Written by:
Laurie K. Schenden
Photographer:
Austin Young
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 12#5
Margaret Cho has strutted into summer with a new CD, a new comedy concert film and a new attitude. Her latest work, Notorious C.H.O., is the smart and sassy follow-up to her well-received 2000 film, I’m the One That I Want.
With I’m the One, Cho created a coming-of-age story, hit on her favorite topics (including sex with men, sex with women, gay drama and her Asian-American family), and gave herself a chance to vent — and purge some bitterness — after her bid for sitcom stardom failed. In 1994, ABC’s All-American Girl was the first television show to star an Asian-American woman, but the series didn’t survive past its second season.
Though Cho once appealed primarily to a gay male audience, her fan base came to include more women and lesbians as she expanded her material to include discussions of lesbian sex and women’s issues, including weight and self-esteem. Now she’s courting that female audience again, and taking those issues even further in Notorious.
We sit down to talk about Cho’s latest show in her 1920s-era home, where she’s lived less than two months. Workmen are still painting and landscaping, and the first-floor furniture is piled under protective plastic. The second floor, which includes the kitchen, dining room and living room, is nearly finished. The bold colors, metallic trim and Asian- and spiritual-influenced art and décor reflect Cho’s likes and personality.
But it’s not a party house and it’s not in Hollywood, or any place affiliated with the entertainment industry. The comedian, who made a living talking about growing up among San Francisco’s gays and her wild days drinking, doing drugs and doing anything that moved, has bought a home in the conservative suburb of Glendale, just north of Los Angeles.
“I lived in Hollywood for nine years and I’m just kind of done,” she says from the comfort of an oversized, garnet-colored sofa in her living room. “I’m glad to live here. It’s the suburbs, but everything is so accessible and it has a great feeling to it. I’m just really happy.”
Cho speaks thoughtfully about the not-so-happy time that followed All-American Girl, a period in her life that led to a lot of personal growth — and inspired much of the material in Notorious. In our hour-long chat, there are no dramatic outbursts like those that infuse her stage show, no facial contortions or funny impressions or nasty vernacular. Out from under the spotlight, Margaret Cho appears to be more Glendale than Hollywood. At least for now.
She admits to partying too hard in her past. She no longer drinks; instead, she practices yoga and is involved in a Sangha, a “group of friends that gather for spiritual intent.” She will love whomever she happens to love — male or female — although she’s been in a “solid” relationship with a man for about a year. She prefers staying home when she’s not on the road working, but occasionally goes to a club to hear music. She loves Björk and Madonna and the writing of Gloria Steinem.
She is not concerned with getting married, though she would like to be a mom someday. “When I bought the house, that really sort of solved everything,” she says. “I felt like I married myself and I didn’t have to marry anything else after that.”
She also credits her recent connection to her audiences with her newfound sense of purpose and responsibility. It was her painful sitcom experience that caused her to reevaluate the person she was and the one she wanted to be. Network television tried to reinvent her, told her she needed to lose weight and transform her character into someone even she didn’t recognize. After All-American Girl failed, she went into a downward spiral that could have eventually killed her but instead became fodder for her comedy.
She says she started talking about her struggles with alcohol, weight and self-esteem — and it was about that time that her female audience began to grow.
“I was also talking about my experiences with women, in a sexual context,” she says. In Notorious, Cho discusses an encounter with a femme in a sex club, but explains that her preference is women who look like John Goodman. Her point, she says in our chat, is “freedom of sexuality, that we can choose what attracts us without being informed by society what we should be attracted to.
“To me, the lesbian butch is the sexiest thing imaginable,” she continues, “because she is so defiant of culture and so defiant of the world in her sexuality and in her strength and to me, that’s really healing. So when I make a joke about ‘I want a woman who looks like John Goodman,’ the audience is so taken aback, because it’s such an off image of what a [sexy] woman should look like, but to me, that’s extraordinarily sexy.”
Cho believes her new material sends a positive message. When her television show was canceled, it was “such a miserable thing to fail,” she says. “I felt like, ‘What now? What could there possibly be beyond that?’” But as she toured the country working out her material, which was rife with profound opinions about the importance of being who you are and not what society wants, she made a discovery.
“I always kind of felt like, well, this is all so I can maintain my lifestyle. That was the whole point of being a comedian: so I could be this sort of pseudo-celebrity onstage,” she says, laughing.
But her audience, made up mostly of minorities, from gays and lesbians to people of color, showed her the power a performer has.
“I did speaking engagements last weekend, one in Louisville, Ky., and one in Charlotte, N.C. These were mostly young gay teens … these kids are saying things like, ‘I decided not to kill myself because if I died I wouldn’t get to see you again.’ And, ‘I’m at this school in the middle of nowhere where everybody hates gays and I feel so isolated. When I watch you, I just feel like you’re my friend and you’re there and if you say that it’s OK, then it’s OK. If you say I’m OK, then I’m OK.’”
At first, Cho couldn’t imagine having that kind of effect on anyone. Then she thought about the artists she admires and how they’ve helped her. “Then I get it,” she says. Now that she’s “discovered the ability to do that, it makes me want to use it more and more.” That’s why some of the comedy in Notorious C.H.O. has serious undertones.
But don’t expect to hear blatant touchy-feely rants about gay pride. Cho’s material is much more subtle than that. Her message is often buried in comedy bits about drag queens, bottoms and fisting.
Today, Cho can look back on her sitcom and all the pain that followed and say it was a learning experience. From that, she was able to “figure out who I wanted to be as a performer, and figure out how I was going to work this kind of combination of storytelling and politics.
“I’m really happy. All that happened the way it did; now I just feel really free to do what I want.”
What she wants is to continue writing and performing. She’s on the road about 35 weeks a year, and loves to travel. She saw Joan Rivers, a friend, perform in Scotland last year, and envies how the veteran comedian still wows crowds in concert halls.
“I’d love to do these big theaters for the rest of my career, and do it well into my old age,” she says. “I think that would be great, to be this real sassy old broad.”
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