Catherine Cohen will be performing at the Difficult to Name Reading Series on May 14.
I really hate everything, so I was pleasantly surprised to watch your short film “Slurp,” which feels aesthetically somehow like a completely new thing. How did you and your co-writer Patti Harrison come up with the mix of absurd and believability that makes the piece work?
Thank you! The initial idea came from this moment I had walking around the east village, eating ice cream out of this little cone and laughing so hard at the thought of an adult strolling around just licking a sweet treat. Patti and I were trying to come up with a bit for Rachel Joravsky's "Peas in a Pod" character show, so I told her we should do a sketch where we're both slurping from these lil cones. We started throwing out all these dumb, surreal lines, and as a template to hold them all together, we thought of those conversations people have where "catching up" is really just an excuse to talk at somebody about yourself for a few hours. I think it was the combination of the absurd lines with that socially familiar situation that excited us.
The poems you read at the latest edition of Just Pussy were at once really funny and kind of heartbreaking. Do you find that the comic distance you create allows you to deal with deeper topics in that way?
Totally. I tell everyone everything and most people would rather listen to things that are funny, so I love writing poems that hopefully make people laugh and feel less alone because maybe they also had an ex-boyfriend who told them their butt looked like an old painting. Classic stuff like that.
What can people expect from your reading/performance?
I will probably burp in a way that says "I'm young, wild and free." It will be extremely sensual.