It was a gamble, but those of you who came to the January 27, 2009 StandUp For Your Sisters show know how it all turned out. Many of us did our best sets, and it was an incredible night of comedy that a lot of the performers will remember for a long time. And the audience apparently will, too: people stop me in the street to this day and say, “That Gilda’ Club event was such a great show! Will you girls be doing it again next year?”. Is there any other answer but “Yes! Yes, yes, YES!”?

We sold out weeks early for that one, and we hope to do the same again, especially since the comics now have another full year of stage time under our belts.

And what a year it’s been!

Shelley Kidwell, who some of you will remember as the sassy Texan in the red dress, has opened for Shelley Marshall and performed at various clubs in Southern Ontario – all while raising three kids and finishing school at The Second City conservatory.

Lianne Mauladin, the blonde rocker who did that killer set in act one, played venues all over Southern Ontario and down the coast of California. She won a tough competition in Toronto called StandUp Showdown, and came in second at two separate Great Canadian Laugh-off contests in Barrie and Hamilton. She surpassed the efforts of some pro comics, and continues to rock her career in stand-up. She’s highly inspiring.

Marilla Wex, the cheeky Brit who probably sold you a raffle ticket at last year’s show, beat out over 60 other comics this summer to come in third in the Toronto Comedy Brawl. She has become a fixture on comedy stages around Toronto and on your TV as well, as her acting gigs also continue to climb.

Becky Bays was chosen to take part in a CBC taping of Barack jokes with the killer Obama bit you’ll remember from last year’s show. She continues to bring her highly original take on life and news to stages in and around Toronto, including Eton House, Spirits, AltDot Comedy and Absolute Comedy, where she opened for headliner Steve Levine.

Laura Salvas, the reluctant Liza Minelli lookalike, came in fourth at the Toronto Comedy Brawl, and continues to make great strides on the improvisation front.

Muniza Rauf quit comedy two more times last year, but came back to play gigs at Spirits, West End Girls and this show. She also has a new boyfriend, and a whole pile of new material to go along with that.

I haven’t won any contests myself, but I’ve performed in four provinces now, with some killer sets in Montreal and St. John’s which keep me pumped to continue in this wonderfully challenging and fulfilling profession. I also spend a lot of time on film sets and writing, and the stand-up has definitely informed my other jobs. Like some of the girls, I now sometimes get paid for my comedy, which is a great feeling.

Maia Mitchell has stopped doing stand-up, at least for the time being, so we invited Rhiannon Archer to join SUFYS this year. Although she’s also a relative newcomer, she can be found performing in or hosting shows across Ontario on any given night. She’s a dynamo, and quite hilarious!

Marjorie Malpass, our special guest last year, has taken a few months off to have a baby (congratulations!).

When I saw how well the SUFYS and other female comics around town were doing, and noted that many comedy rooms in Toronto were still programming “old school” (which is one token female per show), this past September I created a monthly show at Poor John’s in Parkdale called West End Girls. It’s an all girl stand-up room (with one token boy) and the room is always filled to capacity with an all-ages crowd of enthusiastic comedy fans of both genders.

Heidi Mole, who you might remember as last year’s liturgical dance maven, is a crowd favourite at West End Girls, and, I’m proud to say, is now producing this year’s Gilda’s Club show with me and Becky Bays. Her background in film production has made her a natural at fundraising and organizing, and she’s pulled off some major miracles.

Elvira rocked the house so well last year that it took us a long time to come up with a celebrity MC to match her level of skill and funny, but we did it. When Martha Chaves said yes to hosting The ‘C’ Word, we jumped for joy. If you’ve never seen her work, you’ll know what we mean when you see the show. And Jo-Anna Downey – beloved host of Spirits – and Sandra Battaglini – who did the best-ever set so far at West End Girls – are sure to slay you.

How could The ‘C’ Word possibly get any better? Well, the legendary Cylla Von Tiedemann did a photo shoot with us this year outside the famous red doors of Gilda’s Club, and we were honoured to have such an incredible artist lensing us at such an iconic location.

It was touching to be photographed in front of the clubhouse, which is also where Gilda got her comedic training. This show is our small way of honouring the late, great Gilda Radner, a pioneering woman in comedy and the wellness community, and our inspiration.

We hope you will enjoy the show as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you.

It takes balls to put on an all-female standup comedy show, especially when nine of the 12 comics have less than six months’ experience. Charge a ticket fee of $20 in tough economic times with full confidence that you’ll pack the house, raise money for charity and get solid laughs? It’s so crazy it just might work!

For our first blog, I wanted to share with you the story of how our show, “StandUp For Your Sisters: A Benefit for Gilda’s Club”, came to be.

All of the non-feature performers on this show met each other just this summer at stand-up comedy classes with Dawn Whitwell at the Second City Training Centre and Bad Dog Theatre. For many of us, it was a life-changing process. We are all over 25 (some of us well over) and come from a variety of life experiences,  the kinds of experiences which could lead one to either drinking or stand-up.   In some walks of life, aging is seen as a liability, but in comedy, age ain’t nothin’ but a bonus. If you’ve been paying attention, the older you are, the more likely you are to recognize and admit to your individual demons.

Following our mentor’s sage advice to tell the truth about life as we see it, we soon learned that we had no shortage of material to draw from. After weeks of working hard to develop our first five-minute sets, our student shows were packed to the rafters and echoed with encouraging laughs (no small feat when you consider that the Second City Mainstage seats over 300).

We got a surge of confidence to keep going, until some of us started hitting the open mic nights and reality hit – we soon realized that stage time is hard to come by. Especially, it seems, for new female comics. On any given amateur night at the mainstream clubs, you’re lucky to see 10% female comics in the line-up, yet women often make up at least half the audience.  If there were so many of us out there, why were we the exception rather than the rule?  We decided to put on our own show, and bring the audience to us.

It’s no secret that women travel in packs and can “bring the crowd”, in comedy parlance. Unlike the average twenty-something guy telling jokes at open mics, as women of a certain age we all have contacts in the various professional worlds we walk in. We knew from experience that we could fill a 200-seat venue like Hugh’s Room.  So when one of the comics, Leanne Mladen, said, “We should do this for charity… let’s call it StandUp For Your Sisters,” we were immediately energized to make it happen. We brainstormed various causes, and Gilda’s Club soon became the clear contender; we had all been touched by cancer in some way, and we had all been inspired to get on stage in the first place by female comedians like Gilda Radner. We were nothing short of honoured when Gilda’s Club said yes to our offbeat idea for a fundraiser.

We’re not hiding the fact that most of us are new comics – we’re banking on it.  We are hoping the curiosity factor of it all will pique a ticket buyer’s interest. When we asked Dawn Whitwell to headline and Elvira Kurt to host, and both agreed (with full knowledge of our material), we knew we definitely had a show worth seeing.

Shelley Kidwell Eckert kicked in two Raptors floor seats behind the visitors bench with full bar and dinner service, on the sole condition that we auction, rather than raffle, them off, and the Silent Auction portion of the evening was born.  Donations from other companies started coming in and the momentum hasn’t stopped.  Heidi Mole secured a generous donation from TPH for our printing costs, raising our potential proceeds, and Becky Bays stepped up to produce the Silent Auction full-time.

I’ve since taken a tour of Gilda’s Club and was able to see first-hand the wonderful work they do.  I was saddened to hear that the Montreal branch was closed down due to lack of funds; my heart started beating hard at the thought that this could ever happen to Gllda’s Club in Toronto.  We hope in some small way that our show is able to help keep Gilda’s dream alive: that no one should ever have to face cancer alone.

We hope you enjoy the show as much as we are enjoying putting it together, and we hope to do Gilda’s legacy proud.

It all started just less than a year ago. I’d been going on and on and on to my poor husband that my old mate Simon Pegg made the best zombie movie ever and that he had to see it. (If you haven’t yet seen Shaun of the Dead stop reading this blog now, go to your nearest decent video store and rent it immediately.) So we sat and watched it and although my husband agreed that it was, indeed, a very good zombie movie, I felt faintly depressed having watched it again. Not that the movie wasn’t great – it is. It’s just that watching Pegg made me realize that I’ve spent the last 15 years since university (where me and Simon met) waiting for acting jobs to fall out of the sky. Simon started doing stand-up immediately after graduation, wrote his excellent sitcom Spaced (in which Jessica Stevenson’s part is based on me), went on to write his own movies and is now super-famous. Saying it was a little bit of a wake-up call is like saying Facebook is a little bit addictive.

Of course I didn’t get off my lazy arse and start booking open mic gigs – I just lay around in a slough of despond wondering why I’d wasted so much time and how sad it was that I wasn’t going to realize my dream of winning an Oscar before I was 40. Then, thank God, Daniela suggested we take Dawn Whitwell’s stand-up class at Second City. She got onto it right away and I’ve been playing catch-up with her ever since. I booked myself onto Dawn’s course in July (Daniela had already done one round and joined me for her second), did my first gig in September and have been doing open mics ever since.

Where will this lead? Who knows. My dream is to have my own television series and to do more movies, but for now I’m enjoying writing and being in front of a live audience again