Monkeys on My Back: Debbie Kasper's hilarious story of surviving stand-up comedy, alcoholism, and working for Rosanne.

You're listening to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

And I'm Phil Proctor and I'm in the saucer house by the sea in Lewis, Delaware. Today I was trying to find a corner in the house where I could make this call and there is no corner. So I'm actually calling from the bedroom.I hope that's all right. I don't know if the FCC is going to be unnerved by that.

Well, you're not on camera, that's a plus.

Good.

Yeah.

Well, that's really good because I'm wearing my jammies. That probably would unnerve our viewers.

And our guest.

Who is our guest today?

Our guest is Debbie Casper. She's a stand up comedian and a writer. She has a one woman show right now called Monkeys on my Back and everywhere else.It's playing at the Odyssey theater in west la. She is a two time Emmy nominated writer and multiple award winning comedian. Hi, Debbie, how are you?

Well, I'm good, how are you? I was wondering when I was gonna be a part of this.

Yeah. Hey Phil. What? Is there a TV on at your house or something?

Oh, no, that's Adele talking, doing her webinar. Can you hear it?

Yes.

All right, let me go into the bathroom and see if that works. Okay, hold on. My phone. I mean, my God.

Yeah, go to the bathroom.

Privacy.

No flushing anymore. Flushing.

Oh, no, I'm not in flushing. I'm in Lewis, Delaware.

As soon as my co host gets in the toilet, I'll. All right, hold on. The whole show is going in the toilet.

How's this?

Much better. Debbie, you're so patient. Thank you so much.

I'm just drunk. It's okay.

I went to see your show, which I highly recommend. It's funny and pretty heart wrenching. Monkeys on my back and everywhere else kind of alludes to all the things.

That I can't stop doing. All the things. You know.The actual definition of monkeys on your back is I think it's from like the days of the heroin addicts, musicians when they were heroin addicts. But it has since come to mean anything that you can't get out from under, including a mortgage.So for me, I'm a recovering alcoholic, so I experience very obsessive compulsive lifestyle of anything that isn't alcohol that I attached to. Shopping too much, spending too much money, eating too much sugar, craving too many laughs. It's just nothing's ever enough.So that's basically what I'm trying to say. With the title. Does it say it, do you think?

Yeah. Well, particularly when you see the show. You grew up in New Jersey. Exit 4.

Yeah, we talked about this.

Yeah, yeah.

Cherry Hill, South Jersey.

Yeah. You were a child of the 50s and 60s. You are a classic boomer.

I am.

You open up the show talking about your upbringing and your parents seem to be fairly proud. Alcoholics.

Oh, they were what I call white collar alcoholics. You're not supposed to call somebody an alcoholic because it's a self diagnosed disease.However, they're both dead and gone and they were just alcoholics. So I can't help it. I can't help but say it.

I gotta say, you know, Debbie, what you said is so true. Middle class alcoholics. Both of my parents would end their day sitting in chairs or with glasses of scotch in their hand smoking cigarettes.

Yeah.

My girlfriend Adele comes from West Orange, New Jersey and she was telling me just today about her parents sitting and having cheese and crackers. Her mom had an Old Fashioned. She used to dip her cheese and crackers into the Old Fashioned.

Oh my God, that's classic.

Yeah, well, she was taking good care of herself. Cause she was eating while she was drinking.

But there are consequences of being raised by two alcoholics.

That's right. You're gonna become a comedian.

It's so true. You're gonna become an alcoholic. That's gonna lead you down many roads you may not have gone down to. No.The interesting thing about that era is that, to me anyway, is that almost everybody I knew, parents drank too much alcoholically. Starting at 3 o' clock in the afternoon, my mom and her friends would gather.So when the kids came home from school, we'd all have to come to one house. Cause that's where the mothers would be drinking and they'd be having their high balls, you know, their bourbon and water, their Manhattans.And if you walked in and you needed something, it was like, mommy, I need. Well, have a cookie, honey. You know, have a cookie. Have a cookie. She would.The cookie drawer was my mother for many, many years, until I was old enough to drink. But I started to say something else, which was everybody was drinking like that. To my knowledge.When I looked back at my upbringing, I realized not everybody was drinking. My parents attracted the drinkers. That's who they hung with. So all of my childhood friends, they were all raised by alcoholics too.So we're all like insane.

Wow.

And it came with the territory. I remember growing up, everybody smoked cigarettes and had drinks and they go to the diner and have Cigarettes and have coffee.

Yeah. And our mothers all smoked cigarettes carrying us in their, you know, in their wombs. And my mother was like, well, I was smoking for two, you know.

Did she drink while she was.

Oh, they all did.

Wow.

So did if your parents drank. Yeah. They did not know about alcohol. Fetal syndrome. They didn't know anything. They all smoked and drank all the way, and then they all just barraged.I grew up in a house that had five packs of cigarettes a day, smoked in it and blown in my face. And then we would get in the car, and we would drive from New Jersey to Florida with the windows up.And five packs of cigarettes smoked in one day with the windows up.

Hey, Phil, does that bathroom have a door? Because we can still.

Can you still hear it?

Yes.

How about a gag?

The only other thing I could do is I'm getting into the shower.

I told you to do that.

All right.

And I'm going to close the shower. Shower door. Here we go.

I think if you just close the door to the bathroom, it would be fine.

No, don't risk close to the bathroom.

Okay.

What I'm trying to tell you. Okay. Part of the shower just fell down on me.

Yeah, don't turn on the water.

Part of this just fell down.

Oh, boy.

And I'm actually standing in water.

Welcome to the Boomer show.

This. This is the sacri. I hope our listener enjoys the sacrifice that I'm. I'm going through here.All right, now I am in this enclosed shower, standing, stand up shower.

Fantastic. Oh, much better.

Okay.

All right.

I'll do the rest of the show from the shower, but I'm not gonna turn it on to prove that I'm here.

You're not gonna get washed up on this show, Phil.

No, I'm already washed up, and I deserve it.

We are gonna get to our guest today, Debbie Casper. We're having our own thing.

We're all in the same boat. But I never really got into the single standup scene, and I am cur. Transitioned to that.

I started as an actress, and then I got into improv. I did comedy improv, and I just loved getting the laughs, and I couldn't get enough.And I started hanging out at the comedy clubs, and I couldn't get enough of them. It was the mid-80s, and comedy was exploding. Every pizzeria and bowling alley in America had a comedy club in it.

That's right.

Yeah. You'd pull up to do a gig, it would say, fish fry, $4.99 live comed all you can Eat. You know, that was. And I was hanging. This is a true story.I'm bottoming out as an alcoholic. And I'm hanging out at the comedy clubs, and I got a bill one night, a bar tab that was $50 in 1984. I'm gonna let you do the math on that.That's gotta be like 150 now. Okay. Beer. Just drink anyway. And then I find out that comedians drink for free. And I'm like, wow, I'm funny. I'm pre.And the next thing I knew, I was signing up for an open mic, and it got me on stage so I didn't have to. You know. I loved the control of it. I loved not having to wait for somebody to cast me in a play as an actress. And that started me writing Phil.I said, well, I guess at first I didn't know you had to write your own material.So I used to steal people's material, and I'd get on stage and I'd be doing Jerry Seinfeld's act, and some comedian pulled me aside and said, you can't do Jerry Seinfeld's material. I'm like, ah.

The open mic led you to an open bottle.

Or vice versa.

It was the same.

Or vice versa. Right?

Simultaneous.

So you were raised in an alcoholic environment. When did you start drinking yourself?

I was mixing my parents drinks at about age 7 and tasting them copiously.

They had you mix the drinks?

Oh, yes. We weren't children. We were bartenders with no tip jar.

They wanted to make you a mixologist.

Yeah.

Instead of a Girl Scout.

That's true. It's true. So at about age 12, we had a game room in the house. It was called the game room in everybody else's house in the neighborhood.Ours was called the bar room. My parents had this gorgeous bar installed in this room with a brass rail. And they had tons of parties. And we were having a Fourth of July party.I think I'm 12, and I was the bartender. I was mixing drinks. So it was one for you, one for me. My first drink was vodka and coke.

Oh, my God.

I know. Disgusting.

Oh, wait a minute. That's not disgusting. My first drink was BlackBerry brandy and Pepsi Cola.

Your folks condoned this?

They didn't.

Were they oblivious?

They were pretty oblivious. They didn't know they got drunk whenever their friends were over. It was the Fourth of July, big picnic, lots of boozers over, they're all drinking.They finally figured out how drunk I was when they asked me to go get the salad. My parents had this huge salad bowl. And they told me to get the watermelon in the salad.And I picked up the watermelon, and I put it in the salad and crushed the entire salad. And I walked downstairs going, here it is. And my parents went, you know, and they went, well, you learned how to speak.

You learned how to speak drunk.

I learned how to speak Heinekense very early age.

You started drinking fairly heavily right off the bat.

You know, you hear alcoholics tell their stories, and many people are like me, from the minute you have your first drink, you already can't control it. You just drink. And I drank that night until I passed out. I just drank until I passed out.My parents sent me to my room, and I just snuck a Coke and vodka up there and drank more until I passed out. Because now you're shamed at first. You know, it's like, ugh, I'm doing what I. And then you get caught. And then you drink around the shame.I mean, there's always a million reasons to have a drink.

How often were you drinking at the.

Oh, just weekends. I mean, I was still in high school, Right. I didn't go to skid row, for God's sake.

Hey, Debbie. Debbie. Out here in Los Angeles, it's called Skid Drive.

Is it Skid Drive.

Thank you.

He's in the bathtub all week.

You took what eventually became painful and turned it into comedy, right?

Yes. I went to college in Vermont, which was during the 70s. It was a really liberal time, as I know you guys remember.Cause everybody talks about the 60s, but the 70s made the 60s look like the 50s. The 70s were insane. Insane. We were allowed to smoke pot in our dorm rooms, and we did. People were dying from drug overdoses all over the world.So, you know, then the drugs come into the scene.

And cocaine in the mid-70s, before it was stigmatized with crack, it was a party favor.

Oh, not just a party favor. It was everybody's. Boy, I wish I could afford more. I mean, it was a thing. We all aspired to it.

Yeah. Remember Robin Williams said, cocaine is God's way of telling you you're making too much money?

Exactly. And it's true. So I would have to date coke dealers. That was the only way I could afford. Oh, my God.

All right, how did this morph into comedy?

I moved to New York City. I was a theater actress. I mean, when you're a new. A new alcoholic, you still. You don't have any control.Once I picked up my first drink, I had no control. But I Didn't pick my first drink up every single day. You know, I was doing shows. I became an actress.I went to grad school, I learned theater, and I moved to New York City to become, you know, Broadway star. I couldn't dance or sing, and apparently I wasn't a very good actress at that point either. But, you know, I had highfalutin ideas.Cause that went with my alcoholism. It's the, you know, reach for the stars, but you deserve. You deserve the dregs kind of syndrome. What do I say in my show?I'm a narcissist with low self esteem, which means I don't think much of myself, but I'm all I think about. So you drink.

Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah, it is. So that's the syndrome. You think you have a couple drinks and you think you're God because you don't see the faces people are making at you.

One of the big takeaways from your show was that effect that the alcoholism in your household had on you. The things your parents would say to you. Oh, yeah, just destroyed your self esteem.

Harsh criticism.

How did you get over that?

I haven't.

You still haven't.

Yeah, shut up. I'll never get over it. And that's my. That's bad. I mean, a lot of people said to me, get over it.And I'm like, all right, well, tell me how to do that. I've gotten over a lot of it. I think it's funny. Now, listen, I loved my parents, and my show is a pretty big exaggeration.

Sure.

You know, it's like Mark Twain says, nonfiction is the truth, but better. So I don't pat my boyfriend who sadly dies, and I talk about that in the show. His mother read. I wrote a book about a lot of the same stuff.And she read it and she said to me, I feel so. I feel so sorry for you. You know, what horrible childhood you had? I went, it was not a horrible childhood. I had a blast.I'm just not writing about the good parts because that's not particularly interesting. My parents were alcoholics, but they loved me. The problem with alcoholism is you don't feel love. You don't feel it so intellectually.Growing up, I knew I was loved. My parents were very good to me. I had everything I wanted, and they support immensely. But there was no emotional infrastructure.So if I had a problem, I had no one to talk to. And the way we interacted with each other was barbs. Chris. Everybody was really witty, and you better be on your feet.Cause if you were, if it was your turn to get taken down, you know, hey, hey, you got, you gained weight. Hey. You know, my father would look at my brother and say, what are you, girl? Now cut the hair. Cut your hair. You know, it was just. It was ruthless.

A tough Jersey upbringing.

It was a very tough Jersey. But educated, you know, my parents were educated and they had money. We didn't have a lot of money, but we certainly had money growing up.And my parents were like intellectual, atheistic alcoholics.

Interesting. But your show does say there is heart. You squared it up with your mom. You weren't raised by monsters.

No, I squared up with both of them, actually.

Yeah. Eventually you come out to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune.

Yeah.

And you end up writing for Roseanne.

Right.

How did that happen? Wow, that's pretty cool.

Well, when I sobered up in New York, I had all this energy. I mean, I was drinking hard for 20 years, so I'm already like 35 at this point when I sober up.And when you take the alcohol away, you have a lot of angst left. You don't know what to do with your hands. You don't know what to do with your thoughts.Just cause you take the alcohol away doesn't mean you take the alcoholism away.

And you were able to stop because of friend support, Right?

I went to a support group.

You went to a support group in Manhattan?

Yes.

You didn't have an intervention?

No. Nobody cared enough to intervene. In fact, we intervened. My brother. We did an intervention on my brother. My whole family did. And we did it drunk.We're all like, you can't drink anymore. The whole family had a drink in their hand because he was bottoming out faster than the rest of us. And then he kind of turned around.He didn't intervene, but he was a power of example for me.

You were talking about the New York scene in the 70s and 80s, which was wild. Going down to clubs three, four nights a week, dancing. And it was just wonderful. There was a lot of drinking, there was a lot of drugging.Then it went away. And I missed that crowd. Like what happened to all these people?And a dear friend of mine got sober and she took me to a church on Houston street in the middle of the afternoon. And we walked into the basement and it was like almost a football sized field, like downstairs room to this church. And there was the crowd.There were hundreds of people who used to be in the clubs with that music blaring, but they were all sober and they all Had Tupperware. They brought food.I went out onto the floor and danced a little bit and found myself in front of a woman who I knew, who did not want anybody to know that she was an alcoholic. And she says, what are you doing here? And I left.

Yeah.

But it was very interesting to see where that scene in New York went. It was good to see all those people sober and surviving.

There's a whole society of sober people, very large one, as a matter of fact, just sober drunks, you know. So I'm doing comedy. I've started writing. Cause I can't do Jerry Seinfeld's act anymore. Nor did it really work for me.Hey, where's the partner of this sock? It just didn't work for me. Anyway, I got one. So I started writing.And it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that I was at my heart a writer I didn't know because I had been.

Once you got clarity.

Once I had clarity, but I had insane clarity. And I literally started writing hours and hours every night. Every night I would write and write and write. And I wrote.I started writing sitcom spec scripts, which is what you need to get on a sitcom staff. And I wrote a one woman show. And I did my show and it got good reviews. And I moved out to LA to get my own sitcom.Got my big plans, you know, and I put my show up out here in Los Angeles. And at the time, there was very few women writing for sitcoms. Roseanne was already on the air and no one else that had artistic control.I mean, you know, Sybil had a show and Grace, Brett Butler had a show, but they didn't have control. Roseanne had creative control pretty early on. But anyway, they were looking for women.It was the first time in my life, the right time, the right place.And all these industry people just start coming out to see my show because I had good reviews and I won an award and I was getting really great reviews and they were all coming out. And I had an agent call me. I mean, I was only in LA for like two months. And she called me up and she goes, hi, I'm with. I forget the agency.And she goes, I'm an agent. I'm a writing agent. Do you want to write for. Do you happen to have a spec script? And I said, do I hair lip? You know, of course I have a spec script.And I sent it to her and she said, and it was of course a Seinfeld spec script. And she. Because he was our big. He was our big role model.Because he was the first one to get his own show, and he was the best comic around, and he was exemplary, and he wrote eight hours a day and he talked about it. So she takes me on immediately. And she called me up like God, a month later, and she goes, you have an interview the day my mother died.

Oh, my God.

I get a call from her. My mother's dying of lung cancer back in New Jersey. She lets me move to LA knowing she's dying because she didn't want to hold my plans up any.Yeah, she wasn't a monster at all. And my agent called me up on a Monday morning. She goes, you have an interview with Roseanne tomorrow with Dan, who runs Roseanne.I said, well, I have to fly home tomorrow and bury my mother. She goes, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. We'll reschedule your thing. And I said, no, no, don't. No, I don't want to write for Roseanne. Let me go.It'll be a good experience. She goes, what do you mean you don't want to write for Roseanne? I said, I want to write for Roseanne. I heard she's nuts.And he goes, she said, yeah, but it's Roseanne. Yeah, but it's the number one show in America. Debbie, maybe you and I need to have a talk.And I'm like, maybe you and I need to have a talk because I'm not writing first. She goes, all right. So I insist on the interview, even though my mother died the day before. But I walked in not caring, not wanting the job.I walked in with such an attitude, and I sat down and I took over the interview and I said to the head writer, tell me why I would want to write for Roseanne. And he went, excuse me. Because they're supposed to say, tell me why we should hire you.You know, And I sit there and I go, why would I possibly want to write for Roseanne? I hear the worst things. And the entire interview was him playing offense. Not intentionally. I didn't know anything.You know, I wasn't a kid, but I knew nothing about what I was doing. Well, I walked out the door, and he's already hiring me. He calls my agent, says she's h. Just cause he knew I didn't want the job, so he hired me.

Isn't it interesting? It's the ones you don't want. Those are the ones that come through.We're talking to Debbie Casper, standup comedian and comedy writer who's doing a show right now at the Odyssey theater in West Los Angeles called Monkeys on my back and everywhere else. Basically the story of your very interesting and funny life working for Roseanne. Was it just as joyful as you thought it would be?

It was joyful, just as horrific. I have a friend that when I bump into him, we wrote on the show together.And to this day, if you bump into him, he kind of shields his eyes and say, I'm not ready to talk about it. It's like Vietnam. I'm still not ready to talk about it. We worked 18 hour days. You know, the Seinfeld people were on the same set.It was the Carsey Warner lot, and all the Carsey Warner shows were there, plus Seinfeld. So it was grace under fire, Ferguson rock, you know, they were all there.Roseanne Seinfeld and all these other writers were going home at 5:00 at night, and at 5:00 at night, they were ordering in our dinner because we had another eight hour shift. Because we would finish the script. Oh, no, trust me. We would finish the script all week long. We write it and write it and write it.And Roseanne, who had signed off on the script the whole time because she had control at this point, she would call us on Friday night at 7 o'. Clock. We're all waiting all day for her, and we're all sitting around the table wanting to go home. We've already worked 60 hours.And she gets on the speakerphone in the middle of the conference room and she goes, I hate it, snowball. And we would trash the entire thing. And the head writer would look at us and he would go, all right, we're ordering dinner.And I'm new, so I'm like, what's going on? They're like, we're gonna be writing all weekend. Because the table read would be Monday morning.And a table read is, you know, the actors reading the script for the first time and then they're shooting it that week. So it was. It was pretty bad. And the, you know, and everybody's attitude was bad and people.And then the head writer got fired and nobody wanted to take over the show. And the guy that ended up taking over the show was a hoodlum. He had guns. It was just insane.

What?

Yeah, there's guns in the writer's point.

She came from an abusive household. She grew up in Salt Lake City.

Yep.

And what I'm not clear on is whether or not she threw herself in front of a car when she was in high school or she got hit by a car, but she got traumatic brain injury.

I don't know.

That and multiple personality disorder. And these were fairly credible sources. I don't know firsthand. Evidently, she really got hurt horribly, and.

Now I feel bad. Thanks.

Doesn't she live on a nut farm in Hawaii?

I know she owns one. I don't know if she lives there.

I'm just drawing a little parallel.

Of course.

Johnny Goodman. Johnny Goodman was our guest last week, and he told me that.That after doing a show with her, before he could go home, he'd pull into a parking lot and cry for 10 minutes. It was so hard on him.

Wow.

Wow.

It proves what a great actor he was because he really.

It was a very, very toxic set.

You're credited for writing Hoi Polloi meets Hoity Toity.

Yeah. They gave you random credits because everybody.

It was a team effort.

Yes. We gang banged it is what they call. We all wrote all the way.And then they would assign people scripts just so you would get that money and that credit. I mean, I still get residuals from that show.

Wow.

Good for you.

Yeah.

Then you worked for Rosie o'. Donnell.

Yes.

And that was a better experience.

It was a great experience. I love Rosie. She was, you know, people have their thing with Rosie.You know, the thing is when a woman's in charge, and I don't want to turn this into a big feminist soapbox, but the truth is, maybe not anymore, but at that time, if a woman was in charge and she took control or she did anything that was tough or tough love or anything that she had to do to make this multimillion dollar venture that she's suddenly running go smoother, she gets deemed, you know, awful difficult. Yeah, yeah. Cosby, we all know, was, you know, he was horrific. He was a megalomaniac on his set. But you never heard those stories until much later.But you always heard the stories about the women.

Fran Drescher.

Yeah.

I knew someone that worked for her as a writer, and it beat her up so badly, she left town. She went back home.

Well, Ellen, the worst reputation of anybody. I have a girlfriend who wrote for Ellen and was horrif. And that's. That's more current. That's, you know, that's way more current.So it's also, and again, not to be a feministic soapbox screamer, but it's hard to figure out how to wield that power without being considered difficult. It just is.

If you're a woman, the sitcom era is gone, essentially. How do you see the world now? The entertainment world?

Yeah. I don't really know because you saw the show.You know that I got out of showbiz for 10 years because my partner died and we were broke and I just got a job job because I was just fed up with everything. This is my comeback show.

This is.

Oh, good for you. That's great.

Yeah.

You do talk about how your parents seem to discourage you in your self esteem issues as far as you weren't pretty enough, you don't have kids, it's not worth it, or something like that. Like any kid, it impresses you. Right?

Yeah.

So you found yourself in a situation where you hadn't had kids, you hadn't gotten marri.And then as you talk in the show, which struck me the most was this story about how you then were set up to meet somebody who you had no interest in whatsoever and then fell head over heels for him because he put up with everything you threw at him. He must have been something.

He was something.

He had a good 10 years together.

20.

Yeah. But this first cancer was shaving one day and felt a lump on his neck. And so began a with throat cancer, which he fought back.And then he gets struck with pancreatic cancer. And as you say in your show, you finally had a chance to be a mother. You mothered him.

Yeah. Yeah.

It sounded like such a beautiful relationship.

It sounds like you paid attention.

I did pay attention. I think it's a great show.

And it's not a big depressing show about.

No, not at all.

It's a funny show about grief, which apparently, and this was totally unbeknownst to me, I didn't intend to do this. People are like, well, did you know? And I'm like, no, I had no idea.I just wrote what I wanted to write, which is one of the reasons I like one person shows.But one of the byproducts, and I'm really grateful for it, is that so many women and men who have lost someone, because we're at that age, we're all grieving, we're all losing people to.

Cancer left and right.

Left. Yeah. I feel like I'm in an Agatha Christie novel. You know, every week somebody else is gonna die, and I don't know who it is.

True.

It is true. But I talk about grief with humor because I can't not.

Well, the thing that hit me emotionally the hardest of the show was when the love of your life became ill and suddenly your freedom was gone, because now it was all about survival. Here you are happy in a marriage and then suddenly, boom. I mean, you're still together, but the travel plans, all the ideas just change overnight.And that can happen anytime. It's so important to live now.

Absolutely. And most. So many people don't realize that when someone is dying or sick for elongated period of time, it's so.It's almost harder on the caregiver than it is the person. It is so hard to be there for. That is so hard, you know, and you can only. For me, I could only possibly do it one day at a time.I never stopped and thought about what I was doing. I just did it. You know, you just have to. I have to make sure this guy's taken care of.

What do you envision now for your future since you've got another show on.

The show on you? I'm not going to die, that's for sure. I would really like to take the show to other cities. I would love to take it to New York.But if I can't pull that off, you know, I'd like to get this show booked around the country. Cause I think it's. Besides the fact that I just love to do that. It was always on my bucket list. I think that it's a very healing.I know it's a healing show. I hear it after every single show. The women come up. To me, it's mostly women in the audience. Cause that's who mostly goes to the theater.But these women are like, oh, my God, I just lost my husband. Nobody is talking about grief with humor at all. Everybody. You know, the way we talk about grief in this country is like. Is just dire.Like, you're gonna die. And so that's one of the happy byproducts is I'm. I had a woman say, I haven't left in six months since my husband died. Thank you.She's, like, hugging me way beyond comfort. And I'm like, all right, all right.

Thank you. How many days a week are you doing the show?

Three to four. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, matinee, generally.

How exhausting is that?

It's. You know, it's not so exhausting performing the show. It's emotionally exhausting because I go through. I relive his death every single night.Which is like, oh, boy. I hadn't thought how unpleasant that was gonna be. During rehearsals, my director would say to me, it's way too soon for you to cry.Just, Deb, you can't cry at this point. I'm like, hey, buddy, I'm not acting. You know, this is what just happened. Sorry. But the exhausting part is that I'm also producing It.You know, I heard a great interview once with Michelle Pfeiffer years ago in the 80s, when she was like, the hottest actress. And I think it was Barbara Waters saying, what do you say when people say you're being overpaid for your talent?And she goes, well, I say that I act for free. The money is for. This is for doing the interviews. That's what I get paid for, all the work I have to do.And I've always loved that quote, because the work's the easy part. It's everything you have to do to get the word out and to get.

People out of their homes.

Oh, my God. Nobody wants to come out anymore.

How do you do it?

I don't. I mean, you saw. It was a small crown the night you saw it.

Yeah.

I mean, we've had good crowds, but not every night, not by a long shot.

It's so difficult, and it's worthy of people's time to go see this show.

Thank you.And especially because you can't see something like this on tv, you're not gonna, you know, the experience, you know, for me, I'm a theater person, and I know Phil is, too.I don't know about you, but the experience of the connection, which is why one of the themes of the show, the human connection, is the only thing in the world that heals, in my opinion.

This is your life story. What's the takeaway? What did it do for you? Does it clarify?

It has clarified. But it's very interesting because when you're a storyteller, Phil probably knows this.You probably know this when you're a storyteller and you remember.I mean, I've gotten to the point where my story, which is, you know, 90% true, 10% beefed up just for dramatic sake, you start remembering the version you've written instead of the version you've lived, and you kind of forget. And I. And my brother's always saying to me, that is not the way it went, Debbie. I'm like, well, that's the way it went to me. And he's like, nope.But my big ten takeaway is that my job in this planet. I've always known that my job in this planet is to entertain people. I've always been an entertainer.And my big takeaway is how much the world needs to be able to get some perspective on grief and death in this world. That was never what I wanted, the show. I thought this show was about alcoholism.But then the PAT story came out, and then everybody said, you got to build up the pat story. That's the story.

And there is plenty of humor. It's funny.

Oh yeah. Some of the biggest laughs are as he's dying. You know, it's true. It's true because he, you know, we laughed, we had to.

That's what they say, right? Dying is easy, comedy is hard.

But I also have to say that you just articulated so beautifully what it is, why we do what we do and why we feel the calling to perform and tell stories to people. You know, it's a healing force.

It is.

And it both. It heals us and it heals those who connect with us. And God bless you for that.

God bless you guys too.

And I think it's definitely gotta help your self esteem because you seem to have plenty of it now.

I don't.

Well, you're acting very well.

No, I'm a better than I used to be.

Yeah.

Trust me, if one person that came to the show, waited in the audience and said to me that was awful, I would probably go home and drink.

Oh God, who wouldn't though?

That's not true, you know. You know, there's a. I always tell this story. There was a documentary about Madonna when she was at her peak. It was called Truth or Dare, right?And she's sitting backstage and Warren Beatty's her lover and he's there and her manager there. And she said to everybody, who was that guy down front? Because he didn't like me. I told you, I don't want people down front that don't like me.And if it can happen to Madonna, it can certainly happen to debonna.

We're speaking to Debbie Casper, stand up comedian and writer and her one woman show is called Monkeys on My Back and everywhere else. It's a great story with its roots in South Jersey, Manhattan and then Hollywood. People can go to your website, Debbie Kasper with a k dot com.Debbie, thank you so much. Good luck with the show.

Thank you guys so much.

So good to have you. You're listening to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer show here all our shows@SexyBoomershow.com drop us a line.We'd love to hear from you@infosexyboomershow.com I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor on the road.

Take care.