By JEFF YANG| Special to SF Gate
“Cho’s goal isn’t in delivering a party line, but in lining up a party that delivers — and “The Sensuous Woman” does”
Comedian, blogger, activist, entrepreneur — exotic dancer? Jeff Yang catches up with renaissance girl Margaret Cho as she trades in standup for set of pasties and a cavalcade of scantily-clad studs and vixens in her new alt-burlesque traveling show, “The Sensuous Woman”
The scene: The Zipper Factory, a Manhattan midtown-west cabaret lounge whose decor is a psychedelic blend of Weimar Republic languor and zesty queerotica. It’s late, well past the do-you-know-where-your-children-are hour, and the butts in the theater’s seats are mostly male, tanned, waxed, and gymmed to perfection. Pulling back the tatty velvet curtain, Margaret Cho steps onto the stage, her face a Cheshire mask, a sly smile tweaking her lips. Flexing the mike like she’s wringing a neck, she shouts out, “It’s Margaret, bitch!”
And all us bitches cheer, like the bitches we are.
Tonight’s show, “The Sensuous Woman,” isn’t like any Margaret’s put on before. Billed as an “adult variety show,” it features Cho and some of her personal-favorite performers, an oddball mashup of comics and dancers and bawdy wenches, no holds barred, but plenty bared.
“I got into burlesque a few years ago, when I saw a show at a place called the Velvet Hammer in L.A.,” explains Cho. “I was so moved by all the performers, all the women in the show — because they were so different, from very standard body types to women who were larger or smaller or older, and yet they were all feeling beautiful and sexy, and they were letting it out for the world to see. It was a world I was just in love with, and that I wanted to be a part of.”
Margaret’s obsession with exotic dancing — the kind that features tempting and teasing and just enough T&A to make it count — led her to conceive of an eclectic evening of neo-vaudeville entertainment that offers a side of Cho we’ve never seen before … in part because it reveals more of her than we’ve ever seen before. “I want to warn you that you’re going to see a lot of me in this show,” she says. “A lot of different parts of me.”
Oh yeah, that’s a promise — a promise snapped off with the bite of a threat. Because even if Cho is a newbie in the art of the peel, in a figurative sense, she’s been stripping for the past 13 years. Shedding layers of expectation and stereotype. Kicking off convention and correctness. Wriggling out of expectations, and flinging them in the faces of her critics with a wry wink and a savage grin.
You see, 13 years ago, she famously saw her big Hollywood break, the prime time sitcom “All-American Girl,” crash and burn in the face of critical disdain and commercial dismissal. The show’s cancellation prompted Cho to suffer a spectacular meltdown; she subsequently spent years battling drug addiction, depression, self-hate and self-recrimination.
She survived, and made her triumphant comeback with a critically acclaimed show about the whole experience, “I’m the One That I Want.” It was a show that offered audiences full-frontal psychological exposure — Cho’s personal disasters laid out naked to the world. But Cho acknowledges that that was just the beginning; there was plenty more where that came from.
“I came out of the whole ‘Girl’ experience so totally uncomfortable in my own skin,” she says. The experience of the show was nightmarish — kind of racist (watching ratings head south, ABC execs desperately tried to adjust the show’s hue to accommodate the expectations of white viewers — More Oriental! No wait, too Oriental, go back!) and kind of sexist (ABC execs prodded Cho to drop 30 pounds to make her “more appealing” to male viewers, inciting an eating disorder that nearly ended in catastrophic kidney failure). “That fear of being fat — that was already this constant drone in my life, something that I’ve felt constantly since I can remember. It was the bane of my existence. And the show demanded a physical ideal that was impossible for me, this Asian woman physical ideal, which is much smaller than anything I could actually achieve. It sent me over the edge. It was crippling — and you probably see 99.9 percent of women out there feeling the same way; ordinary women, not just anorexics or bulimics, facing this low-grade suffering every moment of every day.”
Cho describes the burden of feeling fat in Hawthornesque terms, as being like a a scarlet letter F emblazoned on women’s chests. “You wear this emotion of constantly feeling that there’s something wrong with you,” she says. “You wear this shame of not fitting the billboard ideal.”
If “I’m the One That I Want” allowed Cho to publicly acknowledge her distorted self-image, the years since have been about getting beyond it — finding a way to become fully accepting of her body and its beauty, to strip off and discard her shame.
She’s done it through belly dancing — a passion that she embraced in 2004, when she discovered that it offered her a way to express herself physically without fear of being fleshy. As she wrote in her blog, in belly dancing, “what is considered excess by mainstream Hollywood standards, is beautiful. In fact, it’s better to have some weight on you, if you want to shimmy properly … The stomach for me had always been a shameful thing, the dead giveaway that I was never going to be the ethereal and frail love object, the movie star’s girlfriend, the chic and popular model, but merely a fat and unchangeable human being. Belly dancers are never too old, too fat, too ugly, too anything that we are too much of in the ‘real’ world.”
She’s done it through business ventures — launching a saucy clothing line for women of all sizes called High Class Cho, and accepting an invitation from Bay Area sex-toy superstore Good Vibrations to join its board of directors. (“I’ve given them enough money,” she laughs. “I figured I might as well take some of it back!”)
She’s done it through body art — she began getting major tattoo work in 2006, at the hands of San Francisco’s modern master Ed Hardy, and now has the makings of an epic tapestry around her shoulders and upper arms, and across her back and stomach. As she told tattoo blog Needled, her ink symbolized that “I own myself, and I can modify and create myself better and more perfect … and being a survivor of childhood physical and sexual abuse, as well as a myriad of eating disorders, this was an entirely revolutionary concept.”
And now, she’s doing it through the rawest form of revelation of all — getting down, dirty, and disrobed. “To me, this whole thing is so far removed from sex — it’s about freedom, it’s about self-esteem, it’s about making visible what was invisible before,” she says. “In the show, I have a little person, Selene Luna, the “Pocket Venus”; I have someone who’s very voluptuous, Miss Dirty Martini. And there’s me, of course. I want to show the full range of size that women can be, and to show people who are so beautiful, but are never seen in a sexual context at all.”
But if the show sounds like nothing but a series of scantily-clad object lessons, that’s completely off the mark. Cho’s goal isn’t in delivering a party line, but in lining up a party that delivers — and “The Sensuous Woman” does, with raunchy humor from transgender standup Ian Harvie, Gay Mafia Comedy Troupe member Kurt Hall (channeling gay rapper LISP), and delirious dyke Diana Yanez, who pairs with Cho in a dozens-duet called “My Puss” — throwing down vaginal volleys like “My puss is so fantastic, your puss it smells like burnt plastic” and “My puss so fine, I flaunt it. Your puss so old, it’s haunted.” It’s catchy, it’s got a beat and you can dance to it.
But the star attraction is still Cho herself — who takes on topics ranging from Britney Spears (“Britney did not look fat at the VMAs. She looked beautiful. If that’s fat, there’s really something wrong with America. She looked high, oh yes. But not fat”) to Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, portrayed as a closet queen so desperate that he forages for penis in every nook and cranny, panhandles for leftover penis, and salvages abandoned penis so it doesn’t go to waste.
The crowd, gay, straight, and omni, adores her. And that’s just with her clothes on. True to her word, Cho gives up the pink for reals — taking it down to feathery highlights and large ostrich fans in one number; swinging the ol’ ta-ta tassels in another (and doing a credible job of the complex “counter-rotation” maneuver); and, well, you’d have to see it to get it, but let’s say that in the show’s goofiest bump ‘n’ grind moment, we see Margaret Cho’d.
But even that eye-popping prop reveal doesn’t come off as a shock so much as an act of solidarity with her big gay audience. In fact, as bawdy and bad-behaving as the cast gets, the whole show feels more like a crazy family reunion than a performance.
“I’m 38, and I’ve already been on the road for so many years,” says Cho. “This was an opportunity to travel with people I’ve worked with and enjoyed spending time with — it’s not as glamorous or surreal when we’re offstage as you might think. Our cast is disciplined; they do their work and they go to bed really early. There’s so nothing all that infamous about anything we’re doing. I’m kind of over scandals, actually … I think once you’ve accepted yourself for who you are, you don’t need that just to keep things interesting.”
She thinks about it. “Well, maybe a bit. I should work harder on my scandal quotient. I’m going to go find a misunderstanding and fan it into a scandal. Why not? I’m not straight, I’m not white, I’m not a guy. I’m not model-thin. I’m not that young anymore. And that sets me free. If I’m never going to belong to any clubs, I can break whatever rules I want to break.”
And why not?
She’s Margaret, bitch.
More Pop
Some disclosure here: Back in 1994, when I was a dewy-eyed young journalist writing for the granddaddy of alternaweeklies, New York’s Village Voice, I finally got my first big break: I was tapped as the paper’s junior TV critic, assigned the stuff that fell a few degrees shy of the cultural hot zone — PBS docs. Cable series (this being before cable was the best TV on TV). Anything featuring Ted McGinley. Faced with this surfeit of third-tier spew, I found myself relying regularly on the cultural critic’s two little friends, sarcasm and hyperbole. Soon shows that were all-too-easy targets were falling before my popgun of wit (or half-wit) on a weekly basis,
And then came my second big break, or so my editor assured me. A new show, “All-American Girl,” had just been announced for the ABC fall season. It featured an all-Asian American cast, and it was scheduled to air in the choice slot after ratings powerhouse “Home Improvement.” The lead critic suggested that I should review it, because, you know, the Asian thing. Also, he’d heard it sucked, and I was getting really good at reviewing shows that suck. This was prime-time, it was a TV Guide-cover kind of program, and it was my chance to show off my critical chops on a series with actual viewers.
The problem was, I already knew about the show: Margaret Cho had announced it was happening as a big “Guess what?” at a charity event that I’d helped organize. And so, yeah, I knew Margaret, too. Even when you’re a dewy-eyed young thing, the Asian American community is so small and, uh, communal that it’s impossible for people not to know other people. And because I knew her, I knew she was talented, drop-dead hilarious, with an edgy presence and effortless audience rapport that many microphone jocks would have sold kidneys to own. I knew this was her big break. And I knew that her standup material and comic persona would fit in with a mainstream family sitcom like, I don’t know, veal chops at a vegan buffet. Ergo: Suck.
So I told my editor I was going to pass on the review. I’m too close to the material. I won’t be objective. And he told me, essentially, that I had to decide whether I want to be a critic or a kiss-ass. And dewy-eyed and young as I was, I took that challenge to my integrity to heart and wrote a sarcastic, hyperbolic review that slammed the show for what it was — a heartbreakingly unfunny mess of cliches, bad writing, and bad acting by otherwise great actors that bore as much resemblance to Margaret’s take-no-prisoners standup as vegan chops to veal. Ergo: Suck.
The day the review ran, Margaret called me, asking me to fax it to her in Los Angeles. I did, with trepidation. Minutes after it went through the machine, she rang me again — to tear me a new one, telling me that I was all but responsible for staking the show through its heart and betraying the Asian American community’s best chance at prime-time success. I wasn’t the only reviewer who’d panned the show, but there was the Asian thing, and ABC execs would point to that as evidence that no one liked it — not even its intended core audience. It was an awkward moment. A few months later, despite repeated retoolings, “All-American Girl” was given the McGinley, consigned to the dustheap of television history. And Margaret spun into a personal decline. I quit TV criticism shortly thereafter, for reasons not wholly unrelated to my feelings about the entire series of events.
There’s a segment in “I’m the One That I Want” in which she talks about her rage at a certain journalist, a fellow Asian American, whom she considered a friend and whose negative review of “Girl” was a devastating blow. I don’t know if the reference pointed at me (or at some composite that included me); I do know that years after “Girl,” Margaret went out of her way to call me, which she explained as being part of “making peace” with her past. It was a generous gesture, and deeply moving; it’s good to see her in a place where she’s able and willing to do whatever the hell she wants — not what critics or execs or any other marginally creepy outside authority expects or demands.
It’s a place that few other Asian American creators have attained — well, just one other, really. That other is Ang Lee, whom I last spoke with when he released his Academy Award-winning musing on star-crossed Western romance, “Brokeback Mountain.” Though the two are about as different as you can imagine — Margaret’s creativity is all ego sent screaming on a rocket-plume of id, while Ang’s is all superego and libido having a tense, wordless morning-after breakfast — both have the kind of creative blank check that only a built-in audience can provide. Cho could do her taxes onstage and still garner a packed house of fanbois and grrrls just happy to hang with her (and she’d find a way to make it funny); Lee has achieved cross-genre, meta-Hollywood filmmaking credibility, which lets him pick and choose projects by whim.
That’s why the uneven critical response to his latest work, “Lust, Caution,” will do nothing to stop Lee’s artistic and commercial juggernaut. On the one hand, it’s gotten bluntly dismissive reviews from the likes of Salon.com and the Chicago Tribune. On the other, it won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival, the first of what are probably numerous awards the movie will garner. It’s too easy to suggest that reviewers who don’t like “Lust” — a kind of reverse-Baked Alaska of a movie, with a gorgeous, chilly surface and a molten-hot center — aren’t “getting it.” Lee’s films have never played well as high-concept vehicles, though that’s how some have been unfortunately described; “Brokeback” wasn’t a “gay cowboy movie” any more than “Hulk” was a comic book movie.
Ultimately, it’s not whether you get an Ang Lee movie, it’s what you get out of it — and “Lust, Caution” is a film that’s better in aftertaste than in viewing. Seeing how it ends and reflecting on why, exploring the layered implications of the film’s final scenes for everything that has gone before; these bring nuance and richness to what at first glance may seem gorgeous but flat. It helps to remember that no Ang Lee work is ever pretty vacant. See it with someone you like arguing with, especially if there’s makeup sex involved.
Jeff Yang forecasts new Asian and Asian American consumer trends for the market-research company Iconoculture (www.iconoculture.com). He is the author of “Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China” (Atria Books) and co-author of “I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” (Ballantine) and “Eastern Standard Time” (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). He lives in New York City. Go to www.ouatic.com/mojomail/mojo.pl to join Jeff Yang’s biweekly mailing list offering updates on this column and alerts about other breaking Asian and Asian American pop-culture news.