(Click
for earlier bad tale of Grandma as a milk-drinking pipsqueak)
or
start here...
...After
poor--but happy--frolicking years of art school in Philadelphia at The
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (and stints at Moore College of Art
and The University of the Arts), Erika was surprised to find herself out on
the streets with a lot of attitude and an inability to keep any jobs. So after a
line of failed crappy jobs, bad room mates, and a couple of
days in jail, Erika was losing the dream of being a rich and famous artist
strung out on heroin supplied by gallery dealers.
Erika
quickly adjusted and hoped to become a famous cartoonist for porn magazines.
No go. But her cartoons kept getting published in San Francisco and so she
moved there and ended up living with a Gothic meth lap dancer and a
bleach-blonde Eskimo call girl from Canada.
Soon
after getting her own apartment with no job in sight, Lopez got a couple of
grants she’d--half-jokingly, but desperately-- applied for during one of
her previous “fired” periods back in Philadelphia: She was a Pew
discipline winner a couple of times, but the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation
and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts each gave her $2500 to write.
Write?
Write what?
She's no writer!
So
following through on her own dare and having nothing left to lose, she read
bad books to inspire her (she knew she could do better with a concussion and
her hands tied behind her back), learned to ride a crappy motorcycle in a week, and rode cross country so she
could at least write about doing something. When she made it safely home,
she faked her way through her first novel, “Flaming
Iguanas,” sprinkling it with enough illustrations to distract the reader from
the writing.
It
worked. It sold. Her editor at Simon & Schuster offered her money to
write again and again, and so she wrote and wrote until she realized she was
getting weird and creepy after so much time alone.
The
future seemed so bright for young Erika, she thought she’d have a
Victorian house in San Francisco within an hour. But after a Simon
& Schuster finale involving a publicist in hot pink pants, and a
tired, bitchy, and cocky author--suffice it to say that the
jig was up. Erika had it up to here with publishing, and unwisely shot
herself in the foot at the beginning of what was to become a massive economic
downturn.
In
no time at all she was going down in flames...
Again,
Erika simply went with the flow. She embraced failure with a pinch on the
cheek and a pat on the head, by getting fatter, wearing muumuus, listening to AM talk radio too loud, and calling herself “Grandma
Lopez.” Grandma Lopez was going around calling people "toots",
pinching their cheeks too hard, and giving
everyone unsolicited advice as she limped on over to the welfare line. Once
there, she’d mumble obscenities to herself and jot down angry notes in the margins of the salmon-colored applications.
Becoming
a burden to the state and calling the welfare checks her “special mini art
grants,” she turned those salmon-colored notes into "Nothing
Left but the Smell: A Republican on Welfare." As far as anyone
knows, it’s the first known Food Stamp Variety Show with lots of
theatrical complaining, some papery cartoon moments, and tender, bitter
singing. It's a show about being a sorely-mistaken, middle class
pipsqueak … one of those totally unsympathetic characters who grows
up thinking all the civil and voting fights have already been fought so now
she’s free to sit back and buy lots of crap from mail order catalogues.
Instead, she ends up in the
welfare line so she can star in her own variety show about it later.
She's already done a couple of
month-long runs in San Francisco and NYC. She's taken it on the road for
some cheapo quickies to Portland, Oregon; to Mount Holyoke Women's College in
Massachusetts where they have fireplaces in their dorm rooms; and has been asked to Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey
twice.
In the summer 2004, some cool
Swedish folks are flying her out to have have both art and performance shows
there, and a girl named "Meaty Maggy" is going to set up some
dates in Oslo, Norway. And if Grandma Lopez has had enough to drink and
jammed plenty of welfare money in her Grandma cleavage, and is feeling
masochistic enough, maybe she'll take herself up on her own dare to do a
week at Edinburgh's Fringe Festival?
Her new goal in life is to one
day be interviewed on American TV in 25 years and laugh condescendingly at
Leslie Stahl and her discreetly hidden colostomy bag and sound like Tina
Turner before her big comeback: "But I was always big in Europe.
In Europe they always knew who I was."
"Hey!"--you
interrupt--"What about all that vast
retail experience?" You ask? "Is it all to go to waste at the end of a
person's life?" No! We say. For all
that retail experience has finally come in mighty handy: After each show,
she cheerfully sells the art chick book version of Nothing
Left but the Smell (she's currently making the affordable version
of this as her own cheap "Grandma Lopez" magazine, due out around
the end of December), as well as home-made Grandma Lopez beauty products that she doesn’t
test on animals, but on her foster children instead.
She’s got: Crack
Ho’ Glow beer-flavored lip balm, "Brother Can You Spare a
Dime?" Soap with actual surprise dime; and "Welfare After-Bath
Refreshing Mist" in a middle-class, freshly mowed lawn scent.
Things may still be a little
rough right now, but she figures it's par for the course. Thinking like that
keeps the complaining down. She may not be able to sit back and order from
catalogues all day but on a good day, she can watch "Matlock" and catch "Columbo"
before lunch. And in between TV shows, she's collaborating more than ever, traveling around,
meeting really nice folks, and trying all sorts of new projects she would've
been too chicken-shit to try on her own before. Her fans are like all of her
dead ex-husbands, and have totally
saved her bacon and inspired her during difficult times.
And like her ex's, for better or worse,
her fans have learned
that just reading and liking one of her books and then writing her about it
can sucker-punch them into a whole give-n'-take relationship with her
looking over at them expectantly in the audience and asking the all-time
relationship greatest hits favorite: "What are you thinking?"
La la la...
