Margaret Cho: I want to be ‘Whorey Oprah After Dark’
Here’s an inside look at how famous people talk. Kathy Griffin asked Margaret Cho whether she wanted to split a $50,000 jet ride from Los Angeles to Las Vegas because they were both performing at The Mirage. It went like this.
Cho: “Well, if it’s more than $50 — which is how much Southwest charges to go from Burbank — then I’m going to have to say no.”
Griffin: “It’s gonna be $50,000.”
Cho: “How could you spend that much? I will buy your Southwest ticket. I will rent a car from L.A. and drive us both.”
Griffin: “Fine. I’m going to ask Bill Maher.”
Cho tells me that story from last year and laughs at how different these two friends can be.
“She’s really rich. She’s really, really successful. That’s the kind of level she operates on,” Cho says. “She also has Suze Orman do her finances.
“I’m such a country mouse, I can’t imagine that kind of lifestyle,” Cho says. “I also never wear makeup or get dressed up. I wear free T-shirts from places.”
Cho and Griffin return this weekend. Cho performs standup Friday at The Mirage. Griffin plays The Mirage on Saturday. Even Maher is back, performing Friday-Saturday at the Palms.
Friday also brings the Pride Night parade downtown, with its official hotel tie-ins across the Strip. Add Cho and Griffin, who are LGBT icons, and this is going to be a fantastically gay weekend.
“You get to the point where you’re a (part of the LGBT community) for long enough, you become like a mother superior,” Cho says.
Cho is one of the only celebrities in America who openly describes herself as a bisexual woman in an open relationship. She’s been with artist Al Ridenour since the 1990s and married to him for 10 years.
“My marriage has lasted at least 51 times longer than Kim Kardashian’s marriage,” Cho jokes. “That’s pretty good.”
She describes an open marriage the same way people describe good close marriages:
“You have to really want to live in it, and be in a marriage, and be able to communicate.”
Cho and I talk about swingers, but she points out that is a different issue.
“I have experienced that (swinger) side of it too, and BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism),” Cho says.
“To me, that’s very social and more of an identity. But the actual sex involved in any of that kind of stuff — which I’ve done a lot — is to me the most non-sexual. It’s more performance than anything else. And I’m totally not an exhibitionist person.”
Maybe she isn’t an exhibitionist. But she enjoys the spotlight. She keeps asking “The View” producers to hire her as a regular.
“I feel like I would inject a different energy into it,” Cho says.
But if “The View” doesn’t hire her, maybe she could start her own late-night “View”/“Oprah” type show.
“I would do a late night ‘View’ where we have rock stars, and lots of music, and comedians, and just get wild and dangerous. I think it would be really cool to give a lot of sex advice.
“I always wanted to do a really whorey Oprah that was late night — helping women, but with that darker side we don’t always get to display.
“I want to be ‘Whorey Oprah After Dark.’”
Doug Elfman’s column appears on Page 3A in the main section on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He also writes for Neon on Fridays. Email him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.
