“My boobs predict Jerry Lewis will make love tonight to his one, true love: himself!”
Who knew my boobies were that funny? Then it was time to pay my respects to the man of the hour. The man who ended every interview we ever did with his filthy version of the Buddhist chant. A beautiful self-affirming chant that we would sing together. Feel free to join in if you know the words: “God Damn Motherfucking Stupid Piece of Shit. HEY!! God Damn Motherfucking Stupid Piece of Shit. HEY!!” Rinse and repeat until you have found your chi. Jack introduces that song to me for the first time, every time. So I sang our little ditty in my head, for courage, and stepped forth deeper into the abyss:
“And my boobs also have a prediction for Jack Black. They predict he will star in a huge box office success called Kung Fu Panda 14. (Turning to Jack:) Jesus, Jack! Don’t you have any self-respect? (To audience:) In that film, Kung Fu Panda will get violently fucked in the ass over and over and over again. That’s right—George Lucas will direct it!
“There’s one thing I admire about Jack Black. Jack will do anything for a movie role, except push-ups and sit-ups.
“In Nacho Libre, he wore these really tight pants, and we saw everything, which is really fucking sad. Jack got his whole body completely waxed. Picture something hairless, clammy, and huge—like Madonna’s pussy!”
After clooping Jack a half dozen more times (that’s a backhand to the nutsack, for the uninitiated), it was time for my big finish, where I get to apologize for giving him the public prostate exam and tell him why his ass is the best. The most important things to me were that I wanted to make Jack laugh, and I needed him to know what an influential role he’d played in my life. I thought for days about the right way to end it, and I finally found inspiration in one of my favorite lines from their 2006 movie Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. It’s a subtle but essential thematic element that stemmed all the way back to the very first episode that aired on HBO in 1997. It was a private joke that only he and Tenacious D diehards would appreciate: “Jack, you and the D have been such an inspiration to me in life, and I just want to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for fucking my ear pussy!”
You know what happened next? Applause. Fucking applause! I couldn’t believe it! The consciousness that had left my body when my name was called suddenly floated back into me just as Jack stood up and gave me a huge hug. Sarah Silverman shook my hand and Jeffrey Ross, “the Motherfuckin’ Roastmaster General,” said to me, “You should seriously consider doing stand-up.” It was the perfect ending to a terrifying verbal bungie jump! I made it out with my head held high.
Well, almost … as I made my way back my seat, Jerry Lewis stood up, tackled me with a bear hug, then proceeded to “body slam” me onto the dais floor, dry humping me. After three whole seconds of pure ecstasy, I walked my new boyfriend back to his chair. “Old and feeble,” my ASS!
P.S. I tried doing stand-up a few weeks after that.
P.P.S. I bombed.
P.P.P.S. Fuck you, Jeffrey Ross!
19
ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, NEVER OUTGUNNED!
… by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.
—To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
If you ask me who I am, what I do, how I feel, how’s work, how’s life, or how’s the family, you have my answer. “Always outnumbered. Never outgunned!” It’s the simple truth of every obstacle before me and my power to overcome it. It’s become a bit of a “battle cry” to remind me that there is no life but the one we make, so get in there and fight, motherfucker, fight!
I didn’t set out to change the world; I was just trying to find a sense of purpose. I soon realized that when you try to do things drastically different than the norm, the world will try to change you. It will come at you from every direction. It will wound your spirit. It will break your heart and it will not be sentimental about it. But like Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “A woman is like a tea bag; you won’t know how strong she is until it’s in hot water.” So I would not be deterred. Whether you find purpose or purpose finds you, once you have it, it can be a source of great strength and much needed clarity. Plus, isn’t life all about taking risks and navigating its hazards with skill in order to find true fulfillment? Is that not the art of living dangerously?
Life is complicated. Show business is a complicated conundrum of contradictions. Like Caitlyn Jenner marrying Kanye West. So you better have a fucking game plan. Either you play the game or the game plays you. As a girl in this business, you are constantly surrounded by unfair limitations, unreasonable scrutiny, unfounded accusations, unprofessional conduct, and unethical judgement. Kind of like asking a flight attendant in coach for a glass of water before take off. All of which only increase with success. Like I’ve said before, everything in showbiz is counterintuitive.
And it doesn’t always come from the obvious places, either. That would be too easy. Instead, it’s everywhere. In fact, much of the time, it comes from the very last place you’d expect. Sort of like the fifty-million-year-old sperm they recently found in Antarctica. No one saw that cumming! Intricately woven into this game’s complex tapestry of challenges is an inbred “battle of the sexes.” Now that, in and of itself, is not much of a revelation, except for the fact that I’m not just talking about women vs. men. I’m talking about every other permutation, including something closer to a “battle royale,” where it’s everyone for themselves. There are days you feel like you’re at a rave with DJ “Sun Tzu,” working his scratch and scribble on the turntable. So you’ve got to be mentally prepared.
“I like Entourage more than I like to say, ‘shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, fart, turd, and twat.’”
—Ronda Rousey
Women kick ass!
Women are born to fight. We’ve been used as accessories. We’ve been treated like luggage. We’ve been owned like property. We are neither the inheritors nor the administrators of legacy. We’ve never had anything handed to us that we didn’t have to earn either before or after receiving it. We’ve been denied, diminished, devalued, and devoured by an androcentric culture. Let’s face it: Women are battle-hardened by design. We are the living embodiment of the old Japanese proverb, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Each day we seize, each stride forward we make, and each success we achieve is an exercise in pure will. We have always been warriors in an unnecessary war.
I’ll say it again. Women kick ass!
From the womb, we’re indoctrinated in the art of mental jiu-jitsu so formidable it makes sphincters tremble. Our exceptional skill and accuracy with the side-eye is akin to that of a Jedi with a lightsaber. We come fitted with X-ray vision so powerful it can see right through dense objects like bullshit. We are created to take that sorry excuse for casual misogyny called “social awkwardness” and shove it where the monkey put the whistle. We are formed from ninja rocks designed to smash any glass ceiling built above us. We are masters of a verbal judo so powerful that our words and ideas have infiltrated the superhighway of public opinion known as the media. Gender equality is no longer our hope but it is our manifest destiny. I’m not just a feminist by choice; I’m a feminist by voice!
So one more time for the cheap seats … women kick some serious ass!
On its best day, the entertainment business is the corporate equivalent of a bullfighting arena filled to capacity with a bloodthirsty mob. All of whom are hiding the awful truth that when the female matadors take the stage, the crowd starts rooting for the bull. Sadly, this business has a wicked way of breeding pettiness and jealousy as everyone tries to protect their square foot of land, both in front of and behind the camera. To be perfectly honest, I can’t help but fear that some women have become so proficient in ass kicking that it no longer matters whose ass it is or why. They just need to kick it. And if you know, you know; but if you don’t, let me tell you when women turn on each other, there are piranha that look away because it’s too damn vicious!!
There’s a critical aspect of this business, you may be shocked to discover, that exploits insecurities and vulnerabilities. It’s the perfect enabler for anyone who thinks sharpening your teeth is the perfect Sunday afternoon: men, women, or sharks! Now here’s a shocking revelation: Entertainment is a business of objectification. Boom! When you’re on camera, you’re on display, and there’s a certain amount of much-needed but generally unwanted attention that goes into getting any display ready. It can be weird and invasive, but if you don’t like the process of being prepared for display, then perhaps being on camera isn’t right for you. Objectification is shallow, demeaning, and exactly what it needs to be. I say that with no enmity. It’s simply an undeniable fact. Anyone who tells you different is probably also trying to convince you that you need a fifty-five gallon drum of lube (which, I’m sure, he can get you for a really good price).
Those of us fortunate enough to work in this business willingly surrender our “humanity card” and are handed our “product ID” on day one. From that moment forward, it’s a game of Poke and Prod, governed by the Japanese rule of Nin’i no ana, which, loosely translated, means “any hole.” Not to be confused with the other Japanese game of Machigatta ana, which means “wrong hole.” But, in all honesty, at the end of a long day of playing Who’s in My Hole? and Which One Is It?, it all feels the same.
Everyone you know and love on TV has been focus grouped, product tested, and Q&A’d up the wazoo! Between the general meetings, auditions, group assessments, and postmortems that we’re exposed to, your undercarriage starts to feel a bit overexposed, if you know what I mean. Probably why “vaginal rejuvenation” has become all the rage in Hollywood! “I swear everyone’s doing it!” Truth be told, these vocational lube jobs are as much a part of your “career maintenance” as STD testing is for porn stars. So you can’t let this mentally trip you up. Accept it, draw strength from the knowledge, and move forward.
Where this can get challenging and hurtful is when the poking and the prodding serves no business reason and is just personal, used with malicious intent by a person in a position of power. Imagine you’re giving a guy a blowjob, and he suddenly decides to hold your head by the ears like a soccer ball and take control, almost choking you in the process. It’s one thing to brutally assess someone for merited reasons, but it’s completely another to tear them down because they wouldn’t sleep with you or because they’re gay or because they’re a threat to you or because you think they’re too confident and need to be taken down a notch or because you woke up on the wrong side of the bed in the bitch ward and need a new ant for your magnifying glass. I think we all come into this business with the understanding that, to a certain degree, we’re going to be treated like human pin cushions. But many of us never really grasp that some people are incapable of seeing the fine line between being a human pin cushion and a tortured voodoo doll.
It’s not just limited to character assassinations by men trying to control women. Oh no, it’s ubiquitous. The truth is no one has an eye for detail like women do, and if you’ve ever sat around a brunch table gossiping with your friends, then you know, when so inclined, we have the capacity to tear each other apart molecule by molecule. Where guys tend to be sloppy and generalize their comments, women have mastered the art of torture by verbal acupressure. They’ll use a comment about your fat ankles to send your mind spiraling into self-consciousness. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that it hurts my heart when I see or hear about women doing this to each other. There’s nothing more demoralizing than crawling through the endless horseshit that you sometimes have to in this business, only to then get handed another shovel’s worth from a female exec with a chip on her shoulder. Someone you’d think, having been through it herself, would be sympathetic and supposedly understand how terrible it is. How can that happen, for fuck’s sake? We’re better than that. I know we are. But on those sad days, hope is just a hooker with a dream.
I’ve had my inexplicable and hurtful experiences with female execs, but I’m one of the lucky ones. I also found the warm embrace of some extraordinary ladies who went to the mat for me throughout my career and in my life. Truth is, every time I’ve been a little down-and-out at the hands of a female exec, it’s always been another girl who shows up and picks me up, dusts me off, and gets me going again. I’m proud to say that some of the people primarily responsible for my improbable and fortunate career have been these incredible women. Which is a pretty wild thing to say when the business is so male dominated. But it just goes to prove that there are still so many wonderful women rooting for each other that it keeps this hooker dreaming.
As much as I’ve tried to avoid it, there was nothing I could do to prevent having some fucked-up, head-scratching, and ass-backward encounters with women. I hate to focus so much on the women, but with men, I sort of expect “complications” here and there. There’s nothing surprising or interesting there. But with women, I’m just fucking baffled. It’s never made any sense to me. It’s not a part of who I am and how I operate. And boy, does it hurt somethin’ fierce when you find yourself at the ass-end of a pile-driver delivered by a woman. Especially one you thought was in your corner. For some reason, I just never see it coming. I always tell myself that in the end, the girls that defy the odds, surpass your expectations, and go all the way are the only ones that matter. The rest are just noise and, maybe, could use a free hug.
I’m proud to say that the majority of my life and professional career has been cultivated by astounding women. Which is probably why it really fucking bugs me when I see the seedy other side because I’m living proof of how good it can be. You can’t come from where I did and not get annoyed with girl-on-girl “corporate” violence. I can’t help but be a bit of a hippie chick when it comes to girls supporting each other. I’m proud to have come from a long line of tough independent women who taught me better!
There’s nothing I haven’t done or wouldn’t do to help a girl find her way. I consider it an unspoken obligation. Yet in spite of that, I’ve had a complicated relationship with women my whole life. I think the girls in school who bullied me left me with some lifelong deeply rooted insecurities and hesitation. So when I connect with a girl and find acceptance, I get really excited because I always start out a bit nervous. To be perfectly honest, walking into a room with just one woman has always been harder for me than walking into a room where there’s just one man. For some reason, I’m much more self-conscious about what I’m wearing or even how I say “hello.” I always feel like I’ve walked in with my skirt tucked into my pantyhose. I’m always afraid of being judged.
But I’ve never let it stop me from walking into any room, especially one with a girl in it, because I figure there’s a good chance that she’s probably feeling the same way. Plus, connecting from a place of mutual tension is what lifelong friendships are made of. I see it as my responsibility to turn the situation around because that’s what girls are supposed to do for each other. Right? In a funny way, it’s very similar to when I walk into a room to interview a female celebrity. Neither of us is completely comfortable or know what to expect, and I do my best to take the edge off and assume she will, too.
It would be easy to assume that the early adopters
of NGTV in the biz must have been straight guys since it’s so edgy and sexually charged. I mean who else would get the humor and invite us? Right? Nope! You could not be more wrong! The vast majority of publicists we dealt with in the beginning—and still do, to this day—are some incredible women, followed by some amazing gay men and women and let’s not forget the kick-ass straight guys. It’s doubtful we would have ever gotten off the ground were it not for some seriously forward-thinking and incredibly hip female studio publicists and execs. They’re the ones that got our humor before anyone else and fought to get us included. At every major studio, women were responsible for and witnessed my inaugural uncensored interviews and F-bomb raids and chose to embrace me.
My first red carpet, junket, in-studio interview, set visit, In Bed With … were all arranged by fucking awesome women. They risked their reputations to get my foul mouth and crazy questions into the rooms with their A-list stars. They were the ones that validated us and then convinced their colleagues, their bosses, their counterparts, and the all-important personal publicists—again, mostly female—to accept us. In every backfire, misstep, and shit-storm along the way, it was a woman who took the heat for us. A woman who didn’t write us off. A woman who understood that when you’re doing something different, there are growing pains. A woman who kept bringing us back. I wasn’t used to it, but at every turn, I found such warmth and support from these girls. They always made me feel like they were rooting for me. They became my friends, my fan club, my laugh track at the interviews, and they even helped me get other work. They made me feel so accepted. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t be here were it not for a multitude of brave and ballsy ladies!!
I owe these incredible women and the amazing men who have supported me throughout my career an enormous debt of gratitude. They all played such a crucial role in helping me prove that the language barrier is actually a connecting bridge because, like I’ve been telling you, everybody curses, I swear! There are so many amazing and wonderful people who helped propel me on this journey, and continue to, to this day, that I swear I could fill an entire book with their names. To all of you, I just want to say THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart for believing that a girl could curse and for taking a chance on me. I salute you all!!
Everybody Curses, I Swear! Page 46