HOME FROM HOLLYWOOD - GREG BURLIAK
Monica Parker knows where some of the gossip dust bunnies are buried. After all, she worked as an actor and producer for more than 20 years in Hollywood and appeared in films with the likes of Anthony Hopkins, George Clooney, Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow.
There’s none of that stuff in her one-woman play Sex, Pies & A Few White Lies, which she’s bringing to the Octave Theatre on June 22 and 23.
Why not?
“I’d like to keep those people as friends,” says the straight-talking Parker, who moved back to Canada a few years ago. “The only famous people I mention are those I don’t know like Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer and all I say about them is that they’re perfect.”
Parker tackled a higher mission than gossip for her show. She might even joke that it was a weightier one.
“I’m fat and I’m pissed off.”
She also later states that it took “101 humiliations for me to become who I am today.” That person is a happy one, and happily married at that. “We are all evolutions in progress,” says Parker. “At a certain point, you either make peace with who you are or spend the rest of your life in misery. “When I was young, I was a fat kid who wanted to be popular. When the ‘in’ crowd didn’t take me in, I started my own crowd, who were a lot more interesting.”
Parker was a dress designer in Toronto when one of her customers told her she was funny. The next thing she knew she was playing a small part as a hooker in a film. From there, she began hosting an exercise show on City-TV. “Dan Aykroyd did voiceovers for it and Gilda Radner would come on, too,” says Parker, speaking of two Second City alumni who would go on to fame as members of the original Saturday Night Live crew. The exercise show landed her work in Los Angeles, where to Parker’s surprise she would work for some 24 years. “I became an actress and then a producer and a writer,” she says.
Among the films she acted in were the 1998 thriller A Perfect Murder with Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow and The Road To Wellville in 1994, which starred Anthony Hopkins, Bridget Fonda and Matthew Broderick. Parker is equally proud of some of her producing projects. They include the 2003 TV movie Hunger Point about anorexia, and the self-explanatory 2007 feature The Party Never Stops: Diary of A Binge Drinker.
Parker came back to Canada because both her parents and those of her husband Gilles Savard had aging parents here. “I always said I’d never get old in LA because they don’t really let you,” she says. “Canada is in my heart and here you can really stay grounded. No one let’s you get fancy.”
The premiere of Sex, Pies & A Few White Lies came two years ago at the Pilot Tavern in Yorkville and the play has since been performed in Newfoundland, California and soon in Scotland. The show is coming to Kingston because awhile back she was performing at an International Women’s Day Conference in Mexico when she meet some women from eastern Ontario. They persuaded her to come here and perform it.
Just why did she write the play? “I am a performer and a writer and I’ve probably been writing it all my life,” says Parker. “I have a lot to say but I wanted to do it in a way that was relatable and funny.”
PAT LAUNER
Plus-sized performance and poignance
Thighs, sighs and comic surprise. That’s another way to look at Monica Parker’s hit show, “Sex, Pies and a Few White Lies.” Her motto, not surprisingly in a performance that focuses on weight issues — among many other things — is, “Life is short; eat dessert first!”
As an actor, writer and producer, Parker has been telling stories and entertaining audiences for years. “If I were alone on a desert island with just a pencil,” she says, “I’d be fine.”
In Parker’s view, “You start you childhood as a liar and a voyeur. You don’t know you’re a writer. I always told stories. And I was always fascinated by other people’s soap opera lives.”
She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to an Austro-Hungarian mother, age 45, and a 50 year-old Brit.
“I was the accidental child,” says Parker. And she swears she was “born overweight.”
Actually, she confesses to being only 6½ pounds at birth, “but one hour later, I weighed 62 pounds. I blame genetics – plus cheese and chocolate. One Christmas, I decorated the tree with chicken legs and donuts!”
All this features into Parker’s amusing, heartbreaking, autobiographical show.
“What my play is about at its core,” says the funnywoman who’s worked with producer/director Ivan Reitman, actor Dan Ayckroyd and her other good actor-friend, the late Gilda Radner (“who always thought she was fat”), “is self-acceptance and the 101 humiliations it took for me to get there.”
Her candor is so disarmingly spot-on that she was invited to be the honest-but-humorous keynote speaker for the National Association of Eating Disorder Psychiatrists.
“We’ve been made to be so neurotic about food and eating and body image,” Parker says, in a serious moment, “thanks to the media and advertisers and corporations. Whether it’s five pounds or 50, it can make you crazy. But why should we all have to be the same?
“Nobody escapes,” she continues. “Everyone struggles with their place in life. Everyone is insecure. Everyone has an issue. Mine was body image. I always say about my body, ‘I have the kind of alcoholism that shows.’ We’re a very addictive society. And fear is on our daily diet. We’re held hostage by fear. The obesity epidemic in America is not just about junk food. We’re also eating to suppress panic attacks.”
Parker’s 90-minute show speaks most directly to women (“they get it in their chromosomes”), but men can relate as well. And the food/eating/weight issues are only part of the plot.
“It’s a love story – to myself, my body, and my husband. Also, it’s about a dysfunctional family – and who doesn’t have one of those? It’s a universal story about the pressure we put on ourselves. I wanted to write from the place of deepest truth, without censorship, and be funny at the same time; then you don’t hurt people’s feelings. There’s very little you can’t say under the umbrella of comedy.”
The show debuted last year in Toronto, and it proved to be both a hilarious and a cathartic experience for many in the audience. This is its U.S. premiere.
ALEX HENTLEHOFF - CASA MAGAZINE
Center Stage Theatre offered up a delicious buffet last weekend!
Sex, Pies & A Few White Lies is entertaining and engaging. Written and performed by Monica Parker, this treatise on the life of a fat woman is her story. She tells it and she sells it with an honesty that is at once funny, poignant, lusty, and courageous.
Sex, Pies ... is a 90 minute guided tour that begins before Ms. Parker's conception, introducing Austro Hungarian mother (with delusions of grandeur - the 'Zsa Zsa syndrome) who fled Austria, found a dreary Brit late one night and "Monica," born in Scotland, was the result.
She guides us through numerous scenes in her life, sharing lifelong struggles with eating disorders ("I have a gold star for losing weight; I have a platinum one for gaining it back.") and her dysfunctional family (whom she brings vividly and hilariously to life).
Moving from early childhood (with a well drawn childhood friend), on through puberty (trying to lose her virginity in the back seat of a car on a double date is hilarious) and into full adulthood with both humour and twinge.
The comedy sparkles when Ms.Parker gets physical. She is amusing playing her mom, superb showing us her dad (like to see more of him), and watching her (struggling in pantomime) into or out of tight fitting clothes is rib-achingly hysterical. With her self image at ground level, a life altering event arrives. Fortune finally smiles when the attentive "Gilles," a French Canadian enters her life. "He must be blind!" she says (this part of the story is filled with the most satisfying, unexpected, and delightful twists and turns).
Sex, Pies and A Few White Lies is provocative, self effacing and quite moving. Directed by Pam Brighton, the staging is simple and direct and the pacing slides easily from storytelling, to situation comedy, to therapeutic analysis.
