Bad Girl, Interrupted
The pandemic put a stop to Jo Carol Pierce's comeback. Don't worry. She's fine.
Jo Carol Pierce, whom Michael Ventura called the “most underrated Texas artist of her generation,” once wrote songs of such shocking ache and whimsy that they inspired a tribute album before she’d ever recorded a note. The stage show that resulted, Bad Girls Upset by the Truth, is her page in the Texas songbook. After a brief moment in the mid-’90s, though, her star fell. Thirty years later, I wrote about the woman whom I considered the best Texas songwriter you’ve never heard of, and through a lucky coincidence (the fact-checker’s girlfriend was an actress) Bad Girls got another moment in the sun. It played all over the world and was beginning a sold-out run in Austin in March. The Great Interruption put a stop to Jo Carol’s comeback. Here’s how she feels about that:
Around sundown about a month ago, I was sitting in Starbucks with my elderly friends when all of our phones started ringing, all at once, messages dinging, emails pouring in. Groups of family members were searching madly for us, calling our friends, calling out the highway patrol, all of a sudden, all at once. The word had gone out to round up all the boomers. We scattered and started our cars, phones to our ears.
This is not how my daughter and granddaughters remember it. They claimed to have been warning us for days to stay home and let them take care of us. They said boomers were all over town, swarming the bars and the movies, cruising the aisles at the H-E-B to get one more thang. My daughter reminded me that I had just been released from five weeks and two surgeries at the Mayo clinic, that I was 75, had chronic heart, pulmonary and esophageal health conditions and am in the 1 percent of the 1 percent. I told her that I’d always had a chronic heart, and while I never considered that a life-threatening condition for anyone other than my husbands I appreciated her desire to keep me around. Also, I don’t want to die.
Nothing about my life after 45 is feasible or believable. I was plucked from my nondescript job and neighborhood by the best director in town to join a theater company, which begat plays and music, a year-long residency at a coffee house, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it was. Week after week, I would make a musical play of my life. Peg and Glenda and Robbie Jacks and David Halley and Kom Longacre and Mike Madducx and Drew Dennet held my hand for the whole year, rewriting every Wednesday night and performing every Thursday night. And week after week, more and more people would show up. If this had been in New York it would’ve been a big deal, but it was Austin in the ‘90s, so it was just a good time, and for about .013 seconds in my forties it was The Thing.
The musical play was called Bad Girls Upset by the Truth. It was based on a true story, both real and imagined, and I performed it because no one else would. It was the story of a bad girl named Jo Carol, like me, who got herself into all sorts of situations, like me, both real and imagined, like me.
Before I’d recorded a single note, let alone a whole song, two musicians, Mike Hall and Troy Campbell, set to making a cd of all our favorite bands playing my songs. The first time I heard a song of mine on the radio I was driving home from the Deep Night shift at the Texas Abuse Hotline. I nearly had a wreck. I don’t even remember which song it was. There were some great renditions. So after that, Troy helped me put out my own version of Bad Girls Upset by the Truth on cd. We took the show on the road to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles where the papers covered Bad Girls as half-sensation, half-provincial curio, and Jayston Williams brilliantly directed a stage version in Atlanta. It was a great ride and one I so needed in order to establish a baseline of okayness.
This lovely state of affairs went on for some years before it sputtered to a stop.
Decades passed, three of them.
Then Texas Monthly did an article about my long-lost career, and it was a good thing that the fact-checker took his work home with him. In the course of making sure I had my facts straight, he watched a video of me performing Bad Girls while his wife, a brilliant young actress with a PhD in anthropology named Lauren Meckel, was in the room. She was smitten and had to do this. In less than a year, Meckel staged Bad Girls as a one-woman show at a festival in New Zealand. She got a brilliant director, Marea Colombo, to direct it.
I saw Bad Girls when my oldest granddaughter, Riane, and I met them at the Fringe Festival in Edinburg, Scotland, where again it was a hit. It was momentarily shocking to hear what a different take Lauren had on the show. I probably performed the show in an understated, West Texas, barely-move-your-mouth-when-talking voice like Loretta Lynn. Riane and I looked at each other with understated alarm, then caught what she was doing, sat back and dug the hell out of it. Lauren performed it like a bullet from a gun, like a hurricane, like wildfire, so full out that it scared everyone but her. She was at once hilarious, heartbreaking, and ravishing. I was surprised by the end to see she was alone on the stage that she had unforgettably populated.
I was immediately entranced. Now I hear her version in my head all the time. My voice of the Bad Girl in my head was effortlessly replaced by Lauren’s voice. Now, when I say something like, “Flipping like pancakes on my own greasy griddle,” I do it in my Lauren voice.
I love getting dressed on the day of Lauren’s performances, going out to eat and having not a care. Such a thrill to sit back and marvel at Lauren’s take on the show, and performance thereof. When I do the show, I won’t let anyone talk to me the whole day before the shows. I’ll snap your head off if you utter a syllable in my presence. That’s what I get to skip now. Did I already tell you that becoming a grandmother of two was the most fun I ever had until I got to see Lauren’s incredible, knock-you-right-down inhabitation of the Bad Girl in music and story? I nearly fainted with joy.
The first time I saw Lauren do Bad Girls in the USA was in a sleepy bar in Marfa full of cowboys and their dogs playing pool. Within five minutes of Lauren taking the stage, she had those cowboys and their dogs eating out of her hand. A few of the dogs came onstage to congratulate her before the end of the show. But this was just the chips and dip before the enchiladas. Bad Girls was coming home to Austin.
There was some concern at Hyde Park Theater on the evening of March 10 about the coronavirus, but nobody suggested cancelling. So I got to see Lauren tear it up in Austin, playing all the characters and singing all the songs, to a packed house, standing ovation. My granddaughters and daughter were there. I got to sit by that comic genius Jaston Williams. Plus, my favorite phylogeneticist and his wife showed up! I was elated! How could this happen? Lauren is so talented. I could see this show celebrated again! I thought it might be dated, but she didn’t, and she convinced me. New York! Lubbock! Oklahoma City! New York! England! Back to the Fringe festival!
I wrote this show and these songs for other people to do but nobody had stepped up until Lauren. I longed for that lightest brush with some flimsy temporary immortality. For the first time, I could imagine a big future for the Bad Girls, and her name is Lauren Meckel.
A lot of people bought tickets to Spider House Ballroom on March 21. We were planning a huge party after the show with musicians from all over, friends, family, journalists, publicists, etc. There was another scheduled gig at Continental Gallery.
Lauren and I talked about the probable cancellation, so we were a little prepared. I rarely expect anything to turn out. Lauren and I were sad when it cancelled, but not surprised. I hate it for her more than for me. She’s the one who does all the work. I just go and live it up! I have faith that it will come around again. It’s wonderful that Lauren and Marea are organized and determined.
I just don’t know what kind of world we will be in. I used to have a penciled map in my head of seasons unfolding and democracies enduring, of how my pale plans would fit into a calendar. I don’t have that anymore. My pale plans have faded right on out. I need a pedicure, a haircut, a dentist, and a hug. I miss going to the movies. I need to get dressed and brush my hair. I need Topo Chico.
But there’s nothing out there anymore. There’s no place to go! This is getting too familiar. There was already no place to go to escape climate change. Sometimes I just sit in a parking lot with a book, my dog, and the music turned way up.
I always thought I’d do fine in jail, or a monastery. I would just write. Meditate. Exercise. What have I done while incarcerated in my homemade jail monastery? I sleep a lot. Watch Tales from the Loop. Watch it again. Two Zooms from friends and family. Not crazy about Zooms. Wore nightgowns well into the day but that’s always. I miss hugs.
Do you have a gig for a girl like me? Can we schedule sometime this century?
RIP
I would like to pay respect to those we lose along the way. If there is someone you would like to be remembered in future newsletters, please post links to their obituaries in the comments section or email me. Thank you.
How we’re getting through this
Making frozen yogurt.
Seeking out good news.
Looking at this time like a gift.
Joining Walker Lukens’ record club.
Contemplating handshake substitutes.
Giving kids free creative writing classes.
Making avocado frozen yogurt with mixed berries.
Delivering takeout from Austin restaurants for free.
Hoping these four women solved mass unemployment.
Humbled by refugees sewing masks for health care workers.
Celebrating the demise of the open office; long live the 6-foot office.
Checking out all the free content the Texas Book Festival is putting out.
Listening to less music but watching more music videos, redefining prime time, and playing more board games.
What I’m reading
This article conflates millennials with Generation Zoom, but regardless, hoo boy.
Mimi Schwartz unloads on Texas Republicans in the Times.
Necessity, meet reinvention.
Articles about the breakfast taco war of 2016
Got some reading suggestions? Post them in the comments section, and I might include them in the next newsletter. Have a book to promote? Let me know in the comments or email me.
What I’m watching
Glen Weldon likes HBO’s Run. Phoebe Waller-Bridge exec produced it. WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED?
Got suggestions? Post them in the comments section, and I might include them in the next newsletter.
What I’m listening to
Walker Lukens dropped a new version of “We See U,” his song about Trump.
Rina Sawayama, born in Japan and educated at Cambridge, is genre-fluid. Good stuff.
Got suggestions? Post them in the comments section, and I might include them in the next newsletter.
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