Debi Kops was minding her own business.
A Scarsdale, N.Y., native who had studied at Parsons School of Design, she was coming home one day in 1978 from her job in Midtown Manhattan as a mechanical-production artist for Random House, as the publishing company was called then. She had overcome a childhood torn up by her parents' divorce and a stint of being sent away to a boarding school far from home. She was doing well, she thought. And now she was just walking to her loft apartment in Chinatown.
"I made a turn, and all of a sudden I heard a pop in the wall beside me," she recalled.
Kops realized someone had shot at her. She yelled, "and they shot at me again. They got my hair and the collar of my coat."
Unhurt, but livid with anger and in shock, she made her way to a police station, where officers heard her story and walked her back to the spot where it happened. The shooters were still there, sitting in a car: kids with BB guns.
"Chinatown was known for street gangs back then," Kops explained. "They weren't safe neighborhoods."
After the youngsters had been brought to the precinct and written up, Kops was asked to return to the station to identify them. But the arresting officers hadn't been careful to protect her identity, she said.
"At that point, it became a full-blown trauma for me," she said.
Sure that she would be targeted by gang members, she asked for police protection and got it, but only for a couple of nights. Soon, Kops became certain she was being followed. She didn't feel safe in her home anymore. Eventually, she felt forced to move out of the loft and leave a neighborhood where she had been getting bookings as a performance poet and success had seemed possible.
"I had to give that up. I felt like I had to start all over again," said Kops.
Uprooted once more and feeling fragile, she tried to get therapy, but couldn't. She didn't believe she could talk to friends or acquaintances about what she was going through – no one she knew had ever been shot at. Kops quit her job and took gigs in the food industry, working catered events while trying to resume her poetry performances.
"At one point, I thought of suicide, I was so upset and depressed," she admitted. And then one morning, "I had an epiphany: The sun came through the window and I said, 'My gosh, I think I'm back in my body again.'" She understood that she wasn't ready to die. "I had to reclaim myself."
She decided to go into comedy.
This might seem an odd choice for someone so full of insecurity and rage. "I kept journals all my life because of the lack of emotional communication in my family. I also read a lot," said Kops. But it took the trauma of being shot to make her realize that "comedy was dark, but you could laugh. I felt much better laughing than being distressed and angry."
Not that comedy as an industry didn't inflict its own kinds of trauma on women. Discrimination, sexual harassment, audience hostility – Kops has seen and endured all of it. But in performing around the city in venues such as the Gotham Comedy Club and Al Martin's New York Comedy Club, as well as with comedian/impresario Gladys Simon's showcases, Kops discovered confidence.
"There were times when I was very sensitive to being alone onstage," she acknowledged, "but there was a part of me that enjoyed being in control, in the driver's seat. As an emcee, I was very quick on my feet. And I had support. It all stems from growing up without much of a voice, a way to express myself. It's always been this desire to speak up and speak out."
Having had her epiphany, Kops found she could live and do her work with less stress than before. "I just had a way of going about things," she said. After trauma, "You're not the same person. Your karma is different."
Though she left the comedy circuit 16 years ago and relocated to Harlem, her new occupation as a popular New York tour guide/historian makes good use of her performance abilities, her sense of humor and her passion for New York history, especially the history of Harlem and of Black artists. Kops now crafts specialty tours that range in topic from architecture and Harlem Renaissance poetry and music to the legendary ghosts of Manhattan.
"It all came to life when I was shot at," said Kops. "I was reborn. It wasn't by choice. But it changed me."
Tour guide Debi Kops reads a Langston Hughes poem at the Schomberg Center for members of one of her New York City "Welcome to Harlem: Harlem Rhythm & Rhyme" tours in 2023.