A Little Is a Lot

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• Selene Luna
• Lucille Ball

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“Gay men made me the woman I am today,” Selene Luna has said. This line gets uproarious laughter onstage, but she's serious. The performer, who stands less than four feet tall, says she has found solidarity with fellow outsiders in the LGBT community. She says gay men taught her about music, art, generosity, dignity, politics, and fashion. She delivers the line with solemnity. And then she brings down the house: “But most importantly, they taught me how to give a great blow job ... and that's something that will always stay with me." As you might expect, she gets a lot of mileage from stories related to her role as an outsider, particularly her stature. ("The word 'midget' is a bad, bad word. I can say it, but you can't - and, bitch, I don't care if you're gay!") But she's also a performer of tremendous depth. She can play the sight gag -- a ventriloquist's dummy, or Madonna's grade-school child -- but she also takes television, movie, and stage roles in which her size is incidental. She's been compared to Lucille Ball, but we think that's too narrow -- Ball wasn't a burlesque star, whereas Luna is. Luna needs no help holding an audience, but tonight at Sweating the Small Stuff, she brings an "associate" -- a "gorgeous, giant robot" named Robopriest, who helps her confess to her largely queer audience that she's also a hopeless "hetero sci-fi geek."
Sat., Dec. 4, 10 p.m., 2010