Lesbian Life: You got your comedy start in high school…
Dana Goldberg: My first set was in high school. I don’t know what in the world a 17 year old was thinking. I’m going to do a ten minute stand up routine. When I was younger I used to listen to tapes of Steven Wright, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg. I would listen to them all the time. I guess I didn’t realize I was kind of studying. I’ve always been funny. I was funny when I was a kid. Something just possessed me and I decided to enter my high school talent show. And I won.Do you remember any of the jokes you told?
Absolutely, I do. I told a couple of teacher jokes. This cracks me up. When I got up there, I grabbed the mic and I yelled, “Give it up for the MC.” I don’t know where it came from. I told jokes about my Mom, about my parents being from Brooklyn. I told two jokes about my boyfriends and how that wasn’t working out so well. It’s hilarious. I wasn’t out yet, but in the tape I’m wearing a pair of jeans, a button-down and a tie. I looked like Paula Poundstone. 1994.I wrote about clothes. My mom wanting to take me shopping but she wouldn’t let me get the cool stuff. It was bellbottoms and a butterfly collar. If there was a wind I would take flight. My bellbottoms were so big there were small children trapped in my jeans. Stuff like that. They went over really well. Everyone else was doing the whole Whitney Houston cover lip syncing, so it was something different. I didn’t touch a stage again for eight years after that.
Why not?
Stage fright. I was terrified of public speaking.The first time, were you scared, or did you just step out there?
You can definitely tell that I was shaking, nervous inside. I think as we get older, those ideas inside of what’s acceptable, people are judging, those ideas start to sink in. In high school, it starts there because there is so much judgment and kids can be mean. I was a band geek. I was a drummer. I was kind of the coolest of the band kids, but I was friends with the cheerleaders. I was everyone’s buddy. So even though I was completely uncomfortable in high school, every body loved me. But when I graduated from high school, I came out of the closet, I was trying to figure myself out. I was suddenly afraid to speak in public. I had to take public speaking classes for university, it was a prerequisite for classes I wanted to take, and I just remember shaking. My voice would speed. I would talk so fast.There was a show that came through Albuquerque each year called the Lesbians for Change show. It was a mixture of different acts to raise money for higher education scholarships.
So, when I was 26, I finally got the courage to audition. I walked in five minutes after auditions ended and they said I couldn’t audition. You have to wait until next year. That was in 2001.
In 2002, I was dating this woman. She was in a military exercise in Puerto Rico and her plane crashed and she got killed. We were broken up, but she was one of the most amazing women I’d ever known and she died young. It was one of those moments in your life, when you’re like “What am I doing?” She was chasing her dreams.
So I went and auditioned again. It was 2002, October. I did a really jagged seven-minute set that I practiced in front of my sister and her friends stoned out of their minds into a lint-roller. That was my microphone. Of course they were laughing their asses off because everyone is high as a kite.
Best audience ever, by the way, but then you have to feed them. (laughs)
I did the audition and they gave me a seven-minute set. So, I go on second in the line up. I’m 26 at this point. I didn’t touch the microphone. I could see my heart beating through my shirt. Kathy, I hit the first big joke…my first set was in front of 650 people in a sold out theater. So, when I hit the first joke, I heard the most deafening laughter I had ever heard in my entire life and I went into this zone. And nothing could have touched me. Everything I said was golden. I felt like I was floating for weeks after the show.
People would come up to me and ask me how long I’d been doing it and I would say, 45 minutes. It was crazy!
From that moment on, I was like, no matter what happens, I’m going to chase this. Hopefully something will happen before I turn 30 that will tell me, yes, this is something I need to do. I gave myself a four year mark. But during that time, I started to get write-ups in Curve.
It’s insane. Seven months into my career, and I don’t know where they heard me, it was the next up and coming 15 comics to look out for. A little paragraph. No picture, nothing. Somehow the Ms Foundation saw that and I got asked to do an appearance on Broadway for the Ms Foundation for Women.
I was doing open mics and a producer from New York happened to see me and invited me to the Fringe Festival in Scotland after seven months.
