Atlanta’s newest ‘Diva’
New Lifetime series brings Cho to the ATL

Friday, May 08, 2009 | By: RYAN LEE

MOVING TO ATLANTA FOR FIVE months, spending a good portion of the day in sleepy Peachtree City and being thousands of miles away from loved ones sometimes has Margaret Cho missing California. But as anyone who’s familiar with Cho knows, there’s no better medicine for her occasional homesickness than a heavy dose of homosexuals.

“I have a lot of friends [in Atlanta], which is cool because I don’t feel like — I mean, I’m certainly a little bit homesick because I miss my family, and my husband and stuff, and that’s hard — but I think it’s so great here,” Cho tells Southern Voice.

“It’s very gay, which is very cool,” she says. “It’s like the gayest place and you can’t believe that it’s in Georgia because it’s super liberal and cool.”

Cho is in town for the summer to shoot the first season of the new Lifetime series “Drop Dead Diva,” a quirky comedic drama due out in July that explores the tensions between external beauty and internal character. When a blonde bombshell named Deb (played by Brooke D’Orsay) dies in a car crash, she learns from heaven’s gatekeeper that her life was too shallow for her to gain entry into eternal paradise.

She begs to have another chance with her life, but instead of being sent back to her former knockout body, Deb must repair her karma while her spirit occupies the body of a brainy-but-plus-sized attorney named Jane (played by Broadway actress Brooke Elliott in a breakout TV role).

Cho’s role as Terri, Jane’s legal assistant, provides much comic relief, but also helps the lead character sort through her identity drama.

“I’m her Miss Moneypenny,” Cho says, referencing the iconic secretary who kept the spies of the British Secret Service on track in James Bond movies.

“It’s a fun role,” she says. “I fell in love with the whole premise and felt that it was such a great show.”

ALTHOUGH CHO MISSES HER friends and family on the West Coast, there are some parts of her home state that are making her sick — not homesick.

On the set of “Drop Dead Diva,” which is being shot in three hangar studios in Peachtree City, Cho fumes about the ongoing controversy involving Miss California Carrie Prejean, who is now trumpeting her anti-gay views on behalf of far right-wing groups such as the National Organization for Marriage.

“People like that are so disgusting. That, to me, is so gross,” Cho says of Prejean. “You represent California and you have to be a bigot — does that mean Californians are going to be seen as bigots and homophobic and just so ignorant? It’s just really disgusting to me and really troubling.”

It’s hard to imagine that Cho would find a reprieve from West Coast bigotry by fleeing to the Deep South, but she’s been pleasantly surprised by how thoroughly gay Atlanta is.

“There’s a lot of restaurants that are queer-owned, there’s a lot bars, there’s a lot of places to go that are tailored or exclusively for gay clientele, which I think is awesome in what you would consider a conservative city,” she says.

But Cho is also impressed that gay folks aren’t restricted to a gay ghetto, but instead able to express themselves in straight venues in areas like Little Five Points and East Atlanta.

“I think in a lot of cities the gays and the lesbians have their own bars, and it’s really separated,” Cho says. “But here, it’s not segregated in that way.”

CHO HAS BEEN SPOTTED STROLLING through the Inman Park Festival and partying with gay anti-crime crusader Kyle Keyser. She’s also working on a song with the gender pop trio Girlyman, who recently relocated from New York to Atlanta.

“I just really love their music and I wanted to write with them,” she says. “Since I’m living here now, this was like the perfect opportunity.

“So I just got really lucky with that and I’m excited about it,” she says, adding that she hopes to perform with Girlyman at Eddie’s Attic on Aug. 2.

“We’re going to try to make it happen,” Cho says. “We’ll see — if I can get out of work in time, or whatever, but I plan on doing that.

“And they’ve agreed to do stuff with me for MondoHomo, too,” says Cho, who hopes her work schedule allows her to play at the queer music festival later this month.

Cho began playing the guitar last year, and is immersing herself in her new craft while living in Atlanta.

“That’s the majority of my downtime, and then the rest is going into Atlanta, hanging out and having fun,” she says. “But it’s fun — it’s just messing around with it, it’s not really anything serious. It’s just to have another way to tell jokes, through music.”