“Hello LaLa.”
“Ahoy Dark Sevier!”
“How are you?”
“Oh, Dark, you know how it is, I’m just being a person in a body.”
That was the beginning of every phone call. Then a bit of non-specific talk begrudging the physical form. After that was out of the way, we got down to the business of forecasts of the spirit, emotional weather, archetypal musings.
I met LaLa in 1989 at the L.A. Cabaret in Encino California. I was green on the comedy stage and she was something else. Raven-haired and raven-like, LaLa took to the stage with a magic wand disguised as a high-school marching baton. Something to illustrate the jokes with, literally poking at the minds of the people in the audience with it, punctuating bits with a “KOO KOO!!” Or a “CAW! CAW!”
Her closing bit was performing a one-handed cartwheel while drinking a shot of Wild Turkey 101 (she wouldn’t do it unless someone in the audience was willing to buy the shot for her. It was a magic trick where she conjured herself a free drink). I don’t think I can tell you any of her jokes though. I don’t think I got most of them. I know that they had a default world meaning, plus a double entendre, and likely more entendres than that, but most were straddling more than one entendre.
She came to L.A. with Rock & Roll dreams, and comedy was where I found her, but I came to know her as a poet, mystic, teacher and friend. She was a decade older than me, and far wiser than I could fathom at the time.
We both started stepping away from stand-up comedy at the same time, for different reasons, but our friendship endured outside the clubs. She was an esoteric planet, and I was an elliptical moon in her orbit. I think she was the weirdest person I knew at the time, and so I would visit her to feel normal, when my own nascent weirdness pushed me outside the prescribed.
Being a performance artist in L.A., LaLa found ways to work flexibly, in order to be able to take the gig, if and when it came. When I met her, she was teaching ESL classes in downtown L.A., but I remember her most as a clairvoyant with a 1-900 number. I spent many late nights until sunrise sitting in her living room, listening to her talk to people who decided to call a psychic at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning.
I gained an immeasurable amount of mental calisthenic techniques watching LaLa do psychic jujutsu. La knew how to make people feel heard and seen, and that was worth far more than $1.99 for the first minute and $.45 for each additional minute.
LaLa introduced me to Western mysticism. She turned me onto books and planted seeds of wisdom that gave me tools to tame my psyche. She was key in keeping me from going too feral as I left the consensus worldview.
Though I enjoyed a free psychic tarot reading for my birthday every year, the last time I saw La in person was when I visited her in the desert in 2014. She lived like a nun without the support of a church. She held court over a monastery of one, frequented by scrappy desert cats, filled with piles of LaLa’s script, held down by desert rocks and bits of meteor she found on her desert walks
I think the television was her familiar. It was always on in the background, day and night, while she was writing, consulting, eating, or sleeping. But that was the height of technology in her world. She never had a cell phone, or a computer, and she never went “online” like most everyone else.
When La went, a very unique and particular part of the world went with her. Never another one like her, but akin to one that must always be. I hope it was an easy dis-encumbering from being “a person in a body.” This person will miss her deeply.
The following are excerpts from a recollection of a pivotal moment where La met me at the crossroads and helped me make the better choice. One of many of these moments she facilitated in my life over the years.
From It Seemed Funny At The Time, a collection of essays about my experience of L.A. in the early 90’s:
New Years Eve in North Hollywierd, 1989
…
Mad Dog had friends from Massachusetts in town and I had friends from Boulder. Mad Dog’s friends were a couple of cut ups, regular Mutt and Jeff with a layer of east coast Beavis and Butthead. There was the lubrication of a long friendship between the three of them.
My friends were closer to acquaintances from a year I’d spent in Colorado. Joey and the English twins, Emma and Daphne, and Daphne’s boyfriend Theo, were in L.A. on holiday and looked me up. The confluence of guests served as motivation to throw a New Year’s Eve party.
A number of people showed up early in the afternoon to help prep and meet the out of towners. La La was there. She charmed the Boston boys right from the start. La La was a Wiccan poet, comedian, and close friend and advisor.
Sicilian to the core, La La Land was a wiry fireball of prose and Magick. She had the social lubrication skills of a veteran lounge singer, pared with priestess wisdom. She had moved from small town Illinois to Los Angeles ten years before with her boyfriend. They did the Aleister Crowley Rock & Roll trip for a few years before they broke up and she became a stand-up.
On stage she would often punctuate her jokes with a “Koo Koo!” and her closer was to do a one-handed cartwheel while shooting a shot of Wild Turkey. She was another of those original characters that couldn’t slip through the filter of the club owners. She was a litmus test for friends of mine: if a person couldn’t recognize the brilliance behind her crow squawking and antics, then they were too dull to befriend.
….
I had recently received a vial of LSD from a chemist friend in Boulder, and broke it out for the party. The evening progressed and drops hit tongues, as more comedians showed up. With this kind of crew, it was hard to tell who was tripping and who wasn’t. Danny Woodburn graced us with his presence and promptly grabbed a wand I had carved, which was a staff for him, and launched into a four-hour improv performance. At 4’1” tall, his impression of a Captain Kirk doing Shakespeare was impossible to not laugh at.
Each performer had to make a signature entrance to announce that their comedy brand was in the house. Holtzman came in with a contingency of Bay area comics. Among them were Lance Solo and Jim Tripp, who had just moved to town. Holtzman entered, looking at the room like a cop busting a party and started his rant: “What have we got here? A bunch of freaks! Dope smokin’ ass grabbin’ degenerates. Animals! Each and every one of ya!” In this mode he had the presence of a bear, likely spiking the adrenal glands of those uninitiated in the Holtzman experience.
We had a fire in the fireplace and there was a big circle of people in the living room involved in a good “craik” session, as the Irish would call it. Stories, banter, good-natured jabs and witty exchanges flew back and forth and around the room in rapid fire. I sat next to the Boston boys to check in. They were both having a good time, sporting perma-grins and beers on their chins.
The out-of-towners were happy to be relegated to the audience of the LA comics, except Daphne’s boyfriend Theo, whom I didn’t know so well. He had strong self-esteem for no reason that I could discern. He was a star student at Colorado University, and probably an only child. He seemed to have no real interpersonal skills. Every time he would open his mouth the banter ball would drop out of play. He would try to match the energy of the exchange, but with no relevance. Finally, after Theo had demonstrated his oblivion to the scene beyond a doubt, Woodburn suggested that Theo take a few steps back. Theo smiled and did so, placing him close to the fireplace. Woodburn suggested that he take a few more steps back, and, delighted to be at the center of attention, he steped up to the edge of the ashes, smiling. Woodburn directed him to step back just a little more, and he did, pushing the heels of his boots into the hot coals, still smiling. Mind you, he was one of the few that weren’t tripping. This left Danny a little stumped, as Theo’s back was against the chimney. Then someone said, “Too bad he’s not your size Danny, then the joke would have a punch line. Everybody laughed and the room resumed the joviality.
The next time Theo brought the energy in the room to a halt with some randomness, Danny started tapping the wand on the floor, chanting “Geek’s in the fire! Geeks in the fire!!”
Feeling the burn, Theo decided to pick on the most obvious target in the room for him to crack on, and in his assessment he picked on La La Land. His comments were unmemorable, but they had a mean undertone of ridicule and pettiness about LaLa’s weirdness. La La acted the diplomatic wizard and neutralized his comments without returning the energy. The “yes, and” tool of improv paired with a bit of a glamour to confuse or dazzle the poor normie. Then Danny would tamp and chant “Geek’s in the fire!'“ again, and the witticisms would crank back into play.
The boys from Boston had been locked shoulder to shoulder on the couch all evening, wide eyed and smiling at the psychedelic circus before them, until they saw Theo picking on La La. They were prepared to take him into the yard and teach him some Boston-style respect, but La La neutralized them as well, keeping the dogs at bay, protecting her harasser.
At a particular high point in the rooms rantings, Theo did it again. There was a nice topical ping-pong session rolling around the circle, when Theo announced, non-contextually, that he could name all the contents that were pumped out of Elvis’s stomach the day he died. There was the usual stunned pause, then the tamping and chanting by Danny. I told Theo that I was very interested in that information and grabbed a mock pen and paper. He smiled and started listing pharmaceuticals and their precise amounts by memory. I mimed writing the list, hoping he would get that I was mocking him, but he didn’t, notice or didn’t care, as long as he had everyone’s attention on him. He was the center again, and glad to stay there as long as he could, no matter the means. The circle abandoned the living room for bathroom and cigarette breaks.
La La and I went into the kitchen for a drink and a puff. I apologized for Theo’s behavior and expressed my desire to fully trounce him next time he jabbed at her. La smiled at me and asked:
”Did you ever have problems with bullies in high school?'“
“Sure, I was a nerdy beanpole and got shoved around by the football players on occasion.”
“They were stronger than you?” she followed.
“Yeah.
“So they were abusing their power at your expense, then?”
I knew where she was going. She had nudged me on this idea of intellectual power abuse before. One night after I destroyed some attention-whore in the front row of a show, La La, in her wry style, showed me there was a way to win a fight without there being a loser in it. It was best to pick on my own size, if I wanted to protect my artistic license from citations.
La La worked the late hours as a psychic hotline operator, and sometimes I would hang in her living room in the wee hours and listen to her sessions on speakerphone. “I wanna know who my girlfriend is with, where they are, and what they’re doing!” a caller belted out one night. La managed to broaden his concept of the psychic world, placate him, and actually give him useful information (about himself), and the guy hung up feeling better, in spite of the $1.99 a minute he’d been shelling out for the last half hour (and not finding his girlfriend). She was very used to dealing with the gullible and dimwitted, and she did it with kindness and grace. She lived and illustrated a non-combative way of being, a way to be a superior human without making her audience feel inferior.
To win against a weaker rival was no victory. We take on the energy and attributes of that upon which we focus our energy. She made her point. The Boston boys and I were tamed like lions that night. Being annoying isn’t a crime, but our reactions to such a thing certainly could be. So for good mental hygiene and psychic self defense, don’t trip on those below us and we save ourselves a fall.
…