SHOCKED AND SURPRISED

On tour with Michelle Shocked, Episode 1

“I chose this play for Cintra because it is absurdist, and this whole gambit is absurd. It’s about time, aging, memory and technology, and I think it belongs right in the middle of my show.”

— Michelle Shocked

I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, with this tour. I just know that when a tiny green elf hands you a pair of magic elf boots, you say “Thank you Sir!” and wear them immediately. Life is improvisation and you’ve got to say YES to weird and unlikely shit, especially doing obscure Irish plays for no reason in the middle of music shows.

I have gone into the wild blue yonder with this exceptional, musical madwoman, Ms. Michelle Shocked, to experience strange new cities and even stranger new venues. It’s all rather wing and a prayer, Sisterhood of the Traveling By the Seat of Our Black Sweatpants-type stuff, which is to say, Michelle has been putting the tour together all by herself, with no infrastructure whatsoever — no booking agent, no tour manager. “I used to tour with two tourbuses, and one was just for catering,” Michelle confessed of her MTV celebrity past. Michelle and Sue the engineer of Michelle’s new audio memoir, “Bootleg This!” have been stitching the whole tour together with spit and grit and elbow grease. It’s punkrock, and I fucks with that.

I named it the “Can’t Kill Art” tour, because here we are — both women of a certain age, still out here doing our thing, even though both of our art careers completely caved in and effectively died — musicians and writers have gotten similar jackboot kicks to the groin, economically speaking.( I hear painters are suffering too, these days. )

Michelle and audio tape are deeply intertwined. Michelle, as I have previously explained, was cancelled in 2013. Her music is unavailable online because she is so deeply committed to staying out of the great AI hoovering of all known media. A bootleg tape began her career, and a bootleg tape effectively ended it when she was caught mouthing off at Yoshi’s, and the militant woke among the audience decided she was homophobic and spewed her bootlegged concert on YouTube. (I have lived in the same room for a week with Michelle, physically close enough to do Argentinian tango, and I can definitely tell you two things: She loves strawberry protein powder and is not homophobic. Not that this even bears mentioning, but maybe it does, in this shallowest of societies: most of her friends are, in fact, gay. Boo.)

Michelle practicing at the Kerouac House, St. Petersburg FL

I was honored to be asked to perform with such a dedicated, celebrated and disgraced artist as Michelle, and so I said yes to doing a very strange short Samuel Beckett play, as part of Michelle’s act. Now, I haven’t acted — really acted — in quite a while. Beckett is a very heady motherfucker, and I really didn’t get in much rehearsal time — just 4 sessions on Zoom with Sue, Michelle’s memoir producer, so in a sputtering panic, I hired my old theatrical comrade Stephen Pocock who also directed me for several sessions over Zoom — which fucking blows, by the way. Being directed over Zoom is like trying to experience emotional intimacy with a football. There’s just not a whole lot of nuance to the medium.

Live performance is ephemeral and you need to feel the room’s energy. Anyone’s energy. You can’t feel energy over Zoom.

At the beginning of the trip I didn’t quite believe Michelle, who is a strange and wonderful artist, that there were still trolls around committed to ruining her career, after 13 years. My attitude is that everything is immediately forgotten these days, there’s just so damned much shit going on constantly.

I didn’t believe at first that there were still people who cared about her cancellation in 2013 enough to actively go out of their way to fuck with her life now, but I got schooled when we were halfway on the 400 mile trip to Jacksonville and the bookstore we were supposed to be performing at abruptly cancelled us without warning. I was on the phone to some whimpering child at the bookstore that didn’t have the whole story, and Michelle, while driving, lunged across the car to scream into my phone. “Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Fuck that! You fucking liars!” I held the phone away from her, hung up on the girl and sat in shock for a few minutes.

“Now you see,” said Shocked, her eyes pinwheeling in fury. She scared the shit out of me, but it was true — someone had got to the bookstore’s owner, and convinced him to cancel us.

We landed in Orlando, the home of live crocodile miniature golf, and settled into the first Motel 6 I have ever stayed at. It was about what you would expect. Motel 6, at least in Orlando, is basically a homeless shelter. People and their dogs and children live there for long periods of time. When we left for our first gig, there was a crowd of black ladies making merry at a table at the far end of the pool, and a truck full of Hispanic laborers playing mariachi music.

Our first gig, in Orlando, was a Quebecois man’s private residence, inside of which was an entire stage, audience, lights and sound mixers. It was a beautiful little theater, and we performed our first show for 5 people. All things considered, it came off pretty well - nobody cried or threw up or lost their shit in the middle and broke all the sets. A minor victory.

Hours later, back at the Motel 6, the black girls were still in full effect.

I wanted to smoke, so I went down to the pool and ended up joining them. They were delightful and welcoming, drinking cognac and smoking blunts. A young white girl with bad tattoos was getting expertly braided by a woman in a shower cap, and I watched for a bit — the braiding was a bit like watching a Florentine master expertly re-string a lute. Art is everywhere, and some of it is good.

Our second gig was at the Kerouac House in St. Petersburg - a house where Kerouac once lived. We pulled up and had no idea how this was our venue — it looked like a typical post-war, suburban 2-bedroom.

“It’s sold out,” Michelle told me. “There’s 50 people coming.”

“Where the hell are they going to sit?” I asked, peering through the window shades and seeing a 1950’s living room with a velvet sectional couch. Michelle shrugged and we let ourselves in.

The Jack Kerouac house, was pretty nondescript from the front, but had a desk and typewriter in the back room that was teeming with beatnik mojo. It had been Jack’s desk, and I got to use it onstage as part of my performance.

The bungalow ranch style house opened up quite well to accommodate our audience of what turned out to be 80 people, but the stage was on the floor at the same level as them. Since I was sitting down for most of my performance, most of the audience couldn’t see me; the ones in back also couldn’t hear me.

After I walked offstage, I heard a woman say, “That was so depressing.” It is a depressing play, no bones about it.

I got in the umpty-ninth fight with Michelle that night over performing after her, which I’d been doing, which I felt made no sense on any level. It’s an ongoing battle we’ve been having since the beginning.

She performs like a valkyrie and thrills the pants off everyone, and then I come on and make everyone sad.

“But you’re the headliner,” I whined. “You get everyone all excited with music, and I’m the inscrutable bummer who comes on after your rock star triumph and bums everyone out with one of the most depressing half hours Beckett has ever crapped out.”

“You don’t understand,” Michelle said. “ I have my audience trained. They’re even weirder than Zappa audiences,” she said. “They expect this kind of thing from me.”

“What, to be fucking bummed out at the end of your show?”

“It’s art,” she said.

I just couldn’t understand why Michelle would want this.

Michelle, who explains things better in music than in conversation, dragged me outside to the Kerouac front porch, grabbed her guitar and sang her ass off for me into the Florida night, neighbors be damned. It was a song called “Stillborn,” which is a song about mortification. She had to explain to me why women died of mortification: they had miscarriages that hadn’t made it out of their bodies, and the dead baby inside them kills them eventually.

I got it. It was the full gamut of human emotion. It was art.

It really was one of the most spine tingling moments of my entire life, Michelle’s enormous voice howling straight from her uterus, straight through her femurs, shattering the sidewalk and pulling up tree roots beneath us. I knew from studying John Millington Synge in college that the sound she was making was keening. A woman wailing the wail of death. It was incredibly moving, and and I let her win the Who’s On First argument that night, because the moment was fucking unforgettable.

Back at the Motel 6 the next night, I was lucky enough to get my hair braided by the lady in the shower cap, an angel named Neeka Boo, who had a tattoo of Betty Boop smoking a joint on her right bicep. Neeka Boo was charming and delightful and we passed a joint around. I’d always wanted my hair braided and Neeka always wanted a spiked bracelet, so I gave her mine. Michelle has been calling me “hood rat” ever since

Neeka Boo sorting out my cornrows. Photo by her daughter MyMy.

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I’m going on in New York tonight. I did the play for my bestie Muire in Michelle’s living room and she told me my Irish accent was “OK.” I think she gave me a solid B. She has lived in Ireland after all.

Michelle and I just got an offer to play the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I hope my accent gets better, before I get the shite beat out of me by actual Irish people. If I feck it up in Scotland the Banshees will surely eat my face.

In any case: Booyah. It’s a fucking thrill to be on the road and performing. Michelle and I sing harmonies in the car. I wouldn’t say it’s glamorous, exactly, but it’s the life.

Cintraw@gmail.com

Theme song: Jack Black!