Wendy Kamenoff, Las Vegas Sun

Columnist Lisa Ferguson: Kamenoff coaches performers to get the words out Lisa Ferguson Friday, July 29, 2005 | 8:14 a.m. Everyone has a story to tell, and Wendy Kamenoff has made it her business to help them extract every last detail. The actress/comedian, who performs through Sunday at Riviera Comedy Club, is also a teacher. She leads several classes for writers and performers in the Los Angeles area. One of them, called Tasty Words, is a "spoken-word salon" that marries live music and storytelling to stand-up comedy. Another workshop, titled Solo Writing from the Soul, is described by Kamenoff as "an intensive, sort of soup-to-nuts" program designed to provide the necessary tools to those interested in penning their own one-person stage shows. It's a subject the single mother of a preteen son knows something about: The Cherry Hill, N.J., native performed during college at New York University, where her 1982 senior thesis was an autobiographical, one-woman show called "Sweatpants." "It never occurred to me that you could just get up and tell your stories and people would laugh and there was something to that," Kamenoff recalled of discovering her comedy prowess during a recent call from her Santa Monica, Calif., home. Soon after, she began working the Big Apple comedy scene and eventually took to the road for gigs at clubs and college campuses. "That's what I love about stand-up: It is interaction with the audience," she says. The process is similar to acting in a play when "you're giving and taking with that other performer." "In stand-up in a comedy club, the other performer in a scene is the audience ... Their line in the script is to laugh -- they just may not know it. But if they miss their cue and they're not laughing, then you've gotta send something else out, you've gotta change your next line." For a time Kamenoff -- who has appeared on television's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "The Bernie Mac Show" and "All My Children," among other shows -- played the road with her former husband, comedian Steve Mittleman, performing a comedy show titled "Breakfast with The Mittlemans" at venues throughout the country. In 1986 Kamenoff moved to Southern California and found work warming up studio audiences during tapings of sitcoms including "The Tracey Ullman Show," "The Larry Sanders Show" and "Mad About You," a gig that she says challenges one's multitasking abilities. Besides keeping show-goers laughing between takes, she explains, "You're telling them what's gonna happen in the next scene ... and, 'The exits are over there, and the bathrooms are over there, and everybody turn off your pagers and cell phones.' That's the job." In the early '90s Kamenoff penned and staged another one-woman show, "Undressing New Jersey and Other States of Mind." In it, she portrayed a dozen characters from her past, nabbing a Dramalogue Award for her efforts. "That was kind of a coming-of-age story about (how) there is life beyond the mall," which touched on many of her personal milestones: "First cigarette, first kiss, leaving home for the first time, going to the big city of New York -- kind of looking at things in my life." Kamenoff is working on what she calls the "second half" of "Undressing": another one-woman show titled "Call Me Every Five Minutes," a portion of which she's scheduled to stage in L.A. in late August. The story was inspired by the 2002 death of her close friend, comedian-writer Judy Toll, who worked behind the scenes on "Sex and The City" and the 1988 flick "Casual Sex." Its premise "is all about how sometimes it takes death to wake us up to our own lives," Kamenoff explains. She intends to also turn the piece into a book and a feature film. Meanwhile, the 44-year-old comedian is gearing up for the January publication of "You've Got Meal" (Champion Press), a tome about the trials and tribulations of dieting, which she co-authored with longtime friend Elisa Trolin Owen. Kamenoff anticipates scheduling a handful of stand-up dates early next year to coincide with a tour promoting the book. She performs her comedy act in storyteller fashion. "There's more of a roller-coaster (feel) to it, so it's like life," she explains, describing her material as "what a real woman in her 40s deals with: being single, raising a child, juggling a career, and also dating and love and all that stuff." Also on Kamenoff's schedule (the bulk of which is posted on www.wendykamenoff.com) is developing "The Hungry and Horny Show," slated to be staged in L.A. in September. The theme of the show, which will star an all-female-comics cast, is "all the hungers -- sexual, spiritual, literal. It's basically funny monologues about food and sex ... People are hungry for this stuff." They also hunger, she insists, to share their personal tales. "Basically, people have stories, and if they don't tell them to other people, they get lost." That doesn't mean, however, that all stories make for good solo-show material. "You need to have gone through something and survived it and come out the other end and be able to talk about it," she says. "If people come to me and say, 'I had a really normal life and everybody loves me and not much happened,' I'm like, 'That's nice, good for you. I don't know if we have a show there.' Usually some kind of trial has to occur, people have to go through some sort of fire and come out of it." Kamenoff points to an expression utilized in 12-step recovery programs: " 'We're as sick as our secrets.' As soon as you get people to open up about their inside stuff, you realize that we're not as different as we think we are." Out of laughs In keeping with the theme of exposing personal sagas, I'll share a bit of mine in this final installment of Laugh Lines, which also serves to close the book on my 14-year career with the Las Vegas Sun. The decision to relinquish one of my babies (this column) in order to spend more time with another (a toddler at home) and tend to some private matters was a bittersweet one, seeing as how I've spent my entire adult life up to this point working for the Sun -- first as a reporter, then as assistant features editor and, finally, a columnist. In nearly a decade and a half, I've interviewed more celebrities -- actual and quasi, at various stages of stardom -- than I could ever hope to recall. My eyes have ached from proofreading dozens of pages in a single day. Of course, they also witnessed the passionate, promising works of a good many up-and-coming artists. I've chatted it up with pop-culture icons at some of the city's hippest hangouts. Then again, I've sat around the kitchen tables of average folks, absorbing their tales of tragedy and triumph. It's all I ever wanted to do -- and then some. A few thank-yous before I go: To former Accent editor Phil Hagen, who took a chance by hiring a ridiculously green, 18-year-old UNLV freshman onto his staff and teaching her how to be a reporter, turning her childhood dream into a reality. Same goes for former editor Steve Bornfeld who, in the late '90s, made me second in command of the section; and current Accent editor John Katsilometes, who's been a terrific boss and an even better friend. Finally, thanks to Managing Editor Michael Kelley, who supported my career as it progressed and ultimately changed direction in step with my personal life; and to Sun staffers, past and present, who most days felt more like family to me than my own brood. It's doubtful my story is the stuff of which stage shows are made. Still, I'm honored to have been able to share it -- and countless others -- with you.