Margaret Cho shares a story about experiencing “spurting orange grease” onstage as a result of taking a weight loss drug.
Margaret Cho will always remember this disorganized performance. The comic revealed that she took a weight-loss medication in the early years of her career, which caused her to have an on-stage mishap.
“I started taking all these weird drugs,” Margaret, 57, stated in the How to Fail podcast's January 7 episode. “There were also foods that would move food through your body quickly, like Olean. [It’s these] weird, chemically produced fats they can fry potatoes in [and] all these sweeteners that would make you just have diarrhea constantly.”
In fact, Olean's line of chips and other snacks, which were made with Olestra, a calorie-free fat alternative, were withdrawn in the mid-2000s due to its well-known gastrointestinal adverse effects. She “started eating only that and then taking these drugs that would remove the fat from the food that you ate,” according to Margaret, and this combo caught her off guard when she dressed "all-white" for her stand-up performance.
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“I was almost at the end, and I started to s--t,” she remembered. “I couldn’t control it. It was starting to come out because it was all oil. It looked like pepperoni grease that you blot from a pizza. I started spurting orange grease out of my a--hole while I’m onstage.”
The Drop-Dead Diva star added, “I got a standing ovation. They wanted an encore [and] all I could do was back out of view through the curtains.”
Margaret's unpleasant situation didn't finish there, though, as she had bowel problems backstage until she felt comfortable enough to leave.
“I was crying,” she wrote about how she felt at the moment. “I was really disgusted. I was concerned because I knew I was staining the seat of my car orange, but I was also laughing because it was funny. I stopped taking the drugs [after that], but I went to other different methods to lose weight.”
After all, Margaret acknowledged that she had battled body image problems since she was a young child, a fact she discussed in her first television program, All-American Girl. Despite her continued pride in creating the series, which lasted for a short time from 1994 to 1995, she disclosed that critics were more interested in her weight than her storytelling.
“I had always been fat and I kind of accepted that,” she clarified. “But being a comedian, I thought it didn’t matter. You could sort of be fat and it wouldn’t make a difference. But I was shocked when suddenly, it did make a difference and that I had to lose a lot of weight.”
She saw that her need to lose weight began to interfere with her career after years of using diet pills. In the end, Margaret attended therapy, stating that the sessions and a "12-step recovery" plan "helped her a lot."
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