Lynn Breedlove - Lynnee Breedloves One Freak Show

W hen I was a kid, my dad would drive me around in his Chevy station wagon, listening to comedians like George Carlin, Redd Foxx, Rodney Dangerfield, and Don Rickles on AM radio. I didn't know what the hell was so funny, but I wanted to make people laugh like they did.

I had my first chance to make people laugh at a performance for parents at the end of day camp, when I got to play a boy in The Enlarging Machine. Everyone walked by a sheet painted like a machine, with a small hole in one end and a big one in the other. Kids threw in a stick or a pebbleout came a log or a rock. I walked around sneakywhistling, shiftythen spit in it, and out came a bucket of water on my head. Everyone cracked up. I'm sold. People laughing with me instead of at methat was new.

In high school, I memorized and impersonated Flip Wilson's Geraldine Jones routine, The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress, breaking the cardinal rule of comedy: never do another comic's material. But I got an A on my drama final, and then was asked to perform it again for the senior talent show. As a clueless kid in 1977, I was somehow able to get away with being a white dyke playing a black man playing a black female from the hood.

My favorite part of being lead singer for Tribe 8 was in between songs when I got to squeeze in two or three funny lines. The band would watch videos of our gigs after the shows. They'd fast-forward through me introducing the songs, stopping right at the part when they would be onstage yelling, Less talk, more rock, but I would say, Stop! I wanna hear what I said.

I never knew what I was saying. I was clean and sober, but being onstage was my drug, so I would spout all this hilarity in some sort of punk blackout and then try to study myself later like a football coach dissecting a game afterwards, and see if anything was salvageable.

Once at the Chameleon in the mid-90s, Bucky Sinister was hosting an all-boy spoken word night. He invited a bunch of Sisterspitters. The guys all heckled any brilliant writers who got up with anything serious, like Anna Joy, who was my girlfriend at the time and God's gift. So when I got up and threw a set list at my feet, I was ready. Heckle me, motherfuckers, I said. I fucking love it. I had the power of the mic and after years of playing to dumbfucks around the world, I knew how to hurl a snappy comeback. I quieted them down with a flurry of verbal violence aimed right over their heads.

When I was on tour with Sisterspit in 1998, like the other eleven writers on tour, I read my words from the page. There was this one person always stretching on the floor before going on stage while everyone else was reading. In an old skool aviator's cap with goggles, she would channel a crazy character, swimming and flying around the stage, freestyling based on stuff she had written, but different every time. That was Stanya Kahn. She had been part of a theater collective in San Francisco in the 80s. I interrogated her about what she did. I would be writing what I was going to read, sometimes up to the last minute before I got onstage, but I always stopped to watch Stanya, fascinated. I never thought I could do what she did.

At Theatre Rhinoceros in 2000, I hosted Kris Kovick's show, where she read from her writing. As host, I talked about my life in San Francisco, sharing all the funny stories I had told for years in bars for free. Kris and I were in the bathroom getting ready one night, and she said to me, I could never do what you do, fly without a net. It was just what I had thought about Stanya.

When my band was winding down to a dull roar by 2002, I got a show at Rutgers University at a feminist conference with author Erika Lopez. Sick of being stuck to the page, I walked around the parking lot for an hour, thinking, then jotted down some ideas, got up in front of thirty people and made them laugh. That became the prototype of the One Freak Show.

Around that time, I would go around the corner to visit Ren Volpe, an ex of mine with a two-year-old, get wired up on coffee and run my mouth. She kept saying, You need to put on a one-man show.

I was working at the Montclair Women's Cultural Arts Club and got to pick up one of my favorite dyke comics, Suzanne Westenhoefer, from the airport. I interrogated her like I did Stanya. She said she was a natural, but there is a science. She said, Always say the opposite of what it is: if the traffic is gnarly, say it was great. Little hints like that, which I remembered. I still listen to her like I listened to Flip Wilson's records, over and over, laughing out loud.

Going to Tarin Tower's comedy night at Spanganga in the Mission that same year, as usual I was making up jokes right up to the front door. I walked onstage in front of a bunch of local male comics, and laid on them what would become the opening line of my One Freak Show. After they had spent the evening laughing at each other's poop jokes, they cracked up, which I took as a badge of honor.

Jim Fourniadis was there, running tech, and he asked me if I was a comic and what was I doing? And I said, Nothing, really. So he invited me to develop a one-man show at his new theater around the corner, The Dark Room. I spent two weeks in the summer of 2003 doing that, calling it Lynnee Breedlove's One Freak Show: Less Rock, More Hilarity. I would just make a set list, lay it on the stage at my feet like I had done in the band, and try out every idea I had, to see what would make people laugh.

The following summer (2004), I did the same thing again, fine-tuning it. I asked playwright Bayla Travis to direct me. She helped me delineate the characters of my mom and The Biz, and to get me to take up a little more of the stage. I was used to standing in one place, grabbing a mic stand to ground me so I didn't fly up off the stage and forget all the words, ADD-style. I had to be really reined in, always trying to remember even the words of songs I had been singing for fifteen years in the band. (Too many drugs in the 80s.) And now I had to remember a bunch of words that didn't even rhymewith no breaks, no one to bounce off offor an hour, sometimes two. Actually I found that once I got up there, you couldn't shut me up. I had songs (in case I missed rhyming) with beats by Skye Lark. I had stuffed animals. Russian nesting dolls. Eggbeaters. Knives.

Then I started doing walking Tonglen meditation before each show, breathing in fear and breathing out loveall woo-woofor myself; for every letter in the LGBTIQQAA community; then for the Iraqi children; then for Rove, Cheney, and Bush. And I found that telling jokes in I-statements, with love in my heart for everyone who might or might not be in the audience, made people laugh more.