AK Video of the Week: Barbarah

Barbarah started coming to AK back in the days of Sidecar and has never missed a show unless she was ill or out of town. She is one of those people who lives and breathes to perform.

Whenever I see people like Barbarah onstage, it reminds me of an important moment in my life:

When I was a student at an improv school in L.A., my teacher, the brilliant actress Cynthia Szigeti (Repo Man, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld), put two words together in a way I’ll never forget. The words were “girl disease”.

This is what happened: Cynthia called on two people for an improvised acting exercise. “I need two people onstage.” Many men jumped up and headed toward the stage. Many women jumped up, too. But, as soon as the women saw that others had jumped up too, they apologetically shrunk back down into their seats, as if to say, “Oh, excuse me for being so rude and aggressive. I couldn’t possibly take someone else’s place.”

Cynthia had a name for that tendency to be overly accommodating. It was an affliction, a horrible disease. GIRL DISEASE.

After all, so many girls had it. And none of the boys did.

Cynthia let all the women in the class have it. She wasn’t one to mince words. “What the fuck are you doing, women? Don’t you realize how hard life is? Don’t you know that everything in your lives is going to be more difficult to come by, just because of sexist prejudice? Why are you shrinking back when you should be pushing forward? Why do you give it up to the guys, when all your life you’ll have to fight twice as hard for anything a guy gets? Don’t sit back on your asses! Come take what’s yours! Now, I said I NEED FIVE PEOPLE ON STAGE.  NO MORE GODDAMN GIRL DISEASE!”

Now back to Barbarah: The first time I saw Barbarah perform, she was very different than the performer you see in the video. She wore a baseball cap pulled down over her face and directed most of her singing at the music stand, from which she almost never averted her gaze. It was obvious she was a powerful person, but she almost seemed to be hiding herself.

But she had a great voice, husky and with a lot of passion and emotion. I gave her a piece of advice: lose the music stand. Don’t hide. Don’t make yourself smaller. Be strong! Be what you are.

The next few times, she made a point to come to the show with the lyrics memorized, and confront the audience head-on.

The difference between the Barbarah from before and the new Barbarah was like night and day. She was a sensation. Besides being an AK regular, she now sings in a band.

Women are conditioned to wait for someone to give them permission. That’s why I love seeing women like Barbarah triumph on stage. But this isn’t a battle of the sexes. It’s not about men vs. women. In truth, this story doesn’t just apply to women. It applies to anyone who might be shy or frightened about asserting themselves — onstage, at work, or in their family.

My point is this: if you’re a shy person and you have something inside you want to get out, why wait for someone to give you permission? You might spend your whole life waiting for it to come… and wondering, “What if?”