Foursome Went Different Ways After ‘Hot Flashes’

In their time, they weren’t quite as famous as the Fab Four.

But in San Diego in the early 1980s, the enormously popular four funny women who called themselves “Hot Flashes” developed a unique brand of humor.

It was feminist humor. It was drawn from life. In fact, it was drawn from their lives. And for two years in a row, the group drew summer crowds to the Theatre in Old Town.

The group broke up in 1985. Since then each Hot Flash has gone her own fiery way, and each has continued the unique momentum that brought her to the team.

The youngest of the Hot Flashes, Bronx-born San Diego State grad Sherri Glaser, 30, is about to star in an autobiographical one-woman show, “Family Secrets” at the Hahn Cosmopolitan beginning Thursday. Last Sunday the show finished a critically acclaimed seven-month run at Los Angeles’ Heliotrope Theatre. Glaser also is negotiating for a possible Showtime production, a series with Warner Brothers and a national tour.

Another Hot Flash, San Diego native Mo Gaffney, 31, just completed a successful Off-Broadway run of “The Kathy & Mo Show.” Gaffney also wrote the flashback scenes in the movie “The Lemon Sisters” and is currently working on a book of “The Kathy & Mo Show” with partner Kathy Najimy. She is also developing scripts for Disney as possible starring vehicles for herself and Najimy and may be collaborating on some of those projects with screenwriter Nora Ephron.

A third, Robyn Samuels, a 38-year-old Los Angeles actress-elementary school teacher, is the director of Glaser’s solo show. Samuels also has acted at the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

And the fourth, Margaret Gillette, 37, is living in the Madre Grande monastery in Dulzura, organizing retreats for women.

The group first got together when Najimy was looking for a feminist comedy troupe to perform in the now defunct B Street Cafe which Najimy ran.

“We had planned to do just one show and the rest is ‘herstory’,” Glaser said with a laugh.

All remember Hot Flashes warmly as a starting point for professional or personal exploration or both. Interviewed independently, each said that the friendships and the work had changed her life.

“What we worked with in Hot Flashes and what I continue to work with is real life, not stereotypes,” Glaser said on the phone from Los Angeles. “Ninety-two percent of what I do really happened. That was always our basic work ethic. When you write from your own life, you don’t have to steal. It touches your heart and people feel it too.”

In Glaser’s current show she plays a mother, father, grandmother and two sisters. She’s currently working on adding a third sister, or a lesbian lover or a husband for of one of the sisters during the course of the Hahn Cosmopolitan run.

Samuels said that the seed of at least one of Glaser’s characters, the father, emerged during a Hot Flashes routine in which all the women played their fathers.

Samuels also appears to be is the one who misses the group the most: “I looked on it even then as a time when what I wanted to do and what I was doing, what I wanted to say and what I was saying were in sync,” she said on the phone from Los Angeles.

Gillette, the only one to have left theater completely, expresses no regrets.

She went from Hot Flashes to a group called the Egomaniacs that she co-founded with Glaser and Gillette’s now ex-husband, Lawrence Nass. Now, to support herself, Gillette cleans houses and serves tables at Jimbo’s, a health food restaurant in North Park. She said it makes sense to her that the four Hot Flashes went in the various directions they did. They were always different, she said, and while the differences enhanced the act when they were together, they were also the reason that the group eventually broke up.

“My whole background has been following different spiritual paths,” said Gillette. “I was the searcher. Robyn got into the directing and being the architect of what was going on on stage. Sheri was the writer--she was more into the processing of personalities. Mo, who was more the entertainer, was the spokesperson between us and the world. She was more the stand-up comedienne than anyone.”

All of them nurse some hope of a reunion someday, although the prospects for a reunion for all four of them is more likely to be personal rather than professional, they all say.

“I made three very good friends that I will have for the rest of my life,” said Gaffney from New York. “I saw Sheri’s show the last time I was in L.A. and we’re convinced we are going to work together again someday. I’m glad we didn’t let go of our relationships.”