I was never a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic, but he was always there in the background, quacking out his wild, often absurd reinterpretations of popular music.
Like just about everyone I went to fifth grade with, I can still sing all of Yankovic’s “The Saga Begins,” his lengthy retelling of the plot of “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” set to the tune of Don McLean’s “American Pie” (“My, my this here Anakin guy” instead of “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie” and so on.)
If you grew up Jewish and nerdy at any point between the 1980s and today, you know Yankovic, the most famous and prolific parody songwriter of all time. (Yankovic is not himself Jewish, but many of his songs use Jewish and Yiddish references. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the guy who wrote “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi” is a Jew.)
Naturally, four Bay Area women who came of age in that era have created “AL-stravaganza,” a bawdy, laugh-out-loud-funny Weird Al-themed burlesque show. They are the subject of the amusing and moving new documentary, “Tight and Nerdy,” which will have its West Coast premiere on Feb. 7 at the SF IndieFest film festival.
Much of the movie examines the paradox of creating a stage persona while revealing one’s most authentic self at the same time. It is as much about being seen as it is about learning to see yourself clearly.
The documentary unfolds like a road trip movie, following the four friends as they tour their “AL-stravaganza.” But the journey takes frequent detours into their personal histories, including trauma, and explores how burlesque and Yankovic’s music helped them heal.
Yankovic himself makes a few appearances in the film, sitting for an interview and, in one scene, inviting the quartet backstage at one of his own shows. The women are visibly awestruck by his presence. As one might expect, the accordion-wielding parodist loves the idea of a tongue-in-cheek burlesque tribute to his oeuvre.
One performer, the ringleader Pickles Kintaro (the troupe mostly goes by stage names), rediscovered herself through burlesque after her brother’s suicide and a subsequent falling out with her adoptive parents.
Another, Audra Wolfmann, is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. “He’s traumatized,” she says in the film of her father, a painter, who makes a brief appearance on screen. “And I feel that what he went through definitely affected how he brought us up as kids.”
In one scene, the other three women join Wolfmann at her childhood home in Fresno, where they help sort through a lifetime of accumulated tchotchkes owned by her antique-dealer mother, who is entering assisted living. Wolfmann explains that her childhood was difficult because her parents were “emotionally closed.”
“I kinda had to learn how to be an open person, how to trust people,” she says. “And coming here [to the house], all of that weight gets added back to my shoulders and brings up a lot of old feelings.”
In the dining room, she shows her friends a set of ornate painted portraits of relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. “The paintings were rolled up and hidden in a wall,” she says. Having grown up with the reminder of that painful history is an emotional burden she carries. Watching her on stage, performing exuberant, comic burlesque routines, it’s clear that she finds this artform to be an outlet that allows her to shrug off some of that weight.
At its core, “Tight and Nerdy” is about the liberating powers of comedy and music and the embrace of one’s own body and oddity. Yankovic reflects in the movie about the origin of his stage name. “Weird Al” started as a college nickname but over time, as he embraced it and made it his public persona, others were liberated by it themselves. By embracing the label “weird,” he says it inspired others to do the same.
In turn, watching these four women strutting their stuff, letting their freak flags fly and having a great time doing it may encourage audience members to embrace their own weird truth.
In the film, as the women go on tour, they begin to receive the kind of recognition they never imagined. When a photo of the troupe and a brief writeup appear in LA Weekly, ahead of a performance in Los Angeles, one of them cries.
Wolfmann sums up the moment, perhaps not as jokingly as her tone conveys: “I really feel like I’m somebody.”