David Roche stands before an audience at the University of Illinois at Chicago and invites them to ask the obvious question: “David, what happened to your face?”
His own question drifts back to him across the windowless lecture hall, repeated calmly and clearly, but Roche, 63, a puckish figure with sky-blue eyes and a plum-colored silk shirt, isn’t satisfied: “I think that wasn’t sincere enough. Let’s try again: 1-2-3!”
“David, what happened to your face?” the crowd roars.
“That’s good! Thank you very much,” Roche says. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Roche, a pioneer in the field of disability arts, didn’t even talk about his face, which is swollen, lopsided and marked by purple veins, until he was in his 40s. Since then, he has not only opened up to friends and family about his rare vascular condition but also to strangers, performing his wry and fearless brand of disability-based humor in Russia, England, Australia and Canada, as well as across the U.S. and at the White House.
“David is incredibly known throughout the world in the disability community,” says Deborah Cohen, executive director of the Toronto-based Abilities Arts Festival.
“He kind of led the way to say that it’s OK: That quality, in terms of performance, is the key issue and anything else is secondary. [He] really did open the door for a whole range of other people to say, ‘OK, maybe I can do this.’ “
During his visit to Chicago, where he performed at UIC and the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern, Roche, who is at once gregarious and guarded — generous with hugs and double-entendres but stingy with information about his inner life — talked about his long, strange trip to the stage.
The eldest child of a factory foreman and a homemaker/small-business manager, Roche was born with an almost imperceptible benign tumor consisting of swollen blood vessels. When he was a year old, the tumor burst forth, with the result that the lower part of his face “looked like a bunch of Concord grapes,” Roche says.
Early sense of humor
A number of surgeries followed. His lower lip was removed, he received so much radiation that the lower part of his face stopped growing and he lost most of his teeth. Still, his childhood in Highland, Ind., was a relatively good one, with occasional teasing but lots of friends, thanks in part to a finely honed sense of humor.
“In my family — seven kids, Irish Catholic, what did we like to do? We liked to talk and be funny,” says Roche, now of Marin County, Calif.
“Like, at the dinner table, my dad would say, ‘OK, Kevin. Stand up and give a two-minute speech on what it’s like to live inside a Ping-Pong ball.’ And it was hilarious. And of course, we’d all be on him, and you’d develop a sense of being a performer.”
Roche was a performer without hope of a career: “The only time you’d see someone like me [performing] was at the county fair in the freak show, so I never felt like I had permission.”
Instead, he tried the priesthood, attending seminary for four years, before being kicked out — for, he says, being insolent and insufficiently pious. He also tried graduate school, computer programming and community organizing — getting married and divorced and having a daughter, now 39, along the way — before he reached a turning point, at 45.
A couple of things happened then, he says, among them that he cared for a friend dying of AIDS. “It was one of those gifts from a dying person: that love is the most important thing.”
He went home after his friend died, and he asked his future wife, Marlena Blavin, a massage therapist whom he had been seeing for more than six months, if she wanted to know about his face.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.
Stopped drinking
He also stopped drinking and enrolled in a class called “Recovery Humor” that stressed truth-telling over jokes. He landed his first gig two months later, an erotic boutique in San Francisco with “all kinds of devices on the wall.” Within six years, he was performing full time as a humorist and motivational speaker.
During his talk at UIC, he told an audience of about two dozen people, many of them students in the field of disability studies, how he handles odd reactions to his face: “I don’t care because I belong to a gang — all the cool facially different guys in showbiz,” including Freddy Krueger and Frankenstein.
The gang hangs out in the bushes, Roche says, “and every once in a while we get to jump out and strangle somebody cute.”
But, seriously folks: “Through most of my life I’ve been ashamed of the way that I look. Now, I’ve come to understand that my face is a gift. Not the kind of gift that I was really excited about, the kind of gift where you open it and say, ‘Oh! That is so cool! How did you know what I wanted?’ …
“But it is a gift. It’s a gift because my shadow side is on the outside. I’ve been forced to find my inner beauty. I feel like I’m the lucky one because I know so many people who think that if they have a nice car, or if they get a good haircut, or if they get a breast augmentation, or really nice clothes, then they’ll be happy.
“But I learned early on that it doesn’t work that way. My face is a gift.” ———-
nschoenberg@tribune.com
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Humor rules in Roche’s Church of 80% Sincerity
In his signature act “The Church of 80 Percent Sincerity,” and his upcoming book from Perigee/Penguin Group by the same name, David Roche stresses the importance — and difficulty — of accepting yourself as you really are. The following quotes are from a recent appearance at UIC.
On his past as a Catholic and a Marxist-Leninist:
“I couldn’t live up to the standards of being like Jesus and Lenin, so I started the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity — the church of choice for recovering perfectionists, OK? We believe 80 percent sincerity is as good as it’s going to get. …
“So 80 percent sincerity, 80 percent compassion, 80 percent kindness, 80 percent celibacy. …”
Dave tried to look himself in the mirror and say, “I love you,” but . . .: “I couldn’t do it. ‘Cause I didn’t love myself. But don’t worry. We’re the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity; you don’t change the individual, you change the practice. I don’t have to look at myself in the eye. I can do it in the manly way. I can say what I really think:
” ‘Hey, Dave, you’re a nice man. You’ve got a nice sense of humor. But I don’t, uh, love you. Um, I just think I’m not ready to make a commitment at this time. Maybe we could just be friends.’ “
Not that Dave doesn’t love himself:
“But you know what? I have the same difficulty loving myself as loving anyone else. You know how it is when you first fall in love with yourself? Everything you do is so cute? …
“But soon all those things that attracted you to yourself — just like in any other relationship — are revealed as rather repulsive, disgusting things? I can’t stand the noise I make when I eat. I leave the toilet up. I’ve broken up with myself a number of times, but I keep coming back, because I’m attached to myself.”
