Excerpt from Barbara's forthcoming Book

GENDER WARS: Stand-Up Like a Woman!

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A lot of guys name their manhood. I named mine, “Albatross.”

Imagine you’re a city manager in a Florida suburb, or say a sportswriter in Los Angeles. In a white bread world you have greatness thrust upon you. Yet in your heart, you recall the world of Oscar Levant: “It’s not what you are; it’s what you don’t become that hurts.”

Your system suffers from testosterone poisoning, and your feminine side must be exposed to the max. Suddenly, the doors around you slam shut, your greatness is repulsed. Career options that had your name all over them are suddenly memories, alone in the moonlight.

Where do you turn next?

Why not try standup comedy?

It’s slightly more respectable than being a Crack addict who molests children. It’s incredibly easy… I know, *I* have been there… In fact, I’m still there. Standup comedy is a place where there are few performers without a penis.

There are even fewer of those of us who only remember having a penis. In standup, there are no boundaries such as good taste. You can expose as much or as little of your inner self as you wish. In comedy, it is all about the smell of the fart joke, and the roar of the crowd.

Unfortunately, rarely does anything in standup lead to money. When you get desperate, you tell a “dick” joke. In a homogenized world where there’s a Starbucks on every urban corner, great big Wal-Marts dot the suburban landscape, and a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq began on September 11, even stand-up comedy can rely on a marketable formula.

It is the mark of an entrepreneur when you can take a formula and improve on it  “Dick jokes” have consequences for most comedians. Tell a “dick joke” to the wrong audience and you won’t even be invited to bus tables there the next night.

For a standup comedian whose premise had twisted in the wind, Albatross rose above the crowd for me. I try hard to avoid a post mortem discussion on why some jokes work, and others don’t. Some nights I feel fortunate when no one is inclined to heave beer bottles on to the stage.

Comedians by nature speak on topics — dating, failed relationships, dysfunctional careers, and sex with animals — with which they have some expertise. I’m no different. Standup comedy is the latest abnormality in my life of deviation from the norm. As someone who faced puberty sporting a deep, black beard, two perky unexplained “C” cups, and more confusion than a Log Cabin Republican, I knew I was someone that even “Tom” on MySpace couldn’t accept as a friend. Heck, even Jesus didn’t love me, I thought.

What choice did I have than to become a comedian in my old age? It wasn’t that I had a deep-dark evil streak. The white bread I had consumed in humungous proportions made me a criminal only in the eyes of those who believe bathroom scales should have no more than two digits. As a fat man, I was welcomed even by those who demanded female elephants at the zoo be height-weight proportional. As a woman of size, I am welcomed only by those who deal in catalogues for “big beautiful women,” and those who sell bras for sports cars.

It took me nearly four decades to accept myself as a woman. It took me more than five decades to accept myself as a comedian. Sure, I had dreams in childhood that carried me beyond the idea of putting a new twist on the Vagina Monologues. I was a part of the Watergate generation where we put Deep Throat on the modified limited hangout road, saw the world in a transition of expletives and inoperative statements, and finally learned how to throw our political rivals under the bus before that became cool.

Now, being fat, female and fifty, I would come to a new realization that despite the faith-based efforts of a few, I would never experience a close encounter of the Beatitudes of the Biblical kind. If the poor were going to inherit the earth, Uncle Sam would have to leave some surprises in his will. Since my parents disowned me, I realized that the only thing I could ever inherit was a bad-smelling wind.

As I took this in, I went through the Elizabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grief, including anger, denial, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. I was used to a world of the white-bread male —strawberry jam and peanut butter was my manifest destiny. Life was supposed to give you nothing but protein and sweetness. My protein had come from climbing the career ladder from cub reporter to the world’s first high-tech journalist to interview Bill Gates as both a male and a female.

My sweetness came from friends and family who loved a man who wasn’t there. I was in heavy denial that what most men consider “brain surgery” would leave me at a competitive disadvantage in my career. I, after all, had never composed an essay, or even a White Paper using Albatross. Still, I learned that there are editors and managers in the business world who believe that a penis is as essential to good composition as a QWERTY keyboard on a standard, black Underwood typewriter.

It didn’t take long for me to bargain with prospective employers who held out the idea that my services were not as valuable as they once were. As a woman, I would be paid 70 percent of what I made as a man. If I wanted a living wage, I would have to marry one, like any other woman. The sense of equality was giving me chills.

Besides, if I was ever going to marry again, it would be to another low-paid woman, just as it was the first time. I am a creature of habit — which dooms me to a life as the mother of 34 cats. Anger, denial, and bargaining were all in my head, I soon would discover from the medical professionals that treated other women. I would need relief from my depression in the only way women can be cured. America’s pharmaceutical industry stood at the ready to medicate everything from restless legs to the thought that maybe life was unfair. Take two Prozac, and the doctor’s answering service will prescribe something else in the morning.

If I have one rule in my personal health care it is that I never take any medication while conscious. If I have reached a point where I have become a total vegetable and a medical professional feels that a little peat moss could make me green again, I can accept that. However, I have never been sad enough to consume any happy pills.

This left me with only a single alternative in my grieving for my White Bread life. My mid-life correction would need to become an open joke. But How? I don’t want the audience to see me as a “man in a dress.” I have a duty to those who share my situation not to make life as a transsexual any more derisive than life as the President of the World Bank. Check that. There are some who admire my ability to stand on a stage and bring out my now not-so-secret life.

Of course others would prefer that I leave on a stage for deepest Idaho. More than one headliner for which I have opened has admired my “courage” in telling my stories to a live audience. Perhaps I am like Jake and Elwood “Blue” of the “Blues Brothers.” I am on a “mission from God.”

Sometimes that takes an Albatross memory. Catch me in the moonlight, “I can smile at the old days —I was beautiful then.”

Copyright © 2007 by Barbara Sehr Productions  | Photographs by Dorothy Pierce

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