Age: 37.
Birthplace: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Current home: Los Angeles.
Occupation: Comedian.
Marital status: Single.
Working on: A Showtime movie, ”No Life To Live.”
Worst job: I got $50 to play at a redneck bar. My friends had to save me from being trampled to death.
The last good movie I saw was: ”400 Blows.”
I stay home to watch: As many movies about insects as possible. I`m fascinated by their lovemaking, and I try to learn from them.
The books I`ve been recommending lately: Anything by Richard Yates. I just finished his ”Young Hearts Crying,” and it was astonishing.
Favorite performers: Bruce Springsteen and Bette Midler.
Every New Year`s I resolve: To continue making the same mistakes I`ve made in the past.
Nobody knows I`m: A short Czechoslovakian folk singer.
I wish I could stop: Blaming everything negative I do on my family.
I`m better than anyone else when it comes to: Crying in bed after sex.
If I could do it over, I`d: Be a home-run hitter.
I`d give anything to meet: Joseph Heller and John Cassavetes.
If I just had more time, I`d: Stay home and worry.
If I could change one thing about myself, it would be: My posture. I look like an anteater onstage.
Superstition: I`m afraid of most major religious holidays.
The best time of my life: When I was in the womb.
The worst time of my life: Coming out.
My friends like me because: I love listening to their problems. It`s one of the few times I`m not in touch with my own.
If I couldn`t be a comedian, I`d love to be an: Architect and design homes for problem families.
My most humbling experience: Performing at a state fair 15 years ago with the audience a quarter of a mile away. Between us was a parade of mutant animals. It`s hard to compete with a camel with 22 humps.
A century and a half ago an 18-year-old woman, not quite 5 feet tall, became Queen of England. In ”Victoria” (E.P. Dutton), biographer Stanley Weintraub provides an intimate portrait of the woman who reigned for 64 years, longer than any other English monarch, and survived rivals, plots and intimidation from all quarters.
Q–The Victorian Era has come to mean a very prudish time. Was Victoria herself a prude?
A–Not at all. When it came to sex, she truly enjoyed it. Before she got married, she interviewed various prospective husbands and finally chose the handsome young Prince Albert. It was a real love match. The morning after her wedding night, she wrote her prime minister about her ”most gratifying and bewildering night.” Much later she wrote her daughter Vicky that the marital bed was ”a foretaste of heaven.”
Q–Can you give us another myth about Victoria that you found to be false?
A–One is that after Prince Albert died, she mourned him for the rest of her life and isolated herself from the throne. He died when she was 42, and she did mourn him for 10 years, but then something happened that pulled her out of it. She got a severe throat infection that nearly killed her. She suddenly realized that if she died, the throne would go to her ne`er-do-well son Edward, who was a womanizer, a gambler and a drinker. So she tried to outlive him, and she almost did.
Q–How come she never remarried?
A–She felt Albert was about as ideal a spouse as could exist. She carried his picture with her all the time and really thought of him as a palpable presence in her life. She would take out his picture and show it things that Albert in life had never seen, like a church she visited in Florence, Italy. She slept with that picture on a pillow next to her.
Q–She sounds a little strange.
A–Well, in that respect she really wasn`t unlike the rest of us, was she?
Q–What was she like in later life?
A–She became ”the woman warrior.” During the Boer War between the British and the Dutch colonists in South Africa, she was nearly blind from cataracts and had a lame leg that kept her in a wheelchair. Despite those disabilities she would often rally the troops. Deciding to give each soldier a Christmas present in 1899, she had boxes of chocolate made with her head embossed on the tin lid. It was a tremendously successful gesture, and the soldiers treasured the boxes. One of the boxes, in fact, stopped a bullet and saved a man`s life.
