Anyone who did comedy on the East Coast in the 1980s or 1990s probably worked, at one gig or another, with Rick Scotti. (In fact, Scotti was the headliner on The Female Half’s first road trip– at a club in Richmond, VA, way back in 1986.) Scotti stopped doing comedy in 2000.

Scotti is back doing standup again. And writing a blog called “Inside and Out.” The subtitle is “Eleven years ago, Rick Scotti performed stand up comedy for the last time. Now returning as Julia,she chronicles the long journey back.”

Julia Scotti writes of her first time back onstage at The Comedy Works in Bristol, PA:

I’m on.

“Thank you! It’s good to be back.! A lot has happened in these last eleven years…let’s see, I went back to college, got my degree, my parents died, upgraded my cable package…and oh yeah…I HAD A SEX CHANGE.”

At that moment, the oddest thing happened. There was total SILENCE. The kiss of death for a comic. The equivalent of being buried alive underground in a cigar box. Like being at your grandma’s 100th birthday party with five generations of your relatives giving her gentle hugs and you squeeze her so hard you crack her rib. It’s that horrifying. Time stops. The little people in your mind get the battle stations claxon and you can see them rolling out of their bunks. Millions of tiny little engine room workers are frantically shoveling mental coal into the boiler to bring the brain some power. At the very least, this line should have provoked a titter, and possibly a nasty remark from some scoundrel heckler. But there was nothing. Crickets. Why?

And then it hit me. They didn’t believe me. All my fears of being teased, of being called a freak in public, of religious zealots throwing holy sand at me and exorcising the demons that led me astray back to Sodom were for nothing, because they thought I had been lying! This was fucking insanely fabulous! (Cue the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah)

I had to do something. So I looked them squarely in their eyes and said; “No really.”

Still nothing.

At this point, it was like opening the trunk, taking out the jumper cables and attaching them to their collective nipples. I took one last shot.

“No….REALLLLLLLLLY.”

Finally, they responded. Some laughed. Some began to talk among themselves. I needed to take control again, so I found the hunkiest young guy in the audience and said…

“And don’t get any ideas, buster! I see you looking at me and undressing me with your eyes! Come on… put ‘em back on !

And that opened them up. The rest of my set was nothing memorable, but I got enough laughs to make me realize that maybe I could do this again after all. Sure I was rusty and my timing needed a tune-up, but I had told the truth. And I survived.

When it was over, Kaplan walked over to me. I was expecting kudos. What I got was, “NOW WAS THAT SO FUCKING HARD?”

Ya gotta love him.

The Kaplan referred to is the perpetually (but charmingly) annoyed Comedy Works proprietor Mike Kaplan.

We always find it fascinating when someone leaves standup… and then returns. And it’s even more interesting when the returnee comes back after a major change or two (Divorce? Weight loss? Near-death experience?) and feels the need or the desire to re-invent himself/herself onstage.

The above-mentioned comeback performance occurred just a few weeks ago, so Scotti’s real-time recounting of the saga has just begun. There’s no better time to hop on, bookmark it and follow along than now!