THE BALLAD OF DONNA NOXIOUS

Bombing as a performance teen

When I was in my mid-teens — 15 and 16, respectively — I won a strange event hosted by a theater that I had grown up doing plays in:  The Mug Root Beer Junior Comedy Competition, which had some very fine comedians judging it: Will Durst, Paula Poundstone, Michael Pritchard, and some others I can’t remember.  Anyway, I won two years in a row against not much competition.  There was one kid whose dad had been a Tonight Show writer who had nice professional delivery, but my act took more weird chances. 

The whole competition was sort of meaningless, since there aren’t really any comedy venues for teens to perform in (comedy clubs are bars, for the most part, but I did do one open mike at the Holy City Zoo, a fantastic comedy venue in San Francisco where I made my mom take me to see Bobcat Goldthwaite. We met him, but he was in no mood to meet a mom with her 15-year old fan.)  But I did end up getting some local press…. and this turned into a one-off job that I would end up regretting for the rest of my life. 

A rich guy called me up (through my Mom, who was acting as Momager), because he wanted me to roast his best friend at his friend’s birthday party.  

“You have to take it, it’s a gig,” said my mother, the working pianist. 

 I took a bus into the city in order to meet with my prospective employer in his penthouse law office in the Embarcadero. I had never been in such a luxurious place of employment.  It was all tall glass windows overlooking the bay.  

“My friend is so weird,” the rich guy with his pinstriped suit and slicked-back hair told me, looking like an extra from the move “Wall Street,” squeaking around behind his broad mahogany desk in his black leather chair.  “First, his house looks like an actual castle — it’s made of cement.”  I knew the house, which was visible from one of the main streets in San Francisco.  It had dark concrete battlements surrounding it, and small windows — it resembled a medieval prison.  The birthday boy, I would learn, was the heir to one of the largest industrial packaged meat corporations in the United States. 

“His wife is Swedish, and they’re miserable all the time,” the rich guy continued.  “They’re rich as hell, but their house is very dark and cold, and they’re all depressed all the time.  It’s like an Ingmar Bergman movie!”  I was furiously taking notes, never having been asked to do anything like this before.  I was there for about an hour, absorbing a slurry of character assassinations I was to level at this powerful man’s best friend, in front of his other friends, for laughs.  I thanked the man, assured him of a solid performance, and took my notebook and went home. 

I set about creating a character for the event.  Since I was a punk rocker, I opted to stick with that.  I put on all my extra-punk regalia — a particular tattered 40’s ballgown I’d scissored off at the knees — I teased my hair into a ratty blonde afro, wore pounds of rhinestone jewelry and adopted an oversize Valley Girl accent.  I opted to call myself “Donna Noxious” for the event — a character not wholly unlike my own, only more Goth punk and dumb.  

My mother escorted me to the party, as my general support. 

The party was in the castle house in question.  It was, as his friend promised, incredibly dark and cold — dark wood floors, very little natural light.  The view of the immediate area was not particularly inspiring  — it looked over one of the less scenic commercial streets.  The guests at the party were all well-shod San Franciscans in their forties — women with real jewelry in modestly cut female offerings in wool from Wilkes Bashford, the local haberdasher to the wealthy; the men were in suits.  The birthday boy, a balding, sallow man, wore a button-up shirt and cashmere sweater. 

This was not a style of adult I had ever been in proximity to, before.  Freeways had been built in the 1950’s, in large part to make sure that people like me never made it into such homes.

After a while, most of the frozen guests were standing around in one of the joyless living areas, and I was introduced by the rich guy who had hired me.  The adults formed a kind of semi-circle around me, and stared at me expectantly. 

“Hi, I’m Donna Noxious, and I’m here to tell you a few things about my friend, the Meat King,” I said — that or something like it - and I launched into the scathing monologue my mother had been helping me refine. 

I can’t remember a single thing I said.  The only thing I remember was that all of the alleged lines of hilarity that the rich guy had supplied me with were provoking open mouthed displays of horror from the guests, who didn’t find them funny at all.  The birthday boy was staring at me with a sad expression on his face that said, “But…why?” The whole concept of roasting was entirely lost on them, and it felt like real feelings were being hurt immediately.  

I knew ten seconds that the entire five minute monologue was going to be a total shit show.   I went into some kind of trance state and burbled out the rest of my lines as gamely as I could in my Yo Dude California accent. 

I could feel the waves of disgust, discomfort and non-amusement emanating from my audience.  Who was this horrible dog-collared teen street urchin, befouling the genteel mood of this occasion by grievously insulting the man of the hour, and his pale, depressive family?  What act of bad taste allowed this to happen? 

I only remember my final line:  “And on top of all of this, he has rather obvious Swedish hair plug implants.”  This was true — the birthday boy’s bald scalp had an array of evenly spaced scar holes all over the front, like a doll head.  He seemed to shudder and redden at the mention of them. 

I exited the floor to an arctic chill of mild and reluctant golf clapping — the clippety claps of conservative distaste and disdain.  

My mother hustled me out of there fairly quickly, once the damage was done.  I was paid — something like $400.  It felt dirty. 

It was a tough audience — tough enough to make me realize that even the very rich could be miserable and mirthless. Maybe even especially the very rich. 

Artwork: “1949 Mercury Lead Sled", oil on linen, Cintra Wilson, 2019.