Natasha Muse is an American stand-up comedian and artist who has built an increasingly distinctive place for herself in San Francisco's comedy scene. Her path to the stage, however, was anything but conventional. A naturally shy person who never expected performing to become part of her life, Natasha first found herself onstage at AsiaSF after someone approached her at a gym and encouraged her to audition. She got the job, discovered that she loved performing, and gradually turned an unexpected opportunity into a career. Her journey from lip-sync performance to stand-up comedy was a particularly unusual one. By 2008, she had begun taking comedy seriously, developing a style that drew on personal experiences, observations and the absurdities of everyday life. She became a regular performer around the San Francisco Bay Area, appearing at venues including Cobb's Comedy Club and the SF Punch Line. In 2010, she won the Battle of the Bay Comedy Competition, an achievement that gave her both financial encouragement and the feeling that she was moving in the right direction. SF Weekly named her one of its "Comedians to Watch."
Natasha's transgender experience naturally became part of her comedy, but she never wanted it to be the only thing she talked about. She was interested in the broader possibilities of comedy, particularly the challenge of finding humor in personal experiences and encouraging audiences to look at familiar subjects from a different perspective. Her approach was not simply to make jokes about being transgender, but to use comedy to reveal the strange, complicated and often wonderfully absurd nature of life itself. Her life outside the stage was changing as well. Natasha was a new mother, and motherhood had become an important source of both reflection and comedy. Her daughter was, as she put it, ever-present in her mind, giving her a new world of experiences to observe and eventually transform into stories. At the same time, she was learning how to balance the demands of parenthood with the desire to continue developing as an artist. Natasha has established herself as a recognizable figure in San Francisco's queer comedy community, performing alongside comedians such as Marga Gomez and participating in shows that brought together some of the city's most interesting LGBTQ performers. Yet beneath the awards and appearances was someone who still described herself as shy, someone who had never originally imagined that a life onstage was waiting for her.
Monika: Natasha, it is such a pleasure to have you here today. Hello, and welcome!
Natasha: Hi Monika!
Monika: How did your artistic career first begin?
Natasha: Well, I started performing at a restaurant here in San Francisco called AsiaSF. I never really thought performing would be a path for me, but someone approached me while I was working out at the gym and asked me to audition. In all honesty, I didn't think they would even give me a second look, since I'm a shy person by nature. I just did it so I could say I gave it a good shot and did my best. But, as you may have suspected, I got the job and slowly but surely grew to love being on stage.
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| Throwing glitter. |
Monika: You perform all across the San Francisco Bay Area, at venues like Cobb's Comedy, the SF Punch Line, Harvey's, and the Dark Room. Have you taken your act beyond the Bay Area as well?
Natasha: Oh yeah. Actually, one of my goals this year has been to perform further away from what I've come to think of as my comfort zone, San Francisco. So a few months ago, I started doing shows in LA. I also occasionally get up to our state's capital, Sacramento. Plus, I'm on the internet, which is worldwide! I even have a strange podcast called "Too Soon."
Monika: Besides stand-up, you also produce and host the monthly underground hit "A Funny Night for Comedy" at the Actors' Theatre. What can you tell me about that show?
Natasha: Well, right now it's a bit up in the air, because the theater has had to temporarily shut its doors while they find a new location. The show will continue, though! It's a comedy talk show I host with a handful of other characters who fill the roles of sidekick, sign-master, one-man band, and stage manager. We have my comedian friends as guests who perform their acts and get interviewed, in addition to topical jokes, games, and sketches. It's a pretty wild show, and I'm excited to find a new home for it soon!
Monika: And what about your work with the sketch group Femikaze?
Natasha: Ha! As luck would have it, right now Femikaze is sort of in the same boat as AFNFC: great show, no home. While we look for another venue, we've been busy writing, scheming, and planning our future. But Femikaze is a really cool group of funny women to work with. We all have a good time rehearsing together, and I think that shines through in our performances.
Monika: You also write about motherhood for Queer Landia. What inspired you to start that project?
Natasha: I started this project because I'm much too eager to begin things! When we were expecting the baby, I thought it would be nice to share my experiences raising her. Since then I've realized that what I really needed to do was start a journal. My home life is pretty great, and there are just some things in my life I don't want to pick apart for public consumption. At least, not as it's happening. I think I need time to figure out how I feel about something before I share it with the world, especially when it's a subject as near and dear to my heart as my little one! I guess the answers to these three questions paint a picture of someone trying to do too many things. If I've learned anything from this interview so far, it's that I lack focus.
Monika: Over the years you've received quite a few professional honors. Which ones mean the most to you?
Natasha: I won a comedy competition a few years ago, the Battle of the Bay 2010. It was the first time I made a good chunk of money from doing comedy, and it felt like confirmation I was heading in the right direction. And then, in the "Best of" edition of SF Weekly here in the city, they cited me as one of the ten "Comedians to Watch" in 2013. That's not actually an award, more of a kudos, but it's pretty nice. Just enough validation to get me through the next few months.
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| Interview for Bay Sunday on KPIX 5 (YouTube). |
Monika: Is stand-up comedy in San Francisco still a mostly male scene, or are more women stepping onto that stage?
Natasha: Yes, I think so, though that depends on what you might expect. It's still not a representative number compared to the population, but it is a growing percentage. There's a new generation of women who don't feel the need to ask permission to be creative and funny, which is something that has held a lot of women back in the past, in addition to the world of comedy, and the world in general, being a male-dominated and male-controlled place. But if you were to blindly pick an individual from the SF comedy scene, you'd probably end up with an unemployed white dude, so we still have some growing to do on many fronts.
Monika: In what ways has being transgender shaped how you see and interpret the world as an artist?
Natasha: This is one of those questions that's always hard to answer, because I don't know what it's like to not be a transgender person to compare it to. But I do imagine what my life would have been like had I not been a transsexual person, and whether it's me being a regular woman or a regular man, I always picture these alternate realities of my life as being relatively quiet and boring. Being transsexual has forced me onto a strange path. In my journey to deal with it, I moved over three thousand miles, almost five thousand kilometers, across the US to San Francisco, lost a lot of friends, and learned a lot of lessons I might not even have known existed had I stayed in New Hampshire. It made my relationship with my mom very difficult for a while, and it's still hard with my dad. It was also, as I mentioned above, the catalyst that moved me into performance. Being a poor transsexual has put me on one of the lower rungs of society, and it's basically been the cause of every major change in my life. So trying to separate that from who I am as an artist is impossible, it's woven into who I am.
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| A sexy biology lesson. |
Monika: Do transgender jokes make their way into your stand-up sets often?
Natasha: They do! It's a deep well of thoughts and ideas I like to draw from, but I've also been trying to write jokes about other things too, so I don't become a one-note comedian. Plus, my personal life is interesting, but I find other topics much more intriguing, and I'd much rather talk about those on stage.
Monika: How would you describe the current situation for transgender women in American society today?
Natasha: We're coming up, right? I don't know. I think we're enjoying greater visibility than ever before, which is a positive thing, but we still have a ways to go. We're the red-headed black sheep of the LGBT movement, and we get dropped sometimes when the "normal" looking queers want to put a nice face on for middle America.
I know here in San Francisco, which admittedly is a bubble that isn't representative of the rest of the country, people seem to be nice enough to me, and I get gigs and stage time depending on how funny I am. I don't think being transgender has held me back, yet, but then, I guess, it's hard to know what isn't happening, if you know what I mean.
Monika: Do you believe we might live to see a transgender woman become President of the United States?
Natasha: I plan on living a while, so yes. But it's not going to be anytime soon. It took us over two hundred years and forty-four presidents to break the chain of white Christian straight men, and we did it with a half-white Christian straight man. We're changing, but slowly. We'll see if Hillary wins in 2016 first, and go from there!
Monika: Are you politically active yourself, perhaps through lobbying or campaigning? And do you think transgender women can truly make a difference in politics?
Natasha: I'm not, and I don't. But I do think about it a lot. I feel like our system is broken, and until there's a viable path for a third-party candidate to win an election, like being allowed to participate in the debates, I'm not going to waste my time supporting the lesser of two evils. But I do definitely think a transgender woman could make a difference wherever she chooses to, if she puts her mind to it, works hard, and gets lucky.
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| Twins? |
Monika: At what age did you begin your own transition, and how difficult was that process?
Natasha: I started in my early twenties, and it was very difficult. This was back in the '90s, before the internet was anything close to what it's like now. I spent a lot of time poking through books in the library, making awkward phone calls to medical professionals in search of treatment, dealing with one very bitter electrologist, and going to support groups looking for answers. When I moved out to SF, I basically started my life over. No one I knew was particularly supportive, my parents didn't understand, and I lived off the money I had saved from my high school job for over a year. It definitely affected my job situation, but at that time I think it was mostly because I was so lost, depressed, and unsure of myself that it was hard to look for a job. And then, of course, later on, it became the prerequisite for the last job I held.
Monika: Did you have any transgender role models to look up to at the time?
Natasha: I had read some biographies of famous trans people, which helped me understand myself more, but I learned a lot as I went. I didn't really know any trans people until I started transitioning myself.
Monika: Looking back, what was the hardest part of coming out for you?
Natasha: Coming out to myself. Accepting that transitioning was what I needed to do for a chance at happiness.
Monika: Have you ever been married?
Natasha: I am married, to a woman! We got gay married back in 2008, when it was legal in California for a few months. I don't think I could overstate how important she is to me. To put it simply, she's the reason I decided to leave my job and pursue comedy full-time. She supports me and inspires me to be a better person.
Monika: Are you into fashion? What kind of outfits do you typically wear, and are there any particular styles or colors you gravitate toward?
Natasha: Fashion is... interesting. I don't keep up with it. Transitioning was never really about the clothes for me. I like wearing comfortable clothes with simple designs that won't go out of style too fast. When I like something, I get attached to it, and I don't want to get rid of it just because it's dated. Flowy dresses, cute sweaters, open-toed shoes, jeans, and tank tops. Also, I'm currently really into wearing this oversized camouflage military jacket, for some odd reason.
Monika: What are your thoughts on transgender beauty pageants?
Natasha: I was in one once! I lost, but I won Miss Photogenic, so I didn't even really need to go. They're not really my thing, but I think it's cool they exist. Just like regular women, trans women have all different types of interests and talents, so the more avenues we have to explore them, the better. It was a fun and memorable experience for me, and I'm glad I got the chance to be in one.
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| Interviewed by David Perry (YouTube) |
Monika: Quite a few transgender women have written memoirs. Has writing your own book ever crossed your mind?
Natasha: Yes, but not until my story is about more than just my transition. Many of those books are a bit like "Transgender 101." I'd like mine to add something different to the conversation.
Monika: Any new projects you've been working on lately?
Natasha: Oh yeah! I was in a short film called "The Fiction of the Fix," which was featured in some film festivals, including Frameline.
Monika: Would you say you're a happy woman these days?
Natasha: Sure! Well, I'll just say I'm a happy person. I guess I'm a woman too. Close enough, right?
Monika: Natasha, thank you so much for this wonderful interview!
All the photos: courtesy of Natasha Muse.
© 2013 - Monika Kowalska
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