The link to the interview right there at the bottom of this post if you are ready to embark on the PUNK GLOBE interview straight away. This article is important to preface, though, and so I will…
I had always practiced getting interviewed as a kid. Sitting there in a carefully structured, ‘laid back’ pose, imagining Rolling Stone or MTV (Much Music for us Canadians) asking me up-close and intimate questions about my “fascinating” life as an Actress, Total Rockstar, Epic Humanitarian… I went over and over in my mind in great detail, how the ‘zine would ask me how I had achieved the great heights I have achieved, and where I planned to soar off to next. I imagined just how the interviewer would describe the far-away look in my eyes as I described working with the ‘GREATS’, while I lended myself to an intimate tone of – “you would have had to be there” upon disclosing a private joke betwixt Jack Nicholson and I on our last shared film set… Yes… I would have even have imagined the interviewer using the word ‘betwixt‘. AND: the whole thing would have been typed out in Zorus Serif font – italicized on super glossy pages that smelled like the latest fragrance Christian Dior put out.. fingers-crossed it would be “Poison”. Mmm-hmmm – you bet! I had it right down to the interview describing just what the room looked like with it’s french balcony doors and their white, billowing, silk curtains licking the breeze as it opened up the grande hotel room to the Cannes Film Fest. Below, scores of fans would be chanting my name. Ah, yes. The lofty ideals and dreams of a budding ‘artiste’. I would have been about the seasoned age of 12 – or was it more like 29? None-the-less, I can never be accused of having an undetailed imagination.
This was way, way, WAY before I slogged and starved while studying and rehearsing, paying upwards of $50,000 for a truly diverse, extensive and EXPENSIVE education over the years. Thank you, Canada Student Loans, for having so quickly and generously loaned me the funding for a chunk of it… and that additional 30% interest compounded over time really didn’t seem like THAT big of a price to pay… (insert droll, sarcastic sound of 2 dirty, Canadian, copper pennies rubbing together right – here). Working 3-4 jobs to pay for the right to ‘Do Art’ and living a gypsy life in a caravan of artists, musicians, shining souls and shooting stars. I had become humbled to the true path of what it meant to hold on to your ideals at places in life where your peers had started other endeavors that seemed less difficult ( and now that I am wiser – they really were no less difficult.. we all work to get ANYwhere in life… ). So by the time I was interviewed for the first time about who I really was, what I really liked to do, where I had really been, I had already enthusiastically explored the high roads and illuminated the low roads with blissful ignorance and made my way along. I ultimately found art, film and music to be less “french doors-y” and more “yellow highway lines through bug-splattered windshields-y”. Like when the band tour-van’s V-8 engine ate up the road (and your per diems) from town to town under the starry blanket of night with 4 of your best, and quite possibly most insane, friends ever.
Like when the after-party is raging in your tour van moving at 100 mph and you and your uber-hyped-in-post-gig-overdrive bandmates are singing/screaming to Frank Sinatra and Tom Waits while bouncing off of the Lazyboy Loveseat in the back, that doubled as a ‘proper’ bench seat…. and you’re all forever married through Rock N’ Roll.
My path as a musician took me from playing some of the most grimiest but famous clubs in North America to touring with Canada’s most seminal Punk bands… Up and down the West Coast to the SXSW Festival and across Canada to the NXNE Festival and every Fest in between, playing venues of every kind, big and tiny.
At the same time, real life as an actress v
aried, sharing the set with people like Mario Azzopardi, Frances Fisher, and later, working with the biggest production house in Canada alongside Emmy-winning producers.
It also often extended to producing, acting, catering and driving the get-away car from guerilla shoots to escape security, potentially resulting in confiscated footage. I had also, by then, experienced what ‘Hour 20’ on set tasted like, where everything was covered in fake blood, while one of my eyelids got stuck to my eyebrow (glued by red-dyed corn-syrup), and we had to shoot the whole damn scene again.
Then, four hours later, work at the film school as my ‘day’ job and have earnest conversations with other ‘filmies’ about investing in a proper program, then teaching it, then selling it. I was living in a punk rock, art house when I wasn’t touring in a van… sharing my couches, food and jam space with crazy creative souls and creative crazy souls in the endless pursuit of the pursuit of either authentic Rock N’ Roll, Film-Making, and all shades of Art in between. All of this cranked up to a mind-bending amplitude that vibrated the dinner plates right off of the table when DOA rehearsed downstairs and we were trying to watch Melrose…BOTH these paths required having 3 or 4 jobs all at once, that I could either put on hold or walk away from, so I could also afford a home, an art space, an education and a life with a decent amount of travelling on top of that. It. Was. Crazy.
So, by the time Ginger Coyote asked for an interview for her Magazine PUNK GLOBE, I was no longer interested in executing that preconceived “glossy-paged-artiste-with-the-demur-doe-eyes” pose… I was in a different place altogether.. and to top it all off – I was GETTING INTERVIEWED BY THE GINGER COYOTE!!! I can go on at length about Ginger, and I do in other posts, I’m certain, but if you click here, here, and right here you’ll get a good head start if you don’t already know her… I was honored in so many ways to have my brain, heart and soul explored by Ginger, but the most meaningful thing that hit me as I clicked open the issue with my interview, was seeing the following line…
“….and most importantly rules as a friend…”
And that, my friend, tops ALL the unseasoned perceptions of my younger artist, specifically in terms of what I would find significant at a more experienced point in my life. That is – to be interviewed by a fellow Rock N’ Roll Tribe-Mate who has long been an icon to those of us on the path of Authentic Art, Self-Actualization and symbiosis with that elusive Rock N’ Roll Energy. More importantly, to be treated as an equal and even more importantly – as a friend.
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