Funnygal Kathy Kinney, who played the garishly painted Mimi Bobeck on the late, lamented “The Drew Carey Show,” said putting on the clown face to play her character was bad – but taking it off was worse!
“I never minded having it on, but I never enjoyed taking it off,” Kinney told the Track. “It was blue, and getting that blue eye shadow off was tough. They kept me in a fresh supply of wipes and I went through all of them.”
Kinney said she got so good at becoming Mimi she could paint on her frightening face in about 20 minutes. “It’s an amazing testament to my skill,” she laughed.
The actress, who now plays Bunny on ABC Family’s “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” is headed to Boston tomorrow to plug her new book, “Queen of Your Life,” which is subtitled“The Grown-Up Woman’s Guide to Claiming Happiness and Getting the Life You Deserve.” She’ll be at the Borders in Downtown Crossing beginning at 1 p.m.
Kinney wrote the book with her best friend of more than 30 years, Cindy Ratzlaff, who, Kinney admits, she wasn’t enamored of at first – for very Mimi-like reasons!
“She was a flirt and I wasn’t. She thought that she was being funny and I thought she was a bitch,” Kinney laughed. The two decided to write the book after Ratzlaff was laid off from her publishing job.
“Even though she was the genius behind the marketing of the South Beach Diet, she thought that she’d gotten stupid overnight,” Kinney said. “I was able to say, ‘Look you didn’t get stupid, you just got laid off.’ ”
They got the inspiration after Kinney Googled the word “crone.”
“I looked it up on my computer and it meant abuse – and any woman over 40. We said we don’t want to be crones, we want to be queens.”
Her main points in the book?
“You don’t have to be 20 to have your whole life ahead of you. It can be now,” she said. “We wanted to aim the book at women thinking, ‘Is this all there is?’ ”
The key to happiness, she said, is practice!
“Happiness is not something we’re born knowing,” she said. “It’s a skill that we have to learn, like riding a bike. Once you get it, you never forget it – but you do have to practice.”
File Under: Happy Face.
