What I liked
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What I didn't like
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My overall impression
Mark Twain reportedly said: “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven.” Not so with Betty Cox’s Broke Bitch Got Rich because not only does she find humor in her pain, i.e. portraits of growing up in unthinkable poverty in Louisiana surrounded by an absent/occasional pop-in father, a beer swigging step-father, and a protective mother struggling to do her best but expressing it through shark’s teeth. But there’s also great humor in her heaven as she lays out a real life Cinderella/Pretty Woman theme that was and is her life, that which she’d wished for, and has now actually gotten. Easy, right? Wonderful, right? Not so for someone dealing with a late into adulthood diagnosis of ADHD. The lack of focus, the confusion and insecurity that it brings (and consumed her as a child) has left her never quite feeling like she belongs or can necessarily succeed in any given situation—a curse of both self-and-externally fulfilled prophecies—that she’s learning to deal with now day by day. Thus her wonderfully threaded theme (as indicated in her fun key art) of never fitting into expected “boxes,” neither before the glass slipper nor after.
Betsy Cox has such great charm and comedic timing that she glides through her show like a grand float in the Rose Parade, yet all the while sharing incredible vulnerability, stories I’d guess she’d kept long buried in an effort of self-protection. But luckily for us, she’s found great humor in the down times, as well as in the struggles in the good times, and she has the courage and skill to lend it to us for an extremely funny and inspiring hour.
