Comedian takes off white gloves> Barr brings entertainment to Junior League dinner

The last time comedian Julie Barr came to Bangor, Stephen King stole her microphone.

“I was performing at Husson College,” she said Tuesday night at the annual dinner for the Junior League of Bangor. “He got the good sound system. I got the one that groaned. Every time I spoke into it, this generator under the stage made a horrible sound like some thing out of one of his novels.”

Barr, 39, has been performing at comedy clubs, colleges and conventions in New England since moving to Boston in 1984. “I found that immediately, I could get on a stage five nights a week, unlike in New York or L.A. I have a ton of work because very few women do stand-up in the area,” she said. “I’m usually in three different states in a week … I’ve done a Shriners convention, but never the JLB before.

“I do most of my performing in bars, so it was nice to have a relatively sober, and all-female audience, who got all of my jokes,” she commented after the show. “After my club performances, people come up to me and tell me I’m too smart for them.”

Much of Barr’s humor centers around her dysfunctional family, her height (5 feet 10 inches) and her size (plus). She grew up in Rochester, N.Y., “the capital of bowling and beer,” the daughter of a judge and an English teacher. Her sister is a Jehovah’s Witness, one brother is a born-again Christian, and the other, a drummer, is in a heavy metal band.

“The trouble with having a father who’s a judge is you have to wait three years for your punishment to be handed down,” she told her audience at the Penobscot Country Club. “And if your mother’s a teacher, you go to school with your papers already corrected.”

Barr also talks openly about her family’s, as well as her own, bouts of alcohol and drug addiction. “The good thing about living in an alcoholic family is the bar’s always open. The bad thing is that it’s usually a karaoke bar, with drunks singing off-key all night long.”

Today, her parents are divorced. Her father still lives in Rochester, but her mother lives and works in Portland. “She’s a security guard at Maine Medical Center,” the comedian said. “But she’s still a mom, so her weapons of choice are a wooden spoon and a hairbrush.”

When Corinne Van Peursem was asked to hire a comedian to perform at the organization’s annual dinner, she didn’t expect to find one who had a connection to the JLB. However, Barr’s aunt and grandmother belonged to the group in Rochester.

“I called the Comedy Connection in Portland and asked them to recommend a woman comedian,” Van Peursem said from her office Wednesday. “When they told me about Julie’s volunteer work with the Walk for Hunger and breast cancer fund-raisers, I knew I’d found the right person for the Junior League.”

The Junior League was founded at the turn of the century by New York debutantes, and the local organization was formed in the 1930s. While its work in the community spans six decades, the organization can’t seem to shake the image that its members are white-gloved society matrons.

Even Barr joked Tuesday night that she attended Junior League teas with her aunt and grandmother. “There I was, wearing white gloves, pushing cake and ice cream up on my spoon with my fingers. I’m glad you gave those up.”

Today, most of the JLB’s active members are working women. President Cindy Hardy owns and operates Bangor Travel Service. She theorized that the “white-gloved image” is left over from the 1950’s, when “members had to be invited to join the organization, and gloves were a fashion statement.”

“I wanted to have some levity at our annual dinner,” she said from her Broad Street office. “We work really hard all year on our projects, so it was a good time for us to reward ourselves.”

While JLB members will spend the summer preparing for their annual antique show, Barr will work on her one-woman show at her family’s cottage on Bustin Island, near South Freeport.

“There’s no electricity, no running water, and no phones,” she said. “And no little, old European men telling me, `You so big, you could plow the fields happily.’ I don’t think so.”