With her hand clasped tightly, and her eyes turned toward the sky, San Francisco, singing comedian, Jane Dornacker says, grandly, “My mother always told me to dare to be different.” Jane pauses for a moment, allowing the thought to sync in, and ads, “I don’t think she had any idea of how different I would actually be.”

Relaxing on a dark bench at Fishermans, wharf, Dornacker, who is better known around the Bay Area by her exotic stage name, Leila T. (The “t” stands for “the”) Snake, is wearing a pair of wacky looking boys, black, high top, tennis shoes, and purple balloon pants. The buxom Jane Dornacker is a statuesque of 6”4” and has wild flouncy red hair. Making something of an attempt to be serious, she says, “No really. She always encouraged me to be myself and as it turns out,” she explains, “that happens to be a source of amusement for people.” Leila T. Snake will be appearing at the Boarding House Friday through next Sunday.
As she watches the tiny waves lap up on the beach, Jane comments that bay swimming is one of her hobbies. A bona fide member of the Dolphin Club, she says that earlier today, she swam a mile and 1/2 in the icy water. She also mentions that cleaning house is another favorite past time. But she adds, “I only do it once a year, and then,” she explains, “only one room at a time.” In seeming contrast to her size, Dornacker has a high-pitched, sweet and crackly voice. She sounds like Jonathan Winter’s Ma Frickerd. Indeed, Jane Dornacker performs a whole assortment of “bag, ladies,” or rather “bag person”s for her comedy sketches.
Jane Dornacker insists she doesn’t invent her “people”. They are just there. She says, “I think they’ve been inside me for a long time. I just try to give them visual form.” Jane, who also plays piano and sings her own “compositions” on stage, uses a wide variety of costumes. Everything from Jewel’s mostly knitted outfit to this skimpy ‘Frontier Nurse” get up. “To me, the funniest things are visual things,” says Dornacker. “Like Jonathan Winters. I mean, it doesn’t matter, even if it’s a bad script or if it’s a Cheetos commercial, he’s always funny he just is.”
Jane realized that she happened to just be one of those funny people herself, when she was only in sixth grade. Given the part of a scarecrow for a Girl Scout play, she realized that all she had to do was stand there, and people would laugh. It seemed like whatever she did turned out funny. Like when she worked at the Casbah as a belly dancer. “It was because I kept knocking down the tent,” says Jane. “You see, I have these 4 inch calcium deposits on my heels.” Eventually, Dornacker knocked down the tent one time too many and the young drama student found herself out of work.
“I got a job as a piano player at the Palms,” says Jane. “Pretty soon people started laughing at that too. After a while, I got a couple of girls from my dance class to come over. And we started doing a little cabaret show.”
Soon, Leila and the Snakes, as they were called, began to draw quite a crowd of comedy lovers. Among them was Bill Spooner of the San Francisco rock band, the Tubes. According to Dornacker, Spooner fell in love with one of he girls and the long and short of it was, “We became the dancers for the Tubes. For a better part of two years, I was out on the road with them.”
Not only did she dance, but Jane Dornacker wrote two songs, “Cathy’s Clone” (and in collaboration with Bay Area songwriter Ron Nagle) “Don’t Touch Me There.” Both songs were recorded by the Tubes and “Don’t Touch Me There.” received considerable airplay in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In 1976, Leila left the Tubes and began performing by herself, first accompanied by a rock band and now, as a single stand-up comic.
Only 17 years old at the time, Dornacker came to San Francisco in 1965. When asked why she moved here, Jane stops and looks slightly confused. “Well, I wanted to go to school,” she pauses and then says suddenly. “Oh. I remember why I came to San Francisco! I came to start the hippie movement!”
Jane Dornacker’s academic career wasn’t nearly so successful as “her hippie movement.” While enrolled in “four or five classes” at San Francisco State, she was elected homecoming queen. “Well, it was an illegal platform,” Dornacker confesses. “People were just starting to go crazy enough to vote for me.” Just exactly what that “illegal platform” was”, what that “illegal platform” was, Dornacker prefers to leave up to the imagination. “I had to drop out of my classes to attend to my homecoming duties. Pretty soon I had to drop out of y duties.”
Shortly after dropping out, Jane began to study drama seriously. She worked with playwright Sam Shepard and appeared in several of his plays, taking leading female roles in “The Death and Life of Jesse James” and “In a Coma.”
In addition to doing stand-up. Jane is currently co-hostess, along with Scoop Nisker on Video West, Channel 26on Wednesday and Saturday Nights. Though she admits she would love to, someday, have her own television show, she says breathlessly, her eyes focused on the fogy horizon, that her life-long ambition is, “to be the greatest actress the world has ever seen.”
A serious actress?
She looks over and smiles. “Well, no.” Then she explains. “A fun Actress.”