Talking to Carrie Fisher over the phone is like chatting with your oldest girlfriend, the one you've known since forever and who's so smart, candid and funny about the travails of being a middle-aged, single mom. She's loyal, but willing to dish about her weight, her problematic parents and her exes. She's a little unhinged, but not so messed up that she's not fun to be with.
"Someone once said, 'You're only as sick as your secrets,' " she says. "Well, I don't have any secrets anymore."
No, she doesn't.
Her one-woman, autobiographical show Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, has been touring the country since 2006. Starting tomorrow, it will stop for two weeks at Arena Stage's Lincoln Theatre in Washington.
Wishful Drinking is a partly improvised riff on growing up as the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, on being Princess Leia and on coping with a diagnosis of manic-depression. In the show, the actress also discusses her marriages to Paul Simon and talent agent Bryan Lourd. The latter left Fisher for another man, but not before fathering the couple's daughter, Billie, now 16.
Oh, and that doesn't even take into account the deeply traumatic discovery on a morning in 2005 that a close friend, Republican operative R. Gregory Stevens, had died overnight of a drug overdose in Fisher's bed after a pre-Oscars party. Fisher explains that she and Stevens had been sharing sheets only because her home was overflowing with guests.
"In my show, I answer questions from the audience. The funniest thing I've been asked recently is how I disposed of the body," Fisher says, "as if I'd cut Greg up in little pieces instead of calling 911.
"I've also been asked twice if I'd been sleeping in the nude. I told them that I'm 51 years old. I haven't been nude for 20 years, and for 10 years before that, I didn't wear sleeveless tops. Greg was gay. I don't think he would have enjoyed it if my naked, middle-aged body had been the last thing he saw in life."
Fisher is a bona fide cultural icon based on her portrayal of Star Wars' warrior princess - a fact that Arena Stage is capitalizing on with its Leia Look-a-like Contest. (Go to arena-stage.org for details.) Though she recently turned to acting in an Emmy-nominated role of a comedy writer on NBC's 30 Rock, Fisher thinks her best talents are as a writer.
In addition to having penned four autobiographical novels (including Postcards From the Edge), she also has been an in-demand script doctor on such projects as The Wedding Singer and the Lethal Weapons films.
