Fa-La-La THIS Ron Kelly

Ron: We did ironic spoofs of classic B movies. So we did Valley of the Dolls, Scarrie the Musical. Our biggest success was Poseidon the Upside Down Musical. We did a holiday show every years called Rudolph the Red Hosed Reindeer, which is a musical about a cross-dressing reindeer and a not-gay-enough elf. We had a monologue show that just kind of grew out of that called Screw Christmas. We broke off and started our own little show and we started Fa-La-La THIS, which I think is a little more fun.

R: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we produced that down there for like three years. We did our last show in this old theater that they just tore down downtown [Chicago], to put in new condos of course.

R: Right where we’re sittin’.

R: Yeah, for the most part. Believe it or not it was a lot tougher than I thought to find people who could write their own stuff and perform their stuff. I was surprised. I guess I just assumed. In the past it had just been so easy. So, it’s myself and the two other monologists are sisters from Milwaukee and they each didn’t know that the other was doing this.

One of them is incorporating the seven deadly sins with the gifts her husband gives her for Christmas. You know, “Is it a sin that I hate this gift so much?” And the other girl does this character where she’s kind of like your bawdy aunt, with the leopard coat and all that. And in between, the first week my friend Jill [Plaisted] is gonna do the kind of twisted Christmas carols. So, there’ll be an intro, a little schtick, a monologue, like a three- minute musical interlude, a monologue, another three-minute music interlude and then a monologue. Hopefully, the show will last around an hour ten.

R: Well there is one gentleman that I’ve talked to a few times and I’m hoping we can still work him in somehow- Dale Caputo? He’s a local actor he’s doing a horror movie?

R: Yeah. Pardon the word, but I’m a self-promoting whore. I don’t believe in jumping on somebody else’s train, you’ve got to make your own thing. I’m happy to ride their train though(laughs).

When I got here I realized I wasn’t gonna sit around and whine. There’s a lot of whining going on in this city. My thing is no one makes it out of this city. No one is discovered here and then they go on, you know? And I think that has something to do with it and that’s just my opinion. But I wasn’t gonna sit around and pick my nose. Since I couldn’t get cable I can’t watch endless reruns of America’s Next Top Model, so I gotta do something.

R: Sure.

R: Mostly collage work. I like cut and paste. I love computer collage, don’t get me wrong, I love it to death, but I’m a tactile person. Like I get the NY Times, I gotta touch it. I have great respect for computer generated art. I don’t know if you saw the piece I did at the Lemon Street show [Rock, Paper, Scissors]. It was a small silver frame with a little Buddha sitting on top of it and I took a portrait cameo of Rock Hudson and I cut it out, and instead of making it black I cut it out of the HIV virus, put it in the kind of classic oval portrait. Behind the portrait I used a gay personal ad and I wrote a dirty story on the glass.

A guy named Joseph Cornell, who’s like the epitome of collage art from the 70’s, his stuff is kind of repetitive, but he really turned me on to the concept of found as art. I like what a lot of people refer to as sleaze. Human behavior is like the last thing to bore me. I actually spend more time conceiving a piece than I do creating it. And that’s kind of the way I live my life.

With this show I’m finally going to lay something down and it’s done, it’s over. I’ll probably never get a date in this city after the show. At least not a cocktail date (laughs). This show that I’m doing is about the death of a friend of mine. He and I we were the shit at Christmas, and hopefully when you see the show you’ll understand. But for me Christmas isn’t easy. I think this year I’m finally able to say, “Okay.” He’s been dead three years now, but he was like my sister for thirteen years, we lived together ten years. We were twenty-two year old kids in San Francisco. Twenty-two year old gay kids in San Francisco. It’s like being in a candy store.

But you know there are two things I miss the most in Chicago: Falafel, I miss the falafel. And I miss the movies. I love going to the movies and for me every time I go to the movies there’s the potential that it could be a life-changing event. For me that’s the transformative nature of art; when it really just attacks something in you. It forces you to see that situation or that object or that person in a different light and I hope that’s what Fa-La-La THIS can do for somebody this Christmas.

I love Christmas. I’ve got a pink tree. But I don’t like what I’m fed. My part of the show [Fa-La-La THIS] is a little dark, don’t get me wrong it’s pretty funny too, but Christmas can be tough for some folks. And I want people to acknowledge that.