Heather McMahan used to stalk Joan Rivers’ shows.
She bartended across the street from a basement comedy club in Hell’s Kitchen, so she knew where the unmarked back entrance was, and one Fat Tuesday she got off early and waited outside it.
When Joan came out, the first thing she said was: oh my God, you’re gorgeous. Then she handed her a string of Mardi Gras beads and gave her ten minutes she didn’t owe her.
Over the next few years, in book-signing lines and outside theaters, Joan kept telling her the same thing — keep going, you have a commercial look, go to LA.
So she went. Within her first 24 hours in Los Angeles she’d been in a car accident and had an allergic reaction to a bad spray tan, which she read as the universe telling her to go home.
Two weeks in, a bartender friend called to say Joan had just walked into a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Heather drove over, went to the table, said she’d taken the advice and moved, and declined the photo the assistant offered.
On her way out, Joan came looking for her across the room: you’ve got chutzpah, you listened, you’re going to make it. Heather got to the valet, called her father, and dry-heaved into the phone.
In this conversation with David Begnaud, she talks about the father who mailed her sorority a list of ten reasons she should quit theater and join the Air Force, and who died of pancreatic cancer seven days after his diagnosis at 57. About writing him a million-dollar check she couldn’t cover, and cashing it two years later.
About self-financing all three of her specials rather than wait for permission, and getting the Netflix call from a wine cellar in Florence. About the Ryder Cup, and the death threats, and what Joan would have told her to do about it. And about the bee that keeps turning up — her father’s sign, and, she discovered years later, Joan’s emblem too.
Heather McMahan’s new special By a Thread premieres on Hulu on October 16, 2026.
