Back From the Dead and Bigger Than Ever!

Hi! Remember me?

There’s been nothing to write about for a while, hence the long absence. There are a few things that have been in the works, but we here at Canned Ham don’t like to mention things until the ink is dry so’s we don’t wind up with egg on our face. The TheaterTWEEDsters (Robbi Kearns, my productive producer and Kevin Malony, my directive-issuing director,) have been toiling away whilst I loll around overdosing on animal crackers and TCM (my drugs of choice) and from straw they have spun gold. (I have no idea how that analogy fits here, but WTF.) What follows is their doing. I'm just along for the ride.

So here we go, ink all dry and face egg-free...

First, that cunning little vixen, Miss Trixie Starr (it was she who presented the World Premiere of Canned Ham in Hudson, NY almost six months ago now, has lined up another gig for the show up here in the northeast in Albany, NY at a bar called Rocks on Saturday, April 3. They just opened their new club space, which is where we’ll be doing the show. La Trix and I went for looksee yesterday and the place and the performing space is just fab. There’s a stage in a corner of the room where I’ll do the show and a go-go platform smack in the middle of the floor. We’re thinking up some fun alterations to the staging to take advantage of that.

The show is still undergoing revisions (I have yet to do the same exact text twice) and we’ll be trying out some new stuff in Albany. Including a minor costume change. Of course, to do a costume change one must take off what one is wearing, so… well, I’ll leave it at that for now.

I have a bit of a rap sheet, er, history in Albany, of course. Years ago I tended bar at a place on Lark Street (the Oh, Bar!) and last spring I spent a few wonderful months working at the Damien Center (the HIV community center there) so I’m hoping some of my confreres will show up on the 3^rd.

I’m excited about it.

At the end of April I head out to Los Angeles for a three-week run of the show at a jernt in Silverlake called The Cavern Club Theater. My gal pal Ann Magnuson got the wheels turning to set that gig up. I have lotsa friends in La-la Land, quite a number of whom figure into the script, so it will be fun (and intimidating?) to do the show for them. The main character in that regard is, of course, Chi Chi LaRue. Ms. LaRue is, in fact, presenting the show out there so I’ve taken out of the script all the nasty things I usually say about her (kidding!) She’s throwing an opening night party on April 28. This will be “coming full circle” to the nth degree since there would be no Canned Ham had I not been “discovered” by Chi Chi on a cold December night in Minneapolis lo these many years ago. (To take up the slack from my shitty 42nd Street contract I was selling pencils on a windy corner of Hennepin Avenue outside of a fashionable boîte and she, thinking they were eyebrow pencils, stopped to peruse my selection. The rest is history.)

L.A. has been on the books for a while, so—while it’s exciting—it’s not the big news of the day.

That would be the fact that after my three weeks in California I come back home to the woods for a week off before heading up to spend the entire summer performing the show in Provincetown. (Huge gasp from the studio audience followed by rolling, excited applause.) Yup, it’s true! The lovely and talented David Drake is bringing Canned Ham to the Cape for the summer season. This will be the second year in a row I’ve had an unexpected and very welcome invitation to spend the summer by the water (ya’ll may remember I was in the Caribbean last June/July.)

I don’t know Provincetown at all, since the extent of my time spent there is about 24 hours—in the winter—in about 1988. So it will be a new and totally exciting time for me. I’m playing in a venue called The Art Theater and alternating nights with the superstar drag-teuse Varla Jean Merman’s impeccable and brilliant cabaret show.

But wait… there’s more!

Who do you suppose will be Varla’s accompanist this summer at The Art Theater? None other than… me! Yes, my friends, I’m really getting back to my roots with this gig: tickling the ivories for a fabulous diva. And the most amazing part of the whole shebang is that the two bookings came completely independently of one another. What are the chances of being booked to do two different shows in the same town over the same summer season? Now that I think of it, if they weren’t actually in the same theater it wouldn’t have worked out.

Sometimes my ever-surprising life manages to surprise even me.

(Varla Jean Merman photo by mmerkel)

Stay tuned for many more details on all of the above as they come in!

Robbi has set up a lovely clearing house website for All Things Ham. It can be found here.