Forget the birds and the bees, Michele A’Court says there are other important things to tell your children. Rebecca Barry Hill talks to the comedian about parenthood, making people laugh and being a grandmother at 53.
It's 9.30pm on a Tuesday at a full Basement Theatre, and Michele A'Court is telling herself to shut up. A younger version of herself, that is: bulbous fringe, earnest expression, a dildo in her hand. As the 20-something on the screen talks viewers through a matter-of-fact condom demonstration, her 53-year-old self rolls her eyes.
Daughter Holly watched the sex education video her mother made for the Department of Health when it was shown at her high school; the most embarrassing thing about it, she told her mum later, was her hair. This is typical of her daughter's reaction to her comedy too, A'Court says. She's grown up around it and has always loved coming to her mum's shows. Tonight, one of Holly's best friends is in the audience, seeing the show for the fourth time.
The nostalgia trip isn't just for laughs. It's to make a point. It's easy to talk about the mechanics of sex, not so easy discussing the ethics and emotions of it. Being the liberal sort, she thought she'd be brilliant at breezy sex chats when her daughter reached the appropriate age. Turns out, not so much. It's one of the conundrums she presents in Stuff I Forgot To Tell My Daughter, the popular show she's performed since 2013, and that she's just released as a book.
A'Court wrote it when Holly went flatting, and it dawned on her she hadn't discussed with her the important things: feminism, sexual politics, how to store ginger.
"Why don't we know these things? It was a revelation to me when a woman in a shop in Christchurch told me how not to snag your tights. I spent $90 on those tights and I've still got them."
It's the next morning, at the quiet, sunny Hillcrest home A'Court shares with husband and fellow comedian Jeremy Elwood. Set down a long driveway, their home is a world away from the spotlight, with low-swooping kereru and tui the only creatures invading their privacy. The house is immaculately tidy, except for the bookshelves, which are groaning with thrillers.
"These are mostly Jeremy's," A'Court says of the slightly jumbled collection. "Mine are in the bookshelf downstairs ... Arranged alphabetically." This will mean hers, under A, is first on the shelf. Stuff I Forgot To Tell My Daughter came out of the show, which she'd performed at the 2013 New Zealand Comedy Festival, and again at the World Buskers Festival in Christchurch last year, both stints receiving an overwhelmingly positive response - including from her daughter.
"She's got a fantastic sense of humour. We're really close. She thinks it's great."
Others told her afterwards, in somewhat of a panic, that they, too, had neglected to talk about the big stuff with their children. They were too busy raising them.
A'Court at home is warmer, less droll than her stage persona. Judging by last night's performance, she's become more cutting over the years, the snarky delivery part of her charm. At one point an enthusiastic fan yelled out, only for A'Court to tell her off, to the delight of the audience. "It's not a f***ing pub."
When she's not doing stand-up, she's MC'ing events and doing voice work. One day her friend Finlay Macdonald, of book publisher HarperCollins, took her out for lunch and asked if she'd consider turning the Stuff I Forgot show into a book - if so, he'd be happy to publish it.
"It was really exciting," she says. "The show has given me the structure for the book but it's about 20,000 words. The book is 80,000. So I had to sit down and work through some ideas."
Among them, sex. A'Court left home at 17 to study journalism at tech, so her first forays into that world were "private and separate".
"Kids these days apparently don't leave home until they're 26. All parents deal with it differently. Sometimes I think it has to do with how big your house is. If you have plenty of space, you don't mind having the daughter and boyfriend stay but, if you live really close together - ugh, I couldn't deal with that idea. You spend your whole life trying to keep them safe and protected, and suddenly they're inviting people in. I found it really confronting."
The history of feminism also takes up a good chunk of the book, as it's a topic A'Court feels has been missing from contemporary conversation. She touched on it briefly when Holly got her first job at the Classic Comedy Club, working behind the bar and in the kitchen, washing dishes, while her mum worked on stage.
Michele A'Court with husband Jeremy Elwood. "We made a conscious decision not to get married because I hadn't really enjoyed being married before." Things changed in Las Vegas. Photo / NZ Herald
"I talked to her then about equal pay, and the world I grew up in, all of that stuff in the 1960s."
Even then, unmarried women in New Zealand were forbidden from working at bars, the prevailing attitude that they'd provide too much temptation for the male patrons. "I told her [her fellow bartender] Nigel would've earned more money, not because he's better but because he's a boy."
Given that women are still paid 12 per cent less than men, she has a practical solution for women: do 12 per cent less work. Stare into space for 4.8 hours a week. Undercook one of the veges. Ignore one of your kids 25 per cent of the time. Not your favourite; the one who irritates you the most.
So yes, the book is funny, but it's also a moving memoir of motherhood, the challenges, joys and awkward learning curves of raising a well-adjusted human, much of it on her own. Interspersed with witty remarks, she rails against social injustices, putting national travesties such as the Roast Busters story in a wider context. She also talks in depth about her close friend Kathryn, who died of cancer.
"She was a really important person to me and obviously Holly's never going to meet her, so being able to write a story about her is a really lovely thing to have. I love storytelling and there are all these things that I wish I'd been told, and stories I was told by people older than me," she explains. "Passing on that wisdom or experience or perspective on the world is really important. We need to tell each other stories."
A'Court is the first to slander and congratulate herself in the marriage role model department.
"Depending on how you view these things," she writes, "I'm either an expert at marriage (I've had three of them) or a failure at marriage (I've had three of them.)"
The first time she did it for the party. The second, because if you had a child with someone, that was the thing to do. Before she met Elwood (and their wedding is another story), there was another love affair - making people laugh.
"The baby and the comedy were born at the same time," she says. "I'd always wanted to do stand-up, but I didn't know how to go about it. There wasn't any in New Zealand until the late 80s. I was in Queenstown working in radio and Facial DBX [Jon Bridges, Jeremy Corbett, Paul Horan] came on tour. I thought, 'That's the thing! That's what I want to do."
She knew no one in Auckland but moved there to be closer to the scene.
"Also I would've had to go into labour in Invercargill, and I didn't fancy that. It was time to move to Auckland, anyway. The only real contact I had with the outside world was Kim Hill."
Her first gig was at Kitty O'Brien's in Freemans Bay, with her friend Margaret O'Hanlon, and Holly in utero. They went on to do a national tour when she was six months pregnant. Holly was premature, arriving just before eight months.
"It was very scary."
But her daughter's birth was a cakewalk compared to the years that followed. There's little of 1993 that A'Court can recall outside of her baby bubble. She missed the Waco seige and the bombing of the World Trade Centre, traipsing around the house in a sleep-deprived fog, but perhaps not surprisingly for a struggling new mother, vividly remembers Lorena Bobbitt. Holly was 4 when her parents split, and though A'Court won't go into the specifics of the break-up, she will say what she learned about herself during her time as a solo mum.
"It was a very difficult period, those first few years of Holly's life. I really had to dig in to hold on to everything and keep going. Holly became the world for me, and my world was Holly, and trying to make a living and do work that I really liked that would also keep us fed."
She writes of the unfairness of getting up at 3am to scrape vomit off the bedsheets, wondering how on earth she'd get through the next day, before realising there were probably hundreds of mothers out there doing exactly the same thing. Life got a little easier when her parents moved to Auckland when Holly was 2 ½. It meant that if someone rang up offering a voice job in two hours, she could make herself available. Things also improved in her love life. She met Elwood when Holly was 6, and they moved in together soon afterwards.
"We made a conscious decision not to get married because I hadn't really enjoyed being married before and wanted to feel like I was in a relationship because I was consciously opting in."
Both A'Court and Elwood had a public profile, (these days he's a fixture on TV3's comedy panel show 7 Days) but for A'Court, being recognised was a novelty that wore off the minute a stranger bailed her up at the supermarket and rummaged through the contents of her trolley.
"Holly thinks it's normal," says A'Court. "She thinks everyone's parents are on TV so it's no big deal. It doesn't embarrass her or make her uncomfortable but it's also not an amazing, wonderful thing either. If your father's a plumber, you expect him to be able to unblock drains."
She and Holly share the performance gene - her daughter is a dancer - and although she doesn't share A'Court's activist streak, Holly is into what her mother calls "social politics". She has a tight-knit group of friends, whom she looks out for.
Michele A'Court and daughter Holly, aged 5. Photo / Supplied
Despite their close relationship, the teenage years still happened.
"Oh my God, yes. Fifteen was dreadful, just dreadful. All mothers agree, you just hold your breath and trust that your delightful, delicious child will come back to you. It's hormones. Nigel Latta talks about teenagers being mentally ill but it's a mental illness they will eventually recover from. Synapses aren't connected. She went from being gorgeous, perfect, delightful, chatty warm, kind, to being sullen, quiet, door-slammy. Then she came out the other end."
Change was also in store with the other love of her life. Ten years into their relationship, A'Court and Elwood went to Canada and the United States to celebrate her 50th. After having a lovely time visiting family, going to Disneyland and seeing The Lion King, Elwood casually inquired as to how difficult it might be to get married in Las Vegas. Next thing they knew, they were saying their I Do's in a Sin City chapel.
"It was really romantic. It seemed like such a wonderful idea to do such a private thing without an audience, with nobody else involved. I can't think of a better way of doing it. It was gorgeous.
"[Being married] feels different than I would've thought it does. It just feels a little more settled. Like a question you didn't know had been posed has been answered." Elwood is 14 years younger, and has talked publicly about the irritation of being asked about it. The age difference is irrelevant to A'Court too.
"I'm never aware of him being younger than me. That would be weird. No, we just arrived on the planet at slightly different times. We have all the same understanding of the world and read the same books, we love the same music, we love the same parts of the world."
Plus, she loves cleaning; he loves cooking. "We're very well matched."
A'Court does a good gag about middle age, a time when she says many women finally feel at peace with the way they look. "Which is ironic," she says, "considering it's the time we actually start looking a bit shit."
She realised she was a grown-up when she started to carry a little compact mirror around, to warn if her face - or the stuff in front of her face - had suddenly melted away.
This is silly as she's very attractive, with a trim, athletic physique, honed from her passion for yoga. On a good week she does three 90-minute classes at an Iyengar studio in Birkenhead. She does a good gag about this, too - you're doing all right if you can pull off a shoulder stand without "suffocating on your own tits". She shows a photo on her iPad of herself in an arrow-straight sarvangasana, still breathing. "I'm quite proud of that."
Why yoga? "It's good for my brain. It's saved my soul, really. It stops all the busy thought processes and makes me get out of my head and think about my body. It strips everything else away. Those moments where you just exist inside yourself - I love that. It's not about how you come across to anybody, or what you look like or sound like."
She feels most like herself when she's practising yoga, just as she does on stage or sitting in her pyjamas, writing. It's a topic she covers in the book. You can recognise when someone feels most like themselves because you can see it on their face.
This is how she came to be humbled by her daughter, now 21 years old. Just before she debuted the show, Holly announced she was pregnant. A'Court realised the life she'd envisioned for her involved Holly joining a dance company in New York, so she could go over and visit jazz clubs and go shopping. After the tears and drama that followed, she came to terms with the fact her daughter really wanted to be a mother. But she almost missed the birth. Holly and her partner were living in Australia, and she was due to be induced so A'Court flew over two days ahead of time. But Holly went into labour earlier than expected. On her way to hospital room, her mum got stuck in the lift, a little tragi-comedy scenario at the worst possible moment.
The story had a happy ending, of course. And when she saw Holly's face, holding her daughter, she realised she was doing the thing that made her feel the most like herself. Now A'Court is a doting grandmother - which seems an odd word to describe her, somehow - of Ariana-Rose. She, too, has the performance gene. She shows me a film of the child dancing, just like Holly used to.
"I only have 2000 photos of her."
When she grows up, you can bet no one will forget to tell her how to defrost bread without electricity, how to find her tribe or make chilli con carne. It's all there in the first book on the shelf.
Stuff I Got To Tell My Daughter by Michele A'Court (HarperCollins $34.99) is out on April 1.
She performs at the Bruce Mason Centre on April 15 and the Auckland Writers Festival gala night event on May 14.
