Bridget Everett Is Larger Than Life
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One day in June, in Romeoville, Illinois, a small town outside of Chicago, an HBO crew encountered an unexpected obstacle: smoke rising from a crematorium. The new series “Somebody Somewhere” was shot in a funeral home and the fumes had a lighting man upset. After a few shots, another burning force entered the room. “No. 1 is here,” announced the assistant director. “Everyone is behaving at their best.” Number one on the call sheet was Bridget Everett, the 49-year-old comedian, singer and, as she likes to call herself, ” Regionally Recognized Cabaret Singer. ”Everett starred on Somebody Somewhere, which premiered this month and is largely based on her life and her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas.
Everett is not known for maintaining her best or even better behavior. In her live shows, which she and her band Tender Moments regularly perform in Joe’s Pub, the cabaret branch of the Public Theater, she roams through the audience in skimpy, outrageous outfits, eats Chardonnay from the bottle and buries the faces of the audience her bosom. She traditionally ends the show by choosing a man from the crowd and sitting on his face.
Everything about Everett is big: her pipes (she studied opera singing in college), her libido, her stage presence, and her body, which she uses as a gelignite to spark a crowd into a willing frenzy. In a signature song she shouts, “What do I have to do to get this cock in my mouth?” and then makes everyone sing along. She talks about sloppy sex, abortions after sloppy sex, blackout drunkenness, the many types of “tits”, her genitals, her parents’ genitals, the genitals of her viewers – but feeling particularly transgressive is all too enjoyable. Her inflated sexuality is less of a weapon than an invitation to feel as uninhibited as she does. Years ago, during a phone interview – she called me from a nudist beach hanging out with Amy Schumer – she described her stage personality as “a crazy maniac who doesn’t get laid enough so I have my sexual energy somewhere.” In her 2015 Comedy Central special, “Gynecological Wonder,” Everett rushes into the audience, drizzles a glass of water over a viewer’s bald head, then slips her fingers into his mouth and sings, “I’m coming for you.”
The alternative cabaret scene is not a typical road to fame, but Everett has many influential admirers. Patti LuPone once got up in Joe’s Pub in the middle of the show and shouted, “There’s no one like you.” She later invited Everett to a duet with her at Carnegie Hall, and the two are now developing a double act on Broadway called “Knockouts.” Schumer showed Everett on her sketch show “Inside Amy Schumer” and took her on comedy tours, not as an opening act, but as a conclusion. “I couldn’t follow her,” Schumer said to me. On stage, Everett drifts from meandering, half-melancholy stories of her dysfunctional childhood (her mother is a recovering alcoholic and her father was largely absent) into sensual power ballads. She is a hot mess that is in total control of a room.
“Somebody Somewhere” got Everett to close Pandora’s box, only to gradually reopen it. She plays a more withdrawn version of herself named Sam, a would-be diva trapped in a small American town. She’d come to the funeral home set as executive producer. A crew man asked her to choose between two bags of counterfeit potty rubbers, one orange and red and the other green and yellow. The next day she was going to shoot a scene where her friends meet for poker and food. “I tend to these,” she said, choosing orange and red. When a showrunner told her the crematorium was late, she screamed. “Oh my god,” she said. “Only one day in a life.”
After seeing a few takes, she introduced me to the camerawoman, a woman. “You used to say, ‘I like having that pussy power behind the camera,’ but now you’d just say, ‘I like that feminine energy,'” Everett said with a laugh, then walked into the parking lot. She wore a black tank top with a hoodie tied around her waist. The hoodie was printed with a large lightning bolt, matching her lightning chain and tote bag. The emblem, she told me, was inspired by the self-help slogan “Dreams Have No Deadlines” popularized by LL Cool J. “It’s a reminder to fucking grab it to make it count,” she said. “Really damn cheesy.” Another necklace had “No. 1 “written in Diamantpavé.” Not every network calls a menopausal woman who sings cabaret to do a TV show, “she said.” You have to celebrate the moments. “
Everett directed her driver to a cannabis dispensary in Naperville to pick up some edibles to get her through the set. Since the real Kansas doesn’t have much of a film-making infrastructure, the producers found the Chicago area that looked most like Kansas, and we drove past corn fields, shopping malls, and gas stations. But Everett had brought a piece of the New York avant-garde. Showrunners Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen are co-founders of the Brooklyn-based theater company Debate Society, and Sam’s friend Fred Rococo is played by drag king Murray Hill, who dresses like a dandy used car salesman and bills himself as “the hardest-working middle man Age in Show Business “. Everett and a few co-stars lived in a rented house they called Ding Dong Dorm.
Smooth jazz was playing in the neon-lit pharmacy. A guy reading a book by Hunter S. Thompson checked Everett’s ID and pointed her to a series of touchscreen menus. She scrolled through the flavors: black cherry, pumpkin pie. “Brunch?” She read. “Damn no.” She chose two packs of sparkling white grape gums (“We just made them the other night and it was so much fun”) and a flavor called Snoozzzeberry to help her fall asleep.
On the way back, Everett asked to stop at an Indian supermarket for a “spice check”. She roamed the hallways and inhaled the aromas. “What do I do with a handful of Thai chilies?” She wondered aloud. “Nothing, is it?” As she moved on, she held up something called the snake gourd, which had a suggestive shape and firmness. “What are you doing with someone like that?” She said with a hint of Mae West. “I know it’s been a long, lonely winter. But isn’t that all? “
“Somebody Somewhere,” dubbed the “coming-of-middle-age story” by executive producer Carolyn Strauss, is an alternate story: what if Everett had never left Manhattan, Kansas to go to Manhattan, New York to go? (Strauss, a HBO veteran, previously worked on “Game of Thrones.” Everett said, “So this is like stepping sideways for her to this very little show about that oversized woman in her forties.”) Your character, Sam, is a stifled cul-de-sac that grades standardized tests, sleeps on her couch and, as Everett put it, “doesn’t really take life by the tits”. Sam’s forms of self-expression – singing rock anthems and writing dirty song lyrics – have been buried until a new crowd entices them to “choir rehearsals” at a local church that turns out to be a secret party and open mike night for. turns out the city doesn’t fit.
“She’s scared of singing because singing brings it all up in her,” Everett told me of her alter ego. In an early episode, Sam Janis sings Joplin’s Piece of My Heart and surprises herself by tearing open her shirt to reveal a black bra – just like Everett did at karaoke nights in her twenties when she was in New York city waited for tables. Independent filmmaker Jay Duplass, who directed episodes of the series and co-produces with his brother Mark, told me, “The character is about to become Bridget Everett.” She unleashes like a comic book hero discovering a superpower the wild thing in itself.
I met Everett one fall day at her apartment on the Upper West Side. The decor was retro glam: a pink daybed, B-movie posters and a neon flamingo next to the door to a wraparound terrace, from which she sometimes spies on Michael Moore on a terrace across the street. (“I see him outside at night, taking his steps.”) Everett was sitting in her lightning-fast hoodie and tie-dye pants in an armchair, clutching a pillow in the shape of a chest. She mourned her Pomeranian Poppy Louise, whose remains lay in an urn on the coffee table. “You’re sort of in a pet cemetery,” she said.
On the way up the doorman had asked me to deliver a bag from a jewelry store – a present from Jessica Seinfeld to thank Everett for appearing at a fundraiser at the Seinfeld home in the Hamptons. Otherwise, Everett hadn’t performed live in two years and she was depressed. “As soon as you get the damn animal out of the cage, I’ll feel a lot better,” she said, getting tearful. “The show is my outlet. So everything that has happened in the last couple of years is damn it here “- she tapped her chest -” and I just have to get it out so I can come back to life. “