The Multi-Cult Semi-Celeb
Perched before a microphone in a basement studio
at Santa Monica College, the Queen of Anti-Cool is at it again, championing the
cause of slackers and non-achievers in another wild-ride radio riff.
"Today's topic," she says, her voice lilting: "Bottom
rollers." Drawing a deep breath, Sandra Tsing Loh launches into her latest
foray through the neurotic, disconnected landscape of her native Los Angeles,
offering another heartfelt jolt of drive-time angst in a zippy five-minute
confessional. Her weekly KCRW radio commentaries, known collectively as
"The Loh Life," spotlight those clueless couch-dwellers who populate
an L.A. far from the glitter of celebrity: B-listers and Valley "shlubs"
forever sentenced to the back of the line. A savvy social chameleon who slips
between disparate orbs--hanging out in greasy spoons, then jetting off to be a
judge at Sundance--Loh is the chronicler of that class of Angelenos she calls
"young, highly trained, downwardly mobile professionals: 'dumpies.' "
During this particular one-woman therapy session,
the 38-year-old writer and performance artist plays cheerleader for those
low-lights of the personal investment world, those with neither day-trading
accounts nor start-up stock ops. "Who are we?" she coos. "We are
the people who have all our money in crappy low-interest CDs."
Her delivery is caffeine-fueled stream of
consciousness, meandering sentences spiced with the trippy rhythms of a maturing
Valley girl. Alone in the studio, hands gesturing in an unchoreographed ballet,
she offers a warning to those gutsy paper trillionaires who are the antithesis
of her constituency: "Your company could fold. At which point, if you're
like me, you'd be forced to hurl yourself headfirst onto the bed, tearing your
hair out and shrieking, Medea-like: 'I'm dead! The end has come! I'm a horrible,
tragic failure!' "
In a hallway outside the taping room, passersby
stop, spellbound by Loh's rantings. Herky-jerky, head swaying, the Queen
continues: "Meanwhile, tucked away in its completely government-insured CD,
my nest egg will continue to grow, every year, by an unshakable . . .
4.7%." ~ When she's through, the hallway audience is laughing hard. But
from a nearby room, a straight-faced engineer announces that the commentary is
over the time limit. So Loh begins another take, speaking faster to fit in all
her thoughts. Even at 78 rpm, the words seem natural, tossed-off and chatty,
warmed with the intimacy of two pals trading gossip over after-work drinks.
Loh's best gossip comes from her own colorful
life. As author of "The Valley" column for the defunct Buzz magazine
and as a solo performer in a pair of one-woman theatrical shows, "Bad Sex
With Bud Kemp" and "Aliens in America," Loh has delved into her
evolving relationship with her father, who at age 79 likes to wear his ex-wife's
black nylon underwear on his daily ocean swims. She has shared scenes from her
premarital love life, "where it just doesn't fly and you're seated on the
bed at midnight and just weeping in your hands." She has revealed how, as a
temp typist for a North Hollywood insurance company, she almost got fired for
blatantly ignoring the requirement to wear control-top pantyhose.
For her efforts, the syndicated monologuist has
been dismissed as a shameless self-promoter and, in the words of one New York
critic, "an annoyingly self-absorbed young woman" without an
unexpressed thought. She also has been called "America's funniest woman in
under five minutes flat." Adore her or dismiss her, she has put a unique
stamp on a prime piece of socio-geography. Just as Woody Allen's nasal whine
evokes Manhattan's chattering classes, Loh's quirky radio croon captures
shirker, fauxhemian Los Angeles.
But Loh's sloucher persona belies her relentless
drive as reflected in her vita: Caltech physics degree; grad work in English at
USC; classically trained pianist, screenwriter, author of a novel, "If You
Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now," and an essay collection, "Depth
Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles."
What's odd--and perhaps revealing of God's great
comic plan--is that she almost certainly got that drive from her father.
As a little girl, Sandra Tsing Loh had this
absurdist fatal vision for her dad: "I dreamed he would go on a long trip,
fall into the ocean and have his eyes pecked out by birds," she says.
"Then my mom would be free to marry the Prince of Monaco."
At home, Eugene Loh was a brooding figure who
exploded into rages, a pathological cheapskate who wore his threadbare sweaters
backward, used a Frosted Flakes cereal box for a briefcase and disconnected the
car battery to keep his family from venturing off to church. Sandra's Christmas
memories are of the aerospace engineer reading his scientific papers in another
room while the family opened gifts--he emerging only to turn down the heat.
Her dad hitchhiked to save money, once forcing his
daughter to accompany him along Pacific Coast Highway on a trip to the dentist.
"I'm already a nerd in junior high school--I played the viola and helped
start the debate and French clubs--and here's my dad," Loh recalls,
"making me hitchhike and saying we'd have better luck if I stood by myself.
"So when an anxious neighbor or mother of a
school friend pulls up to say, 'Sandra? Is that you?' my dad leaps out of the
bushes and announces, 'There's two of us! Can you take us to Santa Monica?' He
had plenty of money. He had a car. How could an insecure 14-year-old not despise
her father for that?"
Thirty years later, with his daily beach exercise
regimen, Shanghai native Eugene Loh remains in prime physical shape for a man
nearing 80. Still, in her stage show "Aliens in America," a
recollection that evokes both the humor and pain of her childhood, the daughter
dismisses her father as "Old Dragon Whiskers." Scrunching up her face
in a caricature of Chinese features, she calls him "the Wily
Mandarin," a diminutive figure starting to look "like somebody's
gardener."
In her last conscious act before a fatal descent
into Alzheimer's, Sandra's mother divorced her father, launching him on a
mail-order quest to take a bride from the old country--ground Loh covers in the
sketch "My Father's Chinese Wives." Rather than being angry or
embarrassed at being the foil for his daughter's comedy, the elder Loh revels in
the attention. "I'm very flattered," he says. "If Sandra didn't
talk about these things, nobody would know about me. Most people have to wait
until their funeral before people say all these interesting things about them.
I'm still alive. I can hear it." As for the accuracy of his daughter's
memory, he shrugs and says, Zen-like: "Each fact you can spin in a
different way. But of all my children, Sandra is the most liberal. She tolerates
me." He pauses, then adds: "But everybody evolves. Even an old man
like me."
These days, Eugene Loh celebrates his own
strangeness. On the beach, he flaunts an undersized Speedo swimsuit salvaged
from a dumpster near his home. He has taken on an odd collection of boarders,
many of whom are disciples of a maharishi. He still hitchhikes; his daughter
once wrote of how he scored a ride with actress Anjelica Huston. Often he goes
to a nearby Starbucks to drink the dregs from abandoned coffee cups. Always
aware of his audience, he sometimes announces to strangers that he has just
refilled his Viagra prescription. He proudly displays his wallet--a tattered,
letter-sized envelope with crucial numbers scribbled across the outside. And he
draws attention to a plastic Lucky bag he uses to shoulder his belongings on
hitching trips and bus rides across L.A. "It's my trademark," he says
of the bag.
The father, who so far has taken two Chinese
wives, has attended many of the daughter's performances, playing up his Chinese
roots to suit his purpose. At last year's "Aliens" opening in L.A., he
came dressed in a floor-length blue satin Mandarin robe and sat in the front
row, snapping pictures and turning heads. "God forbid," Sandra says,
"that any attention might be focused on me." He also has ventured
onstage for Q&A sessions with his daughter. And here's the part that
completely mystifies Sandra and sister Tatjana, whose own anger led her to avoid
her father for about eight years: After watching him subjected to a comedic
character assassination, theater audiences still hold him in awe.
"My father comes onstage and people give him
standing ovations," Sandra says. "They ask him all these philosophy of
life questions. They treat him like the Dalai Lama. It really puzzles my sister
and me how he always comes across as this folk hero. And we're going, 'He's not
that. He's a total shyster, and why can't people see that about him?' But the
more you call him a shyster, the more people go, 'Oh, the angry daughters.'
"
The stage shows have brought Eugene Loh a cult
following. A local rock group once wrote a song titled "Mr. Loh" and
invited him onstage while they performed at a club on Sunset. As his daughter
rolled her eyes, the elder Loh--wearing only a Speedo--did acrobatics from a bar
held by two band members. Now, as part of a long process of forgiveness, Loh
accepts her father's acting-out, appreciating him as a wellspring for her
wistful "here's my pathetic life" comedy.
Still, she has her limits. She recently invited
him to dinner at her home but didn't offer him a lift, so he took a three-hour
bus ride from Malibu. And she only lets him monopolize conversations for so long
before giving him a gentle verbal elbow to the ribs. When a visitor suggests
that both Sandra and her father benefit one another--she gets the comic material
and he gets the publicity--Eugene Loh launches into a dissertation on nature's
many parasitic relationships. With perfect timing, the once-angry daughter turns
to her father. "So what's that make you then, Dad, a bacteria?"
The joke is delivered without malice. "After
my mom died," she says, "I went through this feeling of 'Oh, my gosh,
this is my only parent I have left. This is my only link to the past, for better
or worse.' No matter what friends you have, they're not going to replace your
family. And the more you understand them, the more you understand
yourself."
In 1987, Sandra Tsing Loh played a Steinway piano
for 90 minutes beside the Harbor Freeway as traffic whizzed past. The point was
to be the vibrant auteur who could create art wherever she chose. But the
performance piece fell flat. Rather than being hailed as the new Yoko Ono by the
avant-garde crowd, she landed in People magazine and became the butt of a Johnny
Carson monologue, dismissed as another sideshow from that circus called Los
Angeles. Loh didn't flinch. She played her piano outside a Hollywood hotel while
a gang of rabid passersby knocked her aside, grabbing for the shower of $1 bills
she paid an assistant to drop from a cherry picker. Looking to make a statement
on shameless self-promotion, she got her photo in the National Enquirer. The
1989 grunion gig fared no better. Emptying her savings account, she paid $5,000
to have the 35-piece Topanga Symphony help her serenade spawning fish in a
midnight performance on a Malibu beach. She aimed at the abstract but got
dismissed as another angling Angelyne.
"That's when I thought, 'I have no idea where
I'm going in my life. The only kind of creative art I do costs me thousands of
dollars out of my own grad school pocket.' The art wasn't creating opportunities
for more interesting work. Instead, it triggered phone calls from used-car lots
and a college in Arkansas that wanted me to play piano dangling from a
helicopter to promote the opening of a new library."
For a time, Loh had danced to the tune of her
father's vision, graduating from Caltech with bachelor's degrees in physics and
literature, spending summers working in the advanced tactical weapons division
at Hughes Aircraft in El Segundo. In 1983, the meltdown came. Blowing her
graduate school exams, she bolted from science. Her father reacted unfavorably.
"It was like I was gonna become a crack head." So Loh charted her own
unsteady course, entering the graduate English program at USC, where she taught
for years, writing plays and short stories, doing her performance art, tutoring
10th-graders in math on the side. While floating on a shark-shaped tube at a
backyard pool party in 1988, Loh met future husband Mike Miller, who recalls
being fascinated with this erstwhile rocket scientist. He encouraged her to quit
teaching and to pursue her real passions. Loh quickly moved in with her new
boyfriend--ending her years-long skein of bad dates with unmarriageable men. But
the career conundrum continued as she pursued a succession of freelance
journalism gigs and low-security temp jobs--schlepping for a magician in North
Hollywood, clerking and typing at an amp factory in Sylmar.
"I used to kid Sandra that we were going to
make a "Scared Straight" video about her life to show to aspiring
bohemians," recalls friend Daniel Akst. "Teachers could identify kids
who wore too much black. They'd be pulled aside and the horrors of Sandra's life
would make them go into accounting."
Then Loh got a break: In 1992, she landed
"The Valley" column for Buzz. Founding editor Allan Mayer recalls
falling in love with Loh's take on such subjects as her Valley health club,
which had hairballs in the showers and old people who blundered into her lane
doing laps in the pool. "There was such a clear voice there, a distinctive
Southern California vision," he says. "People talk about humor
essentially being cruel, but that's not the case with Sandra. Her humor works
because it's very pointed and very sharp, like any good art, and it's very
specific. At the same time, what makes it powerful is that there's an enormous
amount of compassion."
Slowly, the "Valley" columns altered
Loh's oh-so-hip persona. "In my early 20s, I desperately wanted to be cool,
to enroll in the fiction workshops and wear the cool clothing. But it didn't
suit me, and I wasn't welcomed into the cool circles. So I guess I did the
reverse. Like living in the Valley and making that OK. Whatever cool people
would do, I always would do the opposite, every single time. That became my
strategy."
Loh began fleshing out material for "Aliens
in America," which she later staged, along with "Bad Sex With Bud
Kemp," in Los Angeles and off-Broadway in New York. She also began work on
the novel. Intended as a meditation on ethnicity, in which a white female and an
Asian American woman cross paths during the 1992 L.A. riots, the book taught Loh
a lesson about her own multicultural identity. Just before sending it off to her
publisher, the woman who had recently started using her middle name "Tsing"
because "it would be cool to sound more Asian" spotted a fatal flaw in
her vision--and scrapped the Asian character. "All that stuff about Asian
identity was in there because I was hoping to get into that whole Amy Tan ring,
but I just didn't have it within me. So then I go, 'Oh, no, I'm white, what does
this mean, that the tribe I most relate to is the tribe of the middle class?' So
the book became a story about middle-class white people, the last oppressed
group whose voice had not been heard. That's the audience I most related
to."
As she delved into her mixed roots, she found
herself wrestling with the constraints of political correctness. Soon she was
taking on the grant-giving gurus of the local art world for patronizing minority
artists such as herself by funding unworthy projects solely on the basis of
color. In a Buzz piece called "Is This Ethnic Enough For You?" she
concluded that multiculturalism in the arts had "become prized over all
other qualities--over talent, over beauty, over ideas."
Unwilling to play the ethnicity card, she dug
deeper for material, unearthing some truths about herself in the process--and
bolstering her instinct toward self-deprecation. Her columns mocked her
baby-boomer fetish for Ikea furniture and recalled living as "white
trash" in the Valley neighborhood of Winnetka, where she had relished
lounging in a cement pool surrounded by a chain-link fence and weeds. She
describes her driver's license photo as so hideous that the DMV took it upon
itself to send her another. In one commentary, she divulged a devil's deal she's
dying to make: "No sex for the rest of your life, but unlimited first-class
air miles. Or sex just once a year and then fly free business class."
She has dissected her pregnancy on-air after she
and Miller, a guitarist, "pulled the goalie" on their contraception.
Then there was the six-part series on the surgery she had for the bags under her
eyes. For Loh, liposuction and laser surgery are barometers of L.A. vanity--and
prime subject matter. "My strategy is that if anything seems taboo, then go
with that. Go on the radio and explain that while you wish it weren't so, that
while your higher self wouldn't have considered it even for a moment, you still
just had the fat lasered out of your eye bags. That's the status of the human
condition--to admit you're not the person you thought you'd be. That's real
fodder for me as a writer."
No matter how rich the material, Loh leaves many
KCRW radio tapings in a bad mood. "Most times I tell myself, 'It sucked!
I'm a total failure!' " Her commentaries, she points out, are not edited or
pre-approved. "It's just me and that microphone alone in our own
confessional booth. If I pondered the implications of that, I'd never be able to
do it."
If nothing else, those therapeutic taping sessions
have given Loh the insight to know which Faustian bargains she had best
avoid--and which are likely to be reneged on even before she can make them. She
has sat straight-faced at network development meetings as executives blather on,
praising her stage show. "You, you, you!" they cry. "Your life!
Your characters! Your vision! You are a natural sitcom!" But time and
again, Hollywood fails to deliver. Not only can Loh not produce her show, the
shot-callers say, but she can't have any acting roles, not even a cameo.
"Not even one line," she says. "Basically what they mean is 'Your
one-woman show is great, but you're too old and haggard to be on TV.' "
Loh recalls a lunch at Maple Drive restaurant. An
executive fawned over her comic depictions of the Loh life and then floated a
job offer. "I'm thinking, 'I've got a TV deal. This is pretty good. Me, my
world, my characters.' Then, like in the middle, my tuna sashimi came halfway
up." What the exec wanted was someone to write funny dialogue for two
22-year-old former Double Mint twins.
He told Loh: "We want to ask the question:
'What is it really like to be blond?' People think blonds lives are so perfect.
But, actually, they have insecurities."
Now Loh has a policy: no meetings with network
comedy development executives, "the unfunniest and most hateful people in
the world." And no more show comps for industry types, the arrogant little
operators who expect everything for nothing just so they can get up and walk out
halfway through your performance. Loh's siblings in the stand-up comedy
sisterhood share her frustration. "I go into this rage when I hear about
Sandra's network development meetings," says "Saturday Night
Live" alum Julia Sweeney, who has done her own one-woman shows. "Some
of those comedians already on TV don't have half of what's going on inside her
head."
So Loh goes about her merry outcast way. Years
after those public piano gigs, she has remained true to her vision of making art
happen on her own terms. Last fall, she footed the bill to stage a reprise run
of "Aliens" at West Hollywood's Tiffany Theater. "So much of the
artist's life is waiting for somebody to give you permission to create,"
she says. "You know, like, 'We will publish your book, but it has to be
this way. We will give you money to write a script, but it has to be that way.'
At the Tiffany, I was just totally my own boss. I put up the money, I hired
people I loved. In the end, I doubled my investment. But the best part was
feeling empowered to do it all myself."
Well, not entirely by herself. "There's a
certain look in Sandra's eyes when she hears possible material," says
Tatjana. "And I sometimes have to say, 'No, you can't use this.' Sometimes
I just want to talk to her sister-to-sister." For years, Miller has endured
jokes that he is the basis for his wife's material on inept sex. He plays the
same role for Loh that fictional husband Fang played for Phyllis Diller, he
says, joking that he and his father-in-law may start a support club as survivors
of Loh's comedy: "We'd have a T-shirt with footprints and the words 'Sandra
was here.' "
Expecting her child in September, Loh still stays
busy. Along with her radio gig, she provides the voice of Mrs. Duong, the
Vietnamese neighbor in the Disney animated TV series "Weekenders." She
recently guest-hosted the talk show "Later." She is writing a book,
"A Year in Provence Van Nuys," about the "charmless, tattered,
sunstroked mini-mall wasteland I call home." She's also researching a book
on her dad (who, let it be known, was tickled to see that a Caltech brochure
listed among its distinguished alumni Boeing executives, Nobel laureates. . . .
and Sandra Tsing Loh).
Loh isn't very famous. And that's fine with her.
"I have the freedom to be creative, to do things that are interesting to
me, and that's the real definition of success," she says. Just in case, she
has devised a foolproof way to keep the celebrity demons at bay. "Each
month, before buying into the whole image thing and thinking 'Yeah, I am kinda
glamorous,' I try to do at least one humiliating thing. Usually, I shuffle
around Trader Joe's to buy some incredibly fatty food, dressed in my sweat pants
with no makeup and looking absolutely horrible."
Of course, her father refuses to let Loh strike a
sophisticated pose. On a recent network limo ride, he wanted pictures taken with
the driver and preened for the camera, waving a brandy bottle from the mini-bar.
"He was the immigrant relative with the shopping bag, just gurgling with
glee," Loh recalls with a dark laugh. "With your father around, you
can basically never, ever be cool."