Summary
No one steps up to life's banquet, holds out her tray, and orders, "Grief, please!" But as a child, Candy Pekkala was served a heaping helping of it. Every buffet line has a dessert section, however, and when a cousin calls with a Hollywood apartment to sublet, it seems as though Candy is finally offered something sweet. It's good-bye to Minnesota and hello to California, where a girl who has always lived by her wits has a real chance of making a living with them. With that, the irrepressible Lorna Landvik launches her latest irresistible character onto the world stage--or at least onto the dimly lit small stage where stand-up comedy gets its start.
Herself a comic performer, Landvik taps her own adventurous past and Minnesota roots to conjure Candy's life in this strange new Technicolor home. Her fellow tenants at Peyton Hall include a female bodybuilder, a ruined nightclub impresario, and a well-connected Romanian fortune-teller. There are game show appearances and temp jobs at a record company and an establishment suspiciously like the Playboy Mansion, and of course the alluring but not always welcoming stage of stand-up comedy. As she hones her act, Candy is tested by humiliation, hecklers, and the inherent sexism that insists "chicks aren't funny."
Written with the light touch and quiet wisdom that have made her works so popular, this is classic Lorna Landvik--sometimes so funny, you'll cry; sometimes so sad, you might as well laugh; and always impossible to put down.
Author Lorna Lanvik was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1954. After high school graduation, she and a friend traveled in Europe and settled in Bavaria where they worked as hotel chamber maids and English tutors. After returning to the United States, she briefly attended the University of Minnesota before moving to San Francisco to perform stand-up and improvisational comedy. She moved to Los Angeles, where she did stand-up comedy at the Comedy Store and The Improv as well as worked a variety of temporary jobs including one at the Playboy Mansion and another at Atlantic Records.
She is an actor and playwright who has performed in plays she has written and produced. She has appeared in numerous plays including Bad Seed, Lunatic Cellmates, and Valley of the Dolls. She has written six novels and currently lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters.
(Bowker Author Biography)