Editor’s Note: When The Stranger interviewed Julia Sweeney in late January, we did not foresee that a virus was about to sweep across the planet killing hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of people. We thought it was odd and interesting that Sweeney—in a piece that was just supposed to be a preview of her comedy show at the Neptune—predicted that things were “going to get really bad” and that “some fucking pathogen” or something was going to come “out of some ice permafrost in Greenland that’s going to kill 50 percent of us overnight,” so we left it in the interview. Well, it wasn’t a pathogen from Greenland, it was a virus from China, but she was completely right on the big picture. At the time of this interview, it seemed like an eccentric prediction; in retrospect, Sweeney looks like Nostradamus.
Julia Sweeney, who starred on Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1994 and since then has created brainy, brilliant one-woman shows about topics like surviving cancer and becoming an atheist, is coming to Seattle on February 1 with her latest comedy monologue, Julia Sweeney: Older & Wider.
She creates shows by workshopping new material in very small theaters, to see what works and what doesn’t. The earliest experiments for Older & Wider took place at Second City in Chicago, and while she was there, another comedian, Abby McEnany, was workshopping a one-woman show of her own called Work in Progress, which just so happened to be about how her life was ruined by… Julia Sweeney. In college, Abby was endlessly teased and harassed for looking like Sweeney’s most well-known SNL character, the ambiguously gendered Pat.
