"You’re a cigarette come to life!” was fellow Los Angeles comic Paul Mooney’s stunned reaction to Sandra Bernhard’s brusquely satirical stand-up act in 1977. Nothing was off-limits when the then 21-year-old Bernhard took to the stage—not the sexual mores of the Beverly Hills divas whose nails she manicured by day, not the debauched perspectives of the Hollywood rock ’n’ roll crowd she ran with by night, and certainly not even the most intimate details of her own personal life. A wowed Mooney promptly hired Bernhard to join the cast of NBC’s nascent The Richard Pryor Show, and while that sketch series died a quick death amidst bitter tangles with network censors, Bernhard hardly tempered her style.
Three decades later, she’s still plumbing the art of the self-confessional, producing work by turns poignant, cutting and, not least, laugh-out-loud funny. She’s also still leaving even the most jaded industry veterans as unsettled as they are impressed. Reviewing her most recent off-Broadway one-woman show, Everything Bad & Beautiful, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood was reminded of Mick Jagger and his “freaky strut, the skinny frame and the righteous energy.” But he also insisted readers “picture Mick as an angry, neurotic Jewish girl.”
Off-stage, Bernhard has been no less bold, penning three separate memoirs while holding the surreal distinction of being the rare children’s-television character to have posed naked for Playboy.
So how exactly does one combine being Noggin’s quirky Macaroni Lady, balancing a spoon on her nose to the delight of all the tiny inhabitants of Littleburg, with a pictorial featuring, as Playboy trumpeted on its cover, “Bunny Wanna-Be Sandra Bernhard Starkers”?
Three decades after ruffling feathers and tickling sensibilities with her bawdy stand-up routine, Sandra Bernhard marches on with the same no-holds-barred attitude in her new show, Everything Bad & Beautiful, whose CD cover is pictured at right, which is headed to the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach on July 27th and 28th.
It wasn’t a mere pictorial, Bernhard corrects with mock sternness by phone from her Chelsea apartment. “Honey, I was the centerfold!” Duly noted. Of course, fewer still would follow being a pinup with a role on Comedy Central’s animated series Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist—as a cartoon character undergoing psychoanalysis, no less.
“I pretty much am a cartoon character most of the time,” Bernhard laughs. “I still think of myself as emotionally arrested, still 17.”
Appropriately, then, next on Bernhard’s calendar is an extended stay in a town that often seems similarly “emotionally arrested”—her old stomping ground of South Beach. For this upcoming series of July performances at the Beach’s Colony Theatre, expect an “unplugged” reworking of Everything Bad & Beautiful, with plenty of acidic takes on the Beach’s internationally fabled 24-Hour Party People.
Call it cultural anthropology from the heart: It was following early-’90s clubhopping visits to Miami alongside Madonna that Bernhard was christened the Material Girl’s “gal pal”; a fascinated press soon made her as much of a tabloid gossip subject as the very A-listers her work lampooned.
Bernhard, with Ingrid Casares in 1991, garnered attention for her South Beach party days and her friendship with Madonna.
Looking back, it’s an era she remains ambivalent about—mining it for the occasional self-deprecating barb, but bristling at the notion that the period still defines her. “You would hope that people would be willing to go along for the ride and know you’re a solid artist and performer,” she says with a touch of exasperation, insisting that her present career “isn’t based on old relationships. If that’s all it was, I certainly wouldn’t have written another 10 shows since then.”
It’s a belief echoed by the third figure in that media moment’s pre-L Word love triangle, Miami promoter Ingrid Casares, who famously griped to New York magazine, “I could discover a cure for cancer and I’d still only be known as Madonna’s girlfriend.” Bernhard, however, isn’t willing to offer a sympathetic fig leaf. “It’s hard to address anything to do with her,” Bernhard says icily of Casares, “because she’s not an artist.”
Not that Bernhard is completely unwilling to dish. “People always love to hear about whom I’m hanging with,” she chuckles. And of late, “Everybody reappeared in New York—Kylie Minogue, Belinda Carlisle. I’ve run into all my old friends under fun circumstances. Chrissie Hynde came for Thanksgiving.”
That sounds like the basis for a new variety show on Fox.
“It is a sitcom sketch come to life,” Bernhard cracks, “but it just so happens to have been my life this past year.”
Of course, limning our collective obsession with celebs is familiar terrain for Bernhard, most pointedly in her 1998 show, I’m Still Here…Damn It! As she complained then, “So many shows hit the lowest common denominator and they do trash people. So we’ve lost the ability to differentiate between intelligent critique and just plain stupid, hurtful gossip.”
But that was nearly 10 years ago. Today’s lines between gossip and news have blurred past the point of recognition, making Bernhard’s complaint all the more prophetic—and ominous. How else to explain CNN cutting away from a breaking report on the Iraq war to broadcast live footage of Paris Hilton being driven to court?
With designer Isaac Mizrahi in 1991.
Yet in 2007 Bernhard is hardly alone in simultaneously toasting and decrying celeb travails. After all, what else is gawker.com and its legion of snarky offspring but Bernhard’s sensibility distilled on-line and updated by the minute?
“I really try to avoid that stuff,” she says of Gawker and co. “My work was a precursor to the Internet, to that immediacy. I was able to tap into the Zeitgeist. Now it’s just there for everybody. Everybody is blogging, everybody knows everything, everybody is a smart ass, everybody’s a cynic. It’s hard to talk about as many people in the public eye as I did 10, 20 years ago, because it’s redundant.”
Groaning playfully, she continues, “I know, I know, what am I going to say now? The things that are really important are just too overwhelming for people. You burn out: the environment, health care, the war, this completely corrupted government that we’ve been stuck with for the past six years.”
The only proper response is to go beyond the easy punch line. “You have to keep turning over the soil and dragging up what’s fresh. Part of my job is to get down deep and pull up roots the audience may not have noticed before.” Accordingly, while late-night talk-show hosts have given us obvious Britney Spears one-liners—complete with rimshots—Bernhard has fashioned an extended monologue with musical interludes, winding through Spears’ life while avoiding pieties. It’s not only dryly funny, but as truly memorable as some of the best work by Spalding Gray.
The other noted development in Bernhard’s act has been the new openness with which she addresses her own sexuality. The coyness of earlier productions has been replaced by a matter-of-fact discussion of her current long-time girlfriend and her now nine-year-old daughter.
Bernhard with her daughter, Cicely.
“Times have changed,” Bernhard explains. Before, “it was just much more interesting to be ambiguous. Sexuality is fluid for a lot of people—for me it has been. But I’m not fucked up about my sexuality. I don’t have skeletons in my closet: I’ve had great relationships, I’ve had crazy ones, and I’ve been in a great relationship with my girlfriend for almost eight years now. I don’t need to make a statement about any of it anymore, because it’s been overstated for so long by so many people. I’m not from the Ellen DeGeneres school of publicity.”
Such a shift begs the larger question: If a scenester such as Bernhard can grow up without losing her creative edge, can South Beach at large do the same? To hear Bernhard tell it, that transition is already happening. “Things shifted a bit when [Gianni] Versace got murdered,” she recalls of the fashion designer’s 1997 killing on the steps of his Ocean Drive manse. The VIP rooms may not have immediately emptied out, but “people backed off a little bit.”
There’s a long pause before Bernhard finally reconsiders her take on the Beach’s social whirl: “Who are we kidding? It’s just as dirty and weird and crazy and [Jewish American Princess]-y and Cuban as it has always been. The Beach is always going to be the Beach.”
Which is not only the city’s attraction—it’s also part of the very reason Bernhard herself keeps returning here: “I haven’t evolved that much either,” she quips.
1. Art war! MoCA versus MAM
Call it the rivalry that dare not speak its name: the barely veiled jockeying between downtown’s Miami Art Museum (MAM) and North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) for bragging rights as this city’s pre-eminent art-world institution. Of course, as long as reporters have their pens unsheathed, there isn’t supposed to be anything as unseemly as “competition” between cultural organizations. But with a limited pool of philanthropic largesse, local tax dollars and art-aficionado attention spans to fight over, MAM director Terry Riley finally lost his cool. “Miami can’t have Art Basel come here once a year,” Riley bitterly griped to the Miami SunPost, “and then ignore the fact it doesn’t even have a third-rate museum.”
Up at MoCA, presumably a “fourth-rate” joint in Riley’s mind, it was hard not to smell a distinct whiff of schadenfreude wafting out of director Bonnie Clearwater’s office. After all, MAM seems to lurch from one existential crisis to the next: There has been tense internal friction surrounding Riley’s new administration, fingers pointed at the meager state of its permanent collection, and, most recently, a growing chorus of misgivings over its $200 million plan to relocate to Bicentennial Park. Meanwhile, MoCA chugs along like the little art engine that could, stretching out to a 12,000-square-foot Wynwood annex (loaned absolutely gratis thanks to real-estate machers Tony and Joey Goldman), and launching its own expansion plans without even a whisper of civic controversy.
Just as importantly—at least from the jaundiced view here on South Beach—MoCA has clearly taken the lead in throwing better parties. That was the verdict following May’s MoCA Mystery Dates fundraiser, when 13 local collectors opened up their homes to the museum’s supporters for a series of dinners and an intimate gander at the art hanging on their own walls. My own purchased ticket found me supping at the South Pointe condo of Alberto Chehebar and Jocelyn Katz, doing my best not to spill my plate of paella while taking in the greatest hits of modern painting and photography arrayed there.
Classic snaps by Cindy Sherman and Helmut Newton battled for attention with of-the-moment brushwork by George Condo and Lisa Yuskavage—but holding its own amidst that exalted company was The Music Critic, a massive 84’’ x 76’’ painting by Miami transplant Craig Kucia. Full of invitingly odd textural touches, it features a masked girl surrounded by a veritable cornucopia of flora and fauna, all to hypnotic effect. You could stare at it endlessly—or you could stroll blithely right past it, as Kucia himself did, only to look genuinely surprised when I dragged him back to face his handiwork. “I rarely ever get to see them once they’re finished and they go off into the world,” he explained with a sheepish laugh after being reunited with his offspring. “I didn’t even recognize it at first. It’s kind of weird.”
Though not quite as weird as the looks Icelandic expat Magnus Sigurdarson says he initially received from newspaper publishers around town as he sought the raw material for his sculptures. But then you go knocking on doors, earnestly asking for any extra four tons of newsprint that happen to be lying around the office.
For the record, Sigurdarson is a big fan of the Miami New Times—he has constructed a towering monument out of issues of that weekly in Chehebar’s living room—though he could care less about the articles. It’s aesthetics he’s after. “They stack perfectly,” he enthuses. And by comparison, the Herald? “A lousy paper. It’s an odd size.” Though he does appreciate the helpfulness of the Herald’s staff. Once they realized he was quite serious about taking home those four tons o’ paper, they let him drive right up to One Herald Plaza’s loading bay and cart off pallets of old editions headed for the trash. New Times’ uncooperative honchos forced him to dive into their Dumpster for his booty. Not that he holds a grudge: “It’s all propaganda,” he quips. “It becomes art on the way to the recycler.”
2. From Havana to Nashville and back again
Has it really been 18 years since singer Raul Malo was first spotted raising the roof of Churchill’s, leading the Mavericks through sets of irresistible honky-tonk and lump-in-the-throat tales of cowboy woe? A Cuban-American country crooner may have seemed like an odd concept, but the Mavericks were quickly snapped up by a major label, taken on the road and lodged into the hearts of fans far from the Miami-Dade border.
These days Malo can be found in Nashville, and his latest solo album, After Hours (New Door Records), comes steeped in his adopted home’s smooth countrypolitan sound. But smooth doesn’t necessarily equal slick on this collection’s covers of vintage country chestnuts, from Buck Owens’ “Crying Time” to Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart,” all given an impassioned—and as the album’s title implies—late-night cabaret-styled makeover. Even Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” seemingly untouchable in the wake of Al Green’s own devastating version of the tune, sounds fresh again when wrapped around Malo’s honeyed pipes.
Another Cuban sonic oddity gets the cinematic treatment in Los Zafiros: Music From the Edge of Time, now out on DVD (Shout Factory). Havana’s answer to the Platters is how Los Zafiros’ early-’60s records are usually described, but there’s an otherworldly quality to the group’s doo-wop harmonies that seems as much indebted to Saturn’s rings as to Brooklyn’s stoops. Add a touch of Brazilian samba to further spice up the grooves and you have a band that sounded like no other of its time—or of any era since. Start with 1999’s thankfully still-in-print greatest hits Bossa Cubana (Nonesuch), but return here for wonderful archival footage of the band shimmying away on Cuban TV’s version of American Bandstand.
