Abe Beame will be playing Buhloone first when De La Soul’s discography hits streaming services this Friday.
The Follow is an interview series I plan on putting out occasionally, or frequently, or maybe never again, in which I basically just talk to the people I enjoy following online who are willing to talk to me for a while. It will be about what they come to Twitter for, how they cultivate their online personas, the things they feel passionate enough to contribute to the infinite discourse on this app, and why they feel the need to do it. And on a basic level, it will be two people on Zoom shooting the shit.
It’s rare that a Tweet thread dedicated to an obscure bit of “celebrity” news makes bigger headlines than the news item itself, but that’s precisely what happened at the end of the Summer in 2021 when it was announced that former Charlotte Hornets sharpshooter, 6th Man of the Year, and father of Steph and Seth- Dell Curry- was separating from his wife of 30-plus years.
The thread dedicated to the news was a 31-part masterpiece: a triumph of observation, wit, and economy. Its author, the pastor Solomon Missouri, hilariously laid out what it would mean for a man of a certain age to return to the jungle of dating in the tech-ravaged husk of the 2020s. The thread was unusual in that these days, most viral Tweets are built around reposting a Tiktok, or a simple digestible QT dunking on a moron. This was practically the Moby Dick of viral Tweets, a writer’s showcase that had real voice and perspective. The thread’s opening “Bud, let me tell y’all something, you don’t want to be out here.” Entered the lexicon. Reading it now, it has the hallmarks of an iconic standup bit out of The Kings of Comedy, a referendum on a changing world packed with quotable phrasing and pitch perfect delivery.
I assumed Solomon was another in an endless line of Twitter comedians or television writers and gave him a follow. But the next two years, I got familiar with a unique, elite poster. Solomon Tweets frequently, contributing to the discourse of the day, shooting the shit with his commenters. He’s reliably consistent in his humor, be it further dispatches from the frontlines of the dating wars, or being shockingly, hilariously horny – openly lusting after television characters and wrestlers.
But what really set Solomon apart is it slowly dawned on me that he was an actual pastor- specifically, the pastor of the Invitation A M E Zion Church in Snow Hill, North Carolina– and would also Tweet sober dispatches on faith, spirituality, and Bible study. I’m a lifelong agnostic Jew, but I found his warm, inclusive, progressive vision of his faith as interesting as his killer bits. It all made for one of the most interesting accounts I’d come across since joining the app, and this series was created specifically to give me an excuse to actually get to talk to people I follow and find fascinating, so I reached out to Solomon and set up a predictably enlightening, hilarious conversation.
(Author’s Note: This interview has been edited and condensed to make me sound like less of an asshole)