Dangerous When Wet: Jamie Brickhouse Reflects on Life, Love, and Addiction

Jamie Brickhouse expects a “Will & Grace crowd” for his solo show Dangerous When Wet: Booze, Sex, and My Mother.

“I like to say the Will & Grace crowd is a big part of my audience—gay men and straight women—but I’ve discovered that the show has drawn audiences well beyond that group,” he said. “One of my marketing lines is ‘This is a show for anyone who’s ever had a mother or is a mother.’”

Dangerous When Wet was adapted from Brickhouse’s memoir of the same name and has been gathering awards since its stage debut in 2016. There will be two performances at Denver’s Bug Theatre at 7:30 p.m. on May 17 and 18. Each performance will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing with Brickhouse. Books will be available for purchase. Tickets are $20 and available online.

“It’s about my drinking life and my relationship with my over-the-top mother Mama Jean and how they’re both kind of alcoholic relationships,” Brickhouse said. “One nearly destroys me—the booze—and one ends up saving me—Mama Jean—despite my trying to escape her all-consuming love by leaving my small town in Texas and landing in New York City, where I’ve been ever since college.”

Memoirs are inherently personal and can be difficult enough to write, but Brickhouse upped the ante by bringing his life to the stage, telling his stories face-to-face.

“I’m a big ham,” he said. “However, I had some trepidation about revealing so much about myself, but I went through that when I was writing the book. Everything I’m telling has already been therapy-ized, recovery-ized, and scribe-ized, so I dealt with the issues off-stage first. I’ve gone through the pain or the joy and processed all the emotions, which has given me a healthy distance from the material.”

After ten years of sobriety, Brickhouse can tell these stories without feeling overwhelmed by them.

“Whatever I’m going through right now in my life that I’m not telling you about, I’m not going to perform a story about, because I haven’t processed it yet,” Brickhouse said. “Give me two weeks or two years or ten years, and then you might see it on the stage or the page.”

Even before his memoir and solo show, Brickhouse was a storyteller, winning four StorySLAM championships with The Moth, a non-profit storytelling group that hosts monthly events across the country.

Moth events are a cross between open mic nights and speech competitions. The brave toss their names into a hat, and the ten selected have five minutes to tell a true story related to that month’s theme.

Denver’s Moth is hosted by Kevin Carlin, who will moderate Saturday’s Q&As after Dangerous When Wet.

“Everybody has stories, whether they think they do or not,” Carlin said. “There’s a whole world of these sorts of shows out there.”

Moth events do not feature Q&As, so Carlin said he’s looking forward to hearing the discussion following the performance, as one story can cause many different responses.

“Everybody gets something different out of it,” Carlin said. “There’s a host in New York who would always talk about the 300 people in the audience, and this one person’s telling a story, and there are 300 different stories going on in the audience’s heads.”

The first night’s Q&A will be led by Denver drag queen Jessica L’whor, who sees the show’s ability to unite Denver’s queer community.

“When people go through struggles, go through depressions—especially alcoholism and drug abuse, and suicide rates are extremely high in the queer community—people in our community look to others that have not only gone through experiences, but found empowerment through their experiences,” L’whor said. “It’s this idea of ‘I’m not hindered by my experiences and what has happened to me, but I’m able to talk to larger audiences that can relate to what I’ve gone through.’”

The whole point of the show, Brickhouse said, is to create an emotional experience for the audience—besides the gravitas, laughter is a key part of that experience.

“It’s darkly comic, and even though there’s loads of heavy stuff in there, it’s a funny show,” Brickhouse said. “There’s a silo of funny booze tales—from drunk-dialing Peggy Lee to scenes in a gay porno shop to a three-way in Acapulco to rehab, where I was the only gay guy and felt like it was my worst nightmare, 24/7 P.E. class.”

Photos by Mikiodo and Derek DeWitt.