GAY MAY DAYS: Friday Night

Cody, Jason, April, Jared. Click on photos for larger image. All photos by Travis Wood.

GAY MAY DAYS got off to a beautiful start on Friday night with an evening of special performances in tribute to LGBTQ icons in "HOMO HEROES." Several LA based performance artists got to honor the spirits of gay greats alongside the Legacy Garden Altar that was constructed from the stage to the back wall.

Neil, Jol, Brian, Tyr

The evening started off with the lighting of the bonfire, a traditional element of Beltane. Tyr Geoffrey Jung-Hall brought a fun assortment of twisted candles that were used in a previous ritual and so several of us got to stand in a circle and pass the fire around as we said blessings for a wonderful weekend.

Jol Devitro and Brian DeShazor pass the fire around

Everybody lights the fire as one

Honored guest Malcolm Boyd in the fire's glow

 

Then Ian MacKinnon propelled us into the evening with a segment of his Gay Hist-orgy, his tribute to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, which was also the first piece that ignited his entire tour-de-force series.

This was followed by the darling of the underground music scene, Monica Howe, aka La Muff, paying tribute to the iconic cross-dresser and provocateur, Marlene Dietrich.

Keeping with the Weimar Republic of Germany theme, we moved on to honor the renowned German psychologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Neil Eliot read from his original script about the "Einstein of Sex."

The audience was then treated to the cabaret-stylings of Jose Promis who sang the song "Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves" from the cult classic movie "Querelle" with lyrics by the one and only man of wit, Oscar Wilde.

Then I took to the stage to present a specially formatted section of my play "Cavafy's Caress" about the intimate world and words of Constantine P. Cavafy. With the help of Jason North, we helped deliver a sexy tribute to one of the most celebrated modern poets.

 

Then to add a bit of performance art variety to the evening, Doug Hammett performed his crowd-pleasing playful striptease number, "Softman", which includes a stunning quilted costume sewn by the multi-talented artist himself.

Act Two got off to a rousing start with the comic stylings of R. SKY Palkowitz and a raunchy tribute to the gay icon, Mae West, whom you should definitely come up and see sometime.

Then Ian took to the stage once again and presented a very heart-felt song "I'm a Man" by the first openly gay pop star, Jobriath, a man far ahead of his time and who sadly was shunned by the public for daring to be too effeminately out in the 70's.

Broadway Playwright Robert Patrick then took to the stage and gave us a little history lesson about early Broadway lyricists and how they depended on female characters in musicals to sing about their sexual longings for men. He charmed audiences by singing a cappella.

Then Brian DeShazor shared an audio clip about the early Radical Faeries movement from the vaults of Pacifica Radio KPFK, where he is in charge of the archives.

Jean Spinosa and Mike Penny paid tribute to one of the greatest rock bands in history, Queen! With Jean as frontsman Freddie Mercury and Mike as guitarist Brian May. Jean explained how well Freddie took care of his many lovers throughout his life and sang "Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy" with backup dancers Ian and Jason.

Terrence Luke Johnson paid homage to his friend the beat poet Robert Duncan, who was an essential part of the San Francisco Renaissance.

The final performance of Act 2 was Coral Lobera and a tribute to the Grammy-Award winning Ranchera musician, Chavela Vargas.

Of course we finished off the night with the audience participating in a festive may pole dance. Check the next blog for photos from that!

Hava Happy Hour / Sunscreen & Tomatoes

This month I look forward to taking to the stage again with April Hava Shenkman for her HAVA HAPPY HOUR - Imagine The Judy Garland Show directed by Fellini.

It was a pleasure to share in the special birthday fun of THE HAPPY HAPPY REBEGIN DAY CELEBRATION. Now I return to the stage to share two songs alongside several special guests. It all happens 8:30pm at Spirit Studio Silverlake, 2601 Hyperion Ave. LA, 90027

For more details visit the Facebook invite page


In honor of the event, here is one of the very first collaborations April and I created, back in 2005! A crazy little romp of a piece called SUNSCREEN & TOMATOES. It's a pretty sick and twisted, yet wild bit of fun satire on relationships and the stereotypical differences between men and women. Plus it was just a good time getting all sloppy and crazy on stage!

A Perfect 20! The Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival 2013

This year I was pleased once again to have edited the promotional video trailer for the Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival. It's a wonderful organization that produces a fantastic festival of solo performing artists. It was a challenge to pack all that amazing work into 1 minute for airing on television, but I think I captured the essence of its diversity!

Additionally, what was cool for me, is that this year the festival is held at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center's Renberg Theatre. I just so happened to have been the venue's first ever Production Manager of the Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Department back in 2001-2002, back before I really got into being a performing artist myself!

Cosmic ReBirthing Pains

So I have heard from several different friends who are experiencing an unusual amount of worrisome feelings and a general sort of depression about the state of world affairs and the future. Certainly it is normal to experience such feelings during January and February, following the big holiday-end of year blitz.

However, a lot of challenging “stuff” happened in the past few months and the issues seem to keep piling up. We are faced with some pretty daunting and depressing global issues. There are some very heated debates and differences of opinions about where to go and what to do.

In many ways we may feel disappointed that there wasn’t some tangible and dramatic shift of energy during the much emphasized end of the Mayan Calendar. What we experienced though on Dec 21, 2012, was one culture’s method of marking time - and our cultures have so many creative ways of marking and measuring time. The Mayans apparently measured a rotation of the galaxy (how they did it so precisely is a marvel to be sure), and while so much more was mythologized around that event, the basic thing that occurred was that the alignment of our planet with the sun made it seem that the sun was positioned at the dark center of the milky way galaxy - in what they considered the birth canal. So it was like experiencing a cosmic rebirth.

If that is the case…we must remind ourselves that any form of a birthing process is painful and difficult. A human birth can take hours or days. A cosmic rebirth…who knows how long the process really takes, but certainly it wouldn’t be simple. It requires a lot of work and effort on our part. I don’t have any firsthand physical birth experience, but they say you have to push and to bare down and breathe, etc.

The same ideas apply within our spiritual lives and as we grapple to find and sustain happiness. We can’t get by with mere illusions and delusions that may have helped us get by in the past. We can’t wait around for a savior, or aliens, or magical miracles to do the work for us. We can’t be complacent. We CAN contribute and create miracles by staying focused and committed and by transforming these ill feelings into something productive and useful. We may have to trick ourselves at times to shake off our worries and fears to move forward with some momentum as the issues pile up.

There is a mountainous obstacle of life to climb. Our culture has to “get over itself.” The key is to enjoy the process and journey as much as we can. We’re all part of a big experiment, and while more and more of it looks pretty complicated and devastating toward the point of collapse, we have to try out new things, keep doing things that are playful, keep doing things that are Foolish and could lead to new possibilities. We will constantly go through periods of forgetting and remembering these processes. The great thing is that so many people are remembering and sharing and moving together.

I remember some teachings from the tantric perspective, that the womb to an unborn child is like paradise. But it can’t stay in there forever. Birth, requires destruction, a removal from the womb, which leads to the creation of a new life in a new world, but the transition is painful and brutal. A baby cries for a reason — it’s paradise was just taken away. But over time, we’ll learn to breathe and accept this strange, new world. It may not be the warm, comfy, dreamy, womb….but it holds many treasures to behold and many opportunities to create. Nothing is created without destruction, but we want to be sure what we create is worth what we lose in the process.

Hopefully more of us wake up to what we are losing and do something about it, and that we are consciously creating some beautiful things to keep us going and to keep us sustainably happy, not just deluded and distracted - but it all serves a purpose! We don’t live forever. Our time here is short. And that may truly suck, but it sucks even more to miss out on what little bit we have. And if part of that is feeling down, then make it be the greatest fertilizer and fuel for the next adventure. The simple things can offer the biggest rewards. The biggest reward can be experiencing the simple relief of just being in the moment of now unfolding into now, now, now, now…

so
if you ever feel unlucky
remind yourself;
out of all the
millions upon millions
of determined, strong-willed, competitive, focused,
fierce, bold, adventurous, awesome…
sperm
that struggled against each other
while seeking out that most cherished
prize of the egg --
you were the lucky one
who hit the jackpot.

so go ahead and enjoy
spending your fortune!