The Long Island Newsday
October 29, 1999

Hearing her life Kathy Buckley tells her humorous, but poignant tale.  Talk about making lemonade.  Kathy Buckley has been handed enough lemons – including a hearing impairment, broken bones and cancer – to open a citrus store.

But she hasn’t puckered.  And neither do we, as she takes command of an Off-Broadway stage to tell us about the journey of her life with the kind of knowing playfulness, gentle humor and smart irony that can make even the most inspirational-averse among us feel good.  Imagine if Frida Kahlo had turned out comic books instead of agonizing self-portraits.

Buckley, who was born with a severe hearing loss, was at first classified as mentally retarded.  No one discovered her disability until she was 8.  “And they called me slow?”

As a young woman, she was run over on a beach by a Jeep driven by a lifeguard who apparently didn’t see her “speed bumps” she says, pointing to her chest.  She spent five years laid up in bed, followed by 2 ˝ years in a wheelchair.  Defying doctors’ prognoses, she recovered – and tried her hand at modeling and fashion design, though her hearing loss caused problems with both careers.  But she had a nice boyfriend.  And then she found out she had cervical cancer.

“The cancer had a voice that was all too familiar to me,” she tells us.  She conquered the cancer, too, and also managed to confront her father about inappropriate touching while she was young.

Not exactly the path one imagines for a stand-up comic, which Buckley has become, very successfully, after entering a comedy contest on a dare from a friend in 1988.  She’s appeared in top venues and on television, including HBO, A&E, “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and a segment of “Touched by an Angel” written for her.  Her current show at Lamb’s Theatre counts among the producers the actor David Hyde Pierce and figure skater Scott Hamilton.

This 75-minute play isn’t just a stand-up routine, although Buckley starts it with a brief reprise of what she says was her first gag – a visual joke involving a plastic hand attached to her ear as a hearing aid.

She talks about a favorite teacher, about a near-death experience in which a man with a white beard takes her up into the clouds and about a sojourn in a building with two women in their 90s who still feuded over a man they both dated as teenagers.  Some of this would be unbearably maudlin in lesser hands.  But not here.

The show – elegantly directed by Sue Wolf on a classy set by Scott Chambliss with handsome lighting by Michael Lincoln – features such props as her first hearing aid and blow-ups of her second-grade report card and of the article about her Jeep accident (in case we don’t believe her).  Of the accident notice, she quips, “My first good press.”  Brian DeLapp’s costume design takes Buckley smoothly from jumper-clad schoolgirl to sophisticated 6-foot-tall adult.  Her height, she points out, is a liability on the dating scene.  So was, she notes with a smile, not being able to hear the phone ring.  But, for about 10 years she’s had a hearing aid that works for her.   Buckley needs no appliance to make people laugh.

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