Kathy Griffin at
Hard Rock Live
Hollywood, FL
June 2, 2012
I
don’t know why I love Kathy Griffin so much. I think it has something to do
with her courage, or her ability to seem accessible even as she is speaking to
thousands of people, or the very natural way she tells a story. She is credited
as a comedienne, but in truth, she is a story teller.
Griffin
doesn’t make up characters, nor does she deliver one liners that deserve a rim
shot from a snare drum. Kathy Griffin just tells stories about people she
meets, topical events from the daily news, interactions with people in her
life, confrontations with detractors, ups and downs of her show business
career. She just tells stories, true stories, but with a mischievous grin and a
naughty delight in being provocative or even shocking. Her stories are funny,
mostly because of how she tells them, otherwise, they really are just things that
happened in her life or on reality television shows or in the news. Her ability
to tell every day stories in a way that is entertaining, for two hours, as if she
were having a conversation with a dozen people at a party rather than with 4000
people in a casino performance space is amazing. OK, I guess I do know why I love
Kathy Griffin.
This
is how captivating Kathy Griffin is: the Hard Rock Live is a glorified
basketball court! People on the floor (it’s all one level) have to look up to
see the stage and screens. Then, there are two more levels (bleacher style
seating), but, like gymnasium bleachers, the people in the elevated seats are
facing each other, with the stage to their left or right (there is a small
section of “stands” in the back that do face forward, but they are the most
removed from the performance area). So, on advice from a friend (who may have been
trying to kill me I now believe), I got seats in the bleachers, which meant I watched
a two hour performance looking over my left shoulder! I’m about to have my
third chiropractic treatment since the show last week and I’m still barely
mobile; and yet!...I enjoyed every minute of her performance and am so glad I didn’t
miss it. When a performance provides enough joy to override excruciating pain,
it is a triumph!
Kathy
came out and surprised the audience by being briefly joined by Gloria Estefan to
sing with her the theme song from Kathy’s new television late night talk show.
While they were on stage together, Gloria (who had been, apparently, tricked
into performing the song unrehearsed) promised to “get” Kathy for dragging her
out on stage, and Kathy’s response was that there is nothing Gloria could do
that would embarrass her and to prove it, she flashed the audience showing her white
cotton “granny panties” (and Gloria seemed genuinely shocked).
After
that, the rest of the show was just Kathy Griffin’s non-stop stream of
consciousness storytelling. She talked about celebrity gossip, her love life
and cosmetic surgeries, her mother and personal assistant, her new show,
Scientology (she had a lot of fun and spent a lot of time on Scientology), and
the recent news of people using bath salts as recreational drugs and becoming
extremely violent. In common parlance, such a topic would be inappropriate for
jest, but Kathy milked it throughout the show, and being able to laugh about it
seemed to actually relieve some of the horror that people had about it (one of
the cases of someone becoming extremely violent after ingesting or inhaling
bath salts was here in Florida).
Notwithstanding
spinal injuries from seating that should be forbidden by the Geneva Convention,
the evening felt like playful gossip with an old friend, and a few thousand
other acquaintances. Griffin ingeniously featured her status as a “D-List”
celebrity in a way that catapulted her to major stardom, but she remains, I
fear, underappreciated as an artist. She is funny, of course, but she is also
smart and has developed an easy, almost ADD
style of storytelling that is engaging, compelling, and hilarious.
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