The Fat Ass Cancer Bitch Goes Shopping

By: iO Staff, July 3, 2012

Christine Rathbun Ernst returns to the Cotuit Center for the Arts’ Black Box Theater this summer with her latest one-woman show, The Fat Ass Cancer Bitch Goes Shopping.

Edgy, unapologetic, funny, wickedly honest, hell-bent and loudmouthed, Ernst is a writer, poet and performer who makes her home in Sandwich. Her play about her battle with breast cancer, Reconstruction or How I Learned to Pay Attention, has been performed more than 40 times all over New England.

Her Black Box show last summer The Further Adventures of a Fat Ass Cancer Bitch sold out, so early reservations to FACB Goes Shopping are recommended.

The “Fat Ass Cancer Bitch” got her name from an insult hurled at her by a neighbor, angry that Ernst was returning a pile of dog excrement that the neighbor's dog had deposited on her lawn. Amused by the epithet, Ernst adopted the name as her own, taking exception only to the “fat ass” part.

Realizing that 90 percent of her new ideas for monologues came to her while she was in a Stop & Shop or on her way to one, Ernst has gathered together her wry observations on life, such as why tomatillos have no PLU code and Citizens Bank was out of purple lollipops.

For a long time, Ernst felt that she should only write if something “important” happened.

“In a weird way,” she said, “when I was sick with cancer, I thought, 'Finally something important to write about.' I could still write about the mundane, but I had something important to hang it on.”

Breast cancer taught her to pay attention and live life to the fullest. In “The Fat Ass Cancer Bitch Goes Shopping, she discovers humor and relevance in all sorts of things, many of which reference the grocery store, happen on the way to the store, or relate to the everyday experience of shopping.

The Black Box Theater is a perfect venue for the monologue, Ernst said.

“I love it,” she said. “Performing in that intimate space is like having a conversation with your best friend.”

Ernst performs her work regularly on stage and at open mics on Cape Cod. She has been featured in the magazine MAMM and in the literary journal Ars Medica. Two of her plays were named Massachusetts Cultural Council grant finalists.