Sandra Grace, August 8, 2001
 

For the past few weeks, premiere comic/ actress Margaret Cho has been treating Provincetown to her creative process. About to embark on a national tour to debut her hilarious new show “The Notorious C.H.O,” Cho has been shaping material before small, enthusiastic audiences at the U.U. Meeting House. The topics: a visit to a S/M sex club, gay politics and bisexuality. If the previews are any indication, she has another hit ready to go. She’ll perform the final product this Saturday and Sunday at Town Hall Theater, Provincetown’s largest performance venue, before taking the show to London and then back to the states. Both accessible and innovative, Cho has also appeared regularly at Ryan Landry’s “Showgirls” at the Crown & Anchor, often acting as a co-host. This week, in the guise of Yoko Ono, she provided thorough commentary on the professional and amateur drag acts for the standing room only performance. Her last show, “I’m the One That I Want,” put her back on the map, effectively establishing her as the queen of all media. The stage show was developed into a book, a CD, a book-on-tape, and a film, which successfully played at art houses earlier this year. The film will premiere on the Sundance Channel this fall and will arrive on video and DVD in October. The show was revolutionary. Cho mined her personal life for humor, including her substance abuse, eating disorder and disappointment over the cancellation of her ABC sitcom “All American Girl.” “I was on tour for a year with it, and it changed my perspective a lot because the show is very positive, and it has a lot of messages about self-love and self-worth and self-reliance, which is hard to find among women in America. So the show is also very empowering and therapeutic for me. How it affected other people was very important, too,” says Cho. Now sober, Cho’s career is on the upswing, earning the kind of accolades that were absent during her sitcom days. She’s happy to be away from the Hollywood machine. “I was really in a bad place anyway [during “All American Girl”]. And for so long I had made the show such a big priority in my life. I had made the show more important than anything else. I got all of my self-worth and self-esteem from being the star of the show. That’s where I put all of my image for myself. Not just for my career, but for myself as well. That was the problem. I think that’s a common mistake that people make in life. We tend to make our job who we are. And that’s not really the case. We should just be happy with our lives because of who we are, not what we do. But for some reason, the world would have us thinking it’s the other way around. And that’s a very painful way to live. Hollywood has a very narrow view of what women are supposed to look like, and I never fit into that role. So that was really a problem, too. I just didn’t look like anyone else in Hollywood, and no matter how much weight I lost or what I did to myself, I would never fit into that Hollywood mold. Basically, I’m not white! I had this weird, internalized inferiority complex because I grew up without any Asian role models on television. So I had no idea what I was supposed to look like. To be the first was really a scary thing. I wasn’t able to really see that because I was so tied up with the weight loss, trying to stay on top, being in league with the other actresses, and trying to fit in. I spent more time doing that than looking back at what I had accomplished.” On the subject of sexuality, Cho doesn’t want to be easily defined, preferring a more fluid approach to sexuality. “I feel like I have satisfying relationships with both women and men. It’s not really important to me what gender they are. It’s also not really important to me to label my own sexuality, because I don’t even know what it is. I wouldn’t say it’s anything specific. It’s all-inclusive. I guess you could say that when it comes to my sexual preference, I’m an all-inclusive resort.”  Material from Associated Press contributed to this report.