Gerry Visco with her boys at Marquee: Tristan Mayfield & Kyle Brincefield
Gerry Visco with her boys at Marquee: Tristan Mayfield & Kyle Brincefield
Originally uploaded by Gerry Visco
Housewives from Hell: Peaches Christ, Gerry Visco, and Shealita BaBay
Housewives from Hell: Peaches Christ, Gerry Visco, and Shealita BaBay
Originally uploaded by Gerry Visco
Peaches Christ, Gerry Visco and Shealita Baby after “All About Evil” screening
Peaches Christ, Gerry Visco and Shealita Baby after "All About Evil" screening
Originally uploaded by Gerry Visco
Join the Gerry party!
Do you want to improve your life, look better, feel better, and save the planet? Are you plagued by depression, wrinkles, lack of energy, constipation, erection problems, or just plain old boredom? Gerrification is the answer and it’s FREE. A new technique, a movement and a burgeoning political party, we all need Gerrification because let’s face it, we could all use a makeover.
“Gerrification” is an interactive, multi-media show premiering at the 19th annual Hot! Festival at Dixon Place, a celebration of queer culture and performance, on the Lower East Side on Tuesday, July 27th at 9 PM. The show, starring Gerry Visco, who is also the writer and director, will reveal the secret strategies Gerry Visco has used to become truly fabulous. She will put into action some of the methods she has used to become a style icon and nightlife personality with the audience and her cast members. She will demonstrate Gerrification, which is guaranteed to make you laugh and have a good time. Gerry Visco believes that feeling good and looking good is synonymous. Gerrification, her divine mission on planet earth, is an anti-gentrification global effort designed to bring joy and beauty to America and the world by inviting people to dress like her—by donning a characteristically outlandish platinum wig, cat-eye glasses, and bright clothing. The show celebrates individuality, non-conformism, outer beauty, fashion, pleasure, cosmetics, social interaction, partying, and plain old fun.
Interactive methods include encouraging members of the audience to “volunteer” to become Gerrified and to join the Gerry party. A group of Gerrys will speak in unison to narrate the history of Gerry and present the Gerry platform. Some of the proposals in her manifesto: the new workday will be 2 to 9, not 9 to 5; plastic surgery will be mandatory; free makeup will be distributed at every street corner; the water system will be filled with gin; the color beige will be banned on penalty of death; there will be parties going on everywhere at all times of the day and night.
Slide shows demonstrating her fabulosity will be shown to instruct and entertain you. She will also show some of her most fabulous outfits that she’s put together over the years, beginning with her mother, a traditional 1950s mom, who was married in a huge Mafiosa wedding. The decades of Gerrification will demonstrate a lifetime of looking good, from frilly frocks and socks with banana curls and bows to elegant designer outfits to the wild disco glad rags she sports nowadays. In a more serious vein, Visco will narrate her life during the 1970s when she first arrived in New York City and she took a walk on the wild side in more ways than one. Videos interviewing her friends and enemies will be played and her excursions Gerrifying and terrifying the citizens of New York City will be featured. Gerrification in song and dance will be celebrated by the cast and audience alike.
Cast members, apart from Gerry Visco, include Jennifer Blowdryer, Matthew Herra*C, Fritz Donnelly, Christina Ewald, Mari Gustafson, Inbred Hybrid Collective, Louis Jordan, Katie Madonna Lee, Cole Nahal, Sir Pudge, Dennis Rolland. Joseph Keckler will appear on video.
Gerrification will make you look better, feel better, and improve your day, your mood, your life. It’s cheaper than Prozac without all the side effects. Let’s face it, we could all use a makeover.
Gerry Visco is illegally blonde and is at large on the Upper East Side after years of causing trouble on the Upper West Side. She lives in a soulless huge apartment complex across from the mosque where she swims laps daily in the rooftop pool. She toils at a day job at one of New York’s leading research universities. She moved to New York City from Boston, Massachusetts in 1974 during the days of grit and glam. Taking the subways in those days meant checking behind you frequently to make sure no one was there with a knife ready to stab you. Hers is a Moll Flanders-like tale of the picaresque. Needless to say, Visco was raped and robbed shortly after arriving into town. Among numerous other casualties, most of her friends from the early days have left New York City, many of whom are dead from AIDS or drug overdoses. She’s been called a bipolar fashionista and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disordered but she manages to cope with her disabilities, even thrive on them. One of her frequent laments is, “I’m so fabulous it makes me sick.” A writer, performer, photographer, style icon, performer, and radio show host, she regularly covers parties, events, and the arts for New York Press. She created her own one-woman show at the Hot! Festival at Dixon Place in August 2009 dramatizing her colorful life as muse, FIT student, actor, fag hag, rent girl, and disco diva in the gritty glamorous world of New York City during the 1970s and 1980s, the subject matter for the memoir she is currently writing. She’s appeared at venues such as Dixon Place, the Slipper Room, Envoy Enterprises Gallery, Parkside Lounge, Paddy Reilly’s, and Chantal’s House of Shame in Berlin. Her photographs have been exhibited at Envoy Enterprises Gallery, Artflux, Gallery U in Montclair, NJ and at the upcoming opening of Gallery U in Detroit, Michigan. Current projects include transforming into Miss Juicy Geraldine, an 85-year-old senior citizen sex advocate. Visco’s first role was in Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories” in 1977. She has a BA, MFA, and MS in Journalism from Columbia University. According to one of her professors, “Gerry Visco is a piece of work!”
“Gerrification!” with Gerry Visco
Hot! Festival at Dixon Place
161a Chrystie Street (betw. Rivington and Delancey)
full bar in the Lounge upstairs
tickets: $10 in advance, $15 at door
212-219-0736
www.hotfestival.org
https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/748625
Tuesday, July 20,2010
Bash Compactor: Once Upon a Penis
at the Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery for Jessica Yatrofsky’s Performance and the Male Nude No. 6
By Gerry Visco
…….
The press release said Jessica Yatrofsky is wholly interested in men, and their underrepresented sexuality. Huh? What about Internet porn—the whole industry is geared towards the male sex. But I saw her point: Mainstream America never shows dick anywhere, whether it be flicks, pics or TV commercials.
It was a sweltering Thursday night in Chelsea and I was at the Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery to see Yatrofsky’s performance and show, titled Performance and the Male Nude No. 6. Yatrofsky does a lovely job photographing naked dudes, both composition-wise and in finding delicious subjects. Maybe that’s why the room was so crammed. The one-time performance was designed to complement Self Exposure, the gallery’s current exhibition featuring Zachari Logan, Francesca Romo and Shen Wei.
We were warned the performance would start at 7 sharp, but nobody told me it would be over 17 minutes later. Given New York City’s bumper-to-bumper traffic, some missed most of the show and there wasn’t a drop of wine, beer or even sparkling water in the sweatbox of a room. But who the hell cared—within 10 minutes of arriving, I hit the jackpot, meeting breathtakingly handsome models Edo Tastic and Andrew Yang, as well as Jeffrey Gaunt, wearing black sunglasses and toting a book called Sex at Dawn. “I’m learning a lot about sexuality,” he confided.
With the longhaired and tattooed Yang as model, Yatrofsky re-enacted the famous scene from the 1966 Antonioni flick Blow Up, where the photographer practically fucks the model with the camera. She used four different ones, snapping away as Yang disrobed. “I present my work as live performance to physically confront an audience with the penis itself, either erect or not,” said Yatrofsky, herself a pretty wholesome-looking brunette. “I’m passionate about male sexuality.” The Polaroids she took were scattered on the floor, where they will remain throughout the Self Exposure exhibit.
I wanted to see more nude performance, but that would have to wait until the fall, when Yatrofsky’s book on male nudes will be published. Meanwhile, we bumped into Tastic on the way out. “I’d love to take some photos of you,” I said, eyeing the male beauty’s luxuriant, tawny-colored Afro. Yatrofsky is originally from Las Vegas, where nude performance is more commonplace. “It was hard finding a gallery in Chelsea that would allow it,” she told me. And this is supposed to be the naked city!
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