Nonlinear Lineage

TUMBLR CHANGES!

"We had a couple of hours to wait, and nothing was open in the airport, so we're just trying to find a place to crash out.  Adrian Xtravaganza... they're pushing the luggage in the carts, and they're so tired.  So tired.  So tired.  And then we came by a closed newsstand - like a 9x9x9 kiosk that was closed, but one side of it was all mirrors.  And so, Adrian [Alicea] Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja and Doug Elkins pulled out their Walkmans with their cassette tapes and vogued for three hours in front of that mirror - nonstop.  At 3:00 in the morning.  Unbelievable.  The guy comes by with the mop, and he's just like, "What the hell?"  They were like, "Don't mop this part."  And he's like, "No problem."  Two stewardesses came by in the tight skirts and little hats and the click-click-click, the heels.  Adrian Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja took off after them, and vogued after them, and cracked them up.  This little, young, Japanese man came by, and his jaw hit the floor.  And he came in and vogued with them, because knew what voguing was.  He was totally a beginner, but he was just ... huge face, eyes, mouth: "These are the people I've heard about, and they're here, doing this!"  I get goosebumps talking about it. ... They would come up to the mirror, roll back out, go back about 20 feet, come up to the mirror again."

“There was one point [at The Pyramid Club] where this guy from the audience was… I was lip-synching [an aria] from [La] Traviata, and he was like, ‘Fuck you!  Fuck you! Use your own voice!’ – coming toward me, right? ‘Fuck you!’ – in the middle of the crowd. The crowd parted. He’s walking up to me on the stage like, ‘Fuck you! Use your own voice!’  So I… there was this foam-core lightning, so I took one off the set and bopped him on the head with it, and then the bouncers came and dragged him out… And people thought it was part of the show.  It was incredible.  It was insane.  But it was also alarming.  And it was like, ‘Whoa, ok; what’s going on there?’  Is it drag-o-phobia?  Is he a vocal connoisseur?”

Remy Charlip, a dancer, costume designer, and children's book author/illustrator died earlier this month.  He is someone I would have liked to interview.  He danced with and designed costumes for Merce Cunningham (beginning at Black Mountain College), performed with the Living Theatre and John Cage, and co-founded the Paper Bag Players.

"We were rehearsing That's How the Rent Gets Paid,* and before practice, Jeff [Weiss] always layered the blackface paint onto my face.  That was a ritual we had every night before the performance.  And we could hear Ellen [Stewart]'s footsteps coming up the stairs.  She was always hands-on in the theater.  After so many years, she would be the one sweeping and cleaning up.  And, she was coming up the stairs, and she saw Jeff putting the blackface [on me].  She looked at both of us, but she looked at me, and she said, 'Baby, we don't do that anymore.'  And Jeff just continued doing it.  This is the renegade he is, and he went, 'Oh, ho ho, Ellen!  That's so funny, ho ho!'  And he just laughed and laughed, perfectly.  And Ellen went, '[heavy, frustrated sigh]' and walked out and never said anything about it again.  But one of the final acts in the play is that I kill him ... I'd shoot Jeff dead, and then off it [the blackface paint] came.  It was like I was no longer his image of... yeah."

"You would try to go see Grand Union every time they were performing, because it was so... you didn't know what was going to happen.  You didn't want to miss it if Barbara Dilley and David Gordon were going to have a fight.  You didn't want to miss it if Douglas Dunn was going to come in wearing one of his weird costumes.  It was like pre-reality television and way more real.  And, also, with way smarter people."

"[We were] doing 'queer' work before there was that word, and something different was happening.  I think there was a real sense that we were a counter-culture.  We were still running on the fumes of the '60s and '70s.  I mean, Peggy Shaw used to make these signs that said, 'U.S. out of Manhattan.'  There was maybe a sense that we were gonna build this world that was different, and the bigger world was going to come to us.  Ha ha ha."

"There was a level of antagonism from the sideshow audience, particularly in those days, but that’s what you learn to work with.  I just learned so much about show business there.  I remember learning that – feeling like – the angle at which I would enter would make a difference, or that, if I sauntered in, it was going to be really different than if I charged in. I learned to give a much stronger presence, and, coming up in the 'downtown' scene, I was way into my vulnerability.  The improvisation scene was about being super-open in the moment and sensing your molecules.  That was not how you were going to get over at the sideshow."

"I helped Annie Sprinkle do this crazy protest during the Giuliani years, when they were closing down all the strip joints. We went out to the Statue of Liberty -- took the boat out there and called it The Liberty Love Boat.  I told the Parks Department, or whoever runs the Statue of Liberty, that we were doing a photo shoot, except everyone showed up, of course, in their lovely 'evening wear.'  All of the sex workers in New York City were there, and there were a bunch of other people who came from Philadelphia and from around the country to be part of that. We positioned it as a promotional event for her [Annie Sprinkle’s] gig at PS 122, but it ended up being more like a protest.  The coastguard, I want to say, were alerted that there were a bunch of people with signs coming onto the Statue of Liberty. This was in 1998, mind you.  It was before 9/11, so there was a lot more space for insanity to happen in the city. But they told us that we had to put our signs down because, if we had them up, that meant that we were having a protest, and that we didn’t have a permit to have a protest. So we had to put our signs down.  They kept threatening to arrest us, and I was like, 'Annie, put the signs down, because we’re not prepared to be arrested.  We’re not trained to be arrested. We’re not having a protest; we’re having a photo shoot… from the show!'”

“I think – and Mac Wellman has also made this point – it’s something about, ‘What is the ‘new Bohemia’ that everybody looks for?’ I think that’s the tying thread through different things.  Bohemia is a place of ideas that can be really freely discussed, without the worry of commerce.”