On August 10, at the historic Cherry Grove Community House, thanks to the Arts Project of Cherry Grove, with special thanks to APCG liaison Anita Auricchio, comic Suzanne Westenhoefer, returning to the Grove for the first time in 30 years, triumphed in a two-hour, intermissionless show, “Fearless, Bold, Unapologetic—and Freaking Hilarious,” holding us spellbound, as she covered so very many pertinent subjects that one could hardly count them.
Westenhoefer hails from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Los Angeles with her girlfriend, who comes from Plymouth, Massachusetts. She came out to us as 58 years old—on age: “it sneaks up on you”—and finds herself momentarily forgetting “one-syllable words” that she knows very well. To girlfriend or partner, however, she prefers the word “sodomite—doesn’t that sound bad-ass?” and the Right won’t want to take it away from us.
She remembered July 31, 1990, when she first performed in a comedy club in New York City, coming out as a lesbian on stage, seeing men in the audience clutch their wives or girlfriends possessively, and thinking “like I couldn’t get her if I wanted to!”
Westenhoefer wondered why gay resorts, like Provincetown and Fire Island, are so hard to get to, and waxed nostalgic about coming here in the 1980s, “when it was fun to be gay,” “when we were special, unusual.” She’s an activist, a veteran of ACT-UP, Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers, and many fundraisers, and wants to say to the 17-year-old lesbian, who blithely says she’s taking her girlfriend to the prom, “Can’t you just suffer a little?”
Westenhoefer spoke of the Dinah, in Palm Springs, commenting, “There are girls who go now who don’t even know golf is happening.” On the VIP line there, she passed women on the regular line and heard one of them asking, about her, “Is that Dinah Shore?”
She met and worked with Joan Rivers—“She was a wonderful” person, who taught her that greeting the fans, signing autographs, and posing for pictures was as much part of her job as performing on stage is.
The Westenhoefer “family folklore,” she shared, was that they came from Baden Baden, Germany, and had been in Lancaster since the late 1700s, but when she had her DNA checked, she turned out to be not only mostly Scandinavian, but also some other surprising ethnicities. She told us about her sisters, one a lesbian, the other a Fundamentalist, and their mother, so very supportive of her and, coming to her shows, befriending the dragqueens and others in the audiences.
Westenhoefer has entertained extensively on the cruise ships, and compared the lesbians and gay men she’s met on them: the lesbians, who pack sparingly and get up at 6 a.m. to hike and bike and still be back on the ship by 2 p.m. to play Bingo, and the gay men, who pack elaborately, rise at noon, and decide not to leave the ship at all.
A pet peeve is “the letters”—first an L added to the G, and then BT, but more recently, confusingly, a Q or two, I, A, and a host of pluses—it’s too much!
If Westenhoefer makes an appearance in your neighborhood or your city, GO!