One June day in Romeoville, Illinois, a small town outside Chicago, an HBO crew ran into an unexpected obstacle: smoke billowing from a crematorium. The new series “Somebody Somewhere” was shooting at a funeral home, and the fumes had flustered a lighting guy. After a few takes, another combustive force entered the room. “No. 1 is here,” the assistant director announced. “Everybody be on your best behavior.” No. 1 on the call sheet was Bridget Everett, the forty-nine-year-old comedian, vocalist, and, as she likes to describe herself, “regionally recognized cabaret singer.” Everett is the star of “Somebody Somewhere,” which premières this month and is largely based on her life and her home town of Manhattan, Kansas.
Everett is not known for staying on her best behavior, or even her better behavior. In her live shows, which she and her band, the Tender Moments, perform regularly at Joe’s Pub, the cabaret arm of the Public Theatre, she prowls the audience in skimpy, outrageous outfits, guzzling Chardonnay from a bottle and burying spectators’ faces in her bosom. Traditionally, she ends the show by picking a man out of the crowd and sitting on his face.
Everything about Everett is large: her pipes (she studied operatic voice in college), her libido, her stage presence, and her body, which she uses as gelignite to spark a crowd into a willing frenzy. In a signature song, she belts, “What I gotta do to get that dick in my mouth?” and then makes everyone sing along. She talks about sloppy sex, having abortions after sloppy sex, getting blackout drunk, the many varieties of “titties,” her genitalia, her parents’ genitalia, her audience members’ genitalia—but it’s all too joyful to feel especially transgressive. Her blowsy sexuality is less a weapon than an invitation to feel as uninhibited as she does. Years ago, during a phone interview—she called me from a nude beach, where she was hanging out with Amy Schumer—she described her stage persona as “a crazy maniac who doesn’t get laid enough, so I have to put my sexual energy somewhere.” In her 2015 Comedy Central special, “Gynecological Wonder,” Everett lurches into the audience, trickles a glass of water over a spectator’s bald head, then thrusts her fingers into his mouth, singing, “I’m coming for you.”
The alternative-cabaret scene is not a typical route to stardom, but Everett has plenty of influential admirers. Patti LuPone once stood up mid-show at Joe’s Pub and yelled, “There is no one like you.” She later invited Everett to duet with her at Carnegie Hall, and the two are now developing a Broadway double act called “Knockouts.” Schumer featured Everett on her sketch show “Inside Amy Schumer” and took her on comedy tours, not as an opening act but as a closing one. “I could not follow her,” Schumer told me. Onstage, Everett drifts from meandering, half-melancholy tales about her dysfunctional childhood (her mother is a recovering alcoholic, and her father was largely absent) into sensuous power ballads. She’s a hot mess who has utter control over a room.
“Somebody Somewhere” has required Everett to close Pandora’s box, only to open it again by degrees. She plays a more withdrawn version of herself named Sam, a would-be diva trapped in small-town America. She had come to the funeral-home set in her capacity as an executive producer. A crew guy asked her to choose between two baggies of fake pot gummies, one orange and red and the other green and yellow. The next day, she would film a scene in which her friends meet for poker and edibles. “I lean toward these,” she said, choosing the orange and red. When a showrunner told her about the crematorium delay, she let out a hoot. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Just a day in the life.”
After watching a few takes, she introduced me to the cinematographer, a woman. “Back in the old days, you’d say, ‘I like having that pussy power behind the camera,’ but now you’d just say, ‘I like having that feminine energy,’ ” Everett said with a laugh, then headed out to the parking lot. She wore a black tank top with a hoodie tied around her waist. The hoodie was printed with a big lightning bolt, to match her lightning-bolt necklace and tote bag. The emblem, she told me, was inspired by the self-help slogan “Dreams don’t have deadlines,” popularized by LL Cool J. “It’s a reminder to fuckin’ seize it, make it count,” she said. “Real fuckin’ cheesy.” Another necklace had “No. 1” spelled out in pavé diamonds. “It’s not every network that’s calling up a perimenopausal woman who sings cabaret to do a TV show,” she said. “You gotta celebrate the moments.”
Everett directed her driver to a weed dispensary in Naperville, for some actual edibles to get her through the shoot. Since the real Kansas doesn’t have much filmmaking infrastructure, the producers had found the area closest to Chicago that looked most like Kansas, and we drove past cornfields, strip malls, and gas stations. But Everett had brought a chunk of the New York avant-garde with her. The showrunners, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, are co-founders of the Brooklyn-based theatre company the Debate Society, and Sam’s friend Fred Rococo is played by the drag king Murray Hill, who dresses like a dandyish used-car salesman and bills himself as “the hardest-working middle-aged man in show business.” Everett and a few co-stars were staying at a rented house that they called the Ding Dong Dorm.
Inside the dispensary, which was lit up with neon signs, smooth jazz played. A guy reading a Hunter S. Thompson book checked Everett’s I.D. and pointed her toward a row of touch-screen menus. She scrolled through flavors: black cherry, pumpkin pie. “Brunch?” she read. “Fuck no.” She chose two packets of “sparkling white grape” gummies (“We just did them the other night, and it was so fun”) and a flavor called Snoozzzeberry, to help her sleep.
On the drive back, Everett asked to stop at an Indian supermarket for a “spice check.” She roamed the aisles, inhaling the aromas. “What am I gonna do with a handful of Thai chiles?” she wondered aloud. “Nothing, right?” Moving on, she held up something called a snake gourd, which had a suggestive shape and firmness. “What do you do with one of these?” she said, with a hint of Mae West. “I know it’s been a long, lonely winter. But aren’t they all?”
“Somebody Somewhere,” which its executive producer Carolyn Strauss calls a “coming-of-middle-age story,” is an alternate history: What if Everett had never left Manhattan, Kansas, for Manhattan, New York? (Strauss, an HBO veteran, previously worked on “Game of Thrones.” Everett said, “So this is like a lateral move for her, to this very tiny show about this plus-size woman in her forties.”) Her character, Sam, is a repressed dead-ender who works grading standardized tests, sleeps on her couch, and, as Everett put it, is “not really taking life by the tits.” Sam’s modes of self-expression—singing rock anthems and writing dirty song lyrics—have been buried, until a new crowd lures her to “choir practice” at a local church, which turns out to be a secret party and open-mike night for the town misfits.
“She’s terrified of singing, because of everything that singing is going to bring up in her,” Everett told me, of her alter ego. In an early episode, Sam sings Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” and surprises herself by ripping her shirt open to reveal a black bra—much as Everett used to do at karaoke nights in her twenties, when she was waiting tables in New York City. The independent filmmaker Jay Duplass, who directed episodes of the show, and is a producer along with his brother, Mark, told me, “The character is in the process of becoming Bridget Everett.” Like a comic-book hero discovering a superpower, she’s unleashing the wild thing within.
One day this fall, I met Everett at her apartment, on the Upper West Side. The décor was retro glam: a hot-pink daybed, B-movie posters, and a neon flamingo by the door to a wraparound terrace, from which she sometimes spies Michael Moore on a terrace across the street. (“I see him out at night, doing his steps.”) Everett, in her lightning-bolt hoodie and tie-dye pants, sat in an armchair, clutching a throw pillow in the shape of a breast. She was mourning her Pomeranian, Poppy Louise, whose remains sat in an urn on the coffee table. “You’re basically in a pet cemetery,” she said.
On my way up, the doorman had asked me to deliver a bag from a jewelry store—a gift from Jessica Seinfeld, to thank Everett for performing at a fund-raiser at the Seinfelds’ house in the Hamptons. Otherwise, Everett had not performed live in two years, and she was glum. “Once you get the fucking animal out of the cage, I’m going to feel a whole lot better,” she said, becoming teary. “The show is my outlet. So everything that’s happened in the past couple years is all just still right fucking here”—she tapped her chest—“and I just need to get it out so I can go back to being alive again.”
On the wall was an old poster that read “VOTE FOR DONN EVERETT.” Her father, who died in 2007, was a lawyer and a Republican state senator in Kansas, but he quit, she said, in order to “spend more time with his family,” a cliché that made her laugh ruefully, “because he was never there.” Her mother, Freddie, is a retired music teacher, and their house had a music room where the kids, who all took piano lessons, would gather to sing; Freddie’s big number was “Hello, Dolly!” Before she stopped drinking, in the nineties, Freddie would command her children to freshen her cocktails, with the instructions “Make it like you’d make it for yourself” or “Fill it to the rim, Roger.” Eventually, she’d black out in her chair, and one of the children helped her to bed.
Onstage, Everett presents her family stories with debauched irony—you can’t quite tell if she’s making them up—but the reality was unsettling. Her brother Brock recalled walking in on their father punching their mother. “I stepped out of the shadows, and he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m sorry you have to see this,’ ” he said. Another time, Brock asked Freddie how she was going to explain a black eye to her friends, and she said, “I’m going to tell them I got hit by a tennis ball.” Bridget, though young, heard everything. “I was in this middle bedroom that everybody had to go through to get where they were going, so I had absolutely no privacy,” she told me. Her parents divorced when she was eight. Freddie would have the kids accompany her on car trips to their father’s apartment to stake it out for girlfriends—another tale of dysfunction that Everett spins into boozy comedy.
Everett is the youngest of six: Brinton, Brad, Alice, Brian, Brock, and Bridget. The eldest, Brinton, died of cancer, in 2008. “If she laughed really hard, she would wet her pants,” Everett recalled. “So we would go to church and my brothers would spend the whole time just trying to make her wet her pants. She would have to excuse herself, and she’d get up and there’d be this tiny little puddle in the pew.” (In “Somebody Somewhere,” Sam is also mourning a sister, the only family member who understood her.) Growing up, the siblings had brutal nicknames for one another, like Wart and Scab; Bridget’s was Fang, because she spent several years with a single front tooth. After she joined the swim team and developed broad shoulders, they called her Lurch, a taunt that played on her insecurities. Her wildness blossomed. She worshipped Debbie Harry and Freddie Mercury and told filthy jokes. Teachers would chastise her for being “too much.” “It kept me from getting the big parts in the musicals and all that shit,” she said. (She’s still bitter over losing the lead in “42nd Street.”) As a teen-ager, she partied hard. “I remember going down to Aggieville—I believe it was Brothers Tavern,” Brock recalled. “She was underage, or it might have been on the cusp. I said, ‘Where’s Bridget?’ Someone pointed over to a pile of coats, and there were Bridget’s feet sticking out.”
Her antics made her popular enough that she was named homecoming queen. Nevertheless, she felt like an outsider in her conservative town. She wanted to go to Arizona State University, in part because it was known as a party school, and she knew that her ticket was her mezzo-soprano: “I had a really big voice, but it was a little wild. Kind of like me, I guess.” She auditioned with Italian art songs and got into the classical-voice program. When she arrived at school, though, she realized that maintaining her instrument meant no drinking or smoking. “I was, like, I don’t want to live life like a nun,” she said. “Instead of being an A student and excelling, I was just, like, a B student and having fun. But I still didn’t really know how to sing in a way that I connected to.”
After graduation, she stuck around the Phoenix area and worked as a waitress at the original P. F. Chang’s. The restaurant was a hangout for Charles Barkley and other pro athletes, and Everett got gigs singing the national anthem at baseball games. But she knew that her operatic voice wasn’t strong enough for a career. “I was, like, Well, I guess I’m just going to be a waitress,” she said. “I hope that you like being on your feet, Bridget, because this is it.” Occasionally, she would go out to karaoke bars, where she’d jump on the bar and rip off her shirt. “Because I didn’t have the money notes, I had to do something else,” she said. “And that’s where the tits came in.”
Everett moved to New York in 1997, at twenty-six, with no plan, no money, and no prospects. She got her Equity card doing a bus-and-truck children’s-theatre tour of “Hansel and Gretel,” but she was miserable: “I was, like, I moved to New York to sing for second graders in fucking Mississippi, getting them to tell Hansel to jump over the river, which was, like, a piece of cardboard with some blue taffeta?” She’d been raised Republican (“Meanwhile, I was, like, ‘Give me all the abortions I can have’ ”) but quickly became a Democrat. She waited tables at Ruby Foo’s. Auditioning terrified her to the point of indigestion, so she did little of it, while her roommate Zach Shaffer landed parts on Broadway. Shaffer recalled, “She was lost.”
Then Shaffer introduced her to the downtown cabaret scene, notably Kiki and Herb, the deranged lounge act performed by Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman. The duo were central to a burgeoning alt-cabaret movement, which defied the decorum of the Carlyle and other staid venues. Everett became a front-row groupie, and Mellman, the accompanist, invited her to perform at a variety night where he was playing. But her main outlet was karaoke, which she and a group of friends performed every Sunday night at the Parlour, a pub on West Eighty-sixth Street. Everett’s go-to numbers were “Piece of My Heart” and Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” “We drank a lot there, because the bartender was our friend,” Shaffer said. “I think we all had sex with people in the bathroom.” Everett’s numbers would crescendo with her crawling across the bar with a Big Gulp-size vodka-soda. “Progressively, the karaoke at the Parlour became more of a show for her,” Shaffer said.
By 2006, Shaffer was dating Jason Eagan, a producer at the Hell’s Kitchen performance space Ars Nova, where he is now the artistic director, and Shaffer took him to one of his karaoke nights with Everett. “We walked into the Parlour, and she was standing on the bar barefoot singing ‘What’s Up,’ the 4 Non Blondes song,” Eagan recalled. “The performance she was giving was so much bigger than the room that it was happening in. I was gobsmacked.” He decided that whatever she was doing belonged on a stage.
Not long afterward, Michael Patrick King, an executive producer of “Sex and the City,” got a call from Jon Steingart, one of the owners of Ars Nova. King was about to attend a comedy festival in Aspen, where Everett had landed a late-night set. Steingart told him that she’d been workshopping material at Ars Nova, and urged him to check her out. Everett performed a raunchy original song called “Canhole” to an audience of industry people and fancy local women wearing cowboy hats. “Half the audience left, and the half that stayed gave her a standing ovation,” King said. “I thought, Well, there’s a star. Nobody knows what they’re seeing.”
Ars Nova corralled King into developing and directing a stage show for Everett, called “At Least It’s Pink.” The title, besides being a vagina joke, referred to a waitressing story that Everett told onstage, about a businessman who sent back an overcooked steak. “It was burned on the outside but on the inside it was pink, and that was our analogy for Bridget,” King said. She and Mellman replaced her karaoke covers with original songs, while King, like an Olympic coach, taught her how to stand still and how to polish an anecdote. Everett nicknamed him Hollywood. He likened his job to creating a ring to fit a diamond. “My goal was to make the people that left in Aspen not leave,” he said.
The show opened at Ars Nova in early 2007. Barely contained in a faux-snakeskin bustier, Everett was part Samantha Jones, part Cookie Monster. “Just this afternoon, I slept with Man No. 2,569,” she told the audience. “And, fellas, one of you could be next!” The Times critic Charles Isherwood wrote that the show “recalls the sexual insouciance and joyous exhibitionism of early Bette Midler.” Everett had the freshness of a plucked-from-karaoke-night Everywoman, but efforts to transfer the show Off Broadway for a longer run stalled. King gave her a small part in the “Sex and the City” movie, as a drunk woman who interviews to be Carrie’s assistant, but even he couldn’t land her a breakout role. “Development executives would say, ‘We think Bridget’s the next Roseanne,’ ” he recalled. “And I thought, Bridget’s the next Bridget!”
Everett was too rock and roll for Broadway, too bawdy for concert halls, and too musical for standup comedy. She recalled singing at a comedy night at Pianos, on the Lower East Side, after which John Mulaney came onstage and said, “What was that?” She met Schumer on a flight to Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival, where both were performing. “At those kinds of things, I used to just hang out in my room and drink wine and watch porn or documentaries,” Everett said. “Amy was, like, ‘Come down, let’s talk to some people and mingle!’ And we just became really fast friends. We both love Chardonnay.”
Schumer became her champion. “Just to see a woman up there owning her own body and sharing what she wants of it, engaging in such a hypersexual way on her own terms, is thrilling,” Schumer told me. But, in contrast to her own act, she doesn’t see Everett’s as politically pointed. “Her show is such an escape,” she went on. “I definitely think I wouldn’t have felt empowered to lift up my dress and show my pregnant belly without her influence.” A bewildered Larry King once asked Everett during an interview, “You have a lot of body confidence, right?” But Everett doesn’t grandstand about self-esteem or standards of beauty, as many of her contemporaries do; her ease in her own skin is liberation enough.
In 2008, Everett, Mellman, and the performance artist Neal Medlyn started “Our Hit Parade,” a monthly live series at Joe’s Pub, in which the trio and guest performers reinterpreted Top Forty songs. The co-hosts would lead ribald games like “What’s in My Diaper?” Everett would usually close out the night with a tipsy showstopper. The series helped launch such downtown performers as Cole Escola, Erin Markey, and Molly Pope. By 2012, though, the three co-hosts were squabbling. “We weren’t really getting along, and it just wasn’t fun anymore,” Everett said. She had formed her own band, the Tender Moments, and felt that she had earned her own spotlight. In 2014, she returned to Joe’s Pub, in “Rock Bottom,” which featured songs co-written with the “Hairspray” team—Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman—the musician Matt Ray, and the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, with an appearance by Escola, as a fetus pleading not to be aborted.
In her forties by then, Everett was a smash downtown while still waitressing uptown; she took jobs on the Upper West Side, where fewer customers would recognize her, and, when they did, she’d feel so embarrassed that sometimes she’d secretly comp their meals. Midway through the run of “Rock Bottom,” she called her manager to put in a shift request, and the woman said, “Are you sure you want to come back in?” That night, Everett announced onstage that she had quit waitressing, and she got a huge standing ovation. She told me, choking up, “It was so exciting to finally be taking a chance on myself.”
Her talents, though, were still difficult to translate to the screen. She had a bit part as a makeup artist in “Girls,” and in 2017 she played the hard-living mother of an aspiring rapper in the Sundance hit “Patti Cake$.” Michael Patrick King, who was still trying to land her a star vehicle in Hollywood, finally got her an Amazon pilot, “Love You More.” Everett, who was a co-executive producer, played a woman who parties by night and works with people with Down syndrome by day. The pilot opened with a sex scene between Everett and a very short man with a very large penis. Amazon released the first episode, to good reviews, but declined to pick it up. “I have never pleaded harder than I did to those Amazon executives,” King said. “I remember them telling me that ‘men didn’t respond to her,’ ” although women’s responses were “ ‘through the roof.’ I said, ‘If you give me one more episode, all those men will love her, because she’ll be the person they want to go drinking with.’ ” But they were hung up on the demographic data and wouldn’t budge. Everett recalled, “I was, like, Well, there was my one chance to make a TV show, and it’s gone.”
On the last night of November, Everett was in her dressing room at Joe’s Pub, two bottles of Chardonnay in ice buckets at her feet. The previous evening, she had given her first public performance since before the pandemic. “I was schoolgirl-nervous all day long,” she said, sitting in front of a mirror and patting concealer under her eyes. When she made her entrance, she recalled, she’d felt unsteady. “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to really become a larger-than-life person onstage. And then to be away from that for so long, you’re just, like, Where did she go? For the first song, I was trying to find her.” By the second song, “Titties,” she had.
Having wrapped the first season of “Somebody Somewhere,” Everett was hovering between her old life and what might be a new kind of fame. She had spent much of the intervening months hiding out in her apartment. News of the Omicron variant had popped up days earlier, but no cases had yet been detected in the United States. Everett is a reach-out-and-touch-someone kind of performer, and she wondered how her act would work in the age of social distancing and tightened sexual boundaries. “The craziest thing is really just that I got through it, trying to navigate how to do audience interaction with the state of the world right now—and I mean that in a thousand different ways,” she said. She twirled a curling iron around her hair and contoured her cheeks, “to separate the quadrants on my face,” she said. “I like to give the appearance that I tried.”
Two hours later, Everett emerged onstage in a bedazzled gold toga, clutching a wine bottle in a paper bag. “My name is Bridget Everett,” she bellowed over an electric-guitar riff. “Some people may not know me, but you will Not. Fucking. Forget me.” She tore off the toga to reveal a silk minidress the color of Velveeta cheese. “Let me explain a couple quick things,” she told the crowd. “ ‘Bridget, you wearing a bra?’ Nope, don’t need one. Next question?”
Before long, she was roaming through the audience, motorboating people’s faces in her cleavage. She scanned the room and picked out a bearded man in a flannel shirt, whom she called Sharky. After telling a long-winded tale about a guy on the street who offered her five hundred dollars if she’d let him suck on her foot (answer: “You know I got two feet, right?”), she lay on the lip of the stage, sprayed one leg with a trail of whipped cream, and gave Sharky a come-hither look. He ran up and lapped it off on cue. (His real name was Thor, and he was a gay retired banker. “I’m actually a pretty inhibited person,” he said afterward.) Then she sat on a stool and took the mood down to a simmer. “You remember when you were little, and your mommy used to sit in her blue chair getting shit-faced, listening to Manilow?” Everett said, summoning a Kansas memory. Her mother had called her one day, she remembered, informing her that her father had thirty days to live. “She was so . . . happy,” Everett said, in a mock-wistful stage whisper. The story is true.
During the final number, she blew bubbles into the crowd and lifted a male audience member onto her back, bringing the house down. I thought about how, during the pandemic, even handshakes have felt perilous. Everett was like a dishevelled Dionysus, giving the crowd (and herself) a long-awaited release, making touch celebratory again. As an encore, she sat at a piano and played an ode to Poppy, her dead dog. “I appreciate all of you buying your tickets and coming out here,” she said, “knowing that this could be the thing that kills us all.” ♦
