I saw Joan Rivers at the Beechman the other night. It was exciting to finally see her perform live after years of enjoying her. Just as at the beginning of her career, Joan always scores big saying the things that we think, but which would be uncouth to say. She had the audience in stitches the other night ranting about ugly babies. Sometimes, her imagination dazzles, coming up with things we’d never even consider, but whose absurdity is hilarious. She had a famous bit years ago about Queen Elizabeth’s purse. What did she carry in it, the keys to Buckingham Palace?
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It’s in my nature to please. I like people to like me. I think there are many different me’s that come out when appropriate, or sometimes, when not. I think in many ways, that can be a good thing, enabling me to get along with all sorts of people and feel at home in all kinds of situations. Sometimes, though, it feels like I’m all over the place being all these different people, based on wanting to be liked or appreciated or respected or desired or admired or loved, by friends, co-workers, colleagues, guys, family, etc.
But there’s a fine line between schizophrenic and multi-faceted, between two-faced and versatile. There is a video on youtube of Whitney Houston performing “I Will Always Love You” at Radio City Music Hall in 1993 – the glory days – where some gravelly-voiced ogler (not me) keeps shouting out, “Sing louder. Louder!” In those days, Whitney could sing as loudly or as sweetly as she wanted, she was just taking her time building that particular song – she certainly got very loud by the end of the number.
Watching this poor-quality bootleg, it isn’t apparent whether Whitney could hear the buffoon; indeed, his yelling elicits no reaction at all from anyone. Surely, at least the people around him could hear the heckling – didn’t they mind? They themselves weren’t shouting directives at the stage – critically or otherwise, so why didn’t anyone say anything to this bozo? Even a simple “Shhhh.” Maybe they thought he was right. New York is a dirty, polluted city full of dirty, polluted people and I love it. I don’t want to be anywhere else, it’s the center of the Universe. But it is gross and there’s no getting around it. The garbage rotting under the summer sun, the slime of the straphangers, the grime under the bum’s fingernails as he cups your hand while you light the cigarette you just gave him.
Brooklyn, where I live, is the butthole of New York. Our garbage gets left out longer, our subways are more poorly maintained and our bums don’t need an excuse to touch you. For a nice Jewish boy like me, it can all be a lot to take. My friend Natalie Joy Johnson and I had been putting together a new show for Joe’s Pub before she got the Jennifer Coolidge character in the national tour of Legally Blonde, and we decided to try it out in LA with my friend Shane Scheel’s Upright Cabaret. It even worked out to have Our Lady J musically direct Natalie for the first time in years. Yes, I have been chronically devastated by my family’s move from New York to LA when I was 5. I’m not necessarily an LA kind of New Old Gay. But I’ve begun to appreciate the compartmentalized and climate controlled comfort of Los Angeles life.
So when New York got so humid my glasses fogged up getting out of a cab, off to LA I went. Let me begin my explaining why I didn’t write a post last week.
I tried to write the post several times, even did some psychologically healthy pre-writing, but just couldn’t zone in on a topic. I had seen West Side Story and considered writing about it, but that just depressed me. I’ve been thinking a lot about sex and relationships, but that just confused me. Each time I sat down to write, I would get frustrated, bored and eventually distracted by the hundreds of wonderful home improvement shows all over television these days. When I smoked my last cigarette the other night, I decided not to run out to the 24-Hour Deli to buy more. (It’s actually a health food store, ironically enough.) I had planned for a new friend (a non-smoker) to come over the next night and I thought, rather than subject him to the secondhand smoke with which I regularly poison those I love, I’d seize the opportunity to quit. Again.
A friend of mine recently left his copy of Charles Busch’s novel, Whores of Lost Atlantis, at my house and, having loved the book in 1998, I impulsively dove back in. Admittedly based on Busch’s own experiences with his Theatre-in-Limbo in the 80s, particularly as the writer and star of the long-running cult-hit, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, “Lost Atlantis” has been remarkable for me to revisit, now after ten years in New York City.
The first time I read it, my mouth watered at the description of the life of young, downtown theatre people, although I dreaded the thought of having to wait ten years for my own success, as Charles Busch had for his. Now, my appreciation goes deeper. Saturday night I went to see “wild-hearted demoness bad-girl bitch” performance artist Penny Arcade workshop her new show, Old Queen, at the Dixon Place Hot Festival. Old Queen is an ode to the gay intelligentsia of New York and the national underground scene that brought Penny up as an artist and thinker in the 1960s. I had never seen Penny before and didn’t quite know what
to expect. She’s oddly reminiscent of Roseanne Barr – if Roseanne had played a beat poet in an Andy Warhol film. Wednesday night, I saw Justin Bond’s brilliant concert at the Highline Ballroom. He sang his face off, though still managing to look fiercely like Julie Andrews’ head on Madonna’s body in a David Bowie/She-Ra Princess of Power costume until the near-end of the show when he left musical director Our Lady J alone onstage for a solo number before returning to the stage in a hot, hot, hot Betty Rubble as Liza Minnelli dress for the final songs.
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