The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Cindy Pierce claims to be incident-prone.

It’s the sort of claim you hear someone make and want to meet with a friendly counter such as, “Oh, you think you can’t catch a break? Well, I ended up in the emergency room my first night in town. Beat that, lady.”

But Pierce — a stand-up comedian, author, innkeeper, wife and mother — seems to have worse luck than most. At the least, she is oddly clumsy.

“I can’t get out the door without something sketchy happening. I’m a righteous imperfectionist,” Pierce said.

She proves this by telling a story that happened in the restroom of a nice restaurant.

“It was a weird shape for a urinal, and it looked like a hand sink. So I picked up this urinal mint (thinking it was soap),” Pierce said, skipping over why she was in a bathroom that featured urinals.

“I knew as a kid I’m a little bit different. But I was always the kid that would get out there and take a risk. And when you do that you fall on your face. I’m an incident magnet.”

For this article, Pierce called the Pilot & Today office and asked if she had missed a call from me. She hadn’t. It was an awkward, but fitting, way to start the interview — Pierce has crafted a one-woman show and a book tour out of her self-deprecating lack of grace.

On Sunday, she’ll bring the show to Steamboat Mountain Theater, joining singer/comedian Nathan Brady Crain on the venue’s first comedy weekend. Billed “Finding the Doorbell,” Pierce’s set is a personal history of sexual misfortunes.

“Your body is going to serve up incidents, and if you throw sex in there it’s going to be funny. When you throw sex in there, even more incidents are going to come at you. I put all my filters out. If you can take it, bring it on,” she said of the show, which is frank about its subject matter but isn’t especially vulgar.

Taking on the challenges of maintaining a long-term, monogamous and not incredibly boring relationship in her recently released book, “Finding the Doorbell: Sexual Satisfaction for the Long Haul,” Pierce said she puts audiences at ease by sharing her own embarrassments.

“I don’t put anyone else down, but I throw my husband and me under the bus constantly,” she said. “This releases people. They say, ‘You help me look at the things that have happened to me through a comic lens.’”

She attributes the positive reaction to a cultural taboo on the topic.

“Our mission was to write a book that helps people,” she said of working on “Finding the Doorbell” with friend and co-author Edie Thys Morgan.

“I’m putting out something everyone is thinking of or dealing with, but no one is willing to talk about.”