*At Joe’s Pub, the Guinness World Record-holding comedian returns to the Paris of the 1960s, proving that age is not an expiration date. It is leverage.*
Immediately the sound of Liza Minelli on a lone Caberet stage comes to mind: “What good is sitting all alone in your room? Come, hear the music play.”
D’yan Forest has spent more than nine decades answering that invitation with a ukulele, a passport and little interest in female respectability.
On July 31, Forest will celebrate her 92nd birthday beneath the lights of Joe’s Pub with *D’yan in Paris: The Wild 1960’s*, an uncensored return to the years she spent moving through a Paris already loosening its stays. There were swingers’ parties, strip clubs, drag shows, Parisian men and, magnificently, a love affair with the city’s first female bus driver. While many women of her generation were instructed to guard their reputations as though propriety were their most valuable possession, Forest appears to have been far more interested in collecting stories.
Now, decades later, she is serving those stories back to us with music, wit and the serenity of a woman who understands that shame is often little more than social control in a tasteful dress.
“Most people celebrate their 92nd birthday with cake. Not me, baby,” Forest has said. “I’m celebrating mine by standing onstage and confessing what I got up to in Paris in the 1960s.”
Cake, of course, is lovely. Public confession is considerably more chic.
Forest holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest working female comedian, though the distinction barely explains what makes her extraordinary. Forest’s real accomplishment is far more delicious: at 92, she remains curious, risqué, professionally active and gloriously impossible to place inside any approved category.
That impossibility gives her story its sharper edge. Modernity has never quite known what to do with a woman who refuses to become smaller with time. She may be desirable, though never too aware of it. She may be ambitious, provided her ambition does not disturb the furniture. She may age gracefully, a phrase that too often means becoming quieter and increasingly grateful simply to remain visible.
Forest, rather elegantly, declined the arrangement.
Raised in the conservative suburbs of Boston, she began as a provincial girl familiar with the boundaries of acceptable womanhood. Following a divorce considered scandalous for its era, she studied French and boarded a ship to Europe. Paris did not merely offer escape. It provided an education in appetite, independence and the possibilities that emerge when a woman stops confusing obedience with virtue.
Once there, she performed in clubs, moved freely through the nightlife and became involved with people who would have horrified polite society. Living them required something more demanding than glamour: nerve.
Women are frequently celebrated for bravery only after the danger has passed and the consequences have been polished into charming anecdotes. Forest possessed the audacity to be brave while everyone was still calling it improper.
Upon returning to the United States, she built a career as an international singer. After September 11 brought much of New York’s performance industry to a halt, another performer might have accepted the interruption as an ending.
Forest became a comedian instead.
With a ukulele in hand, she transformed travel, romance, disappointment and questionable judgment into material. Her one-woman show *I Married a Nun* placed her on stages shared by Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Gaffigan and Joan Rivers. She later performed internationally, appeared on *The Drew Barrymore Show* and *France’s Got Talent*, and became known as saucy, witty and irrepressible.
Her latest show, written with Stephen Clarke, returns to the Parisian years that formed her. The result is not quite nostalgia. Nostalgia makes the past prettier and safer. Forest restores the danger, then gives it timing.
Perhaps that is where the true luxury of aging begins. It has little to do with appearing untouched by time, despite the fortunes spent convincing women otherwise. Real luxury is authorship: the privilege of owning every version of oneself without apology.
Forest still swims regularly at Equinox, memorizes new jokes and songs, and treats curiosity as both discipline and seduction. She is not attempting to imitate youth. Youth, frankly, is still gathering enough material to imitate her.
At 92, she is not politely asking the culture to reconsider its assumptions about women, age or relevance. She is standing beneath the lights, holding the room and, glamorously, shoving the evidence into our faces.
Website: www.dyanforest.com/
