Don't Get Me Started - Hardcover

Clinton, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345388879 ISBN 13: 9780345388872

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1998

Synopsis

Let's get one thing straight. I'm not. And yes, my brother is Bill Clinton. But not the Bill Clinton. These two guys are very different. For one, whenever I hear President Bill speak--on gays in the military, healthcare reform--I hear that sound trucks make when they're backing up.

I was born on the cusp of Title IX, at a time when the sports pages claimed only men played sports. When people ask where I got my comedy training, I tell them teaching high school English. I began performing stand-up in 1981, the same year Ronald Reagan began his comedy. I never got used to saying President Ronald Reagan. It was like saying President Merv Griffin. Reagan wasn't so much a president as the host. He was having such a good time playing president and going on vacation that he decided to run again.

I'm out and proud. When I'm out and it's raining I carry an umbrella. I used to be in but I hate the smell of moth balls. My closet was huge, complete with a foyer, turnstile, a few locks, dead bolts, and a burglar alarm that had to be deactivated before I could even touch the door handle. And then there was the storm door. It wasn't until I had lived and slept with a woman for a year that it occurred to me to ask, "Do you think were lesbians?" By the way, never come out to your father in a moving vehicle.

Now I've written a book. It's not as easy as it looks. One night, I was working late on my computer when a little message came up on the screen, "You are almost out of memory." Here are my thoughts and observations on everything from gay marriage (Mad Vow Disease) to my morbid fear of mascots (with the exception of the San Diego Chicken). Thats all I'm going to say because I don't want to spoil it for you. That's a job for Jesse Helms.

I'll leave you with one last anecdote: Once when my Dad was visiting, he sat through an evening of gay politics, gay theory, gay gossip, and toward the end of the discussion, my partner turned to him and asked, "Well, Mr. Clinton, what do you think we as gay people can do to make more bridges to straight people?" My Dad did one of his patented, exquisitely timed pauses and replied, "Keep talking."

About this title

About the Author

A self-described fumerist (feminist/humorist), Kate Clinton taught English for eight years before a writing workshop and improvisational class convinced her that her political views deserved a public hearing. She quit teaching, took a job as a window washer, and started her professional stand-up career in 1981, using politics, Catholicism, and her lesbianism as basic themes. She performs one-woman shows across the country and writes columns for the Progressive and the Advocate. She has appeared on Arsenio Hall, Good Morning America, Nightline, CNN, C-Span, and many other places. Although she has four comedy albums to her credit, Don't Get Me Started is her first book.

From the Back Cover

"Kate Clinton cracks me up."
--Melissa Etheridge

"She's funny, she's smart, she's gay. Read her book."
--Ellen DeGeneres

"Girls with mascara--watch out! Kate will have it running down your cheeks in no time flat. She reminds me of every mouthy Catholic girl I ever knew in high school. You know, the one who got you in trouble for making you laugh during study hall. Thank heaven Kate did get started. She makes the world a funnier place."
--Rosie O'Donnell

"Laugh out loud funny. For those of us who have watched Kate Clinton perform over the years, it's great to finally have her hilarious takes on life, love, and politics between the covers of this riotous book!"
--Caroline Hirsch, Caroline's Comedy Club

"Kate Clinton manages the neat trick of being deliciously sane. Her book is a joy, filled with tasty, politically dangerous thoughts; Kate is the person you want to sit next to in the back row."
--Paul Rudnick

From the Inside Flap

e thing straight. I'm not. And yes, my brother is Bill Clinton. But not the Bill Clinton. These two guys are very different. For one, whenever I hear President Bill speak--on gays in the military, healthcare reform--I hear that sound trucks make when they're backing up.

I was born on the cusp of Title IX, at a time when the sports pages claimed only men played sports. When people ask where I got my comedy training, I tell them teaching high school English. I began performing stand-up in 1981, the same year Ronald Reagan began his comedy. I never got used to saying President Ronald Reagan. It was like saying President Merv Griffin. Reagan wasn't so much a president as the host. He was having such a good time playing president and going on vacation that he decided to run again.

I'm out and proud. When I'm out and it's raining I carry an umbrella. I used to be in but I hate the smell of moth balls. My closet was huge, complete with a foyer, turnstile, a few locks,

Reviews

The product of an upstate New York Catholic girlhood, Clinton spent eight years teaching English before she took a leave, developed her feminist and lesbian consciousness and began writing. That writing turned into stand-up comedy. Since 1981, Clinton has been performing at festivals, universities and other sites outside the comedy club circuit. This book collects her routines and anecdotes, many of which work as prose, though they clearly would be elevated by performance. In contrast to the mainstream themes of many other comedian's books, Clinton's pointed politics and lesbian frame of reference are showcased here. She chronicles the emergence of gays: "We aren't so much a movement anymore as a niche market waiting to be scratched." Lamenting the programmed world of Disney, she dishes, "Old Walt must have been some kind of control queen." The Gulf War campaign she calls "Operation Just 'Cause George Bush Felt Like It.'" Clinton's comedy aims for more than the laughs, however. She recalls giving a great show in one small church basement in the South, with an audience "in desperate need of some news about their lives." And even though Clinton claims to feel "shame and guilt" about doing talk shows, she recalls how one young lesbian said that seeing her on the Maury Povich Show was a consciousness-raising moment and a relief from depression. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

prevariKate: 1.        phr. liar, liar, pants on fire.

The day Richard Nixon took the big dirt nap in 1994 was Earth Day, and a minor earthquake rattled Southern California near his burial site. I've always thought it wasn't so much an earthquake as the earth doing "Ptui" to get rid of him. Nixon was buried in San Clemente, French for "without a pardon," near the Nixon Library.

Presidents Ford, Carter, Bush, and Clinton made the service look like Four Presidents and a Funeral. I don't remember if Ronald Reagan was there, but neither does he. The first lady, Pat Nixon, or "Poor Pat" as she was usually referred to, was not there. She had predeceased her husband by five years. Who can blame her? Tricia Nixon Eisenhower was a reminder that we all had gotten older. Henry Kissinger mumbled through his eulogy, sounding like Marlene Dietrich doing "The Man I Love."

The funeral was another event in the long Nixon rehabilitation--he got us out of Vietnam (he did not), he started talks with China (it was the only country that would talk to us at the time), and the Watergate break-in was ordered by Hillary Clinton. It was an astounding bit of revisionism.

Nixon is dead! Long live Nixon as Newt Gingrich and his band of Republican House majority tricksters. The GOP hired O. J. Simpson, Kato "Pretty Street, No Cars" Kaelin and Lance "I saved Jay Leno's career" Ito to focus attention out west, away from the right side of the country while they dismantled the government in one hundred days or less, by taking out a "Contract on America." My theory is that Nixon ordered it from the grave.

But I get ahead of myself. I began performing stand-up comedy in 1981, the same year that Ronald Reagan began his comedy. The president was known as the master of the one-liner. His gigs were well produced and spun by a professional atmosphere queen, Michael Deaver. Security was a problem, and after the assassination attempt on Reagan, Alexander Haig did not reassure us with "I'm in charge now" from a White House Situation Room/Tanning booth.

After he was shot, Reagan achieved an untouchable quality. Mustn't make fun of him, hush, hush, he was almost assassinated. My theory is that the Republicans did it. I am not so callous as to suggest they shot him, that was Jodie Foster, but I am suggesting when he was in the hospital, Reagan was reconditioned. Same thing happened with the pope the same year.

Nancy Reagan was such a piece of work, she should have been on my comedy payroll. She seemed so lifelike. It was her Valium-laced frozen face that launched the War on Drugs with "Just Say No." The "thank you" was implied. At one photo op press conference, she toured a crack house and decried how awful it was, yet one suspected that for our Drug Czarina it had something to do with a plaid couch.

I never got used to saying "President Ronald Reagan." It was like saying "President Merv Griffin." Reagan wasn't so much a president as the host. He was having such a good time playing president and going on vacation that he decided to run again. The Democrats nominated Walter Mondale as sacrificial lamb and rightly suspected it was going to be a real rout, so they put a woman on the ticket, Geraldine Ferraro. That way they could lose heavily, then say "I told you so," and not try a woman again for another hundred years.

In his second term, Reagan completed the work of his first term--the rich got really rich, everything
was deregulated, advocacy programs were quashed, the Savings and Loan program was trashed, the deficit was tripled, unions were busted, Housing and Urban Development was in shambles, banks were closing, the military got lots of new toys, the religious right was stronger, and AIDS was ignored. This proved that the operation to make Reagan a perfect asshole had been a success.

During his second term, the Iran Contra scandal came to light, with the gap-toothed Caucasian soldier of fortune Oliver North running money through the White House so he could get his own talk show. In what later became the Alzheimer's defense, Reagan claimed he thought it was a war for drugs, not on drugs, and that Iraq was the past tense of Iran. He also said he thought it was Pittsburgh, not Bitburg.

Polls showed that people disliked everything Reagan was doing but somehow liked him as a person and thought he should run for a third term. There were rules against that in what was left of the Constitution, so Gramps couldn't run and besides he'd lost interest. The Republican Convention was held in Houston in August, so that Republican women could wear their furs
in the air-conditioning and nominate Vice President George Halcyon Bush.

My dad said George Bush seemed like a nice enough guy with lots of experience--senator, ambassador, head of the CIA under Nixon, vice president. I argued he just couldn't hold a job. Head of the CIA was the scariest thing on his r&eacute. When Curious George announced in the most emphatic tone he'd ever used that he didn't eat broccoli, never liked Broccoli, that even Bar couldn't make him eat BROCCOLI, I half suspected every time he said broccoli he was giving someone the signal to invade another Central American country.

When George Bush got the nod from his party he announced his running mate, a true comedy gift, Dan Quayle. Even though Doogie Quayle made Bush look downright presidential, he was not as unnerving as his brittle wife, Marilyn, who always gave the impression that it was really Lily Tomlin in there (still looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe). Dan went on to become a spokesman for Cliff's Notes and was himself a wonderful speaker. During one address to a Rotary Club luncheon at the Cincinnati Golf and Country Club, he quoted Rodney King, from the Los Angeles riots, "As Mr. King once said, 'Why can't we all get a lawn?'"

The Bush/Quayle ticket went up against the Dukakis/Bentsen ticket. Mr. Charisma Bypass, Michael Dukakis, lost me in the presidential debate, when CNN's Bernard Shaw asked the first question, "Mr. Dukakis, if your wife, Kitty, were raped and became pregnant, do you think she should be allowed to have an abortion?" When Dukakis did not jump over the table to punch Shaw out or say something like, "How dare you even put that idea into words, you little weasel," he lost me. Instead, the bloodless wonder, Dukakis ended up talking about drug kingpins; his campaign started warming up that tank.

Once he became president, George Bush revealed a vein of Styrofoam and no matter how deep he tried to go, he always ended up bobbing on the surface. His inaugural speech was like being present at the death of language, the original Dead Poets Society. After the Reagan years, there were only three people of color in the Republican Party. Their slogan was "Republicans--the Other White Meat." George Bush tried to dispel the "whites only" image of his party, often referring to his Mexican-American grandkids as "the little brown ones over there," and nominated Clarence Uncle Thomas to the Supreme Court.

All went smoothly during the nomination process of Clarence Thomas until Anita Hill came forward with her sexual harassment charges and was put on trial by the so-called Ethics Committee. Arlen Sphincter, of Pennsylvania, read his favorite passages from The Exorcist. Utah's Orrin Hatch looked as if he'd sat in something. And Joe "Hair Plugs for Men" Biden kept the proceedings going and going so long, I half expected to see one of those pink Energizer bunnies banging the drum slowly down the table.

Bush's approval ratings slipped. The election was drawing near. What to do, what to do? He started flexing his Commander in Chief muscle and invaded anything. Panama; Operation Just 'Cause George Felt Like It. Somalia; he should have sent in salad shooters. Saddam Hussein questioned George's manhood; Poppy went up to Maine, blasted around in his high-speed cigarette boat, thought things over, and finally invaded. It was all televised and managed by Norm Norm Big as a Dorm Schwartzkopf who went on to be a spokesman for the Quality Value home shopping channel.

The Operation was televised by CNN, though it should have been a Sunday afternoon sport show "Shooting Fish in a Barrel." The only good thing about the Operation was that Bernard Shaw was trapped under fire for three days in a hotel in Baghdad. Bush's ratings were boosted for a few minutes, even though he didn't really get the job done because the dictator Hussein is still alive in a bunker somewhere. His ratings hit an all-time low when he puked and landed facedown in the Japanese Prime Minister's lap, talking about jobs, jobs, jobs.

Presidential candidates should be drug-tested. Take it from me, you cannot fly to forty cities in two days and not take drugs. I know they didn't fly through Newark. By the end of the 1992 campaign, George was hanging off the backs of trains, talking about bozos, wacked out on Ritalin. He was defeated by Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton who was speeding nonstop on white sugar and junk food.

After Gramps and Poppy, President Bill Clinton (no relation) was like having your brother as president. He could talk, and after twelve years of pretty wild syntactic rides, it was nice not to wince every time the president opened his mouth.

The first strains of "Inhale to the Chief" had not even died down, though, and I was disappointed in Clinton. This is a lot like saying, "I'm so disappointed in the patriarchy." He backed up on gays in the military, health care reform, Lani Guinier, welfare reform. Whenever he talked, I swore I could hear that backing-up sound trucks make.

When President Clinton announced in a State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over," it sounded like vintage Reagan with a touch of Elvis. When he sign...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345388879
• ISBN 13: 9780345388872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 199