Why Juan Battle never wants to lose his enormous laugh.

Question: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Juan Battle: The best advice I think I ever received came from my grandmother who passed away a year, maybe two years ago. I have an extremely, very large, loud laugh and my grandmother said to me once, “Don’t ever let them take your laugh.” And I just, as do all black or probably white, even, grandmothers who grow up in the South, everything is wrapped in these parables. Nothing is ever explicitly just stated, and that idea of never let them take your laugh. I mean never let the world take that which feeds you, which sustains you, which takes care of you, which makes you uniquely who you are on the planet. That’s what I took that to mean, of never let them take your laugh.

Recorded on March 2, 2010