SEANCE
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Sitting at Randolph Street Gallery last weekend, its performance space transformed into a cabaret complete with tables and candles, I couldn’t help but think of Lower Links. Not that the Links regulars on parade–Joan Jett Blakk, Gurlene Hussey, Cheryl Trykv, Paula Killen, Pat O’Donnell, and the dancing faeries–haven’t all grown more polished as performers. It’s just that at Seance, RSG’s opening salvo in this year’s “In Through the Out Door” series, the ghost of Lower Links seemed to dominate, for good and for bad.
Certainly one of the highlights of the evening was John Connors (no longer carrying that awful “Sinatra” middle name) singing an homage to the little basement room. And I won’t argue that putting all those Links regulars into the same lineup wasn’t nostalgic and occasionally fun. Blakk’s film bit as the ghost of former Supreme Florence Ballard was hilarious; Trykv’s story, although clearly unfinished, showed her remarkable growth as a writer; the dancing faeries were infinitely more together, more focused, than I’ve ever seen–and as a result, eminently more watchable.
At Links, the schedule changed often enough that if somebody didn’t show up, it was fine–somebody else would undoubtedly replace her. But when Steger announced at Seance that one performer wasn’t going to show (allegedly she was at Betty Ford, he joked lamely), then mockingly chastised another for turning up late, and still later declared that he was essentially killing time until a third got there, it was just plain irritating. (As it turned out, the last announcement was part of Killen’s act at the end of the evening–but by the time she popped up, several people had already left, including me.)
