Somebody has to yell about it.

The setup

Dee Vasquez-Okafor didn't set out to write about her family. She set out to complain about them, and a manager made the mistake of calling it "material."

Raised between a Guadalajara kitchen and a Lagos front porch, Dee spent a decade doing open mics between nursing school shifts before her set about smuggling her mother-in-law's goat stew through airport security went viral at a Denver bar show. She hasn't had a quiet Thanksgiving since.

"My therapist says I have main-character syndrome. My mother says the same thing, but meaner, and in two languages."

Her sets are built like her group chats: overlapping, a little unhinged, somehow always circling back to whether anyone remembered to feed the dog. Three specials and nineteen years of city rooms later, she's still doing it live because the punchlines land better when you can hear the room lose it together.