Lea DeLaria ( born May 23, 1958 ) is an American comedienne, actress, and jazz musician.

DeLaria has performed stand-up comedy for over 25 years and is a prominent figure in the world of LGBT comedy.

" Entertainment Weekly said " a star is born with Lea DeLaria " of her " showstopping " performance as Hildy Esterhazy in the 1998 Broadway revival of On the Town.

DeLaria is currently performing in Prometheus Bound at The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

* Helga Phugly ( Lea DeLaria ) – is a fat, toad-like girl who will eat virtually anything.

* Verdelle Diver ( Lea DeLaria ) – is the regional coordinator of The Li ' l ' Amazons, a Girl Scouts-like troop.

DeLaria has also appeared in a number of films, including Edge of Seventeen and The First Wives Club.

In the meantime and in between time, Cassella wrote a book and two screenplays with Lea DeLaria, and has written for various publications and television networks.

Guest hosts for the series have included: Cherry Jones, Paris Barclay, Janeane Garofalo, Lesley Gore, Lea DeLaria, Madonna, Nathan Lane, Howard Dean, Gavin Newsom, Helen Thomas, Nancy Grace, RuPaul, Angela Lansbury, Jerry Herman, Carol Channing, Larry Kramer, Barbara Gittings, Lillian Faderman, Judy Shepard, Susan Sarandon, Billie-Jean King, Lily Tomlin, Melissa Etheridge, Esera Tuaolo, Martina Navratilova, Judith Light, Margaret Cho, Le Tigre, Lady Bunny, Wilson Cruz, Bill Brochtrup, Staceyann Chin and Lisa Leslie.

The " famously controversial " DeLaria was " the first openly gay comic to break the late-night talk-show barrier " with her 1993 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show.

Of her watershed 1993 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, as the first openly gay comic to appear on a late-night talk-show, DeLaria said " It's the 1990s ...

DeLaria has released two CD recordings of her comedy, Bulldyke in a China Shop ( 1994 ) and Box Lunch ( 1997 ).

DeLaria integrates musical performance into her stand-up comedy, focusing on traditional and modern be-bop jazz.

Lea Delaria's performance as Hildy the taxi driver ( and especially her all-stops-out rendition of " I Can Cook, Too ") won wide praise, with Ben Brantley writing " Working through the saucy double-entendres and scat embellishments of I Can Cook Too, Hildy's mating call of a solo, Ms. DeLaria makes an obliging captive of anyone watching her.

* 2008: Lea DeLaria – The Live Smoke Sessions ( Ghostlight Records )

Directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, it starred Jennifer Laura Thompson in the lead role of Charlotte, and featured Hugh Panaro as Robert, Lea DeLaria as Cinder, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Marco.

This was followed by the album Double Standards in 2003, and by The Very Best of Lea DeLaria in 2008.

* 2006: The Very Best of Lea DeLaria ( Rhino / WEA UK )

The Italian American DeLaria was born in Belleville, Illinois, the daughter of Jerry, a homemaker, and Robert DeLaria, a jazz pianist and social worker.

DeLaria appeared as Jane in the 1998 Off Broadway production of Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, a " a gay retelling of the Bible.

DeLaria subsequently played Eddie and Dr. Scott in the 2000 Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show, and can be heard on the cast recording.

In 2001, DeLaria was the voice of Helga Phugly on the short-lived, animated sitcom, The Oblongs.

In 1999 DeLaria played the recurring role of Madame Delphina on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, returning in 2008 as both Delphina and Professor Delbert Fina.

In November 2008, DeLaria completed a tour of Australia, playing Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.

The Rocky Horror Show had a longer revival on Broadway from October 2000 to January 2002 at the Circle in the Square Theatre and featured Tom Hewitt ( later Terrance Mann ) as Frank N. Furter, Alice Ripley as Janet, Raúl Esparza ( later Sebastian Bach ) as Riff Raff, Joan Jett as Columbia / Usherette ( later Ana Gasteyer ), Lea DeLaria ( later Jason Wooten ) as Eddie / Doctor Scott, and Daphne Rubin-Vega as Magenta.

It is also possible, but equally doubtful, that he actually shot down the hundreds of men with which his legend credits him.

Recognizing that the Rule of Law is `` a dynamic concept which should be employed not only to safeguard the civil and political rights of the individual in a free society '', the Congress asserted that it also included the responsibility `` to establish social, economic, educational and cultural conditions under which his legitimate aspirations and dignity may be realized ''.

At General Power's seat in the balcony there is also a gold phone.

In addition to the authentication and acknowledgment procedures which precede and follow the sending of the go messages, again in special codes, each message also contains an `` internal authenticator '', another specific signal to convince the recipient that he is getting the real thing.

He added that he also stresses the works of these favorite masters on tour, especially Mahler's First and Fourth symphonies, and Das Lied Von der Erde, and Bruckner's Sixth -- which is rarely played -- and Seventh.

The test of form is fidelity to the experience, a gauge also accepted by the abstract expressionist painters.

Though he is also concerned with freeing dance from pedestrian modes of activity, Merce Cunningham has selected a very different method for achieving his aim.

The answers derived by these means may determine not only the temporal organization of the dance but also its spatial design, special slips designating the location on the stage where the movement is to be performed.

It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable.

but there is also compassion.

also he is a drunk, and has lost his job on that account.

And if I have gone into so much detail about so small a work, that is because it is also so typical a work, representing the germinal form of a conflict which remains essential in Mann's writing: the crude sketch of Piepsam contains, in its critical, destructive and self-destructive tendencies, much that is enlarged and illuminated in the figures of, for instance, Naphta and Leverkuhn.

By `` image '' is meant not only a visual presentation, but also remembered sensations of any of the five senses plus the feelings which are immediately conjoined therewith.

he is questioning, also, every epistemology which stems from Hume's presupposition that experience is merely sense data in abstraction from causal efficacy, and that causal efficacy is something intellectually imputed to the world, not directly perceived.

it is true that they are also extremely dull.

Now the detective must save his own skin by informing on the girl he loves, who is also the real murderer.

But it is also the climax to one of the absorbing chapters in our current political history.

Since a civilizational crisis involves also a crisis in private interests and in the ruling class, reaction is normally found among those who feel themselves to be among the ruling class.

`` The Rocking Horse Winner '' is also a story about a boy's love for his mother.

Evidence is plentiful that early and later also he has been indebted to the Gothic romancers, who deal in extravagant horror, to the symbolists writing at the end of the preceding century, and in particular to the stream-of-consciousness novelists, Henry James and James Joyce among them.