MAUREEN Potter recently contradicted with two words - "June Rodgers" - the suggestion that there was no one to take up her baton on the variety circuit. This year for the first time the new kid on the block has achieved the coveted prize of top billing in the Gaiety panto.
June Rodgers is facing 80 shows as the ship's cook, Polly Saturate, in Sin bad, written by Maeve Ingoldsby and directed by Brian de Salvo: "She fancies Sinbad and he doesn't know she's breathing," explains June, between rehearsals. "Frank Mackey is the ship's mate, and he makes a comic duo with me, then there's Pat Kinevane as Zendor the baddie, a yuppy with a mobile phone, `You know, roight', trying to stop Sinbad rescuing Shamira. And Raymond Keane from Barabbas is his side-kick, Grot. Alex Sharpe, who's Shamira, gets Sinbad." She screws up a face she can mould like plasticine: "Oy hay her guts."
This is an important year for the Gaiety panto: it's the 125th anniversary year, and research has shown that there have been at least 102 pantos, stretching back to Turko The Terrible by a certain Edwin Hamilton in 1873. It is also the first year in nearly a decade that the theatre has produced its own panto, rather than drafting in a production company, because the new owner, Break For The Border plc, sees the sure-fire show as an important earner.
Topping the bill is a huge step for a woman only three years into a full-time professional career. She still says things like: "My mother used be glued every Friday night to the Late Late Show. If she'd known her daughter would, be on it!" Hers has been an unusual route to panto prominence - all the more so in these days of increase professionalism.
She explains "I worked for nine and a half years for a Japanese company called Fujitsu - you wouldn't want to say that with a few drinks on you. I spent eight hours a day looking down a micro-scope at cells on microchips." Then Fujitsu started a society to get together an act for the John Player Tops Of The Town: "Of course," says June, "I was put in the back row with the ones with varicose veins, and all the fatties, waving my arms and swaying with. a fixed grin on my face for six months." When she finally made a break for a higher billing, she says, "I looked like an orangutan. My. sister told me I was making a fool of myself. People were laughing at me, not with me. There is a big difference."
This is the hinge on which the conversation turns. June Rodgers is a big woman, and her size is both an obstacle she has had to get over before going on stage at all, and an intrinsic part of her act: "I've spent my life being laughed at for my size," she says. "I was laughed at at school. People think, `because she's big you can say whatever you like to her'. It would be like going up to someone with bad skin and saying, `God, your face is full of pimples'. I feel very sorry for the kids with weight on, I know what they're going through. It got to the stage where I wouldn't walk out the door. And then, at that time, there was nothing for big kids but smock dresses with ruffles and a big bow hanging down the front."
"I'd starve myself, and then you put on more weight anyway. With the amount of energy I use, and the amount of running around I do, my family would say, `I don't know why you're not a size 10'. When you're big, people think you. go home and sit on a couch stuffing your face. When in fact I go into the kitchen and stuff my face." She laughs. `Just joking'. My attitude now is, you take me as I am. I'm not going to get my jaws wired. I would feel sorry for anyone who has a problem with that. I look at people within."
It's obvious she comes from an extremely strong and supportive family background. Born in Tallaght village, she and her parents moved to Brittas when the new town exploded. They were only a few weeks in the house when June's mother died. She and her father moved back to Firhouse, but they only had the house finished a week when her father died: "It's a happy story, isn't it? They're going to think it's something to do with me." Behind the joking, there's a real lament: "My mother never saw me on the stage.
There was no tradition of theatre in the family, just a tradition of fun: "We'd go on Sunday drives and my mother and father would be singing in the front, and we'd be falling asleep in the back. I used to sing into the mirror with the hairdryer, you know" - and she picks up a fork and screws up her face.
While rehearsing for the Tops Of The Town she had developed with writers like Tom Hayes and Martin Higgins, characters like the fat, obnoxious child boiling with fury at Miss Perfect, Jacinta O'Brien - ("She always gets her own back", reports June, with satisfaction) - and the big agricultural lump of a bangharda. Her big break came when she went in for a talent competition at the Clontarf Castle Hotel, and Gay Byrne was in the audience: "Thank God I didn't know he was there. But the next Friday I had three minutes on the Late Late Show."
She did Bridget the Bangharda and a Henry Street dealer, and then she gave an interview, "the first interview I'd ever given as myself". It went down a bomb and her ascent to the stellar heights of top billing at the Gaiety Panto really began on that night:
"On Saturday when I went into The Square, people were winking and pointing at me."
She took the plunge and went professional: "I had a mortgage and all that. But my family said they wouldn't see me starve. I wouldn't see myself starve."
"And," she suddenly announces, flashing a row of diamonds in front of me, "I got engaged. To Peter. He's normal, he's not in the business." Peter, who has his own delivery business, came to one of June's shows at Clontarf Castle with some of her friends: "They told me, `This guy Peter would like to meet you', and I thought, what's wrong with him? I went away on holidays, but when (I came back, I went out with him, and I thought he was very nice. And then - we fell madly in love."
She is getting married in September of next year, but domestic bliss has already been established, a black Labrador pup making three: "That's the child," says June. And what about less furry children? June admits that Peter would like that, but then quips: "I told him I'm not going to ruin my figure for any man."
Home is a refuge from what she says "can be a very false business. Sometimes, you'd get the dagger in your back because you didn't come up through the ranks. A lot of them wouldn't like it, because you're seen as a threat. People who have been very good in their time, and now's the time to let the new people come in."
TIME at home with Peter is increasingly scarce, however.
This year she did 15 weeks of her own cabaret show at Clontarf Castle Hotel, whose boards are well-trodden by Maureen Potter. Most of her other work is comedy for corporate functions, and her aim is to "get up there and make people laugh without getting into dirt."
"I don't do pubs and I don't do men, she says. "They want mother-in-law and toilety jokes. I made the decision not to do men-only audiences after one corporate function. I was absolutely petrified and I spent the day in the bathroom. The audience were mostly men who had been playing golf for the day, and they didn't want a woman comic. One man - maybe it had been a long day for him - said in the middle of my act, `Excuse me, dear, would it not be better if you got off the stage, took off your costume, and went home.' Then he turned to the man beside him and said, `You were saying...'
"Don't worry", says June, "I'll remember his face till the day I die, and when I meet him, God bless his little cotton socks, I'll be dug ou'a him"