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“You're never more wanted in Canada until you leave,” says Kurt. In addition to more work, she is now enjoying more acclaim and creative freedom than she did in the States. “I feel like I don't have to struggle so much for the same amount of job satisfaction,” she says.
“In Canada it's not an issue to do a show with gay themes, or with no gay themes but to present yourself as an openly gay person,” she says. “Whereas in L.A. they're always trying to spin it. Are you going to be funky? Outspoken? A comic relief? Or are you going to die in the second episode? It's always got to be gay and something else.”
But love was Kurt's main reason for moving back to Canada. Last September she married her partner of five years. “I call her my Doctor Smarty Pants,” Kurt says of Chloe, who is a professor at York University. “She tells me, ‘Now that we're gay married, you know, there's no gay divorce, so you can't divorce me.'”
In addition to the Logo gay marriage series, Kurt is developing a sitcom based on her life. She's hoping to play her own mother. “I think Freud would roll over many times in his grave,” she says. “I'm going to be playing my mother. As a sitcom character.”
Kurt notes her mother's “incredible erasing memory” as she breaking into a thickly accented impression: “Well, eef you're going to make something up…” “Yeah, like I need to make anything up. I go on stage and I tell her stories verbatim!,” Kurt adds, not giving herself due credit for her narrative knack and impeccable delivery.
She complains about her Hungarian heritage, a major source of her material: “We're scattered, there's no cohesion. Of all the ethnicities, to have one that so fractured and joyless. Hey, lucky me.”
“I've also inherited the Hungarian outlook,” Kurt continues. “It's not really like the glass is half empty. It's more like [in thick accent] I think the gless is duhrty.' And why is it a glass? Why not plastic? Plastic is safer, you could kill yourself…”
Kurt has often joked that her mother tried to kill her when she came out to her in '89. “My mother is so supportive and sweet and understands there are more of us, and there's kind of even a cachet about it because not everyone is so it's special. Yet she has no problem saying things like, ‘I know iz rilly heppy but iz not normal, you know?'” And she doesn't want any of the family in Hungary to know, claiming “We don't even have zese tings over dehr.”
“Bailey. Bailey, come here!” This time it's the family dog rather than Sesame Street competing with us for Kurt's attention. Apparently the Lab/Newfoundland mix recently discovered the little pan behind the barbecue where all the grease drips, and ever since then she has been going over to lick “the disgusting barbecue drippings” every time she is let out into the yard. “I'm so grossed out by my dog right now,” says Kurt.
Big dogs need plenty of exercise, and Bailey is about to head off to a doggie play group. “It sounds so pretentious. And we do take her for walks,” Kurt says. “But there's something about her running around the lake with a bunch of other big dogs, playing in the water. I mean, I certainly couldn't coordinate that.”
Kurt says Bailey looks like a bear, noting that “the baby must think she lives with a gigantic black monster.” Kurt has already started a “therapy journal” for her daughter, and the first entry is about the dog. “Twenty years from now the baby will be grown up, sitting in therapy going, ‘I have images of this big, black shadow lurking over me...'”
Therapy journal? “I'm so sure I'm going to screw up as a parent that I want to have a book on hand. I just want to her to be prepared.”
As if on cue, the baby starts to giggle in the background. “My comedy has gone from how to come up with a really clever way of saying anything…to making funny faces to make the baby laugh,” Kurt says. “She doesn't care how funny a joke is.”
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