Judy Gold has '25 Questions for a Jewish Mother'
Standup comic Judy Gold had a lot more than 25 questions about Jewish mothers before she first performed her one-woman show "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother" back in 2002. She had heaps of them, many of which she'd been asking her own mother, Ruth, for decades - many of which, in fact, became fodder for Gold's impersonations of her mother in her standup routine.
When the show, in which Gold plays 12 different characters - and yes, Gold's mom is one of them - comes to the Huntington Theatre's Calderwood Pavilion, Dec. 18-31, it'll be a greatly retooled version, pretty much unrecognizable from the original Seattle run.
"That show didn't get great reviews, so we did readings in front of people, and rewrote it," says Gold of her work with playwright Kate Moira Ryan. "About 30 scripts later we ended up at the Comedy Festival in Montreal in 2005. It was an entirely new show and there were raves. When we opened up in New York it was sold out."
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<param value="transparent" name="wmode" />width="425" height="355" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6MNHdJ0aM2Erel=1"></embed></object>The show consists of material culled from more than 50 interviews that Gold and Ryan conducted with Jewish mothers all over the country."We started doing this in Queens," says New York-based Gold. Whenever she went out on the road to do standup, she would call synagogues to ask for recommendations of people to interview. Thirty minutes were allotted for the sessions, each of which began with the same question: What makes a Jewish mother different from a non-Jewish mother?"We did it in their homes and offices or they came to my hotel room," recalls Gold of her five years of research. "We did the gamut - reform, orthodox, conservative, black, white, gay, straight. They ranged from their 20s to their mid-90s. The only thing they had in common is they were Jewish, they were mothers, and there was always food if we went to someone's house."The 6-foot-3, 45-year-old Gold is gay, a single mother of two children, and has been doing standup since the comedy boom of the mid-1980s, when she and other New Yorkers would regularly visit Boston to play clubs such as Nick's and Kowloon's.The show turns out to be as much about her as about the women she brings to life onstage."I'm out there alone, and I actually become the women," she explains. "The way the show is structured is my story is weaved into these questions. I get to a point in my life where I ask one of these questions to myself, and I have one of the women answer it."My journey has changed," she adds. "I mean, here I am, this gay mom, with two kids, I'm Jewish, my kids go to Hebrew school, I'm in clubs all night, cursing at people. Yet I feel like I have a traditional, kosher home. So where do I fit in?"Gold discovered that she fit comfortably within the world of comedy. "In my sophomore year [at Rutgers University], someone dared me to do standup comedy," she says. "It was Secret Santas. Instead of gifts, we used to make people do things. Someone said I had to do a standup routine, using the people on the floor as my material. So I wrote jokes about everyone on the floor, and I swear I got high from that. And then the comedy clubs were sort of my graduate school. I started hanging out and trying to get on. It's the most amazing feeling getting a laugh."After college, I didn't want to be one of those comics that was hanging around going, 'I have no money! I can't eat!' So I worked as a typesetter at a magazine during the day and I went to the clubs every night. The first time I was on TV was when someone who was scheduled at Caroline's Comedy Club in New York missed a plane. The club called and said to come down, right now. Gold has since been featured on Comedy Central specials, has served as co-host on "The View" and has written and produced for "The Rosie O'Donnell Show."Yet even with the success of "25 Questions," which will also go to Washington D.C., Queens, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Tucson, Gold has never been able to shake the standup bug."The show is incredibly gratifying and is such a labor of love," she says. "But I still have to go do standup. If the show ends early, I run over to a club and do something."<em> Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@cnc.com.