BWW Reviews: KATHY GRIFFIN has a Down-Home, Good-Time in Music City USA

You might want to take note that Kathy Griffin will be making a guest appearance on Joan Rivers' Fashion Police on E! tonight (Friday, July 22), promising to be inappropriately funny and bitingly incisive while hanging out with Joan, George and either Kelly or Giuliana. Griffin reminded her audience at Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Jackson Hall of that last night as she engaged in her trademark repartee before an audience filled with her deliriously attentive fans.

Now, I realize you're probably asking: "So that's the take-away from Kathy Griffin's show? What's wrong with you, you freakin' idiot? What did she say about Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Cher?" Well, truth be told, only one of that trio of personalities got much attention from Griffin and, to be honest, Kathy's own fashion choices last night may land her on Fashion Police next week in "Bitch Stole My Look." (Not my look, but that white trash slut down the street's look, for sure.)

Appearing lithe and lovely, with a killer body to rock her "baby-mama-stops-by-the-liquor-store-on-the-way-home-from-buying-cigarettes-and-tampons-at-the-Tiger-Market" look, Kathy Griffin took to the stage wearing a gauzy white peasant skirt with a black bikini top. From Target, no less (which means "baby-mama" probably didn't stop off to buy cigarettes). Assuring her adoring fans that her 91-year-old mother Maggie - she of the "tip it" box-wine drinking, Bill O'Reilly-loving California Griffins - would be aghast that she was wearing such a get-up, she explained that never before had she endured the kind of heat Nashville was offering up to her during her two-day visit to our fair burg.

She was, she told us, "Sweating like a fat girl writing a love letter," attributing the line to the butter-lovin', deep-fried Southern cook and raconteur Paula Deen, with whom she's become gal-pals over the past few years.

But, after a visit that included a blind date with a man who picked up the check (at South Street, where she ate pulled pork on corn cakes and deep-fried cheesecake), thinks she's cute and treated her like a lady (take that, you Californiac barbarians...we know how to treat our somewhat trashy "ladies" here in the South!) and took her for karaoke at Lonnie's Western Room on Printer's Alley, and in spite of personal assistant Tiffany Rinehart's crush on a bullet-riddled Marine who was "real cute" and punched a guy in the face for bumping into him, Kathy Griffin insists that she and gal-pal Kristin Chenoweth - the Broadway diva, Tony-winning Emmy Award-winner, country music "sanging" and petite pixie - have decided to move to Nashville ("You realize you live in a great city, right?" Griffin queried her audience. She may have called it a "rockin' city,"  or something else like that, but I was drunk, so my memory is sketchy at best) and make it their center of operations.

Proudly, and on behalf of Nashvillians of all persuasions (not limited to, but including, those middle-aged, chino-wearing, bourbon-drinking, bon mots-spouting, flower-arranging, thank-you note-writing 'mos in the orchestra seats), I say to Griffin and Chenoweth: "Well, c'mon down, y'all. We're just so proud for you to be here." Or something equally as likely to have the late Minnie Pearl spinning in her grave (although I suspect Minnie would be laughing at a lot of the stories told by Kathy Griffin these days).

Okay, so you're thinking: "He's seven paragraphs into this thing and still hasn't told us anything substantive about the show." To which, I reply: "Suck it, bitches."

To watch Kathy Griffin onstage isn't like being at some traditional "show," rather it's like sitting down with a fifth of hooch at your side, to listen to an old, I daresay trusted and venerated, friend tell gossipy stories about mutual acquaintances (which has always been my stock in trade). At one point even - when she was making fun of unwed mother Bristol Palin's new Jay Leno-inspired chinworks - I found myself nodding at her, encouraging her to go on with her story as if were face-to-face, and I was sitting back in Row X of Jackson Hall with the rest of the unemployed songwriters and other poor people. Kathy Griffin is so conspiratorial in tone - and so intimate, if you get my drift - when telling the stories that make up her act instead of traditional jokes, that you can easily forget you're surrounded by thousands of other worshipful fans clamoring for the latest juicy bits of her not-quite-D-List, but-not-yet-A-List-either existence.

Case in point: Despite assuring the raucously involved crowd (made up of her outrageously outspoken gays, the diffident but lovable lesbians, her coterie of straight supporters and the people who wandered in out of the heat to cool off in the air-conditioned confines of a darkened theater) that we'd be getting into Lindsay Lohan's junk, the latest Paris Hilton scuttlebutt ("Scuttlebutt!" you're chortling. "He said 'scuttlebutt!'") and her unique take on the latest political posturing of half-term Alaskan governor Sarah Palin and Minnesota wacko Republican presidential wannabe Michelle Bachmann, we never quite made it to those stories. Because Kathy Griffin, like every other friend I've ever known in life, can't tell a story on a particularly linear trajectory; instead, she veers from topic-to-topic, depending upon her audience to right her course and get her back on topic. Yet, however circuitous the route she takes you, let me assure you of this: She's so f-ing funny, you cannot help but laugh even when you know in your heart of hearts that you're going straight to hell for doing so.

Her TPAC show, tailored to appeal to her down-home-good-time-hell-raising Tennessee audience's collective sense of humor, included pokes at some of Nashville's own sacred cows - homegrown messianic media mogul Oprah Winfrey and off-key/off-pitch teen country music singing sensation Taylor Swift (who Kathy loves) were both included - and a long-winded, but ultimately entertaining, story about going to a film premiere (okay, it was Zookeeper, but it was a film premiere nonetheless) with that "crazy-ass bitch" aka Cher. Opening with a video retrospective of her career to date (which kicked off with a clip from CNN's New Year's Eve with Anderson Cooper - who, in my fantasy, was introduced by me to Griffin when I hired her to roast him at a private birthday dinner I hosted for him...but I digress...it's giving me the big pants again!)

But the funniest bit - and as much as I hate to say it, you really did have to be there to get it - was a story about a performance in Rochester (New York or Minnesota? Who knows? Who cares? Wherever it was, the audience was filled with yankee palookas who were in from the cold) during which half of the audience was made up of deaf people. And the story was so "controversial" (well, only if you don't have a twisted sense of humor like my pal Kathy and me) that the fine folks at Bravo cut it out of her last special. Granted, they probably needed time for another Andy Cohen promo or to plug yet another Real Housewives series, but still...it was uproariously, unsettlingly funny.

And I'm headed straight to hell. Oh wait, I live in Nashville with its 115-degree heat index, so maybe I'm already there. All I can say is this: Nashville loves Kathy Griffin - whom, henceforth, shall be known as "Ladybug" - and she can share our own little corner of hell (which probably isn't that different from heaven, come to think of it) anytime she wants!

 

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