Rosie O'Donnell on her new one-woman show: 'I'm ready to tell my story'

Well, she's made us laugh for decades and now she's bringing her signature wit and heartfelt storytelling to a brand new one-woman show. We sat down with Rosie O'Donnell to talk about this exciting new chapter and the stories she's ready to share. Fear not! They say you can't come home again, but you can. And that's the great part of home, right? I'm a New Yorker through and through and this will always be my home. Everything that happened in my career happened here. I got a thing on Star Search in 1984 and then 1986 I was on Gimme a Break out in LA and then I came back to New York to be a VJ for VH1 and then from there Penny Marshall saw me and put me in the movies and then it took off. I started writing and before I knew it I had like an hour and a half show. It's not political at all. I have like a three minute segment. The rest of it is about being motherless and trying to mother five children, all of whom are adopted from different places in the country. The mother of five children. It's been the best thing in my life being a mother. By far. Outweighed anything in my career by a million. But I've gotten to the point in this show where there are, you know, moments of sadness but then peppered in with brilliant light and humor. Did you possibly adjust her medication? We talk about the day I found out my mother died, which I've never talked about publicly. I've written about it extensively. And the closing of the show is the last time I saw her before she died. So there are heavy parts where people cry. When I first started doing it in Dublin about a year and a half ago, when they would cry, I would cry. You know? Listen, I want you to leave knowing that life is beautiful, the dark parts and the light parts, and don't give up. This is a New Yorker story. It's a New Yorker's life. And Rosie O'Donnell's Common Knowledge is a limited 12-show run at the Darryl Raw Theatre in New York, July 22nd through August 8th.