PRESS


2016 

Shelly Glaser (L) and Sherry Glaser (R)
Mendocino, CA, September 06, 2016 --(PR.com)-- 

The First Practical Handbook for Crazy People empowers by removing the stigma of "crazy," and replacing it with the hope that we can move through healing and serenity, no matter whose genes we inherited.—Midwest Book Review


On Friday, Sept. 23 at 6:30 p.m., the Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino, Calif. will host author and award-winning performance artist Sherry Glaser’s book launch of "The First Practical Handbook for Crazy People [Making the Best of Mental Illness]," which was co-written with her late mother, Shelly Glaser.

Sherry will be on hand to read and sign the book; and discuss related topics, including her mother’s determination to transcend her severe mental illness diagnosis; the impact of parental mental illness on children who may fear inheriting "craziness;" and what it’s like to co-write a book with a parent who is deceased.

Mother's Milk Publications released the book in paperback on Sept. 6. The handbook came out in Kindle e-book format last month, and garnered stellar reader reviews. Radio journalist Christina Aanestad called it “a unique testament to the human spirit and a touching memoir to Sherry's late mother, who lived a full life with a mental illness, gaining a law degree, managing a company, and raising a family—all while going crazy.”

“Years after my mother died, I came across this manuscript she’d written entitled ‘The First Practical Handbook for Crazy People,’” said Sherry Glaser in a phone interview with journalist Marlan Warren. “I was struck by how honest she was in sharing her own journey and her down-to-earth tips for others who may also be struggling.”

In 2015, Sherry decided to pick up where her mother left off—polishing Shelly Glaser’s manuscript, while adding her own harrowing ‘herstory.’ In the book’s section, “Sherry: The Sequel,” Sherry recounts her rollercoaster life which has run the gamut from celebrated performance artist (her award-winning Off-Broadway show “Family Secrets” still holds the title of “The Longest Running One-Woman Show in Off-Broadway History”) to the mysterious disappearance of her husband to pot advocacy (and SWAT arrest) to lesbian marriage and divorce. Like her mother, Sherry shares the tools she uses to keep straitjackets at bay.



“We’re breaking new ground here,” said Sherry Glaser. “This is the first mother-daughter mental health recovery handbook.”

Clinical psychologist Lauren J. Oliver commented in an Amazon review: “It is inspiring to experience a clear-voiced woman who is committed to self-healing and being well, and who uses many practical and valuable tools to do so.”

The book also features Shelly Glaser’s “Companion Questionnaire,” which serves as an interactive workbook to help readers “avoid making uninformed choices.”

Sherry Glaser created “The First Practical Blog for Crazy People” and on Aug. 22, posted:

“We don't know what's next, but if we know where we're coming from, and that there are practical tools ready and available, we can learn to crawl and walk and run and eventually...fly.”

Book Launch Location:
Gallery Bookshop
319 Kasten Street
Mendocino, CA 95460
E-mail: info@gallerybookshop.com
Phone: (707) 937-2665

Gallery Bookshop Website:
http://www.gallerybookshop.com/event/sherry-glaser-first-practical-handbook-crazy-people

Book Info:
Media Kit: http://sherryglasermediakit.blogspot.com/
Title: The First Practical Handbook for Crazy People [Making the Best of Mental Illness]
Authors: Shelly Glaser with Sherry Glaser
Genre: Psychology & Counseling Mental Illness/Self-Help
Publisher: Mother's Milk Publications
Paperback: Pub. Sept. 6, 2016 Kindle E-Book: Pub. Aug. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-76460-2 (90 pages) ASIN: B01JTMPELO (File Size: 308 KB)
Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sherry-Glaser/e/B001KE31AG

Book Blog: http://www.thefirstpracticalblogsforcrazypeople.com/
Website: http://www.sherryglaser.net
Contact: sherryamore67@outlook.com
 
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BREAKING THROUGH THE GRASS CEILING!

Jezebel 420 News:
Token Women to Tokin Women: Three Days at a Conference for Ladies Who Simply Love Weed


"Glaser talked about PTRD, or post-traumatic raid disorder—a joke that seemed flippant and slightly offensive to me until the women around me started murmuring about the risks they ran of arrest, asset seizure, having their children taken away…But Glaser triumphed over her PTRD, re-opening the collective in 2014, she said. The crowd went apeshit. Glaser closed her talk out with an exercise called the “Boom Chakra Laka,” enthusiastically grabbing her “root chakra,” which is, I guess, the crotch."
--Jia Tolentino, Jezebel.com ("Token women to tokin women: Three days at a conference for ladies who simply love weed")

Mendocino Beacon
"Glaser Uses Her Comedy to Wake Up the World" 

Contributed - Larry Wagner Sherry Glaser
After taking a bit of a hiatus from show business, Sherry Glaser is returning to the stage — as herself — in her stand-up show, “Funny Looking,”in which she shares her interpretation of the world.

“I take this vessel I have been given and use it as a platform to talk about the feminine — the creative, the nurturing, the kind, the comforting, the nursing. I am trying to infuse that into this culture. We need to restore the feminine to bring the whole world back into balance because there is a very masculine approach to everything – economy, military, Hollywood, and religion. I would love to get the whole world to wake up to the Mother Earth,” said Glaser.

Glaser started her comedic career in San Diego doing improvisation with a feminist group called the Hot Flashes. She began writing her own one-woman shows after meeting her husband, Greg Howells, who encouraged her to create her own shows because of her extraordinary characters.

With the help of her husband, who was her director and co-writer, she wrote the show “Family Secrets,” which is a living portrait of Glaser’s five immediate family members. It is to this day the longest running one-woman show in off-Broadway history.
 
Glaser was in the middle of bringing her second show – ‘Oh My Goddess’ – to New York when her husband vanished in 1997, leaving her to raised their two children..
“I was in shock, and in fear because when someone disappears you can’t make it go away, there is no resolution,” said Glaser.

For awhile after this tragic news, Glaser performed her show, ‘Oh My Goddess,’ but soon decided she needed to take time to heal.

For the next ten years, she continued to write and do radio commentary. She then go involved in the world of cannabis cultivation with her partner at the time, who was a farmer. They opened a cooperative, ‘Love In It,’ which was the first cannabis dispensary in the village of Mendocino.

“That whole ten years of my life was fraught with trouble and cat and mouse games with fear. We did get raided, I did go to jail, I got a divorce, and lost everything to a degree. But out of that I got a show,” said Glaser.

This new show, ‘Taking the High Road’, is about mental health and the relationship with cannabis in that realm, Glaser explained. Glaser plays three characters from her early work – ‘Oh My Goddess’ and ‘Family Secrets’.

“I gave them stories that relate to cannabis, but unlikely characters to be like a bridge. My mother’s character for instance from ‘Family Secrets’ was mentally ill and in the end she had to choose between shock treatment or cannabis. I use the characters to talk to people who are struggling to make a decision,” explained Glaser.

Glaser continues to perform ‘Taking the High Road’ while she’s also made a move to doing stand-up in her show, ‘Funny Looking,’ which she performed for the first time last Friday at the Caspar Inn.

“Because all of my material over the last 30 years has so many comic jewels, I can come out as me. Out of character, now Sherry is standing up, just a mic, no props.”

“I just need a stage right now,” explained Glaser, “I have all of this material and it has been a real challenge to get it to the masses. I think it is because of my age and the depth. I have to burst through in a way they cannot ignore me.”

A desire to invoke change in others is an aspiration of Glaser’s you can find in all of her work on and off stage.

Glaser founded an activist group called Breast Not Bombs where women bare their breasts and carry signs that say what is indecent and obscene in the world, like war, racism, rape.

On Glaser’s website she writes, “We are here as women who are the bearers of life, and responsible for nursing our world into a state of well being, stand opposed to our children being killed around the world. We are here to symbolize that we can live in a culture of nurturance (symbolized by the breast) not a culture of war. We will use our feminine nature to wake people up, to cause a stir, to arouse people from their apathetic complacent slumber.”

In order to get people to look at the world differently, Glaser not only exposes secrets and presents alternative views, but appeals to the most fundamental feelings in people to draw them in.

Glaser rides that fine line between joy and sorrow in her shows. Some people will laugh at her jokes and some people will cry.

“I am about feeling,” explained Glaser, “If we knew what was really happening with each other there would be this incredible compassion.”
 
Describing a dream she had of women with yarn weaving through the streets of Washington D.C, she said, “You could shut down the whole city and go to the White House, and weep and wail. Women weeping about their children caught up in the prison industrial complex or these cannabis refugee moms running to Oregon and Colorado, or endless war. If they heard this sound of weeping that would change.”

On May 21, Glaser will perform ‘Taking the High Road’ at the Redwood Playhouse in Garberville, and on June 18 at the Point Arena Theater. She will also be doing family friendly improv comedy at Frankies’ in Mendocino April 28 at 6 p.m.


2015 PRESS RELEASE 

http://www.pr.com/press-release/634462

Off-Broadway Solo Show Star and Prodigal Daughter Sherry Glaser Returns to New York Theater with Serious Comedies “Oh My Goddess!” and “Taking the High Road” 9/18 & 9/19

Battle scarred but unbroken, Sherry Glaser - whose “Family Secrets” holds the title of the longest running one-woman show in Off-Broadway history - returns to New York theater stages with “Oh My Goddess!” at the United Solo Festival Friday, Sept. 18. The next night she performs her very personal “Taking The High Road: Comic Confessions From Behind The Cannabis Curtain” at The Alchemical Theatre Laboratory as a benefit for Drug Policy Alliance, Saturday, Sept. 19.

New York, NY, August 26, 2015 --(PR.com)-- “All day long it’s ‘God this’ and ‘God that’…It’s all about The Father,” says Sherry Glaser, star of the one-woman show, “Oh My Goddess: A Comedy of Biblical Proportions.” “Well, what about The Mother? How would our world be different if that Feminine Nurturing Power was as revered and acknowledged as Masculine Force?” Glaser’s show, which answers that question while asking others, is slated to descend upon New York at the United Solo Festival (USF) Friday, Sept. 18 at 9 p.m. for one performance only.

Sherry Glaser’s award-winning multiple-character “Family Secrets” took Off-Broadway by storm in 1995 and still holds the title of the longest running one-woman show in its history.

“When we closed ‘Family Secrets,’ my husband Greg Howells and I moved to Northern California with our two young children,” says Glaser. “Greg had been very involved in the creation of that show and he also directed it for the New York stage.”

Together they birthed a new show which brings back God’s Better Half - “the Jewish Mother of us all”—who wakes up after a 5,000 year nap to check on her children. Directed by Howells, the show ran previews in Los Angeles as “The Second Coming,” as well as in Northern California. Positive response was so strong they again found themselves on the brink of taking a show to New York.

Could history repeat itself?

“Then Greg vanished into thin air,” Glaser says. “In the middle of previews. And I fell apart.” Her devastation brought all the theater plans to a crashing halt.

Flash Forward 20 years later.

“I’m going home for the holidays,” jokes Glaser, referring to the High Holy Days in September that will be celebrated while she is in the Big Apple with not one, but two shows; and the native New Yorker will set foot once again on New York stages to share her special brand of grist from the Glaser Mill.

The day after the USF performance, Glaser launches her hilariously cathartic “Taking the High Road: Comic Confessions from behind the Cannabis Curtain” Saturday, Sept. 19 at 8 p.m. at The Alchemical Theatre Laboratory, as a one-night-only benefit for Drug Policy Alliance.

“The shows will fall right between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,” Glaser says. “And here comes the Great Jewish Mother—Ma—bringing comfort and joy. Like Santa Claus.”

“Oh My Goddess!” features Miguel De Cervantes who is truly bummed after learning from a psychic that he has been a waiter in all his lifetimes. But wait, there’s some Good News…soon after, Miguel finds himself chosen to channel the Goddess, Ma.

“Why me?” Miguel shrugs. “Everybody else was busy.”

The show has been tweaked with the fresh eyes of director Ricci Dedola who has been instrumental in assisting Glaser to deepen specific moments: “Sherry hits first and foremost emotionally,” says Dedola. “I cry as she cries.”

Together, they have brought the Goddess into 2015. “When the Buddhist Temple in Bangkok was recently bombed, Sherry was almost sick with worry for her daughter who is living there,” Dedola says. “We’ve incorporated that into the show as it conveys the depth of the Universal Mother’s feelings for her Children.”

And what happened to Greg Howells? His disappearance remains an unsolved mystery.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it,” says Glaser. “But throughout much of this sudden movement forward with the show and the various ‘angels’ who have stepped forward to help, I feel as though he’s right next to me. Winking.”

Praise for Sherry Glaser:

“Mother Earth, aka comic genius Sherry Glaser, wags her finger lamenting, 'What have we done to the Earth?' and slowly pulls a plastic bag out of her mouth, proving her point." -Toke of the Town Blog

"(Oh My Goddess) uses Glaser’s experience allegorically, as a springboard into the Universal. It's also a humorous forum for her progressive world view.” -L.A. Times

"Sherry Glaser is a supremely gifted and inventive performer. Devilishly clever, continually funny, touching, and politically perceptive. She gives great theater." -Michael Parenti, Author and Political Scientist

“Oh My Goddess”
Performer/Writer: Sherry Glaser
Director: Ricci Dedola
Producer: Love In It Productions
Friday, Sept. 18 at 9 p.m.
2015 United Solo Festival
410 West 42nd Street (Theatre Row), NYC
Theater Row Box Office or via www.telecharge.com (212-239-6200)
$19.25 ($1.25 theatre restoration charge included)

Sherry Glaser Website | http://www.sherryglaser.net
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/events/798197000296764/
Twitter | @sherryglaser

Publicist | Marlan Warren | Roadmap Communications
(323) 347-6762 | memoircity@gmail.com | http://losangelesnowthen.blogspot.com

For Photos, please contact Publicist or Sherry Glaser. Photos may be viewed at Glaser's website or Publicist's blog.

Video Clips:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB4ciXmYxrQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkztSqqBSO4

For more info re “Taking The High Road: Comic Confessions From Behind The Cannabis Curtain”: http://losangelesnowthen.blogspot.com


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