Review by Dave Shiflett Tis the season to eat, drink and be merry – for tomorrow we may all land in detox. So we are hysterically reminded in Carrie Fisher’s “Wishful Drinking,” which airs on HBO Sunday night at 9 p.m. New York time. Fisher, perhaps best known as Princess Leia in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” and as one-time wife of Paul Simon, lays out her credentials early on in this rollicking 90-minute special. She’s an alcoholic and a drug addict as well, working in a nice spin on the old Karl Marx chestnut regarding religion and opiates: “I took masses of opiates religiously.” She also comes from a fabled but somewhat non-traditional family, which included late father Eddie Fisher, whom she calls “puff daddy” because he smoked “five joints a day” and brought his drug dealer to one of her performances. Fisher has also been immortalized as a PEZ dispenser, an inflatable sex doll ($800 a copy, she says) and as a textbook example of a manic-depressive. She’s both salty and sweet and near impossible not to like. The one-woman show, filmed before a live audience, has many hilarious moments, including a discussion of having a friend die in her bed – a Republican lobbyist, no less. An audience member asks, in this very audience-interactive program, if she was naked at the time. “I haven’t been naked in fifteen years,” she responds, or “sleeveless in twenty.” Fisher also cracks that she once Googled herself and found this posting: “She used to be so hot. Now she looks like Elton John.” Ah, humility. How rare and refreshing, especially considering that, as she reminds with an old publicity photo from her Star Wars days, she was once out-and-out gorgeous. The show, which Fisher wrote, is not an exercise in blame shifting, though her recollections of mother Debbie Reynolds’ various eccentricities and a segment on the “incestuous” nature of Hollywood, which includes mocking descriptions of her father’s multiple marriages, could help explain, in part of least, why she’s been around the bend a few times. She tells a tale of a child who grew up in a “storybook” family who eventually discovered that the stuff so many dreams are made of – especially celebrity – is often quite hollow and unstable. Sure, her dad was also married to Elizabeth Taylor, but then Liz dumped him the second she laid eyes on Richard Burton. He followed Liz with Connie Stevens and later a former Miss Louisiana, but these marriages failed and he ended up having so many facelifts he looked “asian.” In the same spirit her mother was an authentic movie legend and the embodiment of purity in her portrayal of Tammy, yet she married poorly as well though wanted daughter Carrie to father a child by one of her husbands, in part because she liked his eyes. Mom, in a weirdly endearing way, believed her daughter could be artificially inseminated by injecting sperm into her arm. After hearing all this, most viewers will have little trouble agreeing with Fisher than despite all the fairy dust her family is “blue blooded white trash” and one, she adds, whose celebrity has faded. In perhaps her most poignant aside, she notes that celebrity is merely “obscurity biding its time.” All told Fisher shows a depth of humor, humility and wisdom that can only come from acute suffering. The other great thing about her is that she’s clearly not trying to bamboozle us into thinking she’s some sort of role model. She ends her performance by being carried out of the theater on a gurney and slid into an ambulance, having left her audience with this sage advice: “Cry all you want, you’ll pee less.” In this season of often-forced mirth, Carrie Fisher offers some hard-won comfort and something approaching joy.
