SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO MS. EVERETT CAME to New York from Arizona, where she’d attended the state university on a choral scholarship. She spent a decade waitressing at Ruby Foo’s in Times Square and still serves tables from time-to-time, though not a soul knows where. She also takes work entertaining private parties.
“Murray Hill and I did a Christmas party for corporate people,” she says. “I said, ‘Are you sure they want me? Can you double-check, because that sounds like an HR nightmare.’ I did some party in some very wealthy person’s home, and you know I like to move around—I almost knocked over what I think was a Ming vase, and I remember the blood draining out of everyone’s faces. I was like, ‘O.K., I’m just going to keep singing.’ It was only funny because it didn’t break.”
Mr. Medlyn became acquainted with Ms. Everett when both were regulars in Automatic Vaudeville at Ars Nova, a musical comedy venue. He says he knew he had encountered a rare force.
“Bridget does things that should make people feel uneasy,” he says, “yet they are thrilled, elated and empowered. That is something I’ve never seen. Instead of just shocking people, [she] makes the audience feel like they are in on it—that she and the audience are on this fucked-up road trip together, drinking in the car, singing along with dirty songs, and feeling free and alive.”
That inclusiveness owes much to Ms. Everett’s casualness about being naked onstage, which she attributes to “reverse body dysmorphia,” a condition of total self-acceptance she had to reach in order to carve a place for herself in showbiz. If she didn’t learn to celebrate her body, she says, she never would have succeeded.
“I wasn’t a Broadway chorus girl, I wasn’t an actress, and physically I can’t think of anybody successful who looks like me,” she says. “There wasn’t anyone to emulate. I had to write for myself to give myself a job, because there were no jobs available. I created my own destiny, as corny as that sounds.”
“Bridget puts herself out there, sometimes in a painfully vulnerable way,” says Murray Hill, summing it up, “but [she] always comes out the victor of her own battle.”