BY KRISTIN PETTIT

ate Clinton wowed the

audience at the Barre

Opera house in the early
1980s. It was straight stand-up —
except that it wasn’t straight at all
— and that was what really rocked
the audience.

I suppose her material
that night was as witty, up-front
and impudent as it remains to this
day, but the lasting impact of that
night on those of us in our late
20s to late 30s was her seemingly
assured daring in throwing over
her high school English teacher
career to come out and play — lit-
erally and figuratively — in the
tight-knit, hot-house world of the
stand-up comedians.

I tried to imagine the life
she had led before she hit the
road in 198]. I concocted a Clark
Kent/Supemian scenario: mild-
mannered Macbeth pusher by
day, and gay gadabout by night,
the kind of hilarious, irreverent
cut-up whose friends were always
saying, “Gee, Kate, you oughta
go into show business ...”

I imagined — and who
could doubt it, hearing her mar-
velous, mobile voice and trying
to keep up with her quicksilver,
articulate command of language —
that she loved the English teacher
part of herself. So maybe it was-

n’t just fear of failing (and per-
haps being crucified into the bar-
gain) that made leaving teaching
a hard choice.

,And she must have won-
dered who would be her audi-
ence. If the classroom sometimes
felt like the confines of a ghetto,
wouldn’t unending gigs in front
of another “subset” — the
“Birkenstock Brigades” as the
cynical sneerers used to say —
begin to wear out pretty quickly
and leave the promise of
Clinton’s intellect and wit
hemmed in, even stunted?

After all, THEN wasn’t
NOW for the out front gay per-
former. Enough said.

In her book Dan '1 Get
Me Started (Ballantine, 1998)
Clinton remarks that Ellen
DeGeneres’s coming out made
some of Clinton’s friends, —
“jaded hohumasexuals” — very
impatient, while the event
brought back her own coming out
(in the late ’70s): “My closet was
huge, had a foyer, a tumstile, a
few locks, dead bolts, a burglar
alarm that needed deactivating
before I could even go for the
door handle. And then there was
a stonn door. My televised com-
ing out would have been a Ken
Burns 92-part series. Talk about
cliflhangers.”

And at the same time,
she chose to kick over the traces

“Oldest Living
omedian”
ows All-

bian C

 

and go, come what may.

There weren’t buckets of
bawdy girl-comics — let alone gay
girl-comics — out there in those
days. And Clinton billed herself _
as a feminist humorist from
which, she says, she got “lots of
interviews ’cause nobody could
believe the two went together.”
So when talk-show guys called
her up for an interview they were
primed to nail her, assuming she
would be what they expected —
“humorless and horrible.” But the
interviews were “a blast.”
Quickly, she attracted serious
media attention and her following
grew.

Early on, she covered
mostly gay issues and current
events. She met Urvashi Vaid,
then the director of the policy
institute of the Gay and Lesbian
Task Force in Washington, D.C.,
and their meeting 14 years ago
prompted Clinton to incorporate
politics into her routines. And
certainly the AIDS crisis in the

Kate Clinton

eééisi herself
as a

‘feminist humorist’

19805 made it all the more imper-
ative for her comedic reach to
encompass all institutions in
America that had a crucial bear-
ing on the quality and dignity of
individuals’ lives — especially
those individuals who could be,
shall we say, shunted aside by all
manner of “suits.”

A quick check on
Clinton’s biographical and career
stats reveal she’s enjoyed a var-
ied, ever-widening experience
and today she wears many hats,
from comic, writer, commentator,
activist, actress (apparently she
was outstanding in The Vagina
Monologues), host and performer.
Just last week I read her column
“Unplugged” in The Progressive
(September, 2002).

Apparently all restraint
on the part of society’s gadflies
andjokesters after 9/ 11 is long
over. If Jay Leno is zinging GWB
with “dumb jokes,” I wasn’t real-
ly surprised to find Kate “I miss
June Jordan” Clinton positively
excoriating the Repubs as well as
“that eyebrowless Dick Gephart”
and all Dems of his ilk (just about
all of them, I guess) in her essay
“Hormoneland Security.” It was a
delight, as always, to follow her
every word and savor the reveal-
ing snapshots of her skewered
targets. To get a flavor of Kate
today, check it out.

Her recent comic disc

which has
remitted,

she says,

in “tots inf
interviews,
’ca:.ase nobody
could beiie-we
the two

went tegethesf’

Read These Lips came out in fair-
ly early 2001. I listened to it a
few days ago, certain I’d love it.
But my first reaction was flat. I
played it again, but still felt a
nervous let-down and wondered
how I was going to write favor-
ably about this woman of
renown, this trailblazer on so
many fronts who even now is
having a documentary of her life
and times go into final stages of
production. And she’s coming to
our neighborhood — SOON!

Maybe it’s because I had
to attend cotillion class (don’t
ask) in the 1950’s, but I feel,
when reviewing the work of a
legitimate artist, one should at
least be positive and appreciative
if not madly enthusiastic.

So. I backed off for a
few days and tried to get a handle
on my lukewarm response to
Read These Lips. Glad I did. I
think I’ve figured it out: other,
admittedly younger, comediennes
have been turning my head these
days with well-produced video or
film.

I missed Margaret Cho’s
comedy film Notorious C.H.0.
when it was around a few days
ago, but I saw I ’m the One That I
Want, courtesy of the local video
rental. Her reckless abandon in
the baring of her life’s most inti-
mate secrets, coupled with her
manic physicality and brilliant