Long before long-haired guys were jumping around stages, banging guitars and biting the heads off various small, winged animals, there were long-haired guys reading words.
This week, the City of Las Vegas is helping put that latter group in the spotlight Downtown on May 13. Performing will be a collection of local poets—Danna Botwick, Gregory Crosby, Kari O'Connor, Andy Hall and Dayvid Figler—and headliner Beth Lisick from San Francisco.
San Francisco! Birthplace of the be-in! Home of Haight and Ashbury streets! Where there's now an anti-war/anti-Bush rally regularly scheduled the second Sunday of each month. A spoken-word performer from there will make a lively interview, full of bizarre quotes and quirky ideas. If it's good enough, I think I'll be able to talk my editor into putting it on the cover!
Lisick writes a column for SFGate.com, has co-written a screenplay that is being shopped around Hollywood and co-hosts a monthly story-telling series. She also has got two books and a 2-year-old son under her belt with another on the way. (Book, not baby, thankfully as it will be called Everybody Into The Pool. But she could name it that. She's from San Francisco!)
My first question has to be what effect her child has had on her life and her work. Artistes always are only too happy to rhapsodize about how their new child has changed their lives, how those wide eyes and innocent look gave them an epiphany of saintly dimensions.
It's made her better at time management, she says. That, and she can't watch the latest Dateline on child abuse. "Before I was like, 'That's sad,'" she says, on the phone outside an LA restaurant. "But now I'm just like, "I can't! Turn it off!"
Whaaa? Wrong answer! But as we talk, an icy fist of dread closes around my heart. This isn't what I expected from a San Francisco writer. Her normalcy extends back to her upper-middle-class teenage years, when she was a cheerleader and homecoming princess. I probe and ask what her inspiration was to be a spoken-word artist. Surely it was a traumatic event, a broken heart, a pretty sunset?
"I was at an open-mike and saw how people got up there and read their thing and got down, and I just thought, 'Wow, I feel like I could do that and not be too humiliated.'" Not having written anything past "Dear Diary," Lisick went home and specifically wrote some material to be read aloud, and then returned the next week to take to the stage.
"I was always a goof-ball, and wanting to dress up in costumes and do weird things just with my friends," Lisick says. "So I think that's why the performance aspect of writing appealed to me more than, like, 'OK, I'm going to sit and write a novel in this cabin.'"
I see my shot at the cover getting shakier and shakier with each reply. Lisick has been to Vegas five or six times before, brought in by Figler. Surely someone from the Left Coast will have strong opinions about Sin City, slots at Vons and neathage billboards.
"I love Las Vegas. It's interesting to me. There's a part of me that loves what everybody else loves—the kitchiness and the craziness. But what I love is all that stuff that's not that," explains Lisick. "I love meeting the other writers, and people that I've met through the university, and the stuff that's not the Strip, that's all the people that actually, you know, they live in Las Vegas, and that doesn't mean they're a showgirl."
Maybe her plans while she's in town will be wild and bohemian, full of drug-fuelled orgies or sex-crazed drug binges.
"Dayvid always shows me a good time. He'll take me to whatever's new, but usually we'll sit around his back yard and hang around with his friends and talk. I'm not a gambler. I enjoy cocktails, but I definitely don't go to the casinos to gamble at all," she says.
Damn. The interview is not going at all the way I thought it would. I become more desperate, searching and probing for some sign of avant-gardedness. Anything that will arch a reader's eyebrow.
A polarizing question playing off a cliche, perhaps? "You only write about the Bay Area," I say. "Should people only write about what they know?"
"No, no, no. I think that's just me, because some people and some writers I admire are very adventurous."
Double damn. OK, how about a straight-out provocation? "Robert Frost said free verse poetry is like playing tennis without a net. What's your reaction?"
"I don't think there's anything wrong with playing tennis without a net. That sounds like fun to me. That sounds like something I would do."
Curses. I start to flail maddly. "What's your favorite drink?"
"Tequila and soda with a lime."
Doesn't she know all the hip kids are drinking absinthe this year? "How much do you hate your parents? They must have freaked when you told them you were going to read words for a living, right?"
"My parents were just like, 'Whatever,' but not in a hippie way. They definitely were glad that I went to college. They were supportive in that way. But I really just think that I had a good sense of myself because they were such good people."
Non-hippie parents? But she's from the Bay Area, for chrissakes! I fight back some tears and solider on. "But what did you want to be when you grew up?" (Please say Wiccan priestess, please!)
"In my eighth grade year book, they had, 'Where do you see yourself in the year 2000?' And I said, "I'm going to be a doctor, most likely, an anesthesiologist. And I was totally serious."
That's it, I can't take it anymore! I'm off in search of a coke-snorting stripper who was abused as a child but has a heart of gold. There's got to be a cliché somewhere in this town.