Bowie III Part 2
Note from Team Cho: Just got this email from a friend of Margaret’s who writes for the Ellen DeGeneres show:
Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 8:10 PM
I just saw the Entertainment Weekly where the people name Margaret #1! Awesome.
Also, we are taping a show with David Bowie as we speak and in his interview portion he mentions Margaret being at his concert dressed like an Asian princess. Total props from Bowie. I know she’ll freak. It airs Friday.
Hope all is well over there. Here it’s all work, all the time, but I love it.
In the seething hot summer days of 1999, I lived on the Lower East Side, and my neighbor and friend John Cameron Mitchell insisted that I beat the heat, and go see a remarkable Japanese film called “Afterlife.” So, in the midday sun, to escape the pissy glare of the street, I ducked into the Quad for a matinee.
I was working at the Westbeth with my off Broadway show which was attended by Tony Visconti and May Pang, as well as countless other music legends, and I clocked in at about 7pm, which left my days lonely and long, stuffy and claustrophobic. But I still feel like I’m playing hooky when I go see film during the day.
The dark coolness of the theatre welcomed me. The story happens in winter, adding the delightful chill my mind needed. Snow, even pictures of snow in the misery of muggy Manhattan, will make your sweaty headache disappear directly, an ice blue pack of wondrous joy.
“Afterlife” is about what happens when you die. You go to a halfway house for approximately three days. It isn’t a four star hotel, but a comfortable dormitory that you share with the other recently dead, old, young and in-between, and you are interviewed by a crew. They are there to re-create your favorite memory, what you loved about being alive, what you wish to relive, one last time. There doesn’t seem to be much of a budget, but then again, you have died and nothing matters so much now. It doesn’t need be perfect. Mostly, the memories are quietly mundane.
One man recalls being in an airplane, clouds surrounding him. His crew arranges cotton balls around the cardboard cutout of a small flyer, wind machines providing the breeze in his hair, and the lights go down, a director calls - “Action!” It is his moment and it is beautiful. You see why he would want to remember that and make that the scene that would define his life.
I just had mine.
Dawnne and Ava, my dates for the David Bowie show, had a hell of a time trying to get me to stay in the green room. It was scary, and I tried to look for an escape route. Terrified, crying already, trying to jump up on the tables, planning to slide my body out the window, La Femme Nikita style, I was there to meet the Great God of Rock, BOWIE - my nowhere-near-false-but -absolutely- real idol. The only wondrous, glorious, prolific, dangerous, legendary, iconic, impossibly beautiful star I had ever wanted/ didn’t want to meet, because what do you say to God? “Hello? How are you? How is the weather up there?”
Decades ago, when I first discovered him on “Rock Show,” a half-hour show on Sunday afternoons, where they aired “DJ,”"Look Back in Anger,” “Ashes to Ashes” - before MTV, before music videos entered the landscape of American pop culture, his music made my terrible then world seem survivable. I had bruises on my face from my parent’s 20- year domestic-marital war, where I served the entire time as a P.O.W. Bowie’s face seduced me in its asymmetrical perfection. How is it possible to have a face so lovely? Unbloodied, untouched by brutality, or so it seemed to me then.
There may have been sexual feelings, fleeting dreams that involved my lithe yet sensually unaware undeveloped body. Bowie might be responsible for making me a light sleeper, as I developed the habit then, a girl in a shoddy, sadly sagging, smelly canopy bed, with odd wishes to be a boy, but in a girly way. These complex thoughts swirled around my head, never allowing sleep to come, only visions of the future. Was there a way to grow up to be David Bowie yet still be a girl? Would I ever meet him? Would I ever tell him how he shaped my life, my destiny? Would I have the courage to do so if I had the chance?
That little girl grew up well, despite the circumstances. She walks the earth with a heavy confidence, an irrepressible swagger and cadence, due to those nighttime reflections. There were sleepless nights filled with dreams, so many that have come true. I almost expect them to now. That is what dreams are for.
Today, I can meet the most famous people. I can do shots of fine vodka with Mikhail Gorbachev; gossip with Hillary Clinton while she gets her mascara done; lie in bed for hours with too numerous to name rock stars; listen to A-listers talk about themselves so much that if you change the subject, it is almost as if they disappear, for without their celebrity, they cease to be interested in you, and therefore cease to exist, leaving behind hostility and quiet rage, although their body has not moved an inch.
Most white male celebrities, if you are not young, blonde, beautiful and slim, will literally look right through you. To them, I don’t exist, not in the least, and it doesn’t make a difference. I went through a phase where I’d go out of my way to make conversation, because it annoys the hell out of them. It’s fucking hilarious to see them try to ignore me when I am stepping on their foot.
Actresses are competitive, and mean about it, if they are threatened by you in any way. Thankfully, I am not considered an actress, nor a reknown beauty (although I am secretly both. In fact, I am one of the most beautiful women in the world, and the most talented actress, but that isn’t important), and I spent a lot of fat girl time, so I am well liked by most women in film and television and even music.
Rappers are different. They adore me, and I worship them, and that is that.
Anyway, I stayed in the green room, and I - love a cliffhanger. Don’t you?