[VIDEO] Mary, Mary Brings Gospel To Arsenio + Erica Campbell Performs ‘Help’
Hit sister gospel duo Mary Mary’s namesake reality show has been a TV success. With season three kicking off last week and garnering nearly a million viewers for the season premiere, the sisters, Erica and Tina Campbell, show no sign of slowing down. This season, Erica and Tina face incredible trials with the lost of their father to cancer, a battle with now former manager Mitchell Solarek and Tina trying to recover from her husband Teddy’s admission of infidelity. Mary, Mary visited the Arsenio Hall Show and spoke about managing their relationship off camera, learning to heal and acting un-gospel. The pair also sang a snippet of “trouble Ain’t and Erica performed the song, ‘Help.’ Peep the excerpts and clips below.
[Tina] On deciding to discuss her husbands infidelity on the show:
Last year, I became aware that there was infidelity in my marriage and at the last second…I decided I’m not gonna be hostage to this because if I am it’s gonna make me miserable, and I made the decision that I’m gonna try to forgive and maybe if someone watches me or hears about me going though it maybe they might make the same decision maybe I might heal..maybe someone could heal by watching me heal. I kinda made it [the decision] in the spur of the moment. I didn’t know how challenging the process of healing was going to be, but I made the decision in the spur of the moment.
[Tina] If she regrets making the decision in the spur of the moment:
During the process, yes I did. I was like ‘It’s embarrassing, its shameful.’ I’m doing a bunch of stuff thats ungospel. I wasn’t nice, I wasn’t nothing to be played with when it was going on. I’m just saying it was really bad for everybody that was around me. I was like, ‘I’m hurting, I’mma hurt the world, that’s how it’s going down’. You don’t really want to do that while the cameras are rolling, it helps to get behind bars. I was trying to figure out how do I manage this in the process.
I’m grateful that I was able to go through it on camera because I survived the process… if people don’t have an example of what it looks like to be all the way broken down and still be able to stand and smile and live, sometimes you don’t think that you’ll make it through.
[Tina & Erica] Learning to maintain to their relationships off camera:
It’s really kinda easy to keep moving and going through your life without paying attention to your life and in some ways the show forced us to kinda pay attention to things that we said even as a family within watching what was happening on the show, I was like, ‘I don’t want it to go off and her feel like that’ so we would go and say to each other like, ‘are we good?’… we were trying to make sure that we as sisters were good and the same thing for her and Teddy.
The only thing that was hard was when I wanted to be real raw, I was like these cameras are right here and I can’t go Ingelwood on them right now.
And you’re family wouldn’t let you.
Check out their interview and performance below.