Stephanie writes often about how celebrities, particularly female celebrities, are perceived after divorce, and how we culturally talk about women when they end their relationships/marriages. There is no one way to feel when a marriage ends, all feelings are valid. Kinda like … perimenopause, lol.
Menopause is the end of your relationship with your period. For some women, menopause is difficult, the symptoms are horrible, bodies change in unpredictable ways, it’s not a fun time, and it doesn’t f-cking help that, until relatively recently, the medical community wasn’t prioritising women’s health so doctors and other medical professionals weren’t treating women properly – including Halle Berry who was told she had herpes by a gynecologist when, really, she was experiencing perimenopause. Halle was just in Washington, DC to fight for more funding for women’s healthcare where she told another story about another doctor’s unwillingness to even name it.
She is passionate and enraged, and it’s a beautiful thing.
Anyway, back to menopause and divorce. So you’re breaking up with your menstrual cycle. Sometimes it’s sh-tty and painful and uncomfortable, like when you breakup with a person. Sometimes, however, it’s pretty chill. Which is OK, too. So far my perimenopausal symptoms have been chill. I get the flashes and my weight fluctuates but I have a lot of energy, especially creative energy, which I’ve already written about and the point is… I don’t hate it. Perimenopause, for me, does not suck. It’s actually been really interesting, I’m fascinated by myself and my body in this era, and you can say the same for some women – NOT ALL, but some, and they count, too – about divorce. Ali Wong would fall in that category.
Ali just wrapped a 12-show residency at the Wiltern in LA last Sunday, Mother’s Day. And much of her set was about being single in her 40s, following her divorce from ex-husband Justin Hakuta, who remains her best friend, and they’re so close and have managed to stay so loving and respectful of each other that she thanked him when she won the Golden Globe (for Beef) back in January, saying from the stage that, “It’s because of you that I’m able to be a working mother”. Tell that to the NFL player who made headlines this week for what he thinks is a woman’s true vocation, ahem.
From what she’s sharing in her standup, Ali Wong loves being divorced. According to Rolling Stone’s coverage of her show on Sunday:
“I never thought I would have this much fun at this stage in my life. Divorce is so fun,” she said. “I just want to get married again, just so I could get divorced again.”
Part of that fun for Ali has to do with dating. Her divorce actually made dating… easier… for her? That’s not the usual narrative, but it turns out the media coverage about her divorce was like free matchmaking which worked out great because she needed to put all her “just got out of prison energy” into getting “dicked down”, and dick was definitely the goal.
“I didn’t expect the news of my divorce to be so widespread and public,” Wong said about announcing the news of her marriage ending. “I felt really embarrassed and ashamed, but I didn’t realize that all of these media outlets were acting like a bat signal letting all potentially interested men know. I’ve never been pursued this much in my life.”
Again, I repeat, divorce does not look like this for everyone. But it CAN look like this for some people – it doesn’t have to be for women a horrible, lonely, abandoned existence. So I appreciate that Ali is giving us this angle of the divorce spectrum: that divorce can be both an end and a beginning, that it’s OK to welcome that beginning and be excited about it, and laugh about it, and most of all enjoy it.
Ali’s material is certainly benefitting from it. During her set she tells the story about a dude she met at a dinner party who called her afterwards and told her that he’d always had a crush on her, that she was his “dreamgirl”. Shortly afterwards she was on tour in Europe and flowers showed up in every hotel room in every city she was stopping in. When she told her male friends about this, they told her that her suitor was sus. Her joke about this:
“That’s how cheap and lazy men have become. When a fellow man commits any act of kindness, any romantic gesture, it must be a symptom of an undiagnosed mental illness.”
My favourite story was the one about a man she referred to as “Blake”, a white guy she and her friend had dinner with at a Chinese restaurant. This one hit hard and hilariously for me because, as an Asian woman, well, I’ve been there.
“These white dudes from the Midwest, they get diarrhea every time they eat a dish that’s not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” she said, then relating a mishap that Blake got into while they were at dinner. “[He told my friend], ‘I try to be open to everything she introduces to me because that is a form of intimacy for her.’ Then I was like, ‘Look what Blake just did.’ Blake had poured tea for the three of us into our rice bowls. He was like, ‘I don’t understand. Where is the tea supposed to go?’ [My friend] moved the tea cups forward and Blake was like, ‘That’s too small for tea,’ and I was like, ‘It’s definitely too small for rice.’”
The man sending the flowers and the man with the tea in the rice bowls, by the way, turns out to be Bill Hader. He revealed this himself when she brought him out on stage on Sunday and he added to the tea and rice bowl story in the best way:
“…when I did that, the look on Ali’s face was a mixture of embarrassment and she was so stoked. She had this look on her face like, ‘You’re in the act, motherf-cker.’”
Like I said, Ali’s turning divorce and dating into great material. And it sounds like that work process has a lot to do with how attractive she is to Bill because then he proceeded to talk about watching her show up for her kids, spending mealtimes and bedtime with them before heading out, just like she’s always done throughout her career, out to the clubs to finesse her act, sometimes three or four or more a night.
“I got to go on the road [with her] and I watched her work as she goes up, she tries these things … She’s taking tons of notes,” he said. “The amount of work that goes into making this look so effortless, and she just sold out 12 nights at the Wiltern.”
Imagine that. A woman who isn’t giving up her career as a comedian to be a mother and not giving up being a mother to be a comedian. With assists from her ex-husband and her current boyfriend. How’s that for VOCATION?!
Bill’s final words before leaving her stage:
“All I have to say is, Ali Wong is off the market.”
He’s her biggest fangirl. As he should be. Here they are, hand in hand, out for breakfast yesterday. We LOVE this couple, right? Let's Squawk about it! (app link here)
