Word: kron
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Everyone has a humiliating story or two to tell, and some unlucky individuals such as Lisa Kron have (according to her figures) 101. Number 4: Lansing, Michigan, 1975--young girl boards school bus and feels a sharp tug at her hair, thinks it's the bully, but then quickly and painfully discovers her hair is actually caught in the merciless grip of the bus's doors. Number 12: Manhattan, mid-'80s--same young girl, though older, wiser, and out as a lesbian now, saunters through the midtown law office she's temping for, chats it up with the lawyers...
Throw in uncomfortable gym-induced wedgies, bumbling exchanges with celebrities, a provincial midwestern upbringing, a suspicious sanitary napkin ("about the size of a Depends undergarment"), and you have the raw and sometimes hilariously raunchy narrative materials of Kron's 101 Humiliating Stories, a solo comedic performance in the A.R.T.'s Fall Festival...
Unfortunately, Kron's so-called humiliating and embarrassing anecdotes aren't really all that humiliating and embarrassing. If you're going to base an entire performance on agonizing moments, then they had better be totally outrageous. This is clearly where Kron falls short. But we forgive poor, put-upon Lisa, admire her candor and laugh easily because it's nice to hear about crap happening to other people once in a while...
...show's gems are those instances of extreme behavior which powerfully telegraph Kron's peculiarities, such as that memorable workday when she decides to come out at work via an inter-office memo. Or better yet, when she gets sucked into buying a truckload of Prescriptives cosmetics by a very heavily made-up saleswoman who has what Kron calls the Shroud of Turin effect going on--then pays for the cosmetics with the office's petty cash supply. An expensive and traumatic four-hour lunch break just to find out she's an autumn...
...most of the stories involved never ran on the networks anyway. Those days are gone. When NBC News delayed switching to live coverage the night of the California earthquake, for example, CNN effectively replaced the network for CNN's 45 NBC affiliates by feeding them the live coverage from KRON in San Francisco and KNBC in Los Angeles...