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Photo Ann Wood
A newly blond Kate Clinton, with a new book out, poses before a show in her dressing room. |
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Clinton does it all
Comedian-writer-political advocate Kate Clinton breaks out with a new book — and hair
By Ann Wood & Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff
Comedian Kate Clinton may be known for the anti-Bush Administration rants and lesbian jokes that are riddled throughout her funny and thought-provoking show — but every night in Provincetown that show will be different.
“I will write stuff during the day and try it out at night,” she says over a cappuccino Saturday morning. Clinton says she kicks out 20 minutes of her show every evening to try out new material. Eventually, she’ll put most of it back in, she says.
“It’s all written,” Clinton says of her stage show. But that doesn’t mean she’s not still working, changing those words, changing those bits. “I’ve written three, what I think are genius, pages.” She might try it out, cut it down to one line, which later becomes a longer bit. (She’s doing that now with the idea of a home-schooled student attending a reunion.)
“This is what I love about Provincetown, for me, it’s really an opportunity to work on things,” she says.
Not that the audience can tell that she’s testing her material — the show runs smoothly. The almost all-women crowd at The Crown & Anchor Friday night howls at Clinton as she weaves politics and lesbianism together in a 60-minute high-speed ride. It works well because Clinton interrupts herself before the audience has a chance to get sick of each subject — instead, she’s got them hollering for more.
Clinton performs at 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and Tuesday (through Sept. 4) at The Crown & Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown. She’ll return to Provincetown, where she has a home, to perform a 90-minute Women’s Week show in October.
Clinton tells the crowd that she doesn’t have any children. She thinks.
“There was that one softball summer,” she quips.
Clinton, who has just released her second book, “What the L?” (Avalon, soft back, $14.95), has been performing for 24 years, 18 or 19 of those years right here in Provincetown. It’s her third year at The Crown and, as she tells the audience, she’s the only real girl currently starring there.
“I always wanted to try [comedy] and I started talking about it too many times to my friend,” she says, sipping on her coffee drink. Her friend got sick of hearing about it, booked her at a club in Syracuse, N.Y., and told her she had a month to prepare. She did.
Her career really began moving forward when she got to know these women in a rock band. When the band broke up, one of the musicians who had booked the band’s shows started booking Clinton. She began by performing in the basements of Unitarian Universalist churches, moved upstairs and then to concert halls. That lasted for five years.
“If [that booking agent] had been an accountant, it would have been a different career,” she says.
That would’ve been too bad. Besides too many performances to count, two books (including her first, “Don’t Get Me Started”), the monthly columns she writes for The Advocate and The Progressive (which are included in “What the L?”) and seven comedy records (most recently “The Marrying Kind”), Clinton has been featured at comedy festivals, on “Good Morning America,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” and many other news and talk shows. She appeared in the Provincetown Film Festival film “The Secret Lives of Dentists,” which was scripted by her friend Craig Lucas, and she was one of four lesbian comics featured in the award-winning documentary “Laughing Matters.”
The thing is, Clinton’s teaching people while they’re laughing.
“When I saw the Exodus International full-page ad in The New York Times ‘Toward Hope and Healing for Homosexuals,’ my first thought was that it must not be going well for conservatives if they have to throw away good money to advertise for straight people,” she writes in “Scaring Them Straight,” a column that appears in “What the L?”
Or, in concert, “FOX is now a diocese of the Catholic Church.”
But let’s not get all that serious for too long. Clinton admits later that one of her friends, a museum director, told her that museums need benches like audiences need breathers, because “you’ve got to prepare for museum fatigue.”
Standing outside of the coffee shop, Clinton’s talking to a gay man who’s grossed out by her show’s tampon-sticking-an-inch-out story. He doesn’t like it, she says. He makes a face. But he doesn’t complain about her Dangerous Sexual Situation story — it happens when you mistake the BenGay for K-Y lubricant.
Clinton finds a bench and sits down, laughing about a Pamela Anderson roast story that appeared in The New York Times, which talks more about Courtney Love than Anderson. It seems that she’s fed by this stuff.
Clinton says that she was really inspired by both Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin — but not because of their comic style.
“Just in terms of a woman making someone laugh,” she says.
She was also influenced by one of her friend’s mothers who would invite her over to listen to comedy on the record player, such as Mike Nichols and Elaine May albums.
And now that Clinton’s done some ground-breaking political comedy, it seems she’s swung around to the old standard: blond jokes.
She tells the audience the night before that she dyed her hair blond so she’d look more like Brad Pitt — and perhaps get to do Angelina Jolie. Really, in true Clinton form, the reason is much deeper than that: This is the first summer Clinton’s been in town without her friend Eileen, the owner of Salon Rose, who died. So she stepped into the former Salon Rose, sat down in a chair, and let the stylist have his way with her. They transformed her into a blond. Just like her friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and fellow Fine Arts Work Center instructor Michael Cunningham.
“So we’ve been having blond support groups on Wednesdays, because he’s a week ahead of me on the roots,” she says laughing.
awood@provincetownbanner.com
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Aiming a bright Starlite at the religious right
In the Arts
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Aug 18th, 2005