For All Her Ills, She Gives Laughter

As she slinks across the cafeteria floor in tight turquoise pants, purple spangled halter top and silver high heels, the 17-year-old blond diva warbles a la Britney Spears.

“My singin’s kinda off-key--

To make matters worse, I’m on MTV . . .”

Hamming it up like everyone else at the dress rehearsal of Santa Susana High School’s annual comedy revue, Alex Nester vamps and glides through her over-the-top Britney impression.

Last year, the music had to come to her. Friends serenaded the Simi Valley girl as she lay in a hospital bed, exhausted from another round of chemotherapy. A performer whose first professional credit was a yogurt jingle at the age of 9, she was on the road to a high-powered singing career when she was diagnosed with lymphoma. Ravaged and then revived by chemotherapy, she lost her hair, her sweet voice and, very nearly, her will to go on.

But that was then. Now, coiffed with an elaborate blond wig, Alex is just another player, just another starburst of adolescent energy bouncing off the walls as students prepare for Saturday’s production of “Got Comedy?” at the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks. They’ll also perform at the school on Feb. 1 and 2.

At rehearsal, director Peggy Albrecht chides a mumbler for his lack of gusto.

“You don’t just tell the audience, ‘Listen up,’ ” she reminds him. “It’s: Listen up! You want to wake up that guy dozing in the fourth row! Hit ‘em over the head with it!”

Albrecht, an animated woman who peppers her conversation with exclamations, conceived the show as a fund-raiser for the school in 1997. Each year, she writes a new version of it and directs a couple dozen eager players. A seasoned performer herself, she teaches a class in improvisation at Santa Susana, a magnet school in Simi Valley for technology and the performing arts.

For Albrecht, an actress who also wrote some failed sitcoms, this is a labor of love. She tells stories of shy students who blossom, and morose students who rise above their bleakness on a wave of self-confidence.

“These kids aren’t athletes or necessarily A students,” she said. “They don’t have a clique, but all of a sudden they find themselves in a place where they’re welcomed with open arms. A lot of them come in and go, ‘I’m not funny.’ I tell them, ‘That’s my job; when I get through with you, you’ll be funny.’ ”

Success Followed by Grim Diagnosis

For Alex Nester, funny sometimes has been a hard state to attain over the last few years.

By the time she was 16, she was featured on eight CDs and had earned honors at the Los Angeles Music Awards.

But she was overcome with fatigue. She lost her appetite. Last February, she thought she’d pulled an abdominal muscle in a hip-hop class, but she and her parents soon realized it was something much worse.

“I started feeling nauseous and it hurt like crazy,” she recalled. “It went on for a couple of weeks, and then it got so bad I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

The diagnosis: Life-threatening pancreatitis triggered by lymphatic cancer.

“I was scared out of my mind and feeling terrible at the same time,” she said. “It was a real head trip.”

Students and teachers from Santa Susana--known affectionately as Santa Sue--dropped by Alex’s hospital room, and friends showed up with guitars. Even so, her spirits flagged, sapped by the powerful drugs that burned up her cancer.

“Depression was the worst part,” she said. “I was crying the whole time. I just couldn’t find reason in life. Logically, I shouldn’t have felt like that, but I did.”

Bolstered by antidepressants, Alex reentered school gradually, focusing at first on dance to help regain her strength.

“She literally dragged herself here, huffing and puffing through dance class and then sitting down and crying through sheer exhaustion,” Albrecht said. “There’s not a person in the world I admire more.”

At rehearsal, Albrecht is unrelentingly upbeat as she puts 27 students and 15 alumni through their paces.

“And you don’t say, ‘Henny Young-Man,’ ” she tells a cast member who paused between the syllables of the comic’s name. “It’s ‘Youngman.’ He was an old guy. He wasn’t a young guy. ‘Henny Young-Man!’ Omigod! It sounds so waspy!”

Show Honors Great Comics

The production offers wacky glimpses of comedy and music through the decades, paying homage to Youngman, Milton Berle and Jerry Seinfeld while lampooning such pop wonders as the Village People, Cher and ‘N Sync.

During a break from the rehearsal’s focused zaniness, Alex recounts what she can remember of her return to health. Some of it is hazy; the chemo, she says, played tricks with her memory. What she knows for sure is that her spirit and voice had both been wounded--and that both had come back strong.

“For a while, I could barely talk, no less sing,” she says. “My voice--this one thing in life that always made me smile--was in limbo.”

Now she has two CDs in the works--one Christian, the other contemporary. For Christmas, she recorded a jazzy single--”Thank You (To All My Friends)”--and sent it to 300 of the pals, teachers, doctors, nurses and family members who helped during her ordeal.

But as she and the other players go through their antic gyrations, all that is behind her. The only sign of her ordeal sits on her head--an outrageous Britney Spears hairpiece.

“It’s a good thing I got these wigs,” she says.