In a Christmas cabaret show that would make the baby Jesus weep, Christopher Frizzelle, editor of The Stranger, and Sarah Paul Ocampo, cofounder of the The Typing Explosion, will bring not one but two Joan Didions to Seattle. Since Frizzelle and I work together, he answered some questions about the show via Slack.
KH: What’s this thing you’re working on? I hear Joan Didion is in town.
CF: Oh, yes. In fact, two Joan Didions. A lot of people have seen Joan Didion give readings. But how many people have seen two Joan Didions at once? This will be a special and rare occurrence.
Two Joan Didions?
One of us is playing Malibu Joan, and the other is playing Manhattan Joan.
So that's what your wig is for.
I love that wig. I may start wearing it all the time.
Has she lived in Malibu and Manhattan?
Yes. As anyone who's seen the Netflix documentary knows: She was born in Sacramento, California, and then moved to Hollywood and wrote iconic essays about LA in the sixties and seventies, the Manson Family, Patty Hearst, The Doors, hippies, acid, the stupidity of Nancy Reagan, etc. But while she was in college, she won a summertime guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine (the same guest editorship Sylvia Plath wrote about in The Bell Jar). Eventually Joan moved to New York and began a whole East Coast intellectual life that included stints writing for Vogue, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker, and just generally hanging out on the Upper East Side wearing sunglasses and smoking cigarettes and being the greatest living American writer.
Give me more detail on this show. Is it Joan Didion drag? Joan Didion monologue? What can I expect?
Do you know the drag punk duo Kiki & Herb from the '90s? They are our main inspiration.
Ah, yes. Mx Bond. I'm getting the flavor now. Do you have a piano?
No. It's very DIY. We have karaoke tracks. And sunglasses. And lots of jokes about dying.
Well, there is nothing funnier than dying.
Kiki & Herb came about in a dark time, too. All the jokes about tragedy and death in Kiki & Herb were subtextual references to AIDS. Death was all anyone could think about in the queer community in the nineties. So Kiki & Herb went: "How do we talk about death but also make people laugh so hard it hurts?" Anyway, we're living in a dark time again, but Kiki & Herb aren't performing anymore. They have an incredible Christmas album, though, that's available on Soundcloud.
What kind of songs are you covering?
Well it's a mix of actual Christmas songs we've changed the lyrics to, like "Have a Donner Party Christmas" instead of "Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas." And then there are pop songs that we pretend are Christmas songs, like "Hazy Shade of Winter" by Simon and Garfunkel. In between the songs there's banter that will seem improvised but is actually scripted. Dark, hilarious, tragedy-filled banter. Because the holidays suck. Especially when your family's dead.
Are you more into early Joan Didion or late Joan Didion?
I like all eras of Joan Didion, but I will say this: I'm a fan of her nonfiction more than her fiction. I think she changed nonfiction writing forever, and I love that she did it while centering a woman's perspective in the major events of our time. I have written on Slog she should get a Nobel Prize for that. Lots of people like her novel Play It As It Lays, and I think it's pretty good, but Joan Didion was put on this earth for her nonfiction. "The White Album" is the best forty pages ever published.
She has gone through so much tragedy in the last few years with both her husband and daughter dying that I don't know how she gets up in the morning. Other than smoking. That's something to look forward to.
Yeah, she's indomitable. How does she do it? It's amazing to me, the strength of this woman who weighs about 90 pounds. She is a legend.
You mentioned the Donner Party... Joan was alive back then, right?
Ha! No. But her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a pioneer who came out west with the Donner Party. Eventually Didion's ancestor parted ways with the Donner Party in the Sierra Nevadas because (get this) they were traveling with too many books to continue on the same rocky path as everyone else. Turns out books can save your life.
So we would not have Joan Didion without books. In more ways than one.
That's right! And we would not have the best books of the 20th century without Joan Didion. I'm thinking of The While Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and After Henry.
Should I smoke weed beforehand?
We strongly encourage that. Also there will be a bar. I think we're going to call it Cafe Didion, a reference that anyone who's seen the Netflix doc will get.
Anything else you'd like to say?
George Orwell, Britney Spears, and Ernest Hemingway are in the show too.
Impressive lineup.
We are very honored to have George and Ernest in our show. Lots of people know that Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the head. But did you know that George Orwell got shot through the neck and survived? True story. He writes about it in Homage to Catalonia. The bullet went right through his windpipe and out the other side and he lived to tell the tale. For a while at least. As my doctor likes to remind me, life is 100 percent fatal.
What do you think Orwell would think about Twitter?
He would be aghast that his direst predictions about the bastardization of language to manipulate politics were not nearly dire enough.
Your show is on December 22. What's your number one worry about this timeline?
That Joan Didion will find out and send us a cease and desist.
Okay, any last words?
I just want Joan Didion to know we're thinking about her.
"A Very Didion Christmas" will be performed one night only, December 22, at Hugo House. Tickets and more information here.
