If you’ve seen her strut onto a stage lambasting loud, outrageous, biting comedy clad in black leather bomber jacket and skin tight pants, then you know what I’m talking about. LA WEEKLY called her humor “incisive, smart, adult.” That’s Margaret Cho all right. But, she’s more than the veter-an of club, sitcom and motion picture sound stages. She’s clearly a woman who’s wrestled with her own personal demons. Drugs, alcohol, self-esteem and family matters – not necessarily in that order. She’s faced the fires of hell in comedy clubs and in Hollywood and seems finally, at thirty, to be at home with herself.

Margaret Cho is her own melting pot.

Margaret was born and raised in San Francisco, “It was different than any other place on Earth,” she says. “I grew up and went to grammar school on Haight Street during the 70’s. There were old hippies, ex-druggies, burnouts from the 60’s, drag queens and Chinese people. To say it was a melting pot – that’s the least of it. It was a really confusing, enlightening, wonderful time.”

By the time she was 10, she’d changed her name. Her parents named her Moran (pronounced moo-RAN) after a Korean poem about a peony flower will bloom under any circumstances. But, she chose Margaret as her American name. At 10, Margaret Cho was about the business of defining herself. And it turns out, in this life, Moran/Margaret Cho does seem to bloom despite the circumstances.

Margaret says she grew up in in “a pretty bleak household.” By her own admission, she says her parents worked and weren’t “available” to their children. She wasn’t particularly well liked or good in school, and fell in with “a very experimental crowd. “We did a lot of drugs and a lot of drinking.” She got kicked out of a school for accelerated kids and booted over to a performing arts high school where she was able to study theatre and started doing comedy at the age of 16.

How did her parents feel about that? Margaret steels briefly, then says simply, “my parents weren’t very present in my life.” Drugs, performances her parents never attended in high school, and the fast track with her new found “artsy” family forced her to “grow up pretty fast,” she says. By eighteen she was making a living as a stand up comic. She says she took a few college classes “here and there,” but was never involved in campus life.

Comedy clubs were her classroom – and she was working on her Ph.D. as a party girl. “You know it’s ironic,” she says, “that someone who ran away from school ended up spending so much time on college campuses.” Margaret Cho, for those of you who don’t know, was a reigning campus comedy queen in the 1980’s before she left the circuit for the bright lights and big hassles of Hollywood.

“I’ve performed at so many universities. I’ve probably put in enough time to have earned some sort of degree, I’m sure.” The pressures of the road and the grueling tour schedule wore her down. She recalls renting a car and driving from state to state to take the stage on college campuses. She kept touring, playing clubs and colleges, and spent lonely days where her only outlet was the stage. “Even though some of it was really great,” she says talking about the success of showcases and the tours that followed, “it was a kind of trial by fire for me. And it was very lonely.”

“I don’t regret that,” she says simply, “I think that everyone has their own particular journey.” Her own journey, rocky as it was, brought her to this current place of sobriety and sobering insight.

“Now, I’m sober,” she says, “My life is really useful, and my work reflects that. But, the way that I came up was very hard.”

She spent most of her early twenties on the road. All the while Margaret Cho brought her own brand of illumination to racism and the ways it rears its head. “As you know,” she quips, “I’m Korean. But I don’t have a store or anything... (laughter)... Well, not anymore.” Or, “Don’t I give the illusion of being Asian when I squint my eyes?” Audiences couldn’t get enough of her, but Margaret was ready to head back to L.A.

“You know, I did Star Search International. I couldn’t do Star Search, I had to do Star Search International,” she says with a still bitter taste of her exposure to a television crowd who wanted her to be less, uh, Margaret. “Uh, can you be more Chinese?” Star Search execs asked the Korean American talent with the valley girl delivery. And that was the beginning of “powers that be” desperately seeking to dilute Cho.

Audiences loved the Margaret Cho who clamored on stage with sardonic wit to bare her soul. Arsenio Hall introduced her to late night audiences, Bob Hope put her on a prime time special, and seemingly overnight, Margaret Cho became a national celebrity.

The real mantle of martyrdom was thrust upon her in her mid twenties with her ground-breaking, controversial, short-lived ABC sitcom, All American Girl. The first show of it’s kind, pressure was on Cho to carry the Asian Community into the mainstream. From the beginning it seems, Margaret Cho was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. She was vilified by the Asian community and suffered ridicule from the very executives who’d hired her to bring the show the life.

You see, the big boys thought the real Margaret Cho was a bit much. Her manager, Karen Taussig, says some of the many “powerful” people Margaret dealt with com-plained, “Margaret doesn’t make men feel good about themselves” and “the Asian thing puts people off.” They also complained about her weight, and Margaret started popping pills to lose pounds.

She even put part of her insulting experience in a rou-tine: “When I first started working on the show, I went to the studio and we had this meeting all day and it went really well and that night I got a phone call from one of the executives saying, ‘Margaret, it was really great to see you today and I’m really excited about the project but we just had a meeting and we thought it would be a really good idea if you lost 10 pounds before we started shooting.’ The fact that they said that is fine, but just the IDEA that these people had a MEETING to discuss my big fat behind .... You know, unrolled a picture of me,” (and she mimes unrolling a photo indicating trouble spots with a pointer), “here are the problem areas we need to target.”

Margaret says regarding the demise of All American Girl, “There were just so many people involved in that show, and so much importance put on the fact that it was an ethnic show. It’s hard to pin down what ‘ethnic’ is without appearing to be racist. And then, for fear of being too ‘ethnic’, it got so watered down for television that by the end, it was completely lacking in the essence of what I am and what I do. I learned a lot, though. It was a good experience as far as finding myself, knowing who I was and what direction I wanted to take with my com-edy.”

Now she says simply, “My biggest mis-take with the TV show was that I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust that I could have a TV show. I grew up believing that there would never be Asians on televi-sion because I never saw that. 1 actually thought that I was just hired and would make some money.”

When she tried to speak up about prob-lems she had with the show, executives immediately addressed her weight and sent her packing for more prescription diet drugs that wreaked havoc emotion-ally and physically.

“It’s really appalling,” she says in retro-spect, “I was brought in because of my comedic ability, not because of the way I look. Not that there’s anything wrong with the way I look because I look fine. But, I was sought after because of what I stood for – not because I was this Baywatch babe.” The bottom line, she says now, is that she wasn’t willing to accept her own power. “You know, I never really believed in myself. I gave that power away. I wasn’t there for myself. I let my insecurities rule me,” she says in a voice that’s clear and strong and right on target.

Turns out Margaret had her own areas to target, and those didn’t exactly involve stomach crunches and lunges. She had some leaps to make in other areas of her life. She says now she’s had to be willing to accept herself and be willing to claim her own immense per-sonal power. “That’s taken a long time to accept that power and to understand it and to really love it. It really intimi-dated me for so long. I spent so many years listening to others tell me what I should be because I had no sense of self. I relied on other people to tell me who I was because I had no idea. If I can impart anything, it’s that you have to know who you are and love who you are to get anywhere in this world. People will tell you what they want you to be, but that only serves their agenda, not yours. I just didn’t have the self-knowledge and self-love to stand up and say, ‘look, you are diverting from the original plan.’ I didn’t say any of those things. I just decided to lose 30 pounds in two weeks and start urinating blood. That’s what happened to me. I bent to their rules and my own insecurities.”

“My long term love affair with drugs and alcohol really came into play after the show was canceled,” Margaret says. She remembers some of that time as a haze of drunken, drug induced sets when she’d hold onto the mic stand to “keep the room from spinning.”

“That was my life for years. I was still traveling and performing, but also main-taining this terribly destructive disease. I’m so lucky,” Margaret says. “I’ve learned from all of this, and I can try to share it with others – what not to do, how not to live your life. Life is really valuable and beautiful. All of this has really enriched my life because I can share with others and hopefully make it easier.”

“I feel really good about myself and comfortable in my own skin,” she says almost with a sigh of relief. “I feel really lucky to be alive. I could’ve died so many times.”

Karen Taussig, Margaret’s manager, says comedy remained her lifeline during those dark night of soul days. “Margaret is a really great stand up comedian,” Karen says with absolute conviction. “Margaret knows so much. She’s already had the sitcom, she’s had the brush with fame, and she knows you can’t rely on anyone but yourself. Now, she’s clean, sober and more confident than ever. And I really believe her audiences helped keep her alive.”

“They really did,” Margaret admits. “You see, I was at a place where I had no love, but I could go out on stage and find love somewhere. There was still hope there even when I’d forgotten to see it.”

Margaret says herself, “Comedy is my way of coping. It was my way of coping with my parents not being there for me when I was growing up. It was my way of coping with kids not liking me. It was my way of coping when I got kicked out of school. I developed this ability because I had to deal with a lot of pain.”

“I really lived at a bottom for many years. I just survived there. So many things led me to this sort of epiphany... It was just a moment of clarity. I think I just realized that I had lived every day numbing myself out. I couldn’t live that way anymore.” Through it all, she’d maintained the facade that “everything was OK. But, it was really just barely liv-ing. Everything was falling apart. Now, I’m just really grateful to be alive. I’m just grateful that I survived.”

“I hope that I’m here to show people how important it is to love yourself or nobody else will. That’s a horrible truth to see. But everything changes if YOU can love yourself, trust yourself, know yourself. It’s amazing how few people love themselves. It’s tragic that we’re taught not to love ourselves or trust ourselves. In fact, in our culture we’re taught to have such incredible self-loathing and self-hatred that it’s shocking. I don’t know,”  she says as her voice trails off. “I just hope that I can be there to help people learn that les-son. I was given so many chances, but I threw them away. I didn’t like myself, and I didn’t even realize it because self-loathing was where I lived.”

Now, she says, “It’s really an incredible relief. It’s been such a journey; and to survive is the ultimate gift.”

Margaret sells out wherever she goes. She’s been a guest on pretty much all the talk shows: Leno, Letterman, Rosie, Regis... and show like Politically Incorrect and The Crier Report, where intelli-gence, wit, and political savvy are required. She’s appeared in about a dozen films, including Face/Off with Nicholas Cage. Three films have yet to be released: Pink As The Day She Was Born, Fakin’ D’ Funk, and Can’t Stop Dancing. She’s had dinner at The White House with the President of Korea and has been invited for dinner conversation with a select group of students at Columbia University (previ-ous guests include: Jesse Jackson, Stephen Sondheim, Nora Ephron and Mary Tyler Moore). Publications such as The New York Times, MODE, Newsweek, and Worth Magazine have sought Margaret’s humorous quotes on a variety of subjects ranging from The Crisis in Russia, to Wall Street to Clinton/Lewinsky.

Margaret Cho’s in full bloom.

She’s back on stage working on a new show of sketch comedy/character studies at a theatre in L.A. with fellow come-dian Karen Kilgariff. She’s making the transition from comedy clubs to the-aters. She’s speaking on college cam-puses, performing, and in her spare time works with juvenile halls talking to kids with drug/alcohol addictions. Talking about her experience is Margaret’s way of giving back. “I want to help the way others helped me,” she says. “I’m a liv-ing example of what not to do.”

Like the flower, she survived. And she’s bringing laughter and beauty to a lot of lives.

“When I’m performing now it’s just such a joyful experience,” Margaret says
revving up to talk about where she is and where she’s headed. “I want to play Carnegie Hall. I want to play huge ven-ues and bring a level of respectability to what’s still pretty much a rogue’s profes-sion. I want to take what I do and kick it up. That’s what I’m working towards as I move from clubs to theaters.”

Margaret Cho has found her own reward. And odds are you’ll find her in those huge venues with hordes of fans of every persuasion at her feet. She’s turned the spotlight on herself and done some soul searching, gut wrenching, tending of her own garden to get clean and sober and sure of herself.

Margaret Cho has moved to a whole other level, “It’s the ultimate gift, and I hope to be able to share that.”