I mean, my name is practically Juliet anyway.” The drama teacher suggested she play the nurse instead. In one of the few conventional episodes in her life, it was during a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” Sweeney discovered acting in high school. And then I said, ‘But if you hear a bugle and your hamburger runs off, you have to wonder!’ It was such a bad joke - but everybody laughed. Some of the kids asked the sister about it, and she said it wasn’t true. “There was a rumor going around that one of the fast-food restaurants was serving horse meat. Sweeney remembers getting her first laugh, in the second grade. She is still close with her ex-husband, the writer Steve Hibbert. “Doing it every night is just so ‘Here I am! I’m a single woman with an adopted baby! And I’m telling you all about it!’ ” said Sweeney. This time around, she’s decided, she’ll only perform her shows once a week. But then I went through this experience, and it was so profound.” I felt guilty every time I did it because of my parents, like I was using them to get a laugh - which, of course, I was. “After ‘God Said Ha!’ I swore I’d never do another monologue as long as I lived. I love being an actor, but I could see myself working in, you know, a bookstore.” “I read all these acting books that said, ‘You have to want to be an actor so bad that the thought of not being an actor fills you with dread.’ I never passed that test. “I never felt that I had to be an actor,” she said, settling into an overstuffed reading chair in her living room. Among professionally funny women, Julia Sweeney is this way. If you’ve ever seen Tom Waits in a small club, you know. “And here,” she says, moving onto a few shelves of philosophy and science books, “is my ‘the world is screwed’ section.” There are occasionally those performers who don’t really perform, who seem as though they’d just as soon sit down and have a drink with the audience as entertain them, whose unrushed humanity spills over into their stage persona. Indeed, this need is what her shows are about. But its influence still makes itself felt, and in her need to find a meaningful narrative in her life. Sweeney, who for much of her childhood wanted to be a nun, claims to be done with the church. She recently cut her unruly red-brown hair short, partly out of I’m-a-mother-now sentiment (her impossibly cute daughter, Mulan, is 3 1/2). She has probing blue eyes and strong Irish features that have dimmed just a bit with the onset of middle age (she is 43). “I’m trying to get rid of those.” Sweeney, a onetime devout Catholic who’s been flirting of late with various forms of non-belief - currently she’s calling herself a “naturalist” - is wearing jeans and a purple turtleneck and no shoes. “Here’s the religion section,” she says, moving into a hallway. “If they’re stacked horizontally it means I take them out a lot.” Half the books on the wall are stacked horizontally. So Sweeney’s taste in fiction, not surprisingly, tends toward those great but misanthropic postwar Brit-wits, like Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. Like the long-running hit “God Said Ha!” (1996), which dealt with sickness and death, and to a lesser extent “In the Family Way,” a chronicle of her journey to China to adopt her daughter, which she’s just imported to the Groundlings Theater from New York, “Letting Go of God” is an exercise in gallows humor. Sweeney has just begun work on “Letting Go of God,” her third one-woman stage show. “Here is where I keep my favorite novels now,” she says, motioning to a 15-foot-long wall. “I’ve reorganized,” she announces, showing me around. She’s not, it turns out - she just likes to read. Walking into her living room, one wonders if Sweeney, the former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, is planning on becoming an adjunct professor or opening a stall at the Fairfax flea market. Julia SWEENEY’S unassuming bungalow on the southern fringe of Hollywood is lined with books.
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