The Great Lesbian Talent Show, 1974

I begin to reminisce and rehash about this event. True but fragmentary.

When I was growing up, there were talent shows on both sides of my family, as well as community talent shows that I had attended.  Talent shows were for me a positive experience, then a positive memory.  So it is not surprising that when I was twenty-five, and immersed in my young life as a lesbian, I would come up with the idea of a lesbian talent show.  Moreover, it was to be not just a lesbian talent show, but a great lesbian talent show.  It felt great to me, as I worked on it, in its initial stage, privately, as a writer, writing skits, and concocting production numbers, and mentally designing stage craft.

  

I had dropped out of graduate school in political science because I wanted to write about lesbians, without the poli sci structure.  I had been so excited when I came out, I could at last imagine a suitable future for myself.  Then, I started to calm down and build a life that made me hopeful.

  

I was lovers with Darlene Maxwell during the period of the talent show.

  

Darlene had earned her Bachelor of Science degree, and had applied to medical school, but had not been accepted.  She had a brother who was close to her in age and had several similarities with her.  He had also applied to medical school, with the same grades Darlene had, and the same extra-curricular activities, but he had gotten in and she hadn't.  So she was taking a fifth year of college, all pre-med science classes, with a determination to get all A's, and reapply to medical school.

She was really good for me.  Our patterns of being together and apart were good for me as a writer.  When she had to study, I  worked on my writing, and vice-versa.  There was respect and room for both of our ambitions

 

Earlier on, when Susie and Ellen lived in Venice, (California), they also gave me room, and support, to be a writer.  That is when my writing started taking off

  

Once, when I started working on my play, so-called play, really a forty-five minute skit,  I just lost all track of time, and then the phone rang.  It was Susie.  She said, "We haven't seen you in a few days.  Ellen wanted me to call you."

I told her I was working on a play, and I'd lost all track of time.  I told her in a sentence what the play was about.

She said, "I knew it!  I knew you were writing."  Then she hollered to Ellen, "Bunnie, she's writing a play!  I told you she was writing."                                                                                                                                                                                             

Then Ellen hollered something back, and Susie said to me,  "Ellen said when you're finished bring it over here."                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

When they lived in Venice, I tried out all of my new pieces on them.  Now they lived in San Francisco, and I was working on the talent show and they were in my thoughts, five different ways.  When I finished writing the skits I was working on, they would help me cast them, and they would have their choice of parts.  They would help me figure out the staging challenge with the super size stage at the Venice Pavilion, a concrete amphitheater.  Could we use a scrim?  I'd seen this done in an opera, with two threads of action.  This was a crazy ambitious idea.  And I had one or two musical numbers in mind that I wanted them involved in.  I needed to make a trip up there.  I definitely wanted "Erev Shel Shoshanim" to be in the talent show.

 

2

I have numerous and various happy memories set at Susie and Ellen's house, in Venice, on Brooks Ave.  They were a sociable and hospitable couple.  Big groups of mostly lesbians, gathered at their house.  Sometimes, Ellen would take out her guitar, and two or three other women would take out their guitars, which they'd brought along.  Susie would take out her Moroccan drum, and also raid their kitchen for improvised percussion, for whomever wanted, and we would sing folk songs for an hour.

Then, a little down the road, Harriet bought a banjo, and then always brought that instead of her guitar.  Susie bought a violin and started playing that.  She also gave me a drum similar to hers, and gave me small lessons.  They had a piano in the back room of their house but it was not available for our living room jam sessions, in the front.  Their living room was spacious and only minimally furnished with just an old couch at one end and chairs and sitting pillows that could be pushed aside or removed so Susie could have lots of room to dance.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Later still, when they moved to San Francisco, they made their living room there into a dance studio.  No furniture, no carpet, a barre on two sides, a mirrored wall -- the real thing.  Susie was now, additionally, playing the saxophone, that she just took to immediately upon picking it up.

 

Susie was obviously very talented musically and theatrically.  Ellen was also talented, theatrically, educationally, politically, and otherwise.  She was the world's best  master of ceremonies.  She had proven that in her living room, especially on an occasion I have written about elsewhere in detail that I called "The Great Sweater Give-Away," and at another ongoing event once a month at the Westside Women's Center.  She was a charming and intelligent M.C. and when my grandiose idea for a story thread between the acts, enlightened behind a scrim, when that idea had fallen through, and clearly wasn't feasible, why did I not ask Ellen to be the M.C.?   She might have said yes. The problem here was not about her. 

We did not have an M.C. at the Great Lesbian Talent Show, and that was one reason why the show was only good and not great.

I am telling this story in a funny order, possibly backwards.  The show was conceived as great, but it ended up only good.  What happened?  Where was my writing?  Where were all my ambitious skits?  Where was the show within a story?  Where was some kind of narrator between the acts?

  

One of my motives for the Talent Show was to show everybody how eminently talented and how much fun my friends were, meaning in particular Susie and Ellen.  But they were in just one little squinchy skit.  They had amusing repartee,  Susie played the violin, and they wore unusual hats, but the presentation of them seemed small and tame compared to my initial plans, and small and tame as well, compared to my retrospective imagination.

Susie was the only person who asked me, "Evyn, where is your writing?  Why isn't your writing in the Talent Show?"  She asked me this right there at Venice Pavilion.  So that was either at the rehearsal or at the show itself.  I answered her with a magnanimity which I only half felt.

"Oh," I said, "I don't need to be in every production.  I don't need my writing in every show.  Sometimes I can be the producer of other people's work."  And that is what I said to her, and it was sort of true, but evasive, as well.  I was deeply appreciative to her for that question though.