9/1/2023 0 Comments Julia sweeney weird al![]() ![]() Sweeney addresses the issue in Older and Wider, pointing out that she never intended Pat to be trans (in fact, the joke of every Pat sketch was that Pat was oblivious to everyone else’s confusion about his or her gender), while also expressing contrition for any pain Pat caused anybody. Transparent creator Jill Soloway has called the character “an awful piece of anti-trans propaganda.” “Or else they just think, ‘I don’t want to argue with you anymore about it.'”Īlthough decades have passed since Sweeney played Pat, the character she developed on SNL and in the notoriously unsuccessful 1994 spinoff movie, It’s Pat!, she’s still getting Pat-related flak. ![]() Yeah, I’m that good.” Then she breaks into a giggle. “I have not met one person I have not been able to convince of that. “What happened to him is completely wrong,” Sweeney declares. Senate last year following sexual harassment accusations. Sweeney is a vehement defender of another SNL castmate, Al Franken, who resigned his seat in the U.S. In Letting Go of God, she described her journey from Catholicism to atheism, earning critical acclaim but also thousands of angry emails, not to mention a standing Twitter feud with her former SNL castmate, Christian conservative Victoria Jackson. Her breakout one-woman show, God Said Ha!, is an account of the year when she and her brother were both diagnosed with cancer. Sweeney tends to address controversial and uncomfortable topics in her comedy. Unless, of course, you adamantly disagree, as plenty of people have over the years. It’s just that everything she says is at once so disablingly funny and so persuasively reasoned that even if you could draw enough air between gasps of laughter to argue with her, it wouldn’t occur to you to try. Then you get to come to L.A.’ So he’s like, ‘OK.'”Īfter meeting Sweeney, it’s easy to understand how such a thing could have happened. Mulan will go through these schools until she graduates. “And he was like, ‘But I was going to move to you,'” she recalls. “We’re moving to you,” she informed Blum. school, and because Blum had told her how good public schools in Wilmette, Ill., were, she went even further. And because she wasn’t thrilled with Mulan’s L.A. The real story, which she tells in Older and Wider, takes some time.)Īs things got more serious, Blum, who had always wanted to live in L.A., planned to sell his Chicago business (building protein crystallography X-ray detectors) and move, but the undertaking proved more complicated than he’d imagined. (No, Mulan is not named after the Disney princess - but when people ask if she is, as they inevitably do, Sweeney sometimes just says yes, for expediency’s sake. Her daughter, Mulan, whom she’d adopted as a toddler from China, was in third grade. (Sweeney describes their courtship in her 2013 essay collection If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother.)īut Blum, a scientist, lived in Chicago Sweeney was an actress and single mom in L.A. The story of how Sweeney met her husband, Michael Blum, is a fairy tale for the digital age: Blum’s brother, after seeing Letting Go of God, set them up via email. Eleven years! And we’re doing good.’ OK, guess I can’t get into my old romantic depression.” ![]() It got to the point, Sweeney jokes, where “I’d even find myself driving home late at night, going, ‘Why didn’t I ever meet someone? I’m such a delight! I don’t see why - Oh, wait! Oh, my God! I did meet someone. Her 10 years in a different city started to feel like a dream. routines, spending most evenings at the Groundlings, the improv company where she first studied comedy, working on new material. And she quickly fell back into her old L.A. She rented it out during her Illinois sojourn - but after a coat of paint she felt right at home again. She has owned this house, a pretty Spanish-style bungalow, since 1990. “Here I am, this is what I look like now, these are my thoughts now, cast me in something - is basically the show,” says Sweeney, sitting in her living room in Larchmont Village. (She debuted the show in January 2018 in Chicago, to admiring reviews, and has taken it to several other cities the Geffen run marks its L.A. Older and Wider is a calling card, announcing her return to audiences and directors alike. After working for more than a decade as a stay-at-home mom in a suburb of Chicago, she celebrated her daughter’s high school graduation last June by moving back to Hollywood, ready to pick up where she left off. Sweeney developed her latest one-woman show, Older and Wider, in part to answer this question. ![]()
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