Talk about defining moments.
Comedian Paula Poundstone’s career can be split distinctly in terms of everything before it happened and now, almost exclusively, everything after it happened.
It, of course, refers to her June 2001 arrest for driving drunk with her adopted children in the car. She was also accused of child abuse, but those charges were dropped. It took Poundstone nearly 18 months to regain custody of her children, who were placed in state custody when she was arrested. She eventually pleaded guilty to a felony count of child endangerment and spent six months in rehab.
Poundstone, 47, has said it took her about 30 seconds to be able to laugh about her legal troubles, and though she’s constantly asked about it more than a half-decade later, she never shies away from being completely open about it and taking full responsibility.
When asked in a recent NPR interview about endangering the lives of her children, Poundstone put all joking aside and said, “The very idea that I have done that haunts me on a daily basis.”
“I’ve been to hell and back, and even the ‘and back’ wasn’t all that pleasant,” Poundstone said. “The best thing I can do is not do it again. Hopefully, what my kids will see is someone who made mistakes and kind of picked themselves up and kept going and hopefully got better than before.”
That’s the goal for Poundstone, who recently released a biographical book entitled “There Is Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say,” is a regular guest on NPR’s weekend quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and is bringing her famously free-flowing and interactive stand-up act tonight to The Moore in Seattle.
Poundstone’s book – which tells her story through historical anecdotes on figures such as Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln and Beethoven – was in the works for nearly a decade before its 2006 release, but she has said she decided to start it with a chapter that directly addressed her alcoholism to eliminate the elephant-in-the-room quality.
“I did have a drinking problem,” she writes. “I don’t know if you heard. It was kept kind of hush-hush out of deference to me: I was actually court-ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous on television. That pretty much blows the hell out of the second ‘A,’ wouldn’t you say?”
Poundstone, who won a couple of Cable ACE Awards but was most known as a club-hopping comic who made occasional late-night talk show appearances before the incident, said she didn’t hesitate to start working after rehab and is grateful for the support from her fans.
“I was in rehab for six months and I started working the second I got out,” she told Time magazine in December. “Did every place want me back? Absolutely not. There are some places that will probably never have me back. But I have a certain core of fans that continue to come see me.”
Associated Press
Comedian Paula Poundstone performs tonight in Seattle.
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