Mad Tv Sketches

"I came to the door of Kathy Najimy's very warm, feng shui'd home. Her hair was pulled back and wet. She looked surprisingly young. She had a little bit of lip gloss on her lips and not much more--casual yet professional. I was struck by, um, her dainty bones, the Julianne Moore-like look in her eyes.

"That's how [writers] always start [celebrity interviews] out," says Kathy Najimy. "But never on mine."

This is, quite literally, how Najimy starts out her interview with me on an impossibly hot Los Angeles day in late April. It's the start of an afternoon that defies the cliches of the "celebrity interview."

For starters, a sick nanny means Mo Gaffney, Najimy's longtime partner in comedy, can't make it as planned to Najimy's Hollywood hills home. (For the record, her home is very inviting, if littered with photos of Najimy's husband, friends, and 7-yearold daughter, Samia.)

I'm here to talk about Afterbirth: Kathy & Mo's Greatest Hits, which opens on June 11 for a one-month off-Broadway run as part of the 25th-anniversary season of New York City's Second Stage Theatre. Having just wrapped a hit run in Los Angeles, the show is a blend of skits from the previous Kathy and Mo shows Parallel Lives and The Dark Side, their ground-breakingly frank and funny statements on feminism, gay rights, and religion.

Since The Dark Side's 1996 HBO broadcast, both women have gone on to much individual success, Najimy in movies like Sister Act and TV shows Veronica's Closet and King of the Hill, Gaffney in recurring roles on Absolutely Fabulous, Mad About You, and That '70s Show. They've retained their close friendship throughout--as well as their fierce need to speak out on issues like gay rights and a women's right to choose.

In fact, Najimy has just returned from the March on Washington for Freedom of Choice, the massive pro-choice protest in the nation's capital. It" I had any question whether Najimy has kept her edge, it evaporates when I bring up the man who ended up enemy number 1 at that pro-choice protest: George W. Bush.

"I think he hates women and fears them and resents them with every fiber of his being. I think he hates gays and is afraid of them with every fiber of his being. And I think he hates minorities." Najimy pauses briefly to chuckle that she's "going to get killed" for this opinion and then adds in the same breath that Bush is "all about swaggering and showing. There's nothing in him so far that shows he cares about human beings. I think he's a dangerous person; I don't think he has a good heart."

It's around this point that Najimy asks me if I'm single (I am), and as we drive in my beat-up Nissan to Gaffney's home in the San Fernando Valley, she does a little casual match making. ("Do you know so-and-so? You should.") She talks about her family vacationing with Melissa Etheridge's--It's rare when the parents are friends and the kids are friends too"--and explains her beef with all the dead--or-missing mothers in the Disney oeuvre. (This is, in fact, the theme of one of the few new sketches in Afterbirth.)

We arrive at Gaffney's in-the-midst-of-redecorating home, and with her adorably precocious 4-year-old son, Jack, playing in the background, the duo waste no time rifling off my questions. Watching their back-and-forth is like watching two halves of the same brain--where Najimy is all deadpan, Gaffney loves to laugh, especially at her partner's jokes.

Kathy: We do a lot of preparation before the show. Me comes to the theater about four hours early.

Mo: Four and a half.

Kathy: She had a cellar built--just a little room on the side. We don't quite know what she does in there for 4 1/2, hours, but when she comes out She's covered in spaghetti sauce and usually a few hives.

Mo: I'm allergic to the acid--

Kathy: In the sauce. But she's good that night.

Mo: Well, Kathy, oddly enough, brings ... I think it's three or four Southeast Asian people.

Kathy: Three. Don't make it sound base.

Mo: They're from a troupe in Southeast Asia that do body work, mostly, and that's where Kathy frees her mind of her body. They actually have a giant ... you know, a balance beam? It's like that, but in Southeast Asia it's completely different.

Next question: Given all the gay content of the Kathy and Mo shows and the fact that Gaffney is a single mother who had her son with a gay male friend (whose name she prefers to keep private), one could reasonably assume that Kathy and Mo are, well, 'mos. One wouldn't be right, but one wouldn't be totally wrong either.

"You know, we're both so soft-edged straight," Najimy says after talking about the six gay couples who attended her daughter's first birthday party. "Neither of us define ourselves as heterosexual."

"I think [the press] would like us to define ourselves as something," Gaffney adds with a laugh. "Are you straight or gay? 'Yeah.'"

Then I ask about gay people's affinity for making sport of speculating about the sexuality of certain celebrities, and it's like I've tossed a gas can into an already robustly burning fire. "It promotes fear; it doesn't promote understanding or inclusiveness," Gaffney asserts. She hasn't lost any edge either. "They're not saying, 'If you come out, I'm going to be here for you and support yon in every way I can.' They're saying, 'You better come out, or we're gonna make you come out!' and it's like, 'Oh, thank you, that's very brotherly and sisterly of you.'

"What we all should do, whether we're gay or straight or have no idea what we are, is just make a world where that shame doesn't need to exist," Gaffney concludes. "Being gay is a fact of life. That's all it is. It's no better, no worse, no anything than anything else. It's just a fact, and it's hard for people to deal with that."

Next topic: What's up after Afterbirth? While neither misses the rigors of performing seven shows a week, they say they're looking at doing a run of once-a-week shows in Los Angeles, and they're being courted to headline a gay and lesbian cruise. Meanwhile, Najimy is starring next in Peter Paige's directorial debut, and Gaffney says she's heading to London this summer to work with Jennifer Saunders on developing a spin-off of her AbFab character, the "weird American opportunist" Bo.

As I leave, Gaffney's son Jack asks me to squeeze his biceps, and then he squeezes mine--somehow, his is more impressive. As we're leaving, a final twist: I think I've lost my cell phone. So i leave my home number with Najimy in case it's sitting at her home.

When I get back to mine, this voice-mail message is waiting for me: "Hi, Adam, it's Kathy. What're you wearing? What're you doing? Really? All right, it was nice to meet you. Write a good article. 'Cause if you don't, I have an in with the gays. I could turn them against you like that."

Vary also writes for Entertainment Weekly.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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