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I had the joy of interviewing Star Wars star Carrie Fisher (aka Princess/General Leia) who passed away unexpectedly last Christmas. It was right before the 2008 elections, and Fisher one-woman show (Wishful Drinking) was traveling through DC, and a reader of my blog was able to snag us tickets, and even better, an interview back stage before the show!
I never laughed so hard in all my life. Carrie is hilarious, and brilliant, and insane.
My then-blogging-partner-in-crime Joe Sudbay and I met Carrie at her car in the parking lot behind DC’s Lincoln Theater. Carrie said hi, then threw glitter dust all over the both of us. We were covered in the stuff. She acted like it was totally normal. That was Carrie.
So we went with her to her dressing room, and talked for like 20 minutes before the actual on-tape interview. Oh how I wish I had taped that part. Carrie was brilliant, and quite serious, when talking about politics. She almost seemed as if she was being extra-careful NOT to be frivolous in discussing the upcoming 2018 election.
But she was hysterical in the pre-game before we taped, talking about the time she dated then- Senator Chris Dodd, and he took her to the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts for the weekend, and the Kennedy’s ridiculed her mercilessly (referring her to a floozy, in essence). Well, anyone who’s met Carrie knows that you take her on at your own peril. In the middle of a church, after one Kennedy had made one floozy joke too far, she responded, loudly, with a joke about Chappaquiddick.
Oh my god, I said, what did they do? She responded, the entire room erupted into laughter.
The interview itself, in the video below, was more serious. Carrie began by smearing more glitter on Joe’s face (photo to the right). Two parts, however, were lighter, so to speak. In one, Carrie talks about President George W. Bush’s little-known superpower (he can fart on command), and then she went off on Sarah Palin, calling her the c-word. I’m pretty sure Carrie had made the same comment before the show, and we had told her that she can’t say that on tape, especially only six weeks or so before the election — we didn’t want to divert attention from all the bad press Palin was getting. But Carrie being Carrie, she said it anyway. (I did bleep it in the video I posted on YouTube at the time, but still have the original, and will post it when I get back to DC where my copy resides.)
I’d have loved to have had her on our UnPresidented Podcast. What a gem. Here’s my 2008 interview:
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