I have been quite lax in my duties as blogger. Could I use the excuse that John Cameron Mitchell just tuckered my poor little queer brain out? Possibly, but I did want to tell you all how fabulous Lee Kyle’s sold out "Maybe I’m Just Like My Mother" show was, though going to the second to last performance made it a bit less useful. Nevertheless I enlisted the help of my darling gf Jane Larson to do a guest post review of the show. This is what I got back.
So I told my partner, girlfriend, sugarpants the other day that things come in threes. She was puzzled by this statement, so I said it two more times.
"You know," I said, "Like when you hear a word that you don’t know and then you hear it again and then you hear it a third time and it’s sealed in your memory?"
Pregnant pause…
"Okay, okay," I say, "How about that movie Candyman, when the lady says his name three times and then he comes screaming out of the mirror to kill ya…."
Nothing.
It’s at this point that I just continue along whatever yellow brick road of thought I have created for myself and she listens, ’cause she’s good like that.
"Well, first of all we went to that Splendora show, Maybe I am just like my Mother, on Friday night at the Back Door Theater, and he shows a film clip of himself in the shower (grrrr) singing that song from the Little Mermaid.
She replies with the standard, "uh huh…"
"Then we went in our little girl bike gang to the Irvington neighborhood garage sale and since we were on bikes I had to buy a bag to carry my booty in. Remember that I found that kiddie backpack…The Little Mermaid one…and then all of us road our bikes and sang the song…"
She replies, "Riiiiight…"
"And THEN, we were watching TV and it turns out that The Little Mermaid is being re-released on DVD this week and we heard the song again!! TaDa…Three!"
This is usually when I sit back in whatever chair I am in and fold my hands behind my head and revel in my smarty-pants-ness. And she smiles at me blankly. Sometimes I think she’s afraid…it’s one of those frozen smiles, you know?
The rollercoaster that is a conversation with me continues as I take a sharp left and careen back to the beginning of my list, which was really what I wanted to discuss in the first place but I thought the filler story was a delight as well. That beginning being the Splendora show, "Maybe I am just like my Mother."
Goodness, Mary…it was delicious. Like drinking a champagne cocktail in a vat of créme brulee. It was a feast for the eyes as Lee opened with an excruciatingly slow piece of performance art that involved stacking rocks at the hair shrine of what can only have been his mothers wig altar. What came next was a casual, coffee chat between Lee and about 70 of his closest friends. He breaks the audience/actor barrier in a way that would have made Bertholt Brecht weep and beg for mercy. He spoke to us over ice tea in his sunroom. He spoke to us while getting ready for a show in the cramped dressing rooms at the Wonder Ballroom. He talked to us about his life, his family and himself while we played Nintendo in his basement on beanbag chairs. There was no pretense or sing song in his speech, there were no lines, there was only easy conversation. And when the conversation died down, as it tends to between friends, he brought on the multimedia festival of gross. A gross that was so deliciously funny that I smile in business meetings just remembering his turning his mother’s sheer Legg’s pantyhose into a man’s most important part and drinking a mysterious yellow liquid from a bottle. The songs that accompanied these two pieces were pants-peeing funny. Disturbingly so. I do find myself humming these occasionally but the tunes always turn into the little mermaid….singing her heart out…slapping her tail on that big rock for emphasis….sing it with me now: " I wanna be where the people are…"
PS: When you type in Solendora into Google it corrects it for you.
PPS: Clay Aiken is gay. His new name is Gay Clay.
Love Always,
Jane
