Just out., October 19, 2001, Page 45, Image 45

THEATER
.............▼.............
he talks for a living. How hard could an
interview he? She’s a comedian. I will
have an abundance of rich information
on which to draw. This will be great.
Dancing pretty fast
S
Lisa Bradshaw: W h at’s the name of your
new show?
Suzanne W estenhoefer: I’m calling it
Banned in Pittsburgh. I got banned in Pitts­
burgh, but I’m not going to tell you about it.
LB: 1 read about that: I ’m going to ask
you about it later on.
SW: I’m never gonna tell you because I put
so much of it in the act that I don’t want to
talk about it in interviews.
LB: Come on, a little preview.
SW: Nope.
LB: I ’m going to slip it in later, and you’ll
forget....
SW: Nope.
OK, then. Suzanne W estenhoefer is talking
to me from Provincetown, Mass., so I ask about
Lesbianville. T hat works.
“There’s nothing like fall in New England....
Fall in New England is the reason people write
hooks, the reason people do art. It’s so astound­
ing. Leaves, smell, everything. I love the West
Coast, and I love the Pacific Northwest, but
y’all don’t have any fall.”
And it’s W om en’s Week in Provincetown.
Westenhoefer exclaims: "20,000 women in a
space about 12 blocks long. Yeah, that works.”
Westenhoefer is touring the United States
doing the standup act thousands of dykes world­
wide know and love. The show is ever-changing,
but nearly every word, every breath, screams gay.
She can’t help it. “It’s lesbian because I’m
lesbian,” she says.
estenhoefer’s story is a whirlwind of
comedic success. After graduating from
Clarion University with a bachelor’s
degree in acting— “four years I can never get
hack”— she rushed to New York to be a movie
star but instead "became an amazing bartender.”
Slinging barbs along with customers’ drinks,
she eventually was taunted by some regulars to
try out her naturally funny queer-girl act on a
real stage. After weeks of nervous planning and
standing in the back of a comedy club, she
went up to do her three minutes.
“I won the contest— $20!” W estenhoefer
exults. “And then I wanted to do it again.”
Six months and many acts later, she was asked
to appear on an episode of The Sally Jesse Raphael
Show titled “Lesbians W ho Don’t Look Like Les­
bians.” The long-haired femme sat along with fash­
W
LB: You’re in it.
SW : You’re on a need-to-know basis,
here, missy.
Suzanne Westenhoefer stands and delivers during
a difficult period for comics and their audiences
by
L isa B radshaw
ion models and other “straight-looking” women,
describing what it was like to be a real, live dyke.
“This one woman said, ‘Did you get that
way because you had a bad experience with a
man?’ ” Westenhoefer remembers. “I said, ‘No,
did you get that way because you had a bad
experience with a woman?’ ”
In 1992 Westenhoefer won the New York
Cabaret Award for Best Performer. Fast-forward
to 1994, when she became the first out lesbian to
snag her own HBO comedy special, which was
nominated for a prestigious Cable Ace Award.
A few years later her first recording, Nothing in
My Closet but My Clothes, won the Gay and Les­
bian American Music Award for Best Comedy
CD. So the next year she released another and
won the same award. (You can catch one of her
Portland performances on the boxed set Hilarith.)
ot bad for a girl who never really considered
being a comedian. “W hat can I tell ya?”
Westenhoefer quips. “I just had a lot to say.”
This comic hasn’t left acting behind,
though; you can catch her in the film A
Family Affair, which is making its way around
the gay and lesbian festival circuit. The first
thing you’ll notice in the movie is that those
trademark long, blond locks are gone.
N
W hich brings us to the delicate subject of
that other blond lesbian comic. W ith all of
Westenhoefer’s success, you’d think media
deals would be flying at her, and they were—
right before Ellen DeGeneres came out.
Suddenly, the deals ended. There was no
more room for a gay woman on television.
“But there is room,” Westenhoefer insists. “I’m
extremely different from Ellen; our comedy styles
could not be further apart.... It’s interesting to
have your career be so deeply affected by someone
you barely know.”
I did hear about another HBO project,
though.
LB: You play a
Jewish lesbian in an
H B O series, right?
SW: No, th a t’s
not exactly true.
Again, we can’t
talk about this.
LB: You play
something in an
H B O show, right?
SW: C an’t tell ya.
LB: So you cut and died your hair specifi­
cally for this film, right?
SW: Yes, but you can’t talk about that.
LB: W hy can’t I talk about that?
SW: Because it’s in the show!
Westenhoefer enjoys acting immensely,
but standup is her first love. Why?
“It’s me," she says. "I fail or I succeed
because of me. It’s my words, my stories, my
truth. I make all the decisions. It’s me and
you. If you don’t like what I’m doing and you
boo and hiss, then I do something else. And if
you love what I’m doing, and we’re all laugh­
ing, then let’s go. I love that! It’s so power­
ful— us, our night, nobody can touch it.”
Westenhoefer also used to write pieces
for The Advocate, so I joke about why they
never put her on the cover. “Because I wasn’t
straight first,” she deadpans. “T hat’s my bitter,
bitchy way to say it. If you become famous when
you’re straight and then come out, you get to be
on the cover of everything, don’t you know.”
W hat Westenhoefer can talk about right
now is what everyone else in the country is
talking about. She loves what she does but is
finding it particularly hard to be a standup
comedian during a time of terrorism and war.
A t the first performance after the Sept. 11
attacks, she honestly did not want to take the
stage.
“I didn’t want to be funny. I didn’t feel funny.”
Still, the show must go on, and in the end it
was “wonderful.. .the audience was spectacular.
You know, we were all there for each other.”
However, Westenhoefer proceeds with cau­
tion. She describes a bit in which she talks
about losing her luggage: “T he moment I said
‘airport,’ a hundred women just froze. A nd I
went ‘o h ’ and just skipped it.”
Even seemingly safe homo humor can be
on shaky footing. “All of a sudden a joke
about gays in the military is not funny.... So
you’re just up there, and you’re just, uh, let’s
see where we can go. I’m definitely dancing
pretty fast.”
Westenhoefer, who spends half her life on
airplanes, insists: “I’m not afraid to fly, I’m nc£
afraid to go out, I’m not afraid to do any­
thing... nobody gets to take that away from me.
I can’t live my life saying, ‘Is this going to hap­
pen?’ W hat a horrible place to be.”
Westenhoefer stood in line for two hours to
buy a U.S. flag and a rainbow one. She and
A nnie, her partner of nine years, both definite­
ly have found their patriotism— but don’t con­
fuse that with Republicanism.
“You can’t shut A nnie up right now because
everybody is pro-Bush and stuff,” she laughs.
“She’s like: ‘This is fuckin’ bullshit. He didn’t
get any smarter. ' "
In closing, Westenhoefer wants to make
sure the gay boys come to her show, too.
“Sometimes they think that it’s lesbian and
somehow it won’t be about them, but it is.”
She doesn’t even mind if straight people
come. “It’s a really inclusive show because, you
know, it’s about.. .me.
v
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”jn
S uzanne W estenhoefer performs 8p. m.
Nov. 2 at Portland’s Aladdin Theater, 3017 S.E.
Milwaukie Ave. Tickets are $23 at the door and
$20 in advance from It’s My Pleasure, Ticketmas-
ter or 503-224-4400. She takes her act to Eugene’s
Wild Duck Music Hall, 169 W. Sixth Ave., at
8 p.m. Nov. 3. Tickets are $23 at the door and
$20 in advance from Mother Kali’s Books, Fastixx
or 541485-3825.
n
L isa B radshaw is a free-lance writer who also
has a head o f fabulous thick, blond hair.
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