GIRLS ONLY
Teen diaries turn out
crack-up comedy

Written by COURTNEY DRAKE-MCDONOUGH
Photography by KIRA HORVATH

Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein maintained their professionalism throughout their meeting at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Arrangements were being made for the DCPA to produce their two-person show, GIRLS ONLY — The Secret Comedy of Women, at the Garner Galleria Theatre. The hope was that the production would eventually tour nationally.

Remaining very composed, Gehring and Klein left their meeting and walked down the steps of the impressive DCPA Galleria. “Is anyone looking?” asked Gehring.

“No,” replied Klein. So the two friends grabbed hands and rushed to the car. Once inside, the two women screamed at the top of their lungs with joy. So much for businesslike composure!

The little show they wrote on a lark had hit the big time — at least the Denver big time — and its future looked bright. “From the first show we did, I said maybe one day we’ll be playing at the Garner Galleria Theatre, and here we are!” exclaims Gehring.

GIRLS ONLY is just that — performed by two women for an audience of women, as appropriate and funny for preteen girls as it is for elderly women. During a run of the show at Denver’s Avenue Theater earlier this year, there were concerns that aiming a show at half of the population would hurt ticket sales, but it had the opposite effect.

Women would call the Avenue Theater’s box office to purchase two tickets for themselves and their husbands. When they were told the show was about women, for women, they’d say, “Really? Then I want six tickets,” and would bring their girlfriends in hordes.

“We pride ourselves on being lighthearted and kind,” says Klein. “It’s not hard-edged or man-bashing.” Gehring adds, “It’s not a big Broadway production, and it never can look like that. It’s a show you would have created if you’d been friends together when you were 12, so it can’t be too slick.”

There’s a little bit of everything in GIRLS ONLY — sketch comedy, improvisation, singing and dancing. It includes the “Kotex Kraft Korner,” a show for post-menopausal women looking for clever ways to use up feminine hygiene products. The “Pantyhose Dance” provides a completely new way to think of nylons.

The show is set in a typical 12-year-old girl’s bedroom, complete with twin bed, dresser and posters on the wall. It opens with Gehring and Klein sitting on the bed reading from their diaries, which is how the whole idea for the show got started.

The two women met when they formed an improvisational sketch comedy trio called ACE, which stands for an American (Klein, 41, who is from Colorado), a Canadian (Gehring, 39) and an Englishman, Matthew Taylor. The troupe performed its own material locally, nationally and internationally for 10 years. One day, Klein came upon her childhood diary. She found it so funny she couldn’t stop reading it. “You read a diary and say, ‘That’s me, I really wrote that.’ It’s that part of you that never goes away,” observes Klein.

That motivated Gehring to find her diary, which she, too, thought hysterical. At the time, the two women were writing shows about anything that inspired them, so their diaries became the inspiration for a new show.

One night in 2007, when their partner, Taylor, was out of town, Gehring and Klein decided to try out their new show on their loyal female fans. It was a hit.

After performing it again in Canada to great response, they started a sold-out, three-month run of the show at the Avenue Theater this past winter. They ended the show only because Gehring was seven months pregnant with her second child and couldn’t fit into her costumes any more.

In reading their diaries, the longtime friends discovered many differences but also many similarities in their experiences as girls. “We knew our diaries were similar to each other’s, but it wasn’t until we did the first show that we realized the universality of them,” says Klein. “There are many things an audience can glom onto between the two of us because we represent the combined public,” Gehring says. Audience members will often tell them they’d always thought of themselves as weird until they saw the show and realized they weren’t so different after all.

Revisiting their preteen selves was illuminating for both women. “I purposely don’t read every diary entry in the show because it turns out I was kind of mean, and I don’t want to be mean,” says Klein, who had always thought of herself as a really kind kid.

“It brought the truth up to me,” she says. She also noticed that she put herself second a lot. “I started a club of one person — me — yet voted myself vice president!” Klein realizes she has often put herself second in life but has come to terms with it. “You know, being first takes a lot of effort, and being second is OK and has worked just fine for me,” she says. “I don’t think I would have noticed that about my life if it wasn’t for looking back at my diary. Now it’s just an interesting observation I’ve made. So go, No. 2!” she cheers.

Gehring noticed that she would obsess in her diary, writing about the same issue day after day. She also noted that she always looked at the positive side of things, even at the risk of being pathetic. A boy would dump her, (one even returned the valentine she gave him, which she then kept in her diary), yet despite the rejection, she would write the next day, “He looked at me so I think he might like me after all.”

Ever the optimist, Gehring says, “When everything else around me was saying ‘no, no, no,’ I was saying ‘sure, why not?’ My diary taught me that I am tenacious and always have been. I’d think ‘It’s all possible’ and never said ‘no’ to myself, and I’m still that way,” she says. The flip side is that Gehring never said “no” to other people, creating a wicked case of the disease-to-please, which Klein and their ACE partner, Taylor, have helped her overcome. “We held an intervention,” Klein recalls.

Knowing what they know now about life, Klein and Gehring would have some very good advice for their preteen selves. “I would tell myself to be less inhibited in my writing,” says Klein. “I realize that I always wrote as though an audience would read it one day, which is ironic because now they are,” she laughs. “I didn’t want to seem immature or dumb so I would tell my younger self not to worry about what you write — be the free spirit and don’t worry about what you’ll be thinking as a 40-year-old.”

Gehring would tell her younger self “not to waste so much time and energy on things that don’t make you who you are.” Lanky and a late bloomer, Gehring wanted desperately to be like the other girls. “I wish I’d had more confidence at 10 and 11 to say to them, ‘I don’t care.’ Now I would never choose friends based on their popularity,” she says.

Looking ahead, Gehring and Klein imagine what their 70-year-old selves will think of the women they are now. “They’ll say, ‘Wow, I had so much energy!’” laughs Klein. “And I’ll be proud of myself for sticking with the dream to write and perform. The only way this time in my life could be better is if something even more wonderful comes along to surpass it.”

Gehring thinks her older self will be very grateful for friends and family “and the bonus of being part of something creative that went on to make a lot of people happy. And I’ll be really grateful that I didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” To enable the show to one day go national (and to be able to return to writing other shows), Gehring and Klein have been auditioning actresses to play their parts.

To their surprise, they’ve found themselves being very protective over how the other is represented. Turning the show over to other actresses “is like sending your kid off to school,” says Klein. “Hearing someone else talking about Barbara’s dolls or my walkietalkies was hard.”

Gehring laughs and agrees, “We felt like yelling, ‘You leave my friend’s things alone!’”

However, they have not forgotten that the idea is to grow the show. They dream that one day there will be pairs of Barbaras and Lindas performing GIRLS ONLY all over the country, teaching more women that maybe they aren’t so weird after all.

GIRLS ONLY plays at the Garner Galleria Theatre Sept. 18 - Dec. 21. Go to www.denvercenter.org for more
information.