Happy Mother’s Day! Whether you biologically birthed them, adopted them, surrogated them, fostered them, step-mothered them, psuedo mothered them – whether they are people, or ideas, or projects, we are all mothers. We are all mothers to our mother the earth. That’s part of the Big Change. But on a more worldly plane…

I have an essay called “Not’s Landing” in a new book: “No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Motherhood”. Here it is on Amazon.

It’s a cool collection edited by Henriette Mantel, with a forward by Jennifer Coolidge and includes essays by my friends and awesome writers Margaret Cho and Merrill Markoe – among others. Enjoy mine here and check out the book for the others!

“Lately, because I gave up the booze, I’m really getting how much energy it takes to not do something. And how much of not doing things I’ve done and sometimes not done. Not eating. Not smoking. Not sexing. Not becoming my mother. Not not becoming my  mother. Not obsessing. Not being afraid. Not writing. Not having a real job. Not giving in to time. And, most pertinently here, not having kids.

          I picked one big no and a million little yeses. I didn’t want to have to say no all the time. I’m already such a negative person. Cheerful, but negative.

            If you don’t believe me maybe you will believe Greg. Greg is the man I didn’t have children with. Some women meet a man and think this is the father of my children. I met Greg and thought now here’s a man I cannot have kids with.

            We married but I never liked calling him my husband. In fact I spent a lot of time not calling him “my husband.” I found it annoying that the words husband and wife refer etymologically to ownership and emotionally to a particular kind of relationship that most often involves having kids.

            “You’re so negative for a positive person,” he once said. “No, I’m not!”

            I thought about having kids, of course. But why do today what you can put off forever?

            On a gut level I just didn’t want to have kids. I thought maybe I should anyway. In fact maybe I should especially because I didn’t want to. Like the way you should exercise especially when you feel lazy. Reach out and connect especially when you feel isolated. Share especially when you feel greedy. But having kids especially because I didn’t want to? It didn’t seem like bringing another person onto the Earth as a contrary action to my character flaws of selfishness and fear seemed wise. Or fair to the kid.

            Not to mention that it seemed unfair to everyone else already on Earth. Even as a teenager I was very taken with the idea that overpopulation was the root cause of every other problem on Earth. (I’m sorry, Senator Kennedy, but what about just less offspring?) And I just felt that if you didn’t HAVE to have kids maybe just do something else.

            Plus, I just didn’t want to.

            I didn’t want to from the time I was fifteen. I was in the passenger seat of my not-smart-enough boyfriend’s jacked-up blue Nova, headed to my ancestral family tract home, fantasizing about escaping into my real life. The boyfriend threw some trash out the window. I huffed about his littering. And then I had a thought. I’m never going to have kids. You can’t do everything, and I’m an artist and I’m going to do that and not have kids. I didn’t say anything because he wasn’t the one who I was going to not have kids with. I knew that much. I resolved it so strongly that until now, writing this piece, it never occurred to me that I might be living a grown-up life designed by a fifteen-year-old . I was a very strong-willed fifteen-year-old. So strong willed that that version of me still sometimes bosses this version of me around.

            Because maybe that was just a rationalization. As a grown-up I’ve met plenty of women who have had careers they loved and also had kids. But they’ve also made too many compromises[KJN3] . Plenty of guys who have done the same. I had no dreams of family life. I had a dream of an art life. If there had been enough money I think I would have liked to have a child along for the ride.

            Then there was the pain. Pain is something I have definitely tried to not have. But you know what they say: no pain, no life.

            Somewhere right around the time I was thinking maybe I was wrong about not having kids a yoga teacher did an adjustment on me. After the adjustment, the sound of ripping.

            “Is that your pants,” he asked, adding insult to injury.

            In the following months I tried to heal the hamstring with every combination of heat and ice I could think of, including whiskey on the rocks. Finally the teacher sent me to see Mimi and Moses Yu. A husband-and-wife team of acupuncturists who ran a low-rent clinic in East L.A. The luck of the draw assigned me to Mimi. She had me pull down my pants and lie on the table. It didn’t not hurt. It didn’t not hurt so much I started to cry.

            “You can’t take the pain,” she said. “Jewish girls so spoiled. You better never have baby.” Is that even legal to say?

            Then she twiddled the needles in her own neck, in the Frankenstein spot, to prove she could take the pain.

            Over the course of eight treatments the injury was healed. Like fire, sometimes you can fight pain with pain. You don’t notice the absence of pain until there is pain. In the same way you don’t notice the absence of children until there are children[KJN4] . I like children by the way. It was never that. And they like me. Liking has nothing to do with it.

            Mimi Yu reminded me of my mother, who also once told me she didn’t think I should have children. They are both tough, no nonsense, straightforward, partner coupled. Every now and then the more sensitive Moses Yu would come in and twiddle my needles. He had such a light touch. I wished the universe had assigned me to him. But then again Mimi healed the pain. And told me to stop thinking so much and go home and watch some “stupid TV.”

            Because Mimi Yu told me I shouldn’t have a baby, I started thinking about having a baby.

            All my yoganini girlfriends were doing natural childbirth on sheepskin-covered beds or in tubs of water, orgasming and going inside the pain. I started to want to experience childbirth. Just so I could prove that I could take the pain. I couldn’t really take the pain though. That was one of the reasons for all that booze.

            I started thinking maybe there was a way not have a kid but not not have a kid. Had no idea what that would be.

            Then came the last night of a five-day visit from my parents. We were sitting around the living room of our Los Feliz apartment trying to think of something to talk about. We’d covered everything. We should have been watching TV, but my parents felt they didn’t see me nearly enough and wanted to squeeze in every last second of chatting.

            “What else,” my Dad asked.

            There was nothing else.

            “Well,” said Greg, “we’re thinking of donating sperm to this lesbian couple.”

            I motioned across my throat the universal sign for CUT. Stop talking! And he did stop. But so what? It was too late. The baby was out of the birth canal.

            My dad started to hyperventilate, unloosened his belt, and hoisted himself out of our thrift store chic gold velvet armchair. It swiveled. My head spun. My mom turned the little wheel on her yellow BIC lighter and took a big drag off her Pall Mall.

            “No,” she said on the exhale.

            Of course no wasn’t for her to say in this case.

            And I was loving the idea. It would be like we had kids without having kids. I would be like an aunt, but more. Or less. There would be this child on Earth that I’d be connected to in this special way. But she’d, or he’d, already have two moms, plus Greg as a something. I liked the whole weird feel of it. A mom but not a mom. Responsible but not responsible. Helpful but not smothering.

            “Greg will be connected to these women in a way that doesn’t involve you,” she said panicking. That didn’t bother me at all.

            My dad came back in with a few thumbs of scotch in his tumbler.

            “You know,” he said, “you’re grown up now. And you don’t have to tell us everything. And in the future, nothing about sperm.”

            Way to draw a boundary, Dad! I was excited. We needed more boundaries in my family. This was a good start. The fact that my parents do want me to share everything is part of the claustrophobia of family life that was another thing that kept me from wanting to have kids. Maybe that’s one reason people have kids. To give them something to talk to their parents about that’s not them. It’s like a privacy hedge.

            As it turned out that particular lesbian couple decided not to procreate. And so we never did expand our family that way. Soon after that another friend, single and desperate to have kids, said, “Well, if nothing else works I can always borrow your husband’s sperm.” Like it was sugar or something. Yes sure, bring over the measuring cup. That never happened either.

            But here’s what did happen. I manifested a daughter. It was a miracle. Even my own negativity could not get in the way.

            I’d always said I’d have a daughter if I could have an eighteen-year-old. Ha ha.

            And then one day the phone rang.

            “Do you ever have interns?” asked a sweet girl on the other end. We never had, but we could. She said she came to our show, The Un-Cabaret, quite frequently, and really loved it. So she was smart enough to open with flattery. I liked that. So I said come over. We sent her on a Xeroxing run and she did a good job. I asked if she was hungry. She looked hungry.

            “Yes, I’m always hungry,” she said. So I made her some chili. And that was that.

            I got to be a mother to an eighteen-year-old. Not a mother mother. Not a stepmother. Not a surrogate mother. Not a foster mother. But what I came to think of as a pseudo mother.

            Her name is Jaime. Like J’aime. I love.

            I got to be a pseudo mother without tapping into my deep well of negativity. Yes, she could drop out of college for which she was accruing debt to major in a field she was only studying to please her parents. Who weren’t paying for it. I got to tell her yes she could work for my radio show. I got to tell her yes it was okay to start having sex. I got to tell her yes she should try to become a location scout. And yes to becoming a teamster. And yes to quitting her job so that she could go back to school for pre-med and yes to med school as an older student. And then one day she was driving away in a new car that her on-again, off-again big-time screenwriting boyfriend had given her.

            I hired her, I encouraged her, I fed her, I gave her clothes. Now I only see her on Facebook. And maybe I will hardly ever get to see her again. But I love her. I love her in that way that isn’t a friend or a lover or anything besides a child. Even though she’s not mine. And maybe for me that was the most important part of not having a child. Learning to love and not want to possess. To put away no and start saying yes. 

Jonathan Katz, better known to you as Dr. Katz, called me the other day, out of the blue. We’ve never met but he just wanted to say how much he enjoyed the David Feldman podcast on which I was a guest. Johnathan and I had a long lovely talk about life and comedy and UnCabaret’s new Amazon episodes and his new project Explosion Bus. it is one of the joys of telecommunications to sometimes, out of the blue,  hear from someone you admire and do not know.

He asked me really good questions. David is smart and a very precise joke writer, who’s written for Roseanne, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Bill Maher etc. He was genuinely interested in how and why and who and interested in making sense of it for himself, which always makes for a great interview. That’s why I listened to Whitley Strieber for so many years. He was on a personal quest to understand. As I am. As if you have gotten the far I assume you are!

This is David’s description of the show: Why are gay and female comics more fun to watch? Is there room for confessional comedy in mainstream clubs? Could it possibly be true that the Los Angeles comedy scene is America’s most fertile arena? The history of Alternative Comedy.

Here it is on iTunes (Confessional Comedy) Enjoy!

I had fun talking with, and laughing at,  Jimmy Dore, Frank Coniff and David Feldman on Jimmy’s very fine politically astute podcast.

Enjoy.

I visit with Mary Lynn Rajskub on her awesome Nerdist podcast Kickin’ It Mary Lynn style.

These are the instructions on love that I have been told to give you: Love yourself. Love something bigger than yourself. Love something smaller than yourself. Love something the same sized as yourself. Love as a verb not a noun. Not a thing, an action.

Love whoever comes into your path and seek out those for whom your love is abiding. Love without resentment something you both love and resent. Love without anger someone you both love and are angry with. Love your anger and resentment if this is not possible. Love what might be without knowing what it is. For today think of possibility not uncertainty.

Love the absence of trouble in whatever areas your life is trouble free. Love your troubles as they are agents of change. Love the part of you that you love easily with the part of you that you love less so. Love a part of you that is hard to love with a part of you that you love easily.

Love someone older than you. Love someone younger than you. Love someone your own age.

If you are in an elevator send love to each person though the way they are chewing gum is so annoying. Love the person that cut you off in traffic but don’t forget to love the one who let you in. Love your species as a whole. Love a creature from another species. Love someone of your gender. Love someone of another gender. Love a sound and make a sound that others can love. Love a color and put it next to another color that makes it even more lovable. Love something that needs fixing, a cuff or a dent or a dripping faucet. Love an unfinished project. Love your machines. Love your unguents.

When you wonder where to go, go where the love is. When you wonder who to be, be the one who loves. When you wonder why, consider the possibility that the answer is love. When you ask when, know that love does not work in human time. Love is not man-ufactured. Love is an element. Love the earth. Earth and heart are anagrams of each other. Love our earth with your heart. Love with every nano particle of yourself. Love knowing that love begets love. Love in ways you do not understand knowing that loving is your task, understanding is icing on the cake. Very pleasurable. Not as necessary as love. These are the instructions for today, for now. Love now. Love all. Love.

Tamsin Hollo

Beth Lapides Presents: Say the Word: The New America (Skirball Center)
11/15/12

Let me be upfront about this: I am no girl racer. I’m used to people asking if I got lost on the way over. Friends refuse to take road trips with me unless they drive – the whole way.  I cruise through this great semi-tropolis to the tinkling soundtrack of honking horns. But driving down Sepulveda to the Skirball on a rainy Los Angeles evening was a hazard taken in the line of comedy duty which I prayed didn’t deliver a cream-pie medal in the ER later. Scattered raindrops smeared my dust-encrusted windscreen, as I battled through the mysterious, ever-transforming roadworks, and displayed my yellow belly to every entitled Westside driver who sailed by in their entirely redundant off-road leisure vehicle, while, ever the multi-tasker, I cursed comedy down to the last fiber of my public-transport-loving being.  As the Skirball finally appeared on my left, a suburban mall fever-dream of a high art fortress, I slunk into the underground parking spot near the elevators with that chill cascade of relief you got as a kid when your sister cracked an imaginary egg on your head. Maybe that’s how 007 felt, as he entered Dr. No’s secret lair. Because I, too, was on a mission: to observe some of the best minds in TV and film comedy, live and face to face.

Beth Lapides’ Uncabaret has long established itself on the LA scene as a haven for comedy hipsters in the know. In the Cotsen Auditorium, designed with a deco-burlesque-palace-meets-Star-Wars-intergalactic-mothership-with-a-cousin-in-corporate-events theme, the mostly over-30 crowd forsook the bar, shuffling back to their faux-candle lit tables with good strong coffee and chunky low-fat sandwiches in time to the 80s pre-show music. Ms. Lapides, ever the good host as a self-identified “silver lining girl”, squeezed her multi-layered, evocative story of personal despair in the shadow of “Hollywood double-speak” and “DWC’s” (Driving While Crying’s), into the “New America” theme, discounting that fantasy of a perfect life where we “only choose rainbows” in favor of one in which we view happiness, and the experience of life, as a continuous spectrum. Watching her, one is reminded that good writing is gender blind.

Kevin Rooney, veteran of  Politically Incorrect, My Wife and Kids, and Til Death, to name a few, makes it look so effortless. As he masterfully guided us through his potted whistle-stop tour of American history, his dazzling ability to conjure startling, crystalline images prevailed. His coolly sardonic demeanor belies the fury of the talent beneath: his images of Republican “heads so full of holes” they whistle “Onward Christian Soldiers” when accelerating; or the image of a fat kid “like a pond in a pair of sweatpants” inventing the internet, are observations which will shift your perception forever, and force your frontal cortex to work a little while you smile.  Moshe Kasher was a welcome revelation to me, but not to the multitude who have seen him on Conan, Chelsea Lately, Jimmy Fallon,or, in short, own a TV screen. His surreal story about a white “Aunt Tom”, an Occupy Oakland protester known as the “Camp Creeper”, with Malcolm X tracts caught in her dreadlocked hair, culminated in a sweetly salacious finale, which critiqued the American pursuit of self-invention succinctly, and not without a little venom beneath the boyish grin. Unmissable. Cindy Chupack’s (Modern Family) straight-from-the-uterus story about re-defining motherhood offered us a poignant picture of true relatedness, while giving us some uncanny impersonations of too-old-to-party eggs and sperm (“You kids go on”) and their Hollywood agents.

Crowd favorite Taylor Negron(Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Last Boyscout, Call Me Claus), recent New York transplant and self-proclaimed “Che Guevara of vegetables”, fresh from the hurricane-torn East Coast, didn’t disappoint with his election year story about generational identity politics, in which he fantasizes about “slave angels who park and sometimes even vote” for him. His charisma and personal connection with the audience are as matchless, as his advice: “If America’s going to survive, America must make a sex tape. If America does not make a sex tape, the terrorists have won!”.  Brian Finklestein, (UCB, The Ellen Degeneres Show, The Moth) served up arguably the most ambitious piece of writing of the evening, a dual-world comparison of his life as a “revolting” young man juxtaposed with that of a Tiananmen Square revolutionary. Somehow or other we end up in Tijuana watching donkey sex. How? We don’t know, and we don’t care. We’re just enjoying the ride. Compelling, thought-provoking, and twisted. What more could you ask for?

So, listen up, young comedy hipsters. Those over-30s may be on to something – after all, only smart people survive long enough to achieve oldster status. Don’t let them keep this venue their personal secret. Go to the UnCabaret at the Skirball in February for their next star-studded line-up. You’ll get great cheap coffee, a nice healthy sandwich, and you will definitely learn something about unparalleled comedic writing in all its styles and manifestations. Just get your granny to drive.  And check uncabaret.com weekly for show schedule at Uncab’s regular weekly downtown venue.

I give Uncab at The Skirball 8 out of 8 menorahs!

The Pentagon just announced it’s lifting the ban on woman going to the front lines and engaging in hand-to-hand combat. I know this is something that’s supposedly good for women, and something that women in the military want, but it’s something I have such mixed feeling about. Oddly, one of those feelings is gratitude. Because it reminds me why, after 25 years, I’m still so committed to hosting and producing UnCabaret.

The news sent me back to when, years ago, the issue of allowing women on the front lines first came up. I was just beginning comedy career and was performing in what, at the time, was a fashion-forward choice: men’s suits. Partly, I loved the suits for the pockets. Partly, I loved them for the power they bestowed. Partly, I enjoyed the focus on my work which the ease of a uniform provided — much like combat gear.

And then, the issue of women being allowed to fight on the front lines came up. And I started to wonder: Is this where the women’s movement has gotten us? Fighting for the right to fight? I felt like yes, women should be allowed to do everything men do, and I was living proof that, to some degree, things had changed for the better in that department. But I also felt, and still feel, that the women’s movement should have moved us away from war, not towards women being allowed to fight like men. And I saw myself wearing the men’s suits, practicing an art form defined by men, and I thought maybe it’s time to don a dress. That was the actual odd phrase I had in my mind: don a dress.

Then things didn’t happen the way they would in the movie. There was no frenzied montage over the Pet Shop Boys “Shopping.” Instead, I mulled the idea of wearing dresses, flipped through magazines, agonized. Then one night, I followed Andrew Dice Clay at The Comedy Store. I was waiting to go on, watching his women-hating act, hating him, hating the audience for laughing at him, hating myself for hating and thinking, there has to be another way. A better way. I wanted to create a venue where I felt challenged as a comedian but not scared as a human. Where my friends could be as funny as they were on the phone with me. Where I wasn’t lulled to sleep by the rat-a-tat-tat of the gun fire comedy rhythm, where when you did do well, you didn’t kill. When you did less well, you didn’t die. I longed for a venue where instead of a “tight ten,” a locked-in, combat ready set, you could actually play, explore, communicate, experiment, discover, refine. All the things that I knew went into the practice of any art form. All the things I knew were part of the roots of the great stand-ups I so loved.

And so I created UnCabaret. A show where skirted, dressed and even midriff-baring, tight jeans wearing comedians of the female variety were more than welcome to do it slightly differently. Where they weren’t just tolerated, they were celebrated. UnCabaret was very essentially about women. We always loved our boys too. Gay ones, and even straight ones. But UnCabaret is not UnCabaret without women comedians. The show is not the show without the loopier rhythms, the more story based structure, the particular stories, the personal revelation and the fine balance between brashness and vulnerability that every successful woman practicing the art of stand up has mastered. Or should I say mistressed. UnCabaret is not UnCabaret without the particular parade of lovely liveliness that is women in stand-up.

by Jim Bessman

UnCabaret, the legendary story-based, stream-of-conscious comedy show that debuted over 20 years ago at the historic Women’s Building in downtown Los Angeles, is back—and Amazon’s got it.

The weekly Sunday night show, which has been characterized as “idiosyncratic conversational comedy,” had been on hiatus since 2008 (it originated then at M-Bar in Hollywood), and started up again a year ago at the First and Hope restaurant in Downtown L.A.

Now four taped UnCabaret episodes have been made available via Amazon.com’s Amazon Instant Video online streaming and digital download service. It had previously been produced as a Comedy Central Special, a daily radio show on Comedy World Radio, a podcast on Audible.com and three CDs.

Actress/writer/media personality Beth Lapides, UnCabaret’s creator and host, is back in those roles and executive-producing together with new musical director Mitch Kaplan. Filmmaker Adam Salky (Dare) directed the pilot of the Amazon series episodes.

When It Comes to Patience, First Learn the Math

(Written for the LA Times Magazine’s ‘Rules of Hollywood’ column.)

Everyone in this ‘I need it yesterday’ town is waiting for something: the overnights, the weekend read, the end of the day when they can finally take the edge off all the waiting with a drink.

More than the play, in this business, the waiting’s the thing. Which is why the image of the Sardi’s booth, with a post-show cast huddled in anticipation of the early edition, is one of the stickiest images in show business iconography.

And it’s why waiting tables is the quintessential Hollywood day job. “Can I help you,” the waiter asks. “Yes,” says the diner. “Let’s see. I’m not sure. Hmm. Give me a couple more minutes will you?” And what does the waiter say? Nothing. They just wait. Because you if you do not learn how to hurry up and wait when you are a waiter you do not get your tip.

But I never did wait tables. Ironically, I learned my waiting lesson at MTV, a network devoted to an aesthetic of impatience. We’d made a pilot of my talk show for them. A pet project. A dream project. And it was looking good. The show was announced in the trades, people were telling me they’d heard great things, there was buzz. But we were waiting for an official yes. Then the network “asked”, if we’d wait beyond our contractual ‘end of wait’ date.

Unfortunately I had not yet learned the primary axiom of Hollywood Math: the absence of yes over time equals no. So I kept waiting. And not doing anything else unless you count burning candles and chanting.

The night that we finally got the call that we were not ‘getting picked up’ – cruel phrase meaning put down – all we could do was play “Let It Bleed” over and over again. At least that was one thing I could control. And I felt oddly reassured every time I heard that if I wanted to I could bleed all over Mick.

And then I had one of those you’re going to have to change moments where the sound gets narrow and the light start pulsing. I knew that if I was going to continue on in this business, or even in life, I was going to have to get good at waiting.

But what would it take? I’m a very be in the moment girl and waiting is not being in the moment. Waiting is future focused. It has an element of hope. And if you’ve lived in Hollywood for more than ten minutes you know that it’s the hope that will kill you. So I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do. I upped my yoga practice. And one day, while I was waiting for my teacher to release us from a chatarunga hold, I noticed I was waiting and yet not waiting. I was waiting with grace. And that when waiting is graceful it’s called patience. And patience means waiting without waiting. Waiting while breathing. Waiting while moving on to the next project, celebrating your anniversary, devoting yourself to world peace, napping, tracking the moon, trying not to keep other people waiting any longer than necessary. In essence, living. Waiting without waiting means that you are prepared for a positive outcome of the thing you are waiting for but that you proceed as if the possibility of the thing you are waiting for does not even exist.

Recently my people told me I would definitely be receiving a particular offer. A few weeks went by. No offer ensued. Applying the absence of yes over time formula I figured the deal was dead. I called said people, to confirm my suspicions. They checked and said that the offer was in fact still in the works and now had a number attached. A nice number. A few more weeks have gone by. And by a few more weeks I mean a month. No offer. So I continue to wait for the offer without waiting for the offer. Because every rule needs to be broken and sometimes the absence of no over time equals yes.