& Entertainment

Flint native Sandra Bernhard takes on the world at Ann Arbor Summer Festival.

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

A

fter she graduated from high school, Sandra
Bernhard spent a year cleaning guts out of
kosher chickens at Kibbutz Kfar Menahem

in Israel.
"My main job was vacuuming out lungs in the
slaughterhouse, which I actually enjoyed, believe it
or not," she said in a recent telephone interview.
That's not so hard to believe coming from
Bernhard, 49, now renowned for eviscerations of a
more verbal kind. With a menacing smile and a
sneer on her Mick Jagger-esque lips, she dishes it
out as comedy's reigning Queen of Acerbity. Since
her 1989 hit show, Without You Bn Nothing, made
her a cult figure, she's continued to slaughter sacred
cows in the realm of fashion, celebrity, sexuality and
politics.
More recently, Playboy labeled the bisexual actress-
comic-singer a definitive outlaw humorist and a
"self-anointed, fully realized diva." Even though she
now has a 6-year-old daughter and assiduously prac-
tices Kabbalah, her fans continue to watch the
Jagger lips to see what scandalousness will emerge
next.
When Ralph Lauren (born Lifshitz) won a Fash-
ion award, Bernhard announced to his face and
in front of the audience: "There's nothing like
the sight of a Jewish cowboy riding off into

the sunset. I sure do love your sheets, Mr. Lifshitz."
On same-sex marriages, she said: "Every person
deserves equal rights, no matter whom they love."
Bernhard's infamous big mouth remains relatively
mum, however, about specific bits in her new show,
Everything Bad and Beautiful,
which she'll perform 8 p.m.
Thursday, June 30, at the
Power Center during
this year's Ann Arbor
Summer Festival.
She says the title
"describes how I feel
about the state of the
world" and that
she'll riff on what

personally shocks her: "Stupidity, arrogance and
hubris."
President George W. Bush will earn a reprieve in
this particular show. Instead, Bernhard will skewer
"people around him" such as Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. "It's more about how much
almost compassion I have for her, being trapped in
that world, being a black woman, to be so self-
loathing," she said.
Just don't accuse Bernhard of taking potshots at
the powerful. "It's not about targets; it's about going
beneath the surface to see what underpins things,"
she said.

QUEEN

OF ACERBITY on page 48

Sandra Bernhard. "Its not about tawets;
11 S (1/1(1111 going beneath the surfiwe to see
what underpins things."

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