From left: Pam Farone, Betsy Vajtay and Sara Alan in rehearsal for "A Night of Tumorous Comedy" at Denver's Bovine Metropolis benefit show on Thursda, July 22.
Tragedy and show biz interact bizarrely.
There are all the clichés about the doomed artiste. Then there’s the Lifetime Movie Channel aspect of it all: the chipper bravery, the laughter sparkling through the tears.
Or you are for real and you just want to help others. That’s the case with a unique benefit comedy event on Thursday evening at Denver’s Bovine Metropolis Theater, 1527 Champa St. in Denver. There three comedians, all survivors of the threats of cancer, will join together to interweave their survival stories into one – all for laughs, and all for charity.
“It’s amazing how many stories we had in common,” says Sara Alan, part of the local improv troupe Gypsy Cab Company, which will perform in the second half of “A Night of Tumorous Comedy,” the 7:30 p.m. July 22 show. It’s part of International Sarcoma Awareness Week, a worldwide series of benefits for the Team Sarcoma Initiative. Money raised at the event will go to the organization.
Alan will work with fellow comics Pam Farone and Betsy Vajtay to relate their tales of hospitals and recovery. Farone suffered from skin cancer 15 years ago; Vajtay recently dealt with a “large brain tumor.”
Not exactly a goldmine of guffaws, you might say.
“Distance makes a big difference,” Alan says.
Alan graduated summa cum laude with a political science degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder, but she’d been involved in improv from her freshman year, when she joined the Lords of Misrule, a campus comedy group. She met her husband there.
“I was one of the few people to get a political science job right out of college, and I threw it away to get into comedy,” she says.
After two years of performing at Denver’s Impulse Theater improv comedy shows, she moved to New York, returning to the city in the fall of 2007.
She was diagnosed with sarcoma in her left femur in May 2005. Sarcoma is a cancer of soft tissue, a relatively rare form of the disease, representing less than one percent of all new cancer cases, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Alan consulted with physicians at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
“There were as many different opinions as to how to treat my sarcoma as there were doctors in the room,” Alan says. She searched the country, and even visited Germany, in order to gain enough information to make the best choice for treatment.
In December of 2005, she underwent surgery on her leg, removing the growth while saving the limb. The addition of a 24-centimeter titanium rod makes her the only bionic woman in her comedy troupe, according to her bio.
After working her way back via crutches and then a cane for a little over a year, Alan now enjoys full function (our phone interview took place as she was finishing a hike in the mountains).
“I’m much luckier than most,” she says. “Some sarcoma patients have chronic pain.”
Along the way, she started thinking about how she could give back. She received first-hand the benefits of the Team Sarcoma Initiative, a non-profit organization founded in 2003 by Bruce and Beverly Shriver, whose daughter Elizabeth later succumbed to the disease.
So what can a comic do? Put on a show. Comedians transform experience into humor, and any crisis worth surviving is worth making joke fodder out of (think Julia Sweeney’s 1995 "God Said, ‘Ha!’").
Considering the number of ways in which charity events can drain the life out of the evening and the pocketbook, a night of comedy sounds like the best way to go.
For more info: For tickets and reservations for "A Night of Tumorous Comedy" at Denver's Bovine Metropolis Theater, please email reservations@bovinemetropolis.com or call 303-758-4722. For more information about International Sarcoma Awareness Week, please visit www.team-sarcoma.net. For more information about the Bovine Metropolis, please visit www.bovinemetropolis.com.
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