Hedwig and The Angry Inch Actor/Designer Packet Dramaturgy

HEDWIG
AND THE ANGRY INCH

Dramaturgy Packet

The Creators

John Cameron Mitchell: An American actor, playwright, screenwriter, and director.
Mitchell was born in El Paso, Texas and raised as a Roman Catholic. His father, John
H. Mitchell, was a U.S. Army major general, and Mitchell grew up on army bases in
the U.S., Germany, and Scotland, attending Catholic schools, including St. Xavier High
School (Junction City, Kansas) and St. Pius X High School (Albuquerque, NM),
graduting from the latter in 1981. His mother is a native of Glasglow, Scotland, who
immigrated to the United States as a young schoolteacher. His first stage role was
the Virgin Mary in a Nativity musical staged at a Scottish Benedictine boys boarding
school when he was 11 years old. He studied theater at Northwestern University
from 1981-‐85. His brother, Colin, is an actor, writer, and filmmaker. Mitchell’s first
professional stage role was Huckleberry Finn in a 1985 Organic Theater adapation
of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. His first New York acting role was Huck Finn in the
Broadway musical BIG RIVER (1985). He originated the role of Dickon on Broadway
in THE SECRET GARDEN, and appeared in the original cast of the Off-‐Broadway
musical HELLO AGAIN. He received Drama Desk nominations for both roles, and
can be heard on the original cast recording for each. He appeared in the original
cast of John Guare’s SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (both off-‐Broadway and on
Broadway) and starred in Larry Kramer’s Off Broadway sequel to THE NORMAL
HEART, THE DESTINY OF ME, for which he received an Obie Award and a Drama
Desk nomination. Mitchell’s early television work includes guest-‐starring roles in
DAYBREAK, MACGYVER, HEAD OF THE CLASS, LAW & ORDER, THE NEW TWILIGHT
ZONE, FREDDY’S NIGHTMARE, THE EQULIZER, OUR HOUSE, THE DREAMER OF OZ:
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THE L. FRANK BAUM STORY, and THE STEPFORD CHILDREN. He was a regular cast
member on the 1996 Fox sitcom PARTY GIRL, and was the long-‐running voice for
“Sydney”, an animated kangaroo that appeared in commercials for Dunk-‐a-‐roos
cookies. Starring and co-‐starring film roles include a homicidal new waver in BAND
OF THE HAND (1986), a Polish immigrant violinist in MISPLACED (1990), and a teen
Lotario poet in BOOK OF LOVE (1990). Mitchell had a single line (“Delivery!”) in
Spike Lee’s GIRL SIX (1996) as a man auditioning for a pornographic film. Mitchell
is a founding member of the Drama Department Theater Company, for which he
adapted and directed Tennessee Williams’ KINGDOM OF EARTH starring Cynthia
Nixon and Peter Sarsgaard. In 1998, Mitchell wrote (along with composer Stephen
Trask) and starred in HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, an Obie Award-‐winning Off-‐
Broadway rock musical about an East German rock musician chasing after an ex-‐
lover who plagiarized her songs. Three years later, he directed and starred in the
feature film version of the play for which he won Best Director at the 2001
Sundance Film Festival. His performance was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best
Actor in a Musical or Comedy. Both the play and the film were critical hits and have
spawned cult followings around the world. The 2014 Broadway production of
HEDWIG starred Neil Patrick Harris and Lena Hall, was directed by Michael Mayer,
and won four Tony Awards, including Best Actor in a Musical (Harris), Best
Featured Actress in a Musical (Hall), and Best Revival of a Musical. Mitchell reprised
his performance in the role of Hedwig on Broadway for a limited run in early 2015,
opposite Lena Hall as Yitzhak. He received a 2015 Special Tony Award for his return
to the role. After the success of HEDWIG, Mitchell expressed interest in writing,
directing, and producing a film that incorporated explicit sex in a naturalistic and
thoughtful way, without using “stars”. After three years of talent searches, improv
workshops and production, SHORTBUS premiered in May 2006 at the 2006 Cannes
Film Festival. The film garnered many awards, at venues such as the Athen, Gijón
and Zurich international Film Festivals. He directed the 2010 film RABBIT HOLE,
starring Nicole Kidman (in an Oscar-‐nominated performance) and Aaron Eckhart,
adapted from David Lindsay-‐Abaïre’s Pulitzer Prize-‐winning play of the same name.
The film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. Mitchell was the executive producer
of the 2004 film TARNATION, a documentary about the life of Jonathan Caouette
whom he met when the latter auditioned for SHORTBUS. TARNATION won 2004
Best Documentary from the National Society of Film Critics, the Independent Spirit
Awards, and the Gotham Awards. He directed videos for Bright Eyes’ “First Day of
My Life” (featuring SECRET GARDEN co-‐star Alison Fraser) and the Scissor Sisters’
“Filthy/Gorgeous”; the latter was banned from MTV Europe for its explicitly sexual
content. In 2012, Mitchell wrote and produced a narrative short film for Sigur Rós
titled “Seraph”, directed by animator Dash Shaw. He appeared as a recurring
character, e-‐book editor David Pressler-‐Goings, on the 2013 and 2014 seasons of
HBO series GIRLS, and as Andy Warhol in the 2016 season of HBO’s VINYL. Mitchell
appeared in the 2016 documentary DANNY SAYS alongside Danny Fields, Alice
Cooper & Iggy Pop. He has appeared as a character based on Milo Yiannopoulos on
CBS All Access’s THE GOOD FIGHT opposite Christine Baranski and appears as the
character of Egon in Season 4 of Amazon Studios’ MOZART IN THE JUNGLE opposite
Gael García Bernal. In 2015 he directed an unaired pilot of Showtime series
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HAPPYISH starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in his last role. John’s film HOW TO
TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES, a screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s punk-‐era short
story of the same title starring Elle Fanning, Alex Sharp, and Nicole Kidman, was
released by A24 in Spring 2018. He is a series regular in Hulu’s SHRILL staring Aidy
Bryant based on Lindy West’s memoir of the same name. He is currently touring
THE ORIGIN OF LOVE: THE SONGS AND STORIES OF HEDWIG featuring the songs of
Stephen Trask as well as releasing his new musical co-‐written with Bryan Weller as
a fictional podcast series entitled ANTHEM HOMUNCULUS starring himself, Glenn
Close, Patti Lupone, Cynthia Erivo, Denis O’Hare, Nakhane, Laurie Anderson, Alan
Mandell, Marion Cotillard, Ben Foster, and Madeline Brewer, presented by Luminary
Podcast Network. In 1985, aged 22, Mitchell came out as gay to his family and
friends. He came out publicly in a NEW YORK TIMES profile in 1992. His
subsequent writing has often explored sexuality and gender. he is a Radical Faerie,
which was influential in Mitchell’s making of SHORTBUS. Along with SHORTBUS
stars PJ DeBoy and Paul Dawson and performance artists Amber Martin and Angela
Di Carlo, he is a co-‐founder and DJ of the long-‐running monthly part “Mattachine”.
Stephen Trask: An American musician and composer who graduated from
Wesleyan University. He was the music director and house band member (Cheater)
at the New York club SqueezeBox!, where he performed with stars such as Debbie
Harry, Lene Lovich, and Joey Ramone. Trask composed the music for the stage
musical HEDWIG AND THE ANRY INCH (also a 2001 film), about a struggling rack
star named Hedwig. Trask’s real-‐life band Cheater performed as Hedwig’s band
“The Angry Inch”. He received an Obie Award for the play and a Grammy Award
nomination for the movie. In 2014, the show saw its first Broadway incarnation,
opening that April at the Belasco Theatre and winning the year’s Tony Award for
Best Revival of a Musical. The production closed on September 13, 2015. A national
tour of the show began at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre on October 2, 2016.
He has done five films with filmmaker Paul Weitz. He composed the score for
2004’s IN GOOD COMPANY and AMERICAN DREAMZ, for which he co-‐wrote the
numerous songs the contestants sing, as well as the 2009 film CIRQUE DU FREAK:
THE VAMPIRE’S ASSISTANT. Trask also scored the 2003 movies CAMP and THE
STATION AGENT, as well as DREAMGIRLS (2006), IN THE LAND OF WOMEN (2007),
THE SAVAGES (2007), and THE BACK-‐UP PLAN (2010), among other works. He
scored the 2010 film LITTLE FOCKERS, a sequel to both MEET THE PARENTS
(2000) and MEET THE FOCKERS (2004). Recent work includes the 2013 films
LOVELACE, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and ADMISSION, directed
by Paul Weitz. He resides in Lexington, Kentucky, with his partner Michael Trask,
who is a professor at the University of Kentucky. He grew up in Connecticut, in a
Jewish household. He also went to Hebrew school, had a Bar Mitzvah, and both his
parents were involved in the synagogue – his father was head of the youth program
there.

The Form

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Glam Rock: A style of rock music that developed in the United Kingdom in the early
1970s performed by musicians who wore outrageous costumes, makeup, and
hairstyles, particularly platform shoes and glitter. Glam artists drew on diverse
sources across music and throwaway pop culture, ranging from bubblegum pop and
1950s rock and roll to cabaret, science fiction, and complex art rock. The
flamboyant clothing and visual styles of performers were often camp or
androgynous, and have been described as playing with nontraditional gender roles.
“Glitter rock” was another term used to refer to a more extreme version of glam: T.
Rex frontman Marc Bolan, Mott the Hoople, Sweet, Slade, Mud, Roxy Music, Lou
Reed, Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, Jobriath, and Gary Glitter. Others that
adopted the style include Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Def Leppard, Cheap Trick,
Poison, Kiss, Bon Jovi, Quiet Riot, W.A.S.P., Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, and Rod
Stewart.
• A rejection of the false sincerity/simplicity of folk/protest rock.
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• Admits falseness
• Spits on authenticity
• Form over Content
• Erased the line between the sexes. The only time this has occurred in rock
history.
• Hollywood glamour, 1950s pin-‐up sex appeal, pre-‐war cabaret theatrics,
Victorian literary and symbolist styles, science fiction, to ancient and occult
mysticism, and mythology.
• Prefigured by the flamboyant English composer Noêl Coward.
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Punk Rock: A rock music genre that emerged in the mid-‐1970s in the United States,
United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in 1960s garage rock and other forms of
what is now known as “proto-‐punk” music, punk rock music, punk rock bands
rejected perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They typically produced
short, fast-‐paced songs with hard-‐edged melodies and singing styles, stripped-‐down
instrumentation, and often political, anti-‐establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY
ethic; many bands self-‐produce recordings and distribute them through
independent record labels. It spawned a punk subculture expressing youthful
rebellion through distinctive styles of clothing and adornment (such as deliberately
offensive T-‐shirts, leather jackets, studded spike bands and jewelry, safety pins, and
bondage and S&M clothes) and a variety of anti-‐authoritarian ideologies. Bands
included Television, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash,
the Damned, and the Saints. Pop punk bands include Green Day, Rancid, the
Offspring, and Blink-‐182.

Memory Play: A play in which a lead character narrates the events of the play,
which are drawn from the character’s memory. The term was coined by playwright
Tennessee Williams, describing his work THE GLASS MENAGERIE. In his
production notes, Williams says, “Being a ‘memory play’, THE GLASS MENAGERIE
can be presented with unusual freedom of convention.” In a widening of the
definition, it has been argued that Harold Pinter’s plays OLD TIMES, NO MAN’S
LAND, and BETRAYAL are memory plays, where “memory becomes a weapon”.
Brian Friel’s DANCING AT LUGHNASA is a 20th-‐century example of the genre. From
Tom Wingfield’s first lines in THE GLASS MENAGERIE: “The play is a memory.
Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In
memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.
I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it. The other characters are my
mother Amanda, and my sister Laura and gentleman caller who appears in the final
scenes.”

Comedy: In a modern sense, comedy (from the Greek) refers to any discourse or
work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter,
especially in theater, television, film, stand-‐up comedy, or any other medium of
entertainment. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian
democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire
performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy
can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies
against each other in an amusing agon (struggle or conflict) or conflict. Northrop
Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a “Society of Youth” and a “Society of
Old.” A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle
between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose
obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by
his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses
which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.

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Carnival: A Western Christian festive season that occurs before the liturgical season
of Lent. The main events occur during February or early March, during the period
historically known as Shrovetide (or Pre-‐Lent). Carnival typically involves public
celebrations, including events such as parades, public street parties and other
entertainments, combining some elements of a circus. Elaborate costumes and
masks allow people to set aside their everyday individuality and experience a
heightened sense of social unity. Participants often indulge in excessive
consumption of alcohol, meat, and other foods that will be forgone during upcoming
Lent…Other common features of carnival include mock battles such as food fights;
expressions of social satire; mockery of authorities; costumes of the grotesque body
that display exaggerated features such as large noses, bellies, mouths, phalli, or
elements of animal bodies; abusive language and degrading acts; depictions of
disease and gleeful death; and a general reversal of everyday rules and norms.

The Character / The Play

HEDWIG, as a musical changing the form:
• Rejection of spectacle
• Rejection of overearnestness
• Rejection of pretention/self-‐awareness
• Rejection of mind-‐numbing music
• Rejection of boy gets girl storylines
• Real Rock Musical
• Stand-‐up Comedy
• First transgendered character treated seriously.
• Still follows traditional structure: First half = Comedy, Second half = Tragedy
• Received as too rock ‘n’ roll for the uptown theater crowd, Too rock ‘n’ roll
for the gay community, and not rock ‘n’ roll enough for the rock audiences.
• Has a reprise of a song because the song wasn’t finished upon its first hearing
(“Wicked Little Town”)
• All songs are in the past except the last three.
• Rules of the Evening in the first 10 minutes of the show?

Hedwig = Head with a wig (literal)
• Cycle of Patriarchal female co-‐dependency: First was Hansel (an effeminate
girlyboy), then was Hedwig the bride (a botched sex change woman
assuming the identity of her mother to escape East Berlin and marry an
American G.I.), Hedwig the woman alone, Hedwig the lover/music tutor,
Hedwig left a third time (first the father, then the husband, and finally the
soul mate) is alone again living a revenge/stalker rock ‘n’ roll life (the rock ‘n’
roll narrative stereotype: betrayed by love, the down on her luck singer plays
every backroad and backwater bar, diner, café, Laundromat and even
Chinese buffet restaurant to keep herself and her story going – the road
becomes her lover – and its countless, arduous and often humiliating one-‐
nigh-‐gigs leave a trail of waste, damage and potential self-‐destruction in its
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wake) / the restless warrior, the moment-‐of-‐grace-‐stripped-‐of-‐all-‐masks-‐
supreme-‐goddess, and ?.
• From Caridad Svich’s MITCHELL AND TRASK’S HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY
INCH: The societal codes and images of what it means to be a feminine
woman – including how to lash out at her twinned feminine Yitzhak – have
been learnt by her well. Too well.
• Jesus Christ Superstar
• Toni Tenille: An
American singer-‐songwriter and keyboardist, best known as one-‐half of the
1970s duo Captain & Tennille with her former husband Daryl Dragon; the
signature song is “Love Will Keep Us Together”.
• Debby Boone: An
American singer, author, and actress. She is best known for her 1977 hit,
“You Light Up My Life”, which spent ten weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot
100 chart and led to her winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist the
following year. Boone later focused her career on country music resulting in
the 1980 No. 1 country hit “Are You on the Road to Lovin’ Me Again”. In the
1980s, she recorded Christian music, which garnered her four top 10
Contemporary Christian albums as well as two more Grammys. Throughout
her career, Boone has appeared in several musical theater productions and
has co-‐authored many children’s books with husband, Gabriel Ferrer.
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• Anne Murray: A Canadian singer
in pop, country, and adult contemporary music whose albums have sold over
55 million copies worldwide during her 40 year career. Murray was the first
Canadian female solo singer to reach No. 1 on the U.S. Charts, and also the
first to earn a Gold record for one of her signature songs, “Snowbird” (1970).
She is often cited as one of the female Canadian artists who paved the way for
other international Canadian success stories. Murray has received four
Grammys, a record 24 Junos, three American Music Awards, three Country
Music Association Awards, and three Canadian Country Music Association
Awards. She has been inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of
Fame, the Juno Hall of Fame, The Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and
Canadian Broadcast Hall of Fame. She is a member of the Country Music Hall
of Fame Walkway of Stars in Nashville, and has her own star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles and on Canada’s Walk of Fame in
Toronto. In 2011, Billboard ranked her 10th on their list of the 50 Biggest
Adult Contemporary Artists Ever.
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• Lou Reed: An American
musician, singer, songwriter and poet. He was the lead guitarist, singer and
principal songwriter for the rock band the Velvet Underground and had a
solo career that spanned five decades. The Velvet Underground were not a
commercial success during their existence, but are now regarded as one of
the most influential bands in the history of underground and alternative rock
music. After leaving the band in 1970, Reed released twenty solo studio
albums. His second, Transformer (1972), was produced by David Bowie and
arranged by Mick Ronson, and brought mainstream recognition. After
Transformer, the less commercial Berlin reached No. 7 on the UK Albums
Chart. Rock n Roll Animal (a live album released in 1974) sold strongly, and
Sally Can’t Dance (1974) peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard 200; but for a long
period after, Reed’s work did not translate into sales, leading him deeper into
drug addiction and alcoholism. Reed cleaned up in the early 1980s, and
gradually returned to prominence with New Sensations (1984), reaching a
critical and commercial career peak with his 1989 album New York. Reed’s
distinctive deadpan voice, poetic lyrics and experimental guitar playing were
trademarks throughout his long career.

• David Bowie, David Robert Jones was an English singer-‐songwriter and actor.
He was a leading figure in the music industry and is considered one of the
most influential musicians of the 20th century, acclaimed by critics and
musicians, particularly for his innovative work during the 1970s. His career
was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, with his music and
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stagecraft having a significant impact on popular music.

• Ziggy Stardust: A character created by David Bowie in 1971, and first
featured in the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from
Mars, released on 16 June 1972. The character was retired on 3 July 1973, at
a performance at the Hammersmith Odeon, which was filmed and released
on Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture.
• Frank N. Furter:
A character from the musical productions of THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
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since 1973, from the 1975 movie, from the 2015 tribute production
celebrating 40 years, from the 2016 reimagining movie, and from the never
made sequels ROCKY HORRY SHOWS HIS HEELS and ROCKY HORROR: THE
SECOND COMING. He was portrayed by Tim Curry in the 1973 Original
London Production, in the 1974 Roxy Production, in the 1975 Broadway
Production, and in the 1975 film adaptation; by Tom Hewitt in the 2001
Broadway Revival, by David Bedella in the 2015 live tribute production, and
by Laverne Cox in the 2016 reimagining movie, where he is presented as a
female. When it was released in 1975, the movie did so poorly that the New
York run was cancelled before it began. And then someone noticed that “The
Rocky Horror Picture Show” had all the ingredients of a midnight movie – it
was risqué, raucous and a little bit trippy. The film was installed as the late
show at the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village, and something
unexpected happened: people started talking back to the movie, shooting
water pistols and throwing toast, and even dressing up like the characters
and shadowing their moves in front of the screen. Thanks to Tim Curry’s
gloriously over-‐the-‐top portrayal of Frank N. Furter, the film’s seductive,
pansexual lead, those midnight screenings became a sanctuary for people
who saw themselves as outsiders, especially queer and gender-‐
nonconforming people. No longer mere movie-‐goers, they became a tribe
and kept coming back, week after week.
• Iggy Pop:

James Newell Osterberg Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, musician,
record producer, and actor. Designated the “Godfather of Punk”, he was the
vocalist of influential proto-‐punk band The Stooges, who were formed in
1967 and have disbanded and reunited multiple times since. He began a solo
career with the 1977 albums The Idiot and Lust for Life, recorded in
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collaboration with David Bowie. He is well known for his outrageous and
unpredictable stage antics.
• Immanuel Kant:
An influential German philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment. In his
doctrine transcendental idealism, he argued that space, time, and causation
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are mere sensibilities; “things-‐in-‐themselves” exist, but their nature is
unknowable. In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience, with all
human experience sharing certain structural features. He drew a parallel to
the Copernican revolution in his proposition that worldly objects can be
intuited a priori (‘beforehand’), and that intuition is therefore independent
from objective reality. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality,
and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant’s
views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy,
especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-‐
modern aesthetics. In one of Kant’s major works, the CRITIQUE OF PURE
REASON (1781), he attempted to explain the relationship between reason
and human experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional
philosophy and metaphysics. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile
and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism
of thinkers such as David Hume. Kant regarded himself as showing the way
past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists which philosophy had
led to, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.
Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured
through universal democracy and international cooperation. He believed
that this would be the eventual outcome of universal history, although it is
not rationally planned. The nature of Kant’s religious ideas continues to be
the subject of philosophical dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the
impression that he was an initial advocate of atheism who at some point
developed an ontological argument for God, to more critical treatments
epitomized by Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had “theologian blood” and
was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith.
• Florence Nightingale:
An English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern
nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and
trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organized care for
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the wounded soldiers. She gave nursing a favorable reputation and became
an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of “The Lady with the
Lamp” making rounds of wounded soldiers at night. Recent commentators
have asserted Nightingale’s Crimean War achievements were exaggerated by
media at the time, but critics on the importance of her later work in
professionalizing nursing roles for women. In 1860, Nightingale laid the
foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing
school at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing
school in the world, and is not part of the King’s College London. In
recognition of her pioneering work in nursing, the Nightingale Pledge taken
by new nurses, and the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest international
distinction a nurse can achieve, were named in her honor, and the annual
International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birthday. Her social reforms
including improving healthcare for all sections of British society, advocating
for better hunger relief in India, helping to abolish prostitution laws that
were harsh for women, and expanding the acceptable forms of female
participation in the workforce. Nightingale was prodigious and versatile
writer. In her lifetime, much of her published work was concerned with
spreading medical knowledge. Some of her tracts were written in simple
English so that they could easily be understood by those with poor literary
skills. She was also a pioneer in the use of infographics, effectively using
graphical presentations of statistical data. Much of her writing, including her
extensive work on religion and mysticism, has only been published
posthumously. Nightingale felt that genuine religion should manifest in
active care and love for others. She wrote a work of theology: SUGGESTIONS
FOR THOUGHT, her own theodicy, which develops her heterodox ideas.
Nightingale questioned the goodness of a God who would condemn souls to
hell, and was a believer in universal reconciliation – the concept that even
those who die without being saved will eventually make it to Heaven. She
would sometimes comfort those in her care with this view. Nightingale
believed that religion helped provide people with the fortitude for arduous
good work, and would ensure the nurses in her care attended religious
services.
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• Femme Fatale (Marlene Dietrich)

An attractive and seductive woman, especially one who will ultimately bring
disaster to a man who becomes involved with her: Marlene Dietrich
(German-‐American actress and singer) is unmistakable. From the tone of her
voice – deep in the lower registers, distinctive with its Bavarian rhotacism –
to the arch of her brow, framing alluringly languid lids, the late actress is an
icon of cinema, fashion and politics alike. Far from the archetypal screen
siren, Dietrich began to redefine gender constructs in the mainstream,
alongside her staunch opposition to Nazism and her contribution to 20th
century cinema and LGBTQ+ culture. Renowned for attending underground
drag balls in 1920s Berlin, later in life, the actress would use the phrase
‘sewing circle’ to refer to the closeted lesbian and bi-‐sexual scene in
Hollywood, of which she was a member. The late actor Klaus Kinski
described Dietrich’s conquest of his girlfriend Edith Edwards, in his
autobiography: “Marlene tore down Edith’s panties backstage in a Berlin
theater and, using just her mouth, brought Edith to orgasm”. In the 1930 film
MORROCCO, a tuxedo-‐clad Dietrich in the role of Amy Jolly, gave cinema one
of its first on-‐screen lesbian kisses, securing her status as an LGBTQ+ icon.
She also defied conventional gender roles through her boxing at Turkish
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trainer and prizefighter Sabri Mahir’s boxing studio in Berlin, which opened
to women in the late 1920s.
• German Hausfrau:
German housewife stereotype who spends her days working hard to keep
Home, Garden and Family all running smoothly. Rather than purchasing
flashy (and cheap) items with bells and whistles, the hausfrau makes
purchases based on quality. She asks: Can I maintain that product? Will it
last 20 years or more? What is the use of a kitchen appliance that breaks
after 18 months? Can the parts be replaced? How can it be cleaned? The
Hausfrau cooks proper meals midday (for we all know that Germans eat
warm meals for lunch and not for dinner), made from fresh ingredients that
she probably purchased that same morning. One remarkable aspect of
German cuisine is how little of it is prepackaged – Germans actually cook real
food on a regular basis. Of course many non-‐Germans do the same…but the
amount of ready-‐made meals in a German supermarket pales in comparison
to those on offer in North America or England. The Hausfrau also keeps a
tidy and clean home. Opting for quality over quantity, taking pride in hard
work, mastering the art of delayed gratification, focusing on long-‐term goals
instead of quick gains…
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• Sandra Bernhard: A
performer, actress, singer and author. She is the host of e hugely popular
Sandyland, her daily radio show on SiriusxM’s Radio Andy channel 102, for
which she won a Gracie Award. A pioneer of the one-‐woman show, Bernhard
brings a completely unique and raucous mix of cabaret, stand-‐up, rock-‐n-‐roll,
and social commentary to the stage. Notable shows, which she has
performed both on and off-‐Broadway include: WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING,
I’M STILL HERE…DAMMIT, EVERYTHING BAD AND BEAUTIFUL, and
SANDRA MONICA BLVD: COAST TO COAST. “What makes Bernhard’s
comedy so rare – whether she’s philosophizing about Taylor Swift’s squad or
singing Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas” as imagined by Caitlyn Jenner
– is that within every keenly observed pop-‐culture rant, there’s an element of
piercing truth,” Variety wrote. In a review of her career, The New Yorker
noted that “Bernhard teaches the children – all those burgeoning spoken-‐
word artist and monologists – how to perform observational comedy with
style, and right on the political edge.” And the Los Angeles Times praised
another show, writing that Bernhard “has musicality to die for, a voice that
swoops from the bluesy basement to a top floor falsetto…”
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• Nina Hagen:
German singer, songwriter, and actress. She is known for her theatrical
vocals and rose to prominence during the punk and new wave movements in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. Born in the former East Berlin, German
Democratic Republic, Hagen began her career as an actress when she
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appeared in several German films alongside her mother Eva-‐Marie Hagen.
Around that same time, she joined the band Automobil and released the
single “Du hast den Farbilm vergessen”. After her stepfather Wolf
Biermann’s East German citizenship was withdrawn in 1976, Hagen followed
him to Hamburg. Shortly afterwards, she was offered a record deal from CBS
Records and formed Nina Hagen Band. Their self-‐titled debut album was
released in 1978 to critical acclaim and was a commercial success selling
over 250,000 copies. Nina’s lyrics were nasty, honest and oblique. She
relentlessly sang, shouted, shrieked and purred about death, STDs, and sex in
a train station restroom. The band released one more album Unbehagen
before their break-‐up in 1979. That same year Nina Hagen caused a scandal
on Austrian television by giving instructions on masturbation on a talk show.
The presenter was so overwhelmed he grinned sheepishly and didn’t
intervene. After the broadcast, he was fired – while fans of the punk singer
applauded her historic TV appearance. Nina Hagen has always had a heart
for the disadvantaged and has also fought forced psychiatric treatment and
gotten involved in hospice work. Her own belief in divine karma has helped
her regularly look death in the eye. But her religious views are multi-‐faceted.
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• Courtney Love:
An
American singer, songwriter, and actress. A figure in the punk and grunge
scenes of the 1990s, Love’s career has spanned four decades. She rose to
prominence as the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band Hole, which she
formed in 1989. Love has drawn public attention for her uninhibited live
performances and confrontational lyrics, as well as her highly publicized
personal life following her marriage to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Born
to countercultural parents in San Francisco, Love had an itinerant childhood,
22
but was primarily raised in Portland, Oregon, where she played in a series of
short-‐lived bands and was active in the local punk scene. After briefly being
in a juvenile hall, she spent a year living in Dublin and Liverpool before
returning to the United States and was cast in the Alex Cox films SID AND
NANCY (1986) and STRAIGHT TO HELL (1987). She formed Hole in Los
Angeles, receiving attention from underground rock press for the gorup’s
1991 debut album, produced by Kim Gordon. Hole’s second release, LIVE
THROUGH THIS (1994), was met with critical accolades and multi-‐platinum
sales. In 1995, Love returned to acting, earning a Golden Globe Award for
her performance as Althea Leasure in THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT
(1996), which established her as a mainstream actress. The following year,
Hole’s third album, CELEBRITY SKIN (1998), was nominated for three
Grammy Awards. Love has had an impact on female-‐fronted alternative acts
and performers. She has been cited as influential on young female
instrumentalists in particular, having once infamously proclaimed: “I want
every girl in the world to pick up a guitar and start screaming…I strap on that
motherfucking guitar and you cannot fuck with me. That’s my feeling.” In
THE ELECTRIC GUITAR: A HISTORY OF AN AMERICAN ICON, it is noted:
“[Love] truly lived up to Paul Westerberg’s (The Replacements) assessment
of pretty girls ‘playing makeup/wearing guitar’ … She frequently stood on
stage, microphone in hand and foot on monitor, and simply let her Fender
guitar dangle around her neck. She truly embodied the empowerment that
came with playing the electric guitar … Love depended heavily upon her male
lead guitar foil Eric Erlandson, but the rest of her band remained exclusively
female throughout several lineup changes.” In 2015, the PHOENIX NEW
TIMES declared Love the number one greatest female rock star of all time,
writing: “To build a perfect rock star, there are several crucial ingredients:
musical talent, physical attractiveness, tumultuous relationships, substance
abuse, and public meltdowns, just to name a few. These days, Love seems to
have rebounded from her epic tailspin and has leveled out in a slightly more
normal manner, but there’s no doubt that her life to date is the type of story
people wouldn’t believe in a novel or a movie.”
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• LaVern Baker:
An American rhythm-‐and-‐blues singer who had several hit records on the
pop chart in the 1950s and early 1960s. Her most successful records were
“Tweedle Dee” (1955), “Jim Dandy” (1956), and “I Cried a Tear” (1958). She
was one of the first female R&B performers to cross over to reach large
numbers of white listeners in the early days of Rock and Roll. Baker’s
exuberant delivery drove such mid-‐50s hits as “Tweedle Dee” and “Jim
Dandy,” while 1958s “I Cried a Tear” showed her to be an effective ballad
singer. After white singer Georgia Gibbs’ note-‐for-‐note cover version [of
“Tweedle Dee”] topped the pop charts, Baker made a fruitless effort to sue
Gibbs, and unsuccessfully petitioned Congress to consider making such cover
versions illegal.
24
• Patti Smith:
An American singer-‐songwriter, musician, author, and poet, who became an

influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her
1975 debut album HORSES. Called the “punk poet laureate,” Smith fused
rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song is “Because the
Night,” which was co-‐written with Bruce Springsteen. It reached number 13
on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five in the U.K. In 2005,
Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the
French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame. HORSES is an iconoclastic record; the songs are full of the
25
ecstatic violence of things being shattered in order to be remade. It’s the
sound of Smith (“Rimbaud with amps,”) claiming her place among her poet
heroes and doing so with her signature mix of kinship and contempt. In the
months after the release of HORSES, the Patti Smith Group played CBGBs,
making the shabby downtown New York dive bar the center of a global
movement and the “godmother of punk” epithet has stuck.
• Tina Turner:
An internationally recognized singer, songwriter, and actress. She is
originally from the United States, and has been a Swiss citizen since 2013.
Turner rose to prominence with Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm before
recording hit singles both with Ike and as a solo performer. One of the best-‐
26
selling recording artists of all time, she has been referred to as the The Queen
of Rock ‘n’ Roll and has sold more than 200 million records worldwide.
Turner is noted for her energetic stage presence, powerful vocals, career
longevity, and trademark legs. Anna Mae Bullock was born in Nutbush,
Tennessee. She began her career in 1958 as a featured singer with Ike
Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, first recording under the name “Little Ann”. Her
introduction to the public as Tina Turner began in 1960 as a member of the
Ike & Tina Turner Revue with the single “A Fool In Love.” Success followed
with a string of notable hits credited to the duo, including “A Fool In Love”
(1960), “River Deep – Mountain High” (1966), “Proud Mary” (1971), and
“Nutbush City Limits” (1973). In her autobiography, I, TINA: MY LIFE STORY
(1986), she revealed that Ike Turner had subjected her to domestic violence
prior to their 1976 split and subsequent 1978 divorce. Raised a Baptist, she
became an adherent of Nichiren Buddhism in 1973, crediting the spiritual
chant of NAM MYOHO RENGE KYO with helping her to endure during difficult
times. After her divorce and professional separation from Ike, she rebuilt her
career through live performances. In the 1980s, Turner launched a major
comeback as a solo artist. The 1983 singer “Let’s Stay Together” was
followed by the 1984 release of her fifth solo album, PRIVATE DANCER,
which became a worldwide success. The album contained the song “What’s
Love Got To Do With It”; the song became Turner’s biggest hit and won four
Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year. Turner’s solo success
continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s with multi-‐platinum albums and
hit singles. In 1993, WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT, a biographical film
adapted from Turner’s autobiography, was released along with an
accompanying soundtrack album. In 2008, Turner returned from semi-‐
retirement to embark on her Tina!: 50th Anniversary Tour; the tour become
one of the highest-‐selling ticket shows of all time. Turner has also garnered
success acting in films such as the 1975 rock musical TOMMY, the 1985
action film MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME, and the 1993 film LAST
ACTION HERO. From THE GUARDIAN: With new stage production TINA:
THE MUSICAL now open, we look back at the boundary-‐breaking 60-‐year
career of a singer who crossed racial lines and overcame violent oppression
to revolutionise music. Tina Turner was a giant of the decade that brought us
sky-‐high Elnett hairdos and dazzling arena pop. Her swagger, sensuality,
gravelly vocals and unstoppable energy were her trademarks and still evoke
the kind of euphoria that remains synonymous with rock ‘n’ roll. Yet in the
mid-‐1980s – the outset of her second wind as a solo artist – she was also
making history, executing these bold moves as a middle-‐aged African-‐
American female entertainer who had overcome severe personal and
professional obstacles to reach the top.
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• Yoko Ono: A
Japanese-‐American multimedia artist, singer, songwriter and peace activist.
her work also encompasses performance art, which she performs in English
28
and Japanese and filmmaking. She is known for being the wife of English
singer-‐songwriter John Lennon of the Beatles from 1969 until his murder in
1980. Ono grew up in Tokyo and also spent several years in New York City.
She studied at Gakushuin University, but withdrew from her course after two
years and moved to New York in 1953 to live with her family. She spent
some time at Sarah Lawrence College and then became involved in New York
City’s downtown artist’s scene, which included the Fluxus group. She first
met Lennon in 1966 at her own art exhibition in London, and they became a
couple in 1968 and wed the following year. With their performance BED-‐INS
FOR PEACE in Amsterdam and Montreal in 1969, Ono and Lennon famously
used their honeymoon at the Hilton Amsterdam as a stage for public protests
against the Vietnam War. The feminist themes of her music have influenced
musicians as diverse as the B-‐52s and Meredith Monk. She achieved
commercial and critical acclaim in 1980 with the chart-‐topping album
DOUBLE FANTASY, a collaboration with Lennon that was released three
weeks before his murder. Public appreciation of Ono’s work has shifted over
time and was helped by a retrospective at a Whitney Museum branch in 1989
and the 1992 release of the six-‐disc box set ONOBOX. Retrospectives of her
artwork have also been presented at the Japan Society in New York City in
2001, in Bielefeld, Germany, and the UK in 2008, Frankfurt, and Bilbao, Spain,
in 2013 and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2015. She
received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice
Biennale in 2009 and the 2012 Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Austria’s highest
award for applied contemporary art. As Lennon’s widow, Ono works to
preserve his legacy. She funded Strawberry Fields in Manhattan’s Central
Park, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and the John Lennon Museum in
Saitama, Japan (which closed in 2010). She has made significant
philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace, Philippine and Japan disaster
relief, and other causes. In 2012, Ono received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt
Human Rights Award. The award is given annually in recognition of
extraordinary, nonviolent commitment to human rights. Ono continued her
social activism when she inaugurated a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant
for Peace in 2002. She also co-‐founded the group Artists Against Fracking in
2012. She has a daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, from her marriage to Anthony
Cox and a son, Sean Taro Ono Lennon, from her marriage to Lennon. She
collaborates musically with Sean. Ono’s living legacy as one of the most
prolific and confrontational purveyors of outsider art in modern history,
someone whose association with The Beatles through her marriage to John
Lennon was met with a tsunami of polarized opinions. However, thanks to a
generation of underground acts heavily influenced by her solo output –
artists like Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Diamanda Galas, and the Boredoms –
Ono’s albums have been reassessed, finally critically understood in some
circles for the visionary works they are. Where some people only saw TWO
VIRGINS for the nude portrait of its creators on the cover (nevermind the fact
the couple recorded the album while Lennon’s first wife was on holiday),
younger artists heard the genius in the way the guitarist, enraptured by
29
Ono’s artistic daring, took the experimentation the Beatles were exploring on
SGT. PEPPER and THE WHITE ALBUM and made a hard left into John Cage
territory, employing tape loops, assorted instruments and, most importantly,
the elasticity of Yoko’s voice. LIFE WITH THE LIONS, the second release on
Apple Records’ short-‐lived spoken word/experimental subsidiary Zapple
(which also released George Harrison’s second studio LP ELECTRONIC
SOUND), was partially recorded at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London
while Ono was admitted for a rocky pregnancy that resulted in a miscarriage.
The infant, who the couple named John Ono Lennon II, can be heard on the
track “Baby’s Heartbeat,” in which a portable Nagra microphone was used to
capture and loop their first child’s fading heart sounds. The track is
immediately followed by “Two Minutes Silence”, a direct homage to Cage’s
composition “Four Thirty-‐Three”; it consists of complete silence, save for any
subtle natural sounds picked up by the microphone. It is said to be a
memorial to their unborn son. The entire first side of the record is
comprised of a 26-‐minute improvisational piece culled from a March 1969
performance a Cambridge University featuring a caustic back-‐and-‐forth
between Yoko’s voice and John’s guitar feedback, before the duo were joined
onstage by acclaimed free jazz musicians: John Tchicai on saxophone and
drummer John Stevens. YOKO ONO/PLASTIC ONO BAND is the most fully-‐
realized work of the three, recorded with a full band consisting of Ringo Starr
on drums and longtime Beatles associate Klaus Voormann on bass. Free jazz
once again plays a prominent role, this time on the propulsive side two
opener “AOS,” cut live in 1968 with The Ornette Coleman Quartet featuring
Ed Blackwell on drums and double bassists Charlie Haden and David Izenzon.
On the 50th anniversary of the Ono-‐Lennon union, it’s thrilling to see just how
far the music she made – both with her husband and on her own – has come
in terms of gaining appreciation from the public ear.
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• Aretha Franklin:
An American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist. Franklin

began her career as a child singing gospel at New Bethel Baptist Church in
Detroit, Michigan, where her father C.L. Franklin was minister. At the age of
18, she embarked on a secular musical career as a recording artist for
Columbia Records. While Franklin’s career did not immediately flourish, she
found acclaim and commercial success after singing with Atlantic Records in
1966. Hit songs such as “Respect”, “Chain of Fools”, “Think”, “(You Make Me
Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”,
and “I Say a Little Prayer”, propelled her past her musical peers. By the end
of the 1960s, Aretha Franklin had come to be known as “The Queen of Soul”.
Franklin continued to record acclaimed albums such as I NEVER LOVED A
MAN THE WAY I LOVE YOU (1967), LADY SOUL (1968), SPIRIT IN THE DARK
(1970), YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK (1972), AMAZING GRACE (1972), and
SPARKLE (1976) before experiencing problems with her record company.
Franklin left Atlantic in 1979 and sgined with Arista Records. She appeared
in the 1980 film THE BLUES BROTHERS before releasing the successful
albums JUMP TO IT (1982), WHO’S ZOOMIN’ WHO? (1985), and ARETHA
(1986) on the Arista label. In 1998, Franklin returned to the Top 40 with the
31
Lauryn Hill-‐produced song “A Rose Is Still a Rose”; later, she released an
album of the same name which was certified gold. That same year, Franklin
earned international acclaim for her performance of “Nessun dorma” at the
Grammy Awards; she filled in at the last minute for Luciano Pavarotti, who
canceled his appearance after the show had already begun. In a widely noted
performance, she paid tribute to 2015 honoree Carole King by singing (“You
Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors.
Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on Billboard, including 77 Hot 100
entries, 17 top-‐ten pop singles. She is the most charted female artist in
history. Franklin received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1979,
had her voice declared a Michigan “natural resource” in 1985, and became
the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. The
National Academy of Recording Arts and Science awarded her a Grammy
Legen Award in 1991, then the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in
1994. Franklin was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1994, recipient of the
Nation Medal of Arts in 1999, and was bestowed the Presidential Medal of
Freedom in 2005. “American history wells up when Aretha sings,” President
Obama explained in response to her performance of “A Natural Woman” at
the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors. “Nobody emodies more fully the
connection between the African-‐American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and
roll – the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something
full of beauty and vitality and hope.”
• Nona Hendryx:
American vocalist, record producer, songwriter, musician, author, and
32
actress. Hendryx is known for her work as a solo artist as well as for being
one-‐third of the trio Labelle, who had a hit with “Lady Marmalade.” her
music has ranged from soul, funk, and R&B to hard rock, new wave, and new-‐
age. She stated in an interview that her family’s last name was originally
spelled with an “I” and that she is a distant cousin of American music legend
Jimi Hendrix. From righteousbabe.com: Quite simply put, Nona Hendryx is
the quintessential “mother” of contemporary artists such as Erykah Badu,
Emeli Sandé, Janelle Monáe, M.I.A., V.V. Brown, and others who can only hope
to see careers that allow them to span the decades, and she still rocks on!
Longtime Nona Hendryx fans know her as one the founding members of the
doo-‐wop girl group, Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles. Known as the
“sweethearts of the Apollo Theatre” the group was inducted in the R&B Hall
of Fame in 1999. After signing to Atlantic Records, the group lost a member,
but the remaining members reinveted themselves into the iconic funk-‐rock
group, Labelle. The group saw huge success throughout the 70s, racking up
three gold albums and a #1 worldwide platinum hit with the single “Lady
Marmalade”. In 1977, lead singer Patti LaBelle left the group to start her solo
career. While Labelle fans grieved the split, Nona Hendryx fans celebrated at
the launch of her solo career. Nona’s solo efforts included eight studio
albums, collaborations with the likes of Prince, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads,
Bono, Keith Richard, and more, resulting in several top 10 hits and a Grammy
nomination. Hendryx also began writing music for theater and film and
began producing and continued to collaborate with a new generation of
artists including India Arie, Esperanza Spalding, Cassandra Wilson, and
Sheila E. In 2011 Nona dded her long career an adjunct position teaching
Stage Craft, a course she created for The Clive Davis Dpartment at Tisch
School of the Arts at New York University and was appointed Ambassador for
Artistry in Education at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
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• Nico:
Christa Päffgen known by her stage name Nico, was a German singer,
songwriter, musician, model, and actress. She had roles in several films,
including Federico Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960) and Andy Warhol’s
CHELSEA GIRLS (1966). At the insistence of Warhol, she recorded vocals for
three songs of the Velvet Underground’s debut album THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND & NICO (1967). At the same time, she started a solo career
and released CHELSEA GIRL. Nico’s friend Jim Morrison suggested that she
start writing her own material. She then composed songs on a harmonium,
not traditionally a rock instrument; John Cale became her music arranger and
produced THE MARBLE INDES, DESERTSHORE, THE END… and other
subsequent albums. In the 1980s, she toured extensively in Europe, USA,
Australia, and Japan. After a last concert in Berlin in June 1988, she went on
holiday in Ibiza to rest but died after having a stroke while cycling. Her
father Wilhelm, born into a dynasty of Colognian master brewers, was
enlisted as a solider during [WWII] and sustained head injuries that caused
severe brain damage and ended his life in a psychiatric institution; according
to unproven rumours, he was variously said to have died in a concentration
camp, or to have faded away as a result of shell shock. In 1946, Nico and her
mother relocated to downtown Berlin, where Nico worked as a seamstress.
She attended school until the age 13, and began selling lingerie in the
exclusive department store KaDeWe, eventually getting modeling jobs in
Berlin. At five feet ten inches and with chiseled features and pale skin, Nico
rose to prominence as a fashion model as a teenager. At age 15, while
working as a temp for the U.S. Air Force, Nico was raped by an American
34
sergeant. The sergeant was court-‐martialled and Nico gave evidence for the
prosecution at his trail. Nico’s song “Secret Side” from the album THE END…
makes oblique references to the rape. Nico saw herself as part of the
tradition of bohemian artists, which she traced back to the Romanticism of
the early 19th century. She led a nomadic life, living in different countries.
Apart form Germany, where she grew up, and Spain, where she died, Nico
lived in Italy and France in the 1950s, spent most of the 1960s in the US, and
lived in London in the early 1960s and again in the 1980s, when she moved
between London and Manchester. Nico inspired many musicians including
Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Morrissey, Elliott Smith, and Björk.
Siouxsie and the Banshees invited her as special guest on their first major UK
tour in 1978; they also covered “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. The Cure’s leader
Robert Smith has cited DESERTSHORE as one of his favourite records, as has
Björk. Joy Division’s Peter Hook cited CHELSEA GIRL as one of his favourite
albums. Bauhaus’ singer, Peter Murphy, considered that, “Nico recorded the
first truly Gothic album, MARBLE INDEX or THE END. Nico was Gothi, but
she was Mary Shelley to everyone else’s Hammer Horror. They both did
Frankenstein, but Nico’s was real. Morrissey cited Nico when asked to name
artists who have a lasting influence on him: “The royal three remain the
same: the New York Dolls, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, with Nico standing
firm as first reserve.” Morrissey also commented on the song “Innocent and
Vain” with the sentence: “this is my youth in one piece of music”. Elliott
Smith covered “Chelsea Girls” and “These Days” in Portland, Oregon in
October 1999; he also cited THE MARBLE INDEX as one of the “things I was
obsessed about at school” due to her “wonderful intriguing voice, icy and
rmote yet warm at the same time”.
• Reza Abdoh:
An Iranian-‐born director and playwright known for large-‐scale, experimental
35
theatrical productions, often staged in unusual spaces like warehouses and
abandoned buildings. From dazedigital.com’s article “Why queer director
Reza Abdoh was American theatre’s greatest punk”: As humanity widens its
recognition of oppressed queer histories, artists continue to posthumously
enter the spotlight. For AIDS artists, many of whom were tragically taken
from the world at a tender young age, the spotlight comes in a string of
retrospective exhibitions and documentaries aimed at showing how these
artists used their work as a form of protest. Among this cadre of creatives
was queer Iranian theatre director and playwright Reza Abdoh whose
politically potent productions were so piercing that anyone who got to
witness one still frames Abdoh and his performers with god-‐like status.
Abdoh was American theatre’s greatest punk. His ruthless commitment to
experimental performance pushed the boundaries of theatre and sobered
viewers to the stark reality of queer rights in the 1980s-‐90s America – an
influence in direct line with his queer contemporaries like David
Wojnarowicz and Keith Haring. His plays, which were usually set in
abandoned warehouses and buildings, took theatre out of the threatre hall
itself and meshed it with reality while treating social and political life with
pure anarchy. From scenes of BDSM to rave culture, crime thrillers, and fairy
tales, Abdoh’s dark, yet equally luminous plays provoked viewers to consider
the political atrocities of their time, including president Ronald Reagan’s
oppressive regime, the stigmatization of AIDS, and America’s deeply
embedded homophobia and racism. At the age of 32, Abdoh sadly passed
away from AIDS. For Adboh, art was both an escape and a tool for processing
trauma, reality, and survival, making every second of his experimental
productions deeply personal. “I am an artist living with AIDS. I am a
homosexual born in Iran,” Abdoh once reflected. “In my life, I have had to
work through problems of stigmatization and prejudice. When I discovered
the power of the arts to express my pains and joys, it became clear to me that
there would be no other way to work through the demons except to fully
embrace the process of creation. The work was not personal therapy but had
a connection to other people’s realities. As I grow older and more mature, it
becomes clearer to me that personal struggles and conflicts are connected
with universal struggles and conflicts. It is this knowledge, ironically, that
gives me the freedom to experiment in my work.” The earliest personal
strings Abdoh pulls upon his work were memories from his childhood,
including his Iranian heritage, and his tumultuous relationship with his
father. Born in Tehran in 1963, at age 13, Abdoh relocated to live with his
grandmother in London where he fell in love with theatre after seeing a
production of Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. In the wake of
the Iranian revolution, in 1979 the artist and his family relocated to
California where his father died a year later. In 1983, he began directing
plays in Los Angeles by adapting classics like KING LEAR and KING OEDIPUS.
Abdoh’s affination to Iran finds its way into plays like his 1988 play
PEEPSHOW, where Abdoh includes excerpts form the Iran-‐Contra hearings
and war images, while references to his father appear in his 1990 production
36
FATHER WAS A PECULIAR MAN. In 1988, Abdoh was diagnosed with AIDS –
the same year David Wojnarowicz appeared at ACT UP’s Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) protest with a jacket that read, “If I die of AIDS – forget
burial – just drop my body on the steps of the FDA.” AIDS was at crisis point
and queer artists of this moment were unflinching in stating so. When
reflecting upon the inherent sexuality of Abdoh’s work, critic Hilton Als
stated in THE NEW YORKER that, “What was on his mind that year under
Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act, an HIV test was required –
was what was happening to the queer body in America. Sexuality was
inextricable from Abdoh’s work. Not only did he use sex as a vehicle for
exploring the human form, but he created a platform for queer artists by
their sexuality to be openly proud and expressive of their own identity.
“Abdoh didn’t rely on metaphors for the gorgeous confusion and frequent
disillusionment of being sexual; he showed those things,” Als adds. “His
actors tore at their skin, slathered their faces with makeup that ran down
their shirt fronts or their naked chests because Abdoh wanted sex to look like
sex, not like a polite version of closeness or romance.” Al’s description
translates right through Abdoh’s 1991 production BOGEYMAN which lifts the
lid on secret BDSM acts that play out in a nine-‐square grid that looks like a
dollhouse. In BOGEYMAN, latex and chain-‐clad queer men partake in
castration, piercings, torture tanks, and simulated sex scenes set alongside
idyllic prairie scenes and the occasional naked man who would step out of
character to lighten the mood by singing and dancing. Abdoh’s 1993
production QUOTATIONS FROM A RUINED CITY is entirely underlined by the
suffering of the AIDS crisis – the show being a metaphor for the ruins of the
body, as Abdoh once described in an interview. The play follows two male
couples, the first is a gay couple who decay physically and psychologically
across the entire play, while the second couple travels through time. As critic
Elinor Fuchs once reflected in a 1999 biography on Abdoh: “Dying of AIDS is
the very architecture of the performance, which reels from graveyard to
oxygen mask to the sound of gasping for breath to coffins to funeral and da
capo to graveyard to hospital, with the central sufferers each time a little
weaker, a little more transparent. In between come brief remissions:
feverish dances and love scenes.” Fuch adds, “The torrential repetitions –
throwing the actors into one more dance, one more speech, bringing on one
more image, one more idea and geopolitical association-‐ represents perhaps
the most heartbreaking mimicry of the attempt to stay alive in the losing
struggle with AIDS.” Abdoh’s deeply political approach to theatre blurred the
lines between theatre as abstraction and theatre as a form of social
commentary – his deeply surrealist, beautifully queer approach allowed him
to critique reality through a lens of frantic fantasy. In 1996, he produced THE
HIP-‐HOP WALTZ OF EURYDICE, which critiqued the social and political
reality of America in the 1990s through a queer retelling of the Greek myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice – a play Abdoh referred to as a “gut reaction to
systemic repression and erosion of freedom”. The original myth traces the
fateful love of Orpheus and Eurydice, while HIP-‐HOP focuses on an
37
antagonistic, genderless couple Tommy and Dora Lee. As the show’s
synopsis reads: “America is crumbling! Projecting (poet Rainer Maria) Rilke
and (Jean) Cocteau into an Orwellian post-‐nuclear world reworked by the
Marx Brothers, an explosive insane waltz in which Orpheus and Eurydice –
heads shaved, batteries in the neck and genders reversed – explore a punk
underworld where eroticism is strictly forbidden. In 1992, THE NEW YORK
TIMES declared Abdoh’s production THE LAW REMAINS as “one of the
angriest theatre pieces ever hurled at a New York audience” – a statement
which bolstered Abdoh’s inherently radical approach to theatre. The seven-‐
scene play is a critique of violence and its social impact as studied through
the lens of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, THE LAW REMAINS as Abdoh uses
shock as a tactic to interrogate everything from murder to sexual mutilation
and necrophilia. “It’s nauseating, all right, but is it art?” once asked critic
Julius Novick of the show in the essay “Creating Out of Death: An
Introduction to the Work of Reza Abdoh”. “For Abdoh, shock is not a ‘tactic’;
it’s a prerequisite to communicating in a forum where the listeners have
learned to assume a passive and comfortable position.” To read more of this
article go here: https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-‐
photography/article/43420/1/queer-‐director-‐reza-‐abdoh-‐american-‐
theatre-‐kw-‐institute-‐berlin-‐bdsm-‐sex-‐activist
• Janelle Monáe:
An American singer, songwriter, rapper, actress, and producer who is signed
to Atlantic Records, as well as her own imprint, the Wondaland Arts Society.
Monáe’s musical career began in 2003 when she released an unofficial demo
album titled THE AUDITION. In 2007, she publicly debuted with a conceptual
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EP titled METROPOLIS: SUITE I (THE CHASE). It peake at number two on the
US Top Heatseekers chart, and in 2010, through Bad Boy Records, Monáe
released her first full-‐length studio album, THE ARCHANDROID, a concept
album and sequel to her first EP. In 2011, Monáe was featured as a guest
vocalist on fun.’s single “We Are Young”, which achieved major commercial
success, topping the charts of over ten countries and garnering Monáe a
wider audience. Her second studio album, THE ELECTRIC LADY, was
released in 2013 and debuted at number five on the Billboard 200, serving as
the fourth and fifth installments of her seven-‐part METROPOLIS concept
series. In 2016, Monáe made her theatrical film debut in two high profile
productions; she starred in HIDDEN FIGURES as NASA mathematician and
aerospace Mary Jackson and also starred in MOONLIGHT. HIDDEN FIGURES
was a box office success, while MOONLIGHT won the Academy Award for
Best Picture at the 89th annual ceremony. Monáe’s third studio album, DIRTY
COMPUTER, also described as a concept album, was released in 2018 to
widespread acclaim; it was chosen as the best album of the year by several
publications and earned Monáe two nominations at the 61st Annual Grammy
Awards, including Album of the Year. The album debuted at number six on
the Billboard 200 and was further promoted by Monáe’s Dirty Computer
Tour, which lasted from June-‐August 2018. Monáe possesses a mezzo-‐
soprano voice. THE TELEGRAPH published an interview with Monáe, talking
about her first studio album, in which the journalist Bernadete McNulty said,
“I begin to worry for a moment that Monáe may not just be a humourless
science-‐fiction nerd, but actually an android herself, created in a laboratory
as a super-‐musical cross between James Brown, Judy Garland, André 3000
and Steve Jobs, invted to test the desperate incredulity of music journalists.”
She also compared Monáe to artists such as Annie Lennox, Lauryn Hill, and
Corinne Bailey Rae. Her musical styles have been described as “a soaring
orchestral trip enlivened with blockbuster vocals, mysterious imagery and
notes of Sixties pop and jazz”.
39
• Chrissie Hynde:
An American singer-‐songwriter and musician. She is a founding member and

the lead guitarist, lead vocalist, and primary songwriter of the rock band The
Pretenders, as well as its only constant member. Inspired by hippie counter-‐
culture, Hynde worked in London with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne
Westwood at their clothing store, SEX. In 1978, she formed her own band,
The Pretenders, with Pete Farndon, James Honeymoon-‐Scott, and Martin
Chambers. She has also released a number of songs with other musicians
including Frank Sinatra, Cher, and UB40. Hynde was inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005 as a member of The Pretenders. Hynde has a
contralto vocal range. Until 1978, shortly before the advent of The
Pretenders, Hynde had little idea what she sounded like. Attributing her
distinctive time signatures to an inability to count and her distinctive amusia
to an inability to hear, Hynde eschews formal voice training; she contends
that “distinctive voices in rock are trained through years of many things:
frustration, fear, loneliness, anger, insecurity, arrogance, narcissism, or just
sheer perseverance – anything but a teacher. With her take-‐no-‐prisoners
lyrical and musical approach and her Zen-‐Beatnik-‐Punk-‐Biker-‐Chick style,
Hynde, along with her contemporaries Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Joan Jett,
The Runaways, Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, Grace Jones, Exene Cervenka, Lydia
Lunch, The Slits. The Raincoats, Wendy O. Williams, Lene Lovich and Nina
Hagen influenced the musical landscape as well as female fashion and the
feminist attitude for further generations’ inspiration. In a 1994 interview,
Madonna recalled of Hynde: “I saw her play in Central Park [in August 1980,
performing with the Pretenders]. She was amazing: the only woman I’d seen
in performance where I thought, yeah, she’s got balls, she’s awesome! …It
40
gave me courage, inspiration, to see a woman with that kind of confidence in
a man’s world.”
• Judith Butler:
An American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced

political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-‐wave feminist, queer, and
literary theory. In 1993, she began teaching at the University of California,
Berkeley, where she has served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Eliot
Professor n the Department of Comparative Literature and Program of
Critical Theory. She is also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European
Graduate School. Butler is best known for her books GENDER TROUBLE:
FEMINISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITY (1990) and BODIES THAT
MATTER: ON THE DISCURSIVE LIMITS OF SEX (1993), in which she
challenges conventional notions of gender and develops her theory of gender
performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer
scholarship. Her works are often studied in film studies courses emphasizing
gender studies and performativity in discourse. Butler has supported lesbian
and gay rights movements and has spoken out on many contemporary
political issues. In particular, she is a vocal critic of Zionism, Israeli politics,
and its effect on the Israeli-‐Palestinian conflict, emphasizing that Israel does
not and should not be take to represent all Jews or Jewish opinion. From
thecut.com: If you wanted to choose a celebrity avatar for everything
supposedly weird about The Youth, you could do worse than Jaden Smith: a
gnomic tweeter, sometime crystal devotee, self-‐described “Future of Music,
Photography, and Filmmaking,” who has little attachment to the gender
binary. Earlier this year, the 17-‐year-‐old son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett
Smith, brother of Willow, appeared in a Louis Vuitton womenswear
campaign. Jaden Smith, quasar of contemporary teen behaviors, wears a
finged white top and an embellished, knee-‐length black skirt. Wait, though.
Rub your eyes, refocus your gaze, and really, is there any real reason why this
ought to be weird? He looks good. And gender norms – they are pretty
arbitrary, right? Smith also wore a dress, with a loose sport coat and
sneakers, when he took THE HUNGER GAMES’ Amandla Stenberg to the
41
prom. (Stenberg, meanwhile, recently came out as bisexual over Snapchat,
though she’s also shrugged at conventional identity politics: “I don’t really
see sexuality in boxes,” she has said.) Smith’s insouciant attitude toward
gender looks less like affectation than evidence of a world that has changed
profoundly in the two decades since his father starred on THE FRESH
PRINCE OF BEL-‐AIR. Or, for that matter, since his father refused to kiss a
man onscreen 23 years ago. Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out last year was
Kardashian-‐scale teachable moment – the opportunity for patient, prime-‐
time explanations of why not to take gender for granted. But beyond the
“transgender tipping point” heralded by TIME and the broader awakening of
identity politics, there is another revelation going on: a growing acceptance,
especially among a broad swath of young people, of easy gender fluidity and
ambiguity. In 2014, Facebook stopped limiting its gender options to male or
female and began giving users some 50 other choices (from neutrois to
genderqueer to cis). In 2015, the site abandoned that present menu
altogether and just let users enter up to ten terms of their own. We find
ourselves poised someplace between gender mattering tremendously and
mattering not very much at all. The impulse to reexamine assumptions has
had practical consequences – gender-‐neutral college dorms and high-‐school
bathrooms – and cultural ripples. Writers like Jill Soloway (creator of TV’s
TRANSPARENT) and Maggie Nelson (author of the queer-‐family memoir THE
ARGONAUTS) have found human drama in gender’s mutability. Meanwhile,
BuzzFeed offers an illustrated list showing “What People Say to Gender
Nonbinary People vs. the Subtext We Often Hear,” and ROOKIE presents the
recent comic “My Gender is Weird.” Here’s TEEN VOGUE on another photo of
Jaden Smith in a skirt suit: The midi skirt set sends up a poignant rejection of
heteronormativity.” What sage could have predicted that heteronormativity
would eventually make its way into the vocabulary of teen magazines and
shareable web content? Only, perhaps, the queer theorist Judith Butler.
Butler laughs when I tell her about the TEEN VOGUE verdict on Jaden Smith.
“I think there aren’t very many of us who could have foreseen it,” Butler says,
considering the blossoming mainstream interest in gender issues. We are
speaking shortly after President Obama publicly voiced his support for
transgender rights in the fight against North Carolina’s bathroom law, and
gender – as something in need of definition, as something potentially
ambiguous or complex – is at the center of national debate. “Such an
utterance coming out of a U.S. presdent would be impossible in the 1990s,”
Butler says. GENDER TROUBLE, published in 1990, made Butler a star: It
introduced “performativity,” the idea that gender isn’t something we are but
something we continually do, opening the door for “cultural configurations of
sex and gender [to] proliferate,” as she put it in the book’s conclusion,
“confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental
unnaturalness.” If not for Butler’s work, “you wouldn’t have the version of
genderqueer-‐ness that we have now,” says Jack Halberstam, a gender-‐studies
professor at Columbia. “She made it clear that the body is not a stable
foundation for gender expression.” For much of her career, Butler was
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known mostly within academia, in part because of the difficulty of her prose.
And yet the work Butler demands of readers is of a kind that, more than ever,
they are willing to do now – if not necessarily while reading theoretical texts,
then in moving through their daily lives. People outside the academy
question their assumptions; they wrestle with unfamiliar ideas and examine
their own discomfort. “Don’t laugh,” read a recent headline in the
WASHINGTON POST. “I have a serious reason for raising my cats gender
neutral.” (The reason: as a reminder to use the right pronouns for nonbinary
friends.) Theoryspeak, meanwhile, has infiltrated civilian vocabularies.
Trope and problematic and heteronormative; even, in a not-‐quite-‐Butlerian
sense, performative – the sort of words that rankled queer theory’s culture-‐
wars critics – are right at home on Tumblr and Twitter. In a broad-‐stroke,
vastly simplified version, the understanding of gender that GENDER
TROUBLE suggests is not only recognizable; it is pop. I was watching
SCANDAL the other night,” Butler tells me, “and there was a great moment
where a black characters says, ‘Oh, race is just a social construct.’” She enjoys
observing this kind of cultural cross-‐pollination. “I thought it was hilarious!
It was a moment where an academic argument was brought into popular
culture.” (Butler also watches TRANSPARENT, which she considers
“enormously entertaining” but “much better on Jewish life than it is on trans
life. It’s a bit of a throwback to the LA CAGE AUX FOLLES idea of
transgender.”) This kind of thing happens with some frequency now, and
often transcends mere hilarity, as when Laverne Cox talks in interviews
about Simone de Beauvoir. “Laverne says, ‘It was that phrase, that one is not
born but rather becomes a woman, that made it possible for me to think that
I could become trans,’” Butler says. “You know, it’s kind of trippy that here’s
this popular-‐culture person who has read and struggled with ideas, and went
out into this world, and brought them with her” to reach new audiences.
GENDER TROUBLE hasn’t changed – chapters still feel like long-‐distance
runs. And yet completing this feat of endurance today leaves the liberal-‐artsy
reader with a curious sense of lightness. The felling is not of your
worldview’s being upended but rather thoroughly explained. That it comes
into being through repeated actions, so, like, I become recognizable as a “girl”
by doing girls things: Okay. That the world as we know it has generally
presumed everyone to be straight-‐wise, pay the price; and that, while maybe
we can’t totally escape all of this, we can find ways of questioning it, possible
even undermining it, and so making life more livable for everybody: Yeah,
sounds about right. Here is the link to the rest of the article:
https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/judith-‐butler-‐c-‐v-‐r.html
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• Blondie/Debbie Harry:
An American rock band founded by singer Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris
Stein. The band were pioneers in the early American new wave and punk
scenes of the mid-‐late 1970s. Its first two albums contained strong elements
of these genres, and although successful in the United Kingdom and Australia,
Blondie was regarded as an underground band in the United States until the
release of PARALLEL LINES in 1978. Over the next three years, the band
achieved several hit singles, including “Heart of Glass”, “Call Me”, “Rapture”,
and “The Tide is High” and became noted for its eclectic mix of musical styles
incorporating elements of disco, pop, reggae, and early rap music. Debbie
Harry is an American singer, songwriter, model, and actress. From VANITY
FAIR: “I don’t think anybody thought about being in a band for more than a
year or two,” Debbie Harry told VF Hollywood at the opening party for “A
Blondie Exhibition,” at the Chelsea Hotel Storefront Gallery last Monday. But
how wrong she was: this year marks the 40th anniversary of Blondie, one of
the greatest 1970s New York bands and one of the first to blend the grit and
decay of punk rock with the pop and flash of new wave. From DAZED:
Sometimes, looking at images of Debbie Harry is actually painful she looks
that good. With her iconic pout, shock of bleached white hair and revolving,
ever-‐imitated outfit choices, the 70s style queen has always been (and still is)
much more than Blondie’s lead singer. First emerging onto the scene as a
Playboy bunny, and ending up as one of punk rock’s most fearless
frontwomen, Harry defined the effortless fashion of New York City; a style
borne from sweaty basement hangouts CBGB, Studio 54, and Max’s Kansas
City, and documented in Edo Bertoglio’s party-‐buzzed polaroids and
44
countless on-‐stage film clips. These days, her influence is felt everywhere,
from the denim-‐clad looks that Sky Ferreira rocks on stage, to Miley Cyrus’
self-‐aware sexual prowess.
• Suzi Quatro:

An American rock singer-‐songwriter, multi-‐instrumentalist and actress. She
was the first female bass player to become a major rock star. In the 1970s,
45
Quatro scored a string of hit singles that found greater successes in Europe
and Australia than in her homeland. She reached no. 1 in the UK and other
European countries and Australia with her singles “Can the Can” (1973) and
“Devil Gate Drive” (1974). Following a recurring role as bass player Leather
Tuscadero on the popular American sitcom HAPPY DAYS, her duet “Stumblin’
In” with Smokie’s lead singer Chris Norman reached No. 4 in the US. Quatro
released her eponymous debut album in 1973. Since then, she has released
fifteen studio albums, ten compilation albums, and one live album. Her other
solo hits include “48 Crash”, “Daytona Demon”, “The Wild One”, and “Your
Mama Won’t Like Me”. Between 1973 and 1980, Quatro was awarded six
Bravo Ottos. In 2010, she was voted into the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends
online Hall of Fame. Quatro has sold over 50 million and continues to
perform live, worldwide. Her most recent studio album was released in 2019
and she also continues to present new radio programmes. In August 1974,
Simon Frith spotted a problem with the formula that was working outside
the US, saying that, “Suzi’s facing a bit of a [commercial] crisis: Chinn and
Chapman, having proved their point, are losing interest in her. She’s never
had their best material (they don’t play many games with her) and each of
her singles has been less gripping than the one before. Unless they suddenly
imagine a new joke, she’s in danger of petering out and she lacks the
resources to fight back. None of her own musical talents has been needed
and so they’ve been ignored (except on the throwaway B-‐sides) and while
Sweet and Mud have their histories and themselves to draw for support,
Suzi’s present has nothing to do with her past and her group was formed
only to play Chinnichap music. Mud may become a top cabaret act and Sweet
a respected rock group, but Suzi will only be a memory. Mickie Most’s skill in
the ‘60s was to make pop music out of British blues and R&B and folk; Chinn
and Chapman’s skill in the ‘70s has been to make pop music out of an
audience. As this audience ages and changes, so will its music and Suzi
Quatro will have been just an affectionate part of growing up.” In 1983,
journalis Tom Hibbert wrote that Quatro may have overstated her role as the
leading light among female rock musicians. He said that, “…it was in the
wake of the 1977 punk revolution that the traditions of rock were turned
upside down and female musicians truly came to the fore. But Suzi Quatro,
with her tomboy sneers, her bass guitar and her stompingly persuasive teen-‐
tunes, had at least laid down a challenge to the male-‐dominated rock
orthodoxy. On stage in the Eighties, Quatro was still conveying energy and
excitement – and she still lacked class.” In his 2008 paper SUZI QUATRO: A
PROTOTYPE IN THE ARCHSHEOLOGY OF ROCK, Frank Oglesbee writes that,
“The rebellion of rock music was largely a male rebellion; the women – often,
in the 1950s and ‘60s, girls in their teens – in rock usually sang songs as
personae utterly dependent on their macho boyfriends”. He describes
Quatro as “a female rock pioneer, in some ways the female rock pioneer…a
cornerstone in the archsheology of rock.” He said she grew up to become
“the first female lead singer and bassist, an electric ax-‐woman, who sang and
played as freely as the males, inspiring other females.”
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• Jayne County: An American singer,
songwriter, actress, and record producer whose career has spanned five
decades. She was the vocalist of influential proto-‐punk band Wayne County
& the Electric Chairs and has been known for her outrageous and
unpredictable stage antics. She went on to become rock’s first openly
transgender singer. County’s music has encompassed a number of styles
over the course of her career, including glam punk, punk rock, blues rock,
and boogie-‐woogie. County did not think her birth name Wayne Rogers
“sounded very glamorous” and decided to adopt the name of the county in
which Detroit was located because she admired bands from that city “like
Iggy Pop and all those people.” Though she has never been a commercial
success, she has been an influence on a number of musicians including David
Bowie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, Pete Burns, and Lou Reed, and many of
County’s songs have become well-‐known, including “Are You Man Enough to
Be a Woman”, “Fuck Off”, “Stuck on You”, and “Night Time”. Pianist Jools
Holland’s first studio outing was with County on her single “Fuck Off”. She
also appeared as an actress at Andy Warhol’s FACTORY.
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• New York Dolls:
An American hard rock band formed in New York City in 1971. Along with
the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, they were one of the first bands of
the early punk rock scenes. Although their original line-‐up fell apart quickly,
the band’s first two albums – NEW YORK DOLLS (1973) and TOO MUCH TOO
SOON (1974) – became among the most popular cult records in rock. The
line-‐up at this time comprised vocalist David Johansen, guitarist Johnny
Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane, guitarist and pianist Sylvain Sylvain and
drummer Jerry Nolan; the latter two had replaced Rick Rivets and Billy
Murcia, respectively, in 1972. On stage, they donned an androgynous
wardrobe, wearing high heels, eccentric hats and satin. Nolan described the
group in 1974 as “the Dead End Kids of today”. According to the
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR MUSIC (1995), the New York Dolls predated
the punk and glam metal movements and were “one of the most influential
rock bands of the last 20 years.” They influenced rock groups such as the Sex
Pistols, Kiss, the Ramones, Guns N’ Roses, the Damned and the Smith, whose
frontman Morrissey organized a reunion show for the New York Dolls’
surviving members in 2004. After reuniting, they recorded and released
three more albums – ONE DAY IT WILL PLEASE US TO REMEMBER EVEN
THIS (2006), CAUSE I SEZ SO (2009), and DANCING BACKWARD IN HIGH
HEELS (2011). The New York Dolls have been inactive following a 2011
British tour with Alice Cooper; the band’s guitarist on that tour, Earl Slick,
confirmed in an interview they had disbanded that same year. According to
48
AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the New York Dolls developed an
original style of hard rock that presaged both punk rock and heavy metal
music, and drew on elements such as the “dirty rock & roll” of the Rolling
Stones, the “anarchic noise” of the Stooges, the glam rock of David Bowie and
T. Rex, and girl group pop music. Erlewine credited the band for creating
punk rock “before there was a term for it.” Ken Tucker, who referred to them
as a proto-‐punk band, wrote that they were strongly influenced by the “New
York sensibility” of Lou Reed: “The mean wisecracks and impassioned
cynicism that informed the Dolls’ songs represented an attitude that Reed’s
work with the Velvet Underground embodied, as did the Dolls’ distinct lack of
musicianship. When they began performing, four of the band’s five members
wore Spandex and platform boots, while Johansen – the band’s lyricist and
“conceptmaster” – often preferred high heels and a dress occasionally.
Fashion historian Valerie Steele said that, while the majority of the punk
scene pursued an understated “street look”, the New York Dolls followed an
English glam rock “look of androgyny – leather and knee-‐length boots, chest
hair, and bleach”. According to James McNair of THE INDEPENDENT, “when
they began pedaling their trashy glam-‐punk around lower Manhattan in
1971, they were more burlesque act than band; a bunch of lipsticked, gutter
chic-‐endorsing cross-‐dressers.”
49
• Marc Bolan / T. Rex:
An English singer-‐songwriter, musician, guitarist, and poet. He was best
50
known as the lead singer of the glam rock band T. Rex. Bolan was one of the
pioneers of the glam rock movement of the 1970s. He died at the age of 29 in
a car crash two weeks before his 30th birthday. In 1997, a memorial stone
and bust of Bolan, Marc Bolan’s Rock Shrine, was unveiled at the site where
he died in Barnes, London. Bolan’s appearance on the BBC’s music show TOP
OF THE POPS in March 1971, wearing glitter and satins, is often cited as the
beginning of the glam rock movement. Music critic Ken Barnes called Bolan
“the man who started it all”. T. Rex’s 1971 album ELECTRIC WARRIOR, with
all songs written by Bolan, including the UK chart topper “Get It On”, has
been described by AllMusic as “the album that essentially kick-‐started the UK
glam rock craze.” Producer Tony Visconti, who would also work with the
other major glam rock pioneer David Bowie, stated, “What I saw in Marc
Bolan had nothing to do with strings, or very high standards of artistry; what
I saw in him was raw talent. I saw genius. I saw a potential rock star in Marc
– right from the minute, the hour I met him.” Bolan and his producer Tony
Visconti oversaw the session for “Ride a White Swan”, the single that changed
Bolan’s career which was inspired in part by Mungo Jerry’s success with “In
the Summertime”, moving Bolan away from predominately acoustic numbers
to a more electric sound. Recorded on 1 July 1970 and released later that
year, it made slow progress in the UK Top 40, until it finally peaked in early
1971 at number two. Bolan took to wearing top hats and feather boas on
stage as well as putting drops of glitter on each of his cheekbones. Stories
are conflicting about his inspiration for this – some say it was introduced by
his personal assistant, Chelita Secunda, although Bolan told John Pidgeon in a
1974 interview on Radio 1 that he noticed the glitter on his wife, June Child’s
dressing table prior to a photo session and casually daubed some on his face
there and then. Other performers – and their fans – soon took up variations
on the idea. The era of glam and glitter rock was born.
51
• Roxy music:
An English rock band that were formed in 1970 by Bryan Ferry – who
became the band’s lead singer and main songwriter – and bass guitarist
Graham Simpson. Alongside Ferry, the other longtime members were Phil
Manzanera (guitar), Andy Mackay (saxophone and oboe), and Paul
Thompson (drums and percussion). Other members included Brian Eno
(synthesizer and “treatments”), Eddie Jobson (synthesizer and violin), and
John Gustafson (bass). Although the band took a break from group activities
in 1976 and again in 1983, they reunited for a concert tour in 2001, and
toured together intermittently between that time and their break-‐up in 2011.
Ferry frequently enlisted members of Roxy Music as session musicians for
his solo releases. Roxy Music became a successful act in Europe and
Australia during the 1970s. This success began with their self-‐titled debut
album, ROXY MUSIC (1972). The band pioneered more musically
sophisticated elements of glam rock while significantly influencing early
English punk music, and provided a model for many new wave acts while
innovating elements of electronic composition. The group also distinguished
their visual and musical sophistication through the preoccupation with
glamorous fashions. Ferry and co-‐founding member Eno have had influential
solo careers. The latter became one of Britain’s most significant record
producers of the late 20th century. ROLLING STONE magazine ranked Roxy
Music No. 98 on its “The Immortals – 100 The Greatest Artists of All Time”
list, thought it dropped the group from its updated list in 2011. The band’s
final studio album was AVALON (1982), which became platinum-‐certified in
the United States. In 2005 the band began recording a new studio album,
which would have been their ninth, and would have been their first record
since 1973 with Brian Eno, who wrote two songs for it and also played
keyboards. However, Bryan Ferry eventually confirmed that material from
52
these sessions would be released as a Ferry solo album, with Eno playing on
“a couple of tracks”, and that he does not think they will ever record as Roxy
Music again. The album ultimately became Ferry’s 2010 solo album
OLYMPIA, which featured contribution from Eno, Manzanera and Mackay
(amongst many other session players.) Roxy Music played a series of 40th
anniversary shows in 2011, but has since become inactive as a performing
entity. In 2019, Roxy Music were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame. The early style and presentation of Roxy Music was influenced by the
art school backgrounds of its principal members. Ferry, Mackay, and Eno, all
had studied at prominent UK art colleges during the mid-‐to-‐late 1960s, when
these institutions were introducing courses that avoided traditional art
teaching practice, with its emphasis on painting, and instead focused on more
recent developments, most notably pop art, and explored new concepts such
as cybernetics. As writer Michael Bracewell notes in his book ROXY: THE
BAND THAT INVENTED AN ERA, Roxy Music was created expressly by Ferry,
Mackay, and Eno, as a means of combining their musical interests in music,
modern art, and fashion. Roxy Music was one of the first rock music groups
to create and maintain a carefully crafted look and style that included their
stage presentation, music videos, album and single cover designs, and
promotional materials such as posters, handbills, cards and badges. They
were assisted in this by a group of friends and associates who helped sculpt
the classic Roxy Music ‘look’, notably fashion designer Antony Price, hair
stylist Keith Mainwaring, photographer Karl Stoecker, the group’s “PR
consultant” Simon Puxley (a former university friend of Mackay’s) and
Ferry’s art school classmate Nicholas De Ville. Well-‐known critic Lester
Bangs went so far to say that Roxy represented “the triumph of artifice”. In
2005, Tim de Lisle of THE GUARDIAN argued that Roxy Music are the second
most influential British band after The Beatles. He wrote, “Somehow, in a
landscape dominated by Led Zeppelin at one end and The Osmonds at the
other, they managed to reach the Top 10 with a heady mixture of futurism,
retro rock ‘n’ roll, camp, funny noised, silly outfits, art techniques, film
references and oboe solos. And although their popularity has ebbed and
flowed, their influence has been strikingly consistent.
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• Celine Dion:
Canadian singer. Born into a large family from Charlemagne, Quebec, she
emerged as a teen star in her homeland with a series of French-‐language
albums during the 198s. She first gained international recognition by
winning both the 1982 Yamaha World Popular Song Festival and the 1988
Eurovision Song Contest, where she represented Switzerland. After learning
to speak English, she signed on to Epic Records in the United States. In 1990,
Dion released her debut English-‐language album, UNISON, establishing
herself as a viable pop artist in North America and other English-‐speaking
areas of the world. During the 1990s, she achieved worldwide fame after
releasing several best-‐selling English albums, such as FALLING INTO YOU
(1996) and LET’S TALK ABOUT LOVE (1997), which were both certified
diamond in the US. She also scored a series of international number-‐one hits,
including “The Power of Love”, “Think Twice”, “Because You Loved Me”, “It’s
All Coming Back to Me Now”, “My Heart Will Go On”, and “I’m Your Angel”.
Dion continued releasing French albums between each English record; D’EUX
(1995) became the best-‐selling French-‐language album of all time, while S’IL
SUFFISAIT D’AIMER (1998), SANS ATTENDRE (2012), and ENCORE UN SOIR
(2016), were all certified diamond in France. During the 2000s, she built her
reputation as a highly successful live performer with A NEW DAY… in Las
Vegas Strip (2003-‐07), which remains the highest-‐grossing concert residency
of all time, as well as the Taking Chances World Tour (2008-‐09), one of the
highest-‐grossing concert tours of all time. Dion’s music has been influenced
by genres ranging from rock and R&B to gospel and classical. Her recordings
are mainly in French and English, although she also sings in Spanish, Italian,
German, Latin, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. While her releases have
often received mixed critical reception, she is regarded as one of pop music’s
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most influential voices. She has won five Grammy Awards, including Album
of the Year and Record of the Year.
• Karen Carpenter:
An American singer and drummer who was part of the duo the Carpenters
alongside her brother Richard. She was praised for her contralto vocals, and
her drumming abilities were viewed positively by other musicians and
critics. Her struggles with eating disorders would later raise awareness of
anorexia and body dysmorphia. Carpenter was born in New Haven,
Connecticut, and moved to Downey, California, in 1963 with her family. She
began to study the drums in high school and joined the Long Beach State
choir after graduating. After several years of touring and recording, the
Carpenters were signed to A&M Records in 1969, achieving commercial and
critical success throughout the 1970s. Initially, Carpenter was the band’s
full-‐time drummer, but gradually took the role of frontwoman as drumming
was reduced to a handful of live showcases or tracks on albums. While the
Carpenters were on hiatus in the late 1970s, she recorded a solo album,
which was released years after her death. Carpenter had the eating disorder
anorexia nervosa, which was little-‐known at the time, and was briefly
married in the early 1980s. She died at age 32 from heart failure caused by
complications related to her illness. Her death led to increased visibility and
awareness of eating disorders. Her work continues to attract praise,
including being listed among ROLLING STONE’s 100 greatest singers of all
time. Carptenter’s singing has attracted critical praise and influenced several
significant musicians and singers. Paul McCartney has said she had “the best
female voice in the world: melodic, tuneful, and distinctive”. She had been
called “one of the greatest voices of our lifetime” by Elton John. her
drumming has been praised by fellow musicians Hal Blain, Cubby O’Brien
and Buddy Rich and by MODERN DRUMMER magazine. In 1975, she was
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voted the best rock drummer in a poll of PLAYBOY readers, beating Led
Zeppelin’s John Bonham.
• Prince:
An American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, dancer, actor,
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and filmmaker. With a career spanning four decades, Prince was known for
his eclectic work and flamboyant stage performances. He was also a multi-‐
instrumentalist and regarded as a guitar virtuoso. Prince was also known for
his very wide and extensive vocal range, in particular his far reaching
falsetto. His innovative music integrated a wide variety of styles, including
funk, rock, R&B, new wave, soul, psychedelia, and pop. Born and raised in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, Prince developed an interest in music as a young
child and wrote his first song, “Funk Machine”, at the age of seven. He signed
a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records at the age of 17 and released
his debut album FOR YOU in 1978. His 1979 album PRINCE went platinum,
and his next three albums – DIRTY MIND (1980), CONTROVERSY (1981), and
1999 (1982) – continued his success, prominently showcasing his explicit
lyrics as well as blending of funk, dance, and rock music. In 1984, he began
referring to his backup band as The Revolution and released PURPLE RAIN,
the soundtrack album to his film debut. It quickly became his most critically
and commercially successful release, spending 24 consecutive weeks atop
Billboard 200 and selling 25 million copies worldwide. After releasing the
albums AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAY (1985) and PARADE (1986), The
Revolution disbanded, and Prince released the double album SIGN O’ THE
TIMES (1987) as a solo artist. He released three more solo albums before
debuting THE NEW POWER GENERATION band in 1991. In 1993, in the
midst of a contractual dispute with Warner Bros., he changed his stage name
to an unpronounceable symbol, also known as the “Love Symbol,” and began
churning out new albums at a faster rate in order to sooner meet a
contractually required quota and so release himself from further obligations
to the record label. He released five records between 1994 and 1996 before
he signed with Arista Records in 1998. In 2000, he began referring to himself
as “Prince” again. He released 16 albums after that, including the platinum-‐
selling MUSICOLOGY (2004). His final album HIT N RUN PHASE TWO, was
first released on the Tidal streaming service in 2015. Four months later, at
the age of 57, Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose at his Paisley
Park home and recording studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota. Prince pioneered
the late 1970s Minneapolis sound, a funk rock subgenre drawing from synth-‐
pop and new wave. He sold over 100 million records worldwide, making him
one of the best-‐selling music artists of all time. He won seven Grammy
Awards, seven Brit Awards, six American Music Awards, four MTV Video
Music Awards, an Academy Award (for Best Original Score for the 1984 film
PURPLE RAIN) and a Golden Globe Award. He was inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame and Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2004 and
2016 respectively. ROLLNG STONES ranked Prince at No. 27 on their list of
100 Greatest Artists of All Time. The LOS ANGELES TIMES called Prince “our
first post-‐everything pop star, defying easy categories of race, genre, and
commercial appeal.” Jon Pareles of THE NEW YORK TIMES described him as
“a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop”, and highlighted his ability to
defy labels. As a performer, he was known for his flamboyant style and
showmanship. He came to be regarded as a sex symbol for his androgynous,
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amorphous sexuality, play with signifiers of gender, and defiance of racial
stereotypes. His “audacious, idiosyncratic” fashion sense made use of
“ubiquitous purple, alluring makeup and frilled garments.” His androgynous
look has been compared to Little Richard and David Bowie.
• Lady Gaga:
An American singer, songwriter, and actress. She is known for her
unconventionality, provocative work and visual experimentation. Gaga
began performing as a teenager, singing at open mic nights and acting in
school plays. She studied at Collaborative Arts Project 21, thorugh New York
University’s Tisch School of the Arts, before dropping out to pursue a music
career. When Def Jam Recordings canceled her contract, she worked as a
songwriter for Sony/ATV Music Publishing, where Akon helpe her sign a
joint deal with Interscope Records and his own label KonLive Distribution in
2007. She rose to prominence the following year with her debut album, the
electropop record THE FAME, and its chart-‐topping singles “Just Dance” and
“Poker Face”. A follow-‐up EP, THE FAME MONSTER (2009), featuring the
singles “Bad Romance”, “Telephone” and “Alejandra”, was also successful.
Gaga’s second full-‐length album, BORN THIS WAY (2011), explored
electronic rock and techno-‐pop. It peaked atop the US Billboard 200 and sold
more than one million copies in the country in its first week. Its title track
became the fastest selling song on the iTunes Store with over a million
downloads in less than a week. Gaga experimented with EDM on her third
studio album, ARTPOP (2013), which reached number one in the US and
included the single “Applause”. Her collaborative jazz album with Tony
Bennett, CHEEK TO CHEEK (2014), and her soft rock-‐influenced fifth studio
album JOANNE (2016), also topped the US charts. During this period Gaga
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ventured into acting playing leading roles in the miniseries AMERICAN
HORROR STORY: HOTEL (2015-‐2016), for which she received a Golden Globe
Award for Best Actress, and the critically acclaimed musical drama A STAR IS
BORN (2018). She also contributed to the latter’s soundtrack, which received
the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music and made her the only woman to
achieve five US number one albums in the 2010s. Its lead single “Shallow”,
earned Gaga the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best
Original Song. Critics have analyzed and scrutinized Gaga’s musical and
performance style, as she has experimented with new ideas and images
throughout her career. She says the continual reinvention is “liberating”
herself, which she has been drawn to since childhood. Gaga is a contralto
with a range spanning from Bb2 to B5. She has changed her vocal style
regularly, and considers BORN THIS WAY “much more vocally up to par with
what I’ve always been capable of”. In summing up her voice,
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY wrote: “There’s an immense emotional
intelligence behind the way she uses her voice. Almost never does she
overwhelm a song with her vocal ability, recognizing instead that artistry is
to be found in nuance rather than lung power. Gaga’s songs have been called
“depthless” by writer Camille Paglia in THE SUNDAY TIMES, but according to
Evan Sawdey of POPMATTERS, she “does manage to get you moving and
grooving at an almost effortless pace”. Gaga believes that “all good music can
be played on a piano and still sound like a hit”. Simon Reynolds wrote in
2010, “Everything about Gaga came from electroclash except the music,
which wasn’t particularly 1980s, just ruthlessly catchy naughties pop glazed
with Auto-‐Tune and undergirded with R&B-‐ish bests. When interviewed by
Barbara Walters for her annual ABC News special 10 MOST FASCINATING
PEOPLE in 2009, Gaga dismissed the claim that she is intersex as an urban
legend. Responding to a question on the issue, she expressed her fondness
for androgyny. In a 2010 SUNDAY TIMES article, Camille Paglia called Gaga
“more an identity thief than an erotic taboo breaker, a mainstream
manufactured product who claims to be singing for the freaks, the rebellious
and the dispossessed when she is none of those.”
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• Nicky Minaj:
A Trinidad and Tobago-‐born rapper, singer, songwriter, actress, and model.

Born in Saint James, Port of Spain, and raised in Queens, New York City, she
gained public recognition after releasing the mixtapes PLAYTIME IS OVER
(2007), SUCKA FREE (2008), and BEAM ME UP SCOTTY (2009). After
signing with Young Money Entertainment in 2009, Minaj released her first
studio album PINK FRIDAY (2010), which peaked at number one on the US
Billboard 200 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Her second
album PINK FRIDAY: ROMAN RELOADED, was released in 2012 and debuted
at number one in several countries. Minaj made her film debut in the 2012
animated film ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFTS. In 2013, she was a judge on
the twelfth season of AMERICAN IDOL. Minaj’s third studio album, THE
PINKPRINT, was released in 2014. She subsequently played supporting roles
in the films THE OTHER WOMAN (2014) and BARBERSHOP: THE NEXT CUT
(2016). Her fourth studio album QUEEN, was released in 2018. Early in her
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career, Minaj was known for her colorful costumes and wigs. Her rapping is
distinctive for its fast flow and use of alter egos and accents, primarily British
cockney. Minaj was the first female artists included on MTV’s annual Hottest
MC list. In 2016, Minaj was included on the annual TIME 100 list of most
influential people in the world. As a lead artist, she has earned four top-‐five
entries on the Billboard Hot 100: “super Bass” in 2011, “Starships” in 2012,
and “Bang Bang” and “Anaconda”, both in 2014. She has accumulated the
most Billboard Hot 100 entries among women of all genres. Minaj has
broken other records including the most top 10 hits among women on the
Billboard R&B Hip-‐Hop Airplay chart. Minaj has been called one of the most
influential female rap artists of all time. Throughout her career, she has
received numerous accolades, including six American Music Awards, 11 BET
Awards, four MTV Video Awards, four Billboard Music Awards, a Billboard
Women in Music Rising Star Award, and 10 Grammy Award nominations.
Minaj has sold 20 million singles as a lead artist, 60 million singles as a
featured artist, and over five million albums worldwide, making her one of
the world’s best-‐selling music artists. Minaj is known for her animated
rapping style and her unique flow. Her rapping is distinctive for its speed
and the use of alter egos and accents, primarily British cockney. She often
both sings and raps in her songs and combines metaphors, punch lines, and
word play into her work. The alter egos are incorporated with her lyrics in
British accents (Roman Zolanski) or soft-‐spokenness (Harajuku Barbie). Ice-‐
T said about Minaj’s rapping style, “[Minaj] does her thing. She has her own
way of doing it. She has an ill vocal delivery. She kind of reminds me of a
female Busta Rhymes, like how she throws her voice in different directions.”
• Joan Jett:
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An American rock singer, songwriter, composer, musician, record producer,
and occasional actress. Jett is best known for her work as the frontwoman of
her band Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, and for earlier founding and performing
with the Runaways, which recorded and released the hit song “Cherry
Bomb”. The Blackhearts’ version of the song “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” was
number-‐one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1982. Jett’s other
notable hit songs include “Bad Reputation”, “Crimson and Clover”, “Do You
Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)”, “Light of Day”, “I Hate Myself for Loving You”,
and “Dirty Deeds”. Jett has a mezzo-‐soprano vocal range. She has three
albums that have been certified Platinum or Gold, and has been a feminist
icon throughout her career. She has been described as the Queen of Rock ‘n’
Roll and the Godmother of Punk. In 2015, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts were
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Jett lived in Long Beach, New
York, since the late 1970s before moving to Rockville Centre, New York.
From CitizenTruth.org: When asked about the role of feminism in her band’s
early days, Jett said that the term was still new at the time and that it
occasionally conflicted with her own motives. “I definitely felt criticism from
aspects of that movement who were uncomfortable with the fact that young
girls and teenagers want to have sex and talk about sex. You don’t just
dismiss that aspect of being a woman,” Jett said. Jett went on to explain that
Rock n’ Roll is innately “sexual” and that this should be embraced for its
virtues – not feared for its potential limitations and dangers. “It’s frustrating
when you’re taking crap from women you’re trying to follow your dreams.
Your parents always told you that you could be whatever you wanted to be,
and now you’ve got these women telling you that can’t for some political
reason you don’t yet understand. I didn’t get it.” “The problem with labels is
they have boundaries, you know?” Joan continued. “What a feminist is to
one person is not the same thing [to another]. I’m for people being what they
want to be; if that’s a woman being a rock ‘n’ roller or a nuclear physicist,
which may not be fields women typically go into. You can’t let other people
dictate your life to you. I know I’m a woman, I knew I was girl, but I’m going
to do what I’m going to do. I didn’t get caught up in the gender role of it.
That’s what I was fighting against the whole time, the fact that people were
saying girls can’t play rock ‘n’ roll. It didn’t make logical sense to me.”
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• Little Richard:
An American musician, singer, and songwriter. An influential figure in
popular music and culture for seven decades, Richard Wayne Penniman’s
most celebrated work dates from the mid-‐1950s, when his dynamic music
and charismatic showmanship laid the foundation for rock and roll. His
music also played a key role in the formation of other popular music genres,
including soul and funk. Penniman influenced numerous singers and
musicians across musical genres from rock to hip hop; his music helped
shape rhythm and blues for generations to come, and his performances and
headline-‐making thrust his career right into the mix of American popular
music. Penniman has been honored by many institutions. He was inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of its first group of inductees in
1986. He was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is the
recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy and
a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.
Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” (1955) was included in the National Recording
Registry of the Library of Congress in 2010, which stated that his “unique
vocalizing over the irresistible beat announced a new era in music.” In 2015,
the National Museum of African American Music honored Little Richard with
a Rhapsody & Rhythm Award for his pivotal role in the formation of popular
music genres and in helping shatter the color line on the music charts,
changing American culture significantly. Penniman said in 1984 that he
played with just girls as a child and was subjected to homophobic jokes and
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ridicule because of his manner of walk and talk. His father brutally punished
him whenever he caught his son wearing his mother’s makeup and clothing.
The singer claimed to have been sexually involved with both sexes as a
teenager. Because of his effeminate mannerisms, his father kicked him out of
their family home at 15. In 1985, on THE SOUTH BANK SHOW, Penniman
explained, “my daddy put me out of the house. He said he wanted seven
boys, and I had spoiled it, because I was gay.” Penniman first got involved in
voyeurism in his early twenties, when a female friend would drive him
around and pick up men who would allow him to watch them have sex in the
backseat of cars. Penniman’s activity caught the attention of Macon police in
1955 and he was arrested after a gas station attendant in Macon reported
sexual activity in a car Penniman was occupying with a heterosexual couple.
Cited on a sexual misconduct charge, he spent three days in jail and was
temporarily banned from performing in Macon, Georgia. In the early 1950s,
he became acquainted with an openly gay musician Billy Wright, who helped
in establishing Penniman’s look, advising him to use pancake makeup on his
face and wear his hair in a long-‐haired pompadour style similar to his. As
Penniman got used to the makeup, he ordered his band, the Upsetters, to
wear the makeup too, to gain entry into predominantly white venues during
performances, later stating, “I wore the make-‐up so that white men wouldn’t
think that I was after the white girls. It made things easier for me, plus it was
colorful too.” In 2000, Richard told JET magazine, “I figure if being called a
sissy would make me famous, let them say what they want to.” Penniman’s
look, however, still attracted female audiences, who would send him naked
photos and their phone numbers. Groupies began throwing undergarments
at Penniman during performances. Penniman’s music and performance style
had a pivotal effect on the shape and sound and style of popular music genres
of the 20th century. As a rock and roll pioneer, Penniman embodied its spirit
more flamboyantly than any other performer. Penniman’s raspy shouting
style gave the genre one of its most identifiable and influential vocal sounds
and his fusion of boogie-‐woogie, New Orleans R&B, and gospel music blazed
its rhythmic trail.
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• Chuck Berry: An American singer and
songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such
as “Maybellene” (1955), “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), “Rock and Roll Music”
(1957) and “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), Berry refined and developed rhythm
and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive.
Writing lyrics that focused on teen life and consumerism, and developing a
music style that included guitar solos and showmanship, Berry was a major
influence on subsequent rock music. Born into a middle-‐class African-‐
American family in St. Louis, Missouri, Berry had an interest in music from an
early age and gave his first public performance at Sumner High School. While
still a high school student he was convicted of armed robbery and was sent to
a reformatory, where he was held from 1944 to 1947. After his release,
Berry settled into married life and worked at an automobile assembly plant.
By early 1953, influenced by the guitar riffs and showmanship techniques of
the blues musician T-‐Bone Walker, Berry began performing with the Johnnie
Johnson Trio. His break came when he traveled to Chicago in May 1955 and
met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess, of Chess
Records. With Chess, he recorded “Maybellene” – Berry’s adaptation of the
country song “Ida Red” – which sold over a million copies, reaching number
one on Billboard magazine’s rhythm and blues chart. By the end of the
1950s, Berry was an established star, with several hit records and film
appearances and a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own
St. Louis nightclub, Berry’s Club Bandstand. However, he was sentenced to
three years in prison in January 1962 for offenses under the Mann Act – he
had transported a 14-‐year-‐old girl across state lines. After his release in
1963, Berry had several more hits, including “No Particular Place to Go”, “You
Never Can Tell”, and “Nadine”. But these did not achieve the same success, or
lasting impact, of his 1950s songs, and by the 1970s he was more in demand
as a nostalgic performer, playing his past hits with local backup bands of
variable quality. However, in 1972, he reached a new level of achievement
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when a rendition of “My Ding-‐a-‐Ling” became his only record to top the
charts. His insistence on being paid in cash led in 1979 to a four-‐month jail
sentence and community service, for tax evasion. Berry was among the first
musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening
in 1986; he was cited for having “laid the groundwork for not only a rock and
roll sound but a rock and roll stance” Berry is included n several of ROLLING
STONE magazine’s “greatest of all time” lists; he was ranked fifth on its 2004
and 2011 lists of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. The Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll includes three of Berry’s:
“Johnny B. Goode”, “Maybellene”, and “Rock and Roll Music”. Berry’s “Johnn
B. Goode” is the only rock-‐and-‐roll song included on the Voyager Golden
Record. He was nicknamed by NBC as the “Father of Rock and Roll”. Berry
contributed three things to rock music: an irresistible swagger, a focus on the
guitar riff as the primary melodic element and an emphsis on songwriting
and storytelling. Berry’s showmanship has been influential on other rock
guitarists, particularly his one-‐legged hop routine, and the “duck walk”,
which he first used as a child when he walked “stooping with full-‐bended
knees, but with my back and head vertical” under a table to retrieve a ball
and his family found it entertaining; he used it when “performing in New
York for the first time and some journalist branded it the duck walk.”
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• Anthony Newley:
An English actor, singer, and songwriter. Newley achieved success as a

performer in such diverse fields as rock and roll and stage and screen acting.
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As a recording artist he enjoyed a dozen Top 40 entries on the UK Singles
Chart between 1959 and 1962, including two number one hits. With
songwriting partner Leslie Bricusse, Newley penned “Feeling Good”, which
was popularized by Nina Simone and covered by many other popular artists,
as well as the title song of 1964 film GOLDFINGER (along with John Barry).
Bricusse and Newley received an Academy Award nomination for the film
score of WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1971). THE GUINESS
BOOK OF BRITISH HIT SINGLES & ALBUMS described Newley as “among the
most innovative UK acts of the early rock years before moving into musicals
and cabaret”. Newley was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in
1989.
• Lindsay Kemp:
A British dancer, actor, teacher, mime artist, and choreographer. He was
probably best known for his 1974 flagship production of FLOWERS, a mime
and music show based on Jean Genet’s novel OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS, in
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which he played the lead role of ‘Divine’. Due to its homosexuality and
perceived decadence, reviews were sometimes hostile, but it is widely
considered a theatrical and sensory sensation, and it toured globally for
many years. He was also a mentor to David Bowie and Kate Bush. He staged
and performed in Bowie’s ZIGGY STRADUST concerts at London’s Rainbow
Theatre in August 1972, with Jack Birkett, and appears in a the promotional
video for Bowie’s single “John, I’m Only Dancing”, directed by Mick Rock.
• Rufus Wainwright:
An American-‐Canadian singer, songwriter, and composer. He has recorded

seven albums of original music and numerous tracks on compilations and
film soundtracks. He has also written a classical opera and set Shakespeare
sonnets to music for a theater piece by Robert Wilson. Wainwright’s self-‐
titled debut album was released through DreamWorks Records in May 1998.
His second album POSES, was released in June 2001. Wainwright’s third and
fourth studio albums, WANT ONE (2003) and WANT TWO (2004), were
repackaged s the double album WANT in 2005. In 2007, Wainwright
released his fifth studio album RELEASE THE STARS and his first live album
RUFUS DOES JUDY AT CARNEGIE HALL. His second live album MILWAUKEE
AT LAST!!! was released in 2009, followed by the studio ablums ALL DAYS
ARE NIGHTS: SONGS FOR LULU (2010) and OUT OF THE GAME (2012). The
double album PRIMA DONNA (2015), was a recording of his opera of the
same name. His ninth studio album TAKE ALL MY LOVES: 9 SHAKESPEARE
SONNETS (2016), featured nine adaptations of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Wainwright’s work contains several recurring themes: opera, literature, pop
culture, politics, and love (often unrequited love). “Foolish Love” and “Danny
Boy” are about a crush he once had on a straight man. Other songs address
full-‐blown love and the consequences of falling out of love. Wainwrigtht also
sings about his family relationships. Several songs deal with experiences
with addiction.
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• Sex Pistols:
An English punk rock band that formed in London in 1975. They were
responsible for initiating the punk movement in the United Kingdom and
inspiring many later punk and alternative rock musicians. Although their
initial career lasted just two and half years and produced only four singles
and one studio album, NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, HERE’S THE SEX
PISTOLS, they are regarded as one of the most influential acts in the history
of popular music. The Sex Pistols originally comprised vocalist Johnny
Rotten (John Lydon), guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, and bassist
Glen Matlock. Matlock was replaced by Sid Vicious in early 1977. Under the
management of Malcolm McLaren, the band attracted controversies that both
captivated and appalled Britain. Through an obscenity-‐laced television
interview in December 1976 and their May 1977 single “God Save the
Queen”, attacking Britons’ social conformity and deference to the Crown,
they precipitated the punk rock movement. In January 1978, at the end of an
over-‐hyped and turbulent tour of the United States, Rotten announced the
band’s break-‐up. Over the next few month, the three remaining band
members recorded songs for McLaren’s film versoin of the Sex Pistols’ story,
THE GREAT ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SWINDLE. Vicious died of a heroin overdose in
February 1979, following his arrest for the alleged murder of his girlfriend.
Rotten, James, Cook and Matlock briefly reunited for a concert tour in 1996.
On 24 February 2006, the Sex Pistols – the four original members plus
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Vicious – were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but the refused
to attend the ceremony, calling the museum “a piss stain”.
• Farrah Fawcett: An American

actress of stage and screen, model, and artist. A four-‐time Emmy Award
nominee and six-‐time Golden Globe Award nominee, Fawcett rose to
international fame when she starred as private investigator Jill Munroe in the
first season of the television series CHARLIE’S ANGELS (1976-‐1977).
Fawcett began her career in the 1960s appearing in commercials and guest
roles on television. During the 1970s, she appeared in numerous television
series, including recurring roles on HARRY O (1974-‐1976), and THE SIX
MILLION DOLLOAR MAN (1974-‐1978) with her first husband, film and
television star Lee Majors. Her breakthrough role came in 1976 when she
was cast as Jill Munroe in CHARLIE’S ANGELS, alongside Kate Jackson and
Jaclyn Smith. The show propelled all three to stardom, but especially
Fawcett, who was then billed as “Farrah Fawcett-‐Majors”. After appearing
only in the first season, Fawcett decided to leave the show, but eventually
returned for the show’s third and fourth seasons (1978-‐1980). For her role
in CHARLIE’S ANGELS she received her first Golden Globe nomination. In
1983, Fawcett received positive reviews for her performance in the Off-‐
Broadway play EXTREMITIES. She was subsequently cast in the 1986 film
version and received a Golden Globe nomination. Fawcett’s iconic 1976
poster sold a record-‐breaking 20 million copies. Fawcett’s appearance in the
television show boosted sales of her poster, and she earned far more
royalties from poser sales than from her salary appearing in CHARLIES
ANGELS. Her hairstyle went on to become an international trend, with
women sporting a “Farrah-‐do”, a “Farrah-‐flip”, or simply “Farrah hair”.
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Iterations of her hair style predominated among American women’s
hairstyles well into the 1980s.
• Joan Fontaine : A
British-‐American actress who is best known for her starring roles in cinema
during the Classical Hollywood era. Fontaine appeared in more than 45
feature films in a career that spanned five decades. She was the younger
sister of Olivia de Havilland. She released an autobiography, NO BED OF
ROSES, in 1978. She continued to act until her last performance in 1994.
Having won an Academy Award for her role in SUSPICION, Fontaine is the
only actor to have won an Academy Award for acting in a Hitchcock film.
Furthermore, she and her sister remain the only siblings to have won major
acting Academy Awards, although it is well-‐known that they were estranged
for many decades.
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• Barbara Stanwyck:
An American actress, model, and dancer. Starting as a Ziegfeld girl in the
1920s, she was a film and television star, known for her 60-‐year career as a
consummate and versatile professional for a strong, realistic screen
presence. A favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and
Frank Capra, she made 85 films in 38 years in Hollywood before turning to
television. By 1944, Stanwyck had become the highest-‐paid woman in the
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United States. She occasionally served as a dance instructor at a speakeasy
for gays and lesbians owned by Guinan.
• Joan Crawford:
An American film and television actress who began her career as a dancer in
traveling theatrical companies before debuting as a chorus girl on Broadway.
Crawford then signed a motion picture contract with Metro-‐Goldwyn-‐Mayer
in 1925; her career would span decades, studios, and controversies. In 1999,
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The American Film Institute ranked Crawford tenth on its list of the greatest
female stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema. In the 1930s, Crawford’s fame
rivaled and later outlasted, that of MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Great
Garbo. Crawford often played hard-‐working young women who found
romance and success. These characters and stories were well received by
Depression-‐era audiences, and were popular wit women. Crawford became
one of Hollywood’s most prominent movie stars, and one of the highest-‐paid
women in the United States. Crawford has also attracted a following in the
gay community. In JOAN CRAWFORD: THE ESSENTIAL BIOGRAPHY, the
author explains that Crawford appeals to many gay men because they
sympathize with her struggle for success in both the entertainment industry
and her personal life.
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• Bette Davis:
An American actress of film, television, and theater. With a career spanning
60 years, she is regarded as one of the greatest actresses in Hollywood
history. She was noted for playing unsympathetic, sardonic characters, and
was famous for her performances in a range of film genres, from
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contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films, suspense
horror, and occasional comedies, although her greatest successes were her
roles in romantic dramas. After appearing in Broadway plays, Davis moved
to Hollywood in the summer of 1930. However, her early films for Universal
Studios (and as a loanout to other studios) were unsuccessful. She joined
Warner Bros. in 1932, and established her career with several critically
acclaimed performances. In 1937, she attempted to free herself from her
contract; although she lost the well-‐publicized legal case against Warners, it
marked a beginning of her most successful period. Until the late 1940s, she
was one of the most celebrated leading ladies of US cinema, known for her
forceful and intense style. Davis gained a reputation as a perfectionist who
could be highly combative and confrontational. She clashed with studio
executives and film directors, as well as many of her co-‐stars. Her forthright
manner, idiosyncratic speech, and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a
public persona that has often been imitated. In 1964, Jack Warner spoke of
the “magic quality that transformed this sometimes bland and not beautiful
little girl into a great artist”. Davis attracted a following in the gay
subculture, and was frequently imitated by female impersonators such as
Tracey Lee, Craig Russell, Jim Bailey, and Charles Pierce. Attempting to
explain her popularity with gay audiences, the journalist Jim Emerson wrote:
“Was she just a camp figurehead because her brittle, melodramatic style of
acting hadn’t aged well? Or was it that she was ‘Larger Than Life’, a tough
broad who had survived? Probably some of both.”
• Mrs. Robinson:
A term used to describe an older woman pursuing someone younger than
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herself, in reference to the character played by Anne Bancroft in the movie
THE GRADUATE.
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• Janis Joplin:
American rock, soul, and blues singer-‐songwriter, and one of the most
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successful and widely known rock stars of her era. After releasing three
albums, she died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. A fourth album,
PEARL, was released in January 1971, just over three months after her death.
It reached number one on the Billboard charts. In 1967, Joplin rose to fame
following an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead
singer of the then little-‐known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big
Brother and the Holding Company. After releasing two albums with the
band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing
groups, first the Kozmic Band and the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She appeared at
the Woodstock festival and the FESTIVAL EXPRESS train tour. Five singles
by Joplin reached the Billboard Hot 100, including a cover of the Kris
Kristofferson song “Me and Bobby McGee”, which reached number 1 in
March 1971. Her most popular songs include her cover versions of “Piece of
My Heart”, “Cry Baby”, “Down on Me”, “Ball and Chain”, and “Summertime”;
and her original song “Mercedes Benz”, her final recording. Joplin, a mezzo-‐
soprano highly respected for her charismatic performing ability, was
posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
Audiences and critics alike referred to her stage presence as “electric”.
ROLLNG STONE ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest
Artists of All Time. She remains one of the top-‐selling musicians in the
United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications
of 15.5 million albums sold.
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• Kurt Cobain:
An
American singer, songwriter, and musician, best known as the guitarist and
frontman of the rock band Nirvana. He is remembered as one of the most
iconic and influential rock musicians in the history of alternative music. Born
in Aberdeen, Washington, Cobain formed the band Nirvana with Krist
Novoselic and Aaron Burckhard in 1987 and established it as part of the
Seattle music scene which later became known as grunge. After signing with
major label DGC Records, Nirvana found success with “Smells Like Teen
Spirit” from their second album NEVERMIND (1991). Following the success
of NEVERMIND, Nirvana was labeled “the flagship band” of Generation X, and
Cobain was hailed as “the spokesman of a generation”; however, Cobain
resented this, believing his message and artistic vision had been
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misinterpreted by the public, with his personal problems often subject to
media attention. During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with
heroin addiction and chronic health problems such as depression. He also
struggled with the personal and professional pressures of fame, and his
marriage to musician Courtney Love. On April 8, 1994, at the age of 27,
Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle, and police concluded he died
on April 5 from a self-‐inflicted shotgun wound to his head. Cobain has been
described as a “Generation X icon”. He was also posthumously inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Nirvana bandmates Dave Grohl
and Novoselic, in their first year of eligibility in 2014. In 2003, David Fricke
of ROLLING STONE ranked him the 12th greatest guitarist of all time. He was
ranked 7th by MTV in the “22 Greatest Voices in Music”. In 2006, he was
placed 20th by HIT PARADER on their list of the “100 Greatest Metal Singers
of All Time”. Grohl stated that Cobain believed that music comes first and
lyrics second. Cobain focused, foremost, on the melodies of his songs. Cobain
complained when fans and rock journalists attempted to decipher his singing
and extract meaning from his lyrics, writing: “Why in the hell do journalists
insist on coming up with a second-‐rate Freudian evaluation of my lyrics,
when 90 percent of the time they’ve transcribed them incorrectly?” Cobain
originally wanted NEVERMIND to be divided into two sides: a “Boy” side for
the songs written about the experiences of his early life and childhood, and a
“Girl” side, for the songs written about his dysfunctional relationship with
Tobi Vail [a punk rock zinester, whom he believed to be his female
counterpart]. In October 1992, when asked, “Well, are you gay? by MONK
MAGAZINE, Cobain replied, “If I wasn’t attracted to Courney, I’d be bisexual.”
In another interview, he described identifying with the gay community in
THE ADVOCATE, stating, “I’m definitely gay in spirit and I probably could be
bisexual” and “if I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have
carried on with a bisexual life-‐style”. He described himself as being
“feminine” in childhood, and often wore dresses and other stereotypically
feminine clothing.
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• Nick Drake:
An English singer-‐songwriter known for his acoustic guitar-‐based songs.

Though he failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime, his work has
since achieved wider recognition. Drake signed to Island Records when he
was 20, while a student at the University of Cambridge. He released his
debut album, FIVE LEAVES LEFT, in 1969, followed by the jazzier, more
upbeat BRYTER LAYTER (1971) and the sparse PINK MOON (1972). The
albums sold, in total, fewer than 4,000 copies in his lifetime. Drake’s
reluctance to perform live or give interviews contributed to his lack of
success. Drake suffered from depression, a condition evident in his lyrics.
After recording PINK MOON, he withdrew from performance and retreated
to his parents’ home in rural Warwickshire. In 1974, aged 26, Drake died
from an overdose of approximately 30 amitriptyline pills, a prescribed
antidepressant. His cause of death was determined as suicide. The 1979
release of the retrospective album FRUIT TREE triggered a reassessment of
Drake’s music. By the mid-‐1980s, he was credited as an influence by such
artists as Robert Smith, David Sylvian, and Peter Buck. In 1985, the Dream
Academy reached the UK and US charts with “Life in a Northern Town”, a
song written about and dedicated to Drake. By the early 1990s, he had come
to represent a “doomed romantic” musician in the UK music press. The first
Drake biography was published in 1997, followed in 1998 by the
documentary film A STRANGER AMONG US. In 1999, his song “Pink Moon”
was used in a Volkswagen commercial, boosting his US album sales. By 2014,
more than 2.4 million Nick Drake albums had been sold in the UK and the US.
Drake was obsessive about practicing his guitar technique, and would stay up
through the night writing and experimenting with alternative tunings. Drake
who studied English Literature at Cambridge, was drawn to the works of
William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and Henry Vaughn, and his lyrics reflect
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such influences. He also employed a series of elemental symbols and codes,
largely drawn from nature. The moon, stars, sea, rain, trees, sky, mist, and
seasons are all commonly used, influenced in part by his rural upbringing.
Throughout, Drake writes with detachment, more as an observer than
participant, a point of view ROLLING STONE’s Anthony DeCurtis described
“as if he were viewing his life from a great, unbridgeable distance”. This
perceived inability to connect has led to much speculation about Drake’s
sexuality. Boyd has said he detects a virginal quality in his lyrics and music,
and notes that he never knew of him behaving in a sexual way with anyone,
male or female.
• Chris Cornell:
An American musician, singer, and songwriter. He was best known as the
lead vocalist for the rock bands Soundgarden and Audioslave. Cornell was
also known for his numerous solo works and soundtrack contributions since
1991, and as the founder and frontman for Temple of the Dog, the one-‐off
tribute band dedicated to his late friend Andrew Wood. Cornell is considered
one of the chief architects of the 1990s grunge movement, and is well known
for his extensive catalog as a songwriter, his nearly four-‐octave vocal range,
and his powerful vocal belting technique. He released four solo studio
albums, EUPHORIA MORNING (1999), CARRY ON (2007), SCREAM (2009),
HIGHER TRUTH (2015). Cornell received a Golden Globe Award nomination
for his song “The Keeper”, which appeared in the 2011 film MACHINE GUN
PREACHER, and co-‐wrote and performed the theme song to the James Bond
film CASINO ROYALE (2006), “You Know My Name”. His last solo release
before his death was the charity single “The Promise”, written for the ending
credits for the 2016 film of the same name. He was voted “Rock’s Greatest
Singer” by readers of GUITAR WORLD, ranked 4th in the list of “Heavy Metal’s
All-‐Time Top 100 Vocalists” by HIT PARADER, 9th in the list of “Best Lead
Singers of All Time” by ROLLING STONE, and 12th in MTV’s “22 Greatest
Voices in Music”. Across his entire catalog, Cornell has sold 14.8 million
albums, 8.8 million digital songs, and 300 million on-‐demand audio streams
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in the U.S. alone, as well as over 30 million records worldwide. He was
nominated for 16 Grammy Awards and won three. Cornell struggled with
depression for most of his life. He was found dead in his Detroit hotel room
early on the morning of Mary 18, 2017, after performing at a Soundgarden
concert an hour earlier at the Fox Theatre. He death was ruled a suicide by
hanging.
• Michael Hutchence:
An Australian musician, singer-‐songwriter and actor who co-‐founded the

rock band INXS, which sold over 60 million records worldwide and was
inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2001. Hutchence was the lead singer
of INXS from 1977 until his death. According to rock music historian Ian
McFarlane, “Hutchence was the archetypal rock showman. He exuded an
overtly sexual, macho cool with his flowing locks, and lithe and exuberant
stage movements.” Hutchence was named ‘Best International Artist’ at the
1991 BRIT Awards, with INXS winning the related group award. Hutchence
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was a member of the short-‐lived pop rock group Max Q. He also recorded
some solo material and acted in feature films, including DOGS IN SPACE
(1986), FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND (1990), and LIMP (1997). Hutchence
had a string of love affairs with prominent actresses, models, and singers,
and his private life was often reported in the Australian and international
press. In July 1996, Hutchence and English television presenter Paula Yates
had a daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily. On the morning of 22 November
1997, Hutchence was found dead in his hotel room in Sydney. His death was
reported by the New South Wales Coroner to be the result of suicide by
hanging. Hutchence and INXS went on a world tour to support the April
1997 release of ELEGANTLY WASTED. The final 20th anniversary tour was to
occur in Australia in November and December. During the tour, Yates
planned to visit Hutchence with their daughter and Yate’s three children, but
Geldof had taken legal action to prevent the visit. On the morning of 22
November 1997, Hutchence, aged 37, was found dead in Room 524 at the
Ritz-‐Carlton hotel in Double Bay, Sydney. Actress Kym Wilson was the last
person to see Hutchence alive, after partying with him in his hotel room prior
to his death. Geldof and Yates each gave police statements on the phone calls
they exchanged with Hutchence on the morning of his death; however, they
did not volunteer their phone records. Yates’s statement on 26 November
indicated that she had informed Hutchence of the Geldof girls’ custody
hearing being adjourned until 17 December, which meant that Yates would
not be able to bring Tiger and the Geldof girls to Australia for a visit as
previously intended. According to Yates, Hutchence “Was frightened and
couldn’t stand a minute more without his baby… [he] was terribly upset and
he said, “I don’t know how I’ll live without seeing Tiger’”. Yates indicated
that Hutchence said he was going to phone Geldof “to let the girls come to
Australia”. Geldof’s police statements and evidence to the coroner indicated
that Geldof did receive a call from Hutchence, who was “hectoring and
abusive and threatening” during their phone conversation. The occupant in
the room next to Hutchence’s heard a loud male voice and swearing at about
5 AM; the coroner was satisfied that this was Hutchence arguing with Geldof.
At 9:54 AM on 22 November, Hutchence spoke with a former girlfriend,
Michèle Bennett; according to Bennett, Hutchence was crying, sounded upset,
and told her he needed to see her. Bennett arrived at his hotel room door at
about 10:40 AM, but there was no response. Hutchence’s body was
discovered by a hotel maid at 11:50 AM. Police reported that Hutchence was
found “in a kneeling position facing the door. He had used his snakeskin belt
to tie a knot on the automatic door closure at the top of the door, and had
strained his head forward into the loop so hard that the buckle had broken.
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• Ian Curtis:
An English singer-‐songwriter and musician. He was the lead singer and
lyricist of the post-‐punk band Joy Division and recorded two albums with the
group: UNKNOWN PLEASURES (1979) and CLOSER (1980). Curtis, who
suffered from epilepsy and depression, died by suicide on the eve of Joy
Division’s first North American tour and shortly before the release of
CLOSER. His suicide resulted in the band’s dissolution and the subsequent
formation of New Order. Curtis was known for his bass-‐baritone voice, dance
style, and songwriting typically filled with imagery of desolation, emptiness,
and alienation. On the eve of 17 May 1980, Curtis asked Deborah [wife] to
drop her impending divorce proceedings; she replied that he would likely
have changed his mind by the following morning, and then – mindful of his
previous suicide attempt [only a month before] and also concerned his state
of anxiety and frustration may drive Curtis into an epileptic fit – offered to
spend the night in his company. Deborah then drove to her parents’ home to
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inform them of her intentions. When she returned to his house at 77 Barton
Street in Macclesfield, Cheshire, his demeanour had changed, and he
informed his wife of his intentions to spend the night alone, first making her
promise not to return to the house before he had taken his scheduled 10 a.m.
train to Manchester to rendezvous with his bandmates. In the early hours of
the next morning, Curtis ended his life by hanging himself in his kitchen. He
was 23 years old. Deborah found his body soon after; he had used the
kitchen’s washing line to hang himself, having written a note to Deborah in
which he declared his love for her despite his recent affair. Curtis spent the
few hours before his suicide watching Werner Herzog’s 1977 film STROSZEK
and listening to Iggy Pop’s 1977 album THE IDIOT. His wife recollected that
he had taken photographs of their wedding and their baby daughter off the
walls, apparently to view them as he composed his suicide note. At the time
of his suicide, Joy Division were on the eve of their debut North American
tour, and Deborah had stated Curtis had viewed this upcoming tour with
extreme trepidation, not only because of his extreme fear of flying (he had
wanted to travel by ship), but because he had also expressed deep concerns
as to how American audiences would react to his epilepsy. Deborah has also
claimed that Curtis had confided in her on several occasions that he held no
desire to live past his early twenties. In a 2007 interview with THE
GUARDIAN, Stephen Morris expressed regret that nobody had realized
during Curtis’ life the distress he was in, even though it was evident in his
lyrics.
• Elliott Smith:
An American singer, songwriter, and multi-‐instrumentalist. Smith was born
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in Omaha, Nebraska, raised primarily in Texas, and lived much of his life in
Portland, Oregon, where he first gained popularity. Smith’s primary
instrument was the guitar, though he also used piano, clarinet, bass guitar,
drums, and harmonica. Smith had a distinctive vocal style, characterized by
his “whispery, spiderweb-‐thin delivery”, and used multi-‐tracking to create
vocal layers, textures, and harmonies. After playing in the rock band
Heatmiser for several years, Smith began his solo career in 1994, with
releases on the independent record labels Cavity Search and Kill Rock Stars
(KRS). In 1997, he signed a contract with DreamWorks Records, for which he
recorded two albums. Smith rose to mainstream prominence with his song
“Miss Misery” – included in the soundtrack for the film GOOD WILL HUNTING
(1997) – was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Original Song category in
1998. Smith was a drinker and drug user, and was diagnosed with attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and major depressive disorder. His
struggles with drugs and mental illness affected his life and work, and often
appeared in his lyrics. In 2003, aged 34, he died in Los Angeles, California,
from two stab wounds to the chest. The autopsy evidence was inconclusive
as to whether the wounds were self-‐inflicted or the result of homicide. At the
time of his death, Smith was working on his sixth studio album, FROM A
BASEMENT ON THE HILL, which was posthumously completed and released
in 2004. Smith said that transitions were his favorite part of songs and that
he preferred to write broader more impressionistic music closer to pop
rather than folk music. Smith compared his songs to stories or dreams, not
purely confessional pieces that people could relate to. When asked about the
dark nature of his songwriting and the cult following he was gaining, Smith
said he felt it was merely a product of his writing songs that were strongly
meaningful to him rather than anything contrived. Larry Crane, Smith’s
posthumous archivist, has said that he was surprised at the amount of
“recycling of musical ideas” he encountered while cataloging Smith’s private
tapes; “I found songs recorded in high school reworked 15 years on. Lyrics
became more important to him as he became older, and more time was spent
working on them.” Smith died on October 21, 2003, at the age of 34 from two
stab wounds to the chest. At the time of the stabbing, he was at his Lemoyne
Street home in Echo Park, California, where he lived with his girlfriend,
Jennifer Chiba, the two were arguing, and she locked herself in the bathroom
to take a shower. Chiba heard him scream and upon opening the door saw
Smith standing with a knife in his chest. She pulled the knife out, after which
he collapsed and she called 9-‐1-‐1 at 12:18 p.m. Smith died in the hospital
with the time of death listed as 1:36 p.m. A possible suicide note, written on
a Post-‐It note, read: “I’m sorry – love, Elliott. God forgive me.” The name
“Elliott” is misspelled as “Eliot” in the coroner’s report of the note, but not on
the Post-‐it. While Smith’s death was reported as a suicide, the official
autopsy report released in December 2003 left open the question of
homicide. According to PITCHFORK, record producer Larry Crane reported
on his Tape Op message board that he had planned to help Smith mix his
album in mid-‐November. Crane wrote, “I hadn’t talked to Elliott in over a
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year. His girlfriend, Jennifer, called me [last week] and asked if I’d like to
come to L.A. and help mix and finish [Smith’s album]. I said ‘yes, of course’,
and chatted with Elliott for the first time in ages. It seems surreal that he
would call me to finish an album and then a week later kill himself. I talked
to Jennifer this morning, who was obviously shattered and in tears, and said,
‘I don’t understand, he was so healthy.’ The coroner reported that no traces
of illegal substances or alcohol were found in Smith’s system at the time of
his death but did find prescribed levels of antidepressant, anxiolytic, and
ADHD medications. There were no hesitation wounds, which are typical of
suicide by self-‐infliction. Due to the inconclusive autopsy ruling, the Lost
Angeles Police Department’s investigation remains open.
• Wendy O. Williams:
An American singer, songwriter, and actress. Born in Webster, New York,
she came to prominence as the lead singer of the rock band Plasmatics. Her
onstage theatrics included partial nudity, exploding equipment, firing a
shotgun, and chainsawing guitars. Dubbed the “Queen of Shock Rock” and
the “Metal Priestess”, Williams was considered the most controversial and
radical female singer of her time. Performing her own stunts in videos, she
often sported a Mohawk hairstyle. In 1985, during the height of her
popularity as a solo artist, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal
Performance. Leaving home at 16, Williams hitchhiked to Colorado, earning
money by crocheting string bikinis. She travelled to Florida and Europe
landing various jobs such as lifeguard, stripper, macrobiotic cook, and server
at Dunkin’ Donuts. After arriving in New York City in 1976, she began
performing in live sex shows, and in 1979 appeared in the porno CANDY
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GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. That year manager Rod Swenson recruited her to
the Plasmatics and the two became romantically involved. The band quickly
became known on the local underground scene, performing at clubs such as
CBGB. Three albums with Plasmatics later, Williams embarked on a solo
career and released her debut album, WOW, in 1984. Albums KOMMANDER
OF KAOS (1986) and DEFFEST! AND BADDEST! (1988) followed, before her
retirement from the music industry. Williams made her non-‐adult screen
debut in Tom DeSimone’s film REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS (1986), for which she
recorded the title song. She also appeared in the 1989 comedy PUCKER UP
AND BARK LIKE A DOG, television series THE NEW ADVENTURES OF BEANS
BAXTER and MACGYVER. On 6 April 1998, Williams committed suicide near
her home in Storrs, Connecticut by gunshot; she had attempted to kill herself
twice in the years leading up to her death, allegedly she had also been
struggling with deep depression.
• Pete Townshend:
An English multi-‐instrumentalist, singer and songwriter best known as the
guitarist, backing and secondary lead vocalist, principal songwriter, co-‐
founder and leader of the rock band the Who. His career with the Who spans
over 50 years, during which time the band grew to one of the most important
and influential rock bands of the 20th century. Pete Townshend is the main
songwriter for the Who, having written well over 100 songs for the bands 11
studio albums, including concept albums and the rock operas TOMMY and
QUADROPHENIA, plus popular rock radio staples such as WHO’S NEXT, and
dozens more that appeared on non-‐album singles, bonus tracks on reissues,
and tracks on rarities compilations such as ODDS & SODS (1974). He has also
written more than 100 songs that have appeared on his solo albums, as well
as radio jingles and television theme songs. Although known primarily as a
guitarist, he also plays keyboards, banjo, accordion, harmonica, ukulele,
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mandolin, violin, synthesizer, bass guitar, and drums, on his own solo
albums, several Who albums and as a guest contributor to an array of other
artists’ recordings. He is self-‐taught on all of the instruments he plays and
has never had any formal training. Townshend has also contributed to an
authored many newspaper and magazine articles, book reviews, essays,
books, and scripts, and he has collaborated as a lyricist and composer for
many other musical acts. Due to his aggressive playing style and innovative
songwriting techniques, Townshend’s works with the Who and in other
projects have earned him critical acclaim. He was ranked No. 3 in Dave
Marsh’s list of Best Guitarists in THE NEW BOOK OF ROCK LISTS, No. 10 in
Gibson.com’s list on the top 50 guitarists, and No. 10 again in ROLLING
STONE’s updated 2011 list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. In 1983,
Townshend received the Brit Award for Lifetime Achievement; in 1990, he
was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Who; in
2001, he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award as a member of
the Who; and in 2008 he received Kennedy Center Honors. He and Roger
Daltry received The George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical
Achievement at UCLA on 21 May 2016. From The Daily Californian: In the
misty fog engulfing Golden Gate Park on Sunday evening, singer-‐songwriter
and guitarist Pete Townshend walked onto Land’s End stage already
beaming. “You’re wet! You’re all fucking wet – and we’re not wet!” he
laughed as vocalist-‐guitarist Roger Daltrey stepped up to the mic and added:
“But it won’t be long before we are!” Al the while, Zak Starkey – son of Ringo
Starr – pattered along on the drums, egging on the pair’s slightly stoned
quips. Rock legends Townshend and Daltrey are the two remaining original
member of The Who, formed in 1964 in London, England. The band opened
its Outside Lands set with “I Can’t Explain” off its first album, MY
GENERATION. While the set started off with couple nicks and bumps, the
band were later as on-‐point as ever, picking up an electrifying energy – and it
had the crowd with it all the way.
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• Jim Morrison:
An American singer, songwriter, and poet, who served as the lead vocalist of
the rock band the Doors. Due to his poetic lyrics, distinctive voice, wild
personality, performances, and the dramatic circumstances surrounding his
life and early death, Morrison is regarded by music critics and fans as one of
the most iconic and influential frontmen in rock history. Since his death, his
fame has endured as one of popular culture’s most rebellious and oft-‐
displayed icons, representing the generation gap and youth counterculture.
Together with Ray Manzarek, Morrison co-‐founded the Doors during the
summer of 1965 in Venice, California. The band spent two years in obscurity
until shooting to prominence with their number-‐one single in the United
States “Light My Fire,” taken from their self-‐titled debut album. Morrison
wrote or co-‐wrote many of the Doors’ songs, including “Light My Fire,”
“Break On Through (To the Other Side)”, “The End”, “Moonlight Drive”,
“People Are Strange”, “Hello, I Love You”, “Roadhouse Blues”, “L.A. Woman”,
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and “Riders on the Storm”. He recorded a total of six studio albums with the
Doors, all of which sold well and received critical acclaim. Though the Doors
recorded two more albums after Morrison died, his death severely affected
the band’s fortunes, and they split up in 1973. In 1993, Morrison was
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Doors.
Morrison was also well known for improvising spoken word poetry passages
while the band played live. Morrison was ranked number 47 on ROLLING
STONE’S list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”, and number 22 on
CLASSIC ROCK MAGAZINE’S “50 Greatest Singers in Rock”. Manzarek said
Morrison “embodied hippie counterculture rebellion”. Morrison developed
an alcohol dependency during the 1960s, which at times affected his
performances on stage. He died unexpectedly at the age of 27 in Paris. As no
autopsy was performed, the cause of Morrison’s death remains unknown. As
a naval family, the Morrisons moved frequently. As a consequence,
Morrison’s early education was routinely disrupted as he moved from school
to school. Nonetheless, he was drawn to the study of literature, poetry,
religion, philosophy and psychology, among other fields. Biographers have
consistently pointed to a number of writers and philosophers who influenced
Morrison’s thinking and, perhaps, his behavior. While still in his adolescence,
Morrison discovered the works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
He was also drawn to the poetry of William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, and
Arthur Rimbaud. Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and libertine
writers such as the Marquis de Sade also had a strong influence on
Morrison’s outlook and manner of expression; Morrison was eager to
experience the life described in Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD. He was similarly
drawn to the work of French writer Louis-‐Ferdinand Céline. Céline’s book
VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT (JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT) and
Blake’s AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE both echo through one of Morrison’s early
songs, “End of the Night”. Morrison later met and befriended Michael
McClure, a well-‐known Beat poet. McClure had enjoyed Morrison’s lyrics but
was even more impressed by his poetry and encouraged him to further
develop his craft. Morrison’s vision of performance was colored by the
works of 20th-‐century French playwright Antonin Artaud (author of
THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE) and Julian Beck’s LIVING THEATER. Other
works relating to religion, mysticism, ancient myth, and symbolism were of
lasting interest, particularly Joseph Campbell’s THE HERO WITH A
THOUSAND FACES. James Frazer’s THE GOLDEN BOUGH also became a
source of inspiration and is reflected in the title of the song “Not to Touch the
Earth”. Morrison was particularly attracted to the myths and religions of
Native Americans cultures. While he was still at school, his family moved to
New Mexico where he got to see some of the places and artifacts important to
the American Southwest Indigenous cultures. These interests appear to be
the source of many references to creatures and places such as lizards, snakes,
deserts, and “ancient lakes” that appear in his songs and poetry. His
interpretation and imagination of Native American ceremonies and peoples
(which, based on his readings, he referred to by the anthropological term
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“shamans”) influenced his stage routine, notably in seeking trance states and
vision through dancing to the point of exhaustion. In particular, Morrison’s
poem “The Ghost Song” was inspired by his readings about the Native
American Ghost Dance. Morrison’s vocal influences included Elvis Presley
and Frank Sinatra, which is evident in his baritone crooning style on several
of the Doors’ songs. In the 1981 documentary THE DOORS: A TRIBUTE TO
JIM MORRISON, producer Paul Rothchild relates his first impression of
Morrison as being a “Rock and Roll Bing Crosby”. Sugerman states that
Morrison, as a teenager, was such a fan of Presley that he demanded silence
when Elvis was on the radio. He states that Sinatra was Morrison’s favorite
musician and the Beach Boys’ 1967 LP WILD HONEY “one of his favorite
albums…he really got into it.” Morrisons was, and continues to be, one of the
most popular and influential singer-‐songwriters and iconic frontmen in rock
history. To this day Morrison is widely regarded as the prototypical rock
star: surly, sexy, scandalous, and mysterious. The leather pants he was fond
of wearing both onstage and off have since become stereotyped as rock-‐star
apparel. In 2011, a ROLLING STONES readers’ pick placed Jim Morrison in
fifth place of the magazines “Best Lead Singers of All Time”. Iggy and the
Stooges are said to have formed after lead singer Iggy Pop was inspired by
Morrison while attending a Doors concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of
Pop’s most popular songs, “The Passenger”, is said to be based on one of
Morrison’s poems.
Cheater (Stephen Trask, Chris Weilding, Dave McKinley, Scott Bilbrey), and
SqueezeBox!: Cheater
was Stephen Trask’s band that played at the Tribeca Gay Club SqueezBox!
They also were the original band for HEDWIG AND THE ANRY INCH. Stephen
Trask isFrom Tricia Romano’s article in daily.redbullmusic.com: We had a
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sign on the door that said, “This is a gay rock ‘n’ roll club, if you can’t handle
us, fuck off.” The year was 1994. Rudy Giuliani had just been elected mayor
of New York. It was before the city was gripped by terror, before Times
Square was recast as a Disneyfied playground for tourists, before models and
bottles infiltrated and sterilized its clubs. After four years of Mayor David
Dinkins’ meager one-‐term run, New York City still had its gritty and
dangerous parts, with many pockets of Manhattan not yet gentrified to the
teeth. Williamsburg was a Polish/Hispanic/Hasidic neighborhood; “hipster”
was not a pejorative description for every kid from New Jersey wearing tight
black jeans; and the Meatpacking District still had actual meat-‐packers. And
the gay club scene, though not yet as iconic as in its ‘80s heyday, was starting
to coalesce into something that could claim a spot in New York’s rich nightlife
history. As techno became de rigueur in Brooklyn warehouses, muscle
queens danced all night in big Chelsea superclubs, and Michael Alig led club
kids on dystopian drug binges at Limelight, another music subculture
emerged downtown in Tribeca, on the far edges of the west side of
Manhattan at a tiny, divey rock club called Don Hill’s. Bored with the options
for gay men and women, rock ‘n’ roll fashion designer Michael Schmidt
teamed up with Pat Briggs of the industrial band Psychotica, drag queen
Misstress Formika and DJ Miss Guy to create SqueezeBox!, one of New York
City’s last great parties. SqueezeBox! gave gay (and straight) revelers a
different kind of outlet. Every Friday, pretty boys, glam girls, rough rockers
and cool celebs converged upon Don Hill’s, wearing their dirty, filthy, punk-‐
rock best. The party birthed bands, revolutionized the drag scene and served
as a hothouse for HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, which went on to become
an off-‐Broadway hit and a big Hollywood movie. The darkest days of the
AIDS epidemic had passed, but the gay community remained on edge,
remembering lost friends at the mercy of the caustic and careless mayor
Edward Koch. They didn’t have a friend in Rudolph Giuliani, either, who
upon taking office instituted a veritable war against nightlife, wielding an
early-‐century cabaret law to close clubs down at will. But SqueezeBox!
survived. And long after it ended, the club’s influence was clear not only in
the quintessential pansexual New York parties like Motherfucker, Misshapes,
and Berliniamsburg, but in the rock revival and electroclash movements that
would soon rule over Manhattan and Brooklyn. John Cameron Mitchell: It
was the club that I had always been waiting for my whole life. I could just
barely tolerate the music in most gay places until that point. But in terms of a
full-‐on queer rock ‘n’ roll place that was performance-‐based but also a place
where, you know, you could slam with cut boys without fear of breaking their
hair – that was the place to go. You know, it was kinda scary. You never
knew what was gonna happen. It was like punk rock just got invented by gay
people at that point. There was always The Buzzcocks and Jayne County and
everything. So it was from heaven. Very quickly Stephen Trask said, “You
can practice being a fake rock star,” which I was writing about, “And do a gig
here, but you have to do it drag.” He said I couldn’t do male characters. I had
to do what was originally a supporting character of Hedwig. Because it was
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really about Tommy the boyfriend, who was the son of the general, as I was.
And then the supporting character sort of thrust into the spotlight because it
was a drag club and I had to do it in drag. So in a way SqueezeBox! forced
Hedwig out of me like a toothpaste tube. It was just so scary. I had never
sung in a band. I had never been in drag. So my first gig there was just, you
know, full-‐on giving birth. From Stephen Trask’s blog: I think the best part,
though, was being on that stage every week with Jack Steeb. Jack and I were
in my band Cheater together, the band that became the Angry Inch, but we
were also in the Squeezebox band together, playing those great shows every
Friday night for a packed house, hanging out with our friends and boyfriends
in front of the club on the hood of my car, watching all the queer rockers file
in for the show or step outside for a cigarette. Jack and I moved to New York
together to make it: to be rock stars, to be queer, to be queer rock stars
together. We shared an apartment in Fort Greene, listened to albums, went
to shows, drank Silvovitz, delivered pizza. Jack played bass in my bands
Bimbo Limbo Spam and later Cheater. I remember once, when Richard Hell
was looking for a bass player/keyboardist for a Japanese tour, Jack and I
went in as a team, willing to forgo pay and play for nothing but the travel
expenses. Sadly, the travel expenses for two were too high and he couldn’t
make it work – but he wanted to and we had a blast jamming with him in that
rehearsal space on Avenue A. When Cheater started to make a name for itself
and we were in the Squeezebox band and playing the early Hedwig shows, it
felt like we were really getting there, a couple of queer punks making it in
New York on our own terms. Jack didn’t make it with me, though. Jack was
an addict and an alcoholic. I was a classic enabler. I remember snorting
cocaine and getting drunk with him until the wee hours just to hang out on
his terms, getting fucked up and listening to “The Blue Mask” and “Slanted
and Enchanted” and Teenage Fan Club, watching Falcon International porn
while finishing off a bottle. I also remember searching all over some of the
seediest neighborhoods of Baltimore and Philadelphia when Cheater was
gigging there and he had disappeared. I remember the day his mom called to
tell me he’d gone missing two days, and searching all over the lower east side
for him, even climbing up fire escapes to peek into the apartments of some
guy he may have hooked-‐up with. I remember finding him in the strangest
places and in the most disturbing conditions. I was hopeful when he went
into rehab. We put the band on hold almost a year for him, which kind of
killed that project. When he was sober for a year, my boyfriend Michael and I
went to JCM to his AA/NA meeting. One after one, people got up and told
their stories. The stories all seemed to me to have the same theme –
addiction was like a lover that only wanted to scam you out of everything:
your money, your things, your friends, until you had nothing left. I wrote
“The Long Grift” for Jack, sung from the perspective of someone who’d
figured out the game and had the strength to send his lover packing. We all
really thought Jack had won the battle. This lover, though, never stays gone.
He keeps banging on the door, promising, lying: “This time will be different.”
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After about 10 years of his careering from recovery to addiction, I remember
John calling me up to tell me that we had lost Jack.
• Stephen Trask – (Skszp, Keyboards, Guitar, Vocals), See

Creators section for more information.
• Chris Weilding (Krzyzhtoff, Guitar, Vocals) A founding

member of the band Cheater and has been playing guitar for Ms. Hedwig
since her earliest incarnation at The Fez. In addition to playing on the
original cast recording of HEDWIG, Chris has also had the pleasure of singing
background vocals for Julia Greenberg. Also, performed with the band
Goddamn Wolves.
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• Dave McKinley (Schlatko, Percussion)
• Scott Bilbrey (Bass, Guitar, Vocals, Jacek) .
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• Helen Reddy:
An Australian singer, actor, and activist. Born in Melbourne, Victoria to a
show-‐business family, Reddy started her career as an entertainer at age four.
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She sang on radio and television, and won a talent contest on a television
programme, BANDSTAND, in 1966; her prize was a ticket to New York City
and a record audition, which turned out to be unsuccessful. She pursued her
international singing career by moving to Chicago and, subsequently, Los
Angeles, where she made her debut singles “One Way Ticket” and “I Believe
in Music” in 1968 and 1970, respectively. The B-‐side of the latter single, “I
Don’t Know How to Love Him” reached No. 13 in Canadian pop chart RPM
and she was signed to Capitol Records a year later. During the 1970s, she
enjoyed international success, especially in the United States where she
placed 15 singles in the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. Six made the Top 10
and three reached No. 1, including her signature hit “I Am Woman”. She
placed 25 songs on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart; 15 made the
Top 10 and eight reached No. 1, six consecutively. In 1974, at the inaugural
American Music Awards, she became the first artist to win the award for
Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist. In television, she was the first Australian
to host her own one-‐hour weekly primetime variety show on an American
network, along with several specials that were seen in more than 40
countries. Between the 1980s and the 1990s, as her single “I Can’t Say
Goodbye to You” became her last to chart in the U.S., she acted in musical
theaters and recorded a few albums such as CENTER STAGE before retiring
from live performance in 2002. She returned to university in Australia and
earned her degree, and practiced as a clinical hypnotherapist and
motivational speaker. In 2011, after singing “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze”
with her half-‐sister, Toni Lamond, for Lamond’s birthday, Reddy decided to
return to performing. Her song “I Am Woman” played a large role in popular
culture and became an anthem for second-‐wave feminism. She came to be
known as a “feminist poster girl” or a “feminist icon”. In 2011, Billboard
named her the No. 28 adult contemporary artist of all time (No. 9 woman). In
2013 the Chicago Tribune dubbed her the “Queen of ‘70s Pop”.
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• John Lennon:
An English singer, songwriter and peace activist who co-‐founded the Beatles,
the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. He
and fellow member Paul McCartney formed a much-‐celebrated songwriting
partnership. Along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the group
achieved worldwide fame during the 1960s. In 1969, Lennon started the
Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, Yoko Ono, and he continued to pursue
a solo career following the Beatles’ breakup in April 1970. Born John
Winston Lennon in Liverpool, he became involved in the skiffle craze as a
teenager. In 1957, he formed his first band, the Quarrymen, which evolved
into the Beatles in 1960. Further to his Plastic Ono Band singles such as
“Give Peace a Chance” and “Instant Karma!”, Lennon subsequently produced
albums that included JOHN LENNON/PLASTIC ONO BAND and IMAGINE, and
songs such as “Working Class Hero”, “Imagine”, and “Happy Xmas (War Is
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Over)”. After moving to New York City in 1971, he never returned to England
again. In 1975, he disengaged himself from the music business to raise his
infant son Sean, but re-‐emerged with Ono in 1980 with the album DOUBLE
FANTASY. He was shot and killed in the archway of his Manhattan apartment
building three weeks after the album’s release. Lennon revealed a rebellious
nature and acerbic wit in his music, writing, drawings, on film and in
interviews. he was controversial through his political and peace activism.
From 1971 onwards, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-‐
year attempt by the Nixon administration to deport him. Some of his songs
were adopted as anthems by the anti-‐war movement and the larger
counterculture. Music historians Schinder and Schwartz wrote of the
transformation in popular music styles that took place between the 1950s
and the 1960s. They said the Beatles’ influence cannot be overstated:
having, “revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and
opened rock and roll’s doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts”, the group
then, “spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock’s stylistic frontiers”. Liam
Gallagher and his group Oasis were among the many who acknowledged the
band’s influence; he identified Lennon as a hero. In 1999, he named his first
son Lennon Gallagher in tribute. On National Poetry Day in 1999, the BBC
conducted a poll to identify the UK’s favourite song lyric and announced
“Imagine” as the winner.
• Phil Collins:
An English drummer, singer, songwriter, multi-‐instrumentalist, record
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producer, and actor. He was the drummer and later became singer of the
rock band Genesis, and is also a solo artist. Between 1982 and 1989, Collins
scored three UK and seven US number-‐one singles in his solo career. When
his work with Genesis, his work with other artists, as well as his solo career
is totaled, he has more US Top 40 singles than any other artist during the
1980s. His most successful singles from the period include “In the Air
Tonight”, “Against All Odd (Take a Look at Me Now)”, “One More Night”,
“Sussudio”, “Two Hearts”, and “Another Day in Paradise”. Born and raised in
west London, Collins played drums from the age of five and completed drama
school training, which secured him various roles as a child actor. He then
pursued a music career, joining Genesis in 1970 as their drummer and
becoming lead singer in 1975 following the departure of Peter Gabriel.
Collins began a solo career in the 1980s, initially inspired by his marital
breakdown and love of soul music, releasing a series of successful albums,
including FACE VALUE (1981), NO JACKET REQUIRED (1985), and …BUT
SERIOUSLY (1989). Collins became “one of the most successful pop and
adult contemporary singers of the ‘80s and beyond”. He also became known
for a distinctive gated reverb drum sound on many of his recordings. In
1996, Collins left Genesis to focus on his solo work; this included writing
songs for Disney’s TARZAN (1999) for which he received an Oscar for Best
Original Song for “You’ll Be In My Heart”. He rejoined Genesis for their TURN
IT ON AGAIN TOUR in 2007. Following a five-‐year retirement to focus on his
family life, Collins released an autobiography and began his NOT DEAD YET
TOUR, which runs from June 2017 until October 2019. Collins’s discography
includes eight studio albums that have sold 33.5 million certified units in the
US and an estimated 150 million worldwide, making him one of the world’s
best-‐selling artists. He is one of only three recording artists, along with Paul
McCartney and Michael Jackson, who have sold over 100 million records
worldwide both as solo artists and separately as principal members of a
band. He has received eight Grammy Awards, six Brit Awards (winning Best
British Male Artist three times), two Golden Globe Awards, one Academy
Award, and a Disney Legend Award. he was awarded six Ivor Novello
Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors,
including the International Achievement Award. He received a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1999, and was inducted into the Songwriters
Hall of Fame in 2003 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of
Genesis in 2010. He has also been recognized by music publications with
induction into the MODERN DRUMMER Hall of Fame in 2012, and the
CLASSIC DRUMMER Hall of Fame in 2013. From THE GUARDIAN: Few pop
figures have become as successful and yet reviled as Phil Collins. [The] news
that the “housewives’ choice” local radio staple was considering a return to
music brought a predictable chorus of derision. “Please God no!” pleaded on
Guardian commenter. However, it’s about time we recognized Collins’s vast
influence as one of the godfathers of popular culture. Here are some reasons
why: Phil pioneered minimalist electronica, The “Phil Collins drum sound” is
a popular music staple, Phil’s drumming has inspired everyone from Led
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Zeppelin to a gorilla, Phil starred in one of the most pivotal pop films ever (A
HARD DAY’S NIGHT), He almost starred in one of the best-‐loved children’s
classics (CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG), Phil saved Genesis from the prog-‐
rock abyss, Phil is a godfather of avant-‐garde rock and ambient music, Phil’s
music has spanned a multitude of genres, Phil inspired a classic scene in
AMERICAN PSYCHO, and Phil is an icon of American rap and R&B. For more
of this article visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/02/phil-‐collins-‐godfather-‐
popular-‐culture
• Boston:

An American rock band from Boston, Massachusetts, who had its most
notable successes during the 1970s and 1980s. Centered on multi-‐
instrumentalist founder and leader Tom Scholz, who played the majority of
instruments on the debut album, the band is a staple of classic rock radio
playlists. Boston’s best-‐known works include the songs “More Than a
Feeling”, “Peace of Mind”, “Foreplay/Long Time”, “Rock and Roll Band”,
“Smokin”, “Don’t Look Back”, “A Man I’ll Never Be”, and “Amanda”. The band
has sold more than 75 million records worldwide, including 31 million
albums in the United States, of which 17 million were from its self-‐titled
debut album and seven million were for its second album, DON’T LOOK
BACK, making the group one of the world’s best-‐selling artists. Altogether,
the band has released six studio albums over a career spanning over 40
years. Boston was ranked the 63rd best hard rock artist by VH1. Boston’s
genre is considered by most to be hard rock and arena rock, while combining
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elements of progressive rock into its music. Boston founder, guitarist, and
primary songwriter Tom Scholz’s blend of musical styles, ranging from
classical to 1960s English pop, has resulted in a unique sound, most
consistently realized on the first two albums (BOSTON and DON’T LOOK
BACK). This sound is characterized by multiple lead and blended harmonies
guitar work (usually harmonized in thirds), often alternating between and
then mixing electric and acoustic guitars. The band’s harmonic style has
been characterized as being “violin-‐like” without using synthesizers. Scholz
is well-‐regarded for the development of complex, multi-‐tracked guitar
harmonies. Another contributing factor is the use of handmade, high tech
equipment, such as the Rockman, used by artists such as Journey guitarist
Neal Schon, the band ZZ Top, and Ted Nugent. Def Leppard’ album
HYSTERIA was created using only Rockman technology. Scholz’s production
style combines deep, aggressive, comparatively short guitar riffing and
nearly ethereal, generally longer note vocal harmonies. A heavier, lower, and
darker overall approach came in the next two albums.
• Kansas:
An American rock band that became popular in the 1970s initially on album-‐
oriented rock charts and later with singles such as “Carry On Wayward Son”
and “Dust in the Wind”. The band has produced nine gold albums, three
multi-‐platinum albums (LEFTOVERTURE 6X, POINT OF KNOW RETURN 4X,
THE BEST OF KANSAS 4X), one other platinum studio album (MONOLITH),
one platinum live double album (TWO FOR THE SHOW), and a million-‐selling
single, “Dust in the Wind”. Kansas appeared on the Billboard charts for over
200 weeks throughout the 1970s and 1980s and played to sold-‐out arenas
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and stadiums throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. “Carry On
Wayward Son” was the second-‐most-‐played track on US classic rock radio in
1995 and No. 1 in 1997. Kansas’ musical style, the fusion of hard rock,
southern rock, and progressive rock, was influenced by several previous
bands. The music of Yes and Genesis was inspirational to Kansas, especially
demonstrated in the lyrics of Walsh. Livgren cited the 1960s band Touch as
foundational to his development. Livgren’s evolving spirituality is reflected
in the band’s songs, with early works showing an interest in the mysticism of
Eastern religions, works in the late 1970s influenced by the American
spiritual philosophy of THE URANTIA BOOK, followed in the early 1980s by
works embracing born-‐again Christianity. The re-‐formed band produced a
harder pop metal album in the late 1980s.

• America: An American rock band that was formed in London in 1970 by
Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek, and Gerry Beckley. The trio met as sons of US Air
Force personnel stationed in London, where they began performing live.
Achieving significant popularity in the 1970s, the trio was famous for its
close vocal harmonies and light acoustic folk rock sound. The band released
a string of hit albums and singles, many of which found airplay on pop/soft
rock stations. The band came together shortly after the members’ graduation
from high school, and a record deal with Warner Bros. Records followed. Its
debut album, AMERICA, included the transatlantic hits “A Horse with No
Name”. The group continues to record material and tour with regularity. Its
2007 album HERE & NOW was a collaboration with a new generation of
musicians who credited the band as an influence. America won a Grammy
Award for Best New Artist and were nominated for Best Pop Vocal Group at
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the 15th Annual Grammy Awards in 1973. The group was inducted into the
Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2006 and received a star on the Hollywood Walk
of Fame in 2012.
• Europe:
A Swedish rock band formed in Upplands Väsby in 1979, by vocalist Joey
Tempest, guitarist John Norum, bassist Peter Olsson, and drummer Tony
Reno. They got a major breakthrough in Sweden in 1982 by winning the
televised competition “Rock-‐SM” (Swedish Rock Championships): it was the
first time this competition was held, and Europe became a larger success
than the competition itself. Since their formation, Europe has released
eleven studio albums, three live albums, three compilations and twenty-‐four
music videos. Europe rose to international fame in the 1980s with their third
album, 1986’s THE FINAL COUNTDOWN, which has sold over 3 million
copies in the United States and 15 million copies worldwide (including album
and single). “A Masterclass in Cheesiness”: The band just didn’t lend itself to
much credibility. Maybe it was the poodle haircuts, the over-‐pompous
keyboards of Mic Michaeli, or the falsetto voice of singer Joey Tempest, but
the truth was that it was easy to laugh at Europe. However, behind all the
cheesiness lurked a good rock band, capable of good hooks and above-‐
average musicianship.
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• Asia: An
English progressive rock band formed in London in 1981. The most
commercially successful line-‐up was its original, which was a supergroup of
four members of different progressive rock bands of the 1970s: lead vocalist
and bassist John Wetton of King Crimson and U.K., guitarist Steve Howe of
Yes, keyboardist Geoff Downes of Yes and the Buggles, and drummer Carl
Palmer of Emerson, Lake & Paler. Their debut album, Asia, released in 1982,
remains their best selling album and went to number one in several
countries. The singles “Heat of the Moment” and “Only Time Will Tell”
became Top 40 hits, both boosted by popular MTV music videos. Their
influences included self-‐important progressive rockers that reigned supreme
in the 1970s, seminal art rock bands, and stretches of indulgent
instrumentals on their records.
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• Whitney Houston:
An American singer and actress. She was cited as the most awarded female
artist of all time by Guinness World Records and remains one of the best-‐
selling music artists of all time with 200 million records sold worldwide.
Houston released seven studio albums and two soundtrack albums, all of
which have been certified diamond, multi-‐platinum, platinum, or gold by the
Recording Industry Association of America. Her crossover appeal on the
popular music charts – as well as her prominence on MTV, starting with her
vide for “How Will I Know” – influenced several African-‐American women
artists who followed in her footsteps. Houston began singing in church as a
child and became a background vocalist while in high school. With the
guidance of Arista Records chairman Clive Davis, she signed to the label at
the age of 19. Her first two studio albums, Whitney Houston (1985) and
Whitney (1987), both reached number one on the Billboard 200 in the United
States. She became the only artist to have seven consecutive number-‐one
singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, from “Saving All My Love For You”
in 1985 to “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” in 1988. During the 1980s, MTV
was coming into its own and received criticism for not playing enough black
artists. With Michael Jackson breaking down the color barrier for black men,
Houston did the same for black women. She became the first black woman to
receive heavy rotation on the network following the success of the “How Will
I Know” video. Following Houston’s breakthrough, other African-‐American
women, such as Janet Jackson and Anita Baker, were successful in popular
music. Baker commented that “Because of what Whitney and Sade did, there
was an opening for me…For radio stations, black women singers aren’t taboo
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anymore.” Houston was a mezzo-‐soprano, and was commonly referred to as
“The Voice” in reference to her exceptional vocal talent.

Hedwig = (figurative)
• Quest for Individuality
• Search for “Other Half”
• Loneliness
• Gender Confusion
• Platonic Sex = Plato’s Symposium = “Origin of Love” story (origin story of gay,
lesbian, and heterosexual love).
• Two halves into a whole being: Yitzhak = Jew / Hedwig = German (the two
halves of Germany/Berlin during WWII that were broken apart by the “gods”
of the geopolitical world); Hedwig’s botched sex change forcing her into
gender ambiguity before she was ready creating a need to marry her
maleness with her femaleness (finding both halves within herself – maleness,
as well as femaleness comes from within); Erich Honecker (East Germany)
and Helmut Kohl (West Germany) are the gods that split the humans in half;
• Musical Ambiguity = Gender Ambiguity
• Surrealistic, Multi-‐cultural fairytale
• Antithesis / Themes of Opposites in the show: Man/Woman; Gay/Straight;
Spiritual/Physical; East Berlin/West Berlin; Sacred/Profane;
Creator/Creation; God/Mortal; Defiant/Defeatist; and Powerful/Powerless.
• Gods = Destroyers
• God figure: She parallels the Gods in “Origin of Love”.
• Creator = Creates Tommy in her image.
• Gnostics = Religious sect that believes that participants only need to
understand themselves and their world to be saved.
• Doesn’t See: Creation from pain (she created Tommy and Yitzhak from need,
but doesn’t see their potential to betray her).
• Discoveries: She can be whole without another person, making peace with
the past, making peace with gender deformity, making peace with one’ space
in the world, making peace with creating art and sharing it with an audience
– the unconscious reality in the personality of the group.

Tommy and Yitzhak
INCH: Hedwig’s resentment-‐filled dysfunctional relationahip with her other
half, maybe her true other half, escalates as Tommy Gnosis’ career sky-‐
rockets The two lovers – Tommy, the former, deceitful lover, and Yitzhak,
the defeminsized or unsexed one – serve as avatars (Hindu manifestation of a
deity or released soul in bodily form on earth; an incarnate divine teacher)
for Hedwig’s neurotic displays of self-‐hatred and increasing alienation from
herself and the world…Stripped bare o all her ‘selves,’ Hedwig, in a gesture of
peace, then gifts her wig to Yitzhak, thereby giving them permission to
present as female, which is their avowed desire. The caged Yitzhak is set
free. The shadow character is thrust into the light, and in the original version
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of the show, walks off stage to seek their new destiny. In later productions of
the musical, a double ending ensues wherein Yitzhak leaves to make a
spectacular costume change and returns to take over singing the last song of
the show, as Hedwig joins her.

The Connection to the “Spirit of 1969” Season

1969:
• Unrest and crises on multiple fronts
• Civil disunity
• Scientific Advancements
• UC Berkley Protests
• “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam”
• Native Americans claim Alcatraz for 19 months.
• The Release of the My Lai Massacre photos
• Trial of the Chicago Seven, which brought the battle of the leftists and the
establishment to the forefront of society.
• President Nixon becomes President over the “silent majority”.
• Woodstock
• Manson Family Murders
• $1 trillion in goods/services in the United States for the first time in history.
• Boeing’s 747 is launched.
• Walk on the Moon.
• Stonewall riots.

The Songs

From Caridad Svich’s MITCHELL AND TRASK’S HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH:
One of the most dynamic aspects of the libretto and score of HEDWIG AND THE
ANGRY INCH is that even though it presents itself as semi-‐improve gig theatre,
hosted by a character that knows her way around the improvisational nature of the
performativity of gender roles, and encourages each performer taking on the role of
Hedwig in future to adapt the text to the venue in which the are playing, and do their
best to sustain the thrown-‐together feel of the show, the written script and songs
actually do function in a relatively ‘classic’ musical theatre manner. The songs for
the most part move the story forward. The script lays its cards on the line and takes
us through Hedwig’s life step by step.

“Tear Me Down” (past)
• Metaphor for Hedwig as the Berlin Wall, i.e. all of us are cut in half.
• Yitzhak = Jew and Hedwig = German (two halves of Germany/Berlin in
WWII).
• Beginning of the antithesis of Hedwig’s identity told through musical
stylizations: Rock ‘n’ Roll and then cis-‐female crooner music.
INCH: Bear in mind, though, that the assumed masculine look of rock ‘n’ roll
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had its roots in aligning itself and/or adopting a working –class, anti-‐crooner
(i.e. middle class) stance as if to say to the world: this is raw, this is real, there
are no tricks up my sleeve.

“The Origin of Love” (past)
• Pop ballad with a nod to the 1970s pop ‘stylings’ of Debby Boone and Toni
Tennille.
• Platonic Symposium: Describes how once three sexes or human being
existed – children of the sun (male and male), children of the earth ( women
and women), and children of the moon (male and female) – and how angry
gods split the three sexes in two, leaving those abandoned with an existential
yearning to find their other half.
• Berlin Wall cutting the famous art center in half
• Gospel of Thomas
INCH: Thus, in terms of the show’s dramaturgy, on a musical level, it
reinforces what Mitchell has already set up: that Hedwig is positioned
between the earnestness of pop songs as once delivered by gentle-‐voiced
female crooners in contrast to the world of gender-‐bending, queer punch and
glam-‐rockers.
• Allows the audience to settle into the show.
INCH: So, even though ‘The Origin of Love’ is a song about a subject’s search
for completion after being split from their other half, it somehow reads and
sings as an anthem for seeking one’s own path…The effectiveness of Stephen
Trask’s song ‘The Origin of Love’ is that it manages to evoke not only the
wistful yearning at the heart of Hansel/Hedwig and the show itself – the
idealized female-‐identified crooner side of our genderqueer heroine – but
also brings to mind, through its lyrical explication of Aristophanes’ speech in
Plato’s symposium, the more wide-‐ranging possibilities inherent in rock and
popular music. Rock is a form that should get to choose between binary
notions of self, let alone rigid articulations of subject matter. It is a genre that
has always been in-‐between many origins and idealized images: between,
say, the seemingly vapid plasticity of the ‘girl singer’ that pre-‐dated its
existence, and the straight-‐seeming affect and simultaneous affectless-‐ness of
the rock ‘n’ roll ‘boy’ that became its emblem. It’s always been in some ways
a queer form that could do more to own up to its queerness, radical and
otherwise.

“Sugar Daddy” (past)
• Erich Honecker (East Germany) and Helmut Kohl (West Germany) are the
Gods that split the humans in half.
INCH: Trask’s song ‘Sugar Daddy’ becomes the focus of the show at this
point. Buoyed by a repetitive, nearly parodic country-‐fied twang and two-‐
step beat (think a variation of Dolly Parton’s 1973 ‘Jolene’ laced in snark), the
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song is a chance for Mitchell as Hedwig to play the audience as if they were
her sugar daddy. Moving into the crowd, sitting on people’s laps, flirting with
all…It’s an exuberant respite from the darker-‐hued tone of ‘The Origin of
Love,’ and, as a result, allows the audience to simply enjoy Hedwig’s ability to
be charming and audacious within the received expectations of a rock ‘n’ roll
cabaret act. It’s also an occasion for the performer playing the role to
improvise and let loose, and remind us, in case we have forgotten that gender
is a construct that is being performed before our eyes, and that glam’s roots
lie in ‘glamour’ itself, and through its enchantment we are bound to be
seduced…

“The Angry Inch” (past)
INCH: Hedwig’s physical trauma serves as the psychological core of the
show. Risen like Lazarus, she is resurrected into a body that has been
mutilated and is physically rendered by its inability to be neither one thing
nor another. Her sex organ is neither a penis nor a vagina, but something in-‐
between and therefore, ‘other.’ In the song ‘Angry Inch,’ which of all the
songs in the show has the most ‘classic’ punk rock sound, one deeply
evocative of the Sex Pistols’ NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS (1977) album,
Hedwig illustrates her traumatized state. Frenetic, caged, caught, confused,
she cannot find a way out of her dilemma because it is embedded in her skin
and at the root of her newly marked sex – once that also is haunted by its
prior carnal ‘memory’…Hedwig’s ‘otherness’ is caused by an accident. If the
operation had not been botched, there would likely be no story to tell. Or at
least not one that hinges on her constant state of indeterminacy, and how she
wrestles with this fact to discover a way to be in the world. Yet, her
‘otherness’ is central to Hedwig’s existence and how she occupies not only
her own imaginary, but that of the show itself. Bluntly marking Hedwig’s
gendered instability, Mitchell as writer and Trask as lyricist, mine Hedwig’s
rent and rented body as a surface upon which to write a darkly exuberant
fairy tale about a child that discovers she is one of a kind, but also potentially
among her own kind, if she dares travel past borders that confine and try to
stabilize her being and identity.
• The focus of the piece is on trauma’s shock and awe effect upon the psyche
and physical body.

“Wig In A Box” (past)
• Wig = Personal Hell
• LaVern Baker
INCH: ‘Wig in a Box’ details Hedwig’s new transformation. The song is
sweet-‐tempered in its energy and almost bouncy in its rhythms. Backed by
an ooh-‐wah-‐wah chorus (the kind usually favoured in girl group songs of the
1960s), the song allows Mitchell to revel in a costume change – a new dress
and fur coat – and yes, extensions to the wig, which is as much a star of the
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show as he is…In effect, this new look – fanned-‐out wig, high femme make-‐
up, dress and fur coat – becomes both protective shell and convenient
armour with which Hedwig can deal with and face a cruel world. The song’s
lyrics also re-‐inscribe how music is essential to Hedwig’s life and acts as an
agent of grace at each stage in her life’s transformations…Alone in rural
Kansas, she is like one of those heroines from the ‘women’s films’ of the
1940s…In these films, women often suffer hardship and life-‐changing events
at the hands of men and patriarchal culture, but persevere and usually follow
their own path, despite conflicting social obstacles in their way…Styling
herself as ultra-‐femme, using makeup as a mask and weapon with which to
face the world…

“Wicked Little Town” (past)
• First song written for the show
• First time the song is heard, it is not finished.
• Autobiographical to John Cameron Mitchell’s upbringing as a Midwestern
Army Brat.
• Male Point-‐of-‐View
• Antithesis / Themes of Opposites in the show: Man/Woman; Gay/Straight;
Spiritual/Physical; East Berlin/West Berlin; Sacred/Profane;
Creator/Creation; and God/Mortal.
• The song establishes the love-‐at-‐first-‐sight meeting of Hedwig and Tommy
Speck and seals their fate.
INCH: Although Hedwig introduces it mockingly as a poor gal’s mocking
homage to the kind of driving-‐at-‐night, alone-‐in-‐the-‐dark songs made
popular once by Phil Collins (songs like his 1981 hit ‘In the Air Tonight’),
‘Wicked Little Town’ acts as a musical mirror to an earlier song in the show
‘Origin of Love.’ Both are ballads, and both are lyrically centered on a soul
braving and/or wracked by the elements yet determined to carry on. In
‘Origin of Love,’ the lyrics express Hansel’s interpretation of the story from
Plato’s Symposium – the sexes split in two, endlessly searching the universe
for their other half. In ‘Wicked Little Town,’ Hedwig is tossed about by Lady
Luck, living in a town that shuns her, yet she offers those listening to her,
equally stuck in confining, repressive circumstances, a way out of the soul-‐
crunching mess of their lives by riding the waves of her voice – signal against
noise. It is a tender exploration of the power of music and the way voices
that societies wish to silence can still find a way to be heard. Music as
sanctuary. Music as refuge. Music as a space and for liberation. With
truthful utterance through song, then, the potentiality of love exists, and
through it, the possible union with another – the long-‐sought-‐for other half?
[…] The story between them begins to play out a bit like a less starry version
of the iconic Hollywood film A STAR IS BORN ( 1937, 1954, 1976, and 2018).
Tommy starts to write songs with Hedwig. She baptizes him with the stage
name ‘Tommy Gnosis’ and it seems as if Hedwig has finally found her other
half – the one that knows her and con ‘complete’ her torn being. ‘Gnosis’ is
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the common Greek noun for knowledge, and Hedwig’s christening of Tommy
with his new name albeit for the stage, proves to be a double-‐edged sword,

“The Long Grift” (past)
INCH: …when Tommy finds out that Hedwig is not biologically female
through the song ‘The Long Grift,’ he rejects her…’Love the front of me,’
Hedwig demands, but Tommy cannot. He runs away and becomes a bone
fide rock star…Tommy does so using the songs Hedwig has written the ones
they co-‐wrote all under his name, thereby effectively stealing Hedwig’s gifts
of song and erasing her entirely from his story. The memory of this moment
– for the show is a memory play – ignites a smashed reverie of rage…
• From Stephen Trask’s blog: I wrote “The Long Grift” for Jack [Stephen’s
bandmate/friend], sung from the perspective of someone who’d figured out
the game and had the strength to send his lover packing. We all really
thought Jack had won the battle. This lover, though, never stays gone. He
keeps banging on the door, promising, lying: “This time will be different.”
After about 10 years of his careering from recovery to addiction, I remember
John calling me up to tell me that we had lost Jack.

“Hedwig’s Lament” (past)
• A much altered reprise of “Tear Me Down”
• At first it is defiant and later it is defeatist / First powerful and later
powerless (mirroring the themes of opposites in the show).
• Glam Rock, which will be followed by the pure punk piece in the musical, just
like music history.
INCH: She is the broken heroine of all torch song, pining for her man, taking
the damage doled out, and seeking restoration at one and the
same…Hedwig’s inability to cope with not only her life in this new country,
but also with the cracked nature of her consciousness, torn as it is between
nations, languages, and a scarred sex organ that does not ‘work’ according to
society’s and nature’s conventionally rendered dictates. Hedwig is ‘outside’
natural laws. Her freakishness is accentuated. Or so Hedwig feels at this
moment when she feels utterly shattered. Echoes of David Bowie’s CRACKED
ACTOR (1974) can be glimpsed in the brittle, addled slide into despair…

“Exquisite Corpse” (present)
INCH: There is even the rough equivalent in the score of what in musical
theatre terms is called an ‘eleven o’clock number’ – a show-‐stopping song
that occurs late in the second half in which the central character comes to a
major realization about their circumstances in life.
• Punk song preceded by a glam rock ballad, just like music history.
• A nervous breakdown.
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INCH: …stripping off her presentational life mask – wig, dress and makeup –
as she smashes the tomatoes she uses as her fake breasts against her chest,
and lets the red juice of the tomato drip down her front the front that was an
affront to Tommy – the front that cannot be a ‘front’ for anything else,
because there is nothing else there. Torn in every direction, she is a raging,
roaring, aching mess, echoing, musically and lyrically David Bowie again,
specifically his headlong dive into ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.’ In this shattered
mirror, the body is rent for all to see. The sacrificial martyr is now on rock ‘n’
roll’s altar. Pity the star, watch how she falls, and oh, how we love the fall,
because the crowd is primed for this kind of sacrifice. This is the stuff of
theater…It’s ancient Greece and the ritual must come to an end somehow,
and what better way for it to do so than through a spectacular fall from
grace? […] Trauma is re-‐illuminated through the wounds of the battered
psyche of the marginalized body, twice marginalized for being woman and
other/ed. The carnal cabaret electrifies our veins in the audience, spectators
at the carnival of destructive desire, as the meltdown of all meltdowns takes
place. This is the kind invoked by Bowie when he killed off Ziggy Stardust,
but also the kind that raged through the guitar-‐smashing Pete Townsend
when he was The Who, the tranced-‐out dive into the unknown of Jim
Morrison when he fronted The Doors, the jagged, frantic crash and burn of
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, and heck, the dark thread of suicides that
course through rock ‘n’ roll history: Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake,
Chris Cornell, Michael Hutchence, Ian Curtis, Elliott Smith, Wendy O.
Williams, and so on. Rock ‘n’ roll is littered with corpses, glittering once,
burning bright and usually beautiful, primed to give their all and leave in a
blaze of ill-‐fitting glory. For a moment, Hedwig looks like she will too join
their ranks.

“Wicked Little Town (reprise)” (present)
• The song is resolved from the earlier hearing.
• Tommy’s Concert
• Tommy/Hedwig = Creation/Creator
• Hedwig singing to younger version of herself
• Hansel singing to Hedwig
• Hansel singing to his mother
• Hedwig must escape her toxic inside by freeing Tommy.
INCH: Yet, in the midst of her breakdown, something happens, and it’s
almost as if it’s a mistake. She appears to become Tommy Gnosis (a fact
made richer if you know that John Cameron Mitchell originally envisioned
the role of Tommy for himself before Hedwig appeared as a character in the
musical’s development), and in that act of seeming/becoming, Tommy asks
Hedwig for forgiveness. One half meets the other – sun to earth – recalling
the story Hansel heard his mother re-‐tell from Plato’s Symposium. This is a
storied enactment now as the selves break down and face each other in the
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cracked mirror of rock ‘n’ roll’s ecstatic larynx. Hedwig meets Tommy in an
imagined dual performance of selves in a reprise of the song ‘Wicked Little
Town.’ In this slightly hallucinatory, radiant haze of a moment, where the
identities and being of the two halves are blurred, Hedwig as Tommy forgives
Tommy. The altar, this altar of theatre and ritual, will not have a sacrifice
then but rather an offering of reconciliation instead.

“Midnight Radio” (present)
• Declaration of Independence = healing song for the audience and
Yitzhak/Hedwig
• Female empowerment trope song
INCH: A stripped Hedwig stands in the light of grace and benediction in front
of an audience under a liberating halo of empowered yet ambiguous
exaltation…Hedwig sings the glorious, anthemic ‘Midnight Radio’ as an acto
of apotheosis and one of Dionysian celebration. All the supreme goddesses of
rock ‘n’ roll – Patti Smith, Tina Turner, Yoko Ono, Aretha Franklin, Nona
Hendryx and Nico. She asks the crowd to ‘Lift up your hands’ in a gesture of
unity and shared uplift, but also in echoing lyrically and ironically the ending
of Bowie’s ‘Rock ‘n’ roll Suicide,’ which finishes with Bowie as Ziggy Stardust
repeatedly asking his listener/potential lover to ‘gimme your hands.’ So, who
really is Hedwig now? Does she know? Stripped of every mask she has worn
throughout her life, how will she walk into the world/

The Ending
• How to marry Hedwig’s two sides and let Yitzhak go and be a true creation.
• From Caridad Svich’s MITCHELL AND TRASK’S HEDWIG AND THE ANRGY
INCH: Mitchell suggests, especially in the 2001 film version that Hedwig
walks off stage naked or nearly naked, and it is as if they are a new-‐born
babe, once again, facing the world, eyes open and embracing the unknown.
After a tumultuous life of repetitive traumas, Hedwig breaks through
everything and starts again. Think of this as a crash-‐and-‐burn, and then burn
brighter on the other side scenario. Unmasked, the child of the sun, who is
also the child of the earth and moon, will walk the lowly earth, and perhaps
find healing. It’s interesting that Mitchell and Trask do not wish to neatly
resolve Hedwig’s predicament, and make her a poster child for genderqueer
power everywhere. They allow the audience to live with ambiguity about
whether she will make it in the world or not. In a visual nod, though, to a
desire for completion, in the stage directions for the original production,
Mitchell writes that Hedwig ‘walks through the door and into the light. The
projected male and female faces merge into one.’

Vocabulary
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1980s high style (pg. 7): 1980s fashion place heavy emphasis on expensive clothes
and fashion accessories. Apparel tended to be very bright and vivid in appearance.
Women expressed an image of wealth and success through shiny costume jewelry,
such as large faux-‐gold earrings, pearl necklaces, and clothing covered in sequins
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and diamonds. Punk fashion began as a reaction against both the hippie movement
of the past decades and the materialistic values of the current decade. Hair in the
1980s was typically big, curly, bouffant and heavily styled. Television shows such as
DYNASTY helped popularize the high volume bouffant and glamorous image
associated with it. Women from the 1980s wore bright, heavy makeup. Fashionable
clothing in the early 1980s included both unisex and gender-‐specific attire.
Widespread fashions for women in the early 1980s included sweaters (including
turtleneck, crew neck, and v-‐neck varieties); fur-‐lined puffer jackets; tunics; faux-‐fur
coats; velvet blazers; trench coats (made in both fake and real leather); crop tops;
tube tops; knee-‐length skirts (of no prescribed length, as designers opted for
choice); loose, flowy, knee-‐length dresses (with high-‐cut and low-‐cut necklines,
varying sleeve lengths, and made in a variety of fabrics including cotton, silk, satin,
and polyester); high-‐waisted loose pants; embroidered jeans; leather pants; and
designer jeans. Women’s pants of the 1980s were, in general, worn with long
inseams, and by 1981 the flared jeans of the 70s had gone out of fashion in favor of
straight leg trousers. From 1980-‐83 popular women’s accessories included belts,
knee-‐high boots with thick kitten heels, sneakers, jelly shoes, mules, round-‐toed
shoes and boots, jelly bracelets, shoes with thick heels, small, think necklaces, and
small watches.

High Style is a style adopted by a select few. In HEDWIG, we are probably dealing
with the subculture of punk and New Romantic. It was characterized by multi-‐
colored Mohawks, ripped skinny jeans, worn band tee-‐shirts, and denim or leather
jackets. This syle was popular among people who listened to punk music such as
The Sex Pistols, and later, (despite the band’s self-‐proclaimed rock ‘n’ roll image)
Guns n’ Roses. Usually the denim jackets (which became an identity of the group)
were adorned by safety pins, buttons, patches, and several other pieces of music or
cultural memorabilia. The origins of the New Romantic and new wave fashion and
music movement of the mid 1980s are often attributed to the Blitz Kids who
frequented the club Blitz in London, especially David Bowie. Bowie even used the
Blitz’s host Steven Strange in his music video Ashes to Ashes. It is also important to
note that the New Romantics and those involved with the punk scene had inspired
each other because of the concentration of influential individuals going to the same
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clubs and having the same friend circles. This is considered the DIY of punk:
androgynous clothing, including ruffled poet shirts, red or blue hussar jackets with
gold braid, silk sashes, tight pants, shiny rayon waistcoats, and tailcoats based on
those worn during the Regency era. Women, too, were very theatrical in terms of
makeup and style and often favored big hair, fishnet gloves, corsets, crushed velvet,
and elements of Middle Eastern and gypsy clothing.
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Aggessive influence of German philosophy on rock and roll entitled (pg. 16):
From Huffpost article by Nicholas Ferroni: If you live on planet Earth and have
access to a TV or radio, you are well aware of the story behind Adel’s record
breaking album 21. Just to make sure, Adele was so devastated after a breakup that,
unlike most people who get dumped and turn into psycho stalkers, she decided to
write an album with songs that could make the coldest hearted person cry like a
teenage girl after getting dumped. This, however, is not the particular instance to
which I am referring. Adele is not the first person (and considering most songs are
about being in love and heartbreak, and the remaining songs are about money or
“swag,” she won’t be the last) to pour her heart out and express her emotions
through her work, nor will she be the last person to turn personal heartbreak into
fame and success. However, the person who has used his personal experiences as
inspiration and not self-‐destruction, and who has had more of an impact on the
music world than almost any other musician or artist is actually not a musician at
all, but a philosopher. That’s right Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth century German
philosopher, probably deserves to win not only a “Lifetime Achievement Award” in
music, but he is also deserving of dozens of Grammy’s and an induction into every
genre’s Hall of Fame. What most people, and even most musicians, don’t realize is
that Nietzsche coined what can be considered one of the most used phrases in music
and even society. In his book TWILIGHT OF IDOS (1888), Nietzsche wrote, “Was ihn
nict umbringt, macht ihn starker,” which translates to English as “what does not kill
me only makes me stronger.” Not only is this phrase uttered and known by nearly
every person in the civilized world, it has been the basis for more songs in more
genres than any other phrase or quote (even more so that The Beatles’ “All We Need
Is Love”). And, like Adele, Nietzsche’s failures with love led him to adopt many of his
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philosophical views on love, life, and even God. Little did this “existentialist” know
at the time, Nietzsche would be one of the most quoted people in history alongside
Jesus and Confucius. he is not limited to being a “one hit wonder” of the quote world
either; he has hundreds of gems and, for those of us who follow him on Twitter
(@NietzscheQuotes), we enjoy his profound, pathetic and cynical words on a daily
basis, and they are still extremely relevant. As a man who has had his share of
rejection, I truly feel for him and his tortured soul. However, if his soul wasn’t
tortured, we wouldn’t have the hundreds of songs that his quote has come to
inspire. So, thank you Friedrich Nietzsche, your words have helped and continue to
help make artists such as Kelly Clarkson, Kanye West, Asia, Tupac, and many more
into award winners, and most of them I doubt would even know who you are. If
only his family could find a way to cash in on the residuals and revenue acquired by
using his iconic phrase? Whether it’s Adele’s song “Someone Like You,” or
Nietzsche’s quote, “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more
frequent,” it’s safe to assume that the best revenge for being heartbroken is to
become successful and famous, and the best way to do that is to write a song or
something so profound someone will use it in a song. Though, I have also found that
dating someone more attractive and successful than the person who dumped you
works well too. On a different note, for my superhero fans, Nietzsche also coined
the term and concept of a “Superman,” but I will save that for another blog entirely.

Androgynous (pg. 39): partly male and partly female in appearance; of
indeterminate sex. Having the physical characteristics of both sexes;
hermaphrodite. 1620s, “womanish” (of a man); 1650s, “having two sexes, being
both male and female,” from Latin androgynus, from Greek androgynos
“hermaphrodite, male and female in one; womanish man;” as an adjective (of baths)
“common to men and women,” from Andros, genitive of ander “male” = gyne
“woman”.

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Aqua Net (pg. 15): A hair spray brand
notable for its popularity and for its marketing strategy, which aimed to make hair
spray “as ubiquitous as soap”. The brand is known for its distinctive large purple
spray cans, and the spray itself is known for its strong hold and distinctive smell.
Aqua Net was invented in the 1950s. Sources differ on its availability around this
time. One source describes it as being initially available only in hair salons and not
offered directly for sale to the public until the late 1950s. Another states that this
change happened in 1961. Yet another says it was on the market as early as 1953,
but does not specify whether it included direct sale to the public or only to salons.
Regardless of how they obtained it, those who did have access to it in the 1950s and
1960s found it suitable for facilitating the bouffant hairstyles in those decades, such
as the beehive. In the 1960s, Aqua Net was advertised by The Three Stooges. In the
1980s, a renewed trend for big hair, and the rise of glam rock and hair metal,
resulted in the widespread use of hair spray in mainstream and alternative culture
alike. Aqua Net became synonymous with these trends during that decade. In the
1980s Aqua Net was advertised by Donna Mills.
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Arcadians (pg. 41): An ancient Greek tribe which was situated in the mountainous
Peloponnese. It is considered one of the oldest Greek tribes which settled in Greece
and it was probably a relative tribe of the proto-‐Greeks who are mentioned by the
ancient authors as Pelasgians. Whilst Herodotus seems to have found the idea that
the Arcadians were not Greek far-‐fetched, it is clear that the Arcadians were
considered the original inhabitants of the region. This is testified by ancient myths,
like the myth Arcas, the myth of Lycaon etc. Arcadia is also one of the regions
described in the “catalogue of ships” in the ILIAD. Agamemnon himself gave Arcadia
the ships for the Trojan war because Arcadia did not have a navy. Arcadia is a
region in the central Peloponnese. It took its name from the mythological character
Arcas (a hunter who became king of Arcadia; he is remembered for having taught
the people the arts of weaving and baking bread – he is the son of the God Zeus, who
disguised himself as Artemis to rape his mother Callisto, a nymph in Artemis’s
group, who was turned into a bear when Zeus’ wife Hera discovered this) and in
Greek mythology, it is the home of the god Pan. In European Renaissance arts,
Arcadia was celebrated as an unspoiled, harmonious wilderness; as such, it was
referenced in popular culture.

Aristophanes (pg. 39): A comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty
plays survive virtually complete. These provide the most valuable examples ofa
genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with
fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries. Also
known as “The Father of Comedy” and “the Prince of Ancient Comedy”, Aristophanes
has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other
author. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential
125
contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes’ play THE CLOUDS as slander that
contributed to the trail and subsequent condemning of Socrates, although other
satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher. Aristophanes’ second
play, THE BABYLONIANS (now lost), was denounced by Cleon as a slander against
the Athenian polis. It is possible that the case was argued in court, but details of the
trial are not recorded and Aristophanes caricatured Cleon mercilessly in his
subsequent plays, especially THE KNIGHTS, the first of many plays that he directed
himself. “in my opinion,” he says through that plays’ Chorus, “the author-‐director of
comedies has the hardest job of all.” Plato’s THE SYMPOSIUM appears to be a useful
source of biographical information about Aristophanes, but its reliability is open to
doubt. It purports to be a record of conversations at a dinner party at which both
Aristophanes and Socrates are guests, held some seven years after the performance
of THE CLOUDS, the play in which Socrates was cruelly caricatured. Plato was only a
boy when the events in THE SYMPOSIUM are supposed to have occurred and it is
possible that his Aristophanes is in fact based on a reading of his plays. For
example, conversation among the guests turns to the subject of Love and
Aristophanes explains his notion of it terms of an amusing allegory, a device he
often uses in his plays. He is represented as suffering an attack of hiccoughs and this
might be a humorous reference to the crude physical jokes in his plays. He tells the
other guests that he is quite happy to be thought amusing but he is wary of
appearing ridiculous. This fear of being ridiculed is consistent with his declaration
in THE KNIGHTS that he embarked on the career of comic playwright warily after
witnessing the public contempt and ridicule that other dramatists had incurred.

atonement (pg. 9): reparation for a wrong or injury, reparation or expiation for sin.
the reconciliation of God and humankind through Jesus Christ. early 16th century
(denoting unity or reconciliation, especially between God and man): from “at one” +
-‐ment, influenced by medieval Latin adunamentum ‘unity’, and earlier onement
from an obsolete verb one ‘to unite’.
126

August 13, 1961 (pg. 8): Berlin woke up to a shock: the East German Army had
begun construction on the infamous Berlin Wall. The Wall was initially constructed
in the middle of Berlin, and expanded over the following months.

Autobahn (pg. 15): The federal controlled-‐access highway system in Germany. The
official German term is Bundesautobahn, which translates as “federal motorway”.
The literal meaning of the word is “Federal Auto(mobile) Track”. German
Autobahnen are widely known for having no federally mandated speed limit for
some classes of vehicles. However, limits are posted (and enforced) in areas that
are urbanized, substandard, accident-‐prone, or under construction. On speed-‐
unrestricted stretches, an advisory speed of 81 mph applies. While driving faster is
no illegal as such in the absence of a speed limit, it can cause an increased liability in
the case of a collision (which the mandatory auto insurance has to cover).

127
Barbara Streisand (pg. 25):
An American singer, actress, and filmmaker. In a career spanning six decades, she
has achieved success in multiple fields of entertainment and has been recognized
with two Academy Awards, ten Grammy Awards including the Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award and the Grammy Legend Award, five Emmy Awards including
one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute Award, a
Kennedy Center Honors prize, four Peabody Awards, the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, and nine Golden Globes. She is among a small group of entertainers who
have been honored with an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award – though only
three were competitive awards – and is one of only two artists in that group who
have also won a Peabody.

Berlin Accent: High German dialect spoken in the city of Berlin as well as its
surrounding metropolitan area. The area of Berlin was one of the first to abandon
East Low German as a written language (in the late 16th century) and later also as a
spoken language. This was the first dialect of Standard German with definite High
German roots but a Low German substratum apparently formed. Berlinese
pronunciation is similar to that of other High German varieties. Nevertheless, it
maintains unique characteristics that set it apart from other variants. Most notable
are the strong contraction trends over several words and the rather irreverent
adaptation of foreign words and Anglicisms that are difficult to understand among
Upper German speakers. Also, some words contain the letter j (representing IPA:
[j]) instead of g. This is exemplified in the word for good, in which gut becomes jut.
Berlinese grammar contains some notable differences from that of standard
German. For instance, the accusative case and dative case are not distinguished.
Similarly, conjunctions that are distinguished in standard German are not in
128
Berlinese. For example, in standard German, wenn (when / if) is used for
conditional, theoretical, or consistent events and vann (when) is used for events
currently occurring or questions. There is no difference in the two in Berlinese.
Genitive forms are also replaced by prepositional accusative forms, some still with
an inserted pronoun. For example, dem sein Haus (the his house) rather than the
standard sien Haus (his house). Plural forms often have an additional –s, regardless
of the standard plural ending. Words ending in –ken are often written (colloquially)
and pronounced as –sken. From Jerry Blunt’s STAGE DIALECTS: some citizens of
Berlin claim that only they speak a proper German, to which statement some non-
Berliners have been heard to reply heatedly that there is a question whether the Berliners
really speak German at all. To understand this we only have to compare the above
situation to that of an American Southerner who evinces a special attitude toward the
speech of a northern city, Boston or Brooklyn, for example.

Berlin Wall (pg. 7):
A guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from
1967 to 1989. Construction of the Wall was commenced by the German Democratic
Republic (GDR, East Germany) on 13 August 1961. The Wall cut off (by land) West
Berlin from surrounding East Germany, including East Berlin. The barrier included
guard towers placed along large concrete walls, accompanied by a wide area (later
known as the “death strip”) that contained anti-‐vehicle trenches, “fakir beds” and
other defenses. The Eastern Bloc portrayed the Wall as protecting the population
from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people” in building a
socialist state in East Germany. GDR authorities officially referred to the Berlin Wall
as the Anti-‐Fascist Protection Rampart. The West Berlin city government
129
sometimes referred to it as the “Wall of Shame”, a term coined by mayor Willy
Brandt in reference to the Wall’s restriction on freedom of movement. Along with
the separate and much longer inner German border (IGB), which demarcated the
border between East and West Germany, it came to symbolize physically the “Iron
Curtain” that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
Before the Wall’s erection, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc
emigration restrictions and defected from the GDR, many by crossing over the
border from East Berlin into West Berlin; from there they could then travel to West
Germany and to other Western European countries. Between 1961 and 1989 the
Wall prevented almost all such emigration. During this period over 100,000 people
attempted to escape and over 5,000 people succeeded in escaping over the Wall,
with an estimated death toll ranging from 136 to more than 200 in and around
Berlin. In 1989, a series of revolutions in nearby Eastern Bloc countries – Poland
and Hungary in particular – caused a chain reaction in East Germany that ultimately
resulted in the demise of the Wall. After several weeks of civil unrest, the East
German government announced on 9 November 1989 that all GDR citizens could
visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans crossed and climbed
onto the Wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory
atmosphere. Over the next few weeks, euphoric people and souvenir hunters
chipped away parts of the Wall. The Brandenburg Gate in the Berlin Wall was
opened on 22 December 1989. The demolition of the Wall officially began on 13
June 1990 and was completed in 1992. The “fall of the Berlin Wall” paved the way
for German reunification, which formally took place on 3 October 1990.

130
Blackstrap Molasses in the late 1980s (pg. 17):

Blitzkrieg (pg. 18): literally, lighting war. an intense military campaign intended to
bring about a swift victory.

131
Bomb craters near the Berlin Wall (pg. 16):

132
Brita in the 1990s (pg. 28):

calamity (pg. 9): an event causing great and often sudden damage or distress; a
disaster. late Middle English (in the sense ‘disaster and distress’): from Old French
calamite, from Latin calamitas.

133
Camisole in the 1970s (pg. 18):

Chocolate clam shells in the late 1980s (pg. 19):

134
Communist East Berlin (pg. 9):
East Berlin was the capital city of the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to
1990. Formally, it was the Soviet sector of Berlin, established in 1945. The
American, British, and French sectors were known as West Berlin. From 13 August
1961 until 9 November 1989, East Berlin was separated from West Berlin by the
Berlin Wall. The Western Allied powers did not recognize East Berlin as the GDR’s
capital, nor the GDR’s authority to govern East Berlin. On 3 October 1990, the day
Germany was officially reunified, East and West Berlin formally reunited as the city
135
of Berlin. With the London Protocol of 1944 signed on September 12, 1944, the
United State, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union decided to divide Germany
into three occupation zones and to establish a special area of Berlin, which was
occupied by the three Allied Forces together. In May 1945, the Soviet Union
installed a city government for the whole city that was called “Magistrate of Greater
Berlin”, which existed until 1947. After the war, the Allied Forces initially
administered the city together with the Allied Kommandatura, which served as the
governing body of the city. However, in 1948 the Soviet representative left the
Kommandatura and the common administration broke apart during the following
months. In the Soviet sector, a separate city government was established which
continued to call itself “Magistrate of Greater Berlin”. When the German Democratic
Republic was established in 1949, it immediately claimed East Berlin as its capital –
a claim that was recognized by all Communist countries. Nevertheless, its
representative to the People’s Chamber were not directly elected and did not have
full voting rights until 1981. In June 1948, all railways and roads leading to West
Berlin were blocked, and East Berliners were not allowed to emigrate.
Nevertheless, more than 1,000 East Germans were escaping to West Berline each
day by 1960, caused by the strains on the East German economy from war
reparation owed to the Soviet Union, massive destruction of industry, and lack of
assistance from the Marshall Plan. In August 1961, the East German Government
tried to stop the population exodus by enclosing West Berlin within the Berlin Wall.
It was very dangerous for fleeing residents to cross because armed soldiers were
trained to shoot illegal migrants. East Germany was a socialist republic, but there
was not complete economic equality. Privileges such as prestigious apartments and
good schooling were given to members of the ruling party and their family.
Eventually, Christian churches were allowed to operate without restraint after years
of harassment by authorities. In the 1970s, wages of East Berliners rose and
working hours fell. The Western Allies (the US, UK, and France) never formally
acknowledged the authority of the East German government to govern East Berlin;
the official Allied protocol recognized only the authority of the Soviet Union in East
Berlin in accordance with the occupation status of Berlin as a whole. The United
States Command Berlin, for example, published detailed instructions for U.S.
military and civilian personnel wishing to visit East Berlin. In fact, the three
Western commandants regularly protested against the presence of the East German
National People’s Army (NVA) in East Berlin, particularly on the occasion of military
parades. Nevertheless, the three Western Allies eventually established embassies in
East Berlin in the 1970s, although they never recognized it as the capital of East
Germany. Treaties instead used terms such as “seat of government.” From The
Telegraph: Having recently visited the former offices of the Ministry of State
Security in Berlin, it reminded me of how much people suffered under the
communist regime in East Germany. Though I always enjoyed travelling here in the
Eighties, unlike the local population, I was of course free to leave. For me, the
appeal was being able to see part of Germany as it once was, such as in the thirties
without the ubiquitous gaudy fast food outlets or supermarkets found in the West.
In those days, travel in East Germany had to organized through the Berolina travel
agency in London, paying in pounds for vouchers for accommodation to be
136
exchanged at certain specified hotels where Westerners could stay. Petrol could
only be bought at a number of designated stations. It was always interesting to slow
down when approaching restricted areas. I often wondered where the ruling elite
went after a grueling day in the ministries, trying to think of what they could do next
to ensure the regime held up. During those days, it later emerged, the Politburo
used to head off to a walled-‐off park-‐like compound at Wandilitz, 30 kilometers (18
miles) north of Berlin to enjoy privileges such as fresh oranges and real coffee,
denied to the rest of the population. These days there are a great number of
museums in the former East Berlin where it is possible to get an idea of what life
was like under the communist regime. Since 2012, the former offices of the Ministry
of State Security, the headquarters of East Germany’s secret police force (known as
the Stasi) have also been open to the public. In addition, to visiting the premises,
citizens from the former German Democratic Republic can apply to find out what
information was held on them, including who informed on them. In order to set up
this ministry in the Lictenberg area of Berlin, a church and two rows of house had to
be demolished to make space for this huge 52 acre site where as many as 8,000
people worked in 50 offices. As visitors now approach the building from
Ruschestrasse, they can see the large porte-‐cochère added to prevent anyone living
in the vicinity from seeing who arrived or departed. Once striking exhibit in the
entrance hall is what, from the outside, looks like a normal delivery van but which
was actually a prison vehicle, used to bring in opponents of the regime for
questioning, without arousing suspicion among the general public. The longest
serving minister for state security was Erich Mielke, who remained in office for
almost 32 years until the regime collapsed in 1989. Barely eight weeks later the
building was stormed by citizens wanting to know what information was held about
them. In addition to a large wood-‐panelled conference room with a secret staircase
leading down to an inner courtyard, one can see Mielke’s office and a small private
room to where he could withdraw. Naturally, Mielke had a house on the Wandlitz
complex, but apparently his wife complained that it was boring there, not least
because Erich Honecker, East Germany’s leader from 1971 until 1989, banned her
from taking her pet dog with her whenever she went. After 2.7 million citizens had
fled East Germany between 1949 and 1961, it took the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain,
armed border guards and a tightly controlled administration to ensure the
remaining 17 million stayed within the country’s boundaries. It is incredible to
think that, after 12 years of rule under Hitler, another dictatorial regime and
administration was to unfurl over the then Soviet Occupation Zone and last for a
further 40 years. The East German dictatorship permeated all aspects of the lives of
its people and it was up to the Stasi to ensure Communist ideology was adhered to,
not least by appointing a huge number of informants, some 190,000 in fact, who
could be thwarted. Its job was also to recruit and train the next generation of Stasi
staff. Among the artefacts on display to show what lengths the authorities went to
keep an eye on its own citizens are belts, bird-‐boxes, and Thermos flasks all fitted
with built-‐in Russian-‐made F-‐21 KGM miniature spy cameras. One was even hidden
in a watering can, only the top half of which could be filled with water. It was also
the role of the Stasi to keep tabs on anyone showing signs of copying what they
considered to be degenerate Western trends, such as the punk movement or pop
137
culture; even hitchhiking was regarded as decadent. The stories of those killed
while escaping to the West are too numerous to mention. The case of Chris
Gueffroy, the last person to be shot dead at the Berlin Wall, always strikes me as
being particularly sad. Only 20, he died trying to flee to West Berlin on February 6,
1989. Alas he was not to know that, had he waited another nine months, he could
have walked over without fear. Ten years earlier, in 1979, regime-‐opponent petty
officer Bodo Strehlow was on board an East German patrol boat on the Baltic
looking out for people attempting to flee to the West by sea. Threatening the rest of
the crew with a firearm and locking them below deck, he was able to commandeer
the ship in an attempt to et to the coast of Schleswig-‐Holstein and freedom.
However, the other members of the crew managed to retake control over the boat
after a hand grenade was thrown. The Stasi called for Strehlow to be sentenced to
death but he escaped with a life sentence in solitary confinement, which ended, of
course, in 1989, when he was released and went to live near Hamburg. In 1991
Mielke faced trial for his involvement in the murder of two policemen in Berlin in
1931 and in 1993 he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. he served two
years of the sentence but was subsequently released and died in May 2000, aged 92.

constitutional (pg. 28): relating to an established set of principles governing a state.
relating to someone’s physical or mental condition. a walk, typically one taken
regularly to maintain or restore good health. 1680s, “pertaining to a person’s
(physical or mental) constitution,” from constitution meaning “beneficial to bodily
constitution” is from 1750. Meaning “authorized or allowed by the political
constitution” is from 1765.

countenance (pg. 40): a person’s face or facial expression. support. admit as
acceptable or possible. Middle English: from Old French contenance ‘bearing,
behavior’, from contenir sense was ‘bearing, demeanor’, also ‘facial expression’,
hence ‘the face’.

138
Croatia mid-‐1990s (pg. 25):
The Croatian War for
139
Independence was fought from 1991 to 1995 between Croat forces loyal to the
government of Croatia – which had declared independence from the Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) – and the Serb-‐controlled Yugoslav People’s
Army (JNA) and local Serb forces, with the JNA ending its combat operations in
Croatia by 1992. In Croatia, the war is primarily referred to as the “Homeland War”
(Domovinski rat) and also as the “Greater-‐Serbian Aggression” (Velikosrpska
agresija). A majority of Croats wanted Croatia to leave Yugoslavia and become a
sovereign country, while many ethnic Serbs living in Croatia, supported by Serbia,
opposed the secession and wanted Serb-‐claimed lands to be in a common state with
Serbia. Most Serbs sought a new Serb State within a Yugoslav federation, including
areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina with ethnic Serb majorities or
significant minorities, and attempted to conquer as much of Croatia as possible.
Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991, but agreed to postpone it with the
Brioni Agreement and cut all remaining ties with Yugoslavia on 8 October 1991.
The JNA initially tried to keep Croatia within Yugoslavia by occupying all of Croatia.
After this failed, Serb forces established the self-‐proclaimed Republic of Serbian
Krajina (RSK) within Croatia. After the ceasefire of January 1992 and international
recognition of the Republic of Croatia as a sovereign state, the front lines were
entrenched, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was deployed, and
combat became largely intermittent in the following three years. During that time,
the RSK encompassed 13,913 square kilometers (5,372 sq mi), more than a quarter
of Croatia. In 1995, Croatia launched two major offensives known as Operation
Flash and Operation Storm, these offensives effectively ended the war in its favor.
The remaining United Nations Transitional Authority for Easter Slavonia, Baranja
and Wester Sirmium (UNTAES) zone was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia by
1998. The war ended with Croatian victory, as it achieved the goals it had declared
at the beginning of the war: independence and preservation of it borders.
Approximately 21-‐25% of Croatia’s economy was ruined, with an estimated US $37
billion in damaged infrastructure, lost output, and refugee-‐related costs. Over
20,000 people were killed in the war, and refugees were displaced on both sides.
The Serb and Croatian governments began to progressively cooperate with each
other but tension remain, in part due to verdicts by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and lawsuits filed by each country against
each other. Following the end of the war, Croatia faced the challenges of post-‐war
reconstruction, the return of refugees, advancing democratic principles, protection
of human rights and general social and economic development. The post-‐2000
period is characterized by democratization, economic growth and structural and
social reforms, as well as problems such as unemployment, corruption and
inefficiency of the public administration.
140
crypto-‐homo rockers (pg. 10):
Crypto = a person having a secret allegiance to a political creed, especially

communism; concealed, secret; Greek for ‘hidden’. Homo = homosexual, same, Latin
for ‘man’. So, essentially, hidden homosexual rock music. These could include
Freddie Mercury, Elton John, David Bowie, Prince, Boy George, Annie Lennox, Little
Richard, Erasure, Michael Stipe, Liberace, Rob Halford, Indigo Girls. From Stephen
Trask’s blog: I think the best part, though, was being on that stage every week with
Jack Steeb. Jack and I were in my band Cheater together, the band that became the
Angry Inch, but we were also in the Squeezebox band together, playing those great
shows every Friday night for a packed house, hanging out with our friends and
boyfriends in front of the club on the hood of my car, watching all the queer rockers
file in for the show or step outside for a cigarette. Jack and I moved to New York
together to make it: to be rock stars, to be queer, to be queer rock stars together.
We shared an apartment in Fort Greene, listened to albums, went to shows, drank
Silvovitz, delivered pizza. Jack played bass in my bands Bimbo Limbo Spam and
later Cheater. I remember once, when Richard Hell was looking for a bass
player/keyboardist for a Japanese tour, Jack and I went in as a team, willing to forgo
pay and play for nothing but the travel expenses. Sadly, the travel expenses for two
were too high and he couldn’t make it work – but he wanted to and we had a blast
jamming with him in that rehearsal space on Avenue A. When Cheater started to
make a name for itself and we were in the Squeezebox band and playing the early
Hedwig shows, it felt like we were really getting there, a couple of queer punks
making it in New York on our own terms. Jack didn’t make it with me, though. Jack
was an addict and an alcoholic. I was a classic enabler. I remember snorting cocaine
and getting drunk with him until the wee hours just to hang out on his terms, getting
fucked up and listening to “The Blue Mask” and “Slanted and Enchanted” and
Teenage Fan Club, watching Falcon International porn while finishing off a bottle. I
also remember searching all over some of the seediest neighborhoods of Baltimore
141
and Philadelphia when Cheater was gigging there and he had disappeared. I
remember the day his mom called to tell me he’d gone missing two days, and
searching all over the lower east side for him, even climbing up fire escapes to peek
into the apartments of some guy he may have hooked-‐up with. I remember finding
him in the strangest places and in the most disturbing conditions. I was hopeful
when he went into rehab. We put the band on hold almost a year for him, which
kind of killed that project. When he was sober for a year, my boyfriend Michael and
I went to JCM to his AA/NA meeting. One after one, people got up and told their
stories. The stories all seemed to me to have the same theme – addiction was like a
lover that only wanted to scam you out of everything: your money, your things, your
friends, until you had nothing left. I wrote “The Long Grift” for Jack, sung from the
perspective of someone who’d figured out the game and had the strength to send his
lover packing. We all really thought Jack had won the battle. This lover, though,
never stays gone. He keeps banging on the door, promising, lying: “This time will be
different.” After about 10 years of his careering from recovery to addiction, I
remember John calling me up to tell me that we had lost Jack.

142
Cuisinart in the late 1980s (pg. 18):

“Deutschland Uber Alles” (pg. 17): “Germany Above All”, the beginning and refrain
of the first stanza of the song “Deutchlandlied” (The Song of the Germans), which
143
was the national anthem of Germany. In East Germany, the national anthem was
“Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (Risen from Ruins).

Disco dancing jet-‐set in the late 1980s in Milan and Rome (pg. 17):
144
From DAZED: When you think of dance music through the ages, you think of the
meccas of clubbing. Ibiza, long lost hotspots like Haçienda, Berghain, and despite
the loss of Fabric we can still add that one to the list. But one exhibition is
uncovering the long-‐lost era of Spaghetti Disco – an Italian dance music subculture,
born out the volatile and drug-‐ridden 70s. With clubs like Cosmic playing host to
youth searching for an escape from the violence of their heated political climate, it
doesn’t look too dissimilar to London today. When there’s a popular disdain for
politics, most of the time, escapism is the answer. But through escapism, sometimes
something beautiful can be born out of it.

145
Dole pineapple rings (pg. 29):

146
Drag culture in Croatia in the 1990s (pg. 25):
From THE CALVERT JOURNAL: Belgrade’s first drag star, Viva la Diva, was already
active back in the 90s, but it’s only in the past couple of years [2019 article] that the
drag scene has truly developed in Serbia. Now, as in Zagreb, there are more than
two dozen working queens in the city. “Before, I would do two or three drag shows
a year, and now there is almost one a month in Belgrade,” Andrej says. “I think the
fact that we haven’t had a tradition or culture of drag in this region is an opportunity
to develop something authentic, something new,” explains Andrej.

147
Dungeons and Dragons in the late 1980s early 1990s (pg. 25):

Eastern European accent -‐ Croatian (pg. 7): We will be using the Russian Accent, for
Slavic sounds. But, some specifics: There are only 5 vowels and 25 consonants.
They have a very hard time pronouncing some sounds that are simple. They have a
hard time learning when to use definite/indefinite articles – because they don’t have
them. They also have a hard time learning when to use tenses in English – because
their tense structure is somewhat simpler than that of English. Their pronunciation
of the “ch” sound is a bit tougher than the Russian. They also stress all words on the
first syllable.

148
Ephialetes (pg. 39):
An ancient Athenian politician and an early leader of the democratic movement
there. He betrayed his homeland, in hope of receiving some kind of reward from the
Persians, by showing the Persian forces a path around the allied Greek position at
the pass of Thermopylae, which helped them win the Battle of Thermopylae.

Erich Honecker (pg. 19):
A German politician who was the General Secretar of the Socialist Unity Party of
Germany (SED). As party leader he worked closely with Moscow (which had a large
149
army stationed in East Germany). He controlled the government of the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until he was forced out in the
weeks preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. From 1976 onward he
was also the country’s official head of state as Chairman of the State Council of the
German Democratic Republic following Willi Stoph’s relinquishment of the post.
Honecker’s political career began in the 1930s when he became an official in the
Communist Party of Germany, a position for which he was imprisoned by the Nazi
government of Germany. Following World War II, he was freed by the Soviet army
and relaunched his political activities, founding the youth organization the Free
German Youth in 1946 and serving as the group’s chairman until 1955. As the
Security Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee in the new East Germany, he
was the prime organizer of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, in this
function, bore responsibility for the “order to fire” along the Inner German border.
In 1970, he initiated a political power struggle that led, with support of the Kremlin
leader Leonid Brezhnev, to his replacing Walter Ulbrict as First Secretary of the
Central Committee and as chairman of the state’s National Defense Council. Under
his command, the country adopted a programme of “consumer socialism” and
moved toward the international community by normalizing relations with West
Germany and also becoming a full member of the UN, in what is considered one of
his greatest political successes. As Cold War tensions eased in the late 1980s with
the advent of perestroika and glasnost – the liberal reforms introduced by Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev – Honecker refused all but cosmetic changes to the East
German political system. He cited the continual hardliner attitudes of Kim II-‐sung
and Fidel Castro, whose respective regimes of North Korea and Cuba had been
critical of reforms. As anticommunist protests grew, Honecker begged Gorbachev to
intervene with the Soviet army to suppress protests in order to maintain communist
rule as Moscow had done with Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring of 1968 and
with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; Gorbachev refused. Honecker was forced to
resign by his party in October 1989 in a bid to improve the government’s image in
the eyes of the public. Honecker’s eighteen years at the helm of the German
Democratic Republic came to an end. The entire regime collapsed in the following
weeks. Following German reunification in 1990, he sought asylum in the Chilean
embassy in Moscow in 1991 but was extradited back to Germany a year later to
stand trail for his role in the human rights abuses committed by his East German
government. However, the proceedings were abandoned due to his illness and he
was freed from custody to travel to join his family in exile in Chile, where he died in
May 1994 from liver cancer.

150
Ermine Stole in the late 1980s (pg. 18):

151
fish on his truck (pg. 25):

flowing wig extension (pg. 15, 24):
152

French cigarettes in the late 1980s (pg. 18):

153
General Speck (pg. 25):
Hermann Ritter von Speck was a German general during World War II. He was a
recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross of Nazi Germany. Speck was killed
by French machine gun fire on 15 June 1940 in Pont-‐sur-‐Yonne, France. He was the
first German general officer killed in World War II. In 2010, Jay Nordlinger spoke
with von Speck’s daughter, who claimed that the general deliberately sought death
in battle: “According to his daughter, he wanted to die, and arranged to die. He felt
he could not break his oath to the army – he could not desert. And his Catholic faith
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prevented him from committing suicide – suicide straight out, you might say. So, he
put himself in the line of fire. In his dying words, he did not say, ‘Give my love to my
family’, or anything like that. He said, ‘It had to be this way’.

German Dialect: From Jerry Blunt’s STAGE DIALECTS: A German dialect is an
emphatic speech, characterized more by the strength of its vowel and consonant
substitutions than by idiomatic expressions. Definiteness of utterance negates slur
in syllable formation. The result is that the key sounds of the dialect are relatively
easy to detect. In most cases they are also easy to form. The same is true of an
Austrian dialect. The German tongue itself is one specific branch, perhaps the
principal one, of the Teutonic language group. Present-‐day Dutch, Danish, Swedish,
and Norwegian are also members of that group. So is English, although it is the least
noticeable member, it’s words and sounds being the farthest removed of any from
present German speech. Betweent those cousin languages which are located on the
Continent – German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian – some understanding is
possible in written and oral communication. Not so with English. A study of the
German language is required before an equal understanding can come to an
Englishman or an American. Consequently, the number of German words of
transferable use to the dialectician is limited, causing the speaker to rely heavily on
the use of key sounds in the German dialect. On the other hand, the advantage to an
English or American dialectician is that a German dialect introduces only a few new
sounds – the rest are native to us. One of the new sounds the vowel [ɛ̝], has already
been studied as one of the key sounds of Scots, and of the French dialect where it was
heard as [oe:]. Another, the [x], as in loch (lake), is very like its aspirated Scotch cousin.
A third is [ç], ich, also strongly aspirated. These last two have limited use for the
dialectician. For the rest, the majority of the dialect differences fall in the consonant
category. Within the territory of the modern German nation itself – disregarding the
political East-West division – there are the usual dialectical inconsistencies. Some
Germans speak High German, some Low German. The descriptions are geographical,
not social. The term High, a reference to altitude, includes South German areas of
Bavaria and Baden, and some portions of Switzerland and Austria, those which are
located in or on the edge of the Alps. There the dialectician listens almost in vain for the
sound of a back-trilled [r], a sound which, in contrast, is heard often and strongly in the
lower flat areas of North Germany, centering around the city of Hamburg. On the other
hand, some citizens of Berlin claim that only they speak a proper German, to which
statement some non-Berliners have been heard to reply heatedly that there is a question
whether the Berliners really speak German at all. To understand this we only have to
compare the above situation to that of an American Southerner who evinces a special
attitude toward the speech of a northern city, Boston or Brooklyn, for example. In
consequence of the above, the usual twin problems of the dialectician are also present in
this study. First, when listening to primary sources, that is, to German speaking English,
certain key sounds may not be present, causing doubt of the legitimacy of the use of those
key sounds, as in the instance of the lack of a back-trilled [r] in the speech of someone
from Munich. Second, a comment by a German person, one from the Province of Silesia,
might be disturbingly critical of a failure to substitute a [z] for an [s]. For the above kind
of problems, the actor-dialectician has this knowledge to sustain him: that the inclusion
155
of a sectional dialect in a national dialect in any non-English speech is an unnecessary
refinement of his work, one that would require a detailed study and practice beyond
legitimate limits. Fortunately, it is never a matter of pertinence that an actor be required,
in his use of a German or French or Italian dialect, to prove to an audience that the
character he portrays comes from Hamburg or Marseille or Naples; no audience has the
knowledge necessary to detect localized differences, nor a desire to do so. Consequently,
in the section that follows, certain arbitrary but legitimate choices between key sounds
will be made. The choices will be explained, after which, in turn, the student is given an
opportunity to choose for himself which practice he will follow. Many Standard English
pronunciations can be heard in the speech of a German talking in English. If the speaker
did not learn his English from another German, the chances are he learned it, because of
geographical proximity, from an educated Englishman. Before World War II the above
explanation was consistently true. And today, among most older German public figures
the precise accents of Oxford or Cambridge are heard repeatedly. This aspect of a
German dialect could be used to advantage in certain instances. On the other hand, the
restriction need not be an extra requirement for a proper German dialect. Since the war,
in those areas where American personnel have been stationed, American pronunciation
and American idiom (“Can’t lube your care today, Bud, all filled up.”) have made their
expected impress.

gigolo (pg. 30): a young man paid or financially supported by an older woman to be
her escort or lover. 1920s (in the sense of ‘dancing partner’): from French, formed
as the masculine of gigole ‘dance hall woman’, from colloquial gigue ‘leg’.

girth (pg. 12): the measurement around the middle of something, especially a
person’s waist. a band attached to a saddle, used to secure it on a horse by being
fastened around its belly. surround; encircle. Old Norse “a horse’s girth”.

156
Gods of the Nile, The (pg. 13)
Hapi was the god of the annual flooding of the Nile in ancient Egyptian religion. The
flood deposited rich silt (fertile soil) on the river’s banks, allowing the Egyptians to
grow crops. Hapi was greatly celbrated among the Egyptians. Some of the titles of
Hapi were “Lord of the Fish and Birds of the Marshes” and “Lord of the River
Bringing Vegetation”. Hapi is typically depicted as an androgynous figure with a
large belly and pendulous breasts, wearing a loincloth and ceremonial false beard.
The 5 main Egyptian gods are AMUN-‐RA: the Hidden One, MUT: The Mother
Goddess, OSIRIS: The King of the Living, ANUBIS: The Divine Embalmer, and RA:
God of the Sun and Radiance.

Gospel of Thomas (pg. 12-‐14): A non-‐canonical sayings gospel. It was discovered
near Nag Hammadi Egypt, in December 1945 among a group of books known as the
Nag Hammadi library. Scholars speculate that the works were buried in response to
a letter from Bishop Athanasius declaring a strict canon of Christian scripture. The
Coptic-‐language text, the second of seven contained in what modern-‐day scholars
157
have designated as Codex II, is composed of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Almost
half of these sayings resemble those found in the Canonical Gospel, while it is
speculated that the other sayings were added from Gnostic tradition. Its place of
origin may have been Syria, where Thomasine traditions were strong. Selected
Verses from THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS, in the DPS script: Jesus said to them, “When
you make the two one, and the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside,
and the above like the below, and the male and the female into one and the same, so
that the male be not male nor the female female; and when you make eyes in place
of an eye, an hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, and and image in place
of an image; then you will enter the kingdom.” His disciples said to him, “Is
circumcision beneficial or not?” Jesus said to them, “If it were beneficial, their father
would beget them from their mother already circumcised. However, the true
circumcision of the spirit has proved entirely profitable.” Jesus said, “Be not be
anxious from morning until evening and from evening until morning about what you
will wear.” Jesus said, “If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring
forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not
bring forth will destroy you.”

grain alcohol (pg. 28): Purified form of ethyl alcohol (ethanol) made from the
distillation of fermented grain. The ethanol is produced via fermentation of sugars
in the grain by yeast prior to repeated distillation or rectification. The term “grain
alcohol” may be used to refer to any ethanol produced from grain or another
agricultural origin (as in beer or vodka) or it may be reserved to describe alcohol
that is at least 90% pure (e.g. Everclear).

grift (pg. 30): engage in petty or small-‐scale swindling. a petty or small-‐scale
swindle. 1906 underworld slang, perhaps a corruption of graft (corruption).

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Gummi Baerchen (pg. 16):
Small, fruit gum candies, similar to a jelly baby in some English-‐speaking countries
The gummy bear originated in Germany, where it is popular under the name
Gummibärchen (little gum or gummy bear). Gum Arabic was the original base
ingredient used to produce the gummy bears, hence the name gum or gummy. Hans
Riegel, Sr., a confectioner from Bonn, started the Haribo company in 1920. In 1922,
inspired by the trained bears seen at street festivities and markets in Europe
through to the 19th century, he invented the Dancing Bear (Tanzbär), a small,
affordable fruit-‐flavored gum candy treat for children and adults alike, which was
much larger in form than its later successor, the Gold-‐Bear (Goldbär). Even during
Weimar Germany’s hyperinflation period that wreaked havoc on the country,
Haribo’s fruit-‐gum Dancing Bear treats remained affordably priced for a mere 1
Pfennig, in pairs, at kiosks. The success of the Dancing Bear’s successor would late
become Haribo’s world-‐famous Gold-‐Bears candy product in 1967.

gypped (pg. 31): cheat or swindle (someone). From NPR: In never thought about
the etymology of the verb “gypped” until the end of college, when my friend,
lamenting his stolen iPod, said the word and immediately retracted it. “Isn’t that
offensive?” he wondered. Until that moment, I had never thought about it either.
What sparked our unease was the sudden realization that “gypped” was somehow
tied to “gypsy.” “Gypsy” is commonly used to describe the Romani people. But the
term carries many negative connotations, and its derivative carries even more:
159
when somebody is “gypped,” they are, according to Merriam-‐Webster, “defrauded,
swindled, cheated.” According to the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, the first
known recorded definition of the term “gypped” dates back to the 1899 Century
Dictionary, which says that it is “probably an abbreviation of gypsy, gipsy, as applied
to a sly unscrupulous fellow.” It also appears in 1914, in Louis Jackson & C.R.
Hellyer’s VOCABULARY OF CRIMINAL SLANG. The noun “gyp” was described as
“current in polite circles,” and “derived from the popular experience with thieving
Gypsies.” As a verb, the term is defined as “to flim-‐flam” and to “cheat by means of
guile and manual dexterity.” Proper usage? “Gyp this boob with a deuce.” I’m not
exactly sure what gyp this boob with a deuce means, but it sounds like something
stuck between ribald and ridiculous. To read the rest of the article, click here:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/30/242429836/why-‐being-‐
gypped-‐hurts-‐the-‐roma-‐more-‐than-‐it-‐hurts-‐you

Helmut Kohl (pg. 19): A German

statesman who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998 (of West
Germany from 1982 to 1990 and reunited Germany 1990-‐1998) and as the
chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from 1973 to 1998. From 1969
to 1976, Kohl was minister president of the state of Rhineland-‐Palatinate. Kohl
chaired the Group of Seven in 1985 and 1992. In 1998 he became honorary
chairman of the CDU, resigning from the position in 2000. Born in 1930 in
Ludwigshafen to a Roman Catholic family, Kohl joined the Christian Democratic
160
Union in 1946 at the age of 16. He earned a PhD in history at Heidelberg University
in 1958 and worked as a business executive before becoming a full-‐time politician.
He was elected as the youngest member of the Parliament of Rhineland-‐Palatinate in
1959 and became Minister-‐President of his home state in 1969. Viewed during the
1960s and early 1970s as a progressive within the CDU, he was elected national
chairman of the party in 1973. In the 1976 federal election his party performed
well, but the social-‐liberal government of social democrat Helmut Schmidt was able
to remain in power, as well as in 1980, when Kohl’s rival from the Bavarian sister
party CSU, Franz Josef Strauß, candidated. After Schmidt had lost the support of the
liberal FDP in 1982, Kohl was elected Chancellor through a switch of the FDP,
forming a Christian-‐liberal government. After he had become party leader, Kohl was
increasingly seen as a more conservative figure. As Chancellor Kohl was strongly
committed to European integration and French-‐German cooperation in particular;
he was also a steadfast ally of the United States and supported Reagan’s more
aggressive policies in order to weaken the Soviet Union. Kohl’s 16-‐year tenure was
the longest of any German Chancellor since Otto von Bismark. He oversaw the end
of the Cold War and the German reunification, for which he is generally known as
Chancellor of Unity. Together with French President François Mitterrand, Kohl was
the architect of the Maastrict Treaty, which established the European Union (EU)
and the euro currency. Kohl was also a central figure in the eastern enlargement of
the European Union, and his government led the effort to push for international
recognition of Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina when the states
declared independence. He played an instrumental role in solving the Bosnian War.
Domestically, Kohl’s policies focused on economic reforms and later also on the
process of integrating the former East Germany into the reunited Germany, and he
moved the federal capital from the “provisional capital” Bonn back to Berlin,
although he himself never resided there because the government offices were only
relocated in 1999. Kohl also greatly increased federal spending on arts and culture.
After his chancellorship, Kohl’s reputation suffered domestically because of his role
in the CDU donations scandal and he had to resign from his honorary chairmanship
of the CDU after little more than a year in January 2000, but he was partly
rehabilitated in later years. The later Chancellor Angela Merkel started her political
career as Kohl’s protégée. Kohl was described as “the greatest European leader of
the second half of the 20th century” by U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill
Clinton. Kohl received the Charlemagne Prize in 1988 with François Mitterrand; in
1998 Kohl became the second person to be named Honorary Citizen of Europe by
the European heads of state or government. Following his death, Kohl was honored
with the first ever European Act of State in Strasbourg.

161
Hephaestus (pg. 41):
The Greek god of blacksmiths, metalworking, carpenters, craftsmen, artisans,

sculptors, metallurgy, fire, and volcanoes. Hephaestus’ Roman equivalent is Vulcan.
In Greek mythology, Hephaestus was either the son of Zeus and Hera or he was
Hera’s parthenogenous child. He was cast off Mount Olympus, by his mother
because of his deformity or, in another account, by Zeus for protecting Hera from his
162
advances. As a smithing god, Hephaestus made all the weapons of the gods in
Olympus. He served as the blacksmith of the gods, and was worshipped in the
manufacturing and industrial centers of Greece, particularly Athens. The cult of
Hephaestus was based in Lemnos. Hephaestus’ symbols are a smith’s hammer,
anvil, and a pair of tongs.

Homer (pg. 39):

Legendary author of the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY, two epic poems that are the
central works of ancient Greek literature. The ILLIAD is set during the Trojan War,
the ten-‐year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek kingdoms. It focuses on
a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles lasting a few weeks
during the last year of the war. The ODYSSEY focuses on the ten-‐year journey home
of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy. Many accounts of Homer’s life
circulated in classical antiquity, the most widespread being that he was a blind bard
163
from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-‐day Turkey. Modern
scholars consider these accounts legendary. The Homeric Question – concerning by
whom, when, where and under what circumstance the ILIAD and ODYSSEY were
composed – continues to be debated. Broadly speaking, modern scholarly opinion
falls into two groups. One holds that most of the ILIAD and (according to some) the
ODYSSEY are the works of a single poet of genius. The other considers the Homeric
poems to be the result of a process of working and reworking by many contributors,
and that “Homer” is best seen as a label for an entire tradition. It is generally
accepted that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or
early seventh century BC. The poems are in Homeric Greek, also known as Epic
Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic
dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic. Most
researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally. From
antiquity until the present day, the influence of the Homeric epics on Western
civilization has been great, inspiring many of its most famous works of literature,
music, art and film. The Homeric epics were the greatest influence on ancient Greek
culture and education; to Plato, Homer was simply the one who “has taught Greece”.

Howard Stern (pg. 10):
American radio and television personality, producer, author, actor, and

photographer. He is best known for his radio show THE HOWARD STERN SHOW,
which gained popularity when it was nationally syndicated on terrestrial radio from
1986 to 2005. Stern has broadcast on Sirius XM Satellite Radio since 2006. Stern
landed his first radio jobs while at Boston University. From 1976 to 1982, Stern
developed his on-‐air personality through morning positions at WRNW in Briarcliff
Manor, New York, WCCC in Hartford, Connecticut, WWWW in Detroit, Michigan, and
WWDC in Washington D.C. Stern worked afternoons at WNBC in New York City
from 1982 until his firing in 1985. In 1985, he began a 20-‐year run at WXRK in New
164
York City; his morning show entered syndication in 1986 and aired in 60 markets
and attracted 20 million listeners at its peak. Stern won numerous industry awards,
including Billboard’s Nationally Syndicated Air Personality of the Year eight
consecutive times, and is the first to have the number one morning show in New
York City and Los Angeles simultaneously. He became the most fined radio host
when the Federal Communications Commission issued fines totaling $2.5 million to
station owners for content it deemed indecent. Stern became one of the highest paid
radio figures after signing a five-‐year deal with Sirius in 2004 worth $500 million.
In recent years, Stern’s photography has been featured in HAMPTONS and WHIRL
magazines. From 2012 to 2015, he served as a judge on AMERICA’S GOT TALENT.
Stern has described himself as the “King of All Media” since 1992 for his successes
outside radio. He hosted and produced numerous late night television shows, pay-‐
per-‐view events, and home videos. His two books PRIVATE PARTS (1993) and MISS
AMERICA (1995), entered THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER list at number one
and sold over one million copies. The former was made into a biographical comedy
film in 1997 that had Stern and his radio show staff star as themselves. It topped
the US box office in its opening week and grossed $41.2 million domestically. Stern
performs on its soundtrack, which charted the Billboard 200 at number one and was
certified platinum for one million copies sold. Stern’s third book, HOWARD STERN
COMES AGAIN, was released in 2019.

humility (pg. 39): a modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness.
Middle English: from Old French humilite, from Latin humilitas, from humilis.

Hypoallergenic dogs in the late 1980s (pg. 18): The studies about hypoallergenic
dogs started to come out in the 1980s. Dogs suggested included dogs that don’t
shed as much. There is no such thing as a hypoallergenic dog. From
thehappypuppy.com: …since the 1980’s we’ve seen a surge of people claiming to
have the answer: hypoallergenic dogs. Over sixty breeds of dog have been included
on one list of hypoallergenic dogs or another. The American Kennel Club have their
own list, ranging from small hypoallergenic dogs (they suggest a Chinese Crested
dog, or a Maltese), To large hypoallergenic dogs (a Giant Schnauzer or an Afghan
Hound) hairless dogs like the Xoloitzcuintli, and lots of Terriers and Poodles in
between.

idiom (pg. 11): a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not
deducible from those of the individual words (e.g., rain cats and dogs, see the light).
a characteristic mode of expression in music or art. late 16th century: from French
idiome, or via late Latin from Greek idioma ‘private property, peculiar phraseology’,
from idiousthai ‘make one’s own’, from idios ‘own, private’.

indenture (pg. 40): a legal agreement, contract, or document. bind (someone) by an
indenture as an apprentice or laborer. a formal list, certificate, or inventory. an
agreement binding an apprentice to a master. the fact of being bound to serve by an
agreement of indenture. late Middle English endenture, via Anglo-‐Norman French
165
from medieval Latin indentura, from indentatus, past participle of indentare. ‘give a
zigzag outline to, divide by a zigzag line’.

insolent (pg. 39): showing a rude and arrogant lack of respect. late Middle English
(also in the sense ‘extravagant, going beyond acceptable limits’): from Latin insolent
‘immoderate, unaccustomed, arrogant’, from in-‐ ‘not’ + solent – ‘being accustomed’.

Jacek (pg. 24):
Bass
player in The Angry Inch, originally played by the Bass player from Cheater, Scott
Bilbrey. The name is usually Polish of Greek origin coming from Hyacinth, through
the archaic form of Jacenty. Pronounced YAH-‐tsek. The name is also a popular
Polish saint (born c. 1185) who is known for bringing the Dominican religious order
to Poland. Apollo named the flower that grew from Hyakinthos’s blood hyacinth.
Symbolizing sport or play in the language of flowers, hyacinth represent constancy,
while blue hyacinth expresses sincerity.

166
J.C. Penny guitar in the late 1980s early 1990s (pg. 25):

167
Jelly Roll (pg. 17):

Jove (pg. 14):
God
of the sky and thunder and king of the gods in Ancient Roman religion and
mythology. Jupiter/Jove was the chief deity of Roman state religion and mythology
throughout the Republican and Imperial eras, until Christianity became the
dominant religion of the Empire. In Roman mythology, he negotiates with Numa
Pompilius, the second king of Rome, to establish principles of Roman religion such
as offering, or sacrifice. Jupiter/Jove is usually thought to have originated as an
aerial god. His identifying implement is the thunderbolt and his primary sacred
animal is the eagle, which held precedence over other birds in the taking of auspices
and became one of the most common symbols of the Roman army. The two
emblems were often combined to represent the god in the form of an eagle holding
in its claws a thunderbolt, frequently seen on Greek and Roman coins. As the sky-‐
god, he was a divine witness to oaths, the sacred trust on which justice and good
government depend. Many of his functions were focused on the Capitoline Hill,
where the citadel was located. In the Capitoline Triad, he was the central guardian
168
of the state with Juno and Minerva. His sacred tree was the oak. The Romans
regarded Jupiter as the equivalent of the Greek Zeus, and in Latin literature and
Roman art, the myths and iconography of Zeus are adapted under the name
Iuppiter. In the Greek-‐influenced tradition, Jupiter/Jove was the brother of Neptune
and Pluto, the Roman equivalents of Poseidon and Hades respectively. Each
presided over one of the three realms of the universe: sky, the waters, and the
underworld. The Italic Diespiter was also the sky god who manifested himself in the
daylight, usually identified with Jupiter. Tinia is usually regarded as his Etruscan
counterpart.

John (pg. 31): a toilet. a prostitute's client. early 20th century (in john – sense 2)
from the given name John, used from late Middle English as a form of address to a
man, or to denote various occupations, including that of priest (late Middle English)
and policeman (mid 17 century).

Junction City, KS (pg. 22):

169
A city in and the county seat of Geary County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010
census, the city population was 23,353. Fort Riley, a major U.S. Army post, is nearby.
Junction City is so named from its position at the confluence of the Smoky Hill and
Republican rivers. In 1854, Andrew J. Mead of New York of the Cincinnati-‐
Manhattan Company, Free Staters connected to the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid
Company planned a community there called Manhattan (there was also a discussion
to call it New Cincinnati). When the steamship Hartford delivering the immigrants
could not reach the community because of low water on the Kansas River, the Free
Staters settled 20 miles east in what today is Manhattan, Kansas. The community
was renamed Millard City for Captain Millard of the Hartford on October 3, 1855. It
was renamed briefly Humboldt in 1857 by local farmers and renamed again later
that year to Junction City. It was formally incorporated in 1859. In 1923, John R.
Brinkley established Radio Station KFKB (which stood for “Kansas First, Kansas
Best”) using a 1 kW transmitter. It is one of the first – if not the very first – radio
stations in Kansas. Brinkley used the station to espouse his belief that goat testicles
could be implanted in men to enhance their virility. Among Junction City’s residents
is film director Kevin Wilmott, whose movies, including NINTH STREET, are set in
Junction City. Ninth Street specifically refers to a bawdy area of the community that
was frequented by Fort Riley soldiers in the 1960s. Timothy McVeigh rented the
Ryder truck he used in the Oklahoma City bombing from an auto body shop in
Junction City. The makeup of the city was 60.7% White, 22.3% Black, 0.9% Native
American, 3.9% Asian, 0.9% Pacific Islander, 4.0% from other races, and 7.3% from
two or more races. Hispanic and Latino of any race were 13.0% of the population.
Fort Riley’s population is 7,761. Fort Riley is named in honor of Major General
Bennet C. Riley, who led the first military escort along the Santa Fe Trail. The fort
was established in 1853 as a military post to protect the movement of people and
trade over the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe trails. In the years after the Civil
War, Fort Riley served as a major United States Cavalry post and school for cavalry
170
tactics and practice. The post was a base for skirmishes with Native Americans after
the Civil War ended in 1865, during which time George A. Custer was stationed at
the fort. In 1887, Fort Riley became the site of the United States Cavalry School. The
famous all-‐black 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments, the soldiers of which were called
“Buffalo Soldiers”, were stationed at Fort Riley at various times in the 19th and early
20th centuries. During World War I, the fort was home to 50,000 soldiers, and it
sometimes identified as ground zero for the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which its
soldiers were said to have spread all over the world. Since the end of World War II,
various infantry divisions have been assigned there. Most notably, from 1955 to
1996 the post was home to the famed 1st Infantry Division, also called “Big Red One”.
Between 1999-‐2006 the post was headquarters to the 24th Infantry Division
(Mechanized) and known as “America’s Warfighting Center”. In August 2006, the
Big Red One relocated its headquarters to Fort Riley from Leighton Barracks,
Germany.

Korean sergeants’ wives late 1980s early 1990s (pg. 26):
From Sang Jo Kim’s PhD dissertation “We Shouldn’t Be Forgotten”: Korean Military
Brides and Koreans in Kansas: The Korean diaspora in Kansas is unique in a
171
number of respects. Most importantly, Korean women have dominated the makeup
of migrants by gender and continue to play the major role in this expanding
diaspora. Not only hightly gendered, the Korean diaspora in Kansas is also
relatively young and scattered across the state. The dynamics within the Korean
diaspora where race, class, gender, and certain Korean attitudes and behaviors have
created new Korean/American identities, which are never complete but still in
production over time. Since the 1965 Immigration Act, the United States has
witnessed massive migration of Asian immigrants. From 1965 on, a majority of the
Korean immigrants now living in the United States came to this country. While the
impact of this Korean migration to the United States has been examined and
analyzed in urban areas on the East and West Coasts, such as Los Angeles and New
York, the impact of “new” immigration, especially Korean immigrants in the
Midwest, has rarely been explored, despite the fact that the 2000 Census
demonstrates a significant number of Korean migrants who came to the region. The
third wave [of immigration] indicates the period from the late 1960s through the
1980s. This wave occurred after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and
Nationality Act, during the prime of Korean’s glorification of the “American Dream”
of wealth and social mobility. Most Korean female immigrants in the second wave of
Korean immigration came from lower socio-‐economic levels in Korea and were
married to American servicemen. Although not a single study was produced to
validate this point, Sue-‐Jean Cho (2008) asserts that most Korean women who were
married to American servicemen during and following the Korean War were
prostitutes and “barmaids.” Because of their socioeconomic status, these women
had very limited opportunities for education in Korea, so they were not prepared to
been par with people for the outside world. Most of these women came from Korean
traditional rural areas were there were few economic developments and
opportunities, so they tried to find jobs in larger cities such as in factories and small
businesses. Frustrated by their search for jobs and because of their poorly educated
backgrounds, they eventually met American servicemen who hoped to get comfort
and companionship from these women in a foreign country. In turn, these Korean
women thought of marriage to those American servicemen as an alternative and an
excellent way out of their unstable lives. A social work related study on Korean
woman-‐American GI marriage puts these women at the bottom of the invisible
social hierarchy. For instance, Galbraith and Barnard suggests that KMBs “appear to
be loners, they are dependent upon their associates for direction and control of their
life. KMBs may simply be socialized to tolerate domination from males and some
other females, while being something of passive/aggressive; materialism, envy,
jealousy, competitiveness, withdrawal, etc. An intermarried Korean woman is
suspicious of affection; she is considered dangerous. She is, by nature, “a pessimist,
in order to be protected from being hurt.” There are push factors that drove many
Korean women to migrate through exogamy to American servicemen because of
their socio-‐economic needs. “Economic disparity, resource scarcity, political
instability, war threat, traditional rigidity, extended family pressures and western
influences” push many individuals to move to the advanced nations. He adds that
the prolonged presence of American forces throughout South Korea simulated a
larger number of opportunity-‐seeking individuals, especially women intent on
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marrying American servicemen to come to the United States and realize their
American Dream. [Many of these women] are the product[s] of their generation, the
one that had endured colonization, the war, and devastated post-‐war economy in a
society where rigid gender norms were still severely imposed on women. [Many
were born] at the peak of the Japanese colonial period, during which time [they
were] not allowed to speak and learn Korean in school or in public. When [these
women] turned 17, the Korean War broke out. [Many] married servicemen in 1958,
[and moved with them] to the U.S. in 1960, and permanently settled down in
Junction City, KS, in 1964ish. The entire dissertation is located at this link:
https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/10252/Kim_ku_0099D_12
209_DATA_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

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Krystal Nacht (pg. 25):
(German: “Crystal Night”), also called Night of Broken Glass or November Pogroms,
the night of November 9-‐10, 1938, when German Nazis attacked Jewish persons and
property. The name Kristallnacht referes ironically to the litter of broken glass left
in the streets after these pogroms.

Krzyzhtof (pg. 24): Originally played by Chris Weilding from Stephen Trask’s band
Cheater. Means “Christ-‐bearer”. A Polish given name, equivalent to English
Christopher. The name became popular in the 15th century. Its diminutive forms
include Krzys, Krzysiek, and Krzysio. Individuals named Krzysztof may choose to
celebrate their name day on March 15, July 25, March 2, May 21, August 20 or
October 31.
174

Lacedaemonians (pg. 41):
A native or inhabitant of Lacedaemon, an area of ancient Greece comprising the city
of Sparta and its surroundings.

Leute, wir improvisieren jetzt! Bleibt Dran! (pg. 25): Guys, we’re improvising now!
Stay tuned!

175
Licorice Drops in the late 1980s (pg. 17):

lispyboy (pg. 30): a epithet thrown towards homosexual or effeminate men. The
gay lisp is one manner of speech stereotypically associated with gay speakers of
American English, and perhaps other dialects or languages. It involves a marked
pronunciation of sibilant consonants (particularly /s/ and /z/).

lucre (pg. 16): [lu:ker] money, especially when regarded as sordid or distasteful or
gained in a dishonorable way. late Middle English: form French lucre or Latin
lucrum (reward); the phrase filthy lucre is with biblical allusion.

Lillian Vernon Catalogue in the late 1980s (pg. 18):

176
Marshmallow Foam in the late 1980s (pg. 19):

177
Maybelline in the 1990s (pg. 30):
178

179
Meat Packing district / MePa (pg. 15):
In the late 1800s, New York decided to name two acres of lower Manhattan’s west
side after General Peter Gansevoort. This area became a commercial district known
as Gansevoort Market. By 1900, the market would boast more than 250
slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. It is a neighborhood that runs roughly
from West 14th Street south to Gansevoort Street, and from the Hudson River east to
Hudson Street. In the 1980s, as the industrial activities in the area continued their
downturn, it became known as a center for drug dealing and prostitution,
particularly involving transsexuals. Concurrent with the rise in illicit sexual activity,
the sparsely populated industrial area became the focus of the city’s burgeoning
BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism)
subculture; over a dozen sex clubs – including such notable ones as The Anvil, The
Manhole, the Mineshaft, and the heterosexual-‐friendly Hellfire Club – flourished in
the area. Many of these establishments were under the direct control of the Mafia or
subject to NYPD protection rackets. In 1985 The Mineshaft was forcibly shuttered
by the city at the height of AIDS prevention. Beginning in the late 1990s, the
Meatpacking District went through a transformation. High-‐end boutiques catering
to young professionals and hipsters opened, including Diane von Fürstenberg,
Christian Louboutin, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Barbour, Rubin &
Chapelle, Theory, Ed Hardy, Puma, Moschino, ADAM by Adam Lippes, and an Apple
Store; restaurants such as Pastis – which closed in 2014 – and 5 Ninth; and
nightclubs such as Tenjune. In 2004, NEW YORK MAGAZINE called the Meatpacking
District “New York’s most fashionable neighborhood”. A catalyst for even greater
transformation of the area was the opening in June 2009 of the first segment of the
High Line linear park. A former elevated freight railroad built under the aegis of
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Robert Moses, it opened to great reviews in the District (and in Chelsea to the north)
as a greenway modeled after Paris’s Promenade Plantée. Thirteen months earlier,
the Whitney Museum of American Art had announced that it would build a second,
Renzo Piano-‐designed home at 99 Gansevoort Street, just west of Washington Street
and adjacent to the southernmost entrance to the High Line; and on May 1, 2015, the
museum opened at this site. These were turning points in the changes experienced
by the neighborhood over the first two decades of the 21st century, transforming it
from a gritty manufacturing district into a bustling high-‐end retail, dining, and
residential area, as documented by photographer Brian Rose in his 2014 book
METAMORPHOSIS.

Mick Jagger’s backup singer (pg. 29):
Merry Clayton is an American soul and gospel singer and an actress. She provided a
number of backing vocal tracks for major performing artists in the 1960s, most
notably in her duet with Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones’ song “Gimme Shelter”.
Clayton is featured in 20 FEET FROM STARDOM, the Oscar-‐winning documentary
about background singers and their contributions to the music industry. In 2013,
she released THE BEST OF MERRY CLAYTON, a compilation of her favorite song.
181

Milky Ways in late 1980s (pg. 17):

muskrat love (pg. 11): A soft rock song written by Willis Alan Ramsey. The song
depicts a romantic liason between two anthropomorphic muskrats named Susie and
Sam. It was first recorded in 1972 by Ramsey himself for his sole album release
WILLIS ALAN RAMSEY. The song was originally titled “Muskrat Candlelight”
referencing the song’s opening lyric. A 1973 cover version by the rock band
America – retitled “Muskat Love” for the lyrics that close the chorus – was a minor
hit reaching number 67 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In 1976, a cover by pop
music Captain & Tennille resulted in the song’s highest profile, peaking at number
four on the Hot 100 chart. It also reached number two on the Cash Box chart, which
ranked it a the 30th biggest hit of 1976.

Nail Color (pg. 29)
• Harlem Spice: probably a brown-‐ish color – alluding to skin color
• Dusty Menses: probably a pink color – alluding, again, to skin color

Nancy (pg. 30): an effeminate or homosexual man. late 19th century: pet form of the
given name Ann. A post-‐war term for a homosexual male. It is a softer word than
faggot, queer, or dick-‐smoker. “Nancy-‐boy” is synonymous with “that way,”
meaning light-‐in-‐the-‐loafers, but harmless and not at all threatening or predatory.

182
Necco Wafers in the late 1980s (pg. 17):

New York Post newspaper cover (pg. 9 projection reference):

November 9, 1988 (pg. 22): “Prince of Central Park” opens at Belasco Theater NYC
for 4 performances. MLB All-‐Star team beat Japan 8-‐2 in Nishinomya, (Game 4 of 7).

183
November 9, 1989 (pg. 22):
The Cold War begins to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for Berlin’s
Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West. Soon the
wall was gone and Berlin as united for first time since 1945.

184
one blue and one pink – lenses in the 1990s (pg. 29):

185
Osiris (pg. 13): Egyptian god of fertility,
alcohol, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation. He was
classically depicted as a green-‐skinned deity with a pharaoh’s beard, partially
mummy-‐wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive atef crown, and holding a
symbolic crook and flail. He was one of the first to be associated with the mummy
wrap. When his brother, Set, cut him up into pieces after killing him, Isis, his wife,
found all the pieces and wrapped his body up. Osiris was at times considered the
eldest son of the god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, as well as being brother and
husband of Isis, with Horus being considered his posthumously begotten son. He
was also associated with the epithet Khenti-‐Amenitiu, meaning “Foremost of the
Westerners”, a reference to the kingship in the land of the dead. As ruler of the
dead, Osiris was also sometimes called “king of the living”: ancient Egyptians
considered the blessed dead “the living ones”. Through syncretism with lah, he is
also the god of the Moon. Osiris was the judge of the dead and the underworld
agency that granted all life, including sprouting vegetation and the fertile flooding of
the Nile River. He was described as “He Who is Permanently Benign and Youthful”
and the “Lord of Silence”. The Kings of Egypt were associated with Osiris in death –
as Osiris rose from the dead so they would be in union with him, and inherit eternal
life through a process of imitative magic. Through the hope of new life after death,
Osiris began to be associated with the cycles observed in nature, in particular
vegetation and the annual flooding of the Nile, through his links with the heliacal
rising of Orion and Sirius at the start of the new year. Osiris was widely worshipped
186
until the decline of ancient Egyptian religion during the rise of Christianity in the
Roman Empire.

Otys (pg. 39):
Otus and Ephialtes – Sons of Iphimedia, wife of Aloeus, by Poseidon, whom she
induced to make her pregnant by going to the seashore and disporting herself in the
surf or scooping seawater into her bosom. From Aloeus they received the
patronymic, the Aloadae. They were strong and aggressive giants, growing by nine
fingers every month nine fathoms tall at age nine, and only outshone in beauty by
Orion. The brothers wanted to storm Mt. Olympus and gain Artemis for Otus and
Hera for Ephialtes. Their plan, or construction, of a pile of mountains atop which
they would confront the gods is described differently according to the author
(including Homer, Virgil, and Ovid), and occasionally changed by translators. Mount
Olympus is usually said to be on the bottom mountain, with Mounts Ossa and Pelion
upon Ossa as second and third, either respectively or vice versa. Homer says they
were killed by Apollo before they had any beards, consistent with their being bound
to column in the Underworld by snakes, the nymph of the Styx in the form of an owl
over them.

187
Phyllis Stein (pg. 10, 24):
Hedwig’s manager. Might be based off the personality that was friends and lovers
with a lot of the players in the punk movement: She dated and was the partner of
Jerry Nolan of the New York Dolls. She lived with Sal Maida in London during the
70s and befriended Patti Palladin while she lived in London. She was friends with
Nancy Spungen (Sid Vicious’ amor, whom he killed). She is friends with Vera
Ramone (muse of the Ramones). She was friends with Debbie Harry. She hung out
at all the major clubs: CBGBS Max’s Kansas City, and took photos of the scene. She
was also friends with the famous groupie Sable Starr.

piety (pg. 41): the quality of being religious or reverent. a belief or point of view
that is accepted with unthinking conventional reverence. early 16th century (in the
sense ‘devotion to religious observances’): from Old French piete, from Latin pietas
‘dutifulness’, from pius.

188
Plato (pg. 39):
An Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of
the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher
learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the pivotal figure in the
history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates,
and his most famous student, Aristotle. Plato has also often been cited as one of the
founders of Western religion and spirituality. The so-‐called Neoplatonism of
philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry influenced Saint Augustine and thus
Christianity. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: “the safest general
189
characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series
of footnotes to Plato. Plato was the innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic
forms in philosophy. Plato also appears to have been the founder of Western
political philosophy. His most famous contribution bears his name, Platonism (also
ambiguously called either Platonic realism or Platonic idealism), the doctrine of the
Forms known by pure reason to provide a realist solution to the problem of the
universals. He is also the namesake of Platonic love and the Platonic solids. His own
most decisive philosophical influences are usually thought to have been along with
Socrates, the pre-‐Socratics, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, although few of
his predecessors’ works remain extant and much of what we know about these
figures today derives from Plato himself. Unlike the work of nearly all of his
contemporaries, Plato’s entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for
over 2,400 years. Although their popularity has fluctuated over the years, the works
of Plato have never been without readers since the time they were written.

190
Plato’s Symposium (pg. 12-‐14):
A philosophical
text by Plato that depicts a friendly contest of extemporaneous speeches given by a
group of notable men attending a banquet. The men include the philosopher
Socrates, the general and political figure Alcibiades, and the comic playwright
Aristophanes. The speeches are to be given in praise of Eros, the god of love and
desire. In the SYMPOSIUM, Eros is recognized both as erotic love and as a
phenomenon capable of inspiring courage, valor, great deeds and works, and
vanquishing man’s natural fear of death. It is seen as transcending its earthly
origins and attaining spiritual heights. This extraordinary elevation of the concept
of love raises a question of whether some of the most extreme extents of meaning
191
might be intended as humor or farce. Eros is almost always translated as “love”, and
the English word has its own varieties and ambiguities that provide additional
challenges to the effort to understand the Eros of ancient Athens. The event
depicted in the SYMPOSIUM is a banquet attended by a group of men, who have
come to the symposium, which was, in ancient Greece, a traditional part of the same
banquet that took place after the meal, when drinking for pleasure was
accompanied by music, dancing, recitals, or conversation. The setting means that
the participants will be drinking wine, meaning that the men might be induced to
say things they wouldn’t say elsewhere or when sober. They might speak more
frankly, or take more risks, or else be prone to hubris – they might even be inspired
to make speeches that are particularly heartfelt and noble. The host has challenged
the men to deliver, each, in turn, an encomium – a speech in praise of Love (Eros).
Though other participants comply with this challenge, Socrates notably refuses to
participate in such an act of praise and instead takes a very different approach to the
topic. The party takes place at the house of the tragedian Agathon in Athens. This
dialogue is one of Plato’s major works, and is appreciated for both its philosophical
content and its literary qualities. The Text: Aristophanes professed to open another
vein of discourse; he had a mind to praise Love in another way, unlike that either of
Pausanias or Eryximachus. Mankind; he said, judging by their neglect of him, have
never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had understood
him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn
sacrifices in his honour; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done:
since of all the gods he is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of the ills
which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe
his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you.
In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for
the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were
not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and
the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had
once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved
as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back
and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two
faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears,
two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as
men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and
over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like
tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to
run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the
sun, moon, and earth are three;-‐and the man was originally the child of the sun, the
woman of the earth, and the man-‐woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and
earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents.
Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great,
and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes
who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the
gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate
the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end
192
of the sacrifices and worship, which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the
gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of
reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: "Methinks I have a plan which will
humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I
will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in
numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They
shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I
will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg." He spoke and cut men
in two, like a sorb-‐apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg
with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and
the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of
himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal
their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the
skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the
purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a
knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out
most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left
a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval
state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came
together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces,
longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-‐
neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves
died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we
call them, being the sections of entire men or women, and clung to that. They were
being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts
of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position and they
sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one
another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that
by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might
continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways
to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in
us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.
Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture
of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that
double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers
are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the
women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female
attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of
the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man,
they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys
and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they
are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame,
but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they
embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our
statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving.
When they reach manhood they are loves of youth, and are not naturally inclined to
193
marry or beget children,-‐if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they
are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a
nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is
akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of
himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in
an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the
other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their
whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For
the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to
be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either
evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful
presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who
are lying side, by side and to say to them, "What do you people want of one
another?" they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw
their perplexity he said: "Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be
in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into
one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while
you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world
below still be one departed soul instead of two-‐I ask whether this is what you
lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?"-‐there is not a man of
them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that
this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was
the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was
originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called
love. There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness
of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by
the Lacedaemonians. And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that
we shall be split up again and go about in basso-‐relievo, like the profile figures
having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be
like tallies. Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and
obtain the good, of which Love is to us the lord and minister; and let no one oppose
him-‐he is the enemy of the gods who oppose him. For if we are friends of the God
and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this
world at present. I am serious, and therefore I must beg Eryximachus not to make
fun or to find any allusion in what I am saying to Pausanias and Agathon, who, as I
suspect, are both of the manly nature, and belong to the class which I have been
describing. But my words have a wider application-‐they include men and women
everywhere; and I believe that if our loves were perfectly accomplished, and each
one returning to his primeval nature had his original true love, then our race would
be happy. And if this would be best of all, the best in the next degree and under
present circumstances must be the nearest approach to such an union; and that will
be the attainment of a congenial love. Wherefore, if we would praise him who has
given to us the benefit, we must praise the god Love, who is our greatest benefactor,
both leading us in this life back to our own nature, and giving us high hopes for the
future, for he promises that if we are pious, he will restore us to our original state,
and heal us and make us happy and blessed. This, Eryximachus, is my discourse of
194
love, which, although different to yours, I must beg you to leave unassailed by the
shafts of your ridicule, in order that each may have his turn; each, or rather either,
for Agathon and Socrates are the only ones left.

Pop Rocks in the late 1980s (pg. 17):

PX (pg. 25): Post exchange is a

type of retail store found on United States military installations worldwide.
195
Originally akin to trading posts, they now resemble contemporary department
stores.

Rhone in the late 1980s (pg. 19):
A river that is one of the major rivers of Europe and has twice the average discharge
of the Loire (which is the longest French river) rising in the Rhône Glacier in the
Swiss Alps at the far eastern end of the Swiss canton of Valais, passing through Lake
Geneva and running through southeastern France. At Arles, near its mouth on the
Mediterranean Sea, the river divides into two branches, known as the Great Rhône
and the Little Rhône.

Schlatko (pg. 24): North German. Nickname for a weak or listless person. Drums.
Originally played by Dave McKinley of Stephen Trask’s band Cheater.

196
Sergio Valente (pg. 15): An American
clothing brand best known for juniors’ and womens’ designer jeans and stretch-‐
denim fabrics. It is currently owned by the privately held Seattle Pacific Industries
Inc. of Kent, Washington, which additionally owns the Reunion and Saltaire
menswear brands and the Unionbay teen-‐clothing brand. The brand dates to 1975,
but its supposed original designer – ‘Sergio Valente’ – is ficticious. Mr. Valente, in
fact, never existed. The actual creator of Sergio Valente brand jeans, was
Englishtown Sportswear Ltd., a New York City-‐based company formed by William
Hsu, Martin Heinfling, Brian Leung, Tony Lau, Eli Kaplan, and Leo Zelkin.

Sex Changes in East Germany in the 1980s: The first sex change operation actually
occurred in Berlin in 1906 for Martha Baer, the details of which were burned by the
Nazis. The operation was a success. West Germany passed a transgender rights act
in 1980 that required trans people to undergo surgical alteration of their genitals in
order to have key identity documents changed. It was also common for the East
German sports officials to dope their female and male athletes. They did this so
heavily to Heidi Krieger that her body chemistry was changed and she underwent
reassignment surgery and became Andreas Krieger. So, the conclusion is that
gender reassignment surgery was possible in East Germany, and necessary in order
to leave Germany with an American citizen.

197
shoulder pads (pg. 7): As the decade of the
1980s wore on, shoulder pads became the defining fashion statement of the era,
known as power dressing and bestowing the perception of status and position onto
those who wore them. They became both larger and more ubiquitous – every
garment from the brassiere upwards would come with its own set of shoulder pads.
They were based on styles from the 1890s from men’s wear. They would
compensate for sloping shoulders or to maintain the structural integrity of the
fabric used in suits, due to the weight of some fabrics.

Shroud (pg. 27): a length of cloth or an enveloping garment in which a dead person
is wrapped for burial. a thing that envelops or obscures something. wrap or dress
(a body) in a shroud for burial. cover or envelop so as to conceal from view. late
Old English scrud ‘garment, clothing’, of Germanic origin, from a base meaning ‘cut’;
related to shred. An early sense of the verb (Middle English) was ‘cover so as to
protect’.

198
Sizzler in the late 1980s early 1990s (pg. 28):

Skszp (pg. 24): Stephen Trask played him originally. Typically an Albanian name
pronounced Shkip. Skop (another surname) is of Polish, Czech, and Jewish
(Ashkenazic): nickname from Slavic skop ‘wether’, ‘castrated ram’.

slopes (pg. 15): (of a surface or line) be inclined from a horizontal or vertical line;
slant up or down.

Socialism (pg. 11): a political and economic theory of social organization which
advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be
owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

199
Some Indian God (pg. 13):
Probably Shiva – “God of healing” and “Destruction/Renewal”. Shiva is known as
“The Destroyer” within the Trimurti, the Hindu trinity that includes Brahma and
Vishnu. In Shaivism tradition, Shiva is one of the supreme beings who creates,
protects and transforms the universe.

200
sorb-‐apple (pg. 39):
the fruit of the true service tree. early 16th century: from French sorbe or Latin
sorbus ‘service tree’, sorbum ‘serviceberry’.
201
stone-‐washed denim (pg. 7):

succor (pg. 9): assistance and support in times of hardship and distress. Latin
succurrere ‘run to the help of’.

202
Sugar Daddy’s in the late 1980s (pg. 17):

Tear Away Costume Techniques (pg. 24): Tear away clothes are not just for
strippers. A ragged dress can be torn away to reveal Cinderella’s ball gown. They
will speed up any theater quick change. Warm-‐up pants that can open on the sides
allow an ice skater to remover her pants without taking off her skates.
• Pants: Add 1 inch to sides of the front and back of your pants pattern. Cut
out the pants. Iron down 1 inch on the wrong side of the fabric along side
edges. Construct the pants according to your pattern directions, but don’t
sew the side seams. Sew 2-‐inch lengths of hook-‐and-‐loop tape along the
folded down fabric on the side edges, leaving a 1-‐inch gap between the pieces
of tape. Sew the tape on by sewing along both edges of the tape with a
straight stitch. Place the loop on the outside of the pants on the back edge
and the hook tape on the inside front edge.
• Shirt or Dress: Pin the center back of your pattern pieces 1 ½ inches away
from the fold in the fabric. Pin the center back of all back collar pieces the
same distance from the fold. Cut out the pattern. Cut the back of the garment
and all collar pieces along the fold of the fabric. Iron down 1 inch on the
wrong side of the fabric on the back pieces along the cut fold. Construct the
shirt or dress according to your pattern. Sew 2-‐inch lengths of hook-‐and-‐
loop tape along the folded down fabric along the back edges, leaving a 1-‐inch
gap between the pieces of tape. Sew the tape on by sewing along both edges
of the tape with a straight stitch. Place the loop on the outside of the shirt or
dress on the right edge and the hook tape on the inside along the left edge.

transposition (pg. 40): to change the relative position, order, or sequence of; cause
to change places; interchange.

203
Tree of Knowledge (pg. 28):
One of the two specific trees

in the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-‐3, along with the tree of life. Genesis
2 narrates that God places the first man and woman in a garden with trees of whose
fruits them may eat, but forbids them to eat from “the tree of knowledge of good and
evil.” When, in Genesis 3, a serpent persuades the woman to eat from its forbidden
fruit and she also lets the man taste it, God expels them from the garden and thereby
from eternal life.

Uber Alles (pg. 19): Above all else. Part of the German national anthem until the
end of World War II, and is closely associated with the Nazis.

Ukraine’s relationship to East Germany in the 1980s (pg. 19): East Germany
downplayed the Chernobyl disaster as an “incident”. More than five million
Ukrainians die fighting Nazi Germany, most of the Ukraine’s 1.5 million Jews are
killed by the Nazis. When Adolf Hitler decided who the slaves would be in the
German Eastern empire, the answer he gave was the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians
were to be the center of a project of colonization and enslavement. The Ukrainians
were to be treated as Afrikaner, or as Neger – the word was very often used, as
those of you who read German documents from the war will know. The idea was to
create a slavery-‐driven, exterminatory, colonial regime in Eastern Europe where the
center was going to Ukraine. The Ukraine was the center of Hitler’s ideological
colonialism. The Russians, alone, suffered more deaths than any other nation in
WWII, and within that, the Ukraine had more deaths than Russia – the greatest
malicious intention and the greatest destructive practice of the German war was
precisely in Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalist is a real historical tendency and a
204
consequence of the German war in Eastern Europe. With Germany becoming more
successful and prosperous in the 80s, the Ukraine, which was still struggling,
naturally blamed Germany for its problems.
205

206
Vermouth (pg. 23): An aromatized, fortified white wine flavored with various
botanicals (roots, barks, flowers, seeds, herbs, and spices) and sometimes colored.
The modern versions of the beverage were first produced in the mid to late 18th
century in Turin, Italy. While vermouth was traditionally used for medicinal
purposes, its true claim to fame is as an aperitif, with fashionable cafes in Turin
serving it to guests around the clock. However, in the late 19th century it became
popular with bartenders as a key ingredient in many classic cocktails that have
survived to date, such as the Martini, the Manhattan, the Roby Roy, and the Negroni.
In addition to being consumed as an aperitif or cocktail ingredient, vermouth is
sometimes used as an alternative white wine in cooking. Historically, there have
been two main types of vermouth: sweet and dry. Responding to demand and
competition, vermouth manufacturers have created additional styles, including
extra-‐dry white, sweet white (blanc or bianco), red, amber (amber or rosso), and
rosé.

207
Versace jeans in the late 1980s (pg. 17):
208

vocal pyrotechnics (pg. 9): exciting, explosive, dazzling, sparkling, or brilliant
singing – flashy or flamboyant.

Was machst du da verdammt noch mal? (pg. 15): What are you fucking doing?

209
Waterpick in the late 1980s (pg. 18):

Wigs (pg. 23-‐24): A head covering made from human hair, animal hair, or synthetic
fiber. The word wig is short for periwig, which makes its earliest known appearance
in the English language in William Shakespeare’s THE TWO GENTLEMAN OF
VERONA. Some people wear wigs to disguise baldness; a wig may be used as a less
intrusive and less expensive alternative to medical therapies for restoring hair or for
a religious purpose. In Egyptian society men and women commonly had clean
shaven or close cropped hair and often wore wigs. The ancient Egyptians created
the wig to shield shaved, hairless heads from the sun. They also wore the wigs on
top of their hair using beeswax and resin to keep the wigs in place. Wealthy
Egyptians would wear elaborate wigs and scented cones of animal fat on top of their
wigs. Other ancient cultures, including the Assyrians, Phoenicians, Jews in ancient
Israel, Greeks and Romans, also used wigs as an everyday fashion. In China, the
popularization of the wig started from Spring and Autumn period. In Japan, the
upper classes wearing wigs started from before the Nara period. In Korea, gache
were popular among women during the Goryeo dynasty until it was banned in the
late 18th century. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the use of wigs fell
into disuse in the West for thousands of years until they were revived in the 16th
century as a means of compensating for hair loss or improving one’s personal
210
appearance. They also served a practical purpose: the unhygienic conditions of the
time meant that hair attracted head lice, a problem that could be much reduced if
natural hair were shaved and replaced with a more easily de-‐loused artificial
hairpiece. Royal patronage was crucial to the revival of the wig. Queen Elizabeth I
of England famously wore a red wig, tightly and elaborately curled in a “Roman”
style, while among men King Louis XIII of France (1601-‐1643) started to pioneer
wig-‐wearing in 1624 when he had prematurely begun to bald. The fashion was
largely promoted by his son and successor Louis XIV of France (1638-‐1715), which
contributed to its spread in European and European-‐influenced countries. The
wearing of wigs as a symbol of social status was largely abandoned in the newly
created United States and France by the start of the 19th century.
• Farrah Fawcett
211
• Shag
212
• Bi-‐level
213
• Bob
214
• Dorothy Hamill
215
• Sausage Curls
216
• Chicken Wings
217
• Feather Back
• Toni Home Wave
218
• Flip
• Fro
219
• Frizz
• Flop
220

Wichita (pg. 28):
The largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Sedgwick County.
As of 2018, the estimated population of the city was 389,255. Wichita is the
principal city of the Wichita metropolitan area which had an estimated population
of 644,888 in 2018. Located in south-‐central Kansas on the Arkansas River, Wichita
began as a trading post on the Chisholm Trail in the 1860s and was incorporated as
a city in 1870. It became a destination for cattle drives traveling north from Texas
to Kansas railroads, earning it the nickname “Cowtown.” In the 1920s and 1930,
businessmen and aeronautical engineers established aircraft manufacturing
companies in Wichita, including Beechcraft, Cessna, and Stearman Aircraft. The city
became a U.S. aircraft production hub known as “The Air Capital of the World.”
Textron Aviation, Learjet, Airbus, and Spirit AeroSystems continue to operate design
and manufacturing facilities in Wichita, and the city remains a major center of the
American aircraft industry. Wichita is also home to McConnell Air Force Base, and
Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, the largest airport in Kansas. As an
industrial hub, Wichita is a regional center of culture, media, and trade. It hosts
several universities, large museums, theaters, parks, and entertainment venues,
notably Intrust Bank Arena and Century II Performing Arts & Convention Center.
The city’s Old Cowtown Museum maintains historical artifacts and exhibits on the
city’s early history. Wichita State University is the third-‐largest post-‐secondary
institution in the state. The gay community in the 1980s was not very welcoming,
especially since an ordinance to repeal gay rights in 1978 was passed in response to
the Gay Rights Movements spurred on by the 1969 Stonewall Riots. A Christian
fundamentalist movement “Save Our Children” had a success in Wichita.

221
Yentl (pg. 25):
A 1983 American romantic musical drama film from United Artists (through MGM)
that was directed, co-‐written, and co-‐produced by, and stars Barbra Streisand. It is
based on Leah Napolin and Issac Bashevis Singer’s play of the same name, itself
based on Singer’s short story, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.” The dramatic story
incorporates humor and music to relate the story of an Ashkenazi Jewish girl in
Poland who decides to dress and live like a man so that she can receive an education
in Talmudic Law after her father dies. This cultural gender asymmetry that Yentl
endures has been referenced in the medical community with the coining of the
phrase Yentl Syndrome. The film’s musical score and songs, composed by Michel
Legrand, include the songs, “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” and “The Way He Makes Me
Feel”, both sung by Streisand. The film received the Academy Award for Best
Original Score and the Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture – Musical or
Comedy and Best Director for Streisand, making her the first woman to have won
the Best Director at the Golden Globes.

222
Yes album cover (pg. 27):

Yugoslavia in the late 1980s (pg. 22): The breakup of Yugoslavia occurred as a
result of a series of political upheavals and conflicts during the early 1990s. After a
period of political and economic crisis in the 1980s, constituent republics of the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia split apart, but the unresolved issues caused
bitter inter-‐ethnic Yugoslav wars. The wars primarily affected Bosnia and
Herzegovina, neighboring parts of Croatia and some years later, Kosovo. After the
Allied victory in World War II, Yugoslavia was set up as a federation of six republics,
with borders drawn along ethnic and historical lines: Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. In addition, two autonomous
provinces were established within Serbia: Vojvodina and Kosovo. Each of the
republics had its own branch of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia party and a
ruling elite, and any tensions were solved on the federal level. The Yugoslav model
of state organization, as well as a “middle way” between planned and liberal
economy, had been a relative success, and the country experienced a period of
strong economic growth and relative political stability up to the 1980s, under the
rule of president-‐for-‐life Josip Broz Tito. After his death in 1980, the weakened
system of federal government was left unable to cope with rising economic and
political challenges. In the 1980s, Albanians of Kosovo started to demand that their
autonomous province be granted the status of constituent republic, starting with the
1981 protests. Ethnic tensions between Albanians and Kosovo Serbs remained high
over the whole decade, which resulted in the growth across Yugoslavia of Serb
opposition to the high autonomy of provinces and ineffective system of consensus at
the federal level, which were seen as an obstacle for Serb interests. In 1987,
Slobodan Milošević came power in Serbia, and through a series of populist moves
acquired de facto control over Kosovo, Vojvodina, and Montenegro, garnering a high
level of support among Serbs for his centralist policies. Milošević was met with
opposition by party leaders of the western republics of Slovenia and Croatia, who
223
also advocated greater democratization of the country in line with the Revolutions
of 1989 in Eastern Europe. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia dissolved in
January 1990 along federal lines. Republican communist organizations became the
separate socialist parties. During 1990, the socialists (former communists) lost
power to ethnic separatist parties in the first multi-‐party elections held across the
country, except in Serbia and Montenegro, where Milošević and his allies won.
Nationalist rhetoric on all sides became increasingly heated. Between June 1991
and April 1992, four republics declared independence (only Serbia and Montenegro
remained federated), but the status of ethnic Serbs outside Serbia and Montenegro,
and that of ethnic Croats outside Croatia, remained unsolved. After a string of inter-‐
ethnic incidents, the Yugoslav Wars ensued, first in Croatia and then, most severely,
in multi-‐ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina. The wars left long-‐term economic and
political damage in the region, which are still felt there decades later.
Zagred, Croatia (pg. 25):
The capital and

largest city of Croatia. It is located in the northwest of the country, along the Sava
river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. The population of the
Zagreburban agglomeration is about 1.2 million. Zagreb is a city with a rich history
dating from the Roman times to the present day. The name “Zagreb” is recorded in
1134, in reference to the foundation of the settlement at Kaptol in 1094. Zagreb
became a free royal town in 1242. Zagreb is the seat of the central government,
224
administrative bodies, and almost all government ministries. Almost all of the
largest Croatian companies, media, and scientific institutions have their
headquarters in the city. It is a city known for its diverse economy, high quality of
living, museums, sporting, and entertainment events. Its main branches of economy
are high-‐tech industries and the service sector. The name might be derived from a
Proto-‐Slavic word which means hill, uplift. In Croatian folk etymology, the name of
the city has been derived from either the verb za-‐grab-‐, meaning “to scoop” or “to
dig”. One folk legend illustrating this derivation ties the name to a drought of the
early 14th century, during which Augustin Kažotić (a Dalmatian-‐Croatian Roman
Catholic humanist prelate) is said to have dug a well which miraculously produced
water. In another legend, a city governor is thirty and orders a girl named Manda to
“scoop” water from a well (nowadays a fountain in Ban Jelačić Square), using the
imperative “Scoop, Manda!”
225
During
World War II, Zagreb became the capital of the Independent State of Croatia, which
was backed by Nazi German and the Italians. The history of Zagreb in World War II
became rife with incidents of regime terror and resistance sabotage, thousands of
people were executed during the war in and near the city. The city was liberated by
the Partisans at the end of the war. From 1945 until 1990, Zagreb was the capital of
the Socialist Republic of Croatia, one of the six constituent socialist republics of the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During the 1991-‐1995 Croatian War of
Independence, it was the scene of some sporadic fighting surrounding its JNA army
barracks, but escaped major damage. In May 1995, it was targeted by Serb rocket
artillery in two rocket attacks, which killed seven civilians. The climate of Zagreb is
226
classified as an oceanic climate: summers are warm, at the end of May the
temperatures start rising and it is often pleasant with occasional thunderstorms.
Heatwaves can occur but are short-‐lived. Rainfall is abundant in the summertime
and it continues to be in autumn as well. Zagreb is Europe’s 9th wettest capital,
behind Luxembourg and ahead of Brussels, Belgium. Autumn in its early stages is
mild with an increase of rainy days and precipitation as well as a steady
temperature fall towards its end. Morning fog is common from mid-‐October to
January. Winters are cold with a precipitation decrease pattern. Even though there
is no discernable dry season, February is the driest month. On average there are 29
days with snowfall with the first snow falling in early November. Springs are
generally mild and pleasant with frequent weather changes and are windier than
other seasons. Most citizens are ethnically Croatian. Zagreb has been, and is,
hosting some of the most popular mainstream artists and underground artists. It is
also the home of the INmusic festival, one of the biggest open air festivals in Croatia
which is held every year, usually at the end of June. Catholicism is the predominant
religion of Croatia, 1.1 million adherents (almost the entire population). There is a
smattering of Protestant churches that make up the 40-‐non-‐Catholic places of
worship in the city. The history of the Jews in Croatia dates back to at least the 3rd
century, although little is known of the community until the 10th and 15th centuries.
By the outbreak of World War II, the community numbered approximately 20,000
members, most of whom were murdered during the Holocaust that took place on
the territory of the Nazi puppet state called Independent State of Croatia. After
World War II, half of the survivors chose to settle in Israel, while an estimated 2,500
members continued to live in Croatia. According to the 2011 census, there were 509
Jews living in Croatia, but that number is believed to exclude those born of mixed
marriages or those married to non-‐Jews. More than 80 percent of the Zagreb Jewish
Community were thought to fall in those two categories. Today, Croatia is home to
eight synagogues and associated organizations. Of these, the Zagreb community is
the largest and most active, organizing events such as the annual Zagreb Jewish Film
Festival to promote Jewish culture and identity. The most important branches of
industry are chemical, pharmaceutical, textile, food and drink processing.
227
Zeus (pg. 39):

Ancient Greek. The god of the sky, lightning and thunder in Ancient Greek religion
and myth, and king of the gods on Mount Olympus. Zeus is the sixth child of Kronos
and Ghea, king and queen of the Titans. He controlled the weather. He had the
ability to hurl lightning bolts at those who displeased him. He hated dishonesty, and
would punish those who lied or broke promises. His winged horse Pegasus carried
his lightning bolts and he trained an eagle to retrieve them. He weaknesses include
trouble over love affairs, can be moody.

228

229

Hedwig and The Angry Inch Actor/Designer Packet Dramaturgy

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HEDWIG

AND THE ANGRY INCH

An American singer-­‐songwriter, musician, author, and poet, who became an

An American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist. Franklin

American vocalist, record producer, songwriter, musician, author, and

An Iranian-­‐born director and playwright known for large-­‐scale, experimental

An American singer-­‐songwriter and musician. She is a founding member and

An American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced

An English singer-­‐songwriter, musician, guitarist, and poet. He was best

An American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, dancer, actor,

A Trinidad and Tobago-­‐born rapper, singer, songwriter, actress, and model.

An English actor, singer, and songwriter. Newley achieved success as a

An American-­‐Canadian singer, songwriter, and composer. He has recorded

• Farrah Fawcett: An American

An English singer-­‐songwriter known for his acoustic guitar-­‐based songs.

An Australian musician, singer-­‐songwriter and actor who co-­‐founded the

An American singer, songwriter, and multi-­‐instrumentalist. Smith was born

• Stephen Trask – (Skszp, Keyboards, Guitar, Vocals), See

• Chris Weilding (Krzyzhtoff, Guitar, Vocals) A founding

• Scott Bilbrey (Bass, Guitar, Vocals, Jacek) .

The Croatian War for

Crypto = a person having a secret allegiance to a political creed, especially

Helmut Kohl (pg. 19): A German

The Greek god of blacksmiths, metalworking, carpenters, craftsmen, artisans,

Homer (pg. 39):

American radio and television personality, producer, author, actor, and

Pop Rocks in the late 1980s (pg. 17):

PX (pg. 25): Post exchange is a

One of the two specific trees

The capital and

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An American singer-‐songwriter, musician, author, and poet, who became an

An Iranian-‐born director and playwright known for large-‐scale, experimental

An American singer-‐songwriter and musician. She is a founding member and

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A Trinidad and Tobago-‐born rapper, singer, songwriter, actress, and model.

An American-‐Canadian singer, songwriter, and composer. He has recorded

An English singer-‐songwriter known for his acoustic guitar-‐based songs.

An Australian musician, singer-‐songwriter and actor who co-‐founded the

An American singer, songwriter, and multi-‐instrumentalist. Smith was born