Stand-Up Comic Learned Not to Take Life Too Seriously, and She Hopes It Rubs Off

The minute she becomes famous, Glynis K. McCants, 23, of Seal Beach plans to tell comedian Joan Rivers, “I may be fat, but you’re ugly . . . and I can diet.”

Anything for a laugh.

And like Rivers, McCants, 23, a budding stand-up comedian who was voted class clown at Huntington Beach High School--belying her 3.85 grade-point average--feels that her best friend is a microphone.

“Give me a microphone, and I give you laugh time,” she said.

But it’s hardly funny that a real friend’s suicide inspired her start in comedy. “If I was telling jokes before then, she might have listened to me and wouldn’t have killed herself,” said McCants, who became motivated to try comedy at age 17. “People have to learn not to take life so seriously. I have to tell those people, ‘Hey, get off it.’ ”

On stage, her words can be both insightful and bawdy. “Some of my stuff can be pretty naughty,” she admitted, just before a Thursday night performance at the near-packed Long Beach Comedy Club. “For instance, when I talk about sex, the jokes kill the audience, but there’s a way of saying it without being disgusting.”

In a rat-a-tat interview, McCants said performing on stage was inevitable for her. “Everything to me is a stage,” she said. “When I worked as a waitress, they weren’t my customers, they were my audience.”

She currently works for a nationwide dating service. “Let me tell you, the people who call in are another audience of mine. They love to listen to me, and that’s why I’m the top seller,” she said.

McCants is one of 11 children--”People ask me what number I am. I hate to be known as number nine,” she joked, although she seems to find laughs in everything. “Everyone in the family could probably make a good showing on stage.”

Bob Oliver, Comedy Club owner, said, “McCants has developed amazing popularity for a new comedienne, and there’s no question she has the energy and talent to make it big.”

That only confirms McCants’ own feeling. “Chances are 100% that I’ll make it as a comedienne . . . in two years,” she said. “I can make people laugh, and one day I’m going to take classes in psychology so I can help people who are depressed. It’s not hard to find someone upset with something. I just call a friend.”

And McCants someday hopes to be a talk show host.

“Actually, one dream I have over and over is that thousands of people will be in my audience, and I’ll be happy because I’ll be myself,” she said, “not wondering whether they like me,” she said.

Her bottom line? “I have to be the best in everything I do,” she said. “I don’t want to be just OK.”

Get this. Newport Beach artist Michael Bryan made a painting of a full symphony orchestra with a squeeze ketchup bottle. Go ahead, laugh, but it sells for $7,000.

“I use the ketchup bottle a great deal of the time,” said Bryan. “It gives me more freedom than a brush.”

It is his work with a brush, which includes art commissioned by hotels locally and throughout the country that puts bread on Bryan table. But overall, he figures he has painted 700 pieces during the last year, much of it with the ketchup bottle.

Bryan said he gets bored easily and needs to try different mediums. “Mostly I began using use the ketchup bottle to loosen me up.”

Actually, it’s not ketchup bottle art. “I call it tube painting,” he said.

In his final column in the Costa Mesa Chamber of Commerce newsletter, outgoing president Malcolm C. Ross quoted fourth- and fifth-graders who supplied the second half of the following adages:

“A bird in hand is . . . dead.”

“Don’t put all your eggs . . . in your pocket.”

“Don’t bite the hand that . . . has your allowance in it.”

“If at first you don’t succeed . . . blame it on your teacher.”

It was sometime around 1916 when a drifter assaulted a farmer’s daughter, prompting a 100-man posse to chase and catch the scoundrel in what was to become known as the Tomato Springs Shoot-out.

The drifter managed to kill three men and wound 20 others in the posse before the rest of the band shot him dead, relates Alvin J. Knowlton, who just happens to be building a Knollwood hamburger restaurant in a former Irvine blacksmith shop near where the shoot-out took place.

Well, as Knowlton tells the story, a posse member lifted a plug of tobacco from the slain desperado’s pocket and passed it on to his son as sort of a memento.

“Since the restaurant building will have historical significance,” said Knowlton, who will keep the original blacksmith forge in the dining area, “we’re trying to get the posse member’s son to donate the tobacco plug. We want to put it in a little glass case and light it, with an explanation of its historic significance to the Irvine area.”

A 70-year-old historic plug of tobacco?