ROMPER CLOSET

Juvenile delinquency and art

DEAR PEOPLE!

Since there was only one taker for the fiction class, this coming Tuesday is the first night of a new Tuesday night MEMOIR WORKSHOP. These have been ON FIRE. There are a couple of seats left (I take 4 students max so everyone gets real attention) so please, if you want to participate in a completely catalyzing and inspiring writing class that will take you to the next level, contact me at CintraW@gmail.com.

My first theatrical foray was a one act play that I wrote in high school, called “Cafe Wars,” when I was 15.

At fifteen, I had a partially shaved head and a fake ID. I was a profligate runaway — my relationship with my parents was abysmal. The play was based on my relationship with two very sarcastic young queens (one of whom I had briefly dated) with whom I spent most of my hours at the Cafe Trieste in Sausalito.

I only had one typewritten copy. I gave it to my hippy drama teacher hopefully, thinking she might mount a production of it, only to be told weeks later that she had lost the manuscript.

I thought the play was actually pretty fucking great, but it was so perverse, it’s possible my drama teacher “losing” the only copy was the result of her trying to save me from something — the people with the knotty pine torches who would come after us after seeing the play, perhaps. Perhaps she thought it undermined my sanity or reputation, or hers.

She probably just got stoned and lost it in her car.

It was about a couple of utterly bitchy young homosexuals and a young woman who were talking in an utterly campy way about the other patrons of the cafe, and coldly rating them. I can’t remember much else, except that everyone got a proper dressing-down, except for the most fabulous person on earth: Puppy, a young boy, who enters the cafe wearing a leather g-string and a dog collar. The trio of sarcastic harpies are overwhelmed by his fabulousness.

I wrote the part for my friend Mike Aron, who was an adorable doe-eyed freshman who still looked 12.

So, my first play effort probably died on the floor of a Volkswagen hatchback, before anyone but me had read it. Or maybe my drama teacher did read it and found it so disturbing she destroyed it. Either way, it died an ignominious death.

I became an underground club kid. I called myself Cintra Sinatra and swanned around in old black gowns wearing a white bathing cap and a spitcurl in the center of my forehead. I had gained entrance to most of the clubs at the time because I had been interviewed about the San Francisco underground club scene in the Chronicle, and I had said it was all about “whoever’s attitude is loudest.” The club entrepreneurs liked that, and started printing my name on invitations.

I originally wrote “Romper Closet” when I was around 18, as a comedy act for one of these underground clubs, but it was more like performance art. It was an openly disturbing act based on “Romper Room,” a children’s TV show. I was the neurotic host, Miss Bunny. I wore my mother’s knee-length, cornflower blue wedding dress — a strange bit of lacy, layered, early 60’s formalwear — blue eyeshadow, and I acted completely terrified for the entire presentation.

I did some large mixed-media drawings on pieces of thick matting material to accompany my set — they were on an easel, and I would shuffle the cards from front to back. It was primordial Power Point.

I don’t entirely remember what happens, but there was a segment called “Mr. Homunculus Insists.” The card on my easel featured an armless and featureless black doll which Miss Bunny was clearly terrified of. I hoped it became sort of clear to the audience that Mr. Homunculus was the dark God unto whom Miss Bunny and the entire ethos of Romper Closet was enslaved.

Miss Bunny had to do segments she clearly found distasteful, like gutting a fish with her co-host, “El Capitano,” a Mexican wrestler, Luchador doll I had found somewhere.

People found the act curious and somehow charming.

I once performed it for the impresarios of the long-running show “Beach Blanket Babylon,” who were, that year, in charge of running the Oscars halftime show, which would feature Snow White. It was between me and one other actress, who would play a singing, dancing Snow White at the Oscars. My second audition I was sick as a dog with the flu, so the other girl got it. Later I was glad, because Snow White was the biggest scandal of that Oscar night. She was singing a duet with Rob Lowe, and Disney executives were horrified that her dress didn’t cover her knees. It became a legal brouhaha that I was entirely glad not to be associated with.

Sometimes a tall, beautiful girlfriend of mine named Sarah and I would get dressed for hours, go to an underground club and stand on the speakers like we were models, unmoving. People told the club owner, “Yeah, everything was great, but why did you have those two girls modeling on the speakers?” The owner was somehow impressed when he found out we were just doing it on our own, for kicks.

The club entrepreneur, noting that I was game for almost anything, started using me in new ways. Once I was hired to be a Go-Go dancer in a cage about 30 feet above the dance floor. Since Quaaludes, the greatest pill of all time, were plentiful and abundant, my girlfriend and happily swallowed them. Go-go dancing in a cage on Quaaludes is one of the more golden experiences in life’s rich tapestry, and we were wilding out. At one point I noticed that the chicken wire that was our “cage” wasn’t connected to the bottom of the stage, so I started holding onto it, launching off the dance floor and swinging out over the heads of the audience.

The owner of the club suddenly grabbed me, sweaty and pale.

“My god, you could have DIED,” he said. “That chicken wire is only held on with staples! It can’t hold you!” I laughed, because everything is hilarious on Quaaludes. It was all the best parts of being happily drunk without the sour stomach. We confined our crazy dancing to the cage floor.

It is precisely these kinds of experiences that kids are really missing out on these days. They just don’t have the right kinds of drugs or clubs anymore. It was, however, formative in all the right ways for all the theatrical antics I was to inflict on San Francisco night life in the future. You gotta build a freak to make a freak.

Theme Song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Grace in your Face,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2023