Elayne Boosler

Calgary wins for my coldest New Year's Eve gig. That's when I learned Fahrenheit and Celsius cross at 40 below. I could see callers' breath coming out of my phone.

When I was growing up in comedy, there were maybe 10 comics in the whole country. Everyone had a day job. You worked free for years in little clubs, then you got your big break and became a star.

I don't categorize myself. I don't think I'm perceived as a female act by my audience. My fans include just as many men as women.

My fashion philosophy is, if you're not covered in dog hair, your life is empty.

When I played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve, I got to bring Wiley, my 85-pound black lab. He's responsible for my favorite New Year's memory of all: At the end of the show, he ran onstage and then out across all the tables in the showroom, sending champagne glasses and gamblers flying.

I wasn't funny as a kid. I remember enjoying comedians, but I never understood it was a job choice or a profession.

While editors and newspaper owners currently fret over shrinking readership and lost profits, they do the one thing that insures cutting their own throats; they keep reducing space for the one feature that attracts new young readers in the first place; the comic strips.

Guys wake up at your place and they expect breakfast. They don't eat bagels and M&M's in the morning. They want things like toast. I say, 'I don't have these recipes.'

I personally cannot tell you how many times we rescuers put our names on animals to come to us as soon as they are eligible for release, only to find they have been senselessly killed by overzealous pound workers.

When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It's a whole different way of thinking.

Now that the Court has declared money to be speech, I say we replace the current Court with some Ben Franklins, Thomas Jeffersons, George Washingtons, a couple of Susan B. Anthony's, Roosevelts, Hamiltons, a Sacajawea or two, and an Abe Lincoln to cover Scalia in full.

I never minded flying cheap. I always said to myself, 'Taking this flight saves enough money to rescue four dogs, or six cats, or will let me make a difference to the one woman saving chimps in Cameroon.'