Scroll down for Kelli's torrid life story- or read more about her career here!
Kelli Dunham may be the typical skateboard-riding, houseboat-dwelling, stealth gender non-variant, too many book reading ex nun comic but she is also very a much a Dyke On A Mission.
During her recent "I am NOT a 12 Year Old Boy" tour (more than 100 shows in 11 months) Kelli performed, well, just about everywhere. From atop a ladder at the LGBT business expo. For the attendees of the Beltane Sacred Sexuality Conference (on the front row? A dude wearing a beret and a cape and nothing else). Penn State. St Luke's College in Sioux City Iowa. Long Beach, California Pride. The Sisterspace Weekend. And at dozens of fundraisers, community events, colleges, and clubs on both coasts and everywhere in between.
Along the way she has shared the stage with some of the booty-kickinest folks on the circuit today: Bitch, Animal, Doria Roberts, Suede, Deidre Flint, Michele Balan, Jade Esteban Estrada, and even 90's pop icon Crystal Waters and 80s pop star Debbie (now Deborah) Gibson. The CD of the same name is now in regular rotation on Sirius Satellite Radio's Raw Dog mainstream comedy station.
Kelli was profiled in a recent issue of Curve Magazine which declared "Kelli cracks us up" and was featured in an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit on the Showtime Network. She is one of the co-founders of the Famous Lesbian Comedy Road Show and Gayety, the three city (Philly, Portland OR and now New York) queer experimental comedy performing series.
Kelli is also (are you getting all this) the author of four books, How to Survive and Maybe Even Love Nursing School (FA Davis, 2007, now in its third edition), How to Survive and Maybe Even Love Your Life as a Nurse (FA Davis, 2005) , The Boy's Body Book: Everything You Need to Know for Growing Up YOU (Applesauce Press, 2007). The Girl's Body Book: Everything You Need to Know for Growing Up YOU, The Girl's Body Book: Everything You Need to Know for Growing Up YOU (Applesauce Press, 2008). She is also a contributor to numerous anthologies including Love's Funny That Way (Sterling Press, 2006), Squeaky Clean Comedy (Andrew McNeil Press, 2005), She’s So Funny (Andrew McNeil Press, 2004), Dangerous Families (Haworth Press, 2004), and Life’s a Stitch (Random House, 2002). Kelli is currently preparing for the recording of her upcoming CD, "Almost Pretty." The CD recording show will take place in New York in a very bookish venue.
Finally, Kelli is currently writing "Pudding Day," a one woman show about amazing life and death of Heather MacAllister. Heather was the founder of Big Burlesque and the Fat Bottom Revue, a queer/fat activist, a punk rock Diva and was Kelli's beloved Queen.
Kelli is also currently training her pet kangaroo to juggle bangos. Okay, not really. But only because it would make us all too tired to watch.
Kelli Dunham-Her Torrid Life Story
Kelli grew up near Hartford, Wisconsin. "Population 1,547," she says, "if you count cows as equal to people, which-if you live in Hartford, Wisconsin-you do."
Kelli reports she was the kind of child who made her mother say, "Now that's the last time I get drunk and sleep with the traveling Birkenstock salesman."
"When you live in Hartford, Wisconsin, and you've got five kids and almost as many alcoholic ex-husbands, what you need is a child that responds to farm machinery mishaps with a cheerful, 'It's okay mom, I've got another arm.'" Kelli explains. "What she got was an angst-ridden, crunchy-granola hippy child asking 'Mom, can we buy organic produce? Can I be a vegetarian? Can we save the whales?'"
When she was ten, Kelli informed her relatives she would no longer be going by "Kelli Sue," her given name. She explained to them they should refer to her as "Kelli Sam" instead, and to their credit, many of them complied. This was the same year she announced that as soon as she was old enough, she was going to get married...to her skateboard.
Perhaps it was no coincidence, then that when later that year Kelli's mother decided to move the family to Daytona Beach, Florida, she sent Kelli and her sister to a small, extremely conservative fundamentalist Christian school where the rulebook forbade-among other things-attendance at unwholesome movies, dancing, card-playing, and the wearing of flannel shirts by females. "Who do you think they were trying to weed out with that one?" Kelli asks. "Still," Kelli says with a sly grin, "I had a good time. We had small classes, the teachers seemed to really care. And of course, there was softball."
While in high school, Kelli spent two summers in Brazil and Korea with Teen Missions International, a missions organization that sent teenagers on work and evangelism teams to all sorts of spots over the globe that needed "the touch of Jesus."
About these adventures, Kelli says, "Okay, I know now that heads of developing nations are NOT begging: 'Please please don't cancel our debt, engage in fair trade or provide reasonable cost AIDS drugs. What we really need is substandard structures built by sleep-deprived, under trained, loud, overzealous always-singing American teenagers.' When I was 15, however, there was an almost heady joy in feeling I was God's gift to the people of the small villages we visited. It was certainty character building for me, but man, what an annoyance we must have been to the areas we visited."
Kelli followed up her time at Podunk Christian Academy by going to Podunk Bible College in Oklahoma City. She studied English (and of course, the Bible) and for a short time was even engaged. "Talk about your close calls," Kelli says, "If someone wants me to tell 'em a scary story I always say 'I was 2 months away from being a preacher's wife in the Bible belt.'"
When she was done with school (not finished, just done) Kelli moved to Haiti where she developed recreational activities at a school for kids with disabilities until the school closed temporarily due to political problems.
With time on her hands, Kelli began volunteering at the Home for the Dying a few blocks away from the school. This is where Kelli met-and fell in love with-the Missionaries of Charity. Hoping her crush would spend itself, Kelli volunteered with the Missionaries of Charity (or MCs as those on the inside track say) not only in Haiti, but also in Norristown, Pennsylvania and finally, Miami.
After four years, Kelli requested to become an MC and was told to report to their convent in the South Bronx for boot, uhh, um aspirancy, the first level of training.
Because she "had insufficient docility," "too much self-esteem," and "walked like [her] shoulders were angry" (all direct quotes from the nuns) Kelli was held back in aspirancy for 12 months, the convent equivalent of flunking preschool six times. Kelli's time as an MC and the story of the ultimate demise of her religious vocation are chronicled in her one-woman show "Bad Habit" which later became a part of the one dyke, one fag show "Sacred Underwear."
When Kelli left the convent she moved to Philadelphia where she went back to school (she received her RN in 1998), joined a softball team (of course) and began a joyful life as a 26-year-old baby dyke.
Since she was a kid, Kelli had always written funny stuff. "I scribbled something call a 'a day in the life on a nun' on the back of an envelope when I was in the convent," Kelli remembers. "Someone passed it along to the regional superior and she photocopied it for the whole region. I made my sisters laugh; it was the ultimate pleasure!"
Kelli never considered performing or writing comedy professionally, however, until she attended a seminar called "A Laugh a Page" at the 1998 Outwrite LGBT Writers' Convention. "[Out lesbian comic] Kate Clinton said 'my reason for wanting people to laugh is to subvert the dominant paradigm and knock it the hell over.' and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I never thought of comedy as something that could change the world," said Kelli. She began writing and performing and the rest-as they say-is recent history.
Kelli counts as her comic influences Lenny Bruce, Eddie Izzard, Kate Clinton (of course), slam poet Alix Olson, and fellow Wisconsinite Chris Farley. (Wouldn't that be a fun group to seat together at a dinner party?).
Kelli is amazed by her life. "I feel very lucky to have had so many good people cross my path," she continues, "and I feel doubly lucky to be able to spend time making people laugh, and-I hope-making folks think and drawing them closer to one another. I believe laughing is a revolutionary gesture, and laughing together is perhaps the greatest revolutionary gesture of all.”