Liza
When I was in high school, and it was New Years Eve, I wasn’t invited to any parties and my parents were out, Cabaret came on television and I fell in love: the scene with the sweater, the clinging desperate drunken dancing, the growling of ‘screw Maximillion”- but mostly the music.
I sing Maybe This Time when I am falling in love, and Money is my Bling-Bling anthem
I bought her best of a few years ago, in Vancouver on a vacation with a boy I thought I would spend my life with.
Liza was camp , she wasn’t about the music but the pills, and the acting took second place to a bitter chapter in Lorna Lufts Biography.
I played it for a while- the playful fake French on Liza with a Z, the desperation and sadness of Stormy Weather, the heart breaking co-dependency on I Can’t Help Loving that Man. Forgetting that she used to be Judy’s Daughter, the bad marriages, the drugs, and the drink. I forget that she has a weak voice.
She does, but she works hard, and the effort and the production make up for it, it’s like Madonna, but Madonna hasn’t had any tragedies and Liz was born with them.
The last album, before the wedding, was supposed to be her comeback and a reminder that she had two parents- the mater dolorosa of queens everywhere and a fag who made candy coloured musicals, that were not as subversive as Douglas Sirk but much prettier. What it reminded us of was how sick she was.
It sounded like her last album, and the album that people would tsk tsk about wasted talent.
Then she got married again, and the whole thing was bizarre.
There was gossip about money, the sexuality of the spouse, of a new television show, of more rehab and perhaps redemption.
David Gest, her new husband, is playing Svengali and that means a new album-
It is not bad, fresher and more alive then most, but not reaching Cabaret- which seems unreachable.
Cabaret won the Oscar, instead of the Godfather, and it deserved it.
It’s not really about Nazis, like the Godfather is not really about the Mafia.
Period Pieces are more about the when they are shot, then when they are set.
So it’s about the sexuality confusion of the 70s
Which means boys sleep with boys and boys sleep with girls, and boys and girls sleep together.
The Ultimate symbol of Liberation is a trannie pissing next to you.
We’ve been expecting Liza to die since Cabaret, and she was barely mentioned when Alan Cumming threw all of the ambiguity away-the nostalgia about that restoration was that it happened at the Old Studio 54.
Look at the pictures of the wedding- there is people from David’s work old friends of Judy’s and tabloid freaks.
You can count the face-lifts, and the scandals outweigh the work.
It doesn’t matter the quality of Liza’s material anymore-she crossed over.