Somewhere in the midst of
Suzanne Bocanegra's
When A Priest Marries A Witch--that video and live "artist's talk" in which actor
Paul Lazar verbally channels Bocanegra while being thoroughly Paul Lazar--I felt the artificial juxtaposition of channel and channelled fall away. Standing before me, just a few feet away, was neither Bocanegra nor Lazar alone but some deep, thorough cohesion of the two, and I fell madly in love. That's a condition, I assure you, not unfamiliar with regard to Lazar, but Bocanegra, a multidisciplinary artist, is totally new to me.
Up until that moment, though, I had already been well-entertained by Bocanegra's narrative, delivered by Lazar in a shallow space before a packed and cramped but chuckling
Chocolate Factory audience on closing night. Through her genial mouthpiece, Bocanegra revisited her childhood in Pasadena, TX (oil- and NASA-loving country), where the artistic youngster dreamed of coloring for a living, and surveyed a transitional time for Roman Catholics like herself (Vatican II, folk masses, singing nuns, Sr. Carita's art, the Berrigan Bros). Having been raised in the church, too--although in oil-poor, astronaut-deprived New York--I'd lived or witnessed all of Bocanegra's Catholic cultural landmarks. I knew of which she spoke and felt her a sister soul.
On the soundtrack, we could hear her actual voice, at low volume, speaking the monologue just a few beats behind Lazar's voice, but her presence also loomed large in the hour's visual and verbal imagery--First Communion (wearing pink!); first outfit bought with her own money (black satin brocade suit paired with a cowgirl hat and an old pair of white go-go boots); checking out the art and architecture of her church and bemoaning the transition from nun-habit
haute couture to the more humanizing but unacceptable dowdy ugliness of post-Vatican II sartorial reform ("the biggest fashion mistake of the 20th Century").
A "Catholic Mass groupie," she found the tradition gave her, "room to space out and think your own thoughts. Nobody can bug you. You're
praying!" Later, the example set by a local designer in reworking the interior of her church--again, post-Vatican II, and in ways that seriously messed up Catholic habits, not the wearable kind--taught her that "you could make art, and it could be a grown-up thing, not just a kid thing, and you didn't have to work for an oil company."
So anyway, why did Paul Lazar have to be Suzanne Bocanegra? I don't know. But I also don't know why Paul Lazar
shouldn't be Suzanne Bocanegra or why anyone who has to deliver an artist's talk shouldn't hire Lazar to step in and deliver it. I'd certainly do that.
But we
are talking about a person--Bocanegra, I mean--whose Web site's home page looks like this, and I kid you not:
work
info
That's it. Seriously. A page, blank except for her name in a small, black font and those two links. Visit http://suzannebocanegra.com/ and see for yourself.
While you're there, visit this page
http://suzannebocanegra.com/priestwitch1.htm
and check out the still from Change of Habit (1969), which appears to be a towering monument to cheesiness. It starred Elvis Presley as a doctor and Mary Tyler Moore as a nun with the hots for him, a crushing ambivalence about her vows to Jesus, and an application of false eyelashes and shadow that might work perfectly for me but for a nun...? That section of When A Priest Marries A Witch has got to be one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.
Lord! What will The Chocolate Factory do next? Click here and find out.
