Published: January 12, 2002
Section: DAILY BREAK, page E1
Source: VANDANA SINHA THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
© 2002- Landmark Communications Inc.

``A round of applause if I sound a little intoxicated. Do I?'' he slurs slowly. The audience answers with loud claps.``It's not because I AM intoxicated,'' he explains. ``It's because I have cerebral palsy. It means I'm the only member of my family who's an Olympian. Hey, I'm a gold medalist. I beat a blind kid in archery.'' Laughter. Applause.
Meet Guillermo Johnson Marfori. Best known as Will, because Willy never sounded quite right to impress the girls. His job is to make the crowd laugh for 15 minutes, to tell the audience that there's a $4 minimum and they should be good to their wait staff.

Will is the opening act each weekend for Comedy Zone at Waterside. He holds nothing back. His audience buckles with laughter at things that would normally make them cringe. They listen for more. He loves every minute of it. Because he's learning to love who he becomes on stage. Himself.

People always say, `I don't want to offend you, but . . . ' One time, someone asked me, `What the hell is wrong with you?' ``Well,'' he pauses. ``I've got this burning sensation between my legs. . . .''

The truth? His mom's placenta broke. If it hadn't, maybe oxygen would have traveled to Will's brain during the delivery. Maybe he wouldn't have needed therapists to teach him how to walk or talk or tie his shoelaces. Maybe he would have been the ``normal'' kid he always sat next to in grade school. But then he wouldn't be Will.

And his stand-up bit would be about 12 minutes shorter.

Even in that time, he can't cover everything. Like how he started going to physical and speech therapy when he was 18 months old. How he'd have to grip a pen so hard to write that his hand would cramp up. How at about 9, when he put a hand in front of his right eye, he noticed that he had no peripheral vision.  He's sure other kids made fun of him. They probably mocked the way he lumbered into a room, his slurred speech. He doesn't quite remember.  He'll never forget what his parents did: Treat him as they did his younger brother and sister, as if he'd come through birth without a single scar.  ``I made him pick up his toys. I made him run and play. I didn't put him in a padded room and think he could break,'' said Martha R. Marfori, who raised him in a Springfield suburb. ``I don't think he realized there was anything wrong with him, either.''

He didn't, not through childhood, when happiness was a Nintendo at Christmas. He played Little League baseball. He had friends. He made the grades. Then he started to notice that he was different. He fought to be the same. In high school, he was on the debate team, in a quiz club, elected senior class president, working after-school jobs. If he was the smartest and the hardest-working, he reasoned, no one could pity him. ``It's hard to feel sorry for someone who's better off than you.'' And yet, he stood out. In the gymnasium. While walking to class. By senior year, loneliness turned to bitterness. And depression.

``I felt like people knew who I was, but they didn't know me,'' he said. ``There was this image. Here's this kid with cerebral palsy who's so cool. But no one sat and talked to me about how I felt or how lonely I was. So I put up this front.'' Eventually, he realized, it didn't matter that no one asked him how he felt about cerebral palsy. He'd find a way to tell them. Have you ever fought with a disabled person? Don't mess with us. We'll show up in our bus. We're hard core. We're the original Crips. But we don't have a gang sign because we can't move our fingers.'' The audience roars. He beams like a little boy. That's one of his favorite jokes.

Will remembers that first laugh. He was in sixth grade. His vice principal drafted him to talk to first-grade classes about living with a disability. For the first time, people asked him what it was like to be disabled. They asked innocently, without the awkward silences he'd grown accustomed to. He joked with them. They made Will feel comfortable talking about himself.

Seven years later, at Old Dominion University, another group gave Will a second chance to talk about his cerebral palsy: the brothers of Alpha Tau Omega. They'd rib him about walking straight, tease him when he spilled a drink. They made Will laugh at himself. Finally, he saw comedy in his condition.

So you two in the audience, are you guys dating? Yeah? She's your date? Man, look at how happy she is! My dates never look like that. They're thinking, `When is this crap getting over with? I'm not volunteering for the Make-A-Wish Foundation anymore. . . .'' Will's mother always thought he'd be a politician. Maybe a lawyer. He'd talk so easily in front of large groups, would never feel those annoying butterflies. For four summers at ODU, he performed skits, tossed out one-liners and dabbled in improv in front of hundreds of incoming freshmen and their parents during orientation. He thought up jokes. The world's worst thing to say when delivering a baby: ``Hut, hut, one . . . two . . . HIKE!'' A wedding toast: ``Roses are red. Violets are blue. Your wife is a slut, too.'' A new raffle game: Teens who found cardboard under their chairs win a two-day vacation at Nags Head, except, of course, that a hurricane washed out that hotel, so here's this nice ODU T-shirt.

He quipped about male genitalia. He jested about getting drunk. He made the teens relate to him. It no longer mattered how slowly he talked or clumsily he ran. He'd make up jokes at night in the computer lab. Mulled them over on his 10-minute walks to class. The first joke he ever wrote: ``When you grow up as a kid with a disability, everything's a celebration. It's like `Woo-hoo! Will's 5 and is finally walking.' `Woo-hoo! Will's 7 and he's done breast feeding.' `Woo-hoo! Will's 12 and he's done peeing on himself.' When I finally had sex, my mom threw a parade.''

Two years ago, he won a university contest to host one night at the Thoroughgood Inn, a professional club in Virginia Beach. It was his first stage for stand-up. And it opened a door. He performed Amateur Night at the Inn for a year and a half, before finally winning an audition last June to open at the Comedy Zone. 

``There's always an element of truth in comedy,'' said Brad L.C. Greenberg, Comedy Zone's owner and operator. ``He's genuine.'' On stage, nothing about Will is cosmetic. It's the same Will in the gray T-shirt and khaki pants who lounges on his apartment couch, watching TV. He doesn't hide the occasional awkwardness of his movements, shuffling his feet and constantly stepping forward and backward as if he's searching for the perfect stance. He treats the microphone stand like a dance partner, dipping and dragging it across the stage. His fingers fumble with the wire. His eyes take a few seconds to focus at times.

But those 15 minutes on stage are the best 15 minutes of his day.

Each time, Will hears people laugh at his jokes. Each time, he's able to talk about his disability, about growing up half-Filipino, ``about my extreme lack of ability to get love.'' Each time, he's come closer to accepting who he is. He still has to keep his day job as a computer programmer to pay the bills, but comedy has become the emotional release he's wanted for a quarter-century. On stage, it's OK to be different.

``People build up all these facades. I'm this race. I'm this social class. I'm athletic. I'm a fat person. People make assumptions about each other all the time,'' he said. ``If people leave and say a person with a disability has a sense of humor, and is fun to be with, that's cool, man.''

Reach Vandana Sinha at vsinha(AT)pilotonline.com or 446-2318.