classy and sassy, with a dash of raunch
A weekly podcast...
....actually I'm calling it an oddcast - launches on Spotify and other platforms. I'll be riffing on dating younger men, attending sex education classes, shopping for underwear, buying condoms, finding my father's diaries, dealing with my hypercritical mother, writing my own obituary...and other misadventures. Occasionally I'll be interviewing Lusty Bangor, retired porn star, and other characters that may happen by. Generally, though, the monologues will be on whatever raunchy or irreverent subject pops into my head.
HERE'S THE LINK: https://anchor.fm/agingdisgracefully
You'll also be able to READ the stories on my FunnyCarolyn blog, posted at the bottom of the FUNNY CAROLYN website!
THE OLD WHITE LADY TELLS IT
The Making and Unmaking of A Racist
It opened in February 2020......and then Covid shut it down. Fortunately, we had a great video of one of my performances,, and that was available in various streaming platforms. Maybe someday I'll be performing it again, because it's so relevant to current events. And it got good reviews!
“Carolyn Meyer’s new one-woman show The Old White Lady Tells It is a marvelous coming-of-age story of one person’s slow realization and ultimate rejection of the racist ethos that cripples her family and culture. … the octogenarian Meyer is a brilliant raconteur whose command of the stage and scintillating presence holds the audience in rapt attention.” --Matthew Yde, ABQ Journal critic
"Meyer keeps this intensely revealing story funny from opening to close. The stage is dark and bare except for a chair and a faceless white doll she uses as a prop. Director Barry Simon, who notes in the program, 'With humor, empathy, and the cold, precise eye of a writer, Carolyn stands up and exposes through her stories not only the 'isms' she learned and had to reject, but the ones we too have to confront.'
This is an excellent show." -- Rob Spiegel, Talkin' Broadway
"Don't Call Me Young Lady!"
Charm Bracelet
"In the ’50s, when Carolyn “Callie” Meyer ’57 finally won the coveted charm anointing her “the Most Useful Girl” in her high school, she never imagined it would become the rallying cry of her one-woman stage show 60-some years later. After a late foray into standup comedy, this prolific author (60-plus books!) leveraged the charm as the closing punch line of her show. Following 13 sold-out performances that drove audiences wild in her hometown of Albuquerque, Meyer’s piece was selected by the United Solo Theatre Festival for an Oct. 27, 2019, off-Broadway performance.
The charm bracelet sparking a thousand laughs (and Carolyn Meyer’s one-woman show) anchors her Most Useful Girl Award and several Bucknell charms, among them, Sigma Tau Delta and Alpha Lambda Delta.
Bucknell Magazine, Fall 2019
My first solo show, "Don't Call Me Young Lady", opened in 2019 and sold out again and again, before it went to New York to the United Solo Festival in the Fall of 2019.
A LOT OF MY SHOW, “Don’t Call Me Young Lady!,” is a memoir. It goes through my relationship with my mother — we did not get along. She was a gorgeous, talented woman who thought I’d inherit her looks and talent. She won the Most Useful Girl award in school, so it was my dream to win it too, and I did win it my senior year of high school. It was a validation at that time. And now I’m validated in an entirely different way, because my work is going to New York.
The show’s title is all about being labeled — calling a woman “young” when she’s obviously not young is labeling her with expectations of who she is and what she should be doing. It doesn’t fit any of us. It’s condescending! It makes me want to slap people who pretend it’s flattering.
At the end of my show, after I’ve told some very raunchy stories, I say to the audience, “Can you imagine what my mother would think? She hoped I’d turn out well, but I turned out just as badly as she thought I would. But my dad would have loved that I became a writer, a wife, a mother, a lover, a comedian — and the Most Useful Girl!” That’s when I hold up the bracelet, the audience goes nuts, and I get a standing ovation. And that’s why this charm is still my little prize.
How I became a comedian
Being a homely child was the beginning
Straight A report cards didn't get me a prom date
Straight A report cards didn't get me a prom date
Buck teeth, thick glasses, and my mother dressed me funny--and the kids called me Professor Pisspot.
Straight A report cards didn't get me a prom date
Straight A report cards didn't get me a prom date
Straight A report cards didn't get me a prom date
...but I did have a funny part in the senior class play.
After years of writing novels
Straight A report cards didn't get me a prom date
After years of writing novels
...I grabbed a mic, started telling stories--most of them true--and found my true calling at last.