The Mystery of the Obtrusive Beeping

ANN ARBOR – Comedian Elvira Kurt couldn't believe it when she and her sobbing 6-month-old girl were kicked out of a Movie for Mommies screening of a Jodie Foster film.
"It's supposed to be OK to have your kids wailing," she says from her Toronto home. "But either she was very critical of Jodie, or maybe she's upset that Jodie hasn't come out yet."
But her daughter Madeleine's howling doesn't stop there. It becomes the original score for our conversation. Even in the midst of a baby and a marriage, Elvira and I, despite the fact that she is a lesbian and I am a gay man, seemed to be hitting it off.
"What is it, Boo Boo?" she asks.
Kurt quickly cleared up any misconception I might have. "No, not you, Chris."
Oops.
Ever since Madeleine, Kurt and her wife Chloe barely find time to complete mundane tasks – like faxing. As another dial tone kicks in on the line, we try, like Angela Lansbury, to solve The Mystery of the Obtrusive Beeping.
"Oh, Jesus," Kurt says. "It's not your phone, is it?"
It's Chloe's fax machine.
"When she's [Madeleine] occupied everyone tries to get as much done as humanly possible," Kurt says.
Although Chloe and Madeleine won't accompany Kurt on her visit to Ann Arbor this weekend, she'll busy herself over plates of fancy cuisine, like sushi at a local restaurant.
"Often, when I get a phone call from somewhere, I try to register if I've eaten well there," she says.
After the show, Kurt doesn't plan on throwing back any beers. She'll catch some Z's. "Maybe it's an age thing, but I finish the show, and especially now with the baby, I wanna go, and I wanna sleep a full eight hours uninterrupted."
Kurt became used to sleeping more hours than usual because of the Canadian TV show she worked on last year, "Popcultured." "I slept in my bed every single night," she says. "And then I got spoiled."
But maybe it's not Madeleine's fault that Kurt, who has only performed at local venues since the baby, is losing her wind. "It's hard to know how much is the baby and how much is just the natural slowing down," she says.
Kurt only performs one or two overnight gigs a month, versus about four pre-Madeleine. During those shows, Kurt often offers real-life wisecracks and imitations of her Hungarian mother who always complained to Kurt and told her, "I don't talk like dat [Kurt uses a Hungarian accent]."
She retorts, "Like I'd make up an accent to make fun of her! It's part of the cross she has to bear now. Secretly, I think she's hoping my rebellion has skipped a generation and she and my daughter are going to bond."
Kurt honed her comedy skill while helping write stand-up for Ellen DeGeneres post-coming out and between her cancelled sitcom and hit talk show. She's hesitant to divulge too much about working with the lesbian queen of comedy. "Um, ya know, the showbiz folk, they're a little, they're different from us," she says.
When Kurt, like DeGeneres, came out later in her comedy career, her humor became more authentic. "The gayness always opens the doors," she says. "My material became more personal, my delivery was more honest. I think that made the comedy very interesting to me, more than it has been before. More than when I was in [the], 'Hey, ladies, don't you hate it when your men,' [phase]. I had plateaued there and I was like, wow, so this is it?"
But that's not to say she still doesn't have her awkward moments, like when she recently wore a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and jeans to a glitzy fundraiser for a Jewish Day School. "I looked like I came off of the street and thought I'd tell jokes," she says.
But, Mickey aside, she's overcome her ill at ease Gilda Radner days. "She looked the way I felt," she says. "She looked like a gawky, kind of like an outsider … living in her own world."
With a booming comedy career, Kurt, who majored in animation, can't help think what it'd be like drawing characters from "The Incredibles" like many of her classmates do. "I could just be sitting in a cubicle and drawing picture after picture instead of wondering if I'm the reason a show didn't go well," she says.
With the newest Pixar Animation film "Cars" in theaters, Kurt will attempt to sit through the film with Madeleine, whose howling is gaining momentum.
"She's actually increasing her volume to block me out," she says.