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Sara Contreras is not just Sexy but hilarious, she won the Latino Laugh Festival Award and has been in Law and Order, Latin Divas Comedy, and many more TV shows and comedy festivals all over the US. Sara Contreras appeared in TV shows such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Conviction (NBC), and The Original Latin Divas of Comedy.
My parents for teaching me my work ethic; my son for making me a mother; my daughter for her smile; my sister Bibi, a 911 first responder; my siblings Maria & Luis for helping me love the hearing impaired; Susan Rein, my professional mentor; Freddie Prinze for giving me comedic inspiration; Roberto Clemente; Helen Keller; Shirley Maclaine; Karl Marx; Isabel Allende.
Television - Talent - Comedian
MTV3 "Wanna Be Latinos;" Showtime "Original Latin Divas of Comedy;" SITV "Funny is Funny;" ABC "The View;" Comedy Central; Metrochannel "New Joke City" with Robert Klein
Film - Drama - Acting
NBC "Law & Order SVU;" "Third Watch;" "Conviction;" several indies
Theatre - Drama - Acting
monologist; stand-up comedy
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"The Latin Divas of Comedy" is a holiday release I meant to tell you about weeks ago, but still worth mentioning. It features standup by Marilyn Martinez, Sara Contreras, Monique Marvez and Laredo girl Sandra Valls, who now makes her home in Los Angeles.
It's not one of George Lopez's HBO specials (I can watch his show over and over again), but "Latin Divas" is entertaining, bold and well-produced. Women comics don't get the attention that male comedians do, so this DVD is welcome. Several of its divas discuss this with host Alex Reymundo. Their talks are intermingled with their routines, making for good introductions.
The show's California audience was ideal, and a few of them play hilarious, memorable roles in the show. Latinas everywhere will enjoy the show.
"Latin Divas" is also bittersweet as it features a longtime comedian who died a few weeks before the DVD's release.
A few of these comics were new to me. Contreras is a Puerto Rican from Brooklyn, raising two children. One is a son reluctant to leave the nest. ("Papi, get a job.") Marvez, a Cuban-Puerto Rican-Venezuelan, is from Miami and a relationship warrior loaded with advice.
"Why is it that you can't change a man?" she asks her audience rhetorically. "Because they are in their simplest form." This stems, in part she says, because men possess outdoor plumbing. Women, on the other hand, are "crazy and complicated." Marvez is a standout.
Valls, who studied acting at UT and musical theater in New York, was born in Nebraska but grew up on the border as a lesbian in a family that wanted her to be "like your cousin. She works in a bank."
"I grew up wanting to be the Fonz," she says. "How could my parents not see the signs?"
But it's Martinez who takes center stage as the show's senior diva. A longtime Comedy Store regular, Martinez died last November of colon cancer. She was beloved on the circuit. Several friends including comedians Carlos Mencia, Paul Rodriguez and Pauly Shore put on benefits on her behalf.
Martinez was big and brassy. In an obituary by the Associated Press, her husband said, "She used to tell me she was a triple minority. She was fat, she was a woman, she was Hispanic."
In the mid-1990s, she was part of a group called the Hot and Spicy Mamitas. She also joined the Hot Tamales with Eva Longoria Parker.
In this DVD of Showtime's "Latin Divas of Comedy," you'll see that she really was its anchor.
As an aside, Reymundo, one of the Original Latin Kings of Comedy alongside Lopez and Cheech Marin, released a DVD in November, too. It's called "Hick-Spanic," a reference to his children who are the products of a Latino and what Reymundo calls a hillbilly from Kentucky. "Both families spend the day debating who married up," he says.
Tags: sarah contreras