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Hanging with Angie | |
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You have friends, you do favors -- even favors as degrading as going to a book signing by professional former rock star wife Angela Bowie, David's ex. Her claim to fame, aside from bopping both the Thin White Duke and Marianne Faithfull, is that she is the Angie (as in Mick Jagger singing). She's now cashing in by telling all to an uncaring public in her opus Backstage Passes: My Life as the Main Hanger-on or something like that. Overcoming my reluctance and deciding that maybe seeing a never-quite-was in the flesh might make for a breezy afternoon, I wound my way downtown on a Friday afternoon to meet the woman who makes Iman shudder. I walked in: no crowd, not even a line. I got there at 5:30 p.m., mere minutes after the thing started; only two people were worshipping at her feet. She was trying to explain her poetry to one of them and kept saying, "It's hard to explain I need to show it to you. It's in my first book." The store didn't have it in stock. It wasn't published in America, but I think, even if it had been, the only place to have found a copy would have been in the remaindered bin. The other guy there actually had a copy. She introduced them and let them talk about her poetry. My turn. I told her the books were for two friends of mine in New Orleans. Then I mentioned I'd seen her on the now-defunct (I pray) cable show Attitudes singing "Turn My Heart over Easy" (which featured her wild scream of "Now SLAM DANCE!" -- only twelve years after the fact. Some people set the trends; others can't even keep up with them). I asked if it had ever come out. She said, "It takes a long time to get these things out. When I went on that show, I thought the album would be out six months later. The same with this book: it's been three years since we came up with the idea." I've no idea who the we was since she was alone except for a bookstore employee who must have been assigned to keep replenishing her supply of books to sign. He wasn't busy. After she inscribed the books, I got into the check-out line behind five other customers. Only one of them had her book. No one was waiting in line to talk to her. (circa 1993) POSTSCRIPT: More than a decade later and I found this book online at valuebin.com. Doesn't that just say it all? Oh, and one thing that's even more fun: Despite the mess that Velvet Goldmine was (and director Todd Haynes' films are usually exceptional), one thing was superlative -- Toni Collette's accent as Mrs. Rock Star (I forgot what fake name that Haynes used for Bowie). In real life, Angela has a half-trashy American / half-too-cultured Brit accent with a good helping of cigarette ash scraping along the vocal cords. I just imagine poor Toni sitting in her car, listening and relistening to the audiotape version of Backstage Passes, hoping to capture the weird cadences of Angela's accent. If you see the movie, you'll know she nailed it. |
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