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Posted: 12:00 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
“Are you hearing this?”
Somewhere in the Manhattan apartment where she’s lived for more than 20 years, Judy Gold holds the phone away from her far enough so the muffled but distinct yelling from across the hall is audible.
“I can’t take it any more. She’s either singing or abusing her dog,” veteran stand-up Gold grimaces, as the unnamed neighbor continues her verbal harangue. “Everybody knows everyone in this building and I’m right by the frigging elevator. I can’t even take a nap in the living room. She’s like Jekyll and Hyde. First she’s singing, and then her dog pees and she’s yelling. This is how I live.”
Wacky neighbors? A close-knit but changing building? Teen sons? Romantic complications and a lively stand-up comedy career. Kind of sounds like a sitcom, doesn’t it?
So far, none of the networks have agreed, but that didn’t stop Gold, an Emmy-winning writer for “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” an actress and veteran standup, from creating “The Judy Show: My Life As A Sitcom,” a show that got great reviews off-Broadway and plays through Sunday at Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse.
“People say ‘Oh, do you like traveling?’ and honestly I hate everything to do with traveling, but having a hotel room where I do not have to deal with that woman yelling at her dog,” she says, adding that the dates here give her a chance to get out of New York, where “it’s f…ing freezing. It’s awful. I’m laid out on the couch, watching ‘Downton Abbey’ with my Uggs and my coast on. My body’s still cold.”
Gold’s neighborhood, where she’s lived since 1989, is comedian-dense, with Joy Behar, Caroline Rhea and Susie Essman living within blocks. As annoyed as she is in her building, it’s rent controlled, which is, to make a play on words, gold. Besides, “it’s been really wonderful here. It’s like an extended family. But I gotta get out of here.”
After her last show, “25 Questions For A Jewish Mother,” which also came to the Kravis, the comedian says she was talking to co-writer Kate Moira Ryan “working out stuff, for a show, and I said to Kate ‘All I have is really just stories about kids and my life, and my ex, from my entire career. I’ve had some drastic changes in my life.”
There was a time that networks seemed to be practically handing out sitcoms to random comedians in gift bags. Gold says that “every four or five years, I would pitch my life, as a sitcom, and nothing happened. In a way it was a rejection. I’m gay, I’m a woman, and I’m Jew-y, hello! Who are these agents, these self-hating Jews that (rejected this)? Half of them are gay and the other half are self-hating Jews. I do believe that if I was a straight white guy, I would have gotten a deal like every other comic.”
Gold adds that she was influenced by the shows she grew up with, like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Good Times,” that “were a part of my life. We watched them together as a family, and I think they kind of opened a dialogue that you wouldn’t normally talk about. I always thought ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna be Rhoda.’”
She didn’t exactly become Rhoda Morganstern, but she did become a caustically funny Jewish woman rolling with the punches life handed her. And she’s still hopeful that her show happens some day.
“My goal has always been to do my life as a sitcom and have people forget that I’m gay and go, “Their family is just like mine!’” she says. “Really the key is to get over the fact that I’m different, that you’re different. It’s about saying ‘My God, that’s my family! That;s my life. I still want to do it, but when it happens I might be 90 and playing my own grandmother.”
The Judy Show: My Life As A Sitcom: Today, 7:30 p.m., Saturday, 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Kravis Center, Rinker Playhouse, West Palm Beach. Info: 561-832-7469 or kravis.org
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