Your Kmart nightmare has not only returned –
she’s moved in. That’s right. Lexington is
now home to the comedian who created Etta May, the bespectacled,
be-kerchiefed lady with the no-nonsense drawl, salty domestic
humor and voracious appetite for discount shopping.
For 17 years, she lived in Los Angeles. Then, this summer,
she up and moved to Lexington
Um, why
As it turns out, she wanted to leave the rat race and
start living life
The comedian, who hails from Iowa and prefers to use
her stage name in interviews, had already chased a career
and fame. Throughout her 14 years in the business, she
has packed quite a few achievements into Etta’s
skin-tight polyesters” 1999’s Comedienne of
the Year, a recurring role on ABC’s Davis Rules,
an Oprah appearance and her own syndicated radio segment
But this spring in L.A., something pushed her to the
limit
“It’s a weird process out there,”
said Etta May, 38. “You’re looking at these
25-and 26-year-old Beverly Hills kids that are in authority
positions and you wanna go: “You little pinheads,
you’re gonna be out of a job sooner than I will.”
She and her writing partner had pushed for months to
pitch a sitcom revolving around Etta May of Bald Knob,
Ark., as a sort of “white-trash Martha Stewart.”
They finally sat down with Comedy Central
After making the pitch, she recalled, the Comedy Central
folks said: “Well, you know our target market is
15- to 26 year-old males, and we just don’t think
this would appeal – a white-trash how-to show.”
“And I said: “I guess we could do 26 episodes
on how to masturbate into a sock.”
“At that point, I knew I was done with L.A.”
Meeting Sharon
About that same time, Etta received an e-mail from a
Kentucky woman who said her friend, Sharon Hail, was dying
of cancer. Sharon was a tremendous Etta May fan but had
been too sick to make it to her most recent show. Her
friend wondered: Could Etta possibly send her friend an
autographed scarf or some memento
Etta wrote back that she would be performing again in
October. “And she e-mailed me back, saying: “My
friend isn’t going to make it unit October.”
Etta May was on her way
“I flew into Lexington and drove to Somerset,
and it was the most beautiful drive – it was so
breathtaking…Sharon lives on a mountain. Her house
is like a little cabin, tucked away in a nestle of trees.”
She arrived at Sharon’s surprise party in full
Etta May regalia – equipped with extra cat-eye classes
and scarf to dude Sharon up as her twin
“I get down there, and there’s a group of
30 people at the party, and it was just the most incredible
thing,” Etta says
“Find me a house”
The friends performed a living tribute to Sharon, in
which, one by one, everybody lit a candle off Sharon’s
candle and told the group how they met Sharon, what they
thought about her the first time they met her and what
she had meant to them in their lives
“Oh, my God,” Etta said. “There were
30 crying people. It was the most moving thing I had ever
seen. I sat here, and I looked at these people, and I
thought, “I don’t know if I’m gonna
have 30 people that truly know me.”
She had friends, she said, “but everybody’s
life is so crazy in L.A., and everybody’s on their
way to somewhere else, that friendships and relationships
are kind of secondary
“And it was such an incredible experience for
me to walk into a group of people that I knew nothing
about and to feel more at home there than I did in L.A.”
“Suddenly when you lay by somebody’s bedside
and you watch this woman go through what she’s going
through, you really get it.”
So, on the drive back to Blue Grass Airport, she drove
to the first Realtor she spotted – Atkins Real Estate
on Reynolds Road
“I walked in, and I hired this guy Jay Atkins
to be my broker, and I said: “Find me a house.”
That was May 13. She closed on a place my May 31, moved
in mid-June, bought herself a sweet motorcycle and hasn’t
had one day of regret.
Loving Lexington
She’s so high on Lexington she could be the city’s
poster girl
Etta easily rattles off an expansive list of why she’s
in love with Lexington: the Farmers Market, the Kentucky
Theatre, Picnic with the Pops, the demolition derby at
the Bluegrass Fair, Keeneland, Horse Mania, …
Idle praise? Think again: She’s organizing her
tour schedule for 2001 around the Rolex Three-Day Event.
(Etta isn’t unfamiliar with equine life. Growing
up, she had a big old plow horse named Blaze. “He
was half Clydesdale and half quarter-horse – that
was some drunk night in a barn,” she laughed. “He
was so fat that every time I sat on him I was doing a
split.”
“In New York and L.A., you survive. I feel like
I’m living in Lexington,” she said.
Which is why it amazes her when she meets Central Kentuckians
who not only take the state for granted, they poo-poo
it (“Why would you move here?”
“We are living in the exact same place, having
two totally different experiences – how come?…I
am sorry, but the state of Kentucky is milk and honey
to me – it is heaven on earth. And Lexington is
the pearl in the middle of the oyster.”
Ironically, Etta says her career is going even better
now: She’s making more money, getting more offers,
making more progress
“Finally, my career and my life came together,”
she said
While Etta has acted on her dream, she knows plenty
of people don’t
“They’re afraid to dream because they don’t
think they’ll make it. They need to take a ride
with me to Somerset and ride to Sharon’s mountain.
And wake…up.”
As for Sharon, she’s hanging on, receiving home
hospice care, Etta says
“I know she cannot come to the show, but I would
like to know that she was here while I performed in Lexington
“I don’t think she realizes it – how
important she was to me being where I am.”
Lexington Herald Leader
Lexington, KY
Heather
Svokos
Herald-Leader Pop
Culture Writer
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