IN HER OWN words, Carla Collins is “like Olive Oil in a zumba class on Ritalin.”
It’s as apt a description as any for the flamboyant actor, comedian and author of the self-help book Angels, Vampires and Douche Bags who will be playing a series of stand-up shows in southern Ontario this month.
Spend a few moments with her and you’ll find yourself strapped into the “Mulholland Drive” of conversations as it takes turns both scatological and sarcastic at breakneck velocity while also breaking sharply for poignancy and sincerity.
She talks with equal ease about boob jobs (hers) and addiction (her father’s) before switching gears to explain the utter awesomeness of Top Gun and Groucho Marx and why Shemp is the thinking woman’s Stooge.
But I’ve caught Collins in a quiet — or at least, quieter — and more reflective mood when I call her at her Malibu home on a recent Sunday afternoon. “It’s a gift when I’m quiet,” she says.
Collins was out late the night before — she was headlining at the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club although she hesitates to make a big deal about it — and now she’s enjoying some serious cuddle time with Dr. Zira, a Chihuahua–miniature pinscher mix, and Miles, a comically conceived Chihuahua-Great Dane mix.
“Can you imagine the logistics? There must have been a trampoline involved,” she says.
Collins is a huge animal rights advocate, and both Dr. Zira and Miles are dogs she rescued. She has a tattoo of the paw of her last dog, Buster, on her rib cage and even wears the late black Lab’s dog tags.“Dog is man’s best friend, but a white woman’s soulmate. But I’m not one of the crazy ones who think they are my children.That would make me hairier,” she says, “and a bitch.”
Just like that, she’s punched the clutch and dropped the conversation into fourth gear with the top rolled down.
The former host of Entertainment Now, Collins admits she’s still adjusting to life in la-la land. She moved there from Toronto a few years ago and is now happily married to Tyrone Power Jr., the son of the swashbuckling screen legend.
“No one in Los Angeles gets sarcasm. I make an outrageous statement like ‘I have to get home to feed my five monkeys,’ and people respond by asking their names. Anything’s possible here, and it turns out there actually is a lady who lives here and her house is full of monkeys. She actually had to move into the guest house so the monkeys could have the main house.”
Collins was born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, which she says is a lot like L.A.
“They’re both one-industry towns,” she says. “But there are more cabs in the Soo.”
She was both prom queen and valedictorian of her high school graduating class and got her start in show business as a Weather Network host in 1990.
More TV and radio gigs followed, ranging from playing “anchorwoman” in Universal Soldier 2, with Burt Reynolds and Gary Busey, to a regular stint on Paradise Falls to her first stand-up special, The Wonder Bra Years, in 2001.
More recently, she starred in two seasons of the Carlawood, a reality TV satire that follows her as she tries to make it big in Hollywood and start a new business with her husband called the Grin Reapers, which provides personalized comedic entertainment at wakes, funerals and memorials.“It’s not like we’re doing Andrew Dice Clay at these events,” she says.
But even while she’s getting comfortable in California, she’s never far from home.
Her mom lives in Toronto, as does her first husband, Jon Burnside, who is running for city councillor — “Ward 26 Don Valley West represent!” — and for whom Collins and comedian pal Colin Mochrie hosted a fundraiser.
“Los Angeles is a whole festival of crazy,” Collins says.“Toronto is my town. I get nosebleeds north of Lawrence.”
That’s why, when she’s here, you’ll find her having lunch at Joso’s in Yorkville, doing yoga at Downward Dog, working out at Roland Semprie Rosedale and shopping for clothes at Long Legs, “which is at 2717 Yonge Street,” she says. “It’s a great store for any woman over five foot seven. It’s a magical place where a woman with a white girl flat ass and orangutan arms can find clothes that fit.”
Oh yeah, and once a year she visits the Advanced Laser and Cosmetic Surgery Centre at 120 Spadina Rd., “where I believe they inject me with the blood of young teenage boys in order to maintain my youthful appearance!”
On Nov. 6 she’ll be in the city to host the Children’s Aid Society’s Teddy Bear Affair, and then there are her upcoming shows in Belleville (Nov. 19), Cobourg (Nov. 20) and Oshawa (Nov. 21). Called Venus Envy, “the show is for women (and men in drag) only,” Collins says. “How do your legs look in heels?”
And then there are all of the appearances to promote her book. “It’s the one thing I’ve done that’s gotten all positive reviews,” she says, tempting fate. “I wonder who will be the one to ruin it?”
Collins is a big fan of self-help books, like The Secret, but she finds so many of them aren’t really that helpful. “There’s a hypocriticalness to a lot of them: ‘I was born fabulous, I’m fabulous now.’That doesn’t really make anything better,” she says. “Mine is a little more down-to-earth than some of those others.”
While not strictly an autobiography, Angels, Vampires and Douche Bags is a candid yet comedic account of Collins’s life, including coping with her father’s severe gambling addiction that forced him to lead a secret double life.
“I don’t mean to sound trite, but writing the book taught me to write from the heart,” she says. “There are some pretty poignant things in there that I’ve never talked about before publicly.”Which is saying a lot given Collins’s inhibition when it comes to using her personal life in her stand-up routines.
“Just don’t expect any Mackenzie Phillips–type secrets being revealed,” she adds. “My book is fairly tame by comparison. I’m not a Russian doll of mystery. It’s simply the world’s longest drunken Tweet.”
What certainly isn’t a secret is Collins’s close relationship with her mother, who even edited Angels, Vampires and Douche Bags before Collins sent it to her publisher to edit.
And she wasn’t looking for family skeletons to stick back in the closet — she was checking the spelling. “It was like cleaning the house before the cleaning lady comes. She wanted to make sure I made a good impression with my editor.”
As the interview winds down, the conversation turns randomly to Top Gun, the Tom Cruise fighter jock blockbuster. It’s a film she’s watched countless times, including on one of her first dates with her husband.
“He watched it, and all he did was talk about how unrealistic the dogfights were, how they would never last that long,” Collins says. “He just didn’t get it.” Of course that didn’t stop her from marrying Power.