For This Octogenarian Stand-Up Comic, the Show Goes On

Whatever your vision of a woman in her 80s is, Houston Robertson would like to … revise it.

For one thing, she’s been happily single and dating for decades.

“I really like living alone,” she told me, when I visited her several months ago at her home in a  senior mobile home park in Benicia, California. “I really like not having to cook supper. I really like not having to launder the jockey shorts. But I also really like sex!”

When I met her, Robertson was wearing her favorite outfit; a pair of tight black leggings, a t-shirt cinched at her waist and black boots. Her white hair is trimmed short into a pixie cut. The outfit started out as a costume, for use on stage.

In the past few years, Robertson's gotten into something else most people don’t generally imagine older women doing: stand-up comedy.

Robertson's history of being on stage reaches back to the 1950s, when she was in high school in small-town Nebraska. “I grew up a good little girl,” she said. “My father was a minister — so, of course I had to be the good little girl. I have wanted to be on stage ever since I was in my senior high school class play… But, good girls in 1954 did not go into theater.”

Instead, Robertson kept her head down, and went to college at Texas Christian University. In her sophomore year, she met a man named Neil in a class registration line. They got married soon after, and had kids quickly.

Then her husband up and moved them to the San Francisco Bay Area. He’d gotten a new job teaching at a seminary. “And then we pretty much knew fairly soon why we really moved to California,” she said. “Because in 1978, Neal came out to me as gay.”

The next several years were tumultuous. There were the logistical questions — could she really handle her husband bringing home dates he met at a gay bar? What would this mean for their family? But in some ways, the bigger question was the one of her own identity: Who was she as a woman?

“I had married as a virgin bride,” Robertson said. “And I was married for 20 years to a man who didn’t desire me. I mean, it was really — it was a wound that took a long time to heal.”

After Robertson decided to divorce her husband, she’d go out to bars, nonchalantly setting a grocery bag on the stool beside her, so she could try to pick up men without looking too obvious about it. She discovered that she really enjoyed sex. And feeling more in touch with herself physically helped reawaken something else in her: the aspiration to be on stage. She was living in San Francisco by then, and took a keen interest in the city's street performers. And that's when the idea came to her: she could be a clown.

Robertson named her clown character “Ribbons.” She would stroll up and down the street, clad in a clown costume with cascades of — what else? — ribbons attached.

“And I would come up to you,” she said. “I would pull out a ribbon, then I would curl it, and I would give it to you.” The character might seem a bit silly, but it had serious weight for Robertson. “I think — oh, I am sure Ribbons saved my life. I think of Ribbons as keeping safe characteristics about myself that I felt had been trashed.”

Robertson only performed as Ribbons for a handful of years. But the experience stuck with her, and she returned to it a couple of decades later after retiring from her job as a secretary. She started going to monthly shows of solo performers at The Marsh, a theater in Berkeley, and decided to try doing one herself.

The solo show she started working on — called “Victory for the Recycled Virgin” — was full of personal stories: of her marriage, her sex life, the ins and outs of getting older.

The show seizes on people’s discomfort with senior sexuality, and pokes at it. Robertson also began trying her hand at stand-up comedy and brought that topic into her act. To her surprise, she found the stand-up comedy world was a welcoming community.

“Part of it was like hanging out with my grandkids — because most of the stand-ups were in their 20s and 30s,” she said. “And I’m 80! They adored me, I adored them. They told me I was good. One of the young comics said ‘Houston! You terrified us young dudes.’ I thought, 'Yay!’”

This past year, she’s been working on a new solo show —  “The Story of a Nice White Lady” — which digs into white people’s well-intentioned efforts to tackle racism, that often go wrong.

Her big performance of the show at The Marsh had been scheduled for April 1, and then the coronavirus hit. The show was indefinitely postponed. “This is just such a cruel time for theater groups,” she recently told me over the phone. “And the uncertainty of when it’s going to be over, so how can they reschedule — it’s a nightmare.”

But, never one to be slowed by a challenge, Robertson's show will go on. The Marsh has started presenting digital versions of shows that audiences can watch while stuck at home, and Robertson's performance is set to go live on April 27.

And to her surprise, the quarantine has given her another opportunity. She’d thought “Story of a Nice White Lady” would be her last solo show. Instead, she’s spending her time at home writing a new one — all about her experience with getting older. She’s calling it "The Octobabe: Laughs and Longings.”

Robertson also recently got a tattoo of a labyrinth — a symbol she likes the significance of: “Twisting, turning. But no dead ends,” she said.

Roberston said her 83 years have been a testament to that: Even the endings turned out to be beginnings. She just keeps going.

This story is part of a series on ageism and the lived reality of growing older called The Third Act. It was produced with support from California Humanities.