Tonight she’s the one that the audience wants as well. Eighteen hundred people are here to catch Cho’s rants and raves about her love life, her Korean-American family, and her professional traumas-particularly those related to starring in her own sitcom, All-American Girl, when she was just 24. She’s an amazing combination of feminine energy, straight-from-the gut honesty, and bodacious curves.

The guy sitting next to me adores Cho because he thinks she’s bawdy and wise, like an early Bette Midler. And it is true that the two performers share a penchant for trash talking. The woman behind me says that she connects with Cho over their shared Korean backgrounds. Cho does a hilarious riff on the lack of Asian role models on TV:“Kung Fu” should have been titled “That Guy’s Not Chinese.” And another part of the audience laughs knowingly when she talks about hanging out with gay men: “When I was a little girl, I always wished that I’d be constantly surrounded by gorgeous guys. And I am. I guess I should have been more specific.”

But it's when she talks about her struggle to fit into television's definition of attractive that the entire audience responds. There is a moment in the show when she yells out: “Losing ten pounds for me is a full-time job. SO I’M HANDING IN MY NOTICE AND I’M WALKING OUT THE DOOR.”  Well, the crowd goes wild. It becomes perfectly clear that the 30-year-old Cho isn’t just kicking off her tour, she’s kicking ass as well.

Cho was born and raised in San Francisco. Her early years were pretty tough: Just days after she was born, her father was deported to Korea and her mom joined him there a little while later. She was shuttled between her parents and grandparents until her folks returned to San Francisco when she was eight. Cho’s first stand-up gig was at 16 at The Rose & Thistle coffee shop-above the bookstore her parents ran.

“I always really knew what I wanted in life, and performing was it,” Cho says. “I didn’t necessarily think it was going to be comedy, though. But when I started out, there was such a vibrant bohemian comedy scene in San Francisco, and I was fascinated by it. Paula Poundstone, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Robin Williams were part of all that. Also, I felt restricted and repressed where I was living, and comedy created this home for me that I was grateful to have.”

Cho paid her comedic dues in San Francisco and Los Angeles. To support herself,  she took on other jobs. One year she worked during the day at FAO Schwartz as a Raggedy Ann doll, costume and all, and then rode the bus (still in her outfit) to her night gig as a phone-sex operator.

That’s the thing about Cho, you can believe that she was a convincing Raggedy Ann and also that she chose to support herself doing phone sex rather than, say, watering. She’s this disconcerting but appealing mix of girl-next-door sweetness and no-holds-barred outrageousness. This is a blend that can be hard to get your head around. After watching her one-woman show, I was convinced of two things: She’s a real laugh-out-loud funny woman and a ferociously tough cookie. Yet, when a twenty-something fan came backstage to talk with the sarcastic stand-up, Cho couldn’t have been more encouraging and tender. The young woman hugged her over and over.

After meeting her several times, this contrast seemed even sharper. Cho confided to me: “I cry every time I read Mode, because each issue is an emotional experience for me. I love the women in it, and I love the letters. I find the message of the magazine to be so beautiful and so nourishing.” Once again her comments made me feel a little torn. Of course I agreed with what she was saying about the magazine. But it sounded awfully sappy from someone who basically makes fun of things for a living. Yet, as she talked about her experiences, it became clear that this sensitive and effusive aspect of her personality was genuine. It also made her struggles and successes seem more real.

When she was barely older than that fan she hugged, Cho decided to take her comedy on the road. She rented a car and started playing college campuses, where she became the most booked act on the market. The comedienne performed more than 300 concerts in two years, Arsenio Hall introduced her to late-night audiences, and Bob Hope put her on a prime-time special. Suddenly, Margaret Cho was an incredibly hot ticket.

The networks held a bidding war to create a show for her based on her stand-up act. ABC won, and throughout the development process, Cho was given to believe that she was perfect, perfect, per-fect—that is, until they were about to shoot her pilot. Then word came down that she needed to lose weight.

This was the beginning of a terrible time: “I didn’t have the sense of self that I have now. I was so young, so insecure, and so afraid. I didn’t want to blow this opportunity.” She was told: “The network has a problem with the fullness of your face.” Cho was devastated. It was so demoralizing. “How do you stand up and be the star of a show after that?” she says.

So Cho went berserk trying to transform herself into the person that the network seemed to think would be successful. She had never been on a diet before, and suddenly her entire career seemed to hang on whether she could lose weight. She stopped eating and started exercising twice a day. She took diet pills. She took diuretics to flush all of the water out of her body. She took laxatives to help her lose even a few more pounds. She says, “1 was drinking and taking drugs not because I was an alcoholic or drug addict, but because I Was just so hungry I didn’t know what else to do. I was trying to kill my hunger—which is essentially trying to kill ‘yourself.” She lost 30 pounds in less than a month and ended up in the hospital with kidney failure. As soon as she got out, the show went on as planned.

All-American Girl, which aired in the 1994-95 season, was hailed as a landmark TV show—the first with Asian-American stars—but it was plagued by criticism that it was either too ethnic or not ethnic enough. Her own real-life Korean-American experience was watered down beyond recognition, and worse, the producers hired an ethnic consultant who gave bizarre suggestions like “take your shoes off when you enter the house and use chopsticks more often.” It was an extremely confusing, frustrating time for Cho.

After her show was canceled, the drug and alcohol use continued, and her eating disorder grew worse. When she talks about this period of her life, Cho doesn’t sound bitter, just very matter-of-fact. She’s obviously spent a lot of time reflecting on what happened and why. She talks eloquently about the dangers of needing to find love and acceptance outside yourself. “It’s so easy, especially when you are a performer, to put the responsibility of convincing yourself that you are gorgeous and worthy onto other people,” Cho says. “But when they fail to convince you, you immediately interpret it as ‘I’m hideous. I'm awful.’ I fell into self-loathing and I destroyed my health.”

Cho caused irreparable damage to her body with her drive to be unnaturally thin. “It isn’t beautiful and it’s certainly not right for me,” she states. However, she acknowledges that this sort of thing, this kind of body pressure, happens every day and it happens to all women in television. “No one in the industry talks about it because it isn’t what people want to hear. But it is so commonplace and so destructive.”

It took Cho several years to recover from the physical and emotional fallout and get back to who she really is. “I’ve learned to be proud that I have a huge appetite for food and life and love. These are things that I have a right to.” in the aftermath, she has created a professional world for herself in which she generates a huge portion of her own work so that she isn’t vulnerable to the emery-board-thin ideals of Hollywood. There is going to be a film version of I’m the One That I Want, and she’s writing a book as well.

But regardless of what Cho chooses to do with her time, she seems to have truly survived her head-on collision with Hollywood. “1 really love the way my life is going right now—touring and doing stand-up. There’s a lack of different faces out there, and part of my journey must be illustrating my experience. I’m in a really good place.”

This comment made me think back to the first time I met Cho in Washington and heard another line that sent the audience screaming to their feet. She said, “I’m not going to die because I failed as someone else. I’m going to succeed as myself.” And she really does seem to be doing just that. No wonder she’s the one that she wants.