This short play was first performed as a puppet play for a Bowie tribute night at Strawdog Theatre, starring Katie Johnston-Dean as Larissa and Craig Badynee singing. Later, it was performed for the Nerdologues Last Five Years show at The Hideout. Jen Ducharme played Larissa, Craig Badynee sang, and you can watch the whole thing at the 44:35 mark here.
LARISSA:
Thank you for coming out tonight! I’m Larissa. I’m honored to be part of this big celebration, and I drew my inspiration from the “Five Years” theme directly from David Bowie. And I wanted to prepare this wild performance in honor of him with an impossible light show and mini LED lights and puppets and everyday objects that I would keep hidden in my outfit until I needed them, and hide intergalactic prayer cards in your coat pockets when you weren’t looking so at the end I could say something like, “pray with me, love” and you’d reach in your pocket and be like WHAAAA MAGIC.
But then I had to pick up another shift at Starbucks and I had no real energy because the world is a trash fire and it was all I could do to just show up tonight.
BUT! I had already committed to doing this, and had already asked my friend Craig, over there, to play the whole spectacle out with a song, so here we are. I will now do the next-best thing to giving you a mind-bending display of impossibly possible magic and wonder to inspire you in this darkest timeline, and instead will tell you a story about myself.
And David Bowie.
But first about myself.
Oh, and before you get excited, no, I did not memorize this story. I wrote it down with the power of voodoo-who do?- you do!- what?
hopefully audience says “Remind me of the babe” but if not it’s okay, it might even be better if they don’t because it will be painful
With the power of writing. I wrote this story with the power of writing. Here we go.
reading from story
I grew up in Midlothian, Illinois. It’s a blue-collar, super working-class suburb just southwest of Chicago. I like to say it’s a town from a Springsteen song, minus the factory. It is definitely a town minus any aspects of a David Bowie song, unless you count the rough parts from Life on Mars.
When I was growing up there In the late 80s and 90s, it was a place that cottoned more to closed-mindedness, Irish-Catholic family legacies, and subpar high school football than to anything sensitive or artistic. As an adult, I know that was less due to a primal evil being slowly leached into the water source, and more because everyone was so damned overworked and underpaid. Still, Midlothian is and was “The Town That Pride Built,” not the town that crybaby art kids built.
And I was DEFINITELY a crybaby art kid. I was my town’s Billy Elliot, but like a Billy Elliot who wasn’t good at dancing. I was the Billy Elliot of having feelings. Feelings I wanted to share with everyone around me, to trade and gather, like POGs. Feelings I thought could build a bridge between me and us and everyone, commonalities running through us all like gold seams through mountains of adversity.
This is not what happened.
Instead, most of the kids in my town did what any kids worth their salt would do when they detected this kind of epic level raw nerve in their midst.
They poked it. Hard.
The result was spending my tender youth crying literally everywhere a human being could cry, at almost all times, to the infinite frustration of well-meaning friends, family, and school mental health staff. The silver lining on this fat black cloud holding court over my youth is that I got to retreat into the age-old sanctuary for sensitive, artistic children everywhere: The Movies!
“Meeting” David Bowie in the movie Labyrinth in these formative creative crybaby years was key in my development of a strong sense of curiosity and self. When my best friend (also a crybaby) and sister (not) and I first got our hands on Labyrinth, I felt that frisson we all feel when we meet someone important to us. That feeling where you just know someone is going to matter to you. Also, at first I thought He was a She. A godmother scaryish lady witch with killer hair and makeup. Jiggling codpiece and questionable moral compass notwithstanding, I took David Bowie for a female role model. A power weirdo I could look up to, emulate, and one day, become.
Then my mom told me: “That’s not a lady, Larissa. That’s David Bowie. “
Okay. So the beautiful, scaryish witch lady was a man. A man that seemed like he came from another planet very far from my tired, tiny, overworked little town. A power weirdo I could look up to, emulate, and one day, become. Ish.
Flash forward to Crybaby Art Kid: Teen Years. Less crying. More eye makeup. I am confident. I am sassy. I am a seventeen-year-old-wannabe-filmmaker who is smarter than everyone and works at Chuck E. Cheese. Where once I found my power source in raw feeling, I now find it in writing in my journal, laughing with my friends, making out with my boyfriend, and spending my Chuck E Cheese money on gas and Used CDs. I am better than everyone in Midlothian and I sing along at the top of my lungs to Ziggy Stardust to prove it. I use my infinite power of introspection to realize I am a unique space flower, and unique space flowers do not get watered in Midlothian, Illinois. I am confident now, and use this confidence to claw my way out of my hometown and into outrageous debt and prestige at New York University.
College is the first place many people who think they need college to develop self-confidence really develop any self-confidence. It’s where they learn they are talented, skilled, sexy. They make some of the truest friends they might ever have in life. They get on a career track that leads them to satisfaction and gainful employment.
I did all that, and then, I choked. I was now surrounded by people who never had to fight to be confident. They just were. Far from my blue-collar brethren’s disdain for frivolous things like art and feelings, I was suddenly surrounded by kids of the rich and famous who got rich and famous for being artistic. I went from feeling like the special-est space flower on the planet to a common space weed. And a very poor one at that.
Until I started having sex dreams about David Bowie.
Again and again, night after night, Bowie gave me orgasms- and life counsel.
We hung out in his moon Jacuzzi and talked about matters of life, art, my friends and enemies. He told me not to worry that I was poor, and that my goals felt impossible to achieve. Then he licked the hell out of my ear. He had a breezy, seen-it-all, fuck-it-and-carry-on attitude that was so unlike mine at the time, that I think there was some element of me tapping into his subconscious in these little sex n’ chats. I know it sounds a little wild, but a girl can dream, right? Har har.
These dreams made me feel a little brighter. A little more in charge. And when I woke up, I took that afterglow into my days. I got dream-screwed by David Bowie, and my non-dream self’s head screwed on straight. Confidence, be mine!
Then one day, I ran into the man himself. Not in a dream, but on Broadway somewhere between Canal and Houston. My friends and I were walking to school, when I saw Iman.
I was distracted by her statuesque beauty, and sort of body-checked the man who looked like David Bowie walking with her. It was only after I apologized and the man said “It’s alright, hello,” in a British accent, did I realize that the man who looked like David Bowie actually WAS David Bowie.
When the shock wore off, about a block further up and away from them, one of the New Yorkiest things to ever happen to me was accented by another of the New Yorkiest things. A group of construction workers who must have also run into David Bowie leaned over their fence and yelled, “That was David Bowie! DAVID BOWIE!” My friends and I shouted back “David Bowie!” And a group of strangers built a little bridge between each other by joyously shouting “David Bowie” into one another’s faces. Since the man was only just a bit south of us at this point, we were all treated to the sound of him faintly laughing as we walked away.
Body-checking David Bowie on the streets of New York was a big moment for me. A magic moment. Not because it was a celebrity encounter, but because it was a celebrity encounter with David Bowie. It made him a person, instead of an alien. Instead of a rock god or Goblin King. He was a living, breathing, human being who slept and woke and ate and cried and farted. Probably.
But, he was also David Bowie.
I think of that moment a lot these days, so many years out of college. So many years spent actively trying to be the Bowie-est version of myself. I’ve had some successes, sure, but I’ve watched so many friends far eclipse me with their own. I’ve never made any money. I’m still essentially working at Chuck E. Cheese, and as thankful as I am for my current job and all its taught me, it’s a far way off from paying from my own artist lab or Moon Jacuzzi. And when it comes to art, I make it, but I haven’t made it. I’ve made a lot of attempts, and maybe wasted a lot of time, and maybe it’s more out of vanity than any desire to grow or change or succeed. So many of my friends are like that, too. And in a time where art making seems important, and maybe a way to communicate ideas that make everyone bristle and shut down or shut people out, it also seems silly. There’s so much else to do, so why pour so much energy into the weird things you happened to be good at when you were a kid? We all have to turn and face the strange. Time may change me, but I can’t trace time. And that.
puts paper down, visibly upset. Back to paper
Maybe that's the gift of Bowie, though. Knowing he existed, and existing during some of the same time he did, gives us the pleasure of trying to be as Bowie as we can be, even if we are all just crybaby art kids who are doomed to fail. Thank you.
Now there are puppet Bowies
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
Bollocks!
LARISSA:
What? Who said that?
ALADDIN SANE BOWIE:
He did.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
I did.
HALLOWEEN JACK BOWIE:
Well, we did, if you want to get technical.
ALADDIN SANE BOWIE:
But he’s a more, um, temporally unified version of me. Us.
HALLOWEEN JACK BOWIE:
We’re earlier in the timeline, you see.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
And I’m the main Bowie to you, babe.
HALLOWEEN JACK BOWIE:
Because he was your first Bowie.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
I can’t believe you thought I was a bird. Flattery!
LARISSA:
Oh my god. Aladdin Sane Bowie is trying to talk sense to me.
HALLOWEEN JACK BOWIE:
Halloween Jack, darling. I know you’re sad but don’t add insult to injury.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
Sad doesn’t even begin to cover it. Jesus, do you sound dispirited. I was only ever this down on myself when I was out of my head on cocaine. Are you on cocaine?
LARISSA:
No…
ALADDIN SANE BOWIE:
…Have you any cocaine?
HALLOWEEN JACK BOWIE:
I’d quite like some cocaine!
LARISSA:
I don’t have any cocaine!
LABYRINTH BOWIE
Then there’s no need to be so upset.
THIN WHITE DUKE BOWIE:
Did I hear tell the girl’s got some cocaine?
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
She hasn’t got any bloody cocaine! What she’s got is a bad attitude.
general dismay from Bowies
LARISSA:
I don’t have a bad attitude. I’m just being realistic. We can’t all achieve our dreams the way we once thought we could, it’s just not possible!
general pish-poshiness from Bowies
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
Sounds like you think you’re at some magic age where you ought to have it all done and sorted, when really, that’s no age at all.
BLACKSTAR BOWIE:
Unless you know death is imminent. And you live just long enough to release a final masterwork before expiring.
LARISSA:
The day after you-
BLACKSTAR BOWIE:
The day after your birthday. Yes.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
Oh right, don’t let’s be smug about it. These versions of myself, yeah? They all thought they were IT. Until they just…weren’t.
ZIGGY STARDUST BOWIE:
Until it was time for the next thing.
ALADDIN SANE BOWIE:
The next costume change.
LARISSA:
Yeah but all those versions of you…were still rock-god versions of you. I’m no rock god.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
I’m no bloody god.
ALL BOWIES:
We ARE!
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
Well…Yeah, but. Look. People forget about how many times their gods and that cocked it up. And bloody hell, I cocked it up. People forget failures and worship glory, and doom themselves to diamond dust when they could be a diamond dog, scrapping it out in the thick of it just the same. Don’t you remember? I was a fascist for a year. All the cocaine. I talked so much nonsense on television. I made that wretched video with Mick. I never wrote my memoirs. I named my kid Zowie, for chrissake.
ZIGGY BOWIE:
And you tried to do that internet thing.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
Bowienet, yes, rub salt right in the wound. But this is all part of it, love, the failure and the struggle and success is all part of it. That’s life. It’s beautiful. And it’s yours. The only way you can waste it is to pretend the highs and lows of it belong to somebody else.
LARISSA:
Somebody like…the gods.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
Gods or other, more successful people. Yeah. Look. Life is what you do with the glorious afterglow of failure. The success after that. Then you fail again. Then succeed.
It's all water for space flower, babe.
LARISSA:
It’s all water for the space flower.
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
That’s the spirit!
Life. A familiar pattern of win, lose, win, lose- shot through with moments of glorious release.
THIN WHITE DUKE:
Like drugs!
ZIGGY BOWIE:
Or sex!
LABYRINTH BOWIE:
Or a song.
Craig sings "ROCK AND ROLL SUICIDE." Brings house down.
END OF PLAY.
Bowies.