In a twist on the national Take Your Daughter to Work Day, Nancy Stanley plans to bring her 87-year-old mom to work with her tonight.
And before what will surely be a packed house at Laffs Comedy Caffe, the Tucson comedian will crack wise about the joys and pitfalls of being a woman of a certain age. She might talk about the changes in her body now that she’s on the cusp of 60 — she turned 59 last Friday.
Mom is about to see a side of her little girl that might bring on a blush.
“I’ve had to brief her on all the jokes so that she doesn’t require medical treatment during my set,” Stanley said.
Stanley’s mom will see firsthand how Stanley spends the hours after she leaves her day job as an assistant dean at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law — she also teaches a media law class for the School of Journalism.
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“She still thinks I’m hanging with the wrong crowd, just like in high school,” Stanley said. “I think ever since I started this she’s just questioned my choices.”
And mom might be onto something when she sees the cast of characters Stanley will be surrounded by at tonight’s “The Estrogen Hour” comedy show: attorney Elliot Glicksman; retired college dean and professor Tom Potter; musician and funny man Steve Swinehart; and the incomparably irreverent Arizona Daily Star cartoonist David Fitzsimmons.
Stanley lovingly dubs them the “gestosteron” the gentleman version of her estrogen, and they are integral to tonight’s benefit concert for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
The show resurrects one that Stanley did for a stretch not long after launching her comedy career about a year and half ago.
“I tend to have a lot of fun with women, particularly women of a certain age — 40s and 50s,” she explained.
“The Estrogen Hour” is not for women exclusively; everyone is invited and plenty of men have showed up in the past including a fair share “who like to be in the company of women,” Stanley said.
Stanley’s comedy mines her life as a woman beginning her second act. She’s an empty nester — her 18-year-old son is off to become an EMT and her daughter is studying dance at Sarah Lawrence College near New York City. Stanley, who worked as a broadcast journalist in Tucson in the 1980s and ‘90s, says she still feels “real vital and real young” in a world that might not look at her as such.
Granted, there are certain things she can no longer do like she did back then, including getting her drink on. The mornings after leave her looking “like a total hag. Alcohol sucks the collagen out of your face and your cheek bones are down near your chin and you can’t do that too much anymore,” she said. The cure: “I’m committed to those fillers. Juvederm is your friend. And I am really not embarrassed by that.”
Her comedy career is strictly for fun. Stanley added up the nickles, dimes and $10 bills she’s been paid over the past 18 months and figured she’s made a grand total of $920, which includes the $500 she made with a third-place finish in the Phoenix Rotary 100 Club’s “John J. O’Connor Humor Contest.” Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, widow of the contest’s namesake, was in the audience and “trying to make Sandra Day O’Connor laugh” took some doing.
“Boy I tell you, you couldn’t find a tougher crowd there. But I finally got one laugh out of her,” Stanley recalled.
“I won third prize. I remember the guy in front of me had never been on stage before. So he won second and I won third. And I think he told knock-knock jokes.”
“Keep in mind, the bar is low,” she joked about tonight’s show. “People need to ratchet their expectations down for me. Dave and Tom and Elliot are great, but I’m still a beginner.”
