Life after ‘Life’

Forget the NCAA tournament. Sandra Tsing Loh has gone through true March Madness.

In the last three weeks, Loh has weathered a family crisis, emergency rooms and sick children, the heartbreak of being fired from her gig as a commentator for KCRW-FM (89.9), the sweet revenge of being offered that job back -- and turning it down. She said hello to notoriety and goodbye to her status as a “painfully obscure $150-a-week semi-retired performance artist.”

But even with all the stress that comes with being abruptly thrust onto the front lines of the exploding debate over broadcast indecency, Loh has turned down a plea to seek therapy.

More specifically, she’s turned down an offer to try out to be a therapist. Jeff Goldblum’s therapist, to be exact.

Given the hoopla and passionate debate surrounding her firing from the National Public Radio affiliate for using a four-letter obscenity in a prerecorded segment of her weekly commentary, “The Loh Life,” Loh had expected a lot of twists, but not this one: an audition for a key role in a new NBC sitcom starring Goldblum. Her agent gave her the news last week that the NBC casting department wanted her to read for the pilot, “My 11:30.”

“God bless them, and God bless Hollywood,” Loh joked last week. “This town is not going to cast superior moral strands on me because now my name is in the news. Because I am in the news, they want me to read for a funny little sitcom. The only problem is, I can’t act!”

What she will do next is uncertain, but she figures she doesn’t have long to make up her mind. “My friends tell me my 15 minutes are almost up, that I have one more week as ‘censorship poster girl,’ ” she quipped. “For sure, doing a sitcom would be a misuse of those remaining seconds.”

Her lightness of tone is in sharp contrast to the despair she felt after being told by Ruth Seymour, station general manager, on March 1 that she had been terminated. “I felt like my throat had been slit and my body had been thrown on a dumpster,” she recalled. “It was a real hellacious experience.”

Seymour this week offered Loh her job back after learning that the word was inadvertently left in by her engineer instead of being bleeped for comic effect, as he had done on other shows. Loh turned the invitation down, calling the station “toxic ground.” Now Loh says she is living “every fired person’s fantasy. It feels great to be vindicated.”

Unlike Janet Jackson, Howard Stern and other celebrities who have become central to the decency debate, Loh was a relatively unknown commodity in Hollywood who has become famous because of what she said, not because of who she was when she said it. And she hopes her newfound celebrity status doesn’t make her a one-word wonder.

The commentary that led to her firing centered on a recent Bette Midler concert at Staples Center in which Loh’s husband, a musician, performed with the singer. Using a vulgarity, Loh said she was so excited to see her husband so close to Midler that she wanted to have sex with him.

Since being fired, Loh, who has a loyal cult following but is far from being nationally known, has been featured on CNN; appeared on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” on which she was praised by Maher and a veteran of the obscenity wars, George Carlin; and defended by Stern, all for saying a word that was not supposed to have been broadcast.

The irony, said the author, musician and creator of such solo theater pieces as last year’s “Sugar Plum Fairy,” is that she can’t even use her media close-up to promote an upcoming project -- she has none, having taken time off to be a full-time mother to her two young children.

She says she has been approached about reviving “The Loh Life” on other public radio stations, including KPCC-FM (89.3). But whatever she decides to do next, she says it has to be something “productive, so that other artists don’t become another fatality in this. Artists are very fragile creatures. Look at what happened with Spalding Gray. He killed himself in the middle of all of this. It’s a frightening place for an artist to be. Maybe I can do something.”

More shows canceled

Loh, who had been a fixture on KCRW for six years, is still reeling from the incident, which put her in the ranks of Stern and Florida’s Bubba the Love Sponge: radio personalities who had their shows yanked off the air in the wake of the furor over the unveiling of Jackson’s breast during this year’s Super Bowl halftime show.

Her life had already been turned upside down before the furor. Loh, along with her two young children, had been staying in Northern California caring for her brother and his three children while his wife recovers from cardiac arrest.

This week, she returned to Los Angeles as a featured speaker at a Beverly Hills Bar Assn. luncheon about censorship and the Federal Communications Commission. She was also honored Thursday at a party sponsored by the Los Angeles Press Club, an event originally planned as a protest against KCRW. More than a hundred people turned out at the Figueroa Hotel and cheered as Loh delivered an “official statement” about the incident, devoid of expletives, followed by her “off-the-record” statement, in which she liberally sprinkled the offending word.

Meanwhile, KCRW continues to field complaints and criticism over its handling of Loh, even after Seymour admitted that she had fired the humorist hastily before learning all the facts.

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin posted a message on the NPR website comparing Loh favorably to Stern, saying she should be supported in the spirit of free speech. “For many who wrote me to support her, Loh is an accurate social critic who uses humor in concerts and on public radio to illustrate the status of women and minorities,” he wrote. “Stern uses vulgarity and misogyny to extend the range of free speech while in the employ of a large media company.... The choice for public radio looks pretty clear: Loh’s spoken word exists within the context of public radio in a way that Howard Stern does not, because his speech exists entirely in a commercial radio context.”

Dvorkin added: “Public radio in general always prides itself on providing context. It needs to do so again by supporting the principle of free speech on public radio. Seymour did the right thing by reversing herself and asking Loh to come back to KCRW.”

Seymour declined further comment on Loh after Dvorkin’s missive, but station insiders continue to deny that she was pressured to reinstate Loh because numerous subscribers had threatened to withdraw their financial support. (Like other commercial-free stations, KCRW gets most of its funds from listener donations).

Loh said she misses working at the station, even though she earned only $150 a week for “The Loh Life.” “My children would color in the studio while I did my commentary. Staffers would baby-sit them. It was a real family thing.”

She is planning the next revival of “The Loh Life.” She will perform a theatrical version of “The Loh Life” April 9 at the 99-seat Evidence Room in Los Angeles.

“It will be Good Friday,” Loh said with a smile. “Like Mel Gibson, I’ll be on the cross.”