Sandra Tsing Loh Click photo for larger image.

In the crowded field of female writers who agonize over the state of motherhood today, Sandra Tsing Loh stands apart. Her lack of self-pity is striking. Her intelligence is laser-beam-focused, her sense of humor is outrageous, her command of American culture broad and deep.

Best of all, she seems to be as broke as the rest of us.

A Los Angeles-based humorist, performance artist, novelist, public radio commentator and columnist for The Atlantic Monthly, Loh speaks to the overeducated, aspirational and insecure if not completely neurotic middle-class parent of young children who, confronted with $20,000-plus-a-year private school tuition, must instead deal with the reality of an urban public school system and the panicky prospect of "spiraling out of the middle class."

Her own frantic year-long efforts to get her child into a "good" kindergarten in Los Angeles' sprawling school district inspired her latest one-woman show, "Mother on Fire," where she holds forth on class, money, race, ethnicity and motherhood. (Crown Books will publish Loh's book of the same title next year.)

Unlike other affluent media stars in the ongoing debate about motherhood, such as Judith Warner, Naomi Wolf or Caitlin Flanagan -- who has admitted she employs a nanny and a has a personal "organizer" -- Loh lives in the working-poor, heavily Latino community of Van Nuys, Calif., where the real estate prices are still affordable but where English is still pretty much a second language. Loh, 44, says her initial negative impressions about her local neighborhood school were fueled by other parents -- most of whom had never even visited the school, which, she says, is actually a good one.

As it turns out, her daughter was admitted to one of the city's high-performing magnet schools, and when Ms. Loh is not writing or performing, she spends much of her time trying to make Los Angeles' sprawling school bureaucracy more "user-friendly" to middle-class parents intimidated by cracked asphalt, chain-link fences and surly receptionists in school front offices where, instead of cheery children's drawings, the walls are papered with posters of handguns and an admonition against using them.

For the past year or so, she's organized "Martinis and Magnets" seminars across Los Angeles where she, along with Christie Mellor, author of "The Three-Martini Playdate," socialize and educate "sleep-deprived, hysterical" parents on navigating the city's crowded, complex magnet school system.

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Q. There seems to be a lot of commentary in the media by mothers who live fairly affluent lives and who write about other affluent mothers. You seem to speak to a different demographic.

A. There are these hot spots where these people congregate, "artistic bubbles" on the west side of Los Angeles, in parts of Northwest Washington, D.C., Northwest and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and unfortunately a lot of them who live there are journalists and writers, so you get these ridiculous women's anthologies representing all American women. They all come from those bubbles, and they're setting the tone of the writing of our generation.

I think, in fact, many more people do not live in those bubbles, and it just takes probably a few people to break them and adjust the reality. Journalists are quite surprised outside their dinner parties when they hear where I live. "Van Nuys? You still live there?" It is like saying you're from Alabama.

Q. Why are middle-class people afraid to send their kids to urban public schools?

A. In my show, I talk about "spiraling," basically falling out of the middle class. Not to be all Lou Dobbs-y, but in the big cities, in L.A., particularly, people of my ilk without all the movie money, we're in these so-so neighborhoods, they're very immigrant-heavy, but we like our houses, but then when the school thing comes up, people move to Portland [Ore.]. My "Mother on Fire" show really addressed these class issues and uttered these ethnic things -- since I'm Chinese-German, I look Hispanic, and my daughter is blond -- I felt able to say the ethnic things that people are afraid to say. I think that in L.A. one thing that nobody will ever talk about is, for instance, how just one in five kids in L.A. County is white, so when you're looking out there, it's a very brown city.

Q. You're an artist who majored in physics in college. That's quite a shift.

A. I think my father, who was Chinese, basically felt if we didn't major in science we would starve on the streets, so we all went into science, unquestioningly. I kind of faked my way through physics.

Q. Oh, baloney, you can't fake your way through physics!

A. Actually at Cal Tech you can, because it's so abstract and theoretical that if you put down any Greek letter you get partial credit, so I faked it and then I bombed my GRE.

Q. How did your father feel about that?

A. He just kept sending me more applications. He was in denial about it.

Q. So what led you into this really interesting niche that you occupy?

A. Being denied for kindergarten at a private school and driving around town to the public schools, it was such an emotionally intense, acid-stomach, saliva-curdling thing. I could not believe this experience, this harridan, this person I was becoming -- it made me pre-menopausal, too -- it was like an acid trip, an intense flashing thing, this school thing, so when I was going through it, I thought this needs to be really talked about in all its form and color. And I think schooling is about class and ego, I think everything is rolled up in it.

In L.A., you have a lot of hybrid, Prius-driving, global-warming holier-than-thou people who send [their kids] to a private school with all white kids where they 'honor diversity,' and I love that phrase, 'honor diversity' -- honoring it from a distance.

We have schools in L.A., where one is an exclusive private school -- all white kids -- where they have a "diversity retreat" every year, and I always call it "a retreat from diversity," where they go to Santa Barbara and where they watch the movie "Crash" and discuss it with a teacher and a counselor.

Q. How has the school district responded to your Martinis & Magnets get-togethers?

A. They haven't responded at all. Officially they don't know we exist, and that's fine with us. We're happy to operate just the way we operate because, again the alcohol and the school thing, nobody ever wants that connection.

Q. You're focused on Los Angeles, but you obviously know what's going on in other urban public schools.

A. It's the same story everywhere it seems, with a few variations and characters. It's this hyperanxious middle class -- you know, the food allergies, that hand sanitizer -- the bubble begins and that is crashing into these big demographic immigrant things, a lot of immigrants in the public school system, like in Los Angeles, which hasn't had to cater to a lot of middle-class people because they haven't been there, and now they're coming back because of the high prices of private school. We couldn't do the private school and it actually drove us back into the public schools, and we realized actually a lot of value in there.

Of course, the front-desk etiquette is like Ukrainian-style customer service; they just stare dully at you. Even if there are good teachers within, there's no sense of that. Another mom friend who's very funny said she had to harass the school for a long time before they would take down the big photo of the handgun with the slash across it.

Q. Still, it's like Ikea's "unbeatable price!" as you say in your blog.

A. There's a lot of equipment there, a lot of arts money available in the L.A. schools now. The LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) has an enormous amount of upright pianos that you can have just by asking, so we just got one (in my daughter's school's) first grade. It's like this old clanky machine that we're looking into and seeing all this treasure in there because it's actually -- there are a lot of resources in a large school district. So it's actually driven us back into the public schools.

I call it the gentrification of public school, and I think it's important to use a term that's fraught with as many complexities. ... It's usually, supposedly, a bad thing, or a problematic thing. [Middle-class] parents are demanding, and they want the school to look better and that, I believe, even though it's not a pretty process it does help [when you have] the squeaky wheels coming in.

And they have to do it with a certain art, you know, and that's what we talk to parents all the time about. You just can't go in there with a superior attitude and demand organic vegetables [everywhere], you really have to know the realities. ...

I call it moving from a "scarcity" mentality to an "abundance" mentality, where I guess the middle-class thing is kind of like, "Wherever the good school is, you gotta go there!" and you gotta be the last person to jam your kid into the last slot because it has "parental involvement"!

In Los Angeles we've seen a phenomenon where a school will go from one that no one will go to, to within three years, becoming the "hot" school. I've seen this over and over again.

Q. It sounds as if you've embarked on a second career. You're an artist, but it seems to be a narrowing of your focus to the schools.

A. I've come to a point in my career that my art is just a burden that my friends have to shoulder, where you go, "I'm doing another play!" And they go, "Oh no!" How useful is it really to make art and who really cares? We always had that thing of writers sending out short stories to literary magazines that nobody reads. I have to have art that speaks to my community, so I'm reexamining the whole notion of how great it is to be an artist. Not that I don't enjoy it.

In the book "The Winner-Take-All Society," which is really interesting, it opens with this Kurt Vonnegut notion of this -- I think it's of a sculptor -- who said in the old days people lived in tribes of about 50, where there would be one singer, one painter, one plane-maker, one healer, and let's say the songwriter would be very special and people would be delighted that he would sing songs in the cave to while away the long winters.

And now, today, there can be only one singer in America, and that's Britney Spears.

For more on Loh and her work, visit www.sandratsingloh.com.