Margaret Cho weighs in on herself
by Jennifer Weiner
Inquirer Staff Writer
 

For Margaret Cho, it should have been the end of the rainbow.  After years of being on the road, working colleges and comedy clubs, living out of suitcases, traveling thousands of miles in places like Tennessee (“and you do not want to look like me in Tennessee”), here was a large network where the executives loved her stuff, loved her, and they wanted to give her a show, a show about her, about her life: All American Girl.  With one catch.  “The network is concerned,” Cho says, her voice a shamed murmur.  She’s onstage at Rutgers, in the midst of her one-woman show, I’m the One That I Want, reliving the short life and ugly death of her ABC sitcom, in front of a rapt and adoring audience of college students. She’s imitating Gail, her producer, the one charged with delivering this devastating news. “They’re concerned about . . . uh . . . the fullness of your face. They think you’re really overweight. And if you want to have a show—if you want to be a star—then you’ll have to do something. OK?”  What Cho did then—and what happened once she did it—is the subject of I’m the One, which she’ll perform at the Merriam Theater Saturday. Fast-paced and funny and furious, equal parts bons mots and bile, I’m the One could have been nothing more than an E! True Hollywood Story —another talented young actress crashing and burning in the most stereotypical way.  Except that Cho, 31, crashed and burned and lived to tell the tale.  “I don’t know how you keep going when someone says there’s something wrong with your face,” Cho said bitterly. And so she did what the network asked her, taking drastic steps to fit the Friends mold. “A trainer was hired. I worked out four hours a day, six days a week. A nutritionist was hired because I was not allowed to make my own fatty choices.”  She lost weight—lost it so fast, in fact, that she wound up in the hospital after her kidneys shut down. She didn’t care. Her sitcom’s pilot got picked up—“I guess the network figured my face could now fit on the screen and didn’t need to be letterboxed”—and it was back to Los Angeles to film more episodes, to start popping diet pills, to do whatever it took to ensure the show’s success.  “I was dating Quentin Tarantino at the time. He called me up and said, ‘What the [heck] was that? You . . . live to publicly embarrass your family. They took away your voice! Don’t let them do that! Don’t let them take away your voice!”  By then, it was too late. You want voicelessness? When a television critic asked Cho how it felt to have to lose weight to play the part of herself, Gail the producer yanked the microphone away to answer that there was no truth to the weight-loss rumors. Cho herself just stood there. “I . . . was . . . soooo . . . hungry.”  She was thin, but the sitcom was going horribly wrong. Asian Americans complained that the humor was stereotypical. TV critics wrote that the humor was just plain absent. ABC brought in an “Asian consultant” to urge Cho to use chopsticks during eating scenes—“and then you can put them in your hair!” After a single season, All-American Girl was put out of its misery, “replaced by Drew Carey,” Cho noted sarcastically, “because he’s so skinny.” And so there she was - out of work, “chasing the phen-fen dragon . . . this Frankenstein monster, with bits of my stand-up, bits of what focus groups wanted, bits of what the Asian consultant said to do. . . . I did what it’s hard for Asian people to do,” Cho said. “I became an alcoholic.”  And that could have been where the story ended: booze, promiscuity, performing so drunk she had to cling to the microphone stand for support. “Everything I tried to do was a dismal failure. I just didn’t have much hope left.”  She woke up one morning after a long night of drugs and drinking, with her boyfriend beside her. The bed was wet. She didn’t know which one of them was responsible. “And I thought, ‘What kind of [messed] up, Motley Crue, Behind the Music [stuff]is this? I am not going to die because my sitcom was canceled! I’m not going to die because some network executive told me I was fat! I’m not going to die!”  And the college girls are clapping and screaming as Cho shouts, “For me to be 10 pounds thinner is a full-time job, and I am handing in my notice and walking out the door!” It’s catharsis and pep rally rolled into one as Cho stands there, platforms planted, microphone upraised, and head tilted exultantly back toward the sky.          The Margaret Cho you get in person bears little resemblance to the Margaret Cho you’ll see onstage. She’s outrageously clad, as you’d expect from a woman who grew up in San Francisco’s Mission Hill district (raised, she jokes, not by wolves but by drag queens). This afternoon she’s wearing banana-colored leather pants, tight black leather shirt, sky-high platform boots, and a floor-length macrame overcoat. But her face is somber, her voice pitched low, her tone every bit as serious as the books (Fay Weldon’s latest, M.F.K. Fisher’s essays) that wait on her table. “The show really is a natural progression of my work so far as a stand-up comedian,” she says. “I always did talk about the truth of my life.”  Cho was born in San Francisco in 1968 and raised to be a stereotypical Asian overachiever. “My parents were really intellectual, well-read, artistic people.” Cho started doing stand-up at 16, dropped out of school, and spent her 20s performing at colleges, rather than attending one. “I was really lucky that I disappointed my family so early in life. They learned not to expect much from me,” she says seriously. “I was really rebellious, even from a very young age. My parents didn’t understand, and they were really embarrassed and ashamed that I didn’t live up to their expectations. I think they wanted me to be some kind of academic.”  Landing the sitcom gave Cho the kind of legitimacy she still craved - one reason it hurt so much when Hollywood slammed the door shut.  But Cho doesn’t blame the network, or the writers or producers, for what happened to her. “Really, you know, I did it to myself. . . . there’s nobody really to blame.”  She sees the entertainment world changing in its acceptance of real-sized women. There’s Mode magazine (“I look at that magazine and just cry. I’m so grateful to be able to feel beautiful.”) And there are her heroes: Camryn Manheim, Kate Winslet, Drew Barrymore, “breaking free from that weird anorexic thing.” But Cho’s content to observe the revolution from the sidelines and off-Broadway stages. Rather than try to single-handedly reform Hollywood, Cho says she’s concentrating on carving out her own niche—writing her own material, producing her own show, and returning to television, when and if she does, on her own terms.  And she has a full plate. She’ll tour until June, then turn the material into a book. A movie of I’m the One is also in the works, scheduled for next year’s film festivals.  Reliving one of the most painful parts of her life, night after night, was hard at first. “I was very embittered . . . and it was worse in real life,” Cho says. “I had a terrible time living the emotional life of the show every day, but I found so much peace, and people get so much out of it. I learned to accept it and deal with it, and I treasure my life now—and none of it would have been possible without what I went through.”