Coming this weekend and next!

John Cantwell’s FADE TO CONNIE will play July 8 & 9. Friday and Saturday at 9 PM.

The following weekend: FADE 2 CONNIE: THE ROXY FILES will play July 15 & 16. Friday and Saturday at 9 PM.

At the Not-The-Directors-Guild CAVERN CLUB at Casita Del Campo restaurant

Locating Love Connie/Put Her On the Map
by Phillip Littell

Is this a golden age of drag? It certainly is drag’s brave new world. Thanks pretty much entirely to RuPaul, drag is now a career track, and one that is pretty clearly defined. And Drag Race is its Harvard.

Every season a new crop of glamorous raptors graduate, having lip-synced for their lives and for their living. Win or lose they have all gotten an amen and, having made their bones, off they go to make their lives. Of course their elders abide, and some catch a ride on the new wave, as others more set in their ways just keep on keeping on, and all bask in each other’s reflected glory, and get them a piece of the pie. We are definitely having A Moment. And it’s all kind of coherent and categorized and busy and buzzy and certainly very The Biz.

And then there’s Love Connie.

She’s not going to Harvard. Although they offered her a scholarship.

Where are we going to place her? Where on the damn drag-spectrum does she belong? Basically nowhere. Except on the goddamn stage. And, very mysteriously, IN the movies.

No we don’t mean getting hired to act in them (though John Cantwell does that). We mean actually coming right up to the screen and ENTERING them. Being one with the bits and bytes and pixels. Being a movie.

We’re all used to pop references in drag. Lately they seem to be confined to a tight orbit around the Golden Girls. Well Love Connie’s pop references are way out there in space. And we don’t mean the internet. You’ll find them on videocassettes and old cds in rummage bins at the swap meet. Or bouncing around the solar system as radio waves on their final journey to a listening post on Alpha Centauri. The point is, you don’t have to understand a thing, or recognize a single reference to be sucked into the Connie Vortex. The hook is John Cantwell’s total obsession with the flotsam and jetsam of the culture that has warped him. And birthed Connie to now exist alongside Cantwell’s cinema idols like Brian De Palma, Ann-Margret & music icons like Roxy Music.

Her origin myth is no myth. It’s a fact. She was born like Athena out of John Cantwell’s teenaged head (though he claims she’s Cajun inbred) and that is about the last classy parallel we are going to be able to draw from the Life of Connie. She was a self-entertainment and a way to make friends at the gay bar near the Baptist college John was going to, and she stuck around cause everybody liked her . AND THEN, still just a voice and a little bitty notion, she moved with John to New York, where, like Eve Harrington, she bided her time and waited her turn. THAT came at the moment when John was meeting with the now-legendary Nellie Olesons and they asked him if he had a “character”.

Flash forward to TODAY.

Well actually a little further into the future. Like REAL SOON.

Love Connie is returning for two weekends with her two latest and greatest shows, FADE TO CONNIE (“a triumphant tribute to 70’s Cinema” – Huffington Post) and FADE 2 CONNIE: THE ROXY FILES (a tribute to glam rock band Roxy Music). STRAIGHT FROM VIDEO! You can’t miss this MATCHED PAIR. What a RACK!

Love Connie, hair-raisingly hair-did and really quite hairy, who does not speak or even lipsync, who simply dances her story, relying on her big face, and bigger body, and the toughest wigs in show business, to traverse a multi-media narrative landscape stitched together by intuition and only held together by faith (yours, the audience’s belief that each of her shows is a coherent story), is reanimating these instant classics.

CAVERN CLUB CELEBRITY THEATER
at CASITA DEL CAMPO RESTAURANT
1920 HYPERION AVE.
SILVERLAKE, CA 90027
323-662-4255 RESTAURANT if you feel like a before or after nosh.