By Ken Martinez
photos by Tatjana loh

Satirist Sandra Tsing Loh reflects on the dichtomy of parenthood and liberalism in her one-woman show, Mother on Fire.

Sandra Tsing Loh is part observer, part philosopher, part comedian, part rock star, and all parts wonder woman. She is a make-you-think messenger in this ever-changing, fast-paced world, who speaks her truth and comments upon the absurdity we know as life in the western world. Loh was thrown into fame as the woman who found herself in the death grip of a conservative country by mistakenly not editing out the "f-word" in one of her radio commentaries for National Public Radio on KCRW and was consequently fired from her job as a commentator and host of The Loh Life. The irony is that NPR and KCRW are supposed to be liberal-minded organizationsÑforgiving, to say the least. But in this era of Janet Jackson breast snafus and Christians obsessed with the Ten Commandments (thou shalt not cuss being the eleventh), America has gone through a dark time of conservative correctness that can't seem to understand that we all know the last three letters of the "f-word," and certainly know what a female breast looks like (including children and gay men).

But with all that behind her now, the artist and communicator in Loh is soaring high with her transformative new one-woman show, Mother on Fire, opening Sept. 30 at the 24th Street Theatre, about how formerly sane adults become insane once they become parents in Los Angeles. I caught Loh on her cell phone while she was looking for a place to park and wait for her father's bus to arrive at a local stop.

"Five years ago I became a parent. Before, I was doing columns for Buzz Magazine and KCRW. So I really switched from a 38-year-old gal-about-town into a mother," observes Loh on her evolution from non-parent to parent. She goes on to explain the attitudes that both parents and non-parents have towards each other. "So the non-parents think the parents are tedious and the parents think the non-parents have empty lives and are completely narcissistic É and it seems never the twain can meet."

But it appears the twain do meet in Loh's new show. "I wanted to talk about this, but do it in such a way that even non-parents could enjoy the show," she says. "My director, David Schweitzer, is a gay bachelor, and it has been a great dynamic solution to make sure that the show is entertaining to all."

With Loh's high-energy comedic insight, there is no possible way that this show could be anything but entertaining. Loh tackles the contradiction of L.A. liberals and their look-but-don't-touch attitudes towards race, economics, and culture on a whole. "In Los Angeles people become kind of hysterical because we are living in a large, urban, economically and racially mixed city. But if you live in your bubble that is from your house to Trader Joe's to Whole Foods and back, you won't really have to deal with or embrace the culture at large. You can stay with your pretty safe judgments and your soy milk and tofu."

And when these liberals have kids, forget about it. "Once you start embracing something like the Los Angeles public school system, which I think is the metaphor for all culture out there, everything comes up, and you just become a person that you never thought you would be." Loh takes an honest, personal look at what we, who consider ourselves as liberal and open-minded, face when our future liberal children enter the picture. "I think, for instance, because the racial mix of the schools, you realize that all people are the same in different tribes. But would I want to send my kids to a 96 percent Hispanic socio-economically placed school? No. I am going to send them to a school where all the special liberal children spend fifty thousand a year for kindergarten, so they can learn about diversity far from where diversity is actually happening."

But with Loh taking on liberal elite parents, she is also catching a glimpse of her own reflection. "When I had children, I felt that I was much more spiritually evolved than people without children. But I have discovered that parents are worse than non-parents and much more morally reprehensible as they will practically kill and bulldoze any other child so their child can get first place at a hip preschool É as I myself was starting to do."

Looking at her own experience as an American of mixed decent (her father is Chinese, her mother is German), Loh's color-blind upbringing was a direct result of growing up in liberal California. "I grew up in Malibu. I grew up not being aware of being any color. It wasn't until I started doing arts in the '90s that it was suddenly to your advantage to be Asian. But I am Eurasian and get mistaken for being Latina very often."

To make the melting pot known as Loh's life even more complicated, she married a South Dakotan Norwegian, and the two have a daughter who is "light blond like Children of the Corn" jokes Loh. "So when we are in the park, as opposed to the beautiful blond ladies with their adorable Chinese girl babies, we are the complete opposite. I look like her Third World nanny."

Loh has practiced what she preaches and moved on from that over-priced private liberal preschool and has now enrolled her daughter in a public school kindergarten. And the satirical life of the satirist continues: "My daughter is the only blonde in her class of 20. She is suddenly the minority. She is white and I still have to give her the talk that some people might think she is different."

Mother on Fire runs Sept. 30 through Nov. 6 at the 24th Street Theatre,

1117 W. 24th St., L.A. For more infor-

mation, call 1-800-838-3006, or see www.24thstreet.org/motheronfire.