Saturday night at Rainbo, friends and couples cluster in the gloom. Suddenly there’s an apparition. It’s an eight-foot-tall something, large enough to require more than a moment to take in. A pair of two-foot-high papier-mache shoes are topped by a cascading pair of electric blue bell-bottoms and a ruffled pastel shirt. Above the shirt is a human face of some sort. Black dots splotch the part of the visage that can be seen below a seemingly glowing pair of blue sunglasses, and as for the hair, it’s some sort of weird skullcap with a few strands of stringy locks falling from the top like a horse’s mane. The ghoul has a sidekick, a much shorter figure dressed in black with an aluminum-foil crucifix around its neck and a vest that reads “LACKIE” in silver letters across the back.
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The appearance is merely the latest outrage from the Stalkers, a two-woman attack team cum performance-art ensemble currently devoting a lot of time to a single-minded mission: the destruction of local demistars Urge Overkill. They’ve recently published edition number four of the Stalker (the “anti-fanzine for anti-fans of Urge Overkill”), a withering quarterly attack on the band members’ personalities, looks, and records. Now they’ve added live appearances to the mix, with “Miss B” on stilts in a corrosive portrayal of guitarist National (“Nash”) Kato and “Miss K” as drummer Blackie Onassis, who in the pair’s cosmology is a fawning Katoite with a hair-trigger temper. (The pair are somewhat sparing of third band member Ed Roeser, whom they view as merely wayward.)
The preparations continue. “Wait, I need my mole guide,” says Miss B. She grabs a magazine photo of the real Kato to use, cruelly, as a map to apply her own magic marker versions of his facial moles. Meanwhile, Miss K straightens her outfit and practices her sneer. “Look at this,” she marvels. “I’m fat, black, and female, and I look like Blackie O.” Getting into character, the pair intone quotes from recent Urge interviews. “Someone has to be Nash Kato, and it might as well be me,” says Miss B, almost to herself. “You know, my next album is a lot like the White Album,” she continues, before breaking character to cackle. “We’re white,” she concludes gleefully, “and it’s an album.”
