With a family line hailing from Cahersiveen, and a childhood spent practising her one-two-threes in her step classes, Cara Connors' first gig in Ireland is something of a home coming - just not in the way you might expect.
Despite her Irish-American roots, it is the queer community that Connors has set her sights on, bypassing the typical tourist haunts for the alternative stand-up scene.
"I just said to my girlfriend, 'hey, want to try and go to Europe?'," she laughs. "There are some progressive cities that speak English, and I don't know if they'll like my humour but we'll find soon find out."
"I'm very curious about the stand-up scene in Ireland," she adds. "Irish people are funny and they don't take any bulls**t from people, and I like that attitude. I'm excited to see what people respond to."
"Each city I'm finding a local queer comedian to open it up. I have Bláithín de Burca opening in Whelans, and she runs an intersectional talk show so I knew she was perfect."
"I've been researching all these spaces in Ireland like the MOB theatre, Token Straight, Hysteria, and all these podcasts and all the Drag scenes - that's one of the most fun things about going on the road, I get to ingratiate myself into the queer scene and comedy spaces and see what's going on."
Cleverly named Straight For Pay, Connors' tour tracks her personal journey from leaving her marriage and embracing her sexuality to highlighting the often casual exploitation of the queer community.
"I was straight for free for the first big chunk of my life - giving it to people for nothing!"
"I was serving the most straight looks and the most straight life. Now I refuse to be straight unless someone pays me. That's the fun thing, taking parts and spots from straight actors and straight comedians."
"Also, it's a cheeky play on the porn search term. And if you go a level deeper, it's about people exploiting queer people for their bodies by using porn but then telling queer people that you don't like their life or lifestyle choices."
"It's sort of a way of flagging all different kinds of people. And trying to p*ss off certain people as well."
With much of her journey of self discovery happening on stage, the comic says she found her identity slowly but surely (and very publicly), leading her to create a unique brand of high energy, self-effacing and unapologetically feminist and queer humor.
"I think I honestly figured it out because I was doing comedy," she tells me. "Writing is my main form of expression. Sometimes you're talking something out and you don't realise you feel a certain way until you've said it out loud."
"Before I came out, I was writing jokes about how funny it was that everybody thought I was gay even though I was married to a man."
"My subconscious was truly writing jokes in the hopes that I would hear it back," she laughs. "But it took me another year."
Speaking on attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community, both in America and abroad, Connors says she feels it's important to celebrate the queer community as loudly and as often as possible, on behalf of those who don't have the same opportunities.
"I'm in a privileged position, I live somewhere where it's safe to be queer, and everybody around me completely embraces me and supports me. I try to be outspoken about it for the people who can't be outspoken about it, and counter act some of the negative messaging that's out there."
Cara Connors plays Straight For Pay in Whelans on Tuesday, 28th of June in Whelans.
