By Seth Rudetsky
17 Nov 2009

Last week I saw the fabulous Miss Coco at the Laurie Beechman Theater on 42nd Street. Miss Coco is the drag name of Clinton Leupp and his material is so smartly written. He talked about how depressing it is to still have to print up flyers and pass them out to people. Years ago, he had a misprint on one: the word monologue was printed as mono louge. Suddenly, everybody he ran into would have a very concerned look on his/her face and say, "Um…you know. There's a misprint on the flyer. It doesn't say you do 'monologues,' it says 'monolouges.' Clinton had finally had it and decided to gaslight everybody: "Yes," he would say, "it does say that and rightfully so. A monologue is a long speech, but a monolouge is a French word for a speech that's broken up into a few parts, separated by song." Then he'd pause and shake his head, "I'm surprised you didn't know that." Cut to: he started to tell an amazing story about taking his mother to Ireland because, ever since she was a little girl she wanted to see a real castle and at a climactic part in the middle of the story, he stopped and the piano began a song intro. Then he looked at the audience and said, "See? It's a monolouge." Brava!

If you've never seen his/her brilliant turn in the fabulous movie "Trick," rent it ASAP. And, you must also rent the HI-larious "Girls Will Be Girls" starring Miss Coco, Varla Jean and my friend Jack Plotnick as Evie Harris. Go to Www.Girlswillbegirlsmovie.com.

	Tom Lenk and Seth Rudetsky

I recently interviewed my L.A. friend Tom Lenk whom I've known for years through Jack (Plotnick) and who is now in Rock of Ages on Broadway. He grew up on the West Coast and always dreamed of being in a Broadway show. He was incredibly skinny, blond and around 5-foot-3-inches in high school so naturally he set his sights on playing…Raoul in Phantom. He said that he was in total denial of his type for years. His big break on TV was playing one of the "nerds" on Buffy The Vampire Slayer. He thought he was only going to do a couple of episodes, but he wound up doing it for years. The stressful part was that no one ever knew if they were going to be killed off the show. He said that he would get the script and always flip to the end of it to see if he was still alive. One day, he was driving with one of the other "nerds" and they had just gotten a new script. As the other guy was reading it, he was loving it. He would read a page and say, "This is amazing! This week's episode it going to be so much fun!" Tom finally muttered, "Um, yeah. Did you…did you read the ending yet? The part where I…uh...where I stab and kill you?" Devastation. Tom literally had to be the one to tell his friend that it was his last episode. And that Tom himself was the one who was going to kill him. And… awkward rest of car trip.

Speaking of awkward car trips, Tom travels around the world to do Sci-Fi conventions and meet fans/sign autographs. He told me about who was with him in the van going to the sci-fi venue: The guy inside Chewbacca, Boba Fett, the little person who played "Willow," Jaws from The James Bond movies, Mini-Me…and Margot Kidder. AMAZING!