When I heard yesterday that Austin slam poet, Shannon Leigh, 20, died this past Monday, I felt sick. I didn’t know Shannon, but was consumed for a couple of reasons. For one, my son is nearly the same age, and the idea of parents outliving their children is commonly held to be the worst kind of pain. My heart broke for her parents. The other reason the news caught me is that, though it’s been years since I’ve been part of the community, there was a time when the Austin slam scene was a huge part of my life. In fact, it was the slam that got me performing in Austin. As far as I know, Wammo—he of Asylum Street Spankers fame—was the first to introduce the slam to Austin. Slamming, which started in Chicago in 1984, caught on fast here. It didn’t take long before there was a regular, wild, weekly gathering, one that for a long time found its home in the long gone, much missed Electric Lounge.... [continue]

Back in the old days, when I still drank, I’d finish up a bartending shift on 6th Street, by which I mean throw back a few cocktails. Then I’d float, heavily buzzed, on down to the 311 Club to see CJ. The 311 was not really “my” kind of place. Except for CJ, a bartender so amazingly skilled I would go just to watch him. Okay, well that and get a little drunker. The thing about CJ was that he could make any customer—big, small, young, old, stupid, suave—feel like his one true love in the few moments it took him to mix a drink, run a charge card, and wink like he meant it. Maybe it was an act, all this showmanship, but I had the feeling that CJ genuinely liked people and wasn’t just shaking it for tips.... [continue]

By the time you read this, I will have been in Barton Springs twice this week, which is a 100% increase over the number of other times I’ve gotten in that godforsaken body of water since I moved here nearly seventeen years ago. Unfortunately for me, I am one of those people with a horrible memory, by which I mean I remember way too many details, dates, and traumatic events and, thus, associate just about everything in the present, no matter how joyful, with something crappy in the past. Once, my young, hot boyfriend, Warren, and I played a game of Freaky Friday where we pretended to be each other. My role was easy, at least on the surface: chill out, don’t worry about the relationship, the weather, money, or anything else. His job? Call me every thirty minutes and say, You know, I was thinking about what you said this morning. It reminded me of the time my uncle took me fishing when I was six and I got a hook caught in my eye…... [continue]

One day last year, I asked my young, hot boyfriend, Warren, what I might knit for him. I’d already made him a whimsical cock sock featuring three little airplane buttons with real moving propellers. For my next woolly gift of love, he suggested the following: a Jesus suit, chaps, handcuffs. I’m a halfway decent knitter, making up with compulsion what I lack in technical skill. While I liked the idea of the challenge of the first two choices, I knew they’d take a lot of time. As I am ever eager to bestow gifts upon my man at frequent intervals, I therefore opted for choice c) handcuffs. I didn’t have a pattern or much of an idea how to knit bondage devices. But I got out some leftover yarn from my stash and knitted on the fly. ... [continue]

I love Sarah Bird. I LOVE HER, PEOPLE, do you hear me? In case you aren’t familiar with Sarah, let me tell you a few things. Sarah is this incredible novelist whom Austin is fortunate enough to call our own. In 2006, she and I tied for Best Author in Austin in the Chronicle’s Best of Austin Poll. When this happened, I told Sarah that I felt like a dandelion that had been placed in a vase alongside a gorgeous long stemmed rose. I could not believe that I might share such an honor with a writer of Sarah’s caliber.... [continue]

Ken Webster never met a deep dark comedy he didn’t love. Once again, this time offering up his take on playwright Bert V. Royal’s, Dog Sees God, Hyde Park Theatre’s artistic director has produced and directed a humdinger of insightful sarcasm served up in perfect pitch black. There’s not a weak performance in the piece which imagines a more real, more down and dirty, emotionally raw world for players who resemble, remarkably, a certain collection of beloved cartoon characters original conjured by an artist who’s name rhymes with Marles Tultz. ... [continue]

In early 2001 I told my son we were going to Japan. His immediate excited response was this: Well mom, you’re going to have to learn how to shit on a plane. I don’t recall that I actually emptied my bowels on that seventeen-hour flight, but Henry had a point. The idea of crapping away from a familiar toilet, particularly around a bunch of strangers, and in a situation that involves not-real-plumbing is usually enough to stop me up, sometimes for days on end. Which was the case last weekend, at least until my intestines couldn’t stand it anymore. Warren, my hot young boyfriend, had invited me months prior to attend Flipside with him, the local version of Burning Man, that annual festival in the desert where thousands of people set up a tent city and experiment in… well, let’s just say all sorts of things.... [continue]

I love tattooing names on people, says Hez, down at Southside Tattoo. Then he cuts to the punch line: It means they’ll be back for another, bigger tattoo to cover up the first one. Three months ago, I detailed here an example of my sometimes astounding stupidity: In June 2006, I got a tattoo the size of Chicago prominently featuring the name of a man I’d married just a month prior. Because I knew he was the one. Sadly, though, I just didn’t know which one.... [continue]

I am writing this week’s installment somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. I just wrapped up a week in Hawaii with my young, hot boyfriend Warren. The trip was everything and then some, with hikes into deep valleys to watch astounding waterfalls, a trek across a still steaming lava crater, a trip to watch 2000 degree liquid lava pour into the ocean in enormous clouds of brilliant orange steam, a day on a black sand beach watching the locals surf big scary waves with the sort of ease most of us can only associate with walking. We even broke down and went to a beach yesterday, our last full day on the Big Island. It is the sort of beach you conjure when you imagine paradise, the kind of place I had, until yesterday, only seen in the movies. We buried ourselves in wet sand up to our knees and built castles and moats along the water’s edge and jumped big blue and green waves and even, to be silly, took the requisite long romantic walk along the white sand.... [continue]

Being incredibly popular is really very fun but can also, you know, wear a girl out. Which is why, as you’re reading this, my ass is planted firmly and deeply upon a beach chair in Hawai’i for a week as I rest up and prepare for my next round of popular posts. But just because I’m away doesn’t mean I can neglect my duties. And so this week, I present an interview with Kareem Badr, one of the four masterminds in the improv troupe Parallelogramophonograph, aka Pgraph [www.pgraph.com]. (And yes, you might have noticed, I am running a lot of interviews lately. I love other people’s stories. If there’s someone you want interviewed, drop me a note and I’ll see what I can do.) I first saw Pgraph perform at the 2008 Frontera Fest. They did a French Farce and, as I detailed here, I just about drenched my pantalones I was laughing so hard. ... [continue]

Not long after I hooked up with Warren, my young hot boyfriend, he introduced me to the lovely, talented Audrey Maker. Audrey puts together burlesque shows around town. Which is how I wound up, last fall, as a volunteer at the Texas Burlesque Fest, a sold-out, over the topless, two-night celebration of boobs. I got to work the Undressing Room, hanging out with beautiful women (and some men) in various states of undress, asking them if they needed anything. Warren had the more exciting job of Panty Catcher. Outfitted in a Super Hero costume enhanced with a big, bright pink, crocheted cock, he served a function similar to that of the ball boys and girls at Wimbledon. Each time an act finished, Warren dashed onstage to retrieve thongs, gloves, corsets, fishnets, etc. to clear the way for the next act.... [continue]

The best way to efficiently kill a chicken, as far as I know, is to lop off its head. Next best is to break its neck. Neither method appeals to me. I don’t eat chickens—I certainly don’t want to kill them. But when one is an urban chicken farmer, as I was off and on for years, one stands the risk of having to take out a bird now and then. Chicken execution proved to be necessary with my flock last fall when I got a call from Starsky, my then roommate, informing me that the dogs had gotten into the chicken pen. Of my four birds, one was dead, one was hunkered down trembling, one was missing, and a fourth was flopping around, no hope for survival. I was at Warren’s house at the time. We were early into our relationship and he’d already witnessed enough drama—for being incredibly popular often comes with a component of frequent high drama—that I feared enlisting his help might be some last straw for him. I got off the phone and faux-bravely announced I had to run home and slaughter a bird and I’d be right back. ... [continue]

One of the ten million things I love about Austin is how well this town lends itself to the creative class—those of use dreamers who eschew cubicle jobs and want to figure how to put matzoh on the table through some fun, interesting endeavor that pays (I’m trying hard to avoid the word “work” here). It’s precisely because Austin embraces this lifestyle that I’ve been able to support my writing habit through putting on camps and shows and performing non-traditional weddings and working all sorts of nutty gigs. And oh, how I admire my creative class cohorts. Back around 2002, I met David Ansel at a dinner party thrown by Lisa Kaselak. David was just starting a business, inspired by a trip he took to Real de Catorce (a Mexican village I would one day come to count on for my annual escape-Christmas plot). David’s business, the Soup Peddler, involved making good, homemade soup and delivering it to people’s homes. By bicycle.... [continue]

My darling son called me a week or so ago in the middle of the day. Some of you might recall that Henry sometimes (like about 54 times in a row one semester) has a hard time getting up at the crack of 9 a.m. to get to chemistry class and, as a result, he’s been afforded a priceless learning opportunity to find out, firsthand, what it’s like to go to court for truancy. The judge, in addition to basically telling my son that he’s stupid, informed him he better have a pristine attendance record when we show up for our next date, in June. Hence my son’s call. He wanted to let me know that he’d left school in the middle of the day. His excuse? He found a bullet in the hallway. You know, live ammunition. He turned the bullet in to the school cop and principal and voiced his concerns about safety. Then he split. He wanted to let me know that he was worried his absence would be counted as unexcused, getting him in trouble in court. Call me a screaming liberal and Charlton Heston hater, but, you know, I could really get behind this vacate-the-premises-in-the-face-of-otherwise-maybe-getting-shot-to-death.... [continue]

Ballet Austin’s Artistic Director, Stephen Mills, and locally based (internationally loved) composer Graham Reynolds are two of the three collaborative masterminds behind Ballet Austin’s presentation of Cult of Color: Call to Color. Along with visual artist Trenton Doyle Hancock—who created the sets and designed the costumes, and upon whose painted characters the show is based—Mills and Reynolds have put together an astounding presentation. We spoke with Mills and Graham about creating the show.... [continue]

There are not enough good words to say about Cult of Color: Call to Color. Attempts to capture the performance will only wind up sounding like some over-hyped ad in the Sunday Times Arts section. But Cult really is: Astonishing! Amazing! Fifty Thumbs Up! Visually Stunning! Musically Breathtaking! and The Dance of a Lifetime! In short, it very much deserves a Run-Don’t-Walk-to-See-It recommendation, this urgency compounded by the fact that the show is only slated for a very short run. ... [continue]

I sort of hated Elizabeth Gilbert for beating me to the punch in writing a memoir about how an utterly fucked up divorce led to amazing travels, much meditation, and ultimately great healing. On the other hand, I have to say that I actually enjoyed the book, my enjoyment compounded by the fact that I read it while I was in the midst of my own utterly fucked up divorce. For the three of you who haven’t heard of or read Eat, Pray, Love, basically this really tall chick with blonde hair and a big book advance decides to spend four months in three different countries not getting laid for a very long time despite the fact that she meets a lot of hot Italian guys. A part that really stuck with me was how her friends ragged on her for taking night classes in Italian. I think they referred to the campus as Divorced Lady College. As if we must immerse ourselves in frivolous activities to help us forget what our idiot ex-husbands did to us.... [continue]

Just as I was once an amazing pet sitter who nevertheless had a hard time keeping my own animals alive (back off—they were guinea pigs), I am now the wedding officiant who cannot manage to stay married for more than ten months. I tried twice, each time marrying a different facet of my father (round one: the bully, round two: the narcissist) but when husband two walked out, that cured me of any “need” I felt to be hitched. Interestingly, it was during the very month I filed for divorce (he left the dirty work to me), I had to perform eight weddings. It’s true, people, I’m not just popular, I’m a minister. Actually, you can be a minister, too. It takes about two minutes at the Universal Life Church web site. And the cool thing is, once you’re ordained, you are legally qualified to join people in matrimony. Back in 2004, I was up in Jersey, visiting my bio family, and a few days before they chased me down the beach yelling about Jesus, prompting an earlier than planned departure, I was reading the New York Times and I saw an article about a growing need for wedding officiants by non-denominational and mixed-denominational and secular couples. The gig involved writing, public speaking, being useful, making people happy and cold hard cash and so the article caught my attention since these things are all very important to me.... [continue]

The first time I ate dinner with REM’s Michael Stipe—okay so it was also the last time I ate dinner with him—was September 28, 1984. The boys were in Tampa to play at the University of South Florida (my alma mater, a place of such prestige that the dorms had pools behind them and no one took classes during prime tanning hours). Stipe didn’t invite me, I invited myself. I’d lucked into a phone interview with Pete Buck and Mike Mills a few days prior and I was still high from this unbelievable score—me a twenty year-old fledgling music writer getting to talk to them, some of my biggest musical heroes. They weren’t superstars yet, but they were heading in that direction. It was an outdoor gig and when they pulled up, I watched from a little ways away as Pete and Mike scrutinized my words in The Oracle, our college daily. Stipe was a vegetarian—probably still is—and vegetarian wasn’t something the caterer had provided, so it fell to my friend Ed, to ferry the singer to a place where he could find something that suited his palate. I like to think Ed invited me along. Or maybe I just shoved my way into his sports car. Either way, there we sat, gathered around healthy food before healthy food was a trend, at the NK Café. ... [continue]

Photos courtesy Hyde Park Theatre Three from FronteraFestMon-Wed @8pm, thru 3/26Hyde Park Theatre (511 W. 43rd. Street)[info] | [tickets]Short theater is great. It’s great for all sorts of reasons. First of all, if it sucks, it’s over quickly. Better, if it doesn’t suck, and if a short piece is put together with another short piece or two, you wind up with this lovely evening of traveling all over the map, enmeshed, if only briefly, in... [continue]