CHARLESTON I’M A-COMIN’ FOR YA!

This Friday. Be there, Charleston. We'll fall in love all over again.

A Fond Farewell to Governor Sarah Palin

This is probably my favorite of all the Palin/Dina vlogs, although it’s sorely lacking in onscreen Dina.

PALIN FUCKING RESIGNED?!

HOLY shit.

Amazing.

Sleepless Bloggery

So I’ve recently lost the ability to sleep at night.

I took this photo of myself pretending to sleep. Fake like the moon landing!

I know my nutty schedule had something big to do with it–I’m generally at work from 7 p.m. ish to 2 a.m. ish, and sometimes later than that. I’m only on air from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. but there is prep work to be done beforehand, and afterward there is audio to be edited and there are often CDs to copy and send out to people who were guests on the show and who very much want to have evidence of themselves talking on the satellite magic radio, which I completely understand. There are also loads of emails to catch up on and guests to book and things of that nature. And I also enjoy dawdling a bit and returning personal emails and looking at the Internet. I guess I like the peace and quiet of the office at night. It’s a place with a ton of energy swirling around during the day, but at night everything quiets down.

Although there is this one gentlemen who works for a different channel who can sometimes be heard yelling, “FUCK!” at 2 a.m. I think he has technical difficulties and gets frustrated. Or maybe he just likes yelling.

Also at work, there are interesting books and toys. I get a lot of free sex toys. I give most of them away and sometimes keep one for myself. But the books are even better.

I keep meaning to email this one to Margaret Cho, who once went to a dog monastery.

That book isn’t remotely connected to the channel I work for, but it was laying about in the studio and I was psyched to see it.

The other day I auditioned for fUSE (just a short-term gig, I loves my radio job), and I looked sort of like this, I guess, while preparing for it:

I am some sort of 1960s personage.

The other day, I was delighted to finally get to meet Amanda in person. She is a rising 9th grader and she first wrote me back when the Palin vlogs were getting popular. She’s whip-smart and will probably be in charge of the NSA one day. She and her lovely mom, Simone, came to the city with the primary reason of getting to see Anne Hathaway in Shakespeare in the Park and meet her in person, and the secondary reason of having fun doing city things, and the tertiary reason of meeting me at their hotel. Which is just what we did, and Amanda wrote more cool poetry, and her mom gave me a magnificent afghan that she created herself. I want to display it properly before I photograph it.

We are thugs. Taken by Simone.

Now we are well-behaved. Taken by Simone.

The three of us. We enjoy poetry, comedy, and afghans.

Amanda got to meet La Hathaway and give her a five-page letter she’d written her. Amazing. This kid gets stuff done.

And here’s me in my brother’s hat, which I lost and must replace quite swiftly.

Sorry, Steve.

I was looking at Olivia Munn’s Playboy photos and thinking that maybe I should go on an intense diet and work out for hours each day and straighten my hair and wear makeup so that I can look like one of those shiny pretty girls. There are plenty of them to use as role models in this regard. Maybe if I worked out a lot and wore foundation and ate exactly 1200 calories a day, I could do that. There’s a part of me that kind of wants to, in weird middle-of-the-night moments. I’m not saying Olivia starves herself or has to work out a lot. Maybe she’s just got one of those bodies. I’m just saying that I would have to starve myself and work out a ton to look like she does.

But that’s not who I am. It is who Olivia is and it works for her. I have a couple of friends for whom it works, too. They are shiny pretty girls and they do TV stuff where they talk about the Events of the Day, and they do magazine stuff where they pose in their underpants, and they’re good at doing that stuff. It seems to come naturally for them, even if it doesn’t actually come naturally for them. They will have very beautiful photographs to show their grandchildren (I am totally showing my granddaughters hottie photos of myself once they’re in their teens).

Working in entertainment, I sometimes get caught up in plastic culture and think I need to get a tit lift and a nose reduction (please, reduce my ability to breathe, thanks) and straighten my hair and cause myself lots and lots of pain in order to get a flatter tummy (I doubt I could ever get it completely flat).

I recognize that most women in America (and in many many other places) also have these concerns, regardless of their career. We pick ourselves apart in photographs. For example, in the cab backseat photo above, I think my nose looks too big and my hair looks too thin. But I like the photo where I’m standing next to Amanda, because I think the t-shirt doesn’t make me look as chubby as I thought it did when I put it on.

See? Crazy. Makes no sense.

My insecurities are also nutty considering I post photos of myself in a bikini in various places as a publicity tool, to give people manboners and girlboners and to entice them to look at my videos and buy tickets to my shows, where hopefully they will heartily laugh and not pervily hit on me even though I tried to suck them in with a titillating photo. HIGHLY ILLOGICAL.

Note that the bikini bottom covers my tummy pudge. Not very Playboy of me.

Anyway, here’s a photo of me. I think I look very ugly in it, because of my clothes and hair and lack of makeup. But I seem to be happy, with my now-ex-common-law-stepcat on my lap, in my old backyard.

I think this was last summer.

Oy, I hate that fucking photo of me. But I loved, and love, that cat.

This post has nothing to do with anything and something to do with everything. At any rate, I’m going on vacation and performing in Charleston next week. Info is in the post below. I suppose that makes it a working vacation. I get uncomfortable when I don’t have any assignments. I’ll probably call my boss at least twice while I’m at the beach. I’ve got to get a script together. I have to finally get a fucking book proposal together. I have to remember what happens in my show. I think I’m doing some radio down there to promote my show.

When I originally planned this vacation, someone else was coming along, and we were just going to chill and not do work. And now he’s not coming along, and I guess I’m trying to fill the vacant space where he would have been with work. I can’t bring along a partner, so I’ll bring along a razzle-dazzle show! Doesn’t quite work out that neatly, however.

Ugh.

Emo feelingsblogging. I’ve no right to complain or fret about any of this. These are First World Problems (TM) if ever there were any.

I’m just lonely and thinking out loud.

Thanks for reading.

Best,
Sara

South Carolina, I Am Coming For You

CHARLESTON! FRIDAY, JULY 10TH!

I am going to gently cup Governor Sanford’s balls in my hands, look into his eyes, and tell him he’s a very pretty lady. I’d like you to be a part of that, Charleston.

Also, if you have suggestions for fun things to do while I am down there, that’d be rad. I’ve been spending parts of each summer there for pretty much 20 years, but a gal can always learn about new places! Do not suggest a plantation; that shit is fucking creepy.

Elon James White is on a Roll

I spend a lot of nights being awake. That’s partly because of my work schedule; I’m generally at work from around 6:30 PM to around 2:00 AM. I’m on air for three hours, and the rest of the time I’m doing production work (editing promos, on-air vignettes, booking guests) or just enjoying the feeling of peace I get from being alone in an office at an ungodly hour of the night.

But lately it’s veered into a bit of insomnia. I think I can say, without overstepping any boundaries, that I miss my ex-boyfriend and my ex-common-law step-cat. When you miss people and animals who used to be a part of your sleeping regimen, that throws you off a bit. I’m not saying that to whine or to insinuate anything; it’s just the plain truth. It’s a healthy and necessary kind of missing, and it will heal and pass over time, but the fact remains that at the moment, I’m having trouble sleeping.

All this preamble is to say that I get to do some reading at night, generally on the Internets, and I’ve been trying to read stuff that has to do with politics and culture (not my usual professional diet of comedy and girly fluff–enjoyable though those things are.)

And I have to say, my friend Elon James White has been killing it in the blogging front lately.

I strongly suggest reading A Message From the Average Black Person. Elon is one of the few HuffPosters who actually engages with his audience and debates with them in the comments section. And I do recommend reading the comments section. It’s eye-opening even for people who consider themselves to be fairly open to the notion that race is not monolithic. I grew up around mostly Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans, so I have a decent understanding of the class differences that exist within those groups, but people of Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Hispanic descent were exotic to me until I became an adult. Hell, people of Dutch descent were exotic to me until I lived in the Netherlands for a few months.

A really interesting, mostly-civil dialogue takes place in the comments (rare on HuffPo.) My favorite part is getting to read people’s individual stories and learning small bits of illuminating personal information about strangers.

Anyway, maybe that Klonopin pill is finally kicking in and I’ll get some rest. But I just wanted to point you in Elon’s direction today. He’s also on Twitter.

CHARLESTON, SC on JULY 10th!

How cute is this ish? Designed by Mike Wang; Photo by Lauren Goldberg; Font hunted up by Ces Marciuliano

BREAKING NEWS! AGORAFABULOUS IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA!!! JULY 10th!!!

Oh, man alive. I am so stoked to announce my upcoming performance of my one-woman show, AGORAFABULOUS!, at Charleston’s own Theatre 99! Dude, faces will be rocked off. Tell your Southern friends, tell your Northern friends, tell everybody in the East and the West and in various noncardinal directions! I don’t even know what noncardinal directions are! WHOOO HOOO!

I’ve spent a lot of time in Charleston over the years, since I was a wee kid, and I’m tickled pink and pleased as punch to be able to perform in that lovely city.

July 10th, 2009
10:00 PM
AGORAFABULOUS! in CHARLESTON, SC
Theatre 99, 280 Meeting Street
Charleston, South Carolina
Cost: $10
They’ve got delicious delicious booze, too!

“Quite funny and attractive and intelligent and has a kind of Tina Fey air to her”
—Comedy Central’s Indecision 2008 blog

“Adorably…hilarious”
—Time.com

“Delightfully loopy”
—ChicagoTribune.com

“Utterly hilarious”
—NYTimes.com

“Up and coming”
—Wired.com

“Freaking hilarious”
—Newsweek.com

“Hysterical”
—PaperMag.com

“Increasingly surreal and madcap”
—Gawker.com

“She has the brass, folks”
—Bitch Magazine

“Uninhibited, outspoken, occasionally naughty….”
—The Raleigh News and Observer

On Dads

For me, the most surprising thing about becoming an adult was discovering that I actually liked my dad. It certainly hadn’t always been that way. At times throughout my childhood I’m fairly certain we mutually despised each other, though he might protest that he never, ever stopped loving me. As if you can’t love someone and hate them in equal measure at the same time. For most of my upbringing, I’d say he thought I was brilliant and selfish and I thought he was brilliant and, well, selfish. We fought a lot.

In a way, I think we grew up together. Young parents and their kids often do. I was born when he was 24. I’m aware it’s not a young age for a father from a biological perspective. I co-host a radio talk show about sex, and the other day a caller proudly said, “I’m a grandmother!”

“You’re a grandmother!” I exclaimed. “You sound like you’re 22!”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m 37.”

So my parents weren’t that kind of young. But having reached and passed the age of 24 a few years back, I can say with some certainty that the average 24-year-old American adult male is not prepared for fatherhood–not in our culture of perpetual youth, of forever-adolescence. I know things were different in 1980, when I was born, and that my father did not emerge from the type of fast-paced. cosmopolitan lifestyle in which delayed adulthood was (and remains) the norm. Having a daughter at 24 probably made more sense to him than doing key bumps with Elton John somewhere in Manhattan, which I assume is what his hip, cool big-city contemporaries were up to. For some reason, everything I envision about the 1970s and early 1980s involves Sir Elton John and cocaine. I have been told by those who were there that the reality was far more prosaic, unless you were in fact Elton John or, perhaps, Bernie Taupin.

Last weekend, my younger brother came over to my rented studio apartment to help me build an IKEA wardrobe–by which I mean he built it and I helped a little, mostly by keeping him in a steady supply of Guinness. He saw a picture of my father and mother holding me on my first Easter, and noted that Dad looked kind of scared. I studied it later, and I don’t quite agree. Overwhelmed, perhaps; a bit of a deer caught in the headlights type of look. But not scared, exactly. (Mom, on the other hand, looks peaceful and sleepy.)

It is strange to realize that my existence was more or less a planned affair. When I hear of 24-year-olds getting pregnant today, I assume someone forgot to take her Pill, or put on his condom, or both. But actually, my parents had been married since my father was 22 and my mother was 21, and they worked various low-paying jobs and still managed to own–own!–a house. I was as much a part of their plan as the three-bedroom ranch-style dwelling with the pear trees and the forsythia bushes in the backyard. Dad had a white-dude ‘fro of curly red hair, and was probably a full six feet back then. He always had pale skin and freckles and burned easily in the sun. Mom was tiny, about five foot one, and had luminous olive skin and lovely black hair that betrayed her 100% Italian (alright, half-Sicilian) background. Somehow, this overgrown leprechaun and pint-sized Mediterranean mermaid brought forth a son and daughter who look like the nice Jewish girl and boy your parents always wanted you to marry. Be warned: we are nice, but we are not of your tribe. I’d consider converting, but my brother probably wouldn’t.

Incidentally, I have learned certain appropriate strategies to deal with being a single New Yorker who looks like, but is decidedly not, the future mother of two adorable children named Hannah Rivkeh and Aaron Moishe. Once, a very nice, geeky young doctor asked me out and I responded apologetically, “Oh, honey, I’m not Jewish” without blinking.

He was taken aback, and responded, “Yes you are!”

“I’m not,” I assured him apologetically. “And you’re not in the market for a Gentile girlfriend. ” (You can usually tell which ones are and which ones aren’t. It’s a sophisticated sense I’ve developed since this began happening when I hit puberty. When I date Jewish guys, they’re of a different breed–the kind where mom grew up smoking weed with black kids at civil rights marches and dad believes that religion is just another tool of The Man.)

“You’re right,” he said. “Thank you for telling me right away!” He was sweetly relieved. It was as if I’d tapped him on the shoulder on the street and said, “Hey, buddy, you just dropped $20 back there. Here ya go!”

“Good luck!” I told him sincerely.

Incidentally, my Catholic father has told me repeatedly over the course of my life that he doesn’t care about the religion of the person who I bring home. “As long as he’s nice to you,” he says. Should I have offspring, I intend to pass the same attitude on to them. Life is too short and love is too precious to squabble over which version of the God fairy-tale you were forced to listen to on the weekends.

Dad is perhaps the least nerdtastic of a family of Irish Catholic intellectuals, which is saying something because he’s rather smart. The youngest of four, he loved sports more than his sisters or brother, and he played football. On a team. On purpose. I imagine that if I were sent back in time, Marty McFly-style, to hang out with my father and his siblings, I wouldn’t have known how to talk to my dad. Who chooses to play football? I’m actually way nerdier than either my mom or my dad, and to their eternal regret I didn’t play team sports in high school (beyond one stab at the 9th grade lacrosse team, which resulted in exactly 3 minutes of playing time.)

Grades were of the utmost importance in his father’s household, and thus in his own. I learned early on that high grades merited approval and a certain hands-off approach to my extracurricular life, while low grades (and in math they were always low) resulted in tense father-daughter tutoring sessions that generally ended with someone cursing (that would be him) or someone crying (that would be me). The fact that these sessions even occurred at all was evidence of how much he cared, but I’m not going to sugarcoat the fact that he could be a total asshat when frustrated.

He spent a lot of his thirties and forties in a state of high stress, for a variety of reasons. As it happened, I also spent a lot of his thirties and forties in a state of high stress, some of which I chalk up to adolesence, some of which I chalk up to an emerging pattern of mental illness. We clashed often. I’d say we didn’t enjoy one another’s company much from when he was 35 (and I was 11) to when he was 45 (and I was 21).

I have a hazy memory of actually trying to punch him in the face when I was a teen, a quixotic endeavor at best. This is actually a traditional Irish rite of passage, though it’s generally the son who tries to knock his father out, generally at a drunken family wake in which the words, “It was you that killed Ma! With yer drinkin’, and your lyin’!” or “Little Brigid would still be here if not fer you!” are uttered at a high volume. In this case, I was just really incensed, probably the angriest I’ve ever been, and no one was drunk or dead or named Brigid. I’m not sure if he remembers it. I can say I did not have the pugilistic success of one of his personal heroes, Muhammed Ali. I am also fairly certain I was sent to my room.

Raising a child with a sometimes-debilitating mental illness cannot possibly be a simple task, no matter the extent of your previous experience with the ailment in question (either as a sufferer or as a caregiver). I do believe that, as is often the case with families, my mother bore the brunt of dealing with my periodic and ever-worsening descents into panic and depression, and I’ve made a small attempt to publicly acknowledge her fortitude. However, my father also contributed time and time again to my road back to health, as much as by what he didn’t say as by what he did.

He did not, for example, call me crazy, or weak, or accuse me of pretending when I haltingly explained some of the things I felt. Parents are generally smart enough to realize that they never get the entire story, and if a kid says she’s thought about killing herself once or twice, you can generally multiply that by fifty to one hundred. Over the years, long before I came around, my father had seen and felt enough of what would eventually plague his daughter to be able to identify it when it appeared and to try as best he could to steer me towards wellness.

I said earlier that we didn’t get along particularly well until I was 21, and that’s true. Things certainly began to improve once I moved out of the house at 18, but we didn’t begin to build a real adult relationship until I moved back in at 21. Halfway through my junior year in college, I had what used to be called a nervous breakdown. I still call it that, simply because it’s a more convenient and better-understood term than “a severe depressive episode” or whatever the DSM-IV might say. It involved, among other things, developing an acute fear of leaving my studio apartment. I also feared eating in the morning, having a wet head after bathing (perhaps the oddest part of it), and traveling as a passenger in a car, bus, train, or plane. I feared crowds of people. I feared driving. Also, I sometimes peed in places that were not the toilet (glasses, bowls) so that I would not have to go to the toilet. I feared having a panic attack on the toilet. I feared going to school.

In short, I feared many things that healthy 21-year-olds, even the weird quirky artsy kind, should not fear. And when it became clear that I needed more help than I could provide myself, and that the emotional and psychological bumps of my adolescence had been small compared to the mountain of trouble I now faced, it was time for me to go home. And in going home, in admitting defeat, in giving up on what college students foolishly think of as adulthood, I became a child again. And this is when my relationship with my father finally changed.

After many years of trying to act wise beyond my years, of attempting to impress my dad with my intellectual prowess and my academic accomplishments, I gave up. I padded around in pajamas. I cried openly. I numbly refused to do anything I didn’t want to do–and he accepted my refusal. A few times, early on, I crawled into bed with my parents and sat in the glow of the flickering television, watching who-knows-what, killing time before, inevitably, I would have to go to my own bed and try to fall asleep. I hated going to bed because the mornings were so difficult and fraught with terror. My goals became very small: get out of bed before noon. Take a shower. Get dressed. Take your pills. Do the relaxation exercises they taught you at the medical center. Make a sandwich. Try to eat it. Half of it is good enough. Take small bites. Chew thoughtfully. Even if it takes an hour, you can do it. Go outside for a few minutes. The next day, a few minutes more. Take a car ride around the block with Dad. Take a car ride through a couple of neighborhoods with Mom. Go with Mom when she gets groceries. Stay in the car and breathe. It’s okay; you don’t have to go inside this time. Go with Dad when he picks up the dry cleaning. Go inside with him, this time. Stand there. Say hello to the cashier. You can do this.

Sometimes it was too scary and I had to go home before the conclusion of a film, or a shopping excursion. But it got better and better all the time. And along the way, haltingly, my father and I began to reconnect and understand one another in a way that we never had before. More importantly, I think we began to trust one another.

Once, when I was a baby, my dad sat in a rocking chair with me and held me until I fell asleep. He has a great affinity for babies, and they bring him joy and peace–which in turn tends to make him sleepy. That particular day, my 24-year-old, overworked, underpaid, semi-clueless, probably-totally-freaked-out dad relaxed so much that he fell into a slumber of his own. His arms relaxed, and I rolled down his torso and legs into the crook of his feet. I didn’t scream or cry. I didn’t even wake up. We were just there, breathing together, two bundles of nerves and feelings, sleeping in tandem, and even asleep we both knew we were safe.

Shortly thereafter, my mother appeared and raised holy hell, as was her right. Having carried me successfully inside her body for nine months, she was naturally peeved that my father could not carry me for ten minutes without falling asleep on the job. Shifting the blame, Dad protested that it was my mother’s yelling that caused me to wake up and start screaming. In a sense, he was right; I have always been painfully sensitive to my mother’s shifts in moods, a tendency that I later learned to curb by holding her at a distance, sometimes harshly. My dad laughs about the story now, and teases my mom. I have to say that if my future babydaddy ever falls asleep while sitting upright and holding my spawn, my reaction will mostly likely not be sunshine and cupcakes, either.

But the key element I take away from the story is this: even when he fucked up and fell asleep on the job, he didn’t drop me. He still held me up, by the skin of his teeth or the crook of his feet. His heart–and his ankles–were in the right place, even if his brain was on vacation. And so as an adult, I’ve come to define what I want in a partner not by whether or not he drops the ball, but whether he manages, somehow, to catch it at the last second. And to try harder next time. And to forgive himself for fucking up. And to laugh about it later.

So, belatedly, Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Thanks for never letting me hit the ground.

P.S. I could use like fifty bucks. I’m just saying.

The Comedy Business, As Done by Elegant Ladies

In matters of business, it is important to employ proper language.