A Big No for Miss Cho

On Friday my friend Maureen and I went to see Margaret Cho at Dartmouth College. I was a looking forward to the show. I have been a fan of Margaret’s for years, but have never seen her in person.

Dartmouth College is the small town of Hanover in northern New Hampshire on the Vermont border. This town is a Norman Rockwell wet dream, very picturesque, filled with false liberalism, and no minorities unless they are students of course, but if you think they’ll sell property to them, think again.

To get to the theater we had to walk through the foyer of the main campus building, Maureen pointed out all on the rainbow flags on the student mailboxes. Great the place will be overrun with earthy lesbians, I thought. When we took our seats I realized I wasn’t far from wrong. “If I have to sit next to some patchouli stinking hippie, I am going to be very unhappy,” I told Maureen as I tried to fold my legs in a way that would make them fit in the extremely small space that was provide for them.

Margaret started the show with some new material about 2 minutes worth. After that it was nothing but jokes and stories I’d heard before, some classic others not so classic. It was like listening to a bad Greatest Hits package from a great band. The show had no direction or continuity. It barley lasted an hour we drove longer then that to get there.

Although I laughed and thought most of it was funny she wasn’t able to make a real connection with the audience. Never once did I think the whole room was with her. Maybe jokes about urban gay men aren’t as funny to a mostly affluent white community in the middle of nowhere as they are to boys in Ptown.

If there was such thing as an honorary homo Margaret would be one, however I can’t help resent it when she refers to the gay community as “our community”. She said, (paraphrasing) “ If you laugh your ass off at Will and Grace, but you’re against gay marriage then fuck you. You don’t get to pick and choose what part of our community you like and don’t like.” Which of course I agree with, but at the end of the day she is a straight woman who can get married. She is still just a guest in “our” community. I would never assume I know what it’s like to be in ethnic minority by saying “my people”, please don’t do the same to me.