Paula Poundstone will be at the El Cortez Sunday, Sept. 21, to perform at Living Out Loud, Stepping Stone’s annual fundraiser. Poundstone made headlines in 2001 when she was arrested for driving while intoxicated with her adopted children in the car with her. She was charged with a felony count of child endangerment. Two years later, she’s sober, her kids living with her and she’s on tour. The Gay and Lesbian Times caught up with her to find out what to expect.

Paula Poundstone: I can’t swear up and down that no one will ever hear anything that I said before, because I do repeat stuff, but the way you get there is different from night to night.… They always like to make that announcement before they introduce me, saying to turn off your cell phones … but I feel like people can enjoy the show better knowing if there’s an emergency they can be reached.… If a phone rings during the show, I don’t care. I leave mine on. It’s not my intention for it to ring during the show … but occasionally it rings while I’m on the stage and I have a very brief conversation with my daughter.

One night I pretty much said, “No, you can’t watch a movie,” and hung up the phone. Some lady in the audience got all huffy. She didn’t say anything, but you could hear her doing that huffy thing. I didn’t say anything, but at the next show I told the audience, “This isn’t Riverdance. It’s not like I turned and missed catching my partner in the air; it’s a conversation.… If people think they’re going to a highly-scripted cultural event, I guess they’re in the wrong place. The ballet is wonderful, but I don’t think they improvise.

Gay and Lesbian Times: I understand you’re coming to town for an event for Stepping Stone. How did you get involved with them?

PP: I have no idea; I think they just called us up.

GLT: Stepping Stone is a recovery center for GLBT people.

PP: GLBT? Wow, I’ve never heard that before; it sounds like a sandwich.

GLT: They generally invite someone who’s in recovery, so I’m guessing that’s part of the reason they invited you.

PP: I think so.… I haven’t drunk in two years and I’m not a big AA person – although I’m court-ordered to go and I do go. I have to make sure I don’t have to toe any company line, because by AA standards I’m a miserable wench, I guess, because I’m an atheist and atheism doesn’t really fit into that formula.… All the stories are the same. I bumped into somebody that I knew at a meeting in Florida and it was very funny. It was a friend of mine who’s a little snooty, to be totally honest. They too are now court-ordered to AA and they were telling me their story, we were sitting and talking and then they said the place where they usually go was a little more “upscale.” I just looked at him and laughed and said, “I’ve got bad news for you, hon. The story’s pretty much the same from place to place.” You can think that you’re usually with the highbrow people, but…

GLT: Have you put any of your recovery experience into your comedy?

PP: Oh yeah. My act is autobiographical. I’m one of those people who potentially say the wrong thing. Every time I hang up the phone or have an encounter with someone I come away thinking, “What did I say that for?” or “Gee, I wish I hadn’t said that,” because I have no editing skills – or very few. Generally speaking, most things about my life I discuss openly onstage. Most of my goal is to entertain, more than anything else, but the fodder for that is what happens to me and my observations. The good news about that is that people always ask if it’s cathartic and if it’s like therapy. I hate to be that cold and self-serving, but yeah. I’m not quite as whiny as I might be at therapy, because I have this goal of entertaining.

When I went into rehab I’d had a pretty big disaster and no privacy – which certainly exacerbated the difficulty – but there was something of great comfort about sitting among a bunch of other people who, in essence, shared this same whatever you want to call it. For those who are big AA believers, I know that’s one of the number one successful elements. Even though I can’t go with the whole thing, that would certainly be an element that I think is helpful. I always did [think so]. That’s part of the reason I do my job the way I do. If I were the only person, then people would look at me like I have two heads, and they don’t. I didn’t invent the idea of getting drunk and screwing up or making mistakes – those are not unique to me. I think people kind of like hearing about it to some degree.… That’s one of the great things about being onstage, you have something and you tell it and you don’t feel like you’re the only one.

GLT: People always say you hit rock bottom before you go into recovery. What do you think was rock bottom for you?

PP: I’m not sure people are correct about that.… I look around the room sometimes and hear what people say and I think, “Trade ya!” I met a bunch of times with these drug and alcohol counselors before my life blew up in my face. I certainly recognize that I had some sort of a problem, but do you know what somebody said to me, that was probably one of the worst things they could say? I met with this woman and she was a drug and alcohol counselor. I was turned onto her by a shrink because I was looking for medication for obsessive compulsive disorder and he had asked me about drinking every day I talked to him, and he finally said, “I really can’t out-medicate alcohol. I think you have to get that under control before I can help you.” So I said OK. I think I loved the idea of having some sort of staff of therapists or something; I wasn’t put off by that at all. So I said, great, somebody else to turn to for help.… So I meet with this woman and she’s kind of cool and kind of hip and she said she was deciding if I was an alcoholic or not.… She would tell me these stories about the people she had helped … they were big drug addicts, or they drank for x amount of years.… I would think, “Oh, I don’t do that. She helps people who have bigger difficulties than I have.” And I would leave there and go drink, because I wanted to make darn sure that I could fit in and merit this assistance.

In telling you now it sounds like the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, but I swear to you that was the path that my stupid brain took. I’m not sure that was necessary. If there was any one chunk of time I could suck back up, it would be that. I wish nobody had suggested this notion that you had to be “worse off.” I remember being in rehab with a girl who told me, in essence, the same thing. She said that somebody had said to her that she wasn’t [an addict] or whatever, and I remember telling her, “Don’t even bother figuring out what you are or what you aren’t, just stop.”

GLT: It must have been very hard having your children taken away for a while.

PP: It wasn’t a little while, it was a hellaciously long time. I have walked through the bowels of hell. It was awful. I’m not sure there are words to articulate it. It was the saddest, most difficult thing of my entire life and I regret it more than anything else in the entire world. Fortunately it’s behind me. The effects of it will never be behind me – once you’re in the legal system it doesn’t go away. It was a life-altering experience that will leave a really long-lasting mark.

GLT: How are things with your kids now that you have them back?

PP: Good. You have to isolate the variables and live life over again several times, like that Groundhog Day movie or something, to establish for sure what were the effects of what. I don’t know, but it would certainly appear to the naked eye that they too have gotten beyond this awful, awful, awful period of time. They seem good. Everybody’s in school and the difficulties everyone had before they still have. No one has come through this thing and suddenly not had problems they started out with. They’re just regular kids. I still have the same shortcomings I always had. I just don’t drink.