Life, Laughs and Lotus

At first, comedienne Lotus Weinstock is just a voice on the telephone.

Weinstock, who will emcee a benefit Saturday for the Positive Directions Coffeehouse in Glendale, has a pleasant voice that betrays her East Coast origins and laughs easily. But she’s hard to picture.

Then she says it.

“I have a wonderful child that just graduated from Brown University.”

Suddenly, a woman with short blond hair comes to mind. She was on the cable show “Evening at the Improv” last Friday night. She wore a pink flowered dress and red shoes with ankle straps, and sat on a stool chatting comfortably with the audience about her wonderful daughter, whom she raised as a single mom, and who just graduated from Brown University.

The woman on the phone is the same one who on TV wanted to tattoo her chest with her daughter’s diploma and flash Dan Quayle.

Weinstock, a comedian for 29 years “with some time off for life,” goes on and talks about being an individual.

“I tried not being who I am and I wasn’t so good at it. I’m looking forward to a time when we are finally up to the issue of liberating the most oppressed of all minorities: the individual.”

She mentions her ex-husband: “I was married to him for 18 years, he was married to me for three. Possibly.”

Then she takes the phone to the piano and plays her own composition, making up the lyrics as she sings.

No longer just a voice, but a woman who is as serious as she is funny, she closes with a quip: “Unrequited love is just God’s way of saying, ‘Imagine how I feel.’ ”

The benefit concert will be at the coffeehouse, 225-D N. Maryland Ave., and starts at 8 p.m. Performance artist comedian Ritt Henn and comedian Teresa Tudury are also on the bill. Tickets are $20.