“I have made a life of play,” she said recently, in between driving her daughter’s carpool and teaching a class at the Jewish Day School of the North Peninsula. “I’ve made a career of it. I feel incredibly blessed. But I couldn’t have done it without the support of my community — especially the Jewish community.”
Not only did she find her career in comedy, but her mate as well. Husband Norm Newhouse was one of her students in an improv class at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco more than 15 years ago.
“I had a policy never to date any of my students — so I had to marry him,” she said laughing. “He, on the other hand, was looking for free tuition by dating the teacher. It ended up costing him his paycheck for the rest of his life.”
Newhouse is a member of his wife’s two comedy troupes, the Red Morton Herrings and the Gefilte Fisheads, the latter of which has created such notable opuses as “Circus Oy Vay,” “Fiddler on the Spoof” and “A Pageant of Punims.” Although no longer with the Shlepperellas, Sand was also an original member of that comedy group.
“My gift to the art of improv is to create thematic shows that are not scripted,” she explained. If most of those shows have been built around Jewish themes, what can you expect from a girl whose first taste of the limelight was as Queen Esther in a kindergarten Purim parade in her native Akron, Ohio?
Much of her teaching and directing experience has been at Jewish community centers, day schools and synagogues, so her material is well suited to her audience. For her younger students, she has created “Camp Kreplach” and “Camp Wannabagel” as improv shows.
“Doing this around Jewish themes gives me a place, a safety net, in which to explore and experiment,” she said.
In addition to teaching and performing, she is a successful motivational speaker, traveling around the country to teach corporate groups about the value of humor and improvisational techniques in the workplace. Her television credits include “People Are Talking” on KPIX Channel 5 and serving as an entertainment reporter on “PM Magazine” in the ’80s. She also has performed with Robin Williams, Whoopie Goldberg and Dana Carvey.
All this will be honored at a performance Saturday, May 18 in Redwood City that celebrates Sand’s 20 years of comedy. While she admits the show marks a milestone, Sand insists, “This is not a celebration of me but of the community, the kids I teach, their parents and everybody who has helped me over the past 20 years. It’s like all my people are saying: ‘You go, girl!'”
What she calls a “midlife crisis,” plus the encouragement of Jewish Day School of North Peninsula Principal Mervyn Danker, has put Sand back into a leotard of late, and she is teaching modern dance to children at the school.
“Starting last summer, I worked out like crazy and created a modern dance program, ‘Mitzvot in Motion,’ for children,” she said. “Someday I’d like to see this in all day schools. I’d like to get children dancing the things that words cannot express — our emotion, our spirit, our connection to all things Jewish.
“Laughter is a celebration, but it doesn’t necessarily come from life being all that great. Sometimes it comes from life being not so great. That’s one of the reasons the Jews are still around after all these years.”