Victoria Jackson: Tea Party Princess

from the Village Voice:



Tea Party Princess
Victoria Jackson went from the big leagues of comedy to the rabid right of modern politics

By Gus Garcia-Roberts, Wednesday, Jan 25 2012


Victoria Jackson hurtles through intersections and down side streets while using her left hand to hold a Flip cam to her face. The inside of her car—a weathered Honda Civic with "Nobama," Marco Rubio, and Tea Party bumper stickers—smells like it has been fumigated with sweet incense. Steering with elbows and the occasional pinkie, she opens a Bible inscribed with her name and quotes Scripture in her inimitable high-pitched voice. Then she turns the camera on a reporter riding shotgun. She suspects he's a socialist. "Don't you think that some people are on welfare from cradle to grave," she demands, "because the government is encouraging them never to work?"

"Leaving on a Jet Plane," her ringtone, blares from some unknown recess of her purse, and she's suddenly burrowing through loads of makeup cases to find it. "What if we crashed and died on video?" she says, laughing wildly. "That would be the most viral video of the world! You'd be dead, but you'd have a really viral video!"

At age 52, Victoria Jackson bears little resemblance to that lithe and sweetly dopey girl with the grating voice on Saturday Night Live. And you wouldn't recognize her from those eight mostly forgettable '80s and '90s feature films, such as I Love You to Death and No More Baths. She's more plump. Or as Howard Stern recently put it, she "looks like she ate Victoria Jackson."

Her comedy career, which took her from Johnny Carson's stage in Los Angeles to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, long ago squeaked its last breath. These days, she's a Miami-area suburban grandmother and wife of a buff local cop with a Bad Boys–esque career full of shoot-outs and commendations. And to some Christian conservatives, she is a seer of truth. The Washington Post once described her thusly: "If you opened her head, it would be filled with cotton candy." Now the former daffy actress is a bizarrely riveting semi-regular political pundit on Fox News. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-01-25/news/tea-party-princess-Victoria-Jackson/