2010: Confessions Of A Confused Comic

Outside the Main Room, The Comedy Store, 2010

It’s a fall night in 2010. The air is now cooler here in Los Angeles. Not by much. But the slight change is palpable.

I feel sick to my stomach and know what I have to do. I look down at my black, hightop, Converse shoes, part of the get-up of your average stand up comic at the time, and I steel myself. I hated having to do it before a show, and I loathed the taste, but I open the glove box and pull out the bottle. I had found a parking spot at the top of a hill off Sunset Blvd., a secret known only to a handful of comics. I sit in the car, looking down at “the Strip” twinkling back at me with such carefully calculated charm. Yes, LA, you have me. I’m yours.

I wondered if the other comics had to do this before a show.

I take a swig. It’s cool going down and I feel it reach my stomach and do its magic.

The Pepto Bismol was working. My nervous stomach was softening. My breathing relaxed.

Walking down the hill I take in the multiple million dollar homes, wondering what the people inside had done to afford living in this neighborhood. Yet I wouldn’t want to live here. At least, I don’t think I would. I close my eyes, imagining I’m back at Mt. Baldy Zen Center. Right about now, the stars in the sky would be bright and welcoming, the tops of the pines swaying in the October breeze, the lights from the meditation zendo, warm and welcoming, beckoning me to sit for one last meditation of the night. I feel a swell of yearning but keep walking to do what I have to do.

This is my meditation: stay focused. Whatever arises, stay focused. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, let them come and go. Stay focused. Something in me pushes to get to the stage, to write material, to keep going. It’s a force that often feels like it’s other than me. So I follow its harrowing and exhilarating call.

I soften the bend in my legs as I walk down the hill, careful not to over-stress my middle-aged knees. Since I have a few minutes before I’m due, I slow my walk. I remind myself why I’m doing this: performing feels like home. Yet sitting in meditation feels like home. I’ve begun to see that everything isn’t fixed, solid, permanent, including me. Yet why can’t I always flow between my spiritual life and my life as a comic? Why do I still feel torn? Like I’m keeping a secret?

As I turn onto the gritty sidewalk of the Sunset Strip, cars honk, a man in the crosswalk yells at no-one, and a young, glossy couple walk into a hotel across the street.

I look up from my Converse flapping on the pavement and see the sign. I breathe in. The Comedy Store. My creative home for the past two years.

Passing through the crowd of people in the outdoor bar, I try to make eye contact with someone, anyone, who might exude friendliness. Male comics lounge against the railing with their buddies, laughing and looking casual as they drag off cigarettes and quickly glance at me, offering nothing.

I long to walk up the familiar steps to the Belly Room, the smaller stage that the owner Mitzi had installed in 1978 to put up female comics. Back then, Whoopi Goldberg, Sandra Bernhard, Roseanne, and Ellen Degeneres had a safe space where they could work out material and avoid trying to be one of the boys. The room had since become a kind of workshopping space with comics across the gender spectrum. And these days, to me, it had the feel of a welcoming womb. You could explore and create and take risks. You could be whatever you were at that moment and it was OK.

I don’t feel OK tonight. My stomach lurches. I focus on my breath and only my breath…one, two, three breaths. I can do this. I feel a pull to walk up those safe steps to The Belly Room, but instead I walk in the main door and into the larger performing space on the first floor, the Original Room, or as the regulars call it, The O.R.

The O.R. is known as the toughest room in the country. Comics say if you can handle the audience of German tourists, drunken frat boys, and the misfits of Sunset Blvd. who wander in, you’re a damn good comic.

Comedy is seen as a battle, a war, a marathon where those who’ve persevered the hardest and longest get some kind of reward. At least this is what I’d been told. But it felt exhausting to me. After all, I had already been at battle with myself most of my life. But at this point, I’m not in the business of questioning the status quo.

I head toward an empty table in the back where I hope to disappear for awhile. I wonder if there’s another woman on tonight. I hope there is. Often I’m one of about two females on a lineup of what seems to be a thousand white dudes. And I’m usually the only middle-aged woman with just a few years of comedy under her belt.

“Developing” comics like me were nearly half my age. It made me uneasy. What am I doing here?

My mind starts the familiar chatter.

“You’re in over your head.”

“You’re too old for this.”

“Go back to acting. Play a character instead of being yourself on stage.”

I hear the thoughts, and even though I believe them, I let them be. I know what those thoughts do, they stop me in my tracks. And I had been stopping my whole life. But not tonight. Please let me make it through one more night.

I remind myself that the Buddha was tempted by his own mind - or Mara - in the famous story of the night of his enlightenment. But the Buddha was determined to awaken, and probably was onto his mind by then, and didn’t believe all of its shenanigans, and so he sat and sat under the Bodhi tree. Mara showed up. And the Buddha — who wasn’t the Buddha by then, he was merely a guy named Siddhartha who wanted to know the truth of his existence, and why he and so many people suffered — remained steadfast.

Mara told him:

“You’ll never do this.”

“Who do you think you are trying to wake up? You think you’re so special, buddy?”

“You know what? You’ve worked hard. Why don’t you just rest for awhile and give up all this seeking? It’s not getting you anywhere, bro.”

Maybe Mara didn’t use the word “bro”. But who knows how Siddhartha’s own mind talked to him? And how much it tried to keep him small, safe, asleep? I wanted to know what was underneath the bullshit of my own wild mind. I wasn’t so interested in all that enlightenment business, but I knew I wanted be fully expressed, to find peace, to feel good in my own skin. I wanted a kind of freedom.

So I take another deep breath, letting my belly get big and full, but this time I hold it for a moment and then slowly, slowly, slowly exhale to calm my nervous system. I felt it working, like what must be a shot of tequila for the other comedians.

I had a rule for myself: never get on stage after I’ve had a drink. This way, I’d learn how to handle my nerves in a real way, and somehow this felt important to me. I watched the other comics get sloppy when they stepped on stage after having a drink or three, and to me, this felt disrespectful. Not just to the audience, but to the craft; to this miracle of controlling a crowd of people through laughter that I was beginning to learn about.

“Hey Sarah,” Tommy the manager nods at me.

“Oh hi—-“ I say but he whizzes past.

He’s why I’m here. I’ve been recommended to him. The word around the club was that I was a strong comic and Tommy hoped to make me stronger by putting me through the paces, a sort of hazing that apparently happens in order to eventually meet Mitzi, the owner, and become a paid regular.

I started doing stand up at an age when most comedians start thinking about quitting stand up. I came to L.A. to be an actor, not hang out in bars writing jokes. Yet here I was, 41 years old, hardly bright eyed and bushy tailed, and chasing something that seemed like a young person’s game, with the late nights, endless socializing, and enormous amounts of energy needed to keep going. It was a strange art form with secrets I hadn’t yet unlocked.

My spiritual practice and my comedy went hand in hand: several years ago, the summer I began practicing Buddhism, I was hit with an inner, volcanic push to get up on stage, grab a mic, and work to create strategic laughter in groups of total strangers. When I was off stage, I felt inexplicably drawn to meditate for hours and contemplate the nature of the Universe after a lifetime of being an atheist.

My life had gotten weird.

Tommy had been putting me up in the O.R. every Monday night, sometimes at 1AM, other times at midnight, often during the worst spots on the show. Maybe when someone just spilled their drink and the waitress was cleaning it up, causing everyone to stare. Or maybe a comic had “lost the room” as they say, and the crowd is bored. Or maybe right after a comic was mercilessly heckled and the room was thick with tension.

“You’re on next”, he’d say and point at me as he quickly walked by, headed to do something seemingly important. I would have ten minutes on stage to do my thing. I didn’t really believe in God, but I would pray to remember my jokes and to maintain my cool that was starting to fray at the edges.

After I would perform each week, he’d regale me with comedy war stories and his notes, which would be encouraging for the most part, but peppered with vague comments such as, “You’re likable. Stick with that”. Or “You did something with your mouth.”

“Oh. Um. Smile?”

“Maybe”, he’d say mysteriously and then tell me a story about Whitney Cummings, who was starting to get noticed more, and who he felt was becoming a star by getting on stage at The Store.

I didn’t know if I wanted to be a star. I just wanted to get better.

He’d grill me. “You looked nervous talking to that guy in the audience.”

“Uh, yeah...he yelled at me and then started sliding out of his chair onto the floor.”

“He was drunk. You’re going to have to learn how to handle people like that. Can you handle people like that?”

I thought of my dad, who drank heavily until I was about four years old. I was so young, but all I knew was that every night he’d come home from being gone all day, grab a glass, and fill it with a liquid that changed his face. He got sloppy and relaxed and numb. It contained his rage, but often he’d yell so loud I’d hide under the bed.

I had heard from my other siblings he had beaten them with belts, but with me, I was lucky. I could see in their jealous eyes that I was getting away with only spankings. One night, after a particularly wretched spanking that left welts on my bare butt, he began to weep as he listened to my helpless wails. I watched him crumple. I could feel something had broken in him.

Not long after, he was done with drinking, and he shut down, escaping into a world of his own. He exuded a sweet nature, but he was off in his mind or his job or in the lights of the television; distant, removed. He remained at more than an arm’s length, not because of intoxication now, but perhaps from his own despair at not being able to relate in the midst of life’s rawness.

Even after he stopped drinking, I had to work to get his attention for more than a few minutes at a time. “Sweetie, can you move? I’m watching the TV”, he’d tell me with a handful of cashews in his mouth. His addiction had switched from nightcaps to nuts and the news.

“But Daddy, wait...” and I’d make a goofy face, imitating the family dog, or teasing my mom by doing an Edith Bunker impersonation that would make my dad roar with laughter.

At The Comedy Store I was still on duty, trying to get a group of people to look at me, to like what they saw, and to listen. I felt like I was running out of time. I had to get good at it. There was something I was meant to figure out about all of this, but I didn’t know what.

Tommy would tell me about the other comics, about how they’d found their home at The Comedy Store. “This is what you do to be a great comic, Sarah, You keep coming back. The Comedy Store is family.” The word “family” made me recoil, but I’d nod and smile.

“And you know,” he’d continue, “comics don’t even hit their stride until they’ve been at it for fifteen years. You’ve got to keep grinding, keep going.”

I was struck with a vision of me in my mid-fifties, finally beginning to figure out this comedy thing. I shuddered.

Between the Buddhism and the comedy, my life seemed upside down these days. What was I thinking, getting into this at my age? Who am I?

As I enter the O.R. tonight, I don’t feel like a comic. Am I really one of them? The label never fit, especially lately. With all the practice and retreats and the talks on Buddhism, something is sinking in and who I am seems to be more and more…transparent. Light. Ever changing.

Yet I keep coming back. So…tonight I’m a comic. This is my practice. Focus. Be present.

I gather myself and walk up to him with all the professionalism and perkiness of a chorus member of a musical. “Hey Tommy! When do you think I’ll be getting up tonight?”

Tommy grunts and walks past. I know the drill. It’s time to wait.

I slink into my seat and open my notebook as Chris Rock, dropping in unexpectedly, steps on stage to try out new material. The crowd lights up and leans in. I close my eyes and begin to meditate.