THE CULTUREPULP INTERVIEW: Daria O'Neill


As promised to Oregonian readers in today's CulturePulp comic:




Daria O'Neill is the queen of Portland media -- and she took the throne on a whim.

In 1997, O'Neill -- then a teacher's aide at Wilson High -- answered an open audition to co-host KNRK's morning show. She won, and suddenly found herself having to keep up with Mike Chase, the man at the helm of Portland's all-time greatest radio program -- a dirty bomb of literate crudity, punctuated by some of the most imaginative prank calls this side of Victor Lewis Smith. (Chase called 1-976 sex lines as C-3PO, tormented the "Morning Zoo" dinosaurs at other, lamer stations, and laid bare the mechanics of corporate radio with postmodern glee.)

O'Neill, despite her unorthodox hiring, made the show even better -- bringing wicked gifts for writing and improv to the mix. Of course it didn't last. A series of near-suicidal management decisions too complex to recount killed "Mike and Daria" within a couple of years. But by then, Daria was a star.

She eventually headlined KNRK's morning show, earning a cult following for her "Local Entertainment Guide" -- a hilarious, magic-realist autobiography that happened to plug local events and merchants in its last couple of sentences. Even better were a series of co-written sketches in which her brother Damien played a demented version of comics' beloved "Mark Trail."

These days, O'Neill keeps saner hours as an afternoon host at 105.1 The Buzz. She's also become something of a Portland-area sex symbol -- thanks to her TV appearances in various latex getups on Portland's WB and UPN affiliates. She also broke into local theater, working with Don Horn's Triangle Productions and the sketch-comedy troupe The 3rd Floor. Currently she's starring in the one-woman sex comedy "Bad Dates," playing through Saturday, March 5 at Theater! Theater!

CulturePulp spent a Sunday afternoon with Daria talking about "Bad Dates," Portland radio, the sexual fixations of local writers, the infamous "Marconi incident," acting, writing, Wesley Crusher, Mark Trail, and much more. An edited transcript follows the jump; click here (or click the "Read More" link below) to check it out.

____________________

SEX and the DISC JOCKEY

M.E. RUSSELL: Okay, I have to ask: Do you ever get sick of the tendency of local feature writers to sort of sexually mythologize you? From one local article I read, we're to gather that your “face of knife-blade vectors quickly pushes past pretty into aggressively sexy” and that your “powerful swimmer’s build” has, “er, questionable aerodynamics.”

DARIA O'NEILL: That is weird, because I'm getting older, and pretty soon I'm gonna be, um …. aging. [laughs] No, I don't know where that came from, except that I'm not, you know, breast-shy? That and I wore latex-y, provocative outfits on the WB. I think it's just a carryover from that.

Q. And these articles are written by men and women.

A. It's awesome. I mean, I'm not gonna complain about it. I'm not sexually shy at all, and I'm very pro-female sexuality. But I think it creates an expectation for people who haven’t met me, where they meet me and think, "I don't see it." [laughs]



Q. I even recall a little piece your pal Dave Walker wrote in Willamette Week devoted to praising your, uh....

A. Walker's such a trip. Is Russ Meyer still alive?… Walker and I were gonna do a movie together, actually. I auditioned for him, and I had a great series of [resume] shots, one of which was my Reed College yearbook photo -- where I was on a train in the industrial area of town with this '40s dress on, firing a gun. [laughs] That's probably the image that Walker maintains of me.
____________________

'BAD DATES,' NAKED SPENCER and ETHEL MERMAN

Q. Let's talk about this new play you're in, "Bad Dates."

A. It's really similar to the earlier seasons of "Sex and the City" -- when Carrie would have some sort of crisis and talk directly to the camera and lament. It's about a woman in her 30s in New York, and she's a waitress with a 13-year-old daughter, and she's just beginning to date again.
The onstage action consists mostly of her relating what she hated about the previous date as she's getting ready for the next one. And then she fills us in on all the goings-on at her restaurant, which is owned by these unscrupulous Romanians.



Q. You're the only person onstage, correct?

A. Correct. Though it’s implied that her daughter is directly offstage, down the hall.
There's a certain element of voyeurism -- of watching someone and being watched -- that's only present in theater. It makes even mundane moments interesting. It's an exciting, almost sexual feeling.
[Triangle Productions Director] Don Horn and I have done a play together a year for four years. He's leaving town -- he's still gonna come back and do plays, but this is his last official season. So doing this one-woman show is a really special way for us to relate as a director and actor.

Q. How’d you hook up with Don?

A. I did community theater in my hometown when I was 12, 13 and 14. When I was first here in town -- I was 19 or 20 -- I was doing plays at Reed College, but I also auditioned for this reader's-theater production of "Springfield U.S.A." And Don was there, and Don's very distinctive -- he's so tan, he's mahogany, and he's got a real presence, and he rarely wears shoes.
And then, 10 years later, I was doing radio, and Don came in with Danny Pintauro -- you know, the little kid from "Who's the Boss?"

Q. Pintauro's grown up to become this gay icon since that show.

A. And you knew that kid was gay from, like, 7 years old! But Don and I hit it off, and he asked me to audition for "Bees in Honey Drown." This was four years ago. I understand him and he understands me. He's like my surrogate big gay dad.

Q. In one of Don Horn's shows, “Judy's Scary Little Christmas,” you played Ethel Merman.

A. I don’t think Don knows this, but I'd never seen an Ethel Merman performance [before that show].

Q. He'll know now.

A. Exactly.

Q. I was in "As You Like It" with your "Bees in Honey Drown" co-star Spencer Conway a long time ago, and I have to know: Is he still obsessively collecting "Star Wars" toys?

A. Oh. I thought you were going to ask if he was still nude in every play he does.

Q. Uh, that was going to be my next question.

A. He's such a wonderful kid, and so, so, so handsome. He's like old-Sears-catalog-man handsome. But the funny thing about him is that he's always shirtless or completely naked in every play he does. We joke that it's written into his contract. I think even in plays where it's not in the script, at some point, it's like, "What if, to show my vulnerability, my character came out completely naked?"

Q. In "As You Like It," he was going to be in a wrestling scene wearing only a pair of briefs, as I recall.

A. I love that about him!

Q. I think the only reason they didn't end up doing the scene quite that naked was because the other actor he was supposed to wrestle was so out of shape. [Daria laughs] Now: Are you, in fact, the only Reed College graduate using her theater degree?

A. Oh, no! My friend and old classmate Elizabeth Stevens has been running theaters across the country. Another one started a theater in Seattle. They're using their degrees in a much more legitimate, serious-minded, craft-driven, academic way than I. [laughs]
____________________

'MARK TRAIL' and DAMIEN's GENIUS



Q. I loved your little brother Damien's portrayal of the psychotic outdoorsman "Mark Trail" in the radio sketches you used to write for KNRK.

A. Well, I'm really biased toward my brother. He's a genius in any medium -- acting, painting, writing, sculpture, you name it.

Q. He co-wrote the "Mark Trail" sketches, right?

A. I wrote them at first, and then he just got the flavor of them and wrote them from then on. I would give him topics.

Q. I distinctly remember you losing your composure toward the end of several of those sketches.

A. Oh, God, yes. One year, as a Christmas present, he drew up condensed versions of some of our "Mark Trail" monologues as actual "Mark Trail" comic strips.

Q. Wow. That Dodd & Elrod woodcut drawing style is hard to pull off.

A. Exactly. But my brother -- he's taught himself how to work with marble now! He's making this incredibly detailed "good-versus-evil" chessboard with zombies versus zombie-hunters, and vampire queens versus "Buffy"-type characters and Frankenstein's monster versus Dr. Frankenstein. I think there are skeletons versus kick-ass priests -- like the priests from "Exorcist" or "Dead Alive."

Q. [quoting "Dead Alive"] "I kick ass for the Lord!"

A. There need to be more kick-ass priest characters.
____________________

SUDDENLY LOCALLY FAMOUS: PLUCKED FROM OBSCURITY by MIKE CHASE

Q. Now, you came to radio relatively late in life -- and very suddenly, without taking the usual intern route.

A. It was definitely something I never expected to do, and the way it all came about was kind of sudden and weird. It was a spontaneous audition for something really big that I got without really thinking it through.

Q. It's like becoming a reality TV star!

A. Kind of, yeah. I was thrust into it; it was like an improv play that never ends. [laughs] Mike Chase, the first person that I worked with, was great to work with in that respect, because he didn't try to baby me through it.

Q. He was good, as I recall, at incorprating your on-air learning process into the show; it became shtick. He seems like he'd have been quite the taskmaster.

A. That was 100-percent exactly what I needed. He's very driven, and if you're working with someone with his own high expectations, you're going to work twice as hard. And our sense of humor really gelled right away.



Q. In the years since he's left KNRK, he's gone on the record as saying, "God, I really regret some of the on-air hijinks I pulled at KNRK" -- the funny-mean stuff, the stunts, the calling of diaper-fetish hotlines, I guess. Is that a regret you share?

A. Oh, no. The fact is, as Mike and I get older, our demographic has gotten older -- so the desire to tone things down is natural. But I don't think he should regret anything; he's great at mixing the highbrow and the base -- and even at his basest, he was really, really funny.
____________________

THE ART of the 'LOCAL ENTERTAINMENT GUIDE,' plus PRO WRESTLING

Q. You’re an odd duck, demographically speaking. Because you've been on local TV and alternative and mainstream radio, you have this weirdly broad fan base in Portland.

A. I know! And there are people who have lawyers and press agents, and I don't have any of that. I feel like I'm repeating myself in all these interviews, because most of the stories I tell about myself I've already told on the air.

Q. Well, you’ve been doing variations on your autobiographical “Local Entertainment Guide” for -- what? -- almost eight years now?

A. Since 1999.

Q. Two things have strike me about the Guides: (1) They seldom seem to have much to do with “local entertainment”; and (2) you once told me you pretend you’re making a comic book when you write them.

A. Visualizing it, yeah. I kind of storyboard it out in my head when I'm writing it. Right now, there are close to 5,000 of them written. Isn't that insane?

Q. What -- do you write one a day?

A. Well, I did five days a week for several years. Lately I've been recycling old ones that are seasonally appropriate on The Buzz.
But yeah -- sometimes I'd have a great idea and then I'd have to find a way to work in an entertainment angle at the end. Or I'd have a great place I wanted to talk about, and then I'd find a word or a cute thing that would enable me to tie it into my life.

Q. When I was researching this, I found a fan site that was transcribing the Guides. Did you know this?

A. Mm. No. I try not to look up those things because I'll get too analytical and paranoid. It's kind of strange to me.
The plan for several years has been to put them in book or CD form, and I think -- maybe, maybe, maybe -- it'll happen this year. They're in this intangible form now, where you hear the story and it's gone, it dissipates. But if you had it tangibly, in a form where you could listen to it again and again or read it really carefully, then you'll see all the flaws. [laughs] So I think that's been holding me back from doing it.

Q. I loved the one about Evel Knievel. I read it online last night.

A. I have a pretty good recall for dialogue and situations, and I've kept a journal since I was 10. Some of the "Local Entertainment Guides" are 100-percent true; some of them are amalgamations of situations and sometimes even people; and some of them are completely fictional, like when I met, uh, Aquaman. And some of them are true and then they spin off into fantasy. My mom says that when I'm really old, I won't remember which ones really happened and which ones didn't.

Q. [doing old-woman voice] "Yes, that Aquaman was a pip!"

A. Exactly.

Q. You talked in an interview years ago about wanting to make a comic book of your best “Local Entertainment Guide” entries, illustrated by local comics artists. Is that ever going to happen? Portland is about as target-rich an environment for cartooning talent as you’ll find in the U.S. Fer chrissakes, Paul Guinan’s taken your portrait!

A. Oh, God, I don't know. I'm sure you can relate to this: The reason the Guides themselves got written in such a regular fashion is because I had a deadline -- I had to have one by the next day.
I mean, I've also always wanted to write young-adult fiction -- like M.E. Kerr, Judy Blume, that kind of really pro-female, really frank and candid stuff that I loved when I was growing up. I still might do that, but I don't have a contract or a deadline -- or I could watch the "Sex and the City" marathon! Oh, "Absolutely Fabulous" is on? Okay!
____________________

THE MARCONI INCIDENT

Q. What happened with Marconi was awful, on a lot of levels. [The rude-boy KNRK host, who replaced Daria in 94.7's morning slot, was fired after making jokes about the beheading of Scott Berg -- while playing audio from the beheading tape on-air.] From your vantage point, does Marconi's firing signal a sea change in radio? Are we getting away from rude-boy antics on-air?

A. Oh, no. I don’t think you can assign that much significance to it. On the radio, some people are just themselves cranked up a few degrees, and some people create a character. And I think he's really one of those who creates a persona. And you can only fault him to a certain degree, because the fact is, that behavior was encouraged -- strongly -- while it was working, for months and months and months. And the fact that he went too far and took it to a degree where it should not have been taken? That had been accepted from him by his bosses, and in fact encouraged.

Q. Sort of like how Howard Stern was backed up by his company until the FCC started fining him?

A. It's got to swing the opposite way. That was happening around the same time that people were freaking out about seeing Janet Jackson's nipple ring. I mean, do you know anyone who's outraged by the word "fuck," as long as you don't say it around little children? As long as you don't say it in Safeway?
This retro leap backwards, it's so fake to me. I think we're pretending -- pretending to be scandalized and pretending that we're in a more innocent time than we are. Maybe that's what people need to believe.
____________________

LOVING PORTLAND (WRESTLING)

Q. You grew up in Wyoming and Colorado and Iowa -- and then you went to Reed College. Please feel free to dispel my rural stereotyping, but I can’t help but think that must have been a bit of a social acid bath going from the relatively rural West to Ren Faire.

A. Well, my parents were both hippie artists -- so the transition was not as strange as you might think. They both went toward the working world as I got older, but when I was growing up on the farm, they would collect strange people. So [Reed] was kind of comforting in a way -- and nostalgic.
But I wasn't entirely comfortable until I moved off-campus and discovered little places and neighborhoods in Portland. I like everything about Portland. I like the light. And the dogs.

Q. You have a dog?

A. I have two. I would like to have five.

Q. Are you or have you ever been a Portland Wrestling fan?

A. Yeah! I emceed one of them in Vancouver, when the Kafourys were doing it; I don't know if they still are. It was during one of those periods when we didn't know if we could bring wrestling back to Portland, because of some medical/legal reason that drives the liability too high, or something. I'm not sure. But I'm a huge wrestling fan, overall. My husband Steve coaches high-school wrestling -- and I think Portland Organic Wrestling is a combination of theater and pageantry and ass-kicking. It's tremendous. It's really tremendous. It's the closest thing we have in town right now to theater back in the days of England when there was --

Q. -- bear-baiting --

A. -- this mob scene of people out in the front screaming back at the actors.
____________________

HATING WESLEY CRUSHER, LOVING WIL WHEATON

Q. You stopped doing the WB 32 weather reports a while back, citing a desire to do some more writing.

A. Not exactly. The reason I stopped doing stuff with the WB was because it took way too much time and it was really far away. It was live, so I had to be there from 4 to 11 p.m. It was a lot of fun and I really adored the people, but it was a half-hour, 40 minutes to get out there. So I was there all weekend long, every single weekend. I wasn't getting any time to hang out and watch "Absolutely Fabulous." [laughs] I didn't get any time with Steve or my friends.

Q. But now you’re back on the air, doing spots for UPN 49.

A. I can tape out the UPN spots. They don't have news, so they wanted a local personality to give UPN a local feel. In the beginning, it was just descriptions of shows: "Here's what's coming up on 'Malcolm in the Middle'!" Now I'm able to work it into a very, very, very, very short "Local Entertainment Guide."

Q. You've frequently abused Wesley Crusher during your on-air introductions of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes. Do you have any messages you’d like to pass along to Wil Wheaton? I know a guy who plays poker with him.

A. Now, I've actually gathered, through reading Fark and stuff, that Wil Wheaton's actually a really tremendous guy. It was never Wil Wheaton; it was Wesley. It's very important to make that distinction. I'm sure Will Wheaton is a fabulous man -- but Wesley Crusher must die.

Q. I suspect Mr. Wheaton might agree with you.

A. [snorting derisively] Becomes the Traveler! I'm so sure! Every episode of "The Next Generation" that he was featured on was like, "All the geniuses on board can't figure out what's happening. Oh! Wesley's got an idea!"

Q. He was like Boxey after puberty.

A. Yes! That's perfect! Especially in two episodes: Remember the one where they all get the headset game and they're addicted to it? And Wesley's a 14-year-old boy; he'd be the first to go! But no: He's all, "I've got to save the crew!" And then the one where they're on the planet with the people in the loincloths.

Q. Oh, that one. Is that like the one with the planet with the Roman architecture?

A. [laughs] It's the planet where everything's perfect, but you can't break any rules. And Wesley breaks this glass enclosure and he's supposed to die. And the Prime Directive says that Wesley must die, because you can't interfere in other cultures and you have to respect their laws.
But he doesn't.




Posted: Fri - March 4, 2005 at 02:15 AM        

|

©