The Multi-Cult Semi-Celeb

Perched before a microphone in a basement studio at Santa Monica College, the Queen of Anti-Cool is at it again, championing the cause of slackers and non-achievers in another wild-ride radio riff. “Today’s topic,” she says, her voice lilting: “Bottom rollers.” Drawing a deep breath, Sandra Tsing Loh launches into her latest foray through the neurotic, disconnected landscape of her native Los Angeles, offering another heartfelt jolt of drive-time angst in a zippy five-minute confessional. Her weekly KCRW radio commentaries, known collectively as “The Loh Life,” spotlight those clueless couch-dwellers who populate an L.A. far from the glitter of celebrity: B-listers and Valley “shlubs” forever sentenced to the back of the line. A savvy social chameleon who slips between disparate orbs--hanging out in greasy spoons, then jetting off to be a judge at Sundance--Loh is the chronicler of that class of Angelenos she calls “young, highly trained, downwardly mobile professionals: ‘dumpies.’ ”

During this particular one-woman therapy session, the 38-year-old writer and performance artist plays cheerleader for those low-lights of the personal investment world, those with neither day-trading accounts nor start-up stock ops. “Who are we?” she coos. “We are the people who have all our money in crappy low-interest CDs.”

Her delivery is caffeine-fueled stream of consciousness, meandering sentences spiced with the trippy rhythms of a maturing Valley girl. Alone in the studio, hands gesturing in an unchoreographed ballet, she offers a warning to those gutsy paper trillionaires who are the antithesis of her constituency: “Your company could fold. At which point, if you’re like me, you’d be forced to hurl yourself headfirst onto the bed, tearing your hair out and shrieking, Medea-like: ‘I’m dead! The end has come! I’m a horrible, tragic failure!’ ”

In a hallway outside the taping room, passersby stop, spellbound by Loh’s rantings. Herky-jerky, head swaying, the Queen continues: “Meanwhile, tucked away in its completely government-insured CD, my nest egg will continue to grow, every year, by an unshakable . . . 4.7%.” ~ When she’s through, the hallway audience is laughing hard. But from a nearby room, a straight-faced engineer announces that the commentary is over the time limit. So Loh begins another take, speaking faster to fit in all her thoughts. Even at 78 rpm, the words seem natural, tossed-off and chatty, warmed with the intimacy of two pals trading gossip over after-work drinks.

Loh’s best gossip comes from her own colorful life. As author of “The Valley” column for the defunct Buzz magazine and as a solo performer in a pair of one-woman theatrical shows, “Bad Sex With Bud Kemp” and “Aliens in America,” Loh has delved into her evolving relationship with her father, who at age 79 likes to wear his ex-wife’s black nylon underwear on his daily ocean swims. She has shared scenes from her premarital love life, “where it just doesn’t fly and you’re seated on the bed at midnight and just weeping in your hands.” She has revealed how, as a temp typist for a North Hollywood insurance company, she almost got fired for blatantly ignoring the requirement to wear control-top pantyhose.

For her efforts, the syndicated monologuist has been dismissed as a shameless self-promoter and, in the words of one New York critic, “an annoyingly self-absorbed young woman” without an unexpressed thought. She also has been called “America’s funniest woman in under five minutes flat.” Adore her or dismiss her, she has put a unique stamp on a prime piece of socio-geography. Just as Woody Allen’s nasal whine evokes Manhattan’s chattering classes, Loh’s quirky radio croon captures shirker, fauxhemian Los Angeles.

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Raised in tony Malibu, the youngest of three children born to a German mother and a Chinese father, Loh has a lanky frame and a look she calls vaguely Latina. These days, she’s a defiant dweller of Van Nuys--a place “so unfashionable that people actually recoil in horror when you admit you live there.” For Loh, the Valley represents the real Los Angeles, not plastic breasts and BMWs but a place as unpolished as her life: no health insurance until you’re 35; driving a 1987 Acura that valets think would be better handled by a wrecking truck.

But Loh’s sloucher persona belies her relentless drive as reflected in her vita: Caltech physics degree; grad work in English at USC; classically trained pianist, screenwriter, author of a novel, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now,” and an essay collection, “Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles.”

What’s odd--and perhaps revealing of God’s great comic plan--is that she almost certainly got that drive from her father.

As a little girl, Sandra Tsing Loh had this absurdist fatal vision for her dad: “I dreamed he would go on a long trip, fall into the ocean and have his eyes pecked out by birds,” she says. “Then my mom would be free to marry the Prince of Monaco.”

At home, Eugene Loh was a brooding figure who exploded into rages, a pathological cheapskate who wore his threadbare sweaters backward, used a Frosted Flakes cereal box for a briefcase and disconnected the car battery to keep his family from venturing off to church. Sandra’s Christmas memories are of the aerospace engineer reading his scientific papers in another room while the family opened gifts--he emerging only to turn down the heat.

Her dad hitchhiked to save money, once forcing his daughter to accompany him along Pacific Coast Highway on a trip to the dentist. “I’m already a nerd in junior high school--I played the viola and helped start the debate and French clubs--and here’s my dad,” Loh recalls, “making me hitchhike and saying we’d have better luck if I stood by myself.

“So when an anxious neighbor or mother of a school friend pulls up to say, ‘Sandra? Is that you?’ my dad leaps out of the bushes and announces, ‘There’s two of us! Can you take us to Santa Monica?’ He had plenty of money. He had a car. How could an insecure 14-year-old not despise her father for that?”

Thirty years later, with his daily beach exercise regimen, Shanghai native Eugene Loh remains in prime physical shape for a man nearing 80. Still, in her stage show “Aliens in America,” a recollection that evokes both the humor and pain of her childhood, the daughter dismisses her father as “Old Dragon Whiskers.” Scrunching up her face in a caricature of Chinese features, she calls him “the Wily Mandarin,” a diminutive figure starting to look “like somebody’s gardener.”

In her last conscious act before a fatal descent into Alzheimer’s, Sandra’s mother divorced her father, launching him on a mail-order quest to take a bride from the old country--ground Loh covers in the sketch “My Father’s Chinese Wives.” Rather than being angry or embarrassed at being the foil for his daughter’s comedy, the elder Loh revels in the attention. “I’m very flattered,” he says. “If Sandra didn’t talk about these things, nobody would know about me. Most people have to wait until their funeral before people say all these interesting things about them. I’m still alive. I can hear it.” As for the accuracy of his daughter’s memory, he shrugs and says, Zen-like: “Each fact you can spin in a different way. But of all my children, Sandra is the most liberal. She tolerates me.” He pauses, then adds: “But everybody evolves. Even an old man like me.”

These days, Eugene Loh celebrates his own strangeness. On the beach, he flaunts an undersized Speedo swimsuit salvaged from a dumpster near his home. He has taken on an odd collection of boarders, many of whom are disciples of a maharishi. He still hitchhikes; his daughter once wrote of how he scored a ride with actress Anjelica Huston. Often he goes to a nearby Starbucks to drink the dregs from abandoned coffee cups. Always aware of his audience, he sometimes announces to strangers that he has just refilled his Viagra prescription. He proudly displays his wallet--a tattered, letter-sized envelope with crucial numbers scribbled across the outside. And he draws attention to a plastic Lucky bag he uses to shoulder his belongings on hitching trips and bus rides across L.A. “It’s my trademark,” he says of the bag.

The father, who so far has taken two Chinese wives, has attended many of the daughter’s performances, playing up his Chinese roots to suit his purpose. At last year’s “Aliens” opening in L.A., he came dressed in a floor-length blue satin Mandarin robe and sat in the front row, snapping pictures and turning heads. “God forbid,” Sandra says, “that any attention might be focused on me.” He also has ventured onstage for Q&A; sessions with his daughter. And here’s the part that completely mystifies Sandra and sister Tatjana, whose own anger led her to avoid her father for about eight years: After watching him subjected to a comedic character assassination, theater audiences still hold him in awe.

“My father comes onstage and people give him standing ovations,” Sandra says. “They ask him all these philosophy of life questions. They treat him like the Dalai Lama. It really puzzles my sister and me how he always comes across as this folk hero. And we’re going, ‘He’s not that. He’s a total shyster, and why can’t people see that about him?’ But the more you call him a shyster, the more people go, ‘Oh, the angry daughters.’ ”

The stage shows have brought Eugene Loh a cult following. A local rock group once wrote a song titled “Mr. Loh” and invited him onstage while they performed at a club on Sunset. As his daughter rolled her eyes, the elder Loh--wearing only a Speedo--did acrobatics from a bar held by two band members. Now, as part of a long process of forgiveness, Loh accepts her father’s acting-out, appreciating him as a wellspring for her wistful “here’s my pathetic life” comedy.

Still, she has her limits. She recently invited him to dinner at her home but didn’t offer him a lift, so he took a three-hour bus ride from Malibu. And she only lets him monopolize conversations for so long before giving him a gentle verbal elbow to the ribs. When a visitor suggests that both Sandra and her father benefit one another--she gets the comic material and he gets the publicity--Eugene Loh launches into a dissertation on nature’s many parasitic relationships. With perfect timing, the once-angry daughter turns to her father. “So what’s that make you then, Dad, a bacteria?”

The joke is delivered without malice. “After my mom died,” she says, “I went through this feeling of ‘Oh, my gosh, this is my only parent I have left. This is my only link to the past, for better or worse.’ No matter what friends you have, they’re not going to replace your family. And the more you understand them, the more you understand yourself.”

In 1987, Sandra Tsing Loh played a Steinway piano for 90 minutes beside the Harbor Freeway as traffic whizzed past. The point was to be the vibrant auteur who could create art wherever she chose. But the performance piece fell flat. Rather than being hailed as the new Yoko Ono by the avant-garde crowd, she landed in People magazine and became the butt of a Johnny Carson monologue, dismissed as another sideshow from that circus called Los Angeles. Loh didn’t flinch. She played her piano outside a Hollywood hotel while a gang of rabid passersby knocked her aside, grabbing for the shower of $1 bills she paid an assistant to drop from a cherry picker. Looking to make a statement on shameless self-promotion, she got her photo in the National Enquirer. The 1989 grunion gig fared no better. Emptying her savings account, she paid $5,000 to have the 35-piece Topanga Symphony help her serenade spawning fish in a midnight performance on a Malibu beach. She aimed at the abstract but got dismissed as another angling Angelyne.

“That’s when I thought, ‘I have no idea where I’m going in my life. The only kind of creative art I do costs me thousands of dollars out of my own grad school pocket.’ The art wasn’t creating opportunities for more interesting work. Instead, it triggered phone calls from used-car lots and a college in Arkansas that wanted me to play piano dangling from a helicopter to promote the opening of a new library.”

For a time, Loh had danced to the tune of her father’s vision, graduating from Caltech with bachelor’s degrees in physics and literature, spending summers working in the advanced tactical weapons division at Hughes Aircraft in El Segundo. In 1983, the meltdown came. Blowing her graduate school exams, she bolted from science. Her father reacted unfavorably. “It was like I was gonna become a crack head.” So Loh charted her own unsteady course, entering the graduate English program at USC, where she taught for years, writing plays and short stories, doing her performance art, tutoring 10th-graders in math on the side. While floating on a shark-shaped tube at a backyard pool party in 1988, Loh met future husband Mike Miller, who recalls being fascinated with this erstwhile rocket scientist. He encouraged her to quit teaching and to pursue her real passions. Loh quickly moved in with her new boyfriend--ending her years-long skein of bad dates with unmarriageable men. But the career conundrum continued as she pursued a succession of freelance journalism gigs and low-security temp jobs--schlepping for a magician in North Hollywood, clerking and typing at an amp factory in Sylmar.

“I used to kid Sandra that we were going to make a “Scared Straight” video about her life to show to aspiring bohemians,” recalls friend Daniel Akst. “Teachers could identify kids who wore too much black. They’d be pulled aside and the horrors of Sandra’s life would make them go into accounting.”

Then Loh got a break: In 1992, she landed “The Valley” column for Buzz. Founding editor Allan Mayer recalls falling in love with Loh’s take on such subjects as her Valley health club, which had hairballs in the showers and old people who blundered into her lane doing laps in the pool. “There was such a clear voice there, a distinctive Southern California vision,” he says. “People talk about humor essentially being cruel, but that’s not the case with Sandra. Her humor works because it’s very pointed and very sharp, like any good art, and it’s very specific. At the same time, what makes it powerful is that there’s an enormous amount of compassion.”

Slowly, the “Valley” columns altered Loh’s oh-so-hip persona. “In my early 20s, I desperately wanted to be cool, to enroll in the fiction workshops and wear the cool clothing. But it didn’t suit me, and I wasn’t welcomed into the cool circles. So I guess I did the reverse. Like living in the Valley and making that OK. Whatever cool people would do, I always would do the opposite, every single time. That became my strategy.”

Loh began fleshing out material for “Aliens in America,” which she later staged, along with “Bad Sex With Bud Kemp,” in Los Angeles and off-Broadway in New York. She also began work on the novel. Intended as a meditation on ethnicity, in which a white female and an Asian American woman cross paths during the 1992 L.A. riots, the book taught Loh a lesson about her own multicultural identity. Just before sending it off to her publisher, the woman who had recently started using her middle name “Tsing” because “it would be cool to sound more Asian” spotted a fatal flaw in her vision--and scrapped the Asian character. “All that stuff about Asian identity was in there because I was hoping to get into that whole Amy Tan ring, but I just didn’t have it within me. So then I go, ‘Oh, no, I’m white, what does this mean, that the tribe I most relate to is the tribe of the middle class?’ So the book became a story about middle-class white people, the last oppressed group whose voice had not been heard. That’s the audience I most related to.”

As she delved into her mixed roots, she found herself wrestling with the constraints of political correctness. Soon she was taking on the grant-giving gurus of the local art world for patronizing minority artists such as herself by funding unworthy projects solely on the basis of color. In a Buzz piece called “Is This Ethnic Enough For You?” she concluded that multiculturalism in the arts had “become prized over all other qualities--over talent, over beauty, over ideas.”

Unwilling to play the ethnicity card, she dug deeper for material, unearthing some truths about herself in the process--and bolstering her instinct toward self-deprecation. Her columns mocked her baby-boomer fetish for Ikea furniture and recalled living as “white trash” in the Valley neighborhood of Winnetka, where she had relished lounging in a cement pool surrounded by a chain-link fence and weeds. She describes her driver’s license photo as so hideous that the DMV took it upon itself to send her another. In one commentary, she divulged a devil’s deal she’s dying to make: “No sex for the rest of your life, but unlimited first-class air miles. Or sex just once a year and then fly free business class.”

She has dissected her pregnancy on-air after she and Miller, a guitarist, “pulled the goalie” on their contraception. Then there was the six-part series on the surgery she had for the bags under her eyes. For Loh, liposuction and laser surgery are barometers of L.A. vanity--and prime subject matter. “My strategy is that if anything seems taboo, then go with that. Go on the radio and explain that while you wish it weren’t so, that while your higher self wouldn’t have considered it even for a moment, you still just had the fat lasered out of your eye bags. That’s the status of the human condition--to admit you’re not the person you thought you’d be. That’s real fodder for me as a writer.”

No matter how rich the material, Loh leaves many KCRW radio tapings in a bad mood. “Most times I tell myself, ‘It sucked! I’m a total failure!’ ” Her commentaries, she points out, are not edited or pre-approved. “It’s just me and that microphone alone in our own confessional booth. If I pondered the implications of that, I’d never be able to do it.”

If nothing else, those therapeutic taping sessions have given Loh the insight to know which Faustian bargains she had best avoid--and which are likely to be reneged on even before she can make them. She has sat straight-faced at network development meetings as executives blather on, praising her stage show. “You, you, you!” they cry. “Your life! Your characters! Your vision! You are a natural sitcom!” But time and again, Hollywood fails to deliver. Not only can Loh not produce her show, the shot-callers say, but she can’t have any acting roles, not even a cameo. “Not even one line,” she says. “Basically what they mean is ‘Your one-woman show is great, but you’re too old and haggard to be on TV.’ ”

Loh recalls a lunch at Maple Drive restaurant. An executive fawned over her comic depictions of the Loh life and then floated a job offer. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got a TV deal. This is pretty good. Me, my world, my characters.’ Then, like in the middle, my tuna sashimi came halfway up.” What the exec wanted was someone to write funny dialogue for two 22-year-old former Double Mint twins.

He told Loh: “We want to ask the question: ‘What is it really like to be blond?’ People think blonds lives are so perfect. But, actually, they have insecurities.”

Now Loh has a policy: no meetings with network comedy development executives, “the unfunniest and most hateful people in the world.” And no more show comps for industry types, the arrogant little operators who expect everything for nothing just so they can get up and walk out halfway through your performance. Loh’s siblings in the stand-up comedy sisterhood share her frustration. “I go into this rage when I hear about Sandra’s network development meetings,” says “Saturday Night Live” alum Julia Sweeney, who has done her own one-woman shows. “Some of those comedians already on TV don’t have half of what’s going on inside her head.”

So Loh goes about her merry outcast way. Years after those public piano gigs, she has remained true to her vision of making art happen on her own terms. Last fall, she footed the bill to stage a reprise run of “Aliens” at West Hollywood’s Tiffany Theater. “So much of the artist’s life is waiting for somebody to give you permission to create,” she says. “You know, like, ‘We will publish your book, but it has to be this way. We will give you money to write a script, but it has to be that way.’ At the Tiffany, I was just totally my own boss. I put up the money, I hired people I loved. In the end, I doubled my investment. But the best part was feeling empowered to do it all myself.”

Well, not entirely by herself. “There’s a certain look in Sandra’s eyes when she hears possible material,” says Tatjana. “And I sometimes have to say, ‘No, you can’t use this.’ Sometimes I just want to talk to her sister-to-sister.” For years, Miller has endured jokes that he is the basis for his wife’s material on inept sex. He plays the same role for Loh that fictional husband Fang played for Phyllis Diller, he says, joking that he and his father-in-law may start a support club as survivors of Loh’s comedy: “We’d have a T-shirt with footprints and the words ‘Sandra was here.’ ”

Expecting her child in September, Loh still stays busy. Along with her radio gig, she provides the voice of Mrs. Duong, the Vietnamese neighbor in the Disney animated TV series “Weekenders.” She recently guest-hosted the talk show “Later.” She is writing a book, “A Year in Provence Van Nuys,” about the “charmless, tattered, sunstroked mini-mall wasteland I call home.” She’s also researching a book on her dad (who, let it be known, was tickled to see that a Caltech brochure listed among its distinguished alumni Boeing executives, Nobel laureates. . . . and Sandra Tsing Loh).

Loh isn’t very famous. And that’s fine with her. “I have the freedom to be creative, to do things that are interesting to me, and that’s the real definition of success,” she says. Just in case, she has devised a foolproof way to keep the celebrity demons at bay. “Each month, before buying into the whole image thing and thinking ‘Yeah, I am kinda glamorous,’ I try to do at least one humiliating thing. Usually, I shuffle around Trader Joe’s to buy some incredibly fatty food, dressed in my sweat pants with no makeup and looking absolutely horrible.”

Of course, her father refuses to let Loh strike a sophisticated pose. On a recent network limo ride, he wanted pictures taken with the driver and preened for the camera, waving a brandy bottle from the mini-bar. “He was the immigrant relative with the shopping bag, just gurgling with glee,” Loh recalls with a dark laugh. “With your father around, you can basically never, ever be cool.”

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John M. Glionna is a Times staff writer. His last piece for the magazine was a profile of composer Danny Elfman.