Yo, Yoko?

My interview with Yoko Ono ran in Tampa's Creative Loafing this week. Check it out here. And thanks to everyone who e-mailed and posted questions. I went over the moon when she talked about the day John Lennon learned she wasn't a virgin.

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PS. Illustration by fairy-jeraimi.

Ani, if you're out there, thank you.

10 reasons why I love Ani DiFranco:

1. Her voice is creamy. Seriously. Like vanilla pudding. It's a beautiful juxtaposition – somewhere between angelic and fierce. If Ani were singing shit about my pug, I'd turn up the volume and sing along. She's that captivating.

2. Her songwriting is AMAZING. I picture her scratching out lyrics between coffee refills in diner booths. Or on the back porch of her home in Buffalo, under an awning, in the rain, making sense of bad relationships, her 20s, her 30s, politics and pollution.

3. She's from Buffalo. My hometown. And without too much preaching, she became the poster child for a steel belt city with a reputation steeped in bad football jokes, blizzards and economic woes. A few years ago she purchased a historic church on the corner of West Tupper and Delaware Avenue, rehabbed it, reopened it as a music venue and called it Babeville.

4. She is 11 years older than me, but it never felt that way. In the mid-1990s, when I first started listening to Ani, newspapers and magazines labeled her militant, angsty, angry, gay, bisexual, feminist, rocker grrrl, younameit. As a teenager, I couldn't think of a better chick to idolize. She was complex; a Rubik's cube of sexual identity, with song lyrics like poems, marked by peaks and valleys in an emotional landscape not unlike the one I pounded. Britney Spears and I are the same age. (Arrggh! It's true!) Yet it was Ani I latched onto like a long-distance pen pal. (Ani and Jewel to be exact.) From my bedroom in the middle of nowhere, with its pink walls and quilted bunk bed blankets, I spent my nights alternating between Ani and Jewel, a cross-pollination of a fan. Romantic and wispy. Pent-up and pissy.

5. She can fingerpick a hoedown beat like nobody's business. Ani could pluck a love song using her guitar strings to clean out the grit from under her fingernails. She's that fast and that good.

6. She's a journalist's wet dream. She's funny, disarming and ridiculously quotable. ("Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.") Even her terseness is eloquent. ("My songs are just little letters to me.")

7. She's a stubborn success story. Ani has repeatedly turned down baller contracts with major record companies. She formed Righteous Records in 1989 with Dale Anderson, a writer from The Buffalo News, and renamed the company Righteous Babe Records in 1994 after she and Anderson parted ways. The company now produces a growing list of emerging artists – Andrew Bird, Bitch and Animal, Arto Lindsay, Sara Lee and Hammell on Trial to name a few.

8. Her song, Angry Anymore, was my anthem for years. Listen to it. It's cathartic.

9. Fuck you at the start of a refrain never sounded so pretty or so appropriate. Untouchable Face is a lyrical feat of genius.

10. She is finally happy, and I'm happy for her.

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PS. Joe took me to the Tampa Theatre last night to see Ani. The tickets were a Christmas present. (Thank you, Joe!) I cried tears of happiness during the show. It was dark, so no one saw.


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What would you ask Yoko?

I'm interviewing Yoko Ono tomorrow about John Lennon's artwork.

I'm looking for question suggestions.

Thanks!
Heidi

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PS. Sketch is United We Stand, by John Lennon.

PPS. Happy 60th day of the year.

A sucker for beautiful talented people.

I have never, ever tired of the Oscars. Even when the show crawls past midnight, I never turn the TV off.

Even as a kid, when I had no clue who the nominees for Best Supporting Actor were, I'd root for the guy, who when the camera panned his face, seemed humbled by the nomination.

Even when my father bitched that the only movies to ever win Oscars were boring ones he'd never seen, I'd righteously back the Academy's choices. Even as a 12-year-old.

Even when my mother suggested I go to bed before Best Picture had been announced, I'd weasel my way through the end of the telecast.

Even when I went to school the next morning gibbering on about animated short films no one in my rural high school gave two shits about, I never scoffed at the Oscars.

It was my Super Bowl.

I was insanely jealous of the actresses. Their dresses. Their bodies. Their skin. Their grace. Their effusive speeches. I wanted their talent. Their dates. Their doe eyes and bee-stung lips. I was fascinated by the way they tiptoed to the podium and clutched their golden barbells like freedom fighters in silk Valentino, forging forward in battle.

When I bought my first pair of high heels in 2004 – just before moving to Florida to become a newspaper reporter – I practiced walking from the living room to the kitchen by conjuring up images of Charlize Theron accepting her Oscar for Monster.

I realize the awards themselves are mostly overblown. In the scheme of sobering world affairs, actors congratulating actors seems almost bombastic. Yet I'm swept away by the industry's enthusiasm, even when Roberto Benigni clownishly accepts a Best Actor award and I can only understand two words of his speech.

On a frigid February night, in my parent's living room, on a worn sectional sofa in a Western New York farm town 2,500 miles from Hollywood, Calif., the Oscars were a glitzy portal, bloated with beautiful people applauding high stakes creativity.

I even baked special blueberry muffins before watching the ceremony; the same blueberry muffins I baked before watching Ally McBeal.

Naturally, I had crushes on the screenwriters.

I had a good hunch Quentin would win for Pulp Fiction in 1994, as I had read a profanely eloquent interview with him in Talk magazine several months before the awards. In the year of Titanic, when Matt & Ben won for Goodwill Hunting, I considered writing them a congratulatory note on my Christmas stationary set. And last year, when Diablo Cody nabbed an Oscar for Juno, I considered a career in stripping to support my novel-writing.

To Joe's delight, I did not apply for a job at Mons Venus for fear that the opposite shifts would kill our evening Rummy games.

Anyway, I'm a sucker for the Oscars ...

And if I were Mickey Rourke, I'd get me a haircut, a new Chihuahua and start baking blueberry muffins for Jon Favreau.

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PS. Killer Marisa Tomei illustration by Rob Kelly for Time Out New York.

11 people I've interviewed in Sarasota

Divine guidance can be found in a reporters notebook.

...

"No one ever wanted to ride with us in the winter because we only had two blankets. And in the summer, when temperatures reached 95 degrees, we choked from the heat because the car didn't have air conditioning."

- Roberta Tengerdy, with husband Tom, on the 1967 Volkswagon Beetle she bought her sophomore year at Colorado State University, the same year she met Tom. 

"You're lost if you don't believe in it. It's something you don't exactly feel. You just know it's there. You know that when you die, times going on forever. It's not the end. It's the beginning."

- 100-year-old Mildred Bessie Barton Hill on heaven. 

"That's a good question. If the cheese were square it'd stick out the side of the sub."

- Subway superstar Jared Fogle on why the sandwich franchise that made him famous cuts its cheese into triangles.

"He needs his shade. He's a very spoiled bird." 

- Johnny Malone on why he sits under the awning at Whole Foods with his cockatiel, Bobby.

"Everything has changed but everything has stayed exactly the same. Often people will say to me, 'why do you still have Cathy on a diet?' And I say, look at the headlines. It's an endless turf out there. While it's redundant in a way, these are the things we keep wrestling with - our relationships with food, our relationships with the opposite sex, our relationships with our mothers, our relationships with the clutter on our desks. The things we face each day are what I love writing about and women have this fabulous capacity to keep having hope even if there's no hope to be had."

- Cartoonist Cathy Guisewite on why she's refrained from changing "Cathy," to conform to 2008 post-feminist ideals. (The comic strip, which debuted in 1976, began as a series of sarcastic sketches Guisewite would mail her mother ripping on her pathetic mid-20s love life.)

"I'll tell you one thing. He changed. I think he saw a lot of things too young for his lifetime. He came back a  man and I never thought I'd say that. He's a little more guarded and careful now. He's quiet now."

- In 2004 Sherri Vroom's then 20-year-old son, John, served eight months in Iraq. Two years later he was deployed again.

"Well, she has beautiful hair. She has a beautiful face and beautiful eyes."

- Seven-year-old Caitlyn Gutierrez on why her mother is beautiful.

"I'm gonna de-bone them first. That way I'm not sitting on one wing for too long."

- Gilberto Noriega on how he planned to win the Munchies Fire-In-Your-Hole wing eating challenge. (He lost.)

"I look at the bus as a research and exploration vessel. It functions as an idea and information hub. We're researching, exploring and recording our findings."

- Roth Conrad on why he and friend Bob Downes (right) bought their old high school bus, converted it to run on vegetable oil and drove it across the country. See link.)

"I'm an outgoing person. I like to be the funny guy. I want people to notice me. If I had any other role, I wouldn't have been as funny as I was."

- Baseball catcher Connor Davis, 13, on how he knew he owned his middle school production of The Wizard of Oz when his drama teacher cast him as The Cowardly Lion. (His dream role: Dracula.)

"What I told the jury at the onset was that I was going to ask the questions that needed to be asked ... because if not me than who?"

- Assistant Public Defender Adam Tebrugge on how he handled the pressure of defending Joseph P. Smith, the man sentenced to death for the 2004 murder of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia. 

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PS. Cathy Guisewite photo courtesy of People Magazine. All other photos are mine.

Griffingate.

This story is based on actual events.

Here I sit, in bed on a Wednesday night while my Kathy Griffin-loving boyfriend sleeps heavily beside me. Dreaming of Griffin no doubt.

I outed Joe a Griffinite early in our relationship. His KG tendencies were glaring. For example: stalling on Bravo whenever My Life on the D-List was on, reciting two-bit KG jokes and insisting I dye my hair red, cut my bangs short and curl them under like a German puff pastry.

Well, those last two are a lie. But I'm sure the bangs crossed his mind.

Before you throw your hands in the air and call me a lying rat, understand that the first time I saw My Life On The D-List, it was at Joe's apartment. The second and third time - Joe's again.

"You're in love with Kathy Griffin," I cried.

"No, I'm not."

"Yes you are. You love her rolled bangs."

"What are you talking about?"

"You want Griffin."

And so it went on. And on. Whenever an opportunity presented itself to call Joe a card-carrying Griffinite, I would and still do.

"Yes, you're right," he'd sigh, humoring me like you would a child. "I'm in love with Kathy Griffin,"

This faux-admission was satisfaction enough. I was, and am, the most obnoxious girl on the swing set.

Up until last week Joe's Griffin fascination was limited to my unfettered whims. He had tuned in three times to Life on the D-List, confessed once that yes he thought the show was entertaining and like always my self-fulfilling delusions and knack for exaggeration had convinced me Joe was president of the Kathy Club. But alas, as evidence waned I tired of the game. If the KG glove don't fit, I must acquit. Eventually I forgot that my boyfriend was a closeted Griffinite.

Until two weeks ago ...

On our way home from Tampa after Father's Day dinner at his parents, I hit play on his car stero and Griffin's standup act For Your Consideration came on.

I made an indigested face as I went angry ape on the eject button.

"A-ha!" I screamed, holding the Griffin CD in the air like I'd ripped out a still-beating heart. "I knew it, Griffinite."

"It's not mine," he snapped.

"Whatever, crazy Griffinite."

(This is ridiculous, he said. You planted it. What? I shrieked. Am I that absurd? My brother borrowed the car, he explained. It's probably his.)

And thus I dropped the conversation. Was it because I finally believed I had contrived 75 percent of this infatuation? And even if that was the case, ain't no shame in a 25 percent crush on Kathy Griffin.

I dropped it was because I wanted to listen to the CD and see for myself if the ginger was worth her weight in bangs.

She is. Here's why.