(no subject)
the ic
Name: Geneva Downing
Age/Birthdate: 42, November 11th, 1966
Sexuality: Straight
Occupation: Stand up comedian
Location: San Francisco CA
Fairytale: The Duchess from Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass
Age of Realization: 19
Ability, if any: None
Defining Character Traits: She’s allergic to pepper, and she goes back and forth from really nice to really mean. Though she doesn’t have any kids, it’s very possible that she’d beat her kids, but she’s not planning on having any.
Geneva's got a bit of a split personality thing going on, like a lot of other Tales. She can be very sweet and courteous one minute, especially if she needs something from someone and then turn around and be vicious. She's very strong about her opinions, and when she has them, she's very direct and argumentative about them. There can definitely be a physical element to her anger, and she's not above getting up into someone's face and pushing, shoving, or hurting them some other way. She just gets to that point where she snaps, and has been known to physically harm someone if she finds them annoying. It's always the little things that annoy her, (i.e. If someone sneezes too much, or they tap their leg for too long, or a baby crying, and a whole host of other things). If however you don't annoy her and she needs something from you, then she's very sweet, and almost flirtatious like her literary counterpart. She doesn't like people in her business, even if she's usually on the stage and telling people about her business. Mostly she doesn't like people telling her what to do, and how to behave and how to treat other people. Advice gets overlooked or she gets annoyed at it. She's also got a very pointy chin still.
Status: Pretty well known considering lots of people know her from tv and stuff, she doesn't hide it. And probably shares who she is a little too often.
History: Born in 1966 in California around San Diego to parents who weren’t married but together. She had some half brothers and half sisters but no real siblings. Her parents were extreme hippies, believed in free love, peace, and they were both a part of the sexual revolution. They lived in this little commune type of place, where everyone shared everything else, so she felt like she had brothers and sisters. Both of her parents had children from other relationships, and she considers them her brothers and sisters, but she considers the other children around her age that were a part of the commune to be her brothers and sisters too. Though after the commune shut down, she fell out of touch with most of them. The ones she did keep in touch with were the ones who were actual half brothers and sisters.
The commune was called Hope Hill and it was one of the ones where everyone lived together and no one worked, but everyone shared everything equally. They grew their own food, made their own shelter, and all decisions were made unilaterally. No one had a specific place they were supposed to sleep, it was pretty much wherever you wanted to stay. They made money together by building and making things to sell. They decided to close it down when there was just too little people to keep things running. People decided to move out slowly but surely for lots of reasons. Eventually there just wasn't enough people to keep it all together, so they disbanded and everyone left went their separate ways.
When she was three, they even took her to Woodstock, not that she remembers that in the slightest. When it was time for school, she and a bunch of the other kids were homeschooled instead of having to go to public school. They were taught by some of the other people in the community and were taught more about how to care for other people and the environment then actually learning English or Math. But she didn’t really care for school all that much, and she very much embraced the whole hippy culture.
By the time high school rolled around, it was the 1980s and the commune was being shut down, and Geneva had to go to public high school. So her parents packed up and moved to San Francisco. In high school she was the class clown, making everyone laugh and generally disturbing people, but she wasn’t any kind of bully. She just liked making people laugh. She was suspended a couple of times, but eventually she just dropped out anyways. Basically she didn’t know as much as the other kids because of her homeschooling so she tried to make up for it by being funny. It didn’t really work. Her parents both had got menial jobs, several at a time and so she didn’t see them very much after that. They didn’t have very much money, so eventually she had to get a job for herself. She worked part time at a McDonald’s during the day, and at night she cleaned up at a bar at night that did comedy some nights.
She hung out with the comedians, drinking and smoking with them, and somehow she learned a bit about doing stand-up though at first it wasn’t what she wanted to do. Several people she worked with thought that she was funny, but no one would really give her a chance until as cliché as it was, someone canceled and there was no one to go on. She hadn’t even been planning it, but through some cajoling, she tried it out and failed miserably. People thought she was funny, but that she just needed to work on her routine a bit more. So she started to practice, not minding being on stage that much. Eventually she moved out of her parents’ house, right around the time she finally found out that she was a Tale. She was living out of her car at first in those early years, when she was around 19 years old. She started having dreams about Alice in Wonderland, but had no idea what was going on until she had it explained to her. That would explain why she was allergic to pepper. But the magical mirror transportation system was awesome and made things much easier for her.
Finally she got up enough money to move into a small studio she could barely fit into. She tried out her routines on everyone she could and built up a good enough routine that she was given a slot on stage at the place she once cleaned up at. This time she was way better and people turned up to see her. Her audience grew slowly and her act got better each time she performed it. One night she met a guy from her audience and they started talking after her show. He claimed he could talk to someone and see about getting her a chance to make a cd of her stuff, even if cds weren’t exactly that popular yet. They continued to see each other and surprisingly the guy kept his word and put her in contact with a guy who knew a guy who could put her on his label. She used just about every penny she had saved up and made her debut comedy cd and moved out of her crappy studio a month later because using all of her money meant giving it up. She moved in with her boyfriend in a slightly bigger apartment and sold cds out of the back of her car. She made enough to eat but that was about it.
People started to recognize her in the San Francisco area and her boyfriend suggested perhaps going on the radio, so she tried it out and the publicity actually helped and she started to sell more cds at her shows. When she was 23 she was asked if she wanted to go on a tour of comedians along the state of California. She had no reason not to go and so she got on a bus with three other comedians and took off. The tour widened her audience and got her even more money. It seemed like her career was really taking off. Of course when she came home things had changed between she and her boyfriend. He was a bit jealous of her so called fame and so she moved out by herself and started to manage her own career for a while. By the late 90s she was headlining her own tour and Comedy Central called her up, wanting to tape one of her shows and put it on their Friday Night Standup and she agreed. Around that time the boyfriend came back, asking her forgiveness and for some reason, she took him back in.
The show on Comedy Central was a hit and they gave her yet another cd to do. After that she went on tour again and broke up with her boyfriend for the second time. And by 2003 she was known as the late night comedy show queen, and appeared on different shows, even doing a voice for the Simpsons. Having enough money of her own, she bought her own house though continued to live with her on again/off again boyfriend until about last year when she called it quits for good (yeah right). He even gave her his pet pig that he didn’t want anymore named Butterball. She still lives in San Francisco, but also has a place in New York. She’s done Leno and Letterman before and has been on a couple of Roasts of other comedians. She’s met several other Mirror/Wonderlanders and doesn’t mind them all, in fact she rather likes them.
Personality: Geneva says that she’s not that funny when she’s not on the stage but that’s really up to other people to decide. She’s somewhere between pleasant and unpleasant, depending on her mood, the day and a list of other things. She almost absolutely can never make up her mind about anything and takes forever to decide something. She lies heavily on the sarcasm some time to the people of being annoying to other people. Like a lot of other comics, she talks a lot about her real life, focusing a bit on her parents and being somewhere between being a hippy and a conservative. She’s probably a bit more pleasant to the Tale community then to other people she meets because she feels like she can be pretty honest with them.
She probably sees her family during Christmases and maybe some other holidays but because she's on the road so much, she's not very close to anyone in her family. She calls her parents every couple of months, but they mostly keep track of her through email. It's not that she doesn't like them or doesn't want to be a part of their lives, she just doesn't find the time. But she never knows when she'll finally get a break and want to spend time with her family.
Geneva believes a lot in the whole people should be free to be who they want to be. She doesn't like being opressed, and that's why she doesn't really like people telling her what she has to do. She never really grew up with rules, and people telling her that she had to dress a certain way, or that she had to get a job, etc which is the main thing she took away from her upbringing. Whether or not she believes in the whole free love thing remains to be seen. Mostly she's just been with the one guy, though she's had a fling here or there, but so far the whole having multiple partners at once isn't really for her, but she's always open to new things. But if you'd ask her, she'd probably say she'd way rather live in a commune again then some townhouse in the burbs or some mansion somewhere.
She’s also the queen of too much information, both telling people her own TMI and having people for some reason tell her things they normally wouldn’t tell anyone else. She just doesn’t have much of a filter about anything at all, and will talk just about anything at all. She has a lot of bad habits, and even some good habits. The only real phobia she has is agoraphobia, which is odd since she played a lot of smaller clubs when she was starting out. She’s not interested in doing movies but says she might write a book one day. In public among the press, after her shows she’s a little more conservative, is pretty polite, talks softer and though she’s funny and sometimes dirty, people often assume she’s on the innocent side but with people she knows, she’s far more open.
She has a lot of her parents values, mostly about how it takes more then just parents to raise children, how she doesn’t really like children at all, her support on punishment of kids, and that everyone should have the same rights. She doesn’t believe in wars, and even kind of believes in free love creed though she’s never had more than one lover at a time but she doesn’t believe in marriage for herself (that’s a lot of what her and her ex boyfriend keep fighting and breaking up over). As far as being her Tale, she gets annoyed that she’s apparently supposed to be some huge woman with a big head and a bad temper. But mostly she just thinks it’s amusing that she’s the Duchess and stays out of her way to eat any kind of tarts, thinking they’re bad luck. The part about her changing moods at a sudden notice is pretty much par for the course with her.
She thinks it sucks that Tales are fading, mostly because she knows that eventually that’s going to happen to her one day. Of course that’s why she puts parts of it in her comedy routine. Although she never obviously says that she’s a reincarnated Tale, she goes on about how kids don’t read anymore, how they should but tries to play it off as funny (as in her famous line about how it’s not because the Tales are important, it’s because someone’s got to live off of the money their great great great great grandmother once wrote to live off of). However knowing that she’s going to come back one day gives her a great more comfort to be a little more outrageous then she’d normally be.
She finds the other Tales pretty amusing, mostly if only for the reason that when you can view someone's 'diary' and watch people interact, it sometimes causes funny parts and then she can make a joke about them, or try something out. I think she likes the other people from her Tale quite a bit, she finds the whole thing really kind of awesome, especially that she's from Alice in Wonderland. Not that she read the book so much, but she thinks the Disney version is cool, even if she isn't in it herself.
Her boyfriend likes to remind her that she wouldn't be anywhere without him, and I think she feels a little like she has to have him tag along because of that reason. She loves him, she just doesn't know if she's in love with him anymore. They fight an awful lot, and I'm pretty sure it's gotten physical, but possibly on her end more then his. He knows just the right buttons to push to make her completely crazy and mad. She doesn't really want kids, and he really does, which is the main thing they fight about. Then she says that he hasn't ever asked her to marry him, so she doesn't know why she'd want kids with him. He doesn't seem to want to get married though. It's usually a big circle with them. They fight and scream at each other, and I'm sure the cops have been called. And then he leaves or she leaves if it's really bad. If it's not, they just don't speak to each other for a couple of days. After that, they make up and usually it's one of those kind of make ups that are intense and they're horribly lovey dovey after that until the next argument.
Lots of comedians have 'schticks' like where some of them do current events, and some are stand ups about politics and the governement and stuff like that. And then there are those that do jokes about history, and other random things. I don't think she has a schtick so much, but she does really like to make jokes about books. Most of the time she talks about the ones everyone knows and then makes fun of them. That includes her own Tale, and the other tales, not that she ever comes out and says that she's a tale. I guess an example is best. Say she's talking about Snow White. She'd probably make a joke about how Paris Hilton is the closest thing you have to a modern day Snow White because one day she's gonna get stuck in the mirror looking at herself too long and able to fit because she's so skinny and anorexic, which would mean Nicole Richie would be the mirror to tell her she looked fat in those pants. Or maybe she'd joke about how that halloween rumor about having razors in candy probably started from poison candied apples or something like that. I'm just making stuff up, and she's actually funny, but that's how her jokes work.
Potential Interaction: Geneva is all up for hanging out with everyone from Wonderland and Mirrorland and just about everyone. Mostly she’s friendly. Um, there’s potential to have someone be her on again/off again boyfriend. There could be lots of people she could hang out with. Y’know I’m flexible.