how I identified love. I thought if you took me to a motel, bought me some cheap wine, gave me a joint or cocaine, and had sex with me all night, that was love. And yet I felt so worthless all the time.

Back then, in 1987, I was friends with actor Allen Payne, who was from my area. He was dating the actress Tisha Campbell Martin—this was way before she got married and starred in the sitcom My Wife and Kids. I can see now that God put Tisha in my life to encourage my dream of becoming an actress. Tisha would always say, “You don’t belong out there.” She was part of the reason I moved to California when I was 18. She and her mom found me an apartment, bought me a little car, and would come over with groceries. People thought I was crazy to move to Hollywood, but Tisha and her mom believed in me.

In California I knew I wanted to act, but I was a high school dropout and felt very insecure about my craft. Then Tisha took me to the Comedy Act Theater, and I was hooked. I fell in love with comedy and started developing a stand-up career. But I was still broke. A lot of comedy clubs will let you try out material for free; some will even pay you $30 a night, but you can’t make a living on that. To support myself, I worked as a phone-sex operator and ran a cleaning company. After a while I had to move back to New Jersey. Tisha didn’t know much about what I was going through during that period. I was doing a lot of drugs, and she was never a part of that lifestyle.

When I got back to Camden in the early nineties, I decided to try stripping. A friend of mine who was an exotic dancer told me I could make good money in the clubs. She introduced me to the manager at her club and that’s how I started. Between shifts, I would drive to a comedy club in New York City, do a few sets, then go right back to the strip club, where I would make up to $700 a night on weekends.

In the beginning, stripping made me feel powerful, as if I had all of this control over my audience. But after a few months, the scene began to wear on me. I began to see that everything that wasn’t good for me—like sleeping around and getting high—was connected to stripping, and it was damaging my soul. I got so tired of taking off my clothes with 200 men grabbing on me and slipping money into my G-string. I was desperate to leave the club world, but I needed a push to move beyond the easy money of stripping. That push came from comedy.

In my other life, my real life, I was gaining a rep as a stand-up comedian, appearing on Def Comedy Jam and the Uptown Comedy Club. As I traveled the country performing, I began to meet people of faith who would talk to me about their experience with God. When I was a child I used to think being a Christian was corny. Now I realize I just had to discover faith for myself. I found a sense of freedom in my relationship with God—the freedom to be beautiful and sexy and have purpose in life. Slowly I began to see God had been there guiding and protecting me all along. I’m convinced my life changed when I surrendered it to God. I had so much shame about my past that I didn’t understand how much God loves me. I didn’t understand that I could never do anything so horrible that God’s grace would not be there to lift me up, pull me out, and clean me off. His love helped me become a different person, taking me from that life as a stripper to a new life as a woman who prayed and found the courage to get up onstage and do the work she truly loved.

And on the heels of faith and hard work came even greater success. In 1996 I moved back to Hollywood and began starring in the NBC comedy Boston Common. Then in 2002 my acting coach helped me start my own acting school, the Tasha Smith Actors Workshop. Sometimes we just need to change our environment and maybe even our friends in order to move forward. When I did that, God arranged wonderful things for me. One was meeting producer and director Tyler Perry three years ago. He wrote the role of Jennifer in Daddy’s Little Girls for me and then cast me in Why Did I Get Married?

Today I’m involved with the Giving Light Christian Fellowship in Pennsylvania. And my mom and I have renewed our relationship. She went to rehab and has been clean for 20 years. She has become this powerful woman, highly respected in her community. Our goal now is to create a mentoring program, helping others who are going through what we did. A lot of them come to me and say, “I’ve done some terrible things.” I tell them, “Honey, there’s nothing I haven’t heard before and nothing that God can’t help you fix. Trust me. I know.”

Tasha Smith is busy working on a new film, The Longshots, with Ice Cube and Keke Palmer. You can see her in Why Did I Get Married? on DVD.