One of their housemates was going through a plastic-art period and decided to throw a Tupperware party. Just before the demonstration lady arrived, Joe got everyone totally wasted on Angel Dust. I felt really sorry for the poor unsuspecting Tupperware lady as I watched her desperate attempts to get their attention and keep the rowdy gang from performing lewd acts with her merchandise. I don’t think their original intention was to harass the Tupperware lady, but the Ranch considered events like these to be a living art experiment. As I watched the frustrated Tupperware lady pack up and leave without a single sale, I knew it was cruel and inconsiderate. Because they were all so stoned, they didn’t even consider the feelings of that woman. I knew it was not funny, and yet I chose to overlook their bad behavior because I was in awe of their creativity in general and wanted to be in the clique.
Another night at the Ranch, I attended a lovely sit-down dinner given to honor Janet Planet’s new Zen master. The evening began with a six-course macrobiotic meal prepared by Janet, a Jewish girl from the Bronx with a geometric Sassoon haircut. Janet needed no drugs at all since even in her natural state she was always orbiting planet earth. By the end of the night, the dusted guests were standing comatose, holding up the walls and confusing the Zen Master. Later that night, after I left the party, I learned that one of the guests walked through a plate-glass door—and luckily survived.
No matter the show or the menu, Angel or Devil, Dust or Glitter, Dish was King, and in our community, it ran rampant. Joe Morocco appeared once in the Angels’ Cabaret Kitchen Show wearing blackface, dressed as a pepper shaker singing and tapping to “Shaking the Blues Away.” That night Joe Morocco, the dark knight, stole the show, and toward the finale all hell broke loose when, during the middle of the Angels’ chorus number, Planet and Doug threw large chunks of raw ground beef on the stage where they were dancing to mock the Angles’ strict vegan rules. From that day forth, the vile meat eaters were forbidden to work with the Angels.
These contradictions from light to dark behavior dominated our scene. I took what I wanted and left the rest. No matter whom we fucked or worshipped, what we ate, or how we wiped our asses, the one bond that held us together was the fact that we were all hams when it came to the stage, and we were often fiercely competitive.
26. BOOM BOOM
Janice Sukaitis, the naked party hostess I had met at Scrumbly’s during my first trip to San Francisco, was the creative brain behind White Trash Boom-Boom, a troupe of chicks without dicks.
Theresa McGinley, Jan’s childhood friend from Queens, came from a mixed-marriage—Italian mother and Irish Catholic father. Theresa could give Mother Superior a run for her money. Candida Royalle was an artsy, spicy tomato from Brooklyn and an aspiring jazz singer; and Lelani, a dead ringer for a young Marilyn Monroe, was seventeen years old and hailed from the Midwest. Like many of the wounded children in our midst, Lelani had survived on the streets since she was fourteen. Jealous of her own child’s beauty, Lelani’s mother threw Lelani out of the house when she discovered that her husband had been sexually abusing her daughter.
Janice, often behaving like little Rhoda in The Bad Seed, had little tolerance for complaints. She had a motto: “Use your neurosis, and write a play.” Janice did that over and over again. Unlike today, where sharing personal wounds is encouraged by society and popular media, we buried our real-life dramas under crinolines and layers of hair and makeup. Like alchemists, we spun old hurts into gold on stages. Every show was created collectively. Someone came up with a concept and then every player put in their two cents until a script, lyrics, music, sets, costumes, posters and eventually a show was born. It was collectivism at its best.
In White Trash, in Little Italy, Candida, an art major, designed a simple cardboard set that was inspired by her neighborhood Brooklyn Italian Deli, with giant salamis and provolone hanging in the window. Like me, Candice, Janice and Theresa were recovering from Catholicism, and Jan wrote a clever skit expressing the perils of the double standard. Jan, Candida, Theresa and Lelani played the good Catholic girls. I was typecast as Gina, the town tramp who was stealing their boyfriends away because I was the only girl who would put out. We spoke all our lines with Italian accents. I can still see and hear sweet Lelani, dressed like a virgin in a white, pleated skirt and angora sweater, delivering her line to me in broken English, “But Gina, how-a you gonna get-a to heaven-a messin’ around like-a that?”
And I replied, “Oh your Vito, he send-a me to heaven-a every night.” The silly mini musical romp ended with all of us lip synching to a popular Italian song with lyrics we had no clue to the meaning of, but made up our own interpretation of.
Our stage for this one-night wonder was the bar top at The Stud, San Francisco’s most popular gay bar, then in its original location on Folsom Street. Any night of the week you could count on wall-to-wall hot, hunky, long-hair hippy freaks, fags and hags packed in like sardines at this cruising paradise. With the scent of poppers, sweat and heat rising, we took the stage. We were San Francisco’s version of Bette Midler at the gay bathhouses in New York, and the boys ate us up.
That night, when I got down from the stage, I was tapped on the shoulder by a long-haired redhead who looked vaguely familiar.
“Excuse me miss,” he said, “but aren’t you Dee Grosso, from Eastside High School?”
I turned with surprise to hear my long-forgotten family name, as he shouted over pumping dance music.
“I’m Marty Worman. I went to Eastside High with you ten years ago.”
Martin had been a semester ahead of me. I soon learned that Martin performed with and wrote lyrics for the Cockettes. Martin was planning to put together a new troupe with some of the old Cockettes and some fresh talent and, based on the performance he saw that night, asked me and the other Boom-Boom girls to join his new company of performers. I was on my way to the big time.
The afterbirth of the Cockettes, Warped Floors was the new name our troupe decided upon after hours of arguing. Along with Martin, Scrumbly, Pristine Condition, and Bobby Star, this troupe was infused with a new breed of talent that included the White Trash Boom-Boom girls, Joe Morocco, Janet Planet, Jorge, and Liz Birsis from the Ranch, as well as Divine’s matinee idol, David Baker Jr.
Scrumbly wrote all of the music, and Martin and Janice collaborated on the script and lyrics for this new musical. Martin, who had a master’s degree in playwriting thanks to a Shubert fellowship, had been waiting since the original Cockettes had fallen apart to write a show with more serious political overtones. Rickettes, a Day in the Life of the Counter Culture, the first offering from Warped Floors, was to be the anti-Cockette production. No glitz, no glamour or glitter, and no big fake tits, please; this was a musical exploration of the plight of the humdrum workers who performed their duties at their counters in a department store.
I created the character Gloria, a wisecracking snack-bar waitress, based on my mother’s heyday at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. Janice wrote much of my scene, and Martin wrote me a brilliant lyric, “Tapping in a Varicose Vein,” and as I sang the lament of the struggling waitress, Gloria, and her lost dream—”a fabulous dancer at Radio City, with three kids, I gotta to wurk”—I won the heart of my audience. And when I broke out into a full tapdance in my orthopedic tap shoes and support hose over varicose veins that looked like the NY subway system, with the entire cast tapping behind me, the showstopper earned me my first and best critical reviews ever. Unfortunately, some of my fellow performers were not so praised. On opening night, Lelani and Pristine had to be carried out due to Angle Dust overdoes.
27. DILD-0-DAZE
That same year, Rollover Alice was another hit show happening around town. To build buzz for their new show, the Rollover Alice Company offered a free show in Golden Gate Park. They put the word out to the theatrical community at large to enter a special contest called “Queen of the Prom.” This event would be woven into their show leading up to the intermission.
To enter the contes
t all one needed was a theme and an un-motorized float. For my shtick, I came up with A Leather Queen’s Wet Dream in the Castro, and convinced my roommates to play my slaves. Mark America built the float out of a shopping cart and a large trash can. Then he fashioned the head of a giant dildo with chicken wire and paper mache. He painted the whole thing glossy black to create a twelve-foot-long black shiny penis contraption on wheels. We hid in the bushes, oiling our flesh and getting ready, so as not to spoil the impact of our entrance. The boys wore black thongs and heavy metal paraphernalia and were harnessed to my chariot. I rode atop the magnificent dildo float wearing black underwear, torn black hose, and S&M pumps.
The crowd split like the red sea as I rushed in like Pharaoh’s Chariot chasing the slaves in Egypt. Through the audience of mostly hippies and some ladies who regularly attended the park’s band shell every Sunday for the usual free classical concert, my slave boys pulled me toward the stage. The impact and sight of me, riding that gigantic dildo while whipping my slaves into submission, caused a few little old ladies to faint. Hands down I became the undisputed winner and was crowned queen of the prom, adding another step in my climb to fame, without fortune.
Along with the raves and fanfare, there were bruises on the road to stardom. After the show was over, while I was changing back into my overalls and flannel shirt in the park restroom, I watched Viva, now five—a mini diva in training—playing with my crown in the mirror. As she put it on her head, she proclaimed, “Mommy look, now I’m a queen too!”
When I came outside, I found that all my boys had disappeared, gone off to celebrate with new fans or tricks. As the fog rolled over the Haight, I walked home alone, pushing Viva in the dildo shopping cart. There was no way I was going to leave that valuable prop in the park. This was the price I paid for being a star in the Gay Counter Culture. No Backdoor Johnnies waiting to whisk me away in a limo or take me to fancy dinners at Sardis. I got to go home alone, schlepping the kid and props. It was my night to cook at the casa. It kept me humble.
28. MOM-E-QUEE-REST
Outside of my father’s reaction to Viva’s mixed race, it never seemed to be an issue in my world. Viva was a gorgeous girl, the color of a good summer tan, and by the time she began school at age five I had let her curly hair grow long and wild. She looked like a tiny Chaka Khan, especially at parties when I let her wear my bright red lipstick.
At least once a week, I performed the same ritual with Viva after school. I’d sit on the stoop outside of Clayton Street, with Viva sitting between my legs on the step below me. Like a good hippy mom, I’d pour a few drops of Rosemary oil on my hair brush and begin to drag it through Viva’s wild, wavy mop of knotted hair. This ritual of brushing the tangles out was not as much fun as dancing with a snake on her pretty head, but it had to be done. As the brush hit the first big clump, Viva whimpered.
“Am I hurting you honey?” I asked.
“No, Mommy, but I don’t like rosemary oil. It smells funny,” she answered.
“But sweetheart, rosemary oil is good; it makes your hair silky and shiny.”
She raised the whimper a few decibels:
“Please, Mommy, the girls on the bus laugh at me. Can’t you use Vaseline, like Lisa’s mommy?”
“What girls?” I asked.
“The black ones, Mommy, they don’t like me.”
Until that moment I didn’t have a clue about what my daughter was experiencing being of mixed races—what it was like for her to be a light skinned Afro-American with long wavy hair, free of kink. Like any mother, it hurt me to think of my little girl feeling any kind of pain, especially the pain of rejection.
“Oh honey, those girls are just jealous because you have pretty hair. Don’t worry, I won’t use rosemary oil anymore.”
I suddenly was filled with guilt for not being more aware that my bright shining girl, the joy of my life, was having trouble in her first-grade class. I was living under the delusion that I was in touch with her every need. I assumed that she was content as long as she got to pal around with Mommy, and that the fact that she had few age-appropriate kids to play with didn’t matter. I knew kids from straight families had normal playdates, but she had her drag-queen aunties to play dress-up with and teach her how to dance and sing. And I educated her in the arts—took her to plays, movies, concerts, and even the ballet. Before she was old enough to take classes herself, she got to sit in the back of all my tap and flamenco classes, and learned by observation. She could recite every line to every play I ever did from watching endless rehearsals and knew the lines better then the players themselves. I thought all that added up to being a good mother.
From infancy, I took Viva to the movies and she would sleep on my lap unless the volume jumped up suddenly, and then all I’d have to do was stick my boob in her mouth and she’d fall right back to sleep. It got more complicated seeing certain films as she got older. Viva often reminds me of the trauma I caused by taking her to see Brian Du Palma’s horror classic, Carrie, when she was only four. She was so terrified that she kept hiding under her chair and I kept saying, “Get up off of that dirty sticky floor. You’ll ruin your pretty dress.” To this day, Viva can’t watch a scary movie.
Unlike my mother, who cried over a burnt casserole, I never let Viva see me cry. I thought it was important to be strong. I buried my need for a man and father for her under the glitter and gaiety. Little did I know that I was teaching her to hide her deeper feelings from me too. I was trying to be the mother I wished I had had. In my defense, many of her influences were bright and helped her creative spirit soar. There was ample love and affection, but just not a whole lot of conscious child care. I was too busy trying to raise myself in my new family of arrested-developed adult children. As Joni Mitchell so eloquently reminded me every time I played the album Blue, I was still a “child with a child, pretending.”
29. SISTER HAGS
I wasn’t the only single mom living in a household of mostly gay men. Amber Waves, Esmeralda, Beaver Bower, and Lenore were also hippy moms, and we shared a common bond. Beaver Bauer, a core member of the Angels of Light, was a luminous performer as well as a brilliant art director and costume designer. Beaver had a little boy name Sham, who was close to Viva’s age. My earliest off-stage memory of Beaver brings to mind The Little Dutch Boy. Her short, bobbed, pretty-blonde head was always bent over a sewing machine, and on stage, her wholesome beauty was often hidden under gigantic costumes or pounds of makeup and glitter. My friendship with her grew gradually when we eventually got to work together in 1976, when I was invited to perform with the Angels in Mind Kamp Kabaret in 1976.
The dishmongers among the Angels called Lenore “The Breeder” because she had not one, but two daughters. She and her husband Tony had both been with the Living Theatre in New York. But Tony had left her and joined the Angles. When Lenore discovered she was pregnant with a second child, she followed after her man. Ananda, her first-born, became Viva’s first girlfriend.
Viva was four when I met Esmeralda, while she was still living in Mendocino with her two small children, Elo, five, and Lavender, three. Esmeralda, a petite gypsy with long, dark hair and American Indian features was a beauty. “Essie,” as her friends called her, was recently divorced and had plans to move to the City to follow her dream of becoming a singer. As I sat at her homey kitchen table in a rustic, small, colorful house in the middle of a forest in Petaluma, she served me chamomile tea and confessed that she had been afraid to meet me. After seeing our mutual friend Jamian’s film of my Leather Queen in the park, riding the big black dick chariot to stardom, Essie judged me. “I thought you were a real dominatrix. I said to Jamian, ‘I don’t ever want to meet that woman, she scares me.’ You looked so evil whipping those boys.” Once meeting me, she realized I was just a hippy mom like her, and what she saw was just good acting.
Amber Waves, a spacey redhead with piercing blue eyes, was one of the players from the Rollover Alice Company. Amber—originally Patty Pennington, an airli
ne stewardess from Ohio before her reincarnation as Amber Waves—was a mystical showgirl, and had a young son named Sean. Sean’s father was a junkie who left Amber early in their marriage. At the end of the Rollover Alice run, Amber approached me with a suggestion that we gather some of the best and brightest from Rollover Alice and Warped Floors and create a new show together. We enticed Joe Morocco, Candace, Eric, Scrumbly’s roommate, and Scrumbly himself to be musical director, and got Martin to write lyrics and direct. Martin said, “Call your show War Babies, and I’ll write numbers from every decade starting from WW2 till now.”
It was a great concept for the show but not long into the planning, one by one, the War Babies began to drop like bombs on the shores of Normandy, leaving me and Amber the last two divas standing. Even though we still had the support of reliable Scrumbly and Martin, I was reluctant to take on the challenge of carrying the weight of a show with just Amber. In the short time I knew her, I could see that Amber was a handful, on and off stage, but she managed to persuade me to not abandon the project. Scrumbly and Martin had already written my first number for a ’40s character, The Wacky WAC from Hackensack and after the smash hit they created for me with Tapping in a Varicose Vein, I knew I had another showstopper.
Over the next few months Amber and I would drop our kids off at school and work on creating characters and numbers. I put on the producer hat and managed to attract a talented stage crew: my roommate Marshall and his lover, David Greene, both fantastic photographers, along with photographer Danny Nicoletta, who worked for Harvey Milk at Castro Camera. With the collected skills and talents of everyone, we ended up with a multimedia musical revue and called it Broken Dishes.
My Life, a Four Letter Word Page 12
