Former teen columnist comes home for comedy gig

Comedian Jennifer Dziura, former teen columnist for The Virginian-Pilot will be in-town for a show tonight at The Boot. (Ryan Brenizer / Special to the Virginian-PiloT)

By lorraine eaton
The Virginian-Pilot

She graduated from Cox High, left the pages of The Pilot and entered the Ivy League. Since earning a philosophy degree from Dartmouth, Jennifer Dziura, The Pilot 's teen columnist from 1992 to 1996, has been a dot-com entrepreneur, a model, a marketing director, dated an occasional blue-blooded scion (and one Emmy winner) and married (and divorced) an Elvis impersonator.

At 28, she's a stand-up comic living in New York City.

"Which is all fine and good," Dziura said in an interview last week, "but in the end, I mean, my mom still mails me Skin-So-Soft at Christmas."

Her most recent tour brings her home next week. I'm her former editor, and I caught up with Dziura before she left the Big Apple.

Q. Growing up in Virginia Beach you often felt out of place. Are you mining material from those days?

A. I did sometimes feel out of place at school, but I also won an election for sophomore class president based on the slogan "Jennifer Dziura owns a folding chair and an 'American Heritage Dictionary.' "

During the years that I wrote for The Pilot , I received approximately eight pounds of hate mail (and the occasional inappropriate marriage proposal), and I have retained all of it because, as latter-day poet Kevin Federline says, I "sucked in America's hate and now I'm passin' it back."

I am bringing my hate mail to the show. I'll be reading choice excerpts. No grammatical mishaps will go unmocked.

Q. I know this is something that irked you. Please set the record straight about how you got your gig at The Pilot .

A. I did not get my gig at The Pilot because my dad worked there, as I sometimes heard people whispering while I utterly failed to serve a volleyball in gym class.

My dad was a torpedoman chief in the Navy; my mom was an Avon lady. (I have jokes about this, but they're all nice). Anyway, I got my gig at The Pilot when, as an eighth-grader at Lynnhaven Junior High School, I mailed in an article on spec, written on notebook paper, and then the paper called about coming to take my picture, and my parents thought the whole thing was a wrong number. My family had plenty of Skin-So-Soft. And knowledge of torpedoes. But no journalistic pedigree.

One of my very first articles was about how gym class shouldn't be mandatory in schools. I'd like to say to my former gym teachers: I was right! I still can't serve a volleyball or hit any kind of projectile whatsoever, but I work out all the time. I have biceps like rocks! Very girly rocks. My glutes are like the finest farmer's market cantaloupes. I do hanging sit-ups holding 35-pound plates. Why couldn't I do that in high school?

People pay money to lick my abs. OK, not really, but they should.

Q . The Williamsburg Spelling Bee - how did you come up with that?

A . Ah, the spelling bee! Everyone loves the spelling bee! First off, I feel I should explain that "Williamsburg" is the area of Brooklyn where everyone is 25 and moved there after college to express themselves and has an expensive rock-star haircut although they are squatting in an abandoned sugar factory and believe paying rent is a form of capitalist oppression. Are we clear on that? There are no cornered hats whatsoever, or cannons or glass-blowing.

So, back to the story - I was walking down the street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in September 2004 and saw a flier for an adult spelling bee in a bar. I showed up to compete, but the organizers hadn't planned for people who were actually good at spelling to show up - they thought it would just be drunk people in a bar. After the first bee was a bit of a disaster, the owner of the bar decided I'd been the most entertaining contestant, and he asked me to come back and co-host.

I've now been doing that every other Monday for over two years (I sit at a table onstage reading the words and their definitions, as well as telling jokes and bantering with my co-host, spelling bee founder bobbyblue), and we've been in The New York Times, filmed for "Good Morning America" and in media outlets as far flung as The Sydney Morning Herald (as in Australia) and German Public Radio.

Q. That whole "married to a man who dresses as Elvis" chapter - can you give us a synopsis?

A. I'll just say I am currently a dangerously single femme fatale in Brooklyn and that I've now limited my romantic prospects to men who have never performed in Vegas and don't wear jeweled pinkie rings.

Q. And what must your parents think? I mean, you scrimp to get your kid through Dartmouth and she marries an Elvis lookalike and does stand-up comedy for five bucks a head?

A. My parents have been nonplussed since at least 1992. Also, I applied to more than 125 scholarship competitions my senior year of high school and won 14 of them, so that worked out OK.

I do have something of a "real job" here in New York, tutoring teenagers for the SAT (and many other standardized tests). I am very, very good at it and really look forward to going to work, by which I mean hanging out at dining room tables on the Upper West Side and making sure everyone remembers how to find the volume of a cylinder.

I also spent a year teaching the SAT in an NYC Korean hagwon, or study academy, in which I taught dozens of Korean teenagers, all of whom spoke English as a second language, to precede their gerunds with possessive pronouns and to use words like "pulchritudinous" and "serendipitously" correctly in sentences, thus allowing them to speak English that their parents can't understand at all.

Q. Comedy is a tough career path. What's Jennifer's version of success?

A. Groupies with tight pecs and impeccable SAT scores. Well, that's a start. Groupies with tight pecs and impeccable SAT scores who serve me little morsels of protein bars artfully arranged on silver platters? Getting better.

Really, I want a TV show, one in which I play myself. I suppose you could use "Seinfeld" as a comparison, except "Dziura" is a terrible name for a show. It is the very lexicographical nightmare of the name "Dziura" that prompted me to name my Web site Jenisfamous.com instead of, well, something with "Dziura" in it.

I'd also do great in a talk-show format, like Rosie or Ellen, but with better shoes.

Q. Since you've left home and are making a go of it in NYC, how has your perception of South Hampton Roads changed? Would you ever move back?

A. An old friend in Ghent liked to refer to "$40,000 millionaires," meaning that that's how much money it takes to live in Hampton Roads like an all-out superstar. But then again, I spent a couple years living in Spanish Harlem on less than $20,000 a year I made from low-rent modeling gigs. There were many cheap Cuban sandwiches involved.

There are a few things I miss. I'll be in Hampton Roads less than 24 hours on this trip, but I'm going to try to get some coffee at Elliot 's Fair Grounds in Ghent, some matzo ball soup at the Jewish Mother and a crab cake sandwich at Taste Unlimited.

You know what I don't miss? The "No Swearing" signs at the Oceanfront.

Q. And finally, what can the audience expect at Monday's show?

A. Right now I am on tour with author and burlesque star Molly Crabapple, also my best friend. She's doing a book signing ("Dr. Sketchy's Rainy Day Colouring Book ") at Relative Theory Records before my show.

At my show, Molly will be in the back giving out Jenisfamous.com buttons. I'm also a contributor to "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jokes," so I'll be signing copies while I'm there. I'm going to tell jokes, read my old hate mail, do "The History of Western Philosophy in 15 Minutes" and tell more jokes. And it's recommended for fans 18 and older.