Out of the deep end

Clad in head-to-toe black, Rochelle Newman struts onto a darkened stage, sizes up the audience, then announces matter-of-factly: “I was a fat kid.”

It’s hard to imagine Newman, a fit 42-year-old with shoulder-length auburn hair, as a “size 14 at age 14” -- and equally difficult to picture her as the 90-pound anorexic she soon became. Oddest of all, perhaps, is that Newman has chosen to tell her story not in the form of a mawkish movie of the week or an angry “autopathography” displayed at Borders, but as an unsentimental solo show.

Although no topic seems verboten on the one-woman-show circuit -- Eve Ensler took on vaginas and Julia Sweeney covered cancer -- the I-hate-my-body-I’m-so-fat theme has been largely ignored. And Newman, at first, had no intention of changing that.

“I was writing about my workaholism,” she says, referring to what ultimately became “Hip Bones and Cool Whip,” which runs through Wednesday at the Hudson Avenue Theatre before moving to the Santa Monica Playhouse on March 21. “I was working with a well-known dramaturge named Mark Travis, and he said, ‘I don’t know that that’s what you really want to write about.’ I thought, ‘Well, what else do I have to say?’ ”

A stand-up comedian, award-winning playwright and founder of Enlace, a Latino-market advertising firm in Brentwood, Newman the workaholic sat down with a stack of index cards.

“I decided to alphabetize my life,” she says with a laugh. “So I wrote down all the major things that began with A -- adulthood, advertising, anxiety, adolescence, anorexia. But I didn’t want to do an eating disorder. I didn’t want people asking, ‘Why is your dysfunction worth an hour and a half of my time?’ ”

Performing stand-up at Igby’s, the Ice House and the Improv, Newman occasionally joked about dieting (“When my trainer told me muscles have memory, I realized that my butt must have Alzheimer’s”), but mostly riffed neurotic in the safer territories of her Jewish mother and “spousal equivalent” (“The Nutrasweet version of a marriage: All the great taste of a husband, only half the commitment”).

“I didn’t die or anything!” she told Travis when he urged Newman to explore her eating disorder. “That’s good,” Travis replied, “because being alive is a prerequisite for doing a show.”

So is courage. After her mother’s death in 1995, Newman decided it was time to take a risk. “But even then,” she admits, “I kicked and screamed for seven years before I came forward.”

Newman’s loving but misguided, overweight Jewish mother, who taught her daughter to cover up the smell of pork from Chinese food by eating ice cream -- on Yom Kippur -- looms, well, large in “Hip Bones.”

But Newman isn’t afraid of shining the klieg light on herself, illuminating self-absorption, insecurity and behavior on the brink of insanity.

“Rochelle is one of the most courageous writer-performers that I have worked with,” Travis says. “She dove into the deep end of the pool.”

Diving into pools -- metaphorically and literally -- had never been Newman’s forte. In the mid-1970s, Newman’s aerospace-engineer father moved his family from an immigrant neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where “everybody was heavy,” says Newman, to sunny Beverly Hills, where the chubby adolescent fretted about fitting into a bathing suit. As summer began, a Beverly Hills doctor put Newman on a diet of 600 calories a day, which Newman quickly pared down to 400 calories, then 20, and on some days, none.

“I want to show how dangerous these obsessions are,” Newman says. “They don’t tell heroin addicts, ‘Good for you, shoot up more!’ But we all tell dieters, ‘Good for you, you have so much willpower!’ It’s a socially acceptable obsession that’s fatal.”

Which is exactly why Carlos Carrasco, Newman’s live-in partner of 20 years and the show’s director, hadn’t realized the extent of her illness: She didn’t seem that different from “normal” women who look in the mirror and criticize their reflection.

Newman uses her influence in the advertising world -- she serves on the boards of the Los Angeles Assn. of Advertising Agencies, the Assn. of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, and the L.A. Ad Club -- to raise the industry’s consciousness of its impact on vulnerable young minds.

“Some people have an attitude similar to ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ -- ‘Ads don’t make people anorexic, anorexics make people anorexic.’ But advertisers need to take responsibility.”

Today, Newman characterizes her body-image issues as “a low-grade fever.” She’s found a balance around food and exercise, but like most women, she’s mum when it comes to divulging the number on her scale. “I will tell you my whole life story,” she says. “I’ll even tell you my age. But please, don’t ask me my weight.”

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‘Hip Bones and Cool Whip’

Where: Hudson Avenue Theatre, 6537 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood

When: Wednesday, 8 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 26

Price: $10

Info: (323) 856-4200

Also:

Where: Santa Monica Playhouse,

1211 4th St., Santa Monica

When: March 1 at 8 p.m.

Price: $10 donation

Contact: (310) 394-9779, Ext. 1