Catching up with Paula

By Jerry Fink

Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

Who: Paula Poundstone

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Where: The Railhead at Boulder Station

Tickets: $25.75 to $42.25; 432-7777

After some rough times, Paula Poundstone has rebuilt her life.

The 47-year-old comedian with her trademark ties is back on tour with her stand-up act, which comes to Boulder Station on Friday.

Life is "back to normal," Poundstone says, with her three adopted children, Toshia, 16; Allison, 12; and Thomas, 8, at home in Santa Monica, Calif.

She lost custody of her children following a 2001 arrest. Poundstone pleaded no contest to a felony count of child endangerment involving driving drunk with children in her car and to a misdemeanor of inflicting injury on a child. She was sentenced to 180 days in an alcohol rehabilitation program and put on five years probation.

After completing the program, she was granted full custody of her adopted children, but lost custody of two foster children.

Poundstone recently released "There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say," which she had been working on for eight years.

"I love the way things are now," she says. "I just wish everyone within the sound of my voice would pester Oprah to have me on to talk about my book."

She spoke to the Sun by phone from Glen Ellyn, Ill., just outside of Chicago.

Q: What's your book about?

It's a funky little hybrid of a book. It's a series of biographies of towering historic figures and in the telling of their story I tell my own. So each chapter is a comprehensive, albeit brief, biography of an individual - Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller - and in the telling of that person's story, I jump off and tell my own. Every time something reminds me of something else entirely, or something that happened to me once, I tell about it.

Where did the idea for the technique come from?

It's kind of inspired by these kids books called "If You Give a Moose a Muffin," and there's one called "If You Give a Pig a Pancake," where this girl gives a pig a pancake while she's eating breakfast, the pig is outside her window - and when she gives it syrup, everything she gives to the pig it reminds the pig of something else that it wants and it moves away from food entirely until eventually they're building a tree house together.

My book kind of moves in the same way. I did it this way because I felt just silly about writing about myself and I had made a deal to write a book that was supposed to be kind of memoirish, a funny book in the first place. I thought to myself, "I feel like a jerk writing about myself, but if I write a book about Abraham Lincoln I bet I won't be able to shut up about myself."

It ended up being this really fun device.

How did you pick the subjects?

I wanted it to be where saying their name and my name in the same sentence just seemed silly. I don't know, Sitting Bull, I thought, had a silly name. I ended up loving Sitting Bull. Lincoln I had some working knowledge of. Helen Keller I knew a fair amount about. Joan of Arc I happened to be in a book store and found a big thick biography. I didn't know a thing about her, but it turned out to be a great story.

Are you out promoting the book now?

I'm not doing a separate tour because I go out about eight nights a month telling my jokes and I have three children at home. I can't go out any more than eight nights a month. They're not in a row. Three nights here, three nights there.

Have your personal problems been resolved?

Life is back to normal, has been for a long time. It happened five or six years ago. I say it with great relief, "Life is back to normal." Maybe better than normal. We're just regular folk at this point.

Did you learn any lessons from the ordeal.

I imagine. I feel different in some ways from what I did six years ago, but six years ago I felt different than I did six years before that. Some of it is the natural aging process, I think. I'm not sure that we're not just all a big bundle of chemicals moving around all the time. I don't seem to have the same degree of angst that I used to have, and I'm not sure exactly why. Maybe in the course of normal human affairs your angst is lowered in your late 40s and then swings up again in your 50s. I'm 47.

Do anything differently now?

The only thing I do differently than I did before is that I'm very deliberate. I don't work and take care of my kids at the same time. I keep those very separate things now. It used to be whatever day of the week I got the jobs I made arrangements, but now I say "No, I can't do it." I have this kind of job you're never quite sure when work is coming and when it isn't, so it's hard to do that. If you turn something down, say you can't work on Monday, that you have to be with kids, then they may go off and get someone who will work on Monday - or they may say, "Well, what about Friday? "

Why do you work so hard at juggling?

It's like, my son will be 8 this year. He won't be 8 next year. I don't want to miss any part of that.

Do you work consistently?

Yes. There was definitely an economic impact because of my mistake years ago. But I have always worked, it was just a matter of the quality of the jobs I had. I made the deal with the publisher of this book long before the trouble started. They stuck with me throughout, and I think I wrote a really good book, so I guess it was a good thing.

Do you discuss your problems when you're onstage?

I do. And in the book. But it only covers about 5 percent of the total book, and it's in the very beginning. This is not a tell-all. It's a comedy book. There are elements of a memoir in it.

How do you spend your time when you aren't performing?

What am I doing? I spend a tremendous amount of time answering mail. I take care of the kids, which could easily be 24 hours a day. We have a menagerie of animals, so most of my life is spent with a damp cloth in my hand. I keep getting in car wrecks, so there's a lot of back and forth to body shops. I don't know what's going on. I shouldn't say car wrecks. I keep hitting things with my car. The other day I was just parking and there was a trailer hitch on somebody's car. I couldn't figure out why mine wasn't moving forward when there seemed to still be distance between me and the car in front of me. I came out later and "Well, gee, I believe I tore the bumper right off the front of the car."