In the Life: Ep. 1308, "The Art World"

this month in the life gets into the art world with the big girls of Broadway hard work the fights aids I got my message across because a positive being positive post riot girls making a scene people wanted to put their stuff out on a label that would represent them and a torch song from harvest my love lamps it ain't showbiz its whoa biz oh this and me on America's Gay and Lesbian news magazine in the life in the life is funded in part by the H van a murican foundation additional support provided by the Ford Foundation the pride foundation the Gill foundation the Ted Snowden foundation the kollywood foundation and in the life members like you welcome to in the life I'm Frank D Caro there are many places in America where gays and lesbians struggle to fit in but the world of Arts and Letters wouldn't seem to be one of them and yet as many artists working in the business have discovered queer people are often not recognized or marketable unless we leave our identities out of our art over the years those politics have been challenged by growing communities of actors painters sculptors writers directors and musicians these artists have entered traditional territory and created art that stands for us tonight in the life rocks the art world checking out a lesbian chapter in art history once we found a common ground there was now room for the visual expression of difference a novel idea in the publishing houses no one really has been able to do what he's done in the way that he's done it in sort of a mainstream way and a classic Hollywood story you know we just have one little change for the rewrite and we'd like you to make both sisters straight but first the Broadway musical Hairspray based on John Waters film and starring in the life zone Harvey Fierstein brought 1960 to Baltimore to 2002 New York and in the mainstream business of Broadway the hairspray team found a way to infuse their musical with progressive politics and along the way transform it into a critical and commercial smash in 1998 producer Margo lion was looking for her next Broadway project when she saw John Waters 1988 film hairspray starring newcomer Ricki Lake and divine and my diet pill is wearing off Tracy I want you to go to your room and study I'm from Baltimore I'd seen it in 1988 but I wasn't sophisticated enough at that point to appreciate its many verses and in about 20 minutes in I thought this is it this is what I want to do once Lyon secured the rights to the property the first call she made was to the film's writer director John Waters I was thrilled especially when I met that people are gonna do it I chose the creative team beginning with the choice of Marc Shaiman to compose the score who is someone I'd wanted to work with for many years when I called him about hairspray he said yes she called me to see who what I like to work with on lyrics and I said truthfully I would actually like to write them with Scott Scott Whitman has been Mark's occasional collaborator and full-time life partner for over 23 years I said you know Marc I think this is not a good idea I said you know it's way too fragile a situation to go through the ups and downs creating a musical and he said well let us just try noise you should we sat down and we said Tony's right what you'd want me to pista I was captivated by them and decided to take the fight as soon as I knew Marc Shaiman and Scott running music they did South Park the movie which is one of my favorite musicals ever I knew Harvey I know his work I knew everything about himself I was thrilled and when I saw him arrest I thought this is perfect we knew shall be Ethel Merman being young and being a character actress and doing comedy and being chubby and just fun it's just there aren't very many things for me and I never would have imagined that this would come so it's not even like a once-in-a-lifetime thing it's like once in like five lifetimes you know huh have you play my mom but I never even think of it as a man play my mother it's just harvey's my mom well the two of us together have really formed a bond so on stage it's like so trusting like I don't even think that we're doing scenes it's just we're just having fun together this telephone call came that they're doing a musical of a hairspray and they want to see me and I I said and I went in and and I sang and I sang and I sang and I mean I think I must have sang six or seven songs for them by the time I got home the call had already come through this nobody but you we want Lyon hired playwright Mark O'Donnell and Tom Mian who had just written the Tony award-winning book for the producers another film to stage adaptation she was also able to lure the pair who helped to adapt The Full Monty for the stage director Jack O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell in this case also as with Monty you try to distill what you think the film is about and preserve that no matter what you do and I think that's what we're working on right now hairspray is about a big girl with big hair who wins a spot on her local TV dance show and then fights to integrate the show in 1960s Baltimore this is a white establishment listen we just came to dance it's a story of outsiders who fight for acceptance a particularly resonant theme for its gay creators hairspray is not just about hairspray your size your color your race your you know your preference whatever the celebrating away yeah celebrate the eccentricity x' in Hairspray every single person is a hero is the people that are never heroes or heroines in regular movies so the outsiders always win in my movies and plays John had also written a musical his movie is a musical you know even though per se it isn't but it all sings and dances and so it such an ADD easy to write for it so natural after two and a half years of close collaboration between the creative team the book the score and the cast was in place and rehearsals began in April 2002 four weeks into rehearsal the entire cast and crew packed up and relocated to Seattle for hairsprays all-important out-of-town tryout it all starts when the curtain goes up in Seattle in spite of all the work that's been done the last four weeks here in New York and rehearsal in spite of all the pre-production work in the design in the cutting of the costumes and the fitting of them and all of the elements that we've been trying to put together for the last eight or nine months nothing starts until you get in front of an audience it's a big circus you got to put it all together and it's not a lot of time to get it done so it's gonna be tough but well we'll make it well we always do Mark's role there will be with the orchestra and the music and then what's performance starts we'll both be how the audience is reacting and the audience now tell us what it's funny and what works and what doesn't many changes were made to the show in Seattle in fact this song came out because the creators felt it didn't quite work so that was fun because we actually got to sit in a hotel room with the piano and write a song every night to the right one to fit the space the one that we're now reviewing here in New York is our third the third version of it we spent every day in Seattle from 12:00 to 5:00 writing the writers wrote we restage we redirected we shuffled the deck and tried to get it all all our cards in order so when we came here we were ready to show everybody what we had after two weeks of rehearsal and three weeks of performances in Seattle the production returned to New York in anticipation of its Broadway opening about a week before the show opens in theory it will freeze which means no more changes in blocking or dialogue so the actors can become confident with what they're doing rather than feel around for which version of the script they're going to be doing tonight after two more weeks of fine-tuning the show in New York in almost four weeks of preview performances the entire team was ready for their big night well this is it three years after lead producer Margo lion first had the concept of making hairspray the movie into hairspray the musical it all comes down to tonight opening night on Broadway how do you think New York will react to hairspray I think New York has already given their spray a great big oh it's just a dream come true obviously as a couple as well I mean it's been how many gay people does it take to put on music okay by the end of the evening it was clear that hairspray was going to be a big hit it's really a big compliment to the film and to the work we did 14 years ago and it's it's it's thrilling to see it on stage and it's a great show they really did a great job highlights my life I think I mean I look back don't get many of these in your career these are all my dreams you know it's quite a ride in June 2003 hairspray won eight Tony Awards including Best Musical in the two years since its opening night the ten point five million dollar show has grossed over forty million dollars something I remember that kind of influenced me when I was growing up was going to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show we were in Tacoma Washington and besides the fact that it was the only thing open past midnight the fact that it has this sort of freewheeling anything-goes sexuality about it I remember that being pretty eye-opening and revolutionary I don't know when they start on those big lips and it's singing and it just sort of represented all free freedom to me and that you can do anything you want and be anybody you want and there's not a judgement attached to that there's no judgement in that movie and I think that influenced the way I feel about being gay now I'm bill brought up and you're watching America's gay and lesbian news magazine in the life hairspray injects a gay sensibility into the old-fashioned Broadway musical and by returning to his own traditional roots the Pueblo Indian artist Kevin Cotter found a voice to tell his story the story of a gay man living with AIDS I've always done art all my life since I was a child but it became a therapy for me after I developed HIV the miracle combo good water and good medicine my mother she's Irish my father is from the Tewa branch of the pueblos Kevin is Irish and cotta is Native American but you know everybody in San Francisco has a fake name so I'd like to be known as Mushka when I first came out I caught just a berry tail end of that wild rampid sex 70s going into the eighties kind of thing deep down I probably feel that's probably when I contracted HIV I just didn't get symptomatic until 1994 when I got sick I developed cancer and I got spots all over my body after that I was laid up in bed for five months having injections and just trying to get rid of this awful staph infection it was in my brain in my heart I've been close to death four times where I've really you know I'm my t-cells have gotten down to as low as four right before I got sick I started doing what I wanted which was working in interior design two weeks later I was standing in the welfare line because I'd lost all my strength I felt burnt and I felt gypped out of life I had to get rid of that attitude I did art it was my method of coping I said you got yourself into this mess get yourself out of it you know and you have talent those fingers use them get busy stop moping stop using them to pick up tissue and wipe your eyes and start using them to make something that's gonna open somebody else's eyes up that's just waiting to be made into a sculpture I love using natural objects because part of the fun is going to find the natural objects oh here we go halo-halo action all this is disregarded stuff that I find on the street Kachinas to me are representing different spiritual aspects of my emotions that come out Kachina dolls are Native American spirit deities I just kind of wanted to use some traditional ideals with some modern the anthrax scare came out and all of a sudden this was very appropriate the whole goggle and mask kind of thing this one is called a master Kachina this one's called the trick because some trick left his glove at my house I've even had people tell me oh that looks like my ex-boyfriend like oh my god I'm scared for you this one is one of my favorite Kachinas that I've made and I call this one the two-spirit because it represents both male and female this side is obviously the male you turn it over and then you get the female aspect of the two-spirit it's just got all the elements of being an a a Native American gay man when I was young like throughout my life I would take trips and go visit my grandmother who lives in a beautiful Adobe house in San Juan Pablo on the Rio Grande River my grandmother's now 95 all my relatives from my father's side lived there Kevin comes from a family long line of family members who have done some hard work even though he grew up in in the city and uh in California he always appreciate his Indian ancestry my grandmother influenced me as far as my native culture goes she's a very well-known Potter I love the traditional webelo designs a lot of them that they use for their pottery I like to incorporate that in my art I like to kind of use a little bit of modern culture and a little bit of you know the old when I started the HIV pill art I was changing my regimens and I had a huge bottle of pills left over and I felt that I shouldn't be throwing these out so my first piece was made with AZT pills and I brought the piece to the hospital and I showed the doctors what I had done with the pills that were no longer good and I got such great feedback from everybody that I thought well maybe this is something I think it looks really sacred in a way at times Western medicine to me seems just so harsh and it was something true soon and that piece puts it in a little bit of a different place for me I brought all those pieces to the gay games in Amsterdam in 1998 it was the most amazing show people came and they cried and they laughed and I actually sold a bunch of things but the important thing was that I got my message across which was a positive being positive I was really honored at the end of it all when they gave me the Medal of Honor just as a reminder of what I've achieved the most healing part is to see somebody light up after they look at my heart and say wow you know that's that's really beautiful how do you do that I've touched death almost four different times I had a weird out-of-body experience I felt like I went to a different plane look at me now I'm literally on top of the world I just didn't want to let go I didn't want to let go and I said I'm not going you know hey I know what you guys think and I can't speak right now but I ain't going anywhere I'm coming out of this coma and I'm gonna be you know sipping you know lattes with you a cafe floor where it's like I'm not going I'm not going anywhere i'm rachel true and you're watching in the life for centuries the visual arts have given the paintbrushes to men and mostly excluded women artists not to mention lesbians from the hegemony of a traditional canon but in recent years lesbian art history has become a project of reclaiming the past and of recognizing the present i really believe all art is connected to lived experiences into life and social political climates and therefore how do we look at lesbian art i think some of the older artists and these are broad generalizations i'm making a lot of their work was more about hiding or about guilt you know so you look to somebody like fran wine and for instance whose early work are portraits of her dog cindy okay not her girlfriend and the background behind cindy her dog it's all this kind of almost like a hieroglyphic language well it turns out that it's a secret code that fran developed early on as a young girl writing secret poems to women when she was on the school bus through the 80s all the way up until the 90s we're talking about a flaunting of sexual difference there was more space for it once we found a common ground there was now room for the visual expression of difference in the life traveled around the country to talk with three distinguished artists featured in Harmony's book janet cooling based in san diego has had nineteen solo exhibitions since 1976 Cooling's early paintings were some of the first images of lesbian sexuality a lot of my work is based on restructuring art history okay because I hate what it's about but I love the way you know I love paintings it's a girl was painted in 1996 I used the structure of a renaissance painting here to set it up structuring lots of stuff tumbling in after the it's a girl series I began really becoming interested in painting women's bodies and I actually became interested to change in my painting and actually wanted to work with classical figure painting techniques and and I wanted a real different look to the paintings and on political level I was interested really portraying strong women you know you stand this painting it's like your your your eye level middle the painting is basically a crotch that you're looking at it's an extremely confrontive painting but on the same time you think you're looking at a classical figure painting Maria Elena Gonzales a Cuban born artist has been working in sculpture for over 15 years reworking classical elements of sculpture her work invites a complicated and surprising interaction with form we met Maria in her Brooklyn studio to talk about the evolution of her work I cut above was made in 1990 what it is is a stretch of rawhide in the form of a torso rawhide being a transparent material there's obviously something behind it and here's I guess we're being a lesbian has to do with what and for my work my sexual identity was hidden for a long time you know I'm very well acquainted with this mysterious aspect of what you don't know about a person the persistence of sorrow was about loss it was about my friends that had passed away from AIDS I took the whole room and changed the shape of it into an oval that whole expanse of rubber had the names of people that have passed away in Braille also these names had a swatch of Vaseline on top when you touch it when you read the name this residue of Vaseline stay with you for a long time so even after you left the exhibition you still had this residue in your hands that brought back you know your experience magic carpet home is the first public art piece that I've done I used an architectural floor plan of an apartment in the only rooms that I Mark were the closets and what I did was like this undulating surface which I equate to a magic carpet and finally in Boston we spoke with Deborah bright about her 25 years as an exhibiting photographer Deborah is well known for her campy Dreamgirls series well the first body of work I did with a sort of explicit queer theme was the dream girl series which was to take old movie stills and to insert myself in them to mess with the logics of a heterosexual love story I remembered watching these as Kidwai before I you know know what a lesbian was and realizing that you know it was this matter of both wanting to be this powerful woman and wanting to be her lover the beam in writing series like with the dream girls which was also an excavation of childhood this was just another phase okay before we can name our desire what are those signposts along the way that we forget it puberty you know when we're conscripted into this very narrow heterosexual drama so I want to get back to these more anarchic phases when I have shown the work publicly lots of women have come in space and burst into chaos it's like you know this huge relief harmony Hammond herself has been an out lesbian artist and lecturer since the early 70s much of her work incorporates found objects I feel my work was most consciously lesbian probably not until the late 70s when I was working with found fabric and regs I started wrapping these huge forms that were abstract body forms and then I just wrapped fabric from the inside out building it out of itself and so in a very metaphoric way it was about creating my own life moving from the center out most of the artists in this book while there is a kind of pride and a stance in being who we are no woman not a no artist in this book was to be limited by a definition of lesbian art any label is is contingent and strategic okay so in the 70s when these desires were just being identified and named of course you know people called themselves lesbians that you know had a different kind of strategic confrontational oppositional quality to it that it no longer does in this you know 1990s early 21st century environment I still want to see all of us go to the center of the mainstream and I've always felt that way about it I want to see this work in the context of painting period still to come on in the life your typical Bollywood movie your typical top 40 radio hits I'm very conscious of the fact that I would never make it in the mainstream and some typical words from Harvey damn straight the second half of tonight's show turns to the political and economic ground that gays and lesbians break by creating art on our own terms no matter how difficult starting up my bean Michigan otra set out to make a film that almost got made into a different movie and Ellen Harris started selling books out of the trunk of his car and accidentally revolutionized the publishing industry it's been about 12 years in the computer field working for companies like IBM he would pack it in AT&T I quit my job basically and when I finished the manuscript I started submitted to publishers both large and small black and white gay and straight and the manuscript was summarily rejected by every publisher that Senator though myself published it and started peddling it wherever people were in the beauty shops barber shops sorority conventions black Expos in what happened that's kind of how the whole thing got started brilliant you know strategy go to where the women are the woman who read and all that and get people talking wonderful sales reps in that area heard about this amazing guy who was selling copies of his book in the back of his trunk car to all these hairdressing establishments and Atlanta brought it to the attention of one of our band editors I called him and I told him who I was and he said you're John Grisham's publisher aren't you and I said yes we are and he said nothing would make me happier than to be working with John Grisham's publisher because that's what I want to be lyn didn't know he wanted to be a writer until some of his friends started dying of AIDS when I was losing a lot of friends days I would write them letters and these would be long little letters about how we met and some of the good times in our lives because quite frankly I didn't want them to leave here without knowing what their friendship meant to me and one of my friends in his final days you know he called me to visit and we went to visit and he told me how much those letters meant to him and said that I had a gift for writing and he said you should write you should write you should tell our stories now when someone's on their deathbed you you make promises that you don't know how you're going to be able to keep but a year and a half later I just I started invisible life invisible life the book that Lynn first peddled from the back of his car was eventually picked up by Doubleday and is now in its 41st printing we weren't really visible life came out I was like easy gay men's devoted female readership can be credited for his unprecedented rise to success from IBM sales executive to literary superstar an ascension which has become a publishing industry legend he gets what it is to tell a story he really writes about self-acceptance and he believes in love and that is part of what makes this book so successful the same publishers who first rejected Lynn were now offering him multiple book contracts and six-figure advances he's one of the few authors we really take a lead from on marketing plans we surely run everything by him while Lynn's work has been acknowledged by mainstream critics for shattering stereotypes about black gay men it has also been attacked by gay critics for its sympathy toward characters in the closet I think my characters are like individuals within our community each person needs to make a decision on how they want to lead their lives if some people choose to live their life in the closet or choose to not identify themselves as gay or bisexual I'm glad that we live in a country where they're able to make that decision the fluid sexuality of Lin's protagonists is not a common characteristic and mass-market fiction aimed at black readers but in pioneering a new genre Lim is attracted a wide readership gay and straight black and white married and single really has been able to do what he's done in the way that he's done it in sort of a mainstream way there had never been a gay african-american romance as far as I know that had been published previously and that was a dramatic breakthrough I knew that to get noticed you had to be telling a different story you couldn't just tell boy meets girl or boy meets boy or what have you you had to have a story that was gonna intrigue people of all different backgrounds and the characters that I created identify themselves as bisexual some of them didn't identify themselves as bisexual at all even though they were having sex with men and and found the huge audience I found that people were really interested in these type of characters as his characters have struggled with telling the truth about themselves so has Lim I grew up in moon rock Arkansas and I grew up in a very lower class not even middle class it was it was low low income but one of the things that I could aspire to with things that I saw on TV and things I read in books to know that I didn't have to stay in a predicament that I was in as a child if you asked him if he was gay when I first signed him up he would say no I just went into the whole thing with him assuming that he was comfortable with it and was kind of caught up short the first time that I realized he wasn't for me personally the writing has definitely changed you know my outlook I find that it's much easier to tell the truth about Who I am that way I don't have to go back and correct anything that I've said in the past and I think it's also been helpful in allowing other young african-americans or Hispanics or anybody who's was dealing with sexual issues to see that it's okay to say what so in the tell the truth in 2003 Lin published his memoirs what becomes of the brokenhearted the reason why we were interested in his autobiography is because he has an incredibly powerful story to tell starting when he was a child in Arkansas and going on I think probably right up to the point where he publishes the first book the reception of his memoir I think will be crucial as to how he decides to continue and whether he does any nonfiction it's always been my ambition to branch out to not just be known as a black gay writer but as a writer and I know to do that I was gonna have to attack different genres and write different stories all nine of Lin's books have become bestsellers I think been open the door to true the awareness of gay persecution in in Germany because really until then it wasn't known and it wasn't admitted Germany before Hitler was a mecca for gay life and it was wiped out in the second it was wiped out in a second so there is a lesson about taking freedom for granted the other lesson is that they could wipe it out very easily because while all of this freedom was going on there was a law on the book that outlawed homosexuality it was a dormant law no one paid any attention to it but the Nazis simply reactivated it so it also means that one must really really be very careful about what laws are on the book and if people say well that law doesn't mean anything you can't pay attention to that at all you'll have to change that law I'm Martin Sherman and you're watching in the life not getting married mom for gay I want grandchildren a little selfish to give me that mom I'm a lesbian I'm not sterile you're not you have no shame when we finish the script we decided to go to Los Angeles to Hollywood and meet with some companies and see if they would be interested in producing the film we met with this one company who was like we love the script it's really funny we just need you to change one little thing and then we could get it all going why don't you change all the Indian people to Italian people and then they came back to us actually a couple days and said well they don't have to be Italian they could be Jewish there's one other company that was really interested in had all of the financing in place and was ready to shoot right away and they just said you know we just have one little change for the rewrite and we'd like you to make both sisters straight the idea of the least common denominator and let's let's water things down so it appeals to as many people as possible I think it's insulting to audiences you know I think audiences are smarter than that and you know what I found with this movie was the more specific I was and the more willing I was to put myself on the line and show a really specific experience the more Universal it was and the more people could relate to it forget it she's straight gay and lesbian audiences I think we're all ready for like you know a movie to move beyond the coming-out story and not have the fact that this characters gay be the obstacle and be the central focus of the story her bike that's great why don't you just oppose me and cultural oppressors is she you know this family happens to be Indian you know and and that's not the obstacle or the main point of the film and this one character happens to be gay and that's not the obstacle like no one has a problem with that the problem is her sister can't have a baby and she's going to have the baby for her sister and everybody has problem with that you know everybody walks out of chatting pop cornices that mom was just like my mom you know because it's not about being Indian or being lesbian or being of color or being oppressed it's you know all of us have a mom that's a pain in the ass sometimes and all of us have you know the feeling of wanting approval the idea of people only want to see things exactly like themselves that sort of idea and that sort of thinking in Hollywood I hope that's not true when I hope we can prove that it isn't by having film so it shows something different be successful in 1977 ABC announced the debut of its primetime satire soap but before soap had even begun to air its gay character Jodi Dallas played by Billy Crystal sparked a massive controversy provoking boycotts by groups as disparate as the national gay task force and the National Federation for decency Jodi for the record is a gay transvestite who looks just marvelous in his mother's gowns and who tries to undergo a sex-change operation so that he can stay with his pro-football boyfriend but instead the boys break up he slips into a one-night stand with the woman followed as a child and after undergoing a legal battle when's custody rights making Jodi Dallas in 1980 the first openly gay parent on prime-time television I'm Pamela Sneed and you're watching in the life when women's music sprang up in the 70s lesbians grabbed the mics and took to the stage with a decidedly feminist perspective then riot girls like Bikini Kill dominated late 80s and early 90s until mainstream recording companies sterilized girl power and reduced it to just a marketing gimmick so the girls seize control they declared a media blackout and shifted their careers back underground with self-produced fanzines and a new generation took over young women in their teens and 20s whose politics led them to create a do-it-yourself movement instead of negotiating an established industry they founded their own I'm very conscious of the fact that I would never make it in mainstream I feel a lot safer as a deaf musician than I do as a dyke on the street play music is really crucial to our well-being we had heard enough horror stories about major labels that it seemed like we wanted to just have it in our own hands though the DIY scene is managed to stay off the mainstream radar its vast community has thrived creating its own culture politics then even record labels Do It Yourself DIY ethic house is connections to other ways that lesbians have created from nothing something beautiful so whether that's creating a community building a house founding a record label mr. Laney records and videos is a company that my girlfriend Tammy ray Carlin and I started in 1997 the name of our label is called clever shark records chainsaw it started in 87 that's panzine and it became a record label like 1991 because there's a lack of other record labels that have any kind of political viewpoints at all a feminist queer specifically like that there really was a need for that people wanted to put their stuff out on a label that would represent them and would let them also have control we're on the label with a lot of other feminist lesbian bands and that's really important to us neither of us really had any kind of business background so when we decided to put out a CD we didn't really know how we were gonna do it what I do for bands is I manufacture their CDs for them and get them into the stores and do some advertising but mostly trying to get magazines to write about them or get radio stations to play them I'm still learning as I go even though I've been doing this for like ten years I put out my records with chainsaw because it's so important to support a gay label we believe in the same politics in we're family not everywhere is safe for queers you have to keep coming out to the rest of the world over and over again just that there's like so many people out there that are really surprised to see like a queer person up there or like somebody who looks like me is it androgynous or something on stage and performing and feeling good I think that if I if I do anything in any way to hide that or to not let it come across in my music I just be the biggest liar I don't think that I would be in a performer if I wasn't like somehow performing my queerness sometimes it's scary being out especially when we play you know Catholic universities and and we play in the middle of you know the deep south sometimes that can be a little bit you know maybe we should just play this off in some other way being an out lesbian in the music world means that you are subtly discriminated against at every point I'm very conscious of the fact that I would never make it in the mainstream I do notice that there aren't a lot of you know women of color so sometimes I wonder if I'm the one who's just weird for like following my passion and doing this and where all these are people like that in certain towns there seems to be a greater diversity in that in the scene and that makes me really happy you know I'm always like thanks so much for coming the show you know and I hope that that that will kind of foster more people getting involved while the DIY women are always in touch through fanzines and the Internet they also work hard to come together at music festivals right Ladyfest the first lady Fest was in Olympia Washington in August of 2000 it was never been a better time to be a diet in the year 2000 the philosophy behind Ladyfest as a whole is to support the political creative and organizational efforts of women and their supporters the Ladyfest in Olympia raised $30,000 for safe place which is the women's shelter their Ladyfest was idea of a bunch of people who came together in Olympia one weekend because the experience music project was doing a riot girl retrospective he talked about the idea of putting on a woman's music art political festival part of what came up that discussion was that you know here it is 10 years later and we're all still making music so why is it that there's no place for this to happen one thing that we wanted to do with the first lady fest was make sure that other people could emulate what we were doing in their own communities I initiated the New York City area lady fest for 2001 we were the only one to do it twice it was pretty much all volunteer and we were doing you know 50 hours a week of listening to submissions or advertising publicizing I definitely think overall the fuss is getting stronger and more of like a movement rather than just the first what happens I've been lucky enough to go to a bunch of different lady fests all over the place it's been really exciting the live context is is so unique in its spontaneity whatever happens at a live show is only happening in that moment and will never happen again and that is because of the dynamic between the band and the audience when you look out and you see like a bunch of girls or a bunch of queer kids that are like obviously clear something and there's like having a good time and taking up the space that's there and dancing and like I don't really feel like I had that space when I was a teenager the kids that are you know 15 now they they go to out to the shows and they're just they're so cool you know and I think that in a lot of ways the straight kids are the ones who are kind of like looking for something now and finally in outtakes a doubting Harvey buddies dump it there I'm getting into it that's a long way back why does everybody want to be in showbiz could you please help my daughter get a break I did a lot of acting in college they said I was great if I could just get seen by the right people I know I could make it cookies why would you want to mess up your or a loved one's life with a career in the theater listen to me I know a lot of actors and for the most part they are unemployed frustrated and delusional and those are the pretty successful ones the really successful ones are usually just depressed isolated frightened that their careers are already over sounds glamorous how acting hopefuls spend years in classes studying roles they will never get to play they spend more years preparing for auditions they will never book they face daily rejection from agents and directors and casting personnel and even other actors how many actors does it take to play Hamlet eight one to do it seven to say they could have done it better a career in acting involves one of the most famous catch-22s there is to get a role you need to audition to get the audition you need to have an agent to get an agent they need to see act to act you need to get a role to get a role you need to get an audition to get the you unjust youth why would you want to be any part of that and if you do buck the billion to none odds of getting a job you then face another billion to none chance that that job will lead to anything else and if it does happen and you do become a star do you know what you get loss of privacy loss of identity constant pressure to please an endless sea of fans who care nothing about your happiness and in fact would pay good money to buy a magazine featuring the true story of your downfall on sex drugs and excess poundage and then there's the matter of coming out - I come out before I'm a star and risk never having a career do I come out as soon as I'm a star and risk losing the career I worked so hard to get do I come out now that my show is about to be canceled hmm do I come out now that the Enquirer is about to print photos of me on my knees in a public restroom do I come out now that I'm 85 years old and no one cares what I do in a public restroom my love lamps it ain't show biz it's whoa biz now I know most of you looking at me and saying to yourself he's just trying to discourage me because he can't take the competition to you I say damn straight you have any idea how many actors there are for every role hundreds hundreds and hundreds out there in the world of active model personal trainer weight of masseuses there is always someone younger fresher and cheaper to hire consider Meryl Streep greatest actress of our generation Meryl Streep makes maybe one movie every other year that's all most days and months Meryl Streep my hero can't get a freaking job worth leaving the house for so poopsies no matter how fabulous you were as Anita in your high school production of West Side Story you ain't no Meryl Streep so think about how much work you're gonna get and money recently I've been able to make a very nice living in the theater but think about this my last Broadway show was 16 years ago that's a long time between paychecks and I'm a big star who can't get laid they forget I said that's another whole part of celebrity although I pick up a movie or TV show now and then the truth is that I could not support myself on acting alone or it not from my writing I'd be better off taking inventory in a nice little lesbian bookstore in Vermont know my little star hopefuls life upon the wicked stage ain't never what a girl supposes do you know what kind of a schedule a Broadway performer keeps we work six days performing eight shows a week that means two days a week there are two shows a day one or two other days a week you'll be called for rehearsals there are no holidays in fact when the rest of the world is off you will be armed guaranteed when your friends are going out you will be going in when they're enjoying birthdays you'll be performing and when you finally are done at night and you want dinner your friends will all be in bed asleep you get one week off every six months show up late for work and you're turned away and you lose a day's pay all of your friends that go to a concert all my friends are going to see you your mom's sick the show goes on you don't feel well tough get dressed straighten your back take a pill got a cold blow your nose your families will forget you your friends will make other plans the rest of the world have lives but you have a career and you can say goodbye to fresh air and sunlight we vampires of the stage rarely see anything but the darkness of the wings and the lights of Broadway and have you ever seen a real Broadway dressing room there are laws that keep murderers prison cells in better shape dusty dirty dark moldy most Broadway theaters have been around before women had the right to vote and the toilets are there to prove it ah but the fame and glory right you can work on a show for a year put your whole heart and soul into workshops rehearsals out-of-town tryouts more rehearse previews and finally you arrive on an opening night when with one stroke of a merciless pen a critic will grind your dreams into muck no respite no payback you're out of work again and if you think that people will at least pity you remember that which an unnamed bard once said theater is the only business where not only must you succeed all of your friends must fail so star mites you still want to go into showbiz yeah I know all the sense in the world don't mean nothing when your heart's taken the toll so do you I say break a leg and just in case keep the number of a nice lesbian bookstore in your pocket I'm Frankie Caro for all of us at in life here at roots teen display mannequins in New York thank you for watching and we'll see units mom Dell's in the read in the light is funded in part by the H van Ameren foundation additional support provided by the Ford Foundation the Prize foundation the guild foundation the Ted Snowden foundation the Collingwood foundation and in the life members like you you