GREAT DAMES II - Bust Magazine

GREAT DAMES IIinterviews with solange, dolly parton, tina fey, jessica williams, carrie brownstein, rose mcgowan, courtney love, greta gerwig, kathleen hanna, alana glazer and abbi jacobson

1 turning the taBleS (April/May 2017) A Grammy-winning singer/songwriter/producer/activist and fashion icon with a LOT to say, Solange is exactly the kind of star we’ve been waiting for. By Jamia Wilson

10 all dolled up (June /July 2014) Our cups runneth over with love for Dolly Parton—country music’s

BUST-iest badass. By Lisa Butterworth

18 Fey’S time (Aug/Sept 2016) Who better to usher in our 100th issue than comedy legend Tina

Fey—our most popular interviewee of all time? By Debbie Stoller

28 SeriouSly Funny (Feb/Mar 2016) Catching up with The Daily Show’s reigning queen of satire, Jes-

sica Williams. By Bridgette Miller

36 Carrie on (Aug/Sept 2014) The multitalented Carrie Brownstein opens up about Portandia,

Sleater-Kinney, and the legacy she’s proud to leave behind. By Lisa Butterworth

44 peaCe, Courtney love, and underStanding (June/July 2013)

Ever wondered what it would be like to spend the day with rock icon and perpetual rebel Courtney Love? Well, here’s your chance to find out. By Debbie Stoller

52 She’S all that (June/July 2015) Laverne Cox, star of Orange is the New Black, opens up about boy-friends, black culture, and bell hooks. By Sara Benincasa

60 reBel girl (June/July 2016) Kathleen Hanna, the undisputed queen of riot grrrl, opens up

about her return to public life with her hit squad the Julie Ruin. By Lisa Butterworth

68 roSe the riveting (Dec/Jan 2017) Rose McGowan’s evolution from movie star to social media femi-

nist warrior is super inspiring. And she’s just getting started. By Amber Tamblyn

76 greta the great (Dec/Jan 2018) Indie actor Greta Gerwig stepped behind the camera to write and direct Lady Bird, and created the best female coming-of-age film in years. By Jenni Miller

84 all aBroad! (Feb/Mar 2015) Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of Comedy Central’s hilarious hit Broad City bro down and act up. By Bridgette Miller

Table of Contents

38 . apr/may 2017 . BUST

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Solange Piaget Knowles is a time trav-eler. At just 30 years old, she already represents a bold new synthesis of R&B, funk, soul, and hip-hop, expertly carrying the mantle of her creative forbearers while imagining whole new

artistic worlds into existence. Despite pressure to confine herself to fit narrow industry

standards for female R&B vocalists, her latest album, A Seat at the Table, is her most overtly political, critically acclaimed, and commercially successful release to date. In it, Solange takes unapologetic ownership of her cultural pride, voice, and style. “All my niggas let the whole world know,” she declares on her song “F.U.B.U.” “Play this song and sing it on your terms/For us, this shit is for us/Don’t try to come for us.”

Clearly, Solange was unambiguous about her goals and intentions while making her third studio album. Beyond serving as a love letter to blackness past and present, A Seat at the Table is a call to action. A breathing piece of oral his-tory, the album empowers listeners to share and celebrate their stories of triumph and tribulation, practice self-care, and reach back for ancestral wisdom while marching for-ward in the face of injustice.

I first meet Solange during her BUST cover shoot in Long Island City, Queens. Taking shelter from frigid winds, I confirm that I’m in the right place when I notice the shad-ow of her long silhouette and curly fro swaying on the bright studio wall. For the next few hours, Solange dazzles in a

number of bold futuristic styles, including stunning designs by Issey Miyake, whom she’s credited on Instagram for inspiring the avant-garde aesthetic she and her mom, Tina Knowles Lawson, developed for A Seat at the Table’s visual elements. Lithe and graceful, Solange glides around the set with an air of purposeful lightheartedness, despite being tired from recent travel.

During a break, I stroll over to check out the pulsing playlist we’ve been enjoying, featuring Sun Ra, Sade, Outkast, Prince, Cassie, Michael Jackson, Animal Collective, and Marvin Gaye. When I notice the music is playing on Tidal—her brother-in-law Jay-Z’s streaming service—Solange’s team confirms that she made the mix. As I continue to listen, I recognize how whispers of this eclectic blend of intergen-erational influences made it in to her emergent sound.

Solange’s recent tribute to the 20th anniversary of Erykah Badu’s iconic debut album, at Essence Magazine’s Black Women in Music event, is just one example of her reverence for the artistic lineage that inspired her own evolu-tion. Of Badu, Solange remarked, “she is mother, she is sister, she is friend, she is auntie, she is chief, she is warrior of many tribes. She is a beautiful reminder that you cannot put us in a box.” Her words, while directed toward Badu, could easily be used to describe Solange’s own persona—one that centers the beautifully messy complexities of black women’s lives.

The next day, a few hours before Solange is due to “get back to [her] babies”—she lives in New Orleans with her

With her latest album, A Seat at the Table, Solange created not only an r&B masterpiece, but also a call to action. Here, the soul-singing superstar opens up about her upbringing in her mom’s salon, talks about her “womanist” awakening, and shares a tearful moment with our interviewer

By jamia wilson

photos By naDya wasylKo // styling By peju Famojure // maKeup By tracy alFajora

hair By amy FariD // nails By miss pop

Turning The Tables


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husband, music video director Alan Ferguson, and her 12-year-old son Julez from a previous marrriage—we meet for breakfast at Hotel Americano in Chelsea’s gallery district. Illuminated by the sun streaming in from the patio, Solange sips decaf as if she hadn’t just spent the past 48 hours keynoting at Yale, modeling for BUST, and attending Open Ceremony’s protest-inspired bal-let performance and fashion show.

Admiring her air of tranquility despite her demanding schedule, I note that she truly “woke up like this,” as her older sister Beyoncé—whom she affectionately refers to as “B”—fa-mously sang on her self-titled album. After commiserating about the power of the protests at JFK airport that occurred following Trump’s Muslim ban, and our shared aversion to the cold weather’s effect on our Southern-bred sinuses, we dive into deeper conversation.

Solange starts out by describing how growing up in her mother’s Houston, TX, hair salon inspired her. “I saw women of all kinds, from doctors to teachers to strippers to drug dealers’ girlfriends to judges. I saw the entire spectrum of black women,” she muses, vividly describing the clientele who she refers to as her “2,000 aunties.” Passionate about the power of the salon as a convening space for women to care for themselves and tell stories about their lives, Solange noted the common threads between their experiences. After nibbling on her plate of smoked salmon and eggs, she says, “I would see them come into the sa-lon, and carry these woes of whatever they were dealing with

in the world, whether it be career issues, relationship issues, self-esteem issues, or whatever they were working through. And as you know, a black hair salon is really kind of a mediation and therapy session between you and your stylist and the other women in the salon,” she says with a laugh. “I would hear these conversations,” she continues, “and I think what I was hearing, outside of the triumph and the resilience and the grace, was also just how hard it is out in the world for us.”

That female bonding didn’t end once the salon closed for the night. From the way Solange describes it, the Knowles family home was also a place where sisterhood ran deep. “I grew up in a house with five women,” she says. “My mother, my sister B, Kelly [Rowland, of Destiny’s Child] actually moved in with us when I was five. And my other—I also consider [her] my sister, but she’s actually my first cousin, Angie—she moved in when I was 13. So this household was all women’s work. Literally. And there was ab-solutely nothing that couldn’t be done between us. My father was super smart and brilliant and instilled many wonderful qualities in us, but my mother was really the heart and soul of the family.”

Chatting more about how she “felt the sisterhood of black women everywhere” as a result of her upbringing, I share with Solange that her conscious lyrics have created for many, includ-ing myself, a sense of spaciousness and possibility in the midst of a tense and traumatic social climate. “Thank you for recogniz-ing that,” she says. “I think that as women, and as black women in general, we’re always having to fight two times harder.” Solange straightens in her seat. “And you know, even with my videos, I was so invested in the visual storytelling, of wanting to see black men and women in the way that I see them every day, which is powerful but graceful but also vulnerable and also regal and stately. And how we use style as a language, and our pag-eantry, and how we communicate.”

Storytelling is just one way Solange leverages her platform to lift up her community as she climbs. Like Prince—the late artist whose activism inspired Solange’s January lecture at Yale—she walks her talk by investing in women and people of color, in public and behind the scenes. For example, her collaboration with hairstylist Nikki Nelms inspired a tidal wave of YouTube and selfie memes celebrating and emulating her natural black tresses that became known as the “Solange Effect.” The phrase was coined by writer Doreen St. Felix in Vogue to describe a phenomenon that both elevated public conversation about black women’s beauty, and helped Nelms cultivate global recognition. Solange has also been compiling a directory of black-owned businesses, curating a crowdsourced A Seat at the Table syl-

labus, and speaking out about moving her money to a black-owned bank.

This past February, while accept-ing her very first Grammy for Best R&B Performance for her song “Cranes in the Sky,” Solange recognized the far-reaching impact of performers with social justice legacies like Marvin Gaye and Nina Sim-one, who “push political messages through their music and artistry.” In a media and political landscape that is becoming in-creasingly fraught with fake news and

“alternative facts,” she used the Grammy stage to call for truth telling and community building. “I think that all we can do as artists, and especially as songwriters, is write about what’s true to us,” she said. “I felt like I won far before this, because of the connectivity that the record has had, especially with black women and the stories that I hear on the street.”

Although Solange’s political voice is more amplified on this latest album, I learn during our talk that she’s been building support systems for black women and girls since she started a group called “The BF club” in middle school. She reaches for her phone and shows me an image of her 13-year-old self, pos-ing with other young brown girls with cornrows and delightful smiles. “I realize, looking back, that it was really about creating fellowship in a space that felt like it didn’t belong to us, because it was a predominately white school,” she says. “We were giv-ing each other sisterhood and camaraderie and just creating safe spaces for ourselves.”

Since Knowles speaks so much about how powerful women inspire her, I ask if she identifies as a feminist. “Yes. I am a proud

“I was so invested in wanting to see black men and women in the way that I see them every day, which is powerful but graceful but also vulnerable and also regal and stately.”

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black feminist and womanist and I’m extremely proud of the work that’s being done,” she says, referring to the school of thought put forth by writer Alice Walker in her 1983 essay col-lection In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, in which African-American women are placed more centrally in the struggle for women’s liberation. “I’m a feminist who wants not only to hear the term intersectionality, but actually feel it, and see the evolution of what intersectional feminism can actually achieve. I want women’s rights to be equally hon-ored, and uplifted, and heard...but I want to see us fighting the fight for all women—women of color, our LGBTQ sisters, our Muslim sisters. I want to see millions of us marching out there for our rights, and I want to see us out there marching for the rights of women like Dajerria Becton, who was body slammed by a cop while she was in her swimsuit for simply existing as a young, vocal, black girl. I think we are inching closer and closer there, and for that, I am very proud.”

Reflecting on how she developed her black feminist iden-tity, Solange ruminates on how both the women at her mom’s hair salon and writers and activists online helped inform her perspective. “I feel really grateful that I’m also a student of black feminists and womanists,” she says, “and of women who have created this terminology for us to use as we carve out our space. That is one of the beautiful things about the Internet. I’m a high-school educated woman. And I rely on incredible women like the ones you mentioned [we had spo-ken previously about the groups Crunk Feminist Collective and Black Women’s Blueprint], and women like yourself, to really guide me through the process of carving out my feel-ings, and how I articulate them.”

Solange’s remark about carving out her feelings leads me to thinking about the ways she’s literally rewriting the rule-book for women vocalists, and transforming the cultural nar-rative as a composer. Above all of her other talents as a singer, actor, model, and producer, Solange prizes her identity as a songwriter most of all. Her eyes light up when I ask about the role of writing in her life and work. “It means everything to me,” she says. “I consider myself a songwriter first, and in the trajectory of what I’m trying to create, singer comes last. I’m really invested in storytelling.”

Her longtime writing prowess has flourished since she won second-place in the United Way’s jingle-writing competi-tion in elementary school, and expanded into an impressive songwriting and production resume that includes, among many other achievements, writing, arranging, and co-produc-ing every song on her new album, and serving as music consul-tant for Issa Rae’s HBO show, Insecure. Although I’ve observed an increased focus on this aspect of Solange’s talents in recent profiles, many features about her are more eager to focus on her personal relationships, vocal abilities, and fashion sense than on her formidable composition skills. It’s with this in mind that I share with her my frustration with a longtime trend I’ve observed in mainstream music coverage. “Solange, I’m exhausted by it,” I say, “but why is it that mostly white women vocalists get praised for writing their own music?”

Solange responds thoughtfully. “I don’t know the answer to that,” she says. “I think that the black female voice, especially

in R&B music, has always been kind of accessorized. Because I guess it’s supposed to be just so easy and effortless for us, as vocalists.” She sighs. “[Singing] is something that a lot of people think that we are all just blessed with. And so, maybe that’s it. But I do know that there are so many black women who paved the way for me as a songwriter. I think about Missy Elliott, and what she achieved not only as a songwriter, but as a producer in such a male-dominated industry at the time. I mean, you can’t get any more feminist than what she was writing.”

Despite Solange’s magical ability to make it feel like she’s bending time and space in her performances, we aren’t able to shape shift our way out of the reality of her impending flight departure time. I thank her for taking a risk by speak-ing truth to power, and for providing affirmation and solace at a time when so many are in the throes of alienation due to the prevalence of sexism, racism, and state violence targeting people of color. “I’ve literally just been immersed in gratitude that the work that I feel like I was the most afraid to do, in the beginning, has been received in this way,” she says, wiping away a few tears. “What this project has done for me is more than I could ever—I’ll start crying—but more than I could ever do for anyone else.”

Heartened by Solange’s vulnerability, I realize that the resonance and connection her album provided for countless women means just as much to her as it does for us. Humbled, I placed my hand on my heart and share that A Seat at the Table moved me in a way that felt similar to when I read Ntozake Shange’s award-winning choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /When the Rainbow is Enuf. Tears well up in my eyes as I say, “Thank you for your assertion of self and for the knowledge that I’m not alone in my experience. We’re persevering.”

Our eyes meet, and she declares, “Well, that is what women are doing for me. When I read [poet, essayist, and play-wright] Claudia Rankine, that is what she’s doing for me. I feel like black women go through so much on a daily basis, we need to tell each other, ‘Hey girl, you’re not crazy.’”

And with that, we end a conversation that has traveled across our shared experiences, raised our consciousness, and brimmed with therapeutic reflection. As she walks out the door in her silky, pearl-colored Tigra Tigra shirt, I notice the writing on her back for the first time. Embroidered in scarlet are the words, “GOOD LUCK.”

“I want to see us fighting the fight for all women—women of color, our LGBTQ sisters, our Muslim sisters. I want to see millions of us marching out there for our rights.”

AllDolled

Up

Country music legend Dolly Parton opens up about her new album, her old-time religion, and what makes “I Will Always Love You” the greatest ballad of all time

By Lisa Butterworth

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“What better Person to do BUST magazine than me?” It’s the first thing Dolly Parton says when she calls from her part-time home of Nashville, TN, before letting loose with a melodic laugh, as familiar as her Southern, honey-pie accent. It’s not surprising that the 68-year-old leads with a boob joke. Her larger-than-life chest on her petite five-foot frame garners as much attention from fans and the media as her plati-num-selling singing voice and hit-making songwriting. And making boob jokes is kind of her thing. “I’ll just say something, you know, ‘Well, I’m glad to get that off my chest,’ right up front so then they can’t comment,” she says. “But of course, you don’t want people to just think that that’s all you are.”

Anyone with an inkling of Parton’s history knows she’s much more than her bra size (and no, her chest isn’t insured for half a million dollars as celebrity lore would have you believe). She’s a singer, a songwriter, a tireless performer, a mu-sician, a movie star, an author, a philanthropist, and even an amusement park mogul (in 1986 she bought a Smoky Mountain–themed tourist attraction in Pigeon Forge, TN, and reopened it as Dollywood). She’s won eight Grammys and has been nominated for 46 of them (a female artist record tied only by Beyoncé). She’s re-corded 42 studio albums and has had 26 number-one hits on the country music charts. She was even nomi-nated for two Oscars for Best Original Song: one for “9 to 5,” the track she wrote for the eponymous, now-clas-sic feminist flick she also starred in, and one for “Trav-elin’ Thru,” the theme from 2005’s Transamerica, which featured Felicity Huffman as a trans woman.

But somehow it always comes back to her looks. And her breasts. “I don’t mind. I’ve kind of exposed them. I had big boobs all my life, but I had ’em made even bigger, so why not just go along with the fun,” she says. “People hopefully now at least know there is a heart beneath the boobs and that’s one of the rea-sons my boobs are so big, it’s just all heart pushin’ out my chest,” she says, letting out another laugh. It’s this combination of “I do what I want” attitude, disarming graciousness, and an endlessly sunny disposition that make Parton one of the most loveable icons of country music. But after nearly six decades in the public eye, she’s become much more than that. Her body of work is so pro-woman, if BUST had a hall of fame, she’d be a shoe-in. And she doesn’t have a legion of gay fans for nothing—Parton has always been supportive of the

gay community, even while championing a deeply re-ligious worldview. In a culture of manufactured pop singers, she’s a self-made superstar who rose to the top exactly the way she wanted to. And her status as such is a feat in and of itself.

Parton was born in 1946 in Sevier County, TN, just north of the Great Smoky Mountains, the fourth of 12 kids. Legend has it she was delivered by a local pastor who was paid for his services with a bag of cornmeal. Her parents were sharecroppers and the family lived in a one-room farm cabin—money was scarce but cre-

ativity was free, and plentiful. Her aunt wrote songs, her grandmother was known in town for her singing, and her uncles played a variety of instruments. Her grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher and some of Parton’s earliest “performances” were in church. She wrote her first song about her homemade corncob doll when she was just a kid, and learned to play guitar shortly afterward. In 1960, she made her first record-ing at the studio of one of her musician uncles; the 45 featured two songs she co-wrote, “Puppy Love” and “Girl Left Alone.”

That was over half a century ago. Blue Smoke, re-leased in May, marks her 42nd album. But she’s no less enthusiastic about this one than she was about the 41 others that came before. “I get excited about whatever my latest project is. Every time, I think, Well, this is the best I’ve ever done,” she says. “This album really has all the colors of my life and my personality in it, from gospel to mountain music to bluegrass to the country flavor and the pop stuff. It has duets too, so it kind of marks all the things I’ve done through the years.”

Obviously, the things she’s done through the years are plentiful. Not only did Parton build a world-re-nowned career despite an incredibly impoverished childhood, but she also did it during a time when women were second-class citizens, relegated to kitchens and secretary desks. After finishing high school (the first in her family to do so), Parton hopped on a bus and headed to Nashville. It wasn’t long be-

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“People hopefully now at least know there is a heart beneath the

boobs and that’s one of the reasons my boobs are so big, it’s just all

heart pushin’ out my chest.”

From Childhood to dollywood: A dolly PArton timeline

1946 Dolly is born in sevier county, tn, the fourth of 12 children.

1957 Dolly records her first single, “Puppy Love,” at age 11.

1966 Dolly gets her big break when she’s cast on The Porter Wagoner Show.

1973 Dolly writes two of her biggest hits, “i Will Always Love you,” and “Jolene” on the same day.

fore she was getting paid to write songs—she often talks about being the only girl hanging out in the base-ment of Monument Records, writing with the likes of Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson—and at 19 she landed her first record deal. But it was her addition as a regular on famed country star Porter Wagoner’s television variety show that truly acquainted Amer-ica with Parton’s charisma, mile-high hair, dimpled smile, and heart-splitting vibrato.

It was right around this time, in 1968, that Parton re-leased the title track to her second album, Just Because I’m a Woman. Its prescient lyrics about sexual double standards are just as relevant in today’s slut-shaming culture as they were in the ’60s: “I’m sorry that I’m not/The woman you thought I’d be/Yes, I’ve made my mistakes/But listen and understand/My mistakes are no worse than yours/Just because I’m a woman.” The song debuted at the beginning of Parton’s rise to fame, and is one of the main reasons she’s hailed by many as a feminist icon. But this appointment isn’t without its complications. How many feminist icons have self-rendered their bodies to resemble a Barbie doll (or a Backwoods Barbie, the title of her 40th album)? The subject is open to debate, and debated it is, with lengthy diatribes—mostly defending her feminist-icon worthi-ness—appearing everywhere from Jezebel.com, to The Times of London, to the Huffington Post. (For her part, Gloria Steinem praised Dolly Parton in a 1987 issue of Ms. magazine, calling her a woman who “has turned all the devalued symbols of womanliness to her own ends.”) Even Parton’s style, which she often says was inspired by prostitutes, can be looked at from both sides of the lens. Is she parading herself as an object of the male gaze, or is her appearance a self-conscious, almost ironic, over-the-top gender performance? “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!” is one of her favorite Dolly-isms (the capitalizing marketer even offers the phrase on an official Dolly Parton shirt), and her attire seems to be a sartorial middle finger to those who think they know what a “lady”—especially one of Parton’s age—should look like.

But many doubts about Parton’s feminist cred can be laid to rest with a simple viewing of her feature film debut in 9 to 5. In 1980, after a chance run-in with Jane

Fonda helped land her the part, Parton starred in this screwball comedy drenched in the ethos of second-wave feminism—as secretary Doralee Rhodes. Along-side Fonda and Lily Tomlin, Parton played a woman fed up with her sexist jerk of a boss. The three decide to get even, and the film plays out like an absurd feminist re-venge fantasy involving kidnapping, blackmailing, and the eventual liberation of the three women. The movie introduced the singer as a bona fide movie star—she’d go on to star in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas with Burt Reynolds and Steel Magnolias with Julia Roberts and Shirley MacLaine, among others—and helped Par-ton the musician cross over from country to the main-stream with the movie’s title hit, a tune that Parton sup-posedly jotted down on the back of her script between takes, tapping out the rhythm with her acrylic nails. The song went to number one on the country charts (noth-ing new for Parton), but also reached the top of the Bill-board Hot 100, making her one of the few female artists to ever have a simultaneous hit on both the country and pop charts. It also solidified her place as a role model for independent women, in a part that wasn’t too far from the truth. Parton has said that playing Doralee, who threatened to change her boss “from a rooster to a hen with one shot” using the gun in her purse, reminded her of the attitude she had to take with Porter Wagoner, a man she described to the L.A. Times in 2008 as “a male chauvinist pig.” That’s presumably one of the reasons Parton left their partnership in 1974, even though he’d brought her so much success.

Despite 9 to 5’s undeniable inclusion in the feminist film canon and the blatantly feminist themes running through her work, Parton, surprisingly, tells me she doesn’t identify with the label. “I consider myself a fe-male,” she responds, when I ask her if she’s a feminist. “I think of myself as somebody who’s just as smart as any man I know. I don’t think anybody should ever be judged by whether they’re male or female, black, white, blue, or green. I think people should be allowed to be themselves and to show the gifts they have, and be able to be acknowl-edged for that and to be paid accordingly. You know, I love men, but I love women too and I’m proud to be a woman. I just really try to encourage women to be all that they can be and I try to encourage men to let us be that.”

Parton will be the first to tell you that she’s pretty good at getting men to let her be all she can be. And you get the feeling that beneath all of the sparkle, shine, and Southern hospitality, there is a truly calculating busi-nesswoman. But if she’s manipulating you, you can be sure she’s doing it with a wink and a smile. “I’ve always been proud of the fact that I was a woman,” she says. “I grew up in a family of 12 children and 6 of those kids were boys. I was very close to my dad, and my uncles and my grandpas, and my brothers, so I relate to men. I understand the nature of men. I always say that I look like a woman, but I think like a man, or I can think like a man. So at least I know who they are and how they’re li-able to be. But through the years, I’ve always used my femininity to my benefit. I’ve never slept with anybody to get to the top, though. If I slept with somebody, it’s ’cause I wanted to, not to get from point A to point B.”

Parton’s refusal to call herself a feminist, while acting like one all over the place, may seem like a contradiction. But her life is full of apparent dichoto-mies. She’s as likely to be featured in Christianity Today—she’s said that songwriting is her “private time with God”—as she is in The Advocate. In 2006, she received that Oscar nod for penning the theme song for Transamerica, and the deeply spiritual singer often jokes about her gender. “I always say if I hadn’t been born a woman I’d have definitely been a drag queen, so there you go,” she says, with a giggle. “I’m gaudy and flashy and I’m probably gonna always be that.” And while those may be some of the main reasons she’s become a gay icon, she supports the community off stage as well, even vocally support-ing marriage equality. “I always say, ‘Sure, why can’t they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do,’” Parton once jokingly told Joy Behar when she

was a guest on her show. Between her legion of gay fans, her country bombshell persona, and the songs in which she defends women and their sexuality, how does she reconcile this social progressiveness with her deeply religious roots? “I don’t care what people do. I’m not God and I’m not a judge and I just accept people,” she says. “I try to find the God-like in every-body and respond to that. I just love people and we’re all God’s children so I don’t pass judgment on any-thing or anybody; I just look for the fun and the joy and the light in everybody.”

We may be 2,000 miles apart while we’re talking, but Parton’s charm comes through the phone line in full force; she sounds so casual and warm, we could just as easily be sippin’ sweet tea and shootin’ the shit on a ramshackle porch overlook-ing the banks of Tennessee’s Little Pigeon River. It’s clear she’s made a business of her likeability, and though she’s likely given this same spiel to thousands of other jour-nalists, she somehow still makes it seem authentic. It’s just another facet of her in-

triguing duplicity—Parton is a genuine person in exte-rior trappings that are anything but. She’s one of the few celebrities who is completely honest about the amount of plastic surgery she’s had. Much like her manufac-tured bosom, she cracks wise about nipping and tucking the rest of her body as well: “If I have one more facelift, I’ll have a beard,” she often jokes. She has a staffer em-ployed solely to create her custom outfits (no label on the planet makes clothes to her measurements, espe-cially as skin-tight as she likes to wear them), which are heavy on the fringe and kept in a humidity-controlled clothing warehouse spanning 24,000 square feet. She even has a full-time wig wrangler.

She also has a full-time husband, though you’d hard-ly know it. Parton met Carl Dean just hours after first

2014 Dolly releases her 42nd studio album, Blue Smoke, and finally appears on the cover of BUST.

1980 Dolly makes her film debut as Doralee rhodes in 9 to 5.

1986 Dolly’s theme park Dollywood opens in Pigeon forge, tn.

1999 Dolly is inducted into the country Music hall of fame.

arriving in Nashville, at a Wishy-Wash Laundromat, and the two were married in 1966. Dean apparently hates publicity and the two are rarely seen together. But Par-ton often talks of their marriage as a happy one, explain-ing repeatedly that the way they live is working out just fine for them, regardless of what anyone else thinks. (She also has an Oprah-Gayle-like relationship with her pal Judy Ogle, who’s been her best friend since the two were kids, sparking gay rumors that she’s often squelched). The couple never had kids, which seems to suit Parton

just fine. They helped raise several of her siblings once her career was on the up-and-up, and her nieces and nephews seem more like grandchildren (they even call her Aunt Granny). And of course, she has her music, which she refers to in a very maternal way when I ask about the mix of covers and originals on Blue Smoke. “The covers are more exciting to me as a singer, but the content, you know, is more personal to me if they’re mine,” she says. The most surprising cover on the new record is Bon Jovi’s “Lay Your Hands on Me.” But Par-ton has a way of making tracks her own, despite how disparate the original might seem, and this one is no exception. “I love Bon Jovi, first of all. So when I got ready to record this album, I thought, Well, which song am I going to choose to Dolly-ize? And that one popped into my mind,” she says at a press event the week af-ter our phone chat. “I thought, Wow, now that sounds like it would make a great gospel song. ’Cause I grew up where we believed in laying hands on people, prayin’ for em.” But even after “Dolly-izing” songs she loves, the ones that come straight from her—nearly non-stop if accounts of her prolificacy are to be believed—are their own kind of special. “It’s like your own children—you love other people’s kids, but you love your own the best,” she says. “My songs are like my children and I ex-pect them to support me when I’m old.”

One of the songs that’s certainly supporting her now is a little ditty called “I Will Always Love You.” Despite Parton’s acclaim in the country music scene, for some of us who came of age in the ’90s, our first introduction to Dolly actually came via Whitney Houston, who sang this Parton-penned tune as the theme song of the 1992

film The Bodyguard. Parton released the original—in-spired by her professional split from Porter Wagoner—in 1974, and it’s since become one of the most famous love songs of all time. Houston is only one of many who have covered it. Even Elvis Presley wanted to record a version when he first heard it, though Parton told him no when he also asked for publishing rights—a wise decision, since that tune alone has made her millions of dollars since. When I ask her why she believes that song has resonated for so long with so many people, her reply is thoughtful. “Well, I think it has for two reasons. One is, it’s a very simple melody, really easy to sing, like holding the notes. Even if you can’t sing, you can sing, Iiiiiiiiii-Iiiiii will alwaaaaays love yooou,” she says, sing-ing the chorus to demonstrate the song’s ease, as if we could all break into a wrenching soprano on command. (It should be noted, that having Dolly Parton herself croon those words straight from her mouth into your ear is an entirely surreal, amazing experience.) “Plus there’s the message,” she continues. “I think everybody can connect with it, whether it’s their lost love affair, or a partnership, or when children go off to college, or when people die. I’ve had so many people say, ‘Oh, we played “I Will Always Love You” at my dad’s funeral or at my mom’s funeral,’ so I think it’s something every-body can relate to for one reason or another.”

Being relatable is another characteristic on which Par-ton has built her career. She may own homes in Nashville, Malibu, and Manhattan, have an estimated net worth of $450 million, and a theme park named after her, but that’s not what people think of when it comes to Parton’s care-fully crafted legend. They remember her origin story, the one-room cabin and the 14-member family she helped support; they think of her tune, “Coat of Many Colors,” about the jacket her mom made from rags that parallels the Bible story of Joseph. She’s someone who came from nothing, who will never forget her roots. It helps that re-invigorating her hometown is a top priority for Parton (hence Dollywood), and that giving people jobs is some-thing she takes great pride in (the business of being Dolly employs nearly 3,000 people). The superstar also created a nonprofit called Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which sends books to underprivileged children, one a month from the day they’re born until their fifth birthday. “The Imagination Library really came from a serious place in my heart,” Parton says. “My dad and a lot of my relatives were not able to go to school, ’cause they were all from big poor mountain families, and when kids were born, they had to get out and work the fields and do whatever they

48 . June/JuLy 2014 . Bust

“My songs are like my children and I expect them

to support me when I’m old.”

could to keep the rest of the family going. My dad was so smart, but he couldn’t read and write. I just knew how crip-pling that was to him.” The organization now serves over half a million kids in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. “My dad was so proud of that,” she continues. “He got to live long enough to see the Imagination Library do well, and hear the kids call me the Book Lady.” Parton refers to “Try,” the plucky closing track on Blue Smoke, as the theme song for the Imagination Library. But it also acts as a type of soundtrack for Parton’s life, a manual for success the Dolly way. “Yes, I have always been a dreamer, and yes, I have always tried,” Parton says when asked about the song. “And dreams are special things. But dreams are of no value if they’re not equipped with wings and feet and hands and all that. If you’re gonna make a dream come true, you gotta work it. You can’t just sit around. That’s a wish. That’s not a dream.”

Mini pep talks like this one are simply part of Parton’s being. If she ever decided to retire from music (God forbid), she could undoubtedly travel the world as a motivational speaker. Following her on Twitter is like having a super-smiley life coach, cheering you on with her sweet Southern charm. “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails! ” and “When someone shows you their true colors, believe them! ” are just a couple of representative Tweets. But it’s her tongue-in-dimpled-cheek humor that knocks the saccharine down a bit, just before it gets cloying. “Well, Dan-ny’s holding up one finger,” she says toward the end of our conversation, referring to one of the many team members keeping her on a well-greased press schedule. “He gave me the other one before and I didn’t acknowledge it, so I think this is the middle one,” she says, laughing at her own joke. I squeeze in one more question: As someone who’s made such a name for herself by being no one but herself, what advice would Parton—who happens to be Miley Cyrus’ godmoth-er—give to young women coming up in the music industry now? “Well I tell you, it is hard to be yourself, especially this day and time. There’s so many managers, so many people telling you what to do and how to do it and when to do it, how to say it, how to sing it. I just kind of feel sorry for a lot of the artists today. It was different in my day,” she says, her voice lilting musically. “If you can be yourself, stay as true to that as you can. Like I say, I don’t usually give advice, I just pass along some information ’cause I know everybody has to do it their own way and everybody has their own road to walk and all that. But if you can, just like that old saying, ‘To thine own self be true.’ It’s just about knowing who you are and standing up for that as best you can.” We may never know who Dolly Parton truly is, but lucky for us, we don’t have to. She knows, and that’s all that really matters.

49

The Incredible, Quotable, Dolly

deliCious sound bites From the queen oF Country

“There’s no such thing as natural beauty.”

“I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb…and I also

know that I’m not blonde.”

“If you talk bad about country music, it’s like saying bad things about my momma.

Them’s fightin’ words.”

“I was the first woman to burn my bra— it took the fire department four days

to put it out.”

“I look just like the girls next door…if you happen to live next door to an

amusement park.”

“I like to buy clothes that are two sizes too small and then take them in a little.”

“I have little feet because nothing grows in the shade.”

“After Momma gave birth to 12 of us kids, we put her up on a pedestal. It was mostly to keep

Daddy away from her.”

“I always pattern my look after the town tramp. I swear to God that’s true, but

I can’t give her name.”

fey's time

42 . aug/sept 2016 . Bust

By deBBie stoller // Photos By ramona rosales stylist: Cristina erliCh // makeuP: Gita Bass // hair: ted GiBson // nails: miss PoP

Tina Fey is a woman who needs no introduction, and in this interview with BUST ’s editor-in-chief, the legendary comedy icon reveals why being a teen in the ’80s was so much better, what still makes her

nervous, and how she knows her daughter is powerful


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ry to imagine a world without Tina Fey. It isn’t easy. We would never have heard the words “third-wave feminist” uttered on a network sitcom, like we did on the pilot episode of 30 Rock. We wouldn’t have seen a raft of exceptional female co-medians quickly take center stage on SNL in the 2000s—women including Rachel Dratch, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and

Kristen Wiig, all of whom continue to entertain us today. We wouldn’t have had a pair of smart, funny, BFFs—Fey and Poehler—give us news with a feminist edge on that same pro-gram, and then watch those BFFs go on to take both TV and Hollywood by storm. We wouldn’t have had a film like Mean Girls to tell the sad tale of the kind of teenage girl-on-girl crime we all experience in high school, but in a way that we could laugh at. We wouldn’t have had the groundwork laid for future funny feminists like Jessica Williams, Samantha Bee, Broad City, and Amy Schumer. And we might have spent the last eight years living under President John McCain and Vice President Sarah Palin.

Since her rise to prominence 16 years ago as SNL’s head writer, and, later, one of its Weekend Update correspondents, Fey’s influence on the pop culture landscape can’t be over-stated. And we’ve been lucky enough to count her as a BUST fan for all that time. We first featured Fey on our cover in 2004, and were honored when she showed up to that issue’s release party. We were ecstatic when she later appeared on The To-night Show with Jay Leno and held up a copy of BUST with her image on the cover. We were amazed to discover that she had a framed copy of BUST, featuring Amy Poehler on the cover, as set dressing in her 30 Rock office, where it remained through-out the show’s seven seasons. And we were floored when she included a large reproduction of her early BUST cover in her 2011 book, Bossypants. After describing what a very high-end photo shoot is like, she went on to discuss the low-key sce-nario she experienced at BUST, and how much she enjoyed it. “Feminists do the best Photoshop,” she wrote.

This time, however, Fey’s cover shoot was almost exactly like the fancy ones she mocked in her book. It took place in an enormous, brightly lit Chelsea photo studio, complete with its own private coffee bar, and makeup artists, manicurists, and stylists were all there to prep Fey for her close-up. Only the photographer, Ramona Rosales, was the same as last time. Of course, Fey’s achieved an insane amount of success in the 12

years since her original shoot with us—writing and acting in one film (Mean Girls) and starring in six others (Baby Mama, Date Night, Admission, This Is Where I Leave You, Sisters, and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot); writing, producing, and acting in two television sitcoms (30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt); penning a New York Times-bestselling memoir (Bossypants); hosting the Golden Globes, together with Amy Poehler, for three years; and winning eight Emmys, two Golden Globes, five SAG awards, six Writers Guild of Amer-ica awards, and being the youngest person ever awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Given her outra-geously impressive list of projects and awards, the 46-year-old Fey has earned the right to flash some serious ’tude, yet there was not an ounce of diva on the set. Instead, she was wonderfully goofy, going along with everything that was asked of her, and managing to make everyone there laugh.

hen I meet Fey a few weeks later at a restaurant near Central Park, she arrives wearing a casual shirt and pants ensemble with her hair in a po-

nytail. It’s no coincidence that Fey has been appearing in Gar-nier Nutrisse hair color ads for the past four years: her crown-ing glory is truly glorious—thick, glossy, and full. “It’s like that on the rest of me, too,” she deadpans, after I compliment her luxurious locks. It’s exactly the type of self-effacing comment one would expect from her 30 Rock character, Liz Lemon, and it’s charmingly endearing.

She orders a kale salad, I switch on my recorder, and we begin talking about—what else?—feminism. In Bossypants, Fey claims that she’s never watched the first episode of 30 Rock since it ran, so I remind her about a scene in which Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, is meeting with her new boss, Jack Donaghy. “I got you,” he says, sizing her up. “New York, third-wave feminist, college educated. Single and pretending to be happy about it. Overscheduled, undersexed, you buy any maga-zine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover, and every two years you take up knitting…for a week.” For many viewers, it felt like Fey was killing us softly with her song, singing our life with her words. I ask if any of Donaghy's description could fit not just Lemon, but also Fey herself. “Definitely the intermit-tent attempts at knitting and quilting,” she says, laughing. “But the ‘being single and trying to be happy about it’ was a straight up burn from Jack to Liz. I was already married at the time. I’ve been with my husband since I was 24, so I didn’t have a long, active single life.”

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I know the “third-wave feminist” applies to the real-life Fey, but what about the many flashbacks to a young Lemon as a teenage feminist? Was Fey also a feminist teen? “I certainly was, whether I had any language for it or not. But I’m still a poorly educated feminist — I never took a women’s studies class,” she says. “I should rectify that now and stop acting like it’s something that I can’t go back and read more about.”

“Yeah, ’cause you have so much time,” I say, sarcastically.“Yeah, I have so much time,” she sighs. “If I had that kind of

time I would floss my teeth!”

ur conversation turns to the teens of today, and I mention that so many more young women are will-ing to call themselves feminists than women of

our generation, Generation X. “You know,” she says, “I just started reading the Peggy Orenstein book, Girls & Sex. She talks about how among some younger girls, there are a lot of mixed messages around feminism. Like, [they’ll say] ‘It’s feminist that I wear booty shorts and twerk,’ and Orenstein says maybe it is. But the question really is whether [they're doing it] because it feels good, or if they're just doing it to have the currency of being hot.”

I tell her that it’s surprising how little some of those things have changed since we were teens. But Fey disagrees. “Orenstein talks about how girls don’t even consider if [sex] is or should be pleasurable to them. Like [they’ll say], ‘You just have to give boys blowjobs so they’re not mad at you.’ And that was definitely not the case when I was younger. We definitely felt like, ‘I gotta get mines!’ It’s sad to me that [young girls today] have so little expectation of reciprocity.” We discuss the increased popularity of blowjobbing among the young, and Fey tells me that, according to Orenstein, President Clinton gets credit for some of that by defining the act as “not sex.” “Also, there’s a lot more anal now,” she adds. “So, great news everybody! A lot of teen anal!”

“Amy Poehler and I have talked a lot about what things were like when we were teens, and it was so different,” she continues.“First of all, ’80s fashion was so covered up. It was, like, a pirate shirt and jeans and maybe even a big military jacket. And you’d go to a party feeling like you looked pretty good and you could just ride out that feeling because there weren’t Instagram-ed pictures of everything. You’d maybe take a camera and, two weeks later, you’d get the pictures and you’d throw out five of them and keep the two where you thought you looked good.”

Fey must be spending a lot of time thinking about teens these days, not just because she has two young daughters who will eventually become teens, but also because she’s work-ing on a musical adaptation of Mean Girls. She’s writing the musical together with her husband, composer and musician Jeff Richmond, and another collaborator, Mel Benjamin. Rich-mond wrote the scores for both 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt, and you can thank him for the latter’s fictional album, Now That Sounds Like Music!, which featured hilarious pop-music sound-alikes such as “Brother Baptist” for “Sister Christian,” and “I’m Convinced I Can Swim” for “I Believe I Can Fly.”

But the Mean Girls musical isn’t the only project outside

of Kimmy Schmidt that Fey’s working on right now; she’s also executive producing a new TV show that will debut in mid-season on NBC. Great News is about a woman and her mother who end up working at the same local news station together. Unlike both 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt, Fey will not be writing or directing this time around; the show was created and written by Tracey Wigfield, and is loosely based on Wigfield’s life.

Luckily for Fey, the project will allow her some breathing room, as it will be shot in L.A. while Fey supervises from N.Y.C. That’s not to say, however, that Fey’s life is anything less than incredibly hectic. For instance, take the day of our interview. What else is on her calendar? “We’re literally moving offices today,” she tells me, “and I should be working on the musi-cal—we have an internal deadline. But right after this I’m going over to NBC to rehearse for the Maya & Marty show. And then I have a meeting at the end of the day with my husband and Lorne [Michaels] about another project.”

The Maya & Marty thing has her a bit stressed, even though she’ll be working alongside her old friend Maya Ru-dolph and SNL alum Martin Short. “We’re going to tape it tomorrow,” she says. “It’s giving me an old SNL-style bellyache because it’s still a little up in the air. They’re like, ‘We’ll figure it out,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh God, I don’t do “figure it out” anymore!’” And also, I haven’t been in front of the camera in months. You lose your nerve. I gotta try and get some kind of game face.”

Once again, I find myself reminded that stars, they’re just like us: human. Yet, I wonder how many “normal” things Fey is still able to do in her life, now that she’s so famous. “All of them!” she assures me. “I go to the grocery store. I ride the subway—I took the subway to jury duty every day last week and I loved it. It was so peaceful.” Jury duty? How does that work when you’re a celebrity, I ask. “I tried to ask that question, too, because I don’t want someone to be unhappy with how [their trial] goes and then Google where I live and murder me,” she says. “And they were like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

nother “normal” thing Fey faces is the challenge of being a working mom, and she’ll be the first to admit that the only way she can manage it is with lots of

help. Yet, there still seems to be a tinge of guilt that she can’t manage to “have it all.” “I like to be home in the morning, and after school as much as possible, because there are really long stretches of time where I am not home at 5. I’m home at 7:30,” she says, a bit hesitantly. “I still feel reluctant to tell you the time, because I feel like people will judge you that you weren’t there, or that a babysitter put your kid to bed.” And those evenings when she does manage to be at home on time? They sound pretty normal, too. “My husband’s a really good cook. I like to cook, too. It’s not really something I have to do—because it’s not 1955—but I find it fun and relaxing. I’m a good baker. For me, an ideal day is when I get home in time to cook a meal, eat it with my children, and get them to bed.”

Fey has two kids. Her first, Alice, 10, became an instant meme at 8 when a paparazzo captured her looking like she just didn’t GAF while out walking with her parents. Alice is also responsible for Liz Lemon’s saying, “I want to go to there.” d

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“For me, an ideal day is when I get home in time to cook a meal, eat it with my children, and get them to bed.”

49

Fey’s second daughter, Penelope, 4, sounds like she’s following in her fierce sister’s footsteps. “The other night she was doing anything to stall going to sleep, and one of her last-ditch efforts was, ‘Mommy, let’s lick tongues.’” Fey tells me, “And I said, ‘No, that’s inappropriate,’ to which she answered, ‘But nobody’s around!’ Which is terrifying for a parent to hear—that their kid’s moral compass is like, it’s OK if no one sees it. I asked her,

who do you lick tongues with when no one’s around? To which she sheepishly replied, ‘Teddy,’ who is our dog. I got the best possible answer, right? It’s not the doorman, it’s not some kid at school. It’s the dog.”

The next Penelope story Fey shares makes it clear that the girl is destined to be a superstar. “You know, kids at that age, they have no shame about their body. And a year ago she took to naming her privates ‘Coca,’ which is great, because in that Orenstein book she also points out that with boy babies it’s all named—like, these are your eyes, this is your nose, this is your pee pee—but with girls you don’t name it, you just…skip it. So, good for Penelope.”

“Then she was wrestling with her sister one day. We had just come back from Disney World, so she was really wound up. And then she started mooning everybody and it was really funny, and it escalated to, like, pants-off wrestling. And her sister was laughing but also yelling, ‘Get her off me! Get her off me!’ And then at one point she tackled her older sister and straddled her back with no pants on and yelled, ‘Coca! Eat her!’ And instructed her vagina to eat her sister. She was feel-ing really powerful.”

I tell Fey this story proves that she’s doing an excellent job raising her daughter. “She just came out that way,” she says. “She is powerful.”

t was a great stroke of genetic luck that landed Fey two daughters, as she is the consummate lady’s lady—the kind of woman who loves to spend time with other women. Her relationship with Amy Poehler is a ce-

lebrity friendship that’s so high profile, it’s a wonder no one’s given them a combo name yet, like Brangelina or Bennifer. (Tinamy?) But Poehler is not Fey’s only longtime comedy friend. In fact, the character of 30 Rock’s Jenna was written for Rachel Dratch, another of Fey’s pals from her Chicago days at

The Second City comedy club, and who preceded Poehler in joining SNL. When 30 Rock flashes back to a young Jenna and Liz performing a two-woman show together, we’re getting a glimpse into the real life history of Dratch and Fey.

The original 30 Rock pilot was shot with Dratch in the Jenna role, but before it aired, the execs at NBC, “in the most passive, non-direct, taking forever kind of way, forced me to

recast Rachel,” Fey says. “They just kept saying, ‘We’re not sure…,’ And I kept say-ing, ‘Oh, I think it’s going to be fine.’ And then they finally said it was a hard order. Rachel is so sweet and lovable and silly and I was trying to have her play a diva, and they just wanted a diva,” she ex-plains. Eventually the role went to Jane Krakowski. “A list of actresses was made and one was Jane. I thought, let’s go meet this lady and see if she seems cool. So I had lunch with her and was just like, ‘OK. Let’s do it.’ She’s been a muse in a lot of ways. She’s a delight to write for.” Happily, after what must have been

a tense situation, Fey says she and Dratch are still friends. “Much to her credit as a mature human being,” she adds.

Fey has also maintained close ties with many of her other female SNL colleagues. “I have this text chain going with Amy, Maya, Emily Spivey, Paula Pell, Rachel, and Ana Gasteyer, and we talk every day on this thing, sharing pictures and bits and, oh my God, we just keep saying we could publish this thing. It’s really funny. Paula Pell named it the SNL Tang, which I believe is short for poontang.”

earing about Fey’s ongoing friendship with her fe-male comedy pals is heartening, and gives me the opportunity to ask about a 30 Rock episode in which a female comedian, who gets attention by acting

overly sexual, is taken down by Jenna and Liz. (In one scene, Liz convinces the comedian that she doesn’t have to talk like a sexy baby to get laughs. “But I’m a very sexy baby!” she replies.) The character drew comparisons to Sarah Silverman and Anna Faris, but who was the “sexy baby” really modeled on? Fey laughs. “It was an amalgam of people, but the idea came at this time when Jezebel was very anti-Olivia Munn, very pro-Beth Ditto. I had done a movie with Olivia and she was perfect-ly lovely. And I started thinking, ‘Are we mad at Olivia because she’s conventionally attractive?’ Also, there are certain female performers who act very sexy, and, you know, that might inher-ently be repugnant to a heterosexual female. Because you’re literally putting out a vibe that what you are saying is not for me. The actress who played the role, Cristin Milioti, physically looks like Sarah Silverman, so a lot of people thought it was us trying to get after Sarah,” Fey explains.

These days, there are a large number of successful female comedians making headlines, and I ask if Fey ever experiences competition among them. “No,” she says. “The key here is that we’re all generating our own material. If you’re going in to an Ja

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Her relationship with Amy Poehler is a celebrity friendship that’s so high profile, it’s a wonder no one’s given them a combo name yet, like Brangelina or Bennifer. (Tinamy?)

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audition, you’re all reading for the same shitty part, but every-one is making their own stuff and it changes everything. Amy Schumer doesn’t have to be worried that she’s not going to be right for Inside Amy Schumer. It’s kind of great.”

“I think we’re in a golden age for female comics right now,” I venture, but Fey clearly does not agree. “Coming from BUST, I will allow the question,” she begins, patiently. “But when Amy and I were doing the Sisters junket, ev-eryone was like, ‘Isn’t this an amazing time for women in comedy?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, is it?’ Do I make what Will Ferrell makes? No.”

She’s right, of course. “I think the next phase will be whether me and Amy [Poehler] will be allowed to age in this business,” she says. “What will happen? I’ve met a lot of older male comedy writers who still work, but almost no female comedy writers who aren’t marginalized in some way.”

Hopefully, that will change. After all, most of today’s best-known female comedians and comedy writers are creating work that is clearly feminist. Whereas once only folks like Margaret Cho and Janeane Garofalo, and later, Tina and Amy, dared to take on the subject, an entire new generation of funny feminist women has sprung up. That’s good, isn’t it?

“I agree that it’s a positive development,” Fey concurs. “But the new trap is, ‘Oh, so you’re saying you’re a feminist? Well, I’m gonna tell you you’re doing it wrong.’”

t’s obvious that Fey is speaking from experience. Over the past decade, she has found her work to be the target of a wide variety of Internet criticism. Some writers have called her a “feminist hypocrite” for, among other

things, creating in Liz Lemon a conventionally beautiful woman who we are supposed to think is smart but ugly, and in Jenna, a woman who is pretty but dumb. And more recently, she has come under fire for what have been deemed racist por-trayals in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

I raise the issue of the feminism critique. “Does it ever make you want to quit feminism?” I ask. “No,” she says. “But it makes you feel old. At a certain point you have to be, like, I know my own intentions. And if I know my best efforts were made, I have to move on.”

Fey seems to also feel unfairly held up as feminism’s standard bearer. “I’m a comedian. I do that job first. I’m not an elected official. I didn’t run for mayor of television,” she jokes. But that doesn’t mean she’s not listening to what people say about her work. “We definitely take it in,” she says of the response to such critiques in the writer’s room. “We discuss it, take from it what we think is right, and improve ourselves going forward. But I’ve recently decided to opt out of the step where we apologize or explain,” Fey says.

And sometimes, the reasoning behind a storyline isn't as intentional as it seems. “I remember in season four or five, some article came out that was, like, ‘Liz Lemon is being so stupid now, and Jack is the boss of her,’ and we sat down and took it in. What was happening was, the show was moving very quickly, the writers were very tired, and I, as an actor, was more willing to play the fool in a scene than, say, Alec,” she

explains. “So I had to go back in and say, let’s remember season one, where Liz is talking about the Defenestration of Prague, and bragging about reading the papers. And then you just course correct, that’s a thing you do with a series.”

ut even if she’s not “the mayor of television,” Fey must realize that what she does can have an impact beyond simply eliciting laughter. Her power to affect popular opinion was made abundantly clear when,

midway through her 30 Rock run, a meteor named Sarah Palin came careening through her life. John McCain’s seemingly clueless pick for running mate during his 2008 election bid had an uncanny resemblance to Fey, and it created an opportu-nity for satire that Fey just couldn’t refuse.

Fey’s impersonation made actual waves in that election cycle. The perfectly honed barbs that were aimed at Palin (and which never made fun of her simply for being female) hit too close to home to be easily shaken off by the VP hopeful. The combination of SNL head writer Seth Meyers’ scripts and Fey’s spot-on performance perfectly captured the disgust so many felt about this very uninformed and unqualified woman, and likely contributed to Palin’s downfall.

But now the country is facing a candidate who is much more unpredictable, and powerful, than Palin ever was. “I feel very paralyzed,” Fey says about the current political situation.

“This Trump thing is no bueno. It’s really bad. I wish I had one perfect joke that would dismantle it. But I don’t have it yet.” Then she adds, “But, like, you gotta be able to do it without me. Surely, I’m not the tipping point here.”

Suddenly, I realize that we’ve been talking for an hour and a half, and I need to let Fey go. But first, I let her know she has some kale stuck in her teeth. “Oh, of course I do," she says. "My gums are very loose; they’re billowy like a beach umbrella. It’s a sign of stress.”

While she’s trying to get the kale out, I manage to squeeze in one final question. I remind her that in our 2004 interview she said she was going to try to be “less obedient” in the future. Does she feel like she’s accomplished that?

“Yeah, I think so,” she answers. “A little bit.”And with that, she gets up from the table and jumps on

top of a nearby banquette to check her teeth in a mirror that’s placed high on the restaurant’s wall. I watch as Fey stands atop the banquet’s leather seats like a naughty child.

Not so obedient at all, I think.

“I’m a comedian. I do that job first. I’m not an elected official. I didn’t run for mayor of television.”

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by bridgette Miller / / photos: jill greenberg

stylist: brAndy joy sMith @ ArtMiX CreAtiVe / / hAir: nAi’VAshA johnson @

eXClUsiVe Artists / / MAkeUp: jAniCe kinjo @ eXClUsiVe Artists

nAils: Miss pop nAils

Jessica Williams, The Daily Show’s reigning

queen of satire, opens up about her mom, her

therapist, and how she deals with haters

SeriouslyFunny

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Jessica Williams is not a morning person. This is one of the first things she tells me when we meet on a Wednesday morning, which happens to be Free Egg Sandwich Day at The Daily Show of-fice in New York. Williams arrives with one egg

sandwich in her hand and another in her jacket pocket, wear-ing a T-shirt emblazoned with an illustration of the female reproductive system. She looks a bit like a low-key feminist superhero gearing up for a long day of ass kicking.

Which is, of course, kind of the truth. As a correspon-dent on Comedy Central’s long-running news satire series The Daily Show, Williams takes on nefarious forces (racism and sexism are frequent targets of hers) with the not-so-secret power of wit. Since coming on as the show’s youngest-ever corre-spondent in 2012, Williams, now 26, has honed her comedic chops in hugely popular segments that have earned her praise from her fellow feminists and ire from, as Williams tells me with liberal air quotes and eye rolls, “Men’s Rights LOL Activists LOL.” And indeed, just past 10 a.m., in our very casual initial conversation about the beauty of N.Y.C. bo-dega egg sandwiches, feminism is somehow mentioned, and Jes-sica “Not a Morning Person” Wil-liams’ eyes light up. “Woo!” she exclaims at the mere mention of the word, swallowing the last bite of her breakfast and diving right into a discourse on the impor-tance of feminism in her life that spans Christianity, intersection-ality, Beyoncé, and bell hooks.

She begins with hooks: “I’m reading Feminism is for Everybody,” she says, “and her definition of feminism is what it means to me: ‘Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and op-pression.’ I found working on The Daily Show that as soon as you say something about feminism, some people—not all men, but certainly a lot of conservative men—clench at the idea of there being an equal existence between people. It’s infuriating to me.”

And that fury, it seems, only causes further clenching in the pants of the patriarchy. “If those men were women, and especially women of color, who lived in a society that every single day, whether subtly or overtly, reminded them that the

world is not made for them, then they would be upset, too,” Williams says. “There’s this idea of the ‘Angry Black Woman,’ and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, because I often feel like I’m put in that category. A lot of women of color are put in that category, when I think our anger is justified. I actually think that female anger isn’t that different from male anger. Boxing and football are, like, national fucking pastimes. And yet, when a woman expresses that she is unhappy with the way in which our society exists, that’s a big fucking problem. That’s crazy to me.”

One high-profile celeb who seems to have evaded the “Angry Black Woman” classification while still embracing

feminism is the aforementioned Beyoncé, a public figure Williams debates about often with friends. “I feel like Beyoncé is one of those people where it really splits down the middle whether [you think] she’s feminist or not,” says Wil-liams. “Is it wrong for her to have a song like ‘Flawless’ and still do the VMAs with the word ‘Femi-nist’ flashing behind her? I don’t know if that’s necessarily wrong or negative; however, I do have girlfriends who say that she’s not a feminist and she is marketing it. Feminism is something that is so important right now and dear to our hearts. It’s also some-thing very marketable, for like, ‘the modern young lady.’ So it’s controversial. But even if I don’t agree with a young girl who sees Beyoncé as a feminist, who wants to step on a young girl processing feminism—as opposed to allowing her to go through her journey? You know what I mean?”

Beyoncé’s style of feminism aside, Williams’ pointed TV commentaries, and the anger she brings to them, are part of why she’s so beloved. She says she admires women who ac-knowledge their anger, but don’t carry it around all the time. “But at 26 years old,” she admits, “I’m not there yet. I’m so not.” She pauses. “I have this idea of myself when I’m older, having had a career and having done acting and activism and affecting the world in some sort of way, and I’m a bit more of a settled feminist—I’m less angry, less angsty. And I’m able to be sort of Zen and just smoke weed on a beach in Southern California with no bra on.”

The idea of a chilled-out elder Williams, no-doubt radiant

“Feminism is something that is so important right now and

dear to our hearts. It’s also something very marketable, for

like, ‘the modern young lady.’”

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TOP: ETRO; DENIM SHORTS: CITIZENS Of HUMANITY

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47

as she reclines in the sand after a long life spent alternately (or simultaneously) making people laugh and fighting for their rights, is certainly delightful. But what’s most striking about Williams now is how passionate she is. It’s a trait that, from what I can tell based on what Williams tells me next, she gets from her mother, whom Williams calls an “awesome, beautiful force” and whose catchphrase (“when she’s a little bit too excited”) is “‘You came from my coochie!’” “She really kicked ass,” Williams says. “When she was a single mom, she worked, went to school, got a degree—so naturally she had a lot of feminist qualities. And then she and my stepdad got mar-ried and they found religion together. So that really affected my upbringing, because I grew up very Christian, go-ing to church every Sunday.”

Williams, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, says she even participated in her church’s purity ceremony when she was 14, where she promised not to have sex before marriage. “At that age, what I took away from it was that my body is not my own, that sexuality is bad; that if I leaned into my sexuality or took own-ership of my body, that was wrong,” she says. “Then, when I was in high school, Sleater-Kinney was doing what we thought was their last tour, and so I really got into them, and Bi-kini Kill, and Le Tigre, and all those riot grrrl bands. That’s how I got some of my angst out. But when I went to college, I still carried a lot of that with me. I’m still a Christian; I’m just a Christian who believes in equality. I won’t compromise on that. But I started to realize that my body is my body, and I wanted to know more about sex, and I wanted to be free to explore these things as a woman. I do believe that a woman has the right to choose. I realized, Oh, there is a word for this. Oh, it’s feminism. Oh, OK.”

“But aside from the sort of non-feminist sentiment I grew up with, being Christian,” Williams continues, “I also have a black woman sentiment. I got this from my mom. I wasn’t do-ing my homework in middle school, and my mom went to my parent-teacher conference and was really upset. She wasn’t the kind of upset where she’s like, yelling at you in the car. She was the kind of upset where she was just, like, driving quiet-ly. And I knew, Oh shit, I’ma get it. When we walked into the house, it was just me and her, and she was like, ‘You wanna talk to me about these grades?’ And I was like, ‘Uhh…no,’ be-cause I knew what was coming. She said, ‘OK, well, you wan-na explain these Cs to me? Why wasn’t you doing your home-work?’ I had no real reason. I was probably just playing The Sims and watching Lizzie McGuire. I looked up at my mom

and I was like, ‘Well, Mom, uh, when you really think about it, Cs aren’t really that bad. Cs are average.’ And I’ve never seen my mom so upset, to this day. I just saw this flash of fire in her eyes, and she yelled, ‘AVERAGE? You are never allowed to be average, because you look like me. And because you look like me, you always have to work 10 times harder than everybody else. There are people out there who are men, who are white, who don’t look like you, who will get more than you have for doing perfectly average work. So you will never, ever be aver-age.’ And I was like, Oh shit, but I said, ‘So am I, like, grounded or what?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, you know you grounded!’ That

was a really hard lesson to learn. I didn’t really know what she meant, but as I got older, and as I examined feminism more and took things in from a black woman’s perspective, which is the only way I could take things in, then I sort of knew what she meant. She didn’t grow up with the advantages I had, and she sac-rificed for me, and she knew that I had all these opportunities in my future, and that the world is a tough place, especially for a woman, and especially for a woman of color, so I wasn’t allowed to slack. I think that a lot of women of color have that sort of experience.”

I wonder out loud if people tend to project a lot onto Williams, be-cause she seems to represent so

much to so many people. Williams nods. “Sometimes, yeah,” she says. “And it’s flattering, but it also gives me anxiety.” I ad-mit that I struggle with anxiety, too, and that I’ve noticed that the subject of anxiety has come up in several of the interviews I’ve read with her.

“Oh yeah,” she replies. “I have anxiety and OCD [Obses-sive Compulsive Disorder]. I go to therapy twice a week.” Therapy, she says, “is the coolest, most fun thing ever…to have somebody who is fucking awesome and older and wiser objectively listen to you and give you advice is the best.” Wil-liams credits her therapist, Heather (“She’s the best!”), with helping her through the difficult transition of moving from L.A. to New York in the middle of winter to start on The Daily Show. Williams was still enrolled at California State Univer-sity, Long Beach, studying film and English, when she audi-tioned for Jon Stewart in 2011. At that point, she had some experience performing: as a teen, she’d co-starred in the short-lived 2006 Nickelodeon series Just For Kicks; did mu-sicals in high school; and later took improv classes at the L.A. Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Williams impressed Stew-art and landed the gig, and soon found herself experiencing the pressure of suddenly becoming a public figure. “I got a lot

“I’m still a Christian; I’m

just a Christian who believes

in equality. I won’t compromise

on that.”


of anxiety, and it came quickly,” Williams says. “After my first two nights on the show, my Twitter just blew up, and all my @ mentions said things like, ‘Nigger.’ ‘Coon.’ ‘Token.’ ‘Uncle Tom.’ I just really got blasted with that, and it was devastating to me for my first couple months on the show.”

Williams says that a lot of her anxiety comes from the idea of “having to represent other people, because ultimate-ly, there’s nobody that can represent a particular individu-al’s experience, except for that person.” She also says that after that initial spewing of hateful comments, “I never get that sort of thing anymore. And if I do, I’m like, LOL. You’re stupid and I don’t care. And I’m kind of happy that you’re an-gry.” Now, when it comes to haters, “it’s less of a racial sen-timent and more of an anti-feminist sentiment, and, well, good,” she says. “If a man’s upset because I said something about catcalling last night, and that’s something that he wants to defend, then I’m glad that he’s upset. I’m so happy he’s upset. Good. I’ve done my job today. I just don’t care anymore.”

“Separating myself from my thoughts helps,” Williams adds. “And this is gonna sound very, like, college G.E. require-ment right now, but my thera-pist says sometimes I can think of my ideas and my thoughts as trains, and if something hap-pens, I don’t have to catch ev-ery train, because that would be really exhausting. That’s what triggers my anxiety—if I’m worried about what bit I’m going to do on the show tonight while being worried about what my parents are doing and if they’re safe while being worried about the state of terrorism in the world—if those thoughts are all trains going by, I don’t have to jump on each one. I can see it, and I can acknowledge it, and I can just let it pass, which is a really nice way to think about it, because it puts me a little bit more in control. Especially with the OCD, because that’s a control thing.”

With her schedule being as downright bonkers as it these days, Williams does what she can to take care of herself. She loves to “Netflix and chill,” doing her makeup (“I love a good highlight”), and working out. “I try to exercise, but it’s really hard when I’m traveling a lot,” she says. “I just started kick-

boxing, and it’s so much fun. You put on gloves, and you get to kick and punch. It feels really good to do that action. Not at a human, but at a bag. My boyfriend and I took a kickbox-ing class together a couple days ago, and he was saying that I got really into it. Like, I always look like I’m gonna die, ‘cause I just don’t have the stamina for kickboxing. So I’m just sweaty and sort of flopping my arms everywhere but still punching and yelling, ‘WOO! YEAH!’” She claps. “He was telling me about it this morning. And I was like, I’m so proud of myself.”

But despite her self-proclaimed lack of stamina at the gym, Williams shows no signs of slowing down when it comes to her career. In addition to The Daily Show, she co-hosts a live-show-turned-podcast called 2 Dope Queens with her “work wife” and fellow comedian Phoebe Rob-

inson. (“We like to talk about sex and politics and How To Get Away With Murder,” she says.) And she’s also producing and co-starring in a film with Broad City’s Ilana Glazer that was writ-ten and directed by James C. Strouse (who also directed Wil-liams opposite Jemaine Clem-ent in the 2015 indie flick People Places Things).

We chat more about mov-ies for a bit before we part ways so Williams can head to a ses-sion with Heather. But before she leaves, she drops one more pearl of wisdom from therapy that would probably be helpful to a lot of feminists out there who occasionally get exhausted from fighting the good fight. “Some-times my therapist is like, ‘You don’t have to fight that right now,’” Williams says. “And I’m like, ‘What do you mean?!’ Be-cause I’m always ready to fight—

I have all this anxiety in my body, and so many things make me so mad. I’m like, ‘If I could just tell that UPS guy that he’s not allowed to condescend to me like that just because I’m a—’ and she’s like, ‘You can relax, breathe. You don’t have to fight that today. You can do that next week. You can do that another time. Sometimes it’s OK to just get in bed and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’” Williams grins, as if the idea of watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer in bed re-ally appeals to her. “Yasss, therapy!” she exclaims. And then she’s gone.

“ If a man’s upset because I said

something about catcalling last night, and that’s something

that he wants to defend, then I’m glad

that he’s upset. Good. I’ve done my

job today.”

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Carrie On

From riot grrrl trailblazer in the band Sleater-Kinney to sketch comedy genius on Portlandia, Carrie Brownstein has been cranking out pop culture gems since 1994. Here, the Jill-of-all-trades opens up about

fame, Fred, and driving traffic to her fave feminist bookstore

By Lisa Butterworth

Photographed by Ramona Rosales • Styled by Gaelle Paul Makeup by Toby Fleischman • Hair by Ashley Streicher • Manicure by Whitney Gibson

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The last time I was in the same room with Carrie Brownstein it was 2006, and she was on stage in San Francisco completely shredding on guitar, maniacally shaking her shag hairdo, and singing intensely over her band Sleater-Kinney’s raucous, urgent rock. The trio, which also included gui-

tarist and singer Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss, had just released what turned out to be their final album, The Woods, and they were tearing through their new songs for an extremely pumped-up crowd. Brownstein hopped and yelped and high-kicked like a true punk goddess, and everyone there to see the impressive group, born from the Pacific North-west’s riot grrrl scene, bounced right along with her. She was louder and larger than life.

Today, Brownstein’s in a Los Angeles photo studio and she’s not holding a guitar, but rather a gigantic prop tooth-brush. It’s almost as tall as she is, and as Ramona, our pho-

tographer, snaps away, the 39-year-old brandishes it like an enormous spear, pretends to brush her teeth, uses it to scrub her armpits, and twirls it around like she’s an oral care ma-jorette. She seems tiny. And not just because she’s channel-ing Lily Tomlin in the 1981 cult flick The Incredible Shrinking Woman, though that certainly helps. Brownstein’s not unusu-ally short, but she is legit petite and low-key. When she goofs off, she does so quietly.

As we chat, seated on a mustard-colored vintage couch at the photo studio, there’s a thoughtfulness to all of her an-swers. She is quick to smile but more reserved with her laugh-ter, even when she’s exercising her signature wit, which she does when we talk about her BUST cover (“I’m so psyched, it’s like a bucket list thing. Sleater-Kinney was never on the cover. I’m not mad about it. [But maybe you can] superimpose Janet and Corin next to me?”), her happiness over finally giving up on reading the entire literary canon (“I’m like, ‘Wait, I can read A Visit from the Goon Squad? I don’t have to read Flaubert? OK!”), or her forthcoming memoir (“I don’t think it’s a tear-jerker, but you never know. That’s gonna be the tagline, like, ‘You’ll cry your way through this…with laughter?’”).

For many, this is the Carrie Brownstein they’re familiar with—the one who created and stars in the IFC sketch com-edy show Portlandia, in which she lovingly skewers her fellow

organic-food-loving, fleece-wearing, NPR-listening Oregon residents, alongside her best friend, SNL alum Fred Armisen. Portlandia premiered in January 2011—“Put a bird on it,” from a sketch about avian trends in handcrafted DIY décor, quickly became one of the year’s most oft-repeated catch-phrases—and its popularity has increased exponentially. Last season, 3.7 million viewers tuned in to watch characters like the impossibly earnest married couple Peter and Nance; or Toni and Candace—the gals who run the feminist bookstore Women & Women First; or Carrie and Fred, who seem to be a lot like the real-life Brownstein and Armisen, with the added bonus of being super tight with Portland’s mayor (played by Kyle MacLachlan).

These days, however, Brownstein is in L.A., Airbnb-ing a house in Laurel Canyon with one of her two dogs (the less adaptable one stayed home in Portland with her house sitter) while writing season five, which will premiere early next year. (Portlandia’s production takes place in its titular town, but all of the writers live in Los Angeles, a testament to the show’s

humor having roots in a mindset rather than a specific loca-tion.) “I can’t believe it’s season five, that just seems so sur-real. It’s like, now I’ve been doing Portlandia for almost half the amount of time I did Sleater-Kinney, and Sleater-Kinney, that just seemed like I did that forever,” Brownstein says. The photo shoot over, she’s back in her street clothes—black jeans and boots, a distressed T-shirt, and a floral panel hat, the brim of which she tugs up and down as we talk. “I think significant changes take longer to settle in as part of your identity. And I guess because Portlandia feels like a newer aspect to my iden-tity and what I do, it still feels fresh.”

Despite having four seasons under her belt, Portlandia, and the accompanying career as a sketch comedian, is new to Brownstein’s identity. But many of her recent fans have no idea what she did before. “It’s weird now, because a lot of people only know me from Portlandia, and can’t believe I was ever in a band,” she says. And not just any band, of course, but one of the most iconic feminist groups of the late ’90s and early aughts. “I’m like, ‘But wait a second, that’s what I did first!’” she says. “They just see me as this person they know from television, and then they listen to Sleater-Kinney and they think, ‘What is this scary music? You seem so happy on the show. What’s wrong? Why are you so upset?’”

At the time Sleater-Kinney was making music, there was

“[People] just see me as this person they know from television, and then

they listen to Sleater-Kinney and they think, ‘What is this scary music?

You seem so happy on the show. What’s wrong? Why are you so upset?’”

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plenty to be upset about. Brownstein met Tucker while they were both attending Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, the epicenter of the riot grrrl movement. They formed Sleater-Kinney, named for an Interstate exit near Olympia, in 1994 (Weiss joined two years later), and quickly gained a devoted following, even among mainstream press (in 1997, they were named one of Spin magazine’s “Top 40 Most Vital Artists” and in 2001, renowned music critic Greil Marcus named them “the best rock band of the year” in Time). When The Woods, Sleater-Kinney’s seventh full-length, came out, they were more popular than ever. But they called it quits shortly after its

release, a demise akin to the breakup of the Beatles for those reared on the passion and fury of riot grrrl music. “Creatively, we still felt very relevant. I mean, Sleater-Kinney was lucky, we didn’t ever really have a moment that faltered,” Brownstein says. “We really had a full career. Even though it felt like we ended prematurely, 11 years now seems like a long time to do anything. It’s a whole lifetime.”

Deciding to discontinue what you’ve spent a whole life-time doing is a terrifying prospect, but as the women got deeper into their 30s, Sleater-Kinney and the lifestyle it re-quired no longer seemed sustainable. Tucker had become a mom, making road life difficult. And despite her ability to rule the stage, Brownstein was fighting crippling anxiety that led to panic attacks and hospital visits. “I just felt like I was tour-ing emergency rooms as much as I was touring clubs and the-aters,” she says with a subdued laugh. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that Denver ER is great. Oh, the London ER is also pretty nice. Le-icester, England? College town? No, not as nice. Kind of a dive, that ER.’” And making such high voltage music—which music writer Ann Powers dubbed “suffragette rock”—took an energy they didn’t necessarily want to put forth anymore. “It was the kind of band that required an insularity and an intensity that’s very hard to maintain,” Brownstein explains, as she absent-mindedly removes bobby pins from her messy bob. “In order to keep that galvanizing quality, there has to be volatility. That’s harder as you get older. It’s like, who wants volatility? You start to want things that feel more comforting.”

it took Brownstein a while to figure out what those things were. And emerging from such a high-profile chapter of her life only added to the pressure. “The identity that most people related me to was suddenly going to become

something historical. But I want to be measured by what I’m doing now. So what’s next? It was very scary. But it was also a relief,” she says. A short stint at uber-hip Portland ad agency Wieden + Kennedy gave her what she’s called an “existential

crisis” before she found a niche as an NPR music columnist and “All Songs Considered” contributor. (It was also during this time that she was named “Volunteer of the Year” for her work with animals at the Oregon Humane Society.)

But it was the web series ThunderAnt that she started working on with Armisen in 2005—the two met at an SNL af-ter party in 2003—that catapulted her into the comedy world she’s so comfortable in now. Brownstein says ThunderAnt was “very clumsy and only partially formed,” but it laid the ground-work for Portlandia, and gave the pair a reason to get together. “Our friendship started in stages because we were on oppo-

site coasts so we didn’t get to spend that much time together. But there was always a shorthand that we had,” she says. “He also came up through music, so we had traversed the same landscape. He’s older than I am [by eight years], but it felt like we had gone down the same paths, sleep-

ing on the same couches on tour. It was almost like we had been going along the same track, so there was an instant comfort.”

That instant comfort only deepened as the two began see-ing more of each other. “When we really started to work on Portlandia [in 2009], there just was such a sense of being fam-ily and protecting one another. If one of us needed the other person, they would come over any time and spend the night on the couch, you know, during whatever we were going through. And for he and I, we just haven’t had that a lot [in our lives]. So when we realized we each were each other’s constant, it was such a relief.” Spending months on end together filming Port-landia has only strengthened their friendship, and during the writing process, they see each other every day. (In fact, Brown-stein says she’s meeting Armisen for dinner after our shoot.) “We are very careful about preserving [our connection]. You have to be kind of intentional about friendships as you get old-er, because people drift apart so easily with their own lives or families or just physical distance. The friendships you want to maintain, you really have to protect—not just by commenting on their Twitter feed but by actually, like, inviting them over,” she says, laughing. “[You can’t just say] ‘Dude, I liked all of your Instagram photos, so we’re best friends, right? Why didn’t you invite me to your wedding? Every meal you’ve eaten I’ve com-mented on!’”

It’s this jokiness that makes Brownstein resemble the Car-rie of Portlandia more than the one we might remember from Sleater-Kinney, though of course it’s all the same to her. Com-edy might seem like a leap from Brownstein’s rambunctious band days, but she assures me it was only a difficult transition for her fans. Her penchant for performing was never exclusive to music; it was a personality trait she’d nurtured since child-hood. “I was always putting on plays or going to theater camp or, you know, trying to orchestrate little moments that brought attention to me,” she says. Brownstein grew up in Redmond, WA, and loved watching SNL—Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin especially—and The Kids in the Hall, a show that deeply influ-

“The friendships you want to maintain, you really

have to protect—not just by commenting on their

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“When i’m Googling other people, autofill always suggests ‘dating,’

or ‘feet.’ and i’ll think, ‘OK. i was curious about their feet as well.

i’m glad Google will answer this question shortly for me.’”

45

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enced Portlandia. “Kids in the Hall was so strange,” she muses. “They would air it in blocks on weekends and I would tape them all and re-watch those VHS tapes over and over again. Those sketches were very absurd, all the cross dressing, all the weird voices, all the minutiae they explored.”

It’s that same kind of minutiae that she and Armisen now often explore on Portlandia, driven by characters like Toni (Brownstein) and Candace (Armisen), whose “Feminist Book-store” segments make Brownstein’s politics most apparent. Dressed in oversized cardigans and peasant skirts, the two say things like, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying atten-tion,” and, “Every time you point, I see a penis.” “I think of those characters as superheroes,” she says. “Like, we somehow man-aged to make two feminists the most popular characters on our show.” In Other Words, the bookstore where those sketches are filmed, has even become a popular tourist attraction. “The fact that people go to Portland to visit a tiny feminist bookstore—no matter what the impetus is for them getting there—the fact that they go in there and look around and shop for books or statio-nery or whatever, is a major source of pride for me,” Brown-stein says. “As a feminist, I just think that’s cool. So even though there’s a silliness to [our sketches] and it’s very pop culture, we also express a multidimensionality that feminism has always embraced, even though people have often tried to make the movement seem less than multidimensional. We show that hu-mor can be part of it, and always has been.”

In fact, under its easily digestible sketch façade, Portlan-dia has lots of subversive qualities. For example, the charac-ters Nina and Lance are lovers, but Brownstein plays Lance, the man, and Armisen plays Nina, the woman. “Both Fred and I get to explore gender fluidity, and that’s a real bonus of being a performer. You can do that in music too, but to literally bind my breasts and put on a mustache is really fun. When we’re writing the dialogue it’s very liberating,” she says. “I like the way Portlandia feels like a very weird, kind of queer feminist show sometimes. Like when we had k.d. lang, who’s an iconic lesbian artist, hook up with Jason Sudeikis’ character [in sea-son four]. Because our show’s a comedy, we can explore that kind of duality and contradiction, without being too didactic. I really like putting that out into the culture.”

One of the reasons Toni and Candace, and Nina and Lance, and really all the Portlandia charac-ters, inspire such devotion, is because of the obvi-ous chemistry between Brownstein and Armisen,

which raised a lot of questions about their romantic involve-ment when the show first aired. Brownstein has admitted to having an initial crush, but also maintains the two were never an item. But curiosity about Brownstein’s dating life hasn’t waned. In fact, it’s one of the first auto-fills when you Google her name. When I tell her this, she laughs. “Really? Not even, like, Portlandia or something? Jesus,” she says. “Well, yeah, I guess that’s what people want to know. I do notice that when I’m Googling other people [autofill always suggests], ‘dating,’ or ‘feet.’ And I’ll think, ‘OK. I was curious about their feet as

well. I’m glad Google will answer this question shortly for me.’” The interest might also be because she’s very particular

about keeping her private life private. Though it’s been ru-mored that she’s dating Portlandia guest star and musician extraordinaire St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark), when her pub-licist snaps a pic of her on set at our photo shoot, she says that she can use it for her Tinder profile. (Either she was being sar-castic, or every single person in Portland should start swiping immediately). But Brownstein’s not interested in talking about her love life, or anyone else’s for that matter. “It kind of height-ens the experiences and maintains a mythical quality to some-one’s work, especially music, when I don’t know what they ate for lunch, who they’re dating, or what their favorite beer is,” she says, playing with the delicate gold bangle on her wrist. “I just don’t care. It doesn’t help me enjoy their music.”

It’s no surprise that she keeps her romantic cards close to her chest. Brownstein was burned by media oversharing very early on, and the experience seems to have shaped her reticence with the press ever since. In August 1996, Spin pub-lished a profile on Sleater-Kinney, after their second album Call the Doctor was released. In it, the writer outed Brownstein as Tucker’s former lover (as Brownstein told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast in 2012: “Corin and I dated for, like, a sec-ond”), when the fact that she sometimes dated girls was some-thing she had not yet discussed with her family. “It was very disorienting,” she says. “We were so excited about that [inter-view], it was one of the first big articles [about us] so mostly I just was annoyed ’cause it took all the excitement out of the experience. But I think it instilled in me very early on a sense of wanting privacy and not being very interested in having personal information be tantamount to the work itself. Like, it didn’t make anything about that article more interesting at all. Except that I then had to explain a lot of things to my family,” she says with a wry chuckle. “That was interesting.”

When it comes down to it, the work seems to be what Brownstein values the most. Despite her desire for privacy, she’s working on a memoir that will be out next year—though she swears it’s not a tell-all. (“I hate writing. There’s that great Doro-thy Parker quote, ‘I hate writing, I love having written,’” she says. “It’s so true.”) In addition to another season of the show, there’s also a Portlandia-inspired cookbook coming out in October. Next year, she’ll make her feature-film debut in the Todd Haynes mov-ie Carol. And, though her most recent band Wild Flag (with Mary Timony, Rebecca Cole, and Janet Weiss) recorded just one al-bum, there’s always the possibility of more music. “That’s always going to be something I love,” she says. “It’s hard because the kind of music I’m drawn to has an urgency to it, so I have to ap-proach it with hunger. It can’t be manufactured. I really have to want it, to need it.” Nothing Brownstein does feels manufactured, and despite how tiny we’ve made her look in our photo shoot, her feminist infiltration of mainstream pop culture is only continu-ing to grow. “You hear people referencing you or your music as something that really was formative for them, and it just makes you feel lucky,” she says. “‘Cause that’s all you have in the end, you know? You want to pass something on.”

40 . june/july 2013 . BuST

From raw, raging, rocker to chill, chanting, charmer, Courtney Love has commanded

our attention for the past 20 years. But even though her life’s been filled with tragedy and turmoil, she’s somehow managed to

rise from the ashes of each disaster and start anew. Here, she tells us about her men, her music, and her mental health, and proves that you can’t hold a real riot grrrl down

and

Understanding

PeaCe,CoUrtney

Love,

By deBBie stoLLerPHotograPHed By aMBer gray

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43

Love is having her photo taken for our cover not only because it’s our 20th anniversary, but also because she has a new music endeavor that she is anxious to promote. Shortly after I arrive at the photo studio in N.Y.C.’s Chelsea district, she directs me to the dressing room, where she has me plug my earbuds into her laptop so I can listen to her new songs. There are, for the mo-ment, only two, which are both set to be released on iTunes. “I have two excellent songs, and I have two new really good songs, and I’d rather just release the two excellent songs—like an old-school single,” she explains. “The first song, ‘Wedding Day,’ is impeccably great as a slab of really raw rock with an insane hook. The second song is called ‘California’—clearly a leitmotif. I’ve written ‘Malibu,’ ‘Pacific Coast Highway,’ and ‘Sunset Strip,’ so if I want to call something ‘California,’ it had better be good.”

Although the songs sound exactly like what you might expect from the lead singer of Hole, the band will not be called Hole, but instead, Courtney Love. “My name symbolizes a lot of things, and I have to sit in these rooms with lawyers and be called a ‘brand’ often, so I was just like, ‘Fucking name it after me!’ I don’t care.” The band, such as it is, consists of Love, her guitarist Micko Lar-kin, drummer Scott Lipps, and bassist Shawn Dailey. For now she’s the only girl in the group, but that’s not for lack of trying. “I put an ad on Craigslist that said, ‘Band in the style of Hole look-ing for bassist in the style of Melissa Auf der Maur.’ I got exactly one response. There’s just not a lot of chick bass players.”

Now Love has toned down her lip color and is in front of the camera, masterfully striking poses in a fluid stream of mo-tion. The confidence she exudes—even with 10 people standing around, lights bearing down on her from all directions, a fan

blowing in her face, and a photographer snapping away—makes it clear that this is the sort of situation where she feels most com-fortable. But that’s no surprise. Love is, above all, a performer, and a powerful one at that. While she first came to pop-culture prominence as the wife of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, it was her ability to channel her anger on stage that made her such a compelling—and controversial—figure. Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This, released just a few days after Cobain’s suicide, was a runaway critical and financial success, and brought Love the kind of mainstream attention and accolades she had always longed for. In her babydoll dresses, combat boots, and smeared red lipstick, she looked a bit like Cindy Brady all grown up, but on stage she transformed herself into an icon of female rage the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Medusa. It earned her the devotion of a generation of women taught to sublimate their an-ger, but it also made her the target of much media criticism. She was vilified for being a mess, for being a drug addict, for having a big ego, for not being a great parent—in other words, all of the things we expect in a male rock star.

This latest project is her first foray back into music since 2010’s Nobody’s Daughter, a record that began as a solo project, then morphed into a release featuring her current collabora-tors. The album bombed. “I put my fucking money and my ass and my shit on the line for Nobody’s Daughter, and that record is a masterwork,” she tells me. But even without a recent musi-cal success, there is still plenty of demand for Love. “I’ve been offered money to do an oldies [tour] sort of thing,” she explains. “It’s just not me.” She’s not averse to performing some of Hole’s greatest hits, though. “I don’t mind making a crowd happy. I still

ourtney Love is not happy. She’s not happy with the pretty hairdo that the stylist has just worked on for an hour, not happy with the lovely look the makeup art-ist gave her, and not happy with the designer clothes the wardrobe stylists have picked out. And she’s defi-nitely not happy with how she appears in the photog-rapher’s first test shots. It’s not that she doesn’t look great, but something’s clearly not sitting right with her. After studying the digital images on-screen, the 48-year-old musician has an idea. “Just give me five minutes—alone,” she says, and retreats to the dressing room. Finally, she reemerges. She’s selected a vintage white lace minidress from the stylist’s rack, added dark

plum-colored lipstick to her makeup, and rearranged her coif into her trademarked tousled head of bright blond hair. She looks amazing. She looks like Courtney Love. And no one is better at creating an image for Courtney Love than Courtney Love.

C


really like ‘Malibu.’ I play ‘Miss World’ sometimes. I don’t like ‘Doll Parts’ anymore; it’s just a simple song, like three chords, and it kind of drives me nuts.” One thing that won’t ever happen, she says, is a Hole reunion, “for reasons that I cannot even begin to get into,” but then she does get into them, at length. What it comes down to, it seems, is that she has some serious beef with Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson.

In between photo setups, Love re-turns to her chair in the makeup room, talking nonstop. In fact, she’s been talk-ing ever since she got to the studio, regal-ing us with stories about her numerous financial and legal woes, how she posed for Saint Laurent’s latest ad campaign, and how she can fix anyone’s credit score. She’s very entertaining, but also a bit overwhelming. At one point while she’s speaking, I find myself staring at her clear blue eyes and wondering what is really going on behind them. Because as far as I can tell, her mind is like a car-nival of thoughts and ideas, featuring bumper cars driven by lawyers, a Ferris wheel of potential litigants, and a roller coaster filled with lovers, past and pres-ent. “She’s a genius,” the makeup art-ist sighs as soon as she’s left the room. Then there’s silence—the first silence in a long, long time.

After a few more hours, the photo shoot is done, but I still haven’t had a chance to do the interview. “Why don’t we just do it at my house?” she asks. “I just need to go chant first. Do you mind?” We head downstairs, hop in a car, and soon arrive at a Japanese Buddhist center. The place feels more like a night school than a sanc-tuary—it’s all fluorescent lights, linoleum floors, and hallways. We go upstairs to the chanting room, which is like a large, brightly lit classroom with rows of fold-ing chairs facing a small shrine. About 20 other people are there, reciting “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” over and over until they begin to sound like a field of buzzing bees. Love takes a seat toward the front, removes her sweater, and bows her head. From the back of the room, with her messy hair and bare, boney shoulders, she looks almost vulnerable. I think about what a rare moment this must be for her, how the chanting must be a warm refuge from the swirl of lawsuits and finance and insanity that surrounds her. Here, Love is just a girl with problems, hoping to chant them away. The thought almost brings me to tears, but

then I catch her reflection in the glass wall. She is hunched over her smartphone, texting.

After about 25 minutes, Love gets up, and I follow her out. Despite what may have gone down this evening, I know that Love has genuinely devoted herself to this practice for the past

seven years, and I ask her why she does it. “At first you chant for yourself, for things that you want, but as you advance, you chant for others, for the world,” she explains. We grab a cab and head for Greenwich Village, where she’s renting a brownstone in the most beautiful part of the neighborhood. I get a quick tour of the majestic house, which is more than 100 years old: three floors, several fireplaces, loads of original details, and more rooms than I can later remember. In a sitting room outside the master bed-room, Love plops down on the couch, picks up a remote, and clicks on the TV. “I just want to chill out and watch some episodes of 30 Rock first,” she explains. But we don’t actually watch the show at all, because Love has a lot to say, even be-fore the interview has really started.

As I listen, I quickly realize two things. One is that Love is smart as a whip, tossing off words like “hubris” and “gestalt” and “autodidact” with the ease of a Rhodes scholar. The other is that she is going to control this interview the same way she controlled the photo shoot. I might as well just crumple up the piece of paper I’m holding, with all of my neatly typed up questions, because Love is going to talk about what Love wants to talk about. And one of the things she wants to talk about is her suspicion that everyone around her is plotting to gain access to her piece of the Nirvana pub-lishing rights, rights that she, together with daughter Frances Bean, inherited after Cobain’s death. Well, not everyone, but a lot of the people she encounters have an underlying agenda, she fears. Even the boyfriends might have ulterior motives. She once said of her romances something like, “Everyone wants to be

where Kurt’s been,” but when I ask if that’s still the case today, she scoffs. “Nobody gives a shit about where Kurt was. That was rock-star guys,” she explains. “I haven’t slept with a musi-cian in ages. I go for the safe business guys, and then they see [the Nirvana publishing rights] and they go, ‘Boing! You should sell that shit!’”

“i haven’t slept with a musician in ages. i go for the safe

business guys, and

then they see [the nirvana publishing rights] and

they go, ‘Boing! you should sell that shit!’

”

45

“The Nirvana stuff is fucking cursed in my opinion,” she continues. “I mean, how much of this interview has been just directed to that death and the consequences of that death?” I don’t bother pointing out that I haven’t asked a single question about it, but she goes on. “It’s not the defining point of my life….” She pauses. “Yeah, that’s not true. Someone shoots themselves, that’s a pretty defining point of your life.” And along with own-ing a piece of the publishing rights—and its profits—comes a very heavy burden. “Somebody has to guard the gates of this thing,” she says. “Because you know what would happen? The second I sell [the rights], it becomes a jukebox musical, makes a billion dollars, and you’ve got jazz hands on Broadway. Or he’ll be in Gatorade commercials. I will never sell the fucking stakes I have in it, because no one else will bother protecting him.” At times, it all becomes too much. “Some days I look at my passport and I’m like, Can I just leave? Because it’s so much pressure. And my daughter is really all I care about the most. And to lose my daughter over lawyers and money is beyond….” She trails off, avoiding getting into the specifics of her relationship with Fran-ces Bean, from whom she is currently estranged. “I’m thinking of maybe nam-ing my fucking album ‘Died Blonde,’ because I’m in such a morbid space. You know what I mean? It’s not that I’m unhappy. And it’s certainly not that I’m crazy. It’s just that I know all this shit, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

What does make her happy, she tells me, is performing. “That’s my only break. When we were doing photos today, fash-ion, art, reading—that is my only fucking break.” She’s keeping herself busy with quite a few projects these days, but one thing she doesn’t seem to be doing is act-ing. “I just spent a week in L.A. and ex-perienced a lot of ennui, because if you’re in L.A. and you’re not working, it’s a really weird feeling.” It’s a bit surprising, actu-ally, that Love hasn’t continued her ascendancy in Hollywood, as her film career got off to a very promising start. She had a bit part in the 1986 flick Sid and Nancy, but it was her role as Larry Flynt’s wife, Althea, in 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt that really made Hollywood sit up and take notice. The role, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress, instantly gave her “credit in the straight world,” to steal the title of a Hole song. It also resulted in her second-most-publicized relationship: that with her co-star Edward Norton. The relationship seems to have had a profound impact on her, and she still makes frequent references to it, but after three years, it fizzled. “I had my movie-star moment,” she says of that time in her life. “I watched the VH1 special about me, Behind the Music—it got the highest ratings of any of them—but the last half hour was an absolute wash. It was just like, ‘Why didn’t she marry Edward Norton and become a movie

star?’” Then she answers the question herself. “I wasn’t ready to, I didn’t want to, I didn’t know how to.”

I remind Love that the first place I interacted with her was some 20 years ago, on the Hole bulletin boards on AOL. That’s where so many of her fans congregated, especially in the wake of Cobain’s suicide. It was all just typical fangirl stuff until Love’s stepfather, Hank Harrison, showed up and told us that he’d been printing out all our posts and giving them to Love to read, and that they were making her happy. Shortly thereafter, she began posting to the board herself. “I was really raw in that moment,” she tells me. “I was in bed most of the time, and my husband had just shot himself, and I heard there was this place online where they were talking about me. When I went on there, I saw that some people were saying things that weren’t true, so I defended myself.” In fact, Love was possibly the very first ce-lebrity to engage with her fans online this way. Unfortunately, it’s that same willingness to interact directly with her audience that has since gotten her into hot water, particularly in relation

to some nasty tweets she wrote. “I didn’t really understand how to deal with these social networks,” she admits. “I was be-ing the same person that I was back in 1994. I still thought Twitter was like AOL and you could say, ‘Oh, fuck you, you dirty bitch!’—and then I got a lawsuit.”

Her tendency to fly off the handle, coupled with her erratic behavior, has led to many a “Courtney Love is crazy” story, especially online. Since most peo-ple feel emotionally singed whenever they read anything negative about them-selves on the Internet, I ask her how she deals with it. “Oh, the crazy thing is real-ly easy,” she says. “If anybody could have ever proven me to be crazy, they certain-ly would have. And it’s never happened.

Technically, in the sense of being bipolar, manic-depressive, or any of that stuff, it’s just not true. I mean, have I gone online and ranted and raved about my finances? Abso-fucking-lute-ly. Without any filter on. I mean, there’s a part of me that just doesn’t fucking care. And if that’s defined as crazy, then I need to find a psychiatrist who will diagnose that. I mean, maybe I’m more antisocial. I even asked my shrink, ‘Am I bipolar-ish?’ And he’s like, ‘No, you’re not.’ And I said, ‘Not even ish?’ And he said no. It’s just not there. So ‘crazy’ is a word that doesn’t affect me.” She’s also, she tells me, clean and sober. “I was taking Adderall, but I stopped taking it this summer because it serves absolutely no purpose and is just speed.”

It may be hard to imagine a sober, serene Courtney Love, but these days she’s even something of a homebody. She’s working on a memoir for HarperCollins, and the deadline is putting a crimp in her social life. “It’s one of the reasons why I stay home and watch 30 Rock,” she says. “Because I have to write this god-damn book and I know it.” It’s scheduled to be published next

“‘Crazy’ is a word that

doesn’t affect me.

”


year, and with the manuscript due in May, she’s feeling the pressure. “I never thought I would write this book. It’s fucking exhausting,” she says. “But I would rather redefine myself my-self than have anybody else do it.” In addition to writing, she is also working on a fashion line called Never the Bride, and re-cently had a show of her artwork. “Making art is kind of meet-ing my own destiny, as my mother always wanted me to be an artist. I went to San Francisco Art Institute, but I didn’t learn anything there.” She brings out a bound book of her work and leafs through the pages with me. The images look to have been hastily created in watercolor and pencil. Many of them include a sketch of a girl, mostly naked, with words and colors scrawled all over the picture. “I started by doing kind of ass-kissy pictures of girls, and there’s a lot of sex and death and romance,” she says. “This one I made for Gwyneth [Paltrow]. This I did the day of Amy Winehouse’s funeral, with Frances behind her.” She points out a few more of her favorites, then autographs the book and gives it to me, for keeps.

But even with the music, the book, the fashion line, and her art, the issues surrounding the Nirvana rights seem to consume most of her time, energy, and thoughts. I can imagine what a relief it must be to have an outlet for all that an-ger, and tell her it’s exactly her ability to transform her anger into artwork that has been so groundbreaking. She nods. “You know what this guy said to me? He said, ‘Your problem is that women aren’t going to let their husbands go see you, because they’re going to think about you.’ I’m like, ‘Wait, sex isn’t my currency. If we have to talk about currency, I guess rage is my currency.’ He goes, ‘Do you get a lot of women who say, “I grew up with you, you saved me in college?”’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I get that every day.’ And he goes, ‘Why do you think that is?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I express this rage that no one expresses.’ It’s kind of simplistic to say, but there it is.” And so, even after 20 years, Courtney Love is still the girl with the most rage. “Listen, no one’s really come for my crown,” she says. “I mean, I’d be the first to fucking pass the torch.” Yet sometimes she wonders why her audience can’t just let it all out, the way that she can. “Maybe it’s that gene of not caring,” she says. “Maybe that’s the same gene that got me in all that trouble on Twitter, the same gene that got me into flame wars on AOL, and the same gene that allows me to get up in front of 600 people in Lubbock, Texas, or 100,000 people in Poland—where they love fascist dictators, so I might have missed my calling—and say,

‘Everyone take off your shirts!’ Everyone took off their shirts! I was like, Wow, you’re an obedient bunch.”

I’ve been listening to Love speak for hours, barely able to get a word—or a question—in edgewise, but finally I manage to ask her what we ask every celebrity we interview: Do you consider yourself a feminist? “I think the word ‘feminist’ has been pol-luted, horribly. I raised my daughter as a feminist, and she won’t identify as one, because the word has been so fucking polluted by boomer media in the sense that it means that you’re ugly, or you’re fat, or you’re a lesbian—nothing wrong with being all three of those things—and every time I read an article in the main-

stream media, it’s like, ‘Feminism’s dead! Dead! Dead, I tell you! Dead!’ And I’m like, No, it’s really not—not in me. Do I believe in feminism? Of course I do, I’m a fucking feminist. Do I believe that there are a lot of us out there? No. I really don’t.”

The phone rings. She tries to ignore it, but when it goes to her voicemail she decides to answer. When she hears who it is, she lights up and tells the caller that she’s in the middle of an interview. “Oh, I’m glad I answered that call,” she says. “My savior. Yet another daddy issue. An-other 70-year-old man who knows every-thing. But, you know, this one—it could be him. Chant. Chant for a good one.” At this point, I’m not sure if she’s talking about a new lawyer or a new lover. Later on she tells me a story that sounds like it might be about the same person. “I was smok-ing a cigarette outside of [this guy’s] of-fice and he was like, ‘Why are you smok-ing in a doorway?’ And I said, ‘Because it’s illegal,’ and he said, ‘I’ll pay the fee! I own this fucking floor! I wanna see a beautiful woman smoke!’ I fall for that old ‘fakata’ shit,” she says, mispronounc-ing the Yiddish word verkakte, meaning dumb, crappy, bullshit. “I really do.”

Lawyer or not, after all the dark sto-ries she’s been sharing with me this eve-ning, it’s nice to see Love get giddy over

a guy. But this mushy side of her is not one I’m familiar with. “I present myself as an archetype, as an incredibly strong, al-most a dominatrix type. But my actual persona as a woman is really submissive—in terms of business, very submissive. So I’ll rant and I’ll rave and I’ll moan and I’ll write the fucking craziest emails, but when I’m facing that really, really smooth guy, it’s re-ally hard for me to say no. And I will keep looking for saviors and looking for saviors, but the truth is, there is no Daddy Warbucks. Nobody’s gonna pull up in a limousine and say they’re going to save you. That’s not how it happens. You save yourself from drowning, that’s how you do it.” B

“sex isn’t my

currency. if we have

to talk about

currency, i guess

rage is my currency.

”

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Orange is the New Black ’s Laverne Cox is an accomplished actress, outspoken trans-rights activist, and boundary-

busting sex symbol whose unique pop-culture platform is helping her change the world

By Sara Benincasa × Photographed by Danielle Levitt

Styling by Jessica Bobince × Hair by Ursula Stephen @ Starworks Group Makeup by Deja for DD-Pro using MAC Cosmetics

she ’s all that

she ’s all that

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I’ve IntervIewed a few celebrities in my day, but Laverne Cox is the first to mention “cis-normative, hetero-normative, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” within the first ten minutes. Or, you know, at all. By the time we’re

done chatting in N.Y.C., I’m convinced that this actress, ad-vocate, artist, thinker, producer, college speaker, “bell hooks-a-phile,” karaoke-slayer (more about that later) and trained dancer ought to add “intellectual badass” to her business card. Because while I entered our meeting as a starstruck fangirl, I left feeling like I’d been taken to church, school, and possibly intersectional feminist heaven. Quite plainly, the woman is a fucking whirlwind of smarts, beauty, and guts.

“Three or four years ago I could barely pay my rent,” the Emmy-nominated star of Netflix’s hit show Orange is the New Black tells me over lavender mint tea. “So it’s nice to be in demand.” We’re sitting in a well-appointed, quiet two-sto-ry restaurant with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. When the Alabama-raised actress takes off her sunglasses and hood—a standard-issue celebrity disguise that looks incred-ibly chic on her—she seems a little sleepy. She’s just finished a speaking tour of Ontario; shot a CBS pilot; and is gearing up to do press for the third season of OITNB. “In demand” seems like the understatement of the year.

Cox warms up quickly as we delve into the topics that seem closest to her heart: art and advocacy. The transgen-der actress, an alum of the Alabama School of Fine Arts and Marymount Manhattan College, plays inmate Sophia Burset on OITNB. She received a historic Emmy nomination for her performance, but her career doesn’t stop there. I tell her I’ve never seen a speaking schedule as rigorous as hers is—in one recent month, she crisscrossed the states speaking at six different universities from Connecticut to California—and wonder how she balances her passion for acting with her obvious dedication to trans advocacy. “I’m an actress first and always an actress first,” she says. “I have to prioritize that work. At the end of the day, most of what I do in terms of advocacy is talking. I talk a lot. I’ve also been involved in elevating some trans people’s stories that maybe didn’t have the same platform that I’ve had, and I’m proud of that.”

To that end, Cox is a major creative force behind Free CeCe, a documentary about transgender woman CeCe Mc-Donald, who served time in a men’s prison in Minnesota. The film, expected to debut in 2016, focuses on trans-misogyny and violence against transgender women of color.

“I love CeCe,” Cox says. “Her case came to me because violence against trans women has always been something that hits me in my gut.” Cox is not unfamiliar with physical

and emotional violence. “I think ‘bullying’ is almost a nice word for being beat up, held down, and kicked by groups of kids. ‘Bullying’ makes it all sound nice when it’s straight up violence. So I have a history. I’ve dealt with a lot of street harassment, so violence against trans women is something that’s terrifying.” And then Cox asks the question central to her work as both an advocate and an artist: “How do we re-ally begin to dismantle a culture of violence, of rape culture? What does that look like?”

This is the point where Cox mentions what feminist author bell hooks calls “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” and says she amends it to include “cis-normative and hetero-normative.” It isn’t the only time she mentions hooks, a longtime influence, and I bring up a conversation the two had onstage at The New School in the fall of 2014. The women agreed on much, but hooks called into question Cox’s presentation of femininity—how her long blond wigs, dresses, and traditional feminine beauty embody what some feminist women have attempted to reject or avoid. Onstage, Cox responded in part, “If I’m embracing a patriarchal gaze with this presentation, it’s the way that I’ve found something that feels empowering…I’ve never been interested in being invisible and erased.”

Cox, who remains in touch with hooks, tells me “every-body” asks her about that exchange. I ask her if it’s insulting to suggest that her high-femme presentation is, in fact, a capitulation to the patriarchy rather than an empowered choice, and she responds carefully. “What bell hooks would say to that is that we make choices—and this is me being a huge fan of bell hooks—but there’s something almost binary that suggests either you are moving against cis-normative, hetero-normative, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, or you are complicit with it. That kind of binary is really, deeply problematic. I think it’s more complicated. I’ve gone through all sorts of aesthetic phases. I had a shaved head in college. I wore makeup and I was gender-noncon-formist. I also had box braids and a mohawk in college and a little bit after. So I’ve gone through all these different phases aesthetically. I love where I’m at now. I feel like I’ve evolved into being more myself.” But, she adds, “I think at the end of the day, I am very much working within the system.”

She contrasts her own experience with that of her twin brother, the noted musician, composer, singer, and multi-media artist M. Lamar, who played a pre-transition Sophia on OITNB (and who first introduced Cox to the work of bell hooks). While he’s received critical acclaim in such esteemed outlets as The New York Times, particularly for his 2014 mul-timedia gallery piece Negrogothic, a Manifesto, the Aesthetics


of M. Lamar, Cox says outsider work like Lamar’s, “rarely transfers to financial stability.” She muses about this differ-ence between their work and where it has taken them. “Even though there’s something about me that isn’t fully main-stream, there’s something about the choices I’ve made that exists within a system more so than other people.” I get the sense she doesn’t think this is particularly fair. I also begin to realize that while Cox is giving me a lot of answers, she also spends a lot of time asking questions—of herself, of the cul-ture in which she finds herself, and of the world at large.

We talk about the task of being the Laverne Cox: the advo-cate, the actress, the star of creator Jenji Kohan’s women-in-prison magnum opus. I ask what it’s like to have every ele-ment of her being analyzed because of what she represents. Everything from her hair to her career to…. “To my basic humanity and gender?” she interjects.

“Yeah,” I say. “Your right to exist. Your lipstick. Everything.”“That’s how patriarchy works,” she says. “We are all con-

stantly scrutinized based on aesthetics and appearance and judged on that stuff. I think that’s part of being a woman. It’s a part of being an actress on a popular TV show—thank God. I’m grateful for that. It’s a lot of spiritual work for me as I deal with and figure out how to be a famous person who’s recog-nized. A lot of my work is to stay grounded, is to stay spiri-tual. It is to disconnect from what other people say about me, but also to try and be connected to the joy and the love. I think this is where I’m struggling now.”

This reminds me of something Cox posted on Instagram recently. It was an image from her recent trip to Canada, with a caption that read in part, “I am not always open to re-ceive all this love. Sometimes it’s too much. I feel so grateful to be open today.” I ask her about it—the simultaneous open-ness and resistance to adulation from strangers. “This week, I allowed myself to be open and really present with it, which I’m not always able to do because I’m distracted,” she says. “Because I think when you let in the good stuff, then the bad stuff is going to come in, too.”

She grins and adds, “I feel like Mariah Carey when she talks about how her fans make her feel better. It’s almost corny to say that, but it’s the truth. Yet in an airport or on the street, I’m not always able to receive that. As much as I love and am grate-ful for my fans and supporters, I have to set boundaries with them. I have to set boundaries with everybody.”

Actually, she may well be an idol of Mariah-like stature to the rabidly devoted fan base of OITNB. Cox calls the show “a gift” and says with evident amazement, “It’s like, who gets famous just from one show?” “The characters are so nuanced and so profoundly human,” she says, “which is a gift from Jenji Kohan and all of our writers. She discovered so much unknown talent—like Uzo Aduba, Samira Wiley, Danielle Brooks, Yael Stone. There’s just all of these amazing actors who no one knew about until this show, who are brilliant.”

I ask Cox if her character, Sophia, who has undergone

genital reconstructive surgery and hormone therapy, would actually be placed in a women’s prison in real life. Cox ex-plains that in many states, the decision of where to house a trans person in the correctional system is based exclusively on surgical status. Which brings us to our culture’s obses-sion with genitalia, specifically with knowing whether a trans person has had “bottom surgery.” She admits she hasn’t always been immune to that curiosity herself, and recalls a time when she wondered about the surgical status of a friend of a friend. True to form, she used it as an opportunity to critically analyze her own way of thinking. “When we meet someone who is cis-gender or non-transgendered,” she says, “we generally make assumptions about what their bodies

are like. But when we meet someone who is trans we can’t do that. So for me in that moment, I got this crazy anxiety and asked the question, ‘What does it mean for us to be able to sit with anxiety?’ A lot of times, we don’t know how to do that.”

In previous interviews, Cox has mentioned that some romantic partners have not introduced her to their families. I wonder if it’s gotten any easier now that she’s achieved pro-fessional success. “There’s a man that I was involved with on and off for eight years,” she says. “I never met any of his friends or family. We barely even went out in public together, so that tells you the nature of the relationship. What’s deep to me about that is that I think I had this fantasy that once I was famous and accepted by society, this guy would be like, ‘Oh, I’m dating Laverne. I can show her off now.’ And it’s actually the opposite of that. He’s engaged to someone else now.”

I’m struck by how heartbreaking that must have been, and also by how clear it is that Cox has done the work to deal with and understand it. “What I realized is it’s not about me,” she says. “It’s actually about that man’s shame around being attracted to me. And his own issues of being seen as less of a man. He has deep, deep, deep insecurities. There are many men who date transgender women and who engage with us only sexually and don’t want anyone to know about it. They’re straight identified, and there’s a huge stigma around men who are attracted to and have sex

“I had this fantasy that once I was famous and accepted by society, this

guy would be like, ‘Oh, I’m dating Laverne.’”

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with and date trans women. They’re arguably even more stigmatized than we are.”

“I used to believe that if I was smart enough, if I was good enough, if I were pretty enough, that this man all of a sudden would love me and want to fully integrate me into his life,”

she adds. “What I have come to learn is that it does not mat-ter how successful I am, how accomplished I am, how smart I am, how good in bed I am. None of that matters if a man is just not available. I cannot choose those people. I have to choose differently.”

In reflecting on all that she’s accomplished in her life—and on all the insights she’s shared with me in the space of barely an hour—it occurs to me that there must have been somebody in her early life who held her to high standards. “My mother,” she says immediately.

Cox speaks admiringly of her mother’s elegance. “My mother is very put-together,” she says. “She’s the one who goes out of the house with makeup, a dress, and handker-chiefs. I don’t carry handkerchiefs,” she adds, smiling, “but that’s what I grew up with. My mother held me to high standards and I internalized it.” Cox’s mother was also devoted to educating her children well. She grew up in the segregated South and plied her children with black his-tory books. It seems there was no question that the twins would grow up to be outstanding in their fields of choice. “My brother and I have been talking about this,” she says. “In black culture, there’s a tradition of excellence. We’ve had to be amazing to get ahead in a white supremacist culture. I aspire to be in that lineage of black excellence.” As examples, she names opera singers Jessye Norman and Leontyne Price (“my idol”) as well as actress Cicely Tyson, singer/actresses Diahann Carroll and Eartha Kitt, authors Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin, and adds “the list goes on and on and on and on.”

The discussion of race leads to one about Cox’s femi-nism, an ideology grounded in a combination of academic theory and lived experience. “When I found critical theory and I found feminism, it gave me a space to heal and a way to understand the world around me,” Cox says. “I was able to look at the world critically. Then, a few years later, when I needed to go to therapy because of my transition

[after college], I realized I also needed therapy because of the trauma in my childhood. I wasn’t just having the therapy and thinking, ‘OK, now I’m leaving critical theory behind. Now I’m leaving politics behind.’ The trauma that I was experiencing was happening in this context of cis-normative, hetero-normative, imperialist, white suprema-cist, capitalist patriarchy—these things were happening together. So for me, the healing is very political, and the personal is political as well.”

Speaking of the personal, we circle back to the aforemen-tioned ex-love, this time, in the context of feminism. “What I like to say to audiences, and to the world, is that men are just as hurt by patriarchy as women are. That man I alluded to earlier…I never met any of his friends and was never real-ly a part of his life. He just objectified me sexually. I believe he was in a tremendous amount of pain because he was not able to be fully authentic. At one point, he told me he loved me, [but] his masculinity would have been called into ques-tion in a way he was not comfortable with, so he was not able to live fully authentically, I would argue.”

“He was afraid,” I say.“He was afraid,” she agrees. “I’ve dated so many men who

I’ve seen patriarchy destroy because they’re not able to re-ally allow themselves to be vulnerable. To lean in to their vulnerability or the parts of themselves that may be a little feminine. So patriarchy is a system that not only harms women, but also harms men.”

We’ve gone through a good amount of that wonderful lavender mint tea, and our time together is nearly at an end. But there’s one last question that weighs on my mind, and it’s one I’ve wanted to ask since I first took a look at Cox’s jam-packed public schedule. “Do you ever get to re-lax?” I ask.

She grins. And that’s when I learn that Cox is a huge—and I mean huge—karaoke buff. She calls it “one of my big cathartic things.” In fact, the night before, she and some pals got to a karaoke joint at 8:00 p.m. and stayed past mid-night. I ask if she has a go-to jam. Turns out, she’s been into Phantom of the Opera lately. “I’m not saying I sing it well,” she says, “but it’s something I’ve been doing a lot. I also do Frankie J’s version of ‘More than Words’—Frankie J’s version as opposed to Extreme. I did ‘Listen to Your Heart’ because a girl did it on The Voice this week. I’ve been doing karaoke since college, so ‘My Immortal’ used to be my go-to song by Evanescence. Do you know that song? It got me through a breakup. It really did.”

I tell her that’s a pretty great place to stop, considering we’ve gone from bell hooks to Phantom of the Opera. She smiles, and I turn off the recorder. As we bid each other goodbye, she puts her disguise back on and I watch her walk away. She carries herself in the same way that she speaks: with grace and elegance. I instantly think of a million more things I want to know about her, but the moment has passed. Laverne Cox has left the building.

“What I like to say to the world is that men are just as hurt by patriarchy as

women are.”

Feminist rock icon Kathleen Hanna opens up about her illness, her abusive childhood, and learning not to “take shit every fucking day, in every fucking way”

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By Lisa Butterworth

Photos By Mary eLLen Matthews

styList // KeMaL harris

hair // Linh nguyen @ Kate ryan

MaKeuP // tsiPPorah LieBMan using MaC CosMetiCs

naiLs // aLexaundra MCCorMiCK @ honey artists

set design // shawn PatriCK anderson/aCMe studio

38 . june/july 2016 . bust


his doesn’t seem very Kathleen Hanna, I think when I walk into the business-casual Bel-gian brasserie that the 47-year-old frontwoman picked for our N.Y.C. lunch date. That’s when I stop myself. What the hell do I know about a per-son I’ve never even met? I’m sure I’m not the only feminist who feels like she knows Hanna. As the

founder of Bikini Kill, the legendary punk band that helped shape the ’90s riot grrrl movement; Le Tigre, the electro-dance trio that made political party music in the early 2000s; and now the Julie Ruin, her latest and most intimate venture, Han-na is a feminist icon. And when it comes to the political, she makes it feel very personal. Revolution Girl Style Now!, Bikini Kill’s first record, was a sonic feminist manifesto, as visceral and relevant now as the day it came out in 1991. It felt more like a call to arms than an album, and Hanna, with her disrup-tive ideology and a shriek that could shake your very soul, was the mouthpiece women hadn’t re-alized we’d so des-perately needed. She made it OK to get pissed about gender inequali-ty, to stop taking the blame for sex-ual assault, to be loud and demand change and do it all without apology. Later, in Le Tigre, when she donned eye-popping outfits and did coordinated dance moves to an-thems about misogyny and overcoming it, she even made fem-inism fun. And she’s always advocating for women off stage as well, volunteering with Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls and rallying tirelessly for Planned Parenthood.

When she walks through the restaurant door, her signa-ture half-pulled-through high ponytail gives her away before I even see her face. “I’ve never been here before,” she says, when I wave her over to the table. I’m briefly reassured that the Han-na in my heart is not too far off from the one sitting across from me. As she orders a steak and fries (only after making sure it won’t gross me out), I think about the reasons I feel like I do know her: In her music, and her public life, Hanna goes where most people won’t, speaking her mind no matter who it offends and sharing herself, darkness, flaws, and all. Her new record, Hit Reset, by the Julie Ruin—her band with Kenny Mellman, Sara Landeau, Carmine Covelli, and former Bikini Kill-member Kathi Wilcox—is no exception.

“I feel like there are parts of [the album] that are so fuck-ing vulnerable it makes me want to puke,” she says, her speech peppered with enough likes to rival my own Valley girl accent. “Like, I can’t believe I did that. And I’m embarrassed about it. But I’m also happy.” Happy, in part, because it includes a song called “Calverton” that she wrote to thank her mom for help-ing her survive a childhood she wasn’t sure she would make it through. “She made me think that I could be something in this world when everyone else was telling me I couldn’t. I always just think, How is someone like me living this life? How am I even still alive?” she says, before our food even arrives. “I’ve felt for a long time like I’m living for all the girls who didn’t make it out, because that’s how dangerous my childhood felt. I didn’t know if I would wake up the next day, or if my drunk dad would get into his gun collection and decide, ‘Well, I’m just going to do it.’ He could literally be voted most likely to shoot his family and then shoot himself. Actually, most

likely to shoot his en-tire family and then run away because he didn’t have the guts to shoot himself. And I don’t care if you’re reading this, Dad.”

Letting go of car-ing is something Han-na’s done a lot of in the last few years, first by donating all of her old fanzines and journals to NYU’s Fales Li-brary Riot Grrrl Col-

lection in 2010, then by giving director Sini Anderson the OK to make a documentary about her: 2013’s moving The Punk Singer. But these weren’t arbitrary decisions. At the time, a dire health issue was propelling Hanna to open up and docu-ment her legacy—she was deathly ill with late-stage Lyme dis-ease, a tick-borne illness. (“We camped across the country ev-ery summer,” Hanna says. “I got bit by so many fucking ticks and my parents would burn them out of me with a lighter be-cause that’s what the ’70s and early ’80s were like.”) It gave rise to debilitating symptoms that were misdiagnosed as ev-erything from Crohn’s Disease to MS. “There were times when I thought I wasn’t going to make it through the night,” she says. But finally getting properly diagnosed was only the beginning. “I had a suitcase for my medicine, like, an old-fashioned suit-case,” she says, miming a shape with her hands that seems im-possibly large. She also had a PICC line—a constant IV that fed medication straight to her heart—for the better part of a year, which made everyday activities like opening heavy doors

“I’ve felt for a long tIme lIke I’m lIvIng for all the gIrls who dIdn’t make It out, because that’s how danger-ous my chIldhood felt.”

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tasks of Herculean proportions. Hanna, who’s now Lyme free, is down to a cosmetic bag for her pill bottles, but even coming off the meds has had a downside. The constant nausea she ex-perienced as a result has led to a lot of weight loss, one of the rea-sons she’s eating a steak in the first place. “I’ve got to get some girth before I go on tour,” she says. “I’ve got to be strong.” And the recovery process isn’t only physical, it’s emotional as well. “It re-traumatizes you,” she says. “[First] feeling like you grew up in your house and you have no control. Then your body be-comes your house that you’re trapped in and you can’t get out.”

Perhaps the most insidious things about Lyme disease are how little is known about it and that it often has no outwardly visible symptoms—factors that, for female sufferers, are like lightning rods for sexism. “Some asshole wrote me on Face-book or Twitter years ago when The Punk Singer first came out,” she says. “He sent me an article: ‘Why do more women have Lyme disease than men?’ Like, it’s a hysterical illness. I was like, ‘Oh, this is why.’ Because they treat you like you’re hysterical so you don’t seek medical attention until it gets really, really bad. You wait because we’re sup-posed to just take it. We take shit ev-ery fucking day, in every fucking way.”

Being sick of taking shit is one of the things that made fem-inism resonate so much with Hanna to begin with. Though she was born in Portland, OR, her family moved around quite a bit, and she first felt the fire of feminism at a rally her mom took her to in Washington, D.C., where Gloria Steinem spoke. She was only nine. After her parents divorced and she went back to Portland with her mom as a teen, Hanna moved to Olympia, WA, to attend Evergreen State College, where she felt it even more acutely—especially after volunteering at a domestic vi-olence shelter for women. She formed Bikini Kill in 1990 and helped ignite the feminist movement percolating in the punk scene. As quickly as it coalesced, however, it began to splin-ter. Mainstream media misconstrued the activist message of riot grrrl and resentment brewed, especially toward Hanna, who had unwittingly become the de facto face of the new fem-inist zeitgeist. When I say that I’m curious to know how it ac-tually felt to be in riot grrrl—suggesting it was possibly more traumatic than empowering—Hanna pauses, something worth noting since she often talks quickly and off the cuff. “I’m sorry, just you asking that question makes me feel empowered. I seri-

ously want to cry right now. Nobody’s ever asked me that,” she says. “To a lot of people, Bikini Kill was a young band who got a lot of attention. The riot grrrl thing, blah blah blah, all these awesome women banding together. But that’s not the way I experienced it. I’m not saying that it wasn’t a good thing, but it was really difficult.”

Hanna came to feminism and the underground music scene in search of a family. When it started to feel like the community she helped shape (along with many other people, she makes clear) was turning against her, “it was so painful,” she says. But maybe also to be expected. “Riot grrrl attracted a lot of people who had never been heard before, people who had been abused by family members or friends or just had a lot of violence visit their doorstep,” she explains. “It’s bound to be kind of a Molotov cocktail when you have a lot of people who felt voiceless coming to voice at the same time and feeling the rage that they pushed down for so long. Sometimes we would

turn it against each other. Me includ-ed.” But it wasn’t only the internal turmoil that was af-fecting Hanna. The outside reactions were intensifying as well. “There was a point where I was like, ‘I’m not per-forming anymore

because I’m going to get shot,’” she says. “The hate mail and the violence at our shows had gotten to a point where I was scared. So I took off performing for a while because I was like, ‘I can’t change anything if I’m dead.’”

As Hanna gesticulates, her short neon-pink-painted nails catch my eye, as does the wedding ring she wears: a scripted nameplate that reads Adam. Hanna is married to Adam Horo-vitz of the Beastie Boys (he wears a ring that says Kathleen), someone she often refers to in interviews as the love of her life. It was right around the time that Hanna took a break from performing that the two started dating in 1996. “My mom, of course, said the grossest thing when we first started going out. She [told Adam], ‘You remind me so much of the son I nev-er had. You and Kathleen really could be brother and sister. There is something about you.’ I was like, ‘Mom, that’s disgust-ing,’” Hanna says with a laugh, her eyes crinkling. But her mom was right, there was something about Adam: the two have been together ever since. And Hanna definitely inherited her mom’s “weird” sense of humor. “She always made fucked up jokes with me, like, I would be in the bathroom taking a bath, and she’d say, ‘Kathleen your kindergarten class is here. I’m going

“there was a poInt where I was lIke, ‘I’m not performIng anymore because I’m goIng to get shot.’”


to let them in.’ It’s funny right? Clearly, I knew she was kid-ding,” she says. “But when I first got together with [Adam], I’d do shit like shove crazy notes under the door while he was hav-ing private time in the bathroom. Like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I shook the handle a couple of times to freak him out. I was like, ‘This is for you, Mom.’”

The early days of Hanna’s relationship with Horovitz were also around the time she retreated to her bedroom, got her hands on a drum machine, taught herself production, and cre-ated the first Julie Ruin album as a solo venture. It’s no coin-cidence that this is the project she decided to resurrect when she was wanting to make music again during Le Tigre’s hiatus and while Lyme ravaged her body. At its heart, the Julie Ruin is Hanna at her most stripped down. “I was in a deep depres-sion both times and I used the music as a way to help me out,” she says. “It gave me something to look forward to.” If the first Julie Ruin album helped her through the dissolution and dis-illusion of the riot grrrl scene, getting a band together in 2010, and releasing their first album in 2013, was her way of identifying with s o m e t h i n g o t h -er than being sick. But the new album, Hit Reset, certain-ly reflects every-thing Lyme put her through. “During the record I was weaning off ste-roids that I had been put on because my adrenal glands were just shot. And getting off steroids is no joke. In between takes I would just lay on the floor and then get back up and drink like a triple espresso and just go for it,” she says. Just going for it was the mantra that governed her writing process, too. “It’s still weird for me to give myself permission to just write what I want to write and not have this weight of, ‘YOU HAVE TO WRITE A FEMINIST ANTHEM!’” she says, affecting a monster voice. “Because I didn’t want to. I just felt like writ-ing about stuff and the illness totally influenced me.”

Hanna might not feel like she’s writing feminist an-thems, but doing what she wants is perhaps just the next iteration of her feminist art, especially as the pop-culture currency of feminism increases. “[Feminism is] becoming this trendy thing that publishers use as a way to pit wom-en against each other. Like in the ’70s—there was a whole myth that feminists hated housewives. Even though femi-

nists were actually saying that it’s a job and women should get paid for it,” Hanna says. “Women who already feel to-tally under-represented are much more likely to strike out against another woman than against the men who control the system. It’s easier. It’s a lot easier.”

As a remedy to this kind of girl-on-girl aggression, Han-na suggests it’s time we change the conversation. “Tons of big names have said stupid stuff when asked if they’re a fem-inist, like, ‘No, I don’t hate men.’ [But] that has nothing to do with the conversation. The whole idea that feminists are man haters is made up so that people won’t fight back against op-pression—and it’s totally obvious. I don’t care if women are like, ‘I’m not interested in [feminism].’ Like, fucking fine. I don’t give a shit what you do, but don’t act like you know about something that you don’t,” she says. “Here’s the thing. Why aren’t we asking men [if they’re feminist]? I want Justin Timberlake to be asked if he’s a feminist. Are Vampire Week-

end? I’m actual-ly curious. Why am I always asked what it’s like to be in a band with oth-er women and not a s k e d w h a t i t ’ s like to be in a band with other white people? I’d love to talk about racism in the indie scene but people don’t ask that, they ask me about fucking Miley Cyrus twerking.”

Ultimately, feminism has to “connect to something,” says Hanna. “It has to connect to ending oppression for everybody.” And sometimes, that means men. She launches into a discus-sion of how sad and unfair it is that men are now often be-ing objectified in ways similar to women, before interrupting herself. “If someone told me that when I was 19, I would’ve been like, ‘No! They have all the privilege!’” she says. “So that’s where my feminism has changed. I think seeing nuances and understanding compromise is what’s changed for me. The an-ger is still totally there, I just take out the knife when I need it. I’m not carrying it outside of the sheath 24 hours a day.”

On our way out of the restaurant, Hanna rolls her eyes and juts her thumb at a table of suits, then hugs me goodbye on the sidewalk outside. As she walks off down Sixth Avenue, her pseudo-bun bouncing, I realize I still don’t really know Kath-leen Hanna. I only know what she means to me, and to legions of women like me. And that’s enough.

“women who already feel totally under-represented are much more lIkely to strIke out agaInst another woman than agaInst the men who control the system.”

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rivetingKnown for years as a movie star, Rose McGowan has recently taken on a new role: feminist troublemaker. Here, she opens up about Hollywood’s “macho crap,” being the daughter of a cult leader, and how she plans to shatter the patriarchy

interview By AmBer tAmBlyn

photos By jill greenBerg // styling By cAnnon @ judy cAsey // nAils By mABelyne mArtin

mAkeup By Alex Byrne @ exclusive Artists mAnAgement


A lot has happened since Rose Mc-Gowan first graced the cover of BUST 10 years ago. Back then, McGowan was rid-ing a new wave of notoriety in the wake of her career switch from indie-film “It” girl—in flicks like Jawbreaker, Going All The Way, and The Doom Generation—to TV titan as the witchy star of the popular WB series Charmed. In the years since Charmed ended in 2006, she made a

memorable appearance in 2007's Grindhouse before her résu-mé grew to include directing with the short film Dawn, in 2014. Captivating on screen and off, McGowan could possibly at-tribute some of her strong personal magnetism to her unusual upbringing—until age nine, she lived on an Italian commune inside a cult led by her father, called Children of God.

In June 2015, however, McGowan transitioned from be-loved Hollywood babe to feminist badass in the eyes of women everywhere, when she tweeted to over 600k followers a photo of some casting notes she’d received for an Adam Sandler proj-ect which read: “Please make sure to read the attached script before coming in so you understand the context of the scenes. Wardrobe note: Black (or dark) form-fitting tank that shows off cleavage (push-up bras encouraged). And formfitting leggings or jeans. Nothing white.” Beneath the photo, McGowan captioned: “Casting note that came w/script I got today. For real. Name of male star rhymes with Madam Panhandler hahahaha I die.” And while feminists everywhere cheered this rare example of an actress calling out Hollywood’s casual sexism, not everyone was pleased. A week later, McGowan tweeted, “I just got fired by my wussy acting agent because I spoke up about the bullshit in Hol-lywood. Hahaha. #douchebags #awesome #BRINGIT.”

Even in 2015, the consequences for calling out sexism at work were swift and severe for McGowan. But at this juncture, where many others would cut their losses and try to make nice, McGowan doubled down. Two days later, she went on Good Morning America to discuss, “the systemic abuse of women in Hollywood,” and quit acting, after almost 25 years in the industry, to focus on writing, directing, and speaking out for women’s rights on and off social media alongside the hashtag #RoseArmy. Just this past month, McGowan continued to use her powerful voice on Twitter to shine a light on the entertain-ment industry’s abuse of women by sharing a painful story about being raped by a Hollywood studio executive when she was younger.

In short: She’s not staying silent any longer, and she’s done with masquerading as a sex object. Being encouraged to wear push-up bras and revealing clothing to get a job is not exclusive to Hollywood; it is the spoken and unspoken law for women at every level, in every profession. Be prettier. Smile more. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t wear that outfit. Don’t be so angry. Keep your ideas to yourself, or if you have ideas, figure out how to make a man in charge feel like they’re his ideas. Be a muse, not a matriarch. Don’t make a stink. Don’t fight back. Stay in your lane. Do as you’re told. McGowan has broken every one of these

rules in her tenure as an actor, activist, and businesswoman—and she has no plans to stop anytime soon.

I was one of the people whose attention McGowan caught in the wake of “CastingGate,” so I reached out through a mutual friend to give her my support. It wasn’t long before a strong friendship was born between us, and we began texting and talking almost daily. She came and supported my directo-rial debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival this past June, and we joined forces for a fundraiser in New York to unseat the judge in the Brock Turner rape case. In the time I’ve known her, McGowan has tirelessly proven herself to be a voice for the voiceless, a blazing fire for the matchless, and a beating heart for the broken.

I contacted the 43-year-old artist in Italy, where she’s working on a record of what she calls “galactic hypnotic” mu-sic, one of the many creative swords she wields that makes her so damn fascinating. Rose McGowan is not a breath of fresh air. She’s a fresh tornado—an army of many in a single body, ready to pulverize the patriarchy.

It’s so interesting to me that you were on the cover of BUST 10 years ago. I feel like you have always been that rebel, that person who was not going to take shit from anybody. But maybe you hid it more then because you were an actor and you were more vulnerable. I think that’s a perception that is not necessarily true. But I have had a hell of a life, and acting is probably the least inter-esting part of it. My history was intertwined with [acting]. In Italy, I was born on a commune, and I was trained from an early age to perform on the street for money.

Obviously, your acting was the reason people began to know who you were. And I think people should know what it’s truly like to be in the mind of a woman who acts.Nobody ever talks about it.

Exactly, no one ever really talks about it. But you’re a rare example of someone who speaks every type of truth. So what I want to know is, in the years that you did act—when it mattered and it was a thing you did a lot—was there a moment when you realized you had more to offer the world, and you didn’t know how to do that? I always knew. There was never a moment when I did not think that what I was doing was beneath me. The content, the people I was working with—with a few exceptions—it was beneath me. People never talk about something being beneath them, but what I consider art was not in any way reflected in the world around me. I was perceived as this strange version of a movie star who wasn’t playing the role. Like, there’s a role—the smart, thinking actress—that’s assigned to you by the media. But I was literally just too beautiful. Nobody would listen to me.

Yeah, you were a sex symbol. But I also think of you as a feminist guru. I am. I am the daughter of a fucking cult leader.

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You are the daughter of a cult leader—that is true. But what’s so powerful about you, too, is that you use lan-guage and attitude in a way that is extremely unusual for a mainstream celebrity. So, was there a certain breaking point that you reached as an actress that made you say, “Fuck this, I am done”?For me, it was on Tarantino’s [Grindhouse] set—it’s wasn’t him, he was a cherry. It was all of it. The thing was, there was never really an Option B. And then there was a point when I was won-dering, How do I get out of this? On those two [Grindhouse] films, where there was heaping amounts of macho crap going down, I was like, Why am I subjugating myself for some dickhead’s benefit so they can get their rocks off? This is not fun. This abuse is not fun. All of the women who support this system are not fun. I don’t want to live this way. This means nothing to me. I have dealt with systematic hatred; was held up as an example of what to hate. I was cast in [films about] people’s Madonna/whore issues. It’s not my fucking problem that you have a problem with your mommy. Get over it. Yeah! I mean, I remember when I was 12 or 13, going on an audition for a movie that had a famous director in-volved. I wasn’t even through puberty yet, but I remem-ber wearing this really cute, red, Betsey Johnson dress that I had bought with my soap opera money. I loved it so much, and I went on this audition, and the scene was, this older man is in bed with a little girl and the cops bust in on him, and I was playing the girl… Oh, lucky you!

…and I remember the director commenting, in the audi-tion room, on my body—because I was wearing this little slinky dress. He literally said to me, “Well, I can see you’re starting to get breasts, and you probably have a little pubic hair, don’t you? So you’re that perfect age.” I left and I got in the car with my dad, and I leaned the seat back and I lay there feeling sick. I didn’t understand what had happened or why it made me feel like shit, but I felt like shit. I told my dad what had happened, and he was so angry. He drove out of there and was, like, “No way, fuck this.” My dad [Russ Tamblyn] was a child actor, so he was maybe exposed to some form of that. He was so angry, he called my agent. I’ve never told that story before, but it was extremely upsetting.It’s casual, deep misogyny. Yes, absolutely. It was the moment when I went from be-ing a cute little actress to suddenly thinking, My body now matters and people have no problem saying that. And for the rest of my life, I have dealt with variations of, “Oh, she would be a huge movie star if she lost 15 pounds.” What did you do, after you had that moment?Ugh, look at the contents of [Grindhouse], see what happens to women, and draw your own conclusions. I just checked out. Basically, I would astrally project out of my body. I read a book about astral projection when I was nine, and I was constantly trying to do it. I think in some ways, I’ve mastered that—I just hover above and watch while my body is doing something else.

The problem was, I got so good at being out of my body, I didn’t protect myself while I was in it. There was nobody protecting me. You had your dad, and I had my father. But after [my father] saw my first movie [The Doom Generation], he asked me what it felt like being a whore.

Wow. Are you still close with your dad at all? He died, actually. My father was a very difficult and interesting human. He was the finest artist I’ve ever known. I’ve never met anyone as naturally gifted as that man was. But he also suffered from being a very handsome, manic-depressive man with a God-complex. I’ve never lived within the confines of society and its structures, so they don’t really apply to me. I never was good at being a celebrity. I probably could have been a huge star had I given two fucks. But for me, it was like, Oh, I have to play the role of an actress, and then play the movie? OK, cool, let’s go. And then, unfortunately, I got very lost while I was doing Charmed. For my kind of brain, that was like hell, to be honest. I know people have a lot of affection for that show, but for how I like to live my life and for how my brain works…my hair was falling out. I was sick all the time. I gained 10 to 15 pounds. Acting felt like a punishment. It wasn’t exciting for me to be outside of my own body and mind, because my mind interested me a lot more than what was on the page. Most people go to a job and they still have the luxury of hav-ing their own thoughts, whereas I was professionally paid to not be me. I hated that. I resented that.

Lets talk about your directing. I imagine being a director really allows you to put your own vision into it. Ninety-eight percent of the directors I’ve worked with over 25 years have been men, and even as a little girl, I learned how to make my ideas the male director’s ideas, to make them feel like they thought of it. Oh, I didn’t do that. They just blatantly stole ideas from me, and not just directors. Like, any guy that I was with was like, “You’re my muse.” And I was like, “You’re a thief. I’m not your muse, motherfucker, you’re a fucking thief.”

Did you feel that way at the time or did it creep up on you?I was resentful. It pissed me off. I couldn’t figure out why some-one would do that. I was like, “Oh, but wait, I wrote that. But wait, that’s my song. Oh, but wait….” We’re taught that the greatest role in life that a girl can get is to be someone’s muse. [Makes gag-ging noises.] Vomit. And that’s what I would be thinking on set,

“ i was cast in films about people’s Madonna/whore issues. it’s not my fucking problem that you have a problem with your mommy. get over it.”


every fucking time. So I have a line on the inside of my mouth where I just gnaw the fuck out of it to hide my fucking rage at the incompetence, the pettiness, and the abuse. But I knew the structure of it all, and I knew that there was no way to speak up for myself, so I just kept my nose to the grindstone. But a very smart person once told me, “Just because you can handle a lot, doesn’t mean that you have to.” And that’s the thing that took the weight off my back. So now, I want to push back and to teach others how to, also.

There’s this sense that people, especially men, love to tell women like you that they need to be less angry and more happy. They can shut the fuck up. I don’t care what they tell me. I hear that shit every moment of every day. It doesn’t interest me. Because frankly, their brains cannot comprehend the scale and level of my thought—the field that I play in is not available to them. They have not done the work to get there. They have not done what it takes to be me.

I brought it up because I think it’s something that affects all women. We’re all told that we should be less of one thing, more of another. Yeah, like, a tankini is too much coverage, and a bikini is too small. Fuck. That. I’m not interested in that. Recently, I walked into a 7-11, and some guy working there says, “You’re going to walk in here and not smile or say hello? In my house?” And I was like, “Excuse me?” And he was like, “You’re a woman, you say hello!” And I was like, “No, I don’t say hello. Asshole.” I don’t. I do what I want. I don’t have to smile. And guess what? You have fucking earned my anger. This anger is because of people like you, and you are not unique. Men come up to me all the time, thinking they’re going to be unique and not kiss my ass, that they’re going harass me instead. And I’m like, “You are one in a long line of basics. You are all the same.” I have met more people than most will in 10 or 20 lifetimes. And I have lived a global existence that none of these people have, so they don’t get to touch me. Just because you write for a magazine, or you write for a blog and you’re from Chicago but you’re moving to New York…no. Sit. Down. Don’t come at me.

[laughing] I love it. So, tell me about your transition into directing. It started with the writers of [my 2014 short film] Dawn, Josh Miller and Mark Fortin, who were both long-term friends of mine. They just said, “It’s time.” And I said, “You’re right.”

Three months later, I was shooting. And now I just sold a show that I wrote and will be directing for Amazon—Children of God.

That’s amazing!I’m working completely outside the system right now. I won’t work with agents or managers. They brainwash you into think-ing you need them. But I just employ someone to fill the gaps that I need filled, instead of giving somebody 10 percent of my income and hoping they can remotely understand what I’m doing and are able to sell that. Though the idea of me being “sold” to anyone or anything is stomach turning. So I refuse to sell or buy anybody to anybody. The Amazon thing came about because the head of Amazon Studios followed me on Twitter. I followed him back, and that’s how it happened. It wasn’t based on someone saying, “Oh, you really ought to read this script!” It wasn’t somebody doing the typical song and dance. Actors are not empowered. But if you’ve survived as an actor for a certain amount of time, you are a businessperson—act like it. Figure it out. You are your own CEO, so act like one.

That’s very true. I swear, I could sit and listen to you forever. Well, soon you can! I’m launching a digital platform [called] #RoseArmy. One of the features will be a live feed where I sit in and just converse. Like, “In five easy steps, you, too, can be liv-ing a better and more informed life, instead of being an asshole who hurts animals, women, and children—you fucking dick. Just shut up and listen.” #RoseArmy is an army of thought.

Tell me more. What exactly are you talking about when you say you want to build a #RoseArmy?#RoseArmy is a growing group of likeminded individuals who are pro-thought, pro-intellect, and pro-art. If a man can plant a flag in the ground and say, “These are my borders, these are my laws, these are my rigid, narrow rules within which you have to live,” well, then I can create a virtual world that rejects those beliefs. We all can. #RoseArmy members be-lieve in pushing boundaries and fighting for justice. The site, rosearmy.com, is being built now, and it’ll become clearer what I’m doing and why once it’s launched. I realized there was no one publicly advocating for thought. What I want is for every being in the world to be 10 percent more conscious in their lives. I want people to think differently, and I want them to do better. I want to dismantle the status quo and I want to shatter the patriarchy. It is not working for society, and it is especially not working for women. I want us to be equal. I will not rest until it is so. I believe an army of thought will bring about the systemic change we so need. And it starts with us. So let’s go.

One more question. Is there something you want to say to people who read this magazine who may be feeling lost, cornered, violated, or stuck?Yes. While you’re enduring crap, arm yourself. Prepare your-self for your new life, the life you’re really meant to live. I don’t mean with a gun, I mean with knowledge. Learn every-thing you can about the various things that interest you. Be brave. Leap and the net will appear. Your life can be bigger than you imagine.

“A very smart person once told me,‘Just because you can handle a lot, doesn’ t mean that you have to.’”

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37

gretathe greatinterview by jenni miller

photos by nadya wasylko

styling by lara backmender @ honey

hair by marco santini using davines @ tracey mattingly

makeup by daniel martin @ the wall group

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When Greta GerwiG sits down to breakfast at Café Cluny in N.Y.C.’s West Village, she is friendly and warm despite our masochistically early 8 a.m. meeting time. It seems impossible but entirely too

tempting to believe her when she says she remembers me from previous interviews I’ve done with her over many years as a freelance film writer. That’s because, based on her screen persona, she seems like the ulti-mate ride-or-die best friend every woman wants—no, needs. An hour-long conversation with Gerwig is cultur-ally nourishing; we veer from the joys of Virginia Woolf and nighttime walks to the unmasking of Elena Fer-rante and even her love of passports.

“You gotta wander around,” she says of her regular constitutionals. “It definitely helps the quality of thought. Actually, if I’m stuck, I always try to go walk, because usually it solves something. Even if it just solves my bad attitude.” She then adds, “I actually have trouble think-ing or talking when I’m sitting. Sorry.” There’s nothing to forgive, of course. Gerwig, 34, is endlessly charming and fun to chat with, sitting or not.

“I love getting passports, because when you get a passport, it expires in 10 years, and you have this physical object, and you think, ‘What are the next 10 years going to hold?’” she muses. “I got my passport renewed right after I graduated from college, and I had to get it renewed again last year. I remembered holding my passport right after I graduated from college and I thought, ‘What am I going to be like at 32? And what are these 10 years going to be?’ Then when I got it again, I thought, ‘What’s 42?’ I don’t know. The persistence of objects over time never ceases to amaze me.”

These anecdotes may make her sound as whimsi-cal as some of her onscreen characters, like her break-through role in 2012’s Frances Ha—in which she plays an aspiring dancer whose life is upended when she’s ditched by her best friend—yet Gerwig is anything but.

Greta Gerwig has known she’s wanted to direct since she was in kindergarten. Although her childhood desire

to lead her classmates in a theatrical production of An-drew Lloyd Weber’s Starlight Express was never realized, the multi-hyphenate made her filmmaking dreams come true this past November with the release of her directo-rial debut, Lady Bird, a film she also wrote. Boasting powerhouse performances by Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird is a mother/daughter story bursting with heart and humor that established Gerwig as a film-making force to be reckoned with.

But before she reached this career milestone, Gerwig made her name acting—first in micro-indies like Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Baghead (2008), and then in festival darlings including Greenberg (2010) and the aforementioned Frances Ha.

Now claiming her place among the current van-guard of female auteurs taking charge of their careers and the movie industry—a group that includes Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, and Patty Jenkins—Gerwig is veering off the leading lady track and opting to go behind the camera. “What scared me most was the fact that I knew there was a perfectly good lane in which I never did this,” Gerwig explains when I ask about her decision to break into di-recting. “If I had never directed [Lady Bird], if I’d never written this, I would have been fine. I would have fig-ured it out. I would have done things. But… if I wanted to carve out another path, no one was ever going to come to me. I would have to beat it out myself.”

That path included a short stint in ballet before be-ing told her body “wasn’t right”—“99.9 percent of bodies are not right for ballet,” she points out—and then a long stretch exploring other types of performance. Like her character in Frances Ha, “I kept dancing,” she says, “I still love dancing.” But she also took up theater in high school in California, including stints in community theater, which her parents encouraged. “I don’t think people think of Sacramento necessarily as a place where you can see a lot of theater, but there is a lot of great community theater there. I was seeing one or two plays a week, every week, for my entire childhood.” Eventually, she went to Barnard for

An indie-movie queen with festival hits like Frances Ha, Mistress America, and Greenberg to her credit, Greta Gerwig made the leap to big screen writer/direc-tor in November with the unapologetically woman-focused Lady Bird. Here, she talks candidly about the female gaze, the New York dream, and writing scripts where “the central story is not a question of whether a woman will or will not end up with some dude”

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undergrad, and during that time she continued to act while studying English and philosophy, subjects that would help her later as a screenwriter directing her own work.

“My desire to direct and my determination to direct was a feeling of, ‘I’ve been given all these gifts, and I know all those women, and I know all those professors and all the women who came before me,’” Gerwig says. “And it’s not good enough if I don’t do it. I’m letting them down and I’m letting the next generation of those women down because—I felt like there was a sense of the gauntlet being thrown down to all of us.”

Gerwig has picked up that gauntlet with record speed, starting with a co-writing credit on 2012’s Frances Ha, which she penned with her partner, writer/director Noah Baumbach. Gerwig currently lives in Manhattan with Ba-umbach, whom she initially met when he cast her in his 2010 film Greenberg, a veritable pageant of discomfort co-starring Ben Stiller. Baumbach split with his then-partner Jennifer Jason Leigh after making that film, and he and Gerwig started dating in 2011. She and Baumbach also co-wrote 2015’s Mistress America, in which she plays a hipster hustler who becomes friends with her stepsister-to-be, played by Lola Kirke. And in addition to writing, she con-tinued to kill it on the acting front with memorable roles in Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, Rebecca Miller’s Mag-gie’s Plan, and Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, among others.

Gerwig’s early work on so-called “mumblecore” indies (a subgenre of low-budget films characterized by natu-

ralistic dialogue and production) required her to learn everything from how to hold a boom to editing and find-ing costumes—all skills that served her well as a director. She also soaked up everything she could while working on larger film sets. Between this sort of on-the-fly film training and a rapturous love for movies—you can find Gerwig and Baumbach haunting N.Y.C.’s art house theaters all the time, and our conversation is peppered with references to the Chantal Akerman film Jeanne Dielman, and French writer/directors Claire Denis and Leos Carax—Gerwig realized she was ready to take her script for Lady Bird and fly.

Lady Bird is a classic in the making, a quintessential com-ing-of-age story that’s usually the purview of male filmmakers and their boyhood stand-ins. Saoirse Ronan sparks as Chris-tine, aka Lady Bird, a wild-haired teen who is prone to dramat-ics like throwing herself out of a moving car during a fight with her mother, the harried and excellent Laurie Metcalf.

Lady Bird’s senior year is rife with discoveries, from her newfound love of theater to her interest in boys like Danny (Lucas Hedges), her sweet onstage co-star, and Kyle

(Timothée Chalamet), a too-cool-for-school jerk whom Lady Bird longs to impress. She also struggles with embar-rassment over her family’s finances; they’ve never been as well off as her peers, but things become even more fraught after her father, played by the legendary playwright Tracy Letts, loses his job. Still, Lady Bird has her sights set on life in the big city, and she’s determined to make it happen.

Like Gerwig, Lady Bird grows up in Sacramento; also like Gerwig, she dreams of college in New York City where she can pursue her artistic dreams. However, that’s where the similarities ends. “I’m in every character in it, because they all came from a part of me or a part of other people who touched me,” Gerwig says. Relationships between women in Lady Bird are the connective tissue. Although the lead char-acter dallies with boys, her relationships with her best friend and mother carry the narrative. “The idea of who women are when we’re not looked at by a man, that’s fascinating to me,” Gerwig says. “And to be a female filmmaker, what does it mean—is there a female gaze? What does that mean? How is it operative? What am I looking for on a screen that’s differ-ent than what a man in my position would be looking for?”

“Maybe it’s not gender,” she continues. “Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it just has to do with personality. And I don’t ever want to reduce the accomplishments of female directors by putting them in the category of ‘female directors.’ But…how does gender play in art-making? It’s fascinating, and I think we’re just starting to dismantle it.”

Gerwig’s scripts for Frances Ha, Mistress America, and Lady Bird all pass the Bechdel test with flying colors: each one features lots of female characters, these charac-ters interact with one another, and the dialogue features women talking to each other about plenty of things other than men. “I’ve consciously tried to write female charac-ters where their central story is not a question of whether she will or will not end up with some dude,” she says, add-ing, “I love those movies, I really do, and I’ll probably make one someday. But if you force yourself to find another plot, you’ll find there are endless narratives that don’t include it. I like writing about women in relation to other wom-en—mothers and daughters, friends, sisters, mentors, em-ployees and employers, et cetera—because men don’t know what women do when they aren’t there. These are power-ful, complicated, rich relationships that deserve their own place in the collection of stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be human.”

The complex humanity of women is at the forefront of Gerwig’s work at all times, no matter who’s behind S

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“I like writing about women in relation to other women—mothers and daughters, friends, sisters, mentors, employees and employers, et cetera—because men don’t know what women do when they aren’t there.”


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the camera. And that’s no accident for the self-professed feminist. “I think about feminism and what it means all the time, and I’m always trying to figure out how to push it forward,” she says. “I wonder about what I’m still holding back, and how much of that gets internalized—that you stop yourself because it’s fucking hard for women to do what we’re not really supposed to do.”

When she’s not on set, Gerwig eschews social media and cool events in favor of living a low-key life with Baumbach in N.Y.C., where she can enjoy an anonymity unavailable in the Hollywood bubble. “I get so much joy out of slipping by unnoticed. That’s a big part of how I feel I get ideas, and move through the world,” she explains. “What I will say is, having a partner who knows what it is that I do, and the odd require-ments of the job, is very helpful, because there’s a deep un-derstanding of what it asks of you and what it doesn’t ask of you, and how you ride these waves of certain things working and other things not working. It’s kind of an all-or-nothing job. You’re either working for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or there’s nothing. Which is an odd combination, and

to be able to share that is good.” As we speak, it’s unclear whether anyone at the café

notices or cares that an actor/writer/director on the rise is in their midst or if they’re doing the cool “ignore a famous person” thing New Yorkers are famous for. Either way, we’re left in peace except for the stellar waitress who keeps bringing us endless utensils to replace the ones we both keep dropping as we gesticulate.

“I think I’ve always felt that getting to live in New York was living the dream,” Gerwig muses. “For me, just being here always has a quality of fulfillment. It’s wonderful that I have been able to act and write and produce and direct. But in a way, the enjoyment of being in New York has always been separate from that. I would want to be here no matter what.”

As we wrap up our interview, Greta Gerwig takes out her wallet and tries to split the bill with me. “Here, let me throw some stuff down,” she says, relenting only when I point out that I can write off the breakfast as a work ex-pense. Then she slips out the door into the sunshine, unno-ticed, just the way she likes it. S

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38 . feb/mar 2015 . bUST

Female fans around the world are downright obsessed with Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s hit comedy series Broad City.

Here, the pair gets real about Girls, plays “Fuck/Marry/Kill,” and recalls how Amy Poehler made them freak out

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By Bridgette Miller Photographed by Danielle St. LaurentStyling by kemal harriS • makeup by Sarah eagan

hair by marcel dagenaiS for oribe hair care • prop Styling by chelSea maruSkinhand lettering by cristina martinez


bbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are two of comedy’s hottest stars, and they are about to drive a convertible off a cliff. Rather, they are sitting in a borrowed convertible and they are not driving it at all, especially not off any

cliffs, because it is parked in a Brooklyn studio. Still, as they re-enact the iconic final scene of Thelma & Louise for our photographer, their hands clasped together and raised in the air, I get a bit of a lump in my throat. The characters that Jacobson, 30, and Glazer, 27, play on their breakout Comedy Central hit Broad City, while exaggerated ver-sions of themselves, are not exactly aspirational. The pair are relatable, sure, and no doubt a refreshing change of pace for TV, with their endearing affinity for sex, weed, Lil’ Wayne, and each other; but here in this studio, in front of this green screen that someone will Photoshop a desert onto later, the power of their friendship feels totally genu-ine and very strong.

Later, after the convertible has pulled away and the girls have traded the day’s wardrobe of light-wash denim and dirt for clean faces and their own clothes, Glazer will tell me what Jacobson told her while they were shooting that moment: “This is like what we did.” I know she doesn’t mean that they went out together in a blaze of glory after a crime spree and an epic standoff with law enforcement. But I get it—it’s been a wild ride, and they couldn’t have done it without each other. Numerous times throughout the discussion that follows, both Glazer and Jacobson mention how surreal it is to be where they are; indeed, when it comes to origin stories, theirs is a pretty great one.

“I thought she was Maeby from Arrested Develop-ment,” says Jacobson about the first time she met Glazer, at a practice for their improv team. The two were taking classes at New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, the storied comedy training school co-founded by Amy Poehler, and according to Jacobson, “it didn’t seem crazy that [Alia Shawkat] would be on an improv team.” After practice, while hanging out at a bar, Jacobson realized that Glazer was not, in fact, starring on one of the funniest television shows ever (not yet, anyway), but she was still pretty cool. Jacobson snaps her fingers to demonstrate how the two hit it off that night. “We were quick friends,” she says. “Immediate friends.” Glazer nods. “I met her, and I was like, ‘Yup.’ It was just solid.”

The two palled around for a couple of years before de-ciding to start a Web series together in 2009. They knew

they wanted it to be based on their lives as young women in New York navigating a surfeit of awkward situations, but they needed the perfect name for the project. Glazer recalls, “Abbi was spitting out names for it, and she said, ‘Broad City,’ and I was like, ‘Fuck! That’s awesome.’ And she was like, ‘OK, let’s keep going, though, just to make sure…Broadville? Girl City? Titstown?’ And then we were like, ‘No, Broad City. Yeah!’” Later, I look up the history of the term “broad” and come across an entry from Jane Mills’ Womanwords: A Dictionary of Words About Women that defines a broad as “a woman who is liberal, tolerant, unconfined, and not limited or narrow in scope.” That certainly applies to these broads, whose early YouTube of-ferings were short on time (the first episode of Broad City clocked in at just two minutes) and production values, but not on charm. Like Elaine Benes before them, Abbi and Ilana made the often-dubious day-to-day decisions of a New York lady look downright hilarious as they quickly escalated in absurdity, like the episode in which Ilana started hooking up with a guy just so she could use the washer and dryer at his apartment.

But to compare Broad City to Seinfeld—or, as is more often the case these days, Lena Dunham’s Girls—would be reductive. When the expanded TV version of Broad City first premiered on Comedy Central in January 2014, in the same hour as the network’s wildly popular Workahol-ics, the bro-iest of the Workaholics fanbase were quick to accuse the newer show of simply inserting women into the proven formula of feckless friends minus money plus drugs divided by ridiculous plot = success by way of failure. But there is something different about Broad City, which blends whip-smart subtlety with off-the-wall physical comedy in a way that feels unlike anything else we’ve seen young women do on television. Its imperfect-but-proud, strangely empowered female protagonists are a breath of fresh air, even when that air is subsequently exhaled with the familiar cough of a 20-something stoner hotboxing before another shift at her crappy job.

Asking Jacobson and Glazer how they really feel about all those Girls comparisons has been done a million times by now, so when it comes up, I try not to linger on it, though I do note how strange and unfair it seems that crit-ics so often praise one show by putting down the other. “I read a piece the other day that called Broad City ‘the show that Girls would be if it were funny’ in its opening line,” I mention. “That just seems unnecessary and lazy to me.”

Jacobson sighs. “It’s so insane,” she says. “I mean,

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whatever; people can compare them. I’m just a little over that, because it’s like, What? They’re not trying to be the same show at all. And they show really different forms of friendship. I really love Girls. And I’ve had those kinds of friendships, and I love watching it because I’m like, ‘Oh, I know that.’”

Glazer calls both shows “legitimate and relatable repre-sentations.” She continues, “With TV and film, so often shit is thrust upon people like, ‘This is you, right?! This relates to you!’ And, well, what if it doesn’t? It so rarely does. It’s a real privilege to be on the creation side of it, and it’s also just so strange. Our whole lives, we’re consuming, consum-ing, consuming, and now we’re putting stuff out to be con-sumed; it’s bizarre. It feels really important to us—we do take what we represent very seriously. Our goal in general is inclusion. Unless you’re, like, a fucking asshole. Then you don’t need to be at the party.”

This leads me to the portion of every BUST interview where we ask the person appearing on the cover of the magazine if she’s a feminist. In this case, how-ever, I don’t really have to ask, because Glazer and Jacobson have already said that they are feminists,

most notably at the Critics’ Choice Television Awards last June when PopSugar asked if they were “cool with” the word. The Wall Street Journal referred to Broad City’s “sneak-attack feminism” back when it was still a Web se-ries, and other sources have called them “femininjas.” So I’m curious about just how conscious they are of feminist issues when writing.

“When we sit down in the writers’ room,” says Jacob-son, “there’s not an agenda. But we hire people who have the same….”

“Ethics,” Glazer interjects.“…As us,” Jacobson finishes. “So everyone we hire on our

show is a feminist, male or female, and it’s never an issue. The writers’ room is so difficult in terms of coming up with stories, and keeping it fresh and new and funny, that, like, we don’t even want to have to deal with that ever. So it’s just always there. We are two women, and we based [the show] on ourselves, and we, without a doubt, are feminists, so the show is seen in that way.”

“When we write for these characters,” Jacobson con-tinues, “who are exaggerated versions of ourselves, I think the thing that we talk about the most is like, well; What would we really do? It’s just real. And maybe that’s part of

feminism—showing real women versus what we had seen on TV for so long.”

“Even dudes aren’t represented in a real way, though,” Glazer says. “Dudes on TV are really hot, but they’re con-sidered ‘normal guys.’ You know Dan on Veep? He’s a nor-mal guy on TV. But [Reid Scott, the actor who plays him] is hot. Jason Bateman on Arrested Development is fucking hot. But he’s supposed to be like, an average guy. Nothing’s real on TV.”

That sentiment rings especially true when it comes to Glazer and Jacobson, who very clearly only play slackers on television. “I have this problem where I need to be so completely crazy-stressed busy,” Jacobson tells me when I ask what they do when they’re not really, really busy. “I need to write lists of things I have to do, and I have to have my next thing ready, and I’m trying to work on this other project, and it’s like, what is fucking wrong with me? That’s my way of relaxing. All I want is, like, a day to work on this other thing. I don’t want to be like that.”

“We’re…it’s not competitive as much as it is, like, mutu-ally motivating,” Glazer says. “We motivate each other and inspire each other to work, but we don’t inspire each other enough to chill the fuck out. Maybe we will in, like, our 40s?”

“I get this natural high from finishing something,” Ja-cobson says, and Glazer nods enthusiastically as Jacobson expounds on how much she loves making charts and lists, a trait that has served her well ever since she was an ambi-tious kid stealing chores away from her brother to make more money.

It’s incredibly inspiring to hear two smart, successful young women talk about their work with such passion, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also want to play “Fuck/Marry/Kill” with them. Glazer and Jacobson often incorporate several rounds of the game into their monthly live show at UCB; when I go to see the show a few weeks after our inter-view, they play with special guest Susie Essman (Curb Your Enthusiasm) who shrieks, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” at most of the options presented to her. “Alright,” I posit. “Fuck/Marry/Kill: the original Ghostbusters.”

“OK,” Glazer says, thinking hard. “There’s Jeff Goldblum, Harold Ramis….”

“Jeff Goldblum was not in Ghostbusters,” I remind her, and we all crack up.

Glazer recalls that Ernie Hudson was hot (after first checking with me to make sure he wasn’t Danny Glover), while Jacobson says there’s “just something about

“Maybe that’s part of feminism−showing real women versus what

we had seen on TV for so long.”


Bill Murray.” Then Glazer wonders aloud, “What’s up with his dick?”

and this sets us off on a tangent about sexy senior citizens. Glazer reveals that her boyfriend’s uncle is a total hottie, the kind of geriatric gentleman you’d actually want to bang instead of just admire. (“It’s like, Sidney Poitier is a gor-geous older man,” she explains, “but you’re not actually going to fuck him.”) I admit that I had a crush on Diagnosis Murder-era Dick Van Dyke as an adolescent. “Is he still…with us?” Glazer asks. I confirm that he is, and she re-sponds, “I’m glad. He got ill recently; he doesn’t do the New Year’s Eve thing anymore.”

“No, that’s Dick Clark!” Jacobson corrects her.“And Dick Clark is dead,” I add.To help her process the difference between the two

Dicks, Jacobson starts singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” Van Dyke’s chimney sweep song from Mary Poppins, with an impressive Cockney accent. Then we swerve back to the fuckability of non-Ghostbuster Jeff Goldblum (“You could totally hit that,” Jacobson assures me) before confirming that the game has run its course.

When I ask the pair to describe their earliest big Oprah-style “A-ha! moment” in terms of their career, they first make gestures of reverence at the mention of Winfrey. “I’ve been waiting to talk about Oprah,” Jacobson says. (On Broad

City, The Queen of All Media is a major source of inspira-tion for Abbi—her character reveals an Oprah portrait tattoo in the episode “Hurricane Wanda.”) “There are a bunch, actually,” she continues. “When we put out our first video, Lucia Aniello, who now writes for and directs the show, wrote us to say, ‘This is something. I love what you guys are doing. I just want you to know that.’ She was someone we respected, and having her respond was really big for the Web series continuing. I think the biggest Aha! moment, though, was when we had been doing the Web series for, like, a year and a half, and we had also written a pilot and were planning on going to L.A. with it. We were discussing the season finale [of the Web series] and we were like, ‘Let’s get somebody big to be in it. Let’s get some celebrity we could never get.’ So we reached out, through a friend, to Amy Poehler.”

If you’re a fan of the show, you know how the rest of that story goes. Poehler became the executive pro-ducer of Broad City on Comedy Central (and also made a memorable appearance in the first season finale as a bitter chef fighting with her waiter boyfriend at the fancy restaurant where Abbi and Ilana go to celebrate Abbi’s birthday). When she agreed to a cameo on the Web series, though—after letting the girls know she had, in fact, seen the Web series—Jacobson says, “That was

even bigger than when she agreed to executive produce. We were freaking out. The way we reacted was as if we had sold the show.”

“When she said that she would do the Web series,” Glazer says, “it was almost like we knew, in our hearts, that we were gonna make the show.” She pauses, then adds, “We’re lucky that we have each other. If we were alone, I don’t know if we’d be repeating this as much and knowing our own personal history as well. It’s nice. It’s kind of like having a sibling. You’re like, ‘Remember when Grandma did that? That was weird.’”

“Lucky” seems to be the word that is uttered most often throughout the course of our conversation, but it’s obvious that it’s not just luck that has landed the pair where they are. They’re ambitious and they possess a kind of natural appeal that seems to radiate from their bodies, whether they’re dancing super hard to Black Box’s “Everybody, Everybody” at UCB as a pre-show warm-up or slouching in their chairs. They are also generous, especially to fellow comic actors (UCB alum make frequent guest appearances on the show) and to other women (the live show I caught featured a video by sketch writer Celeste Ballard, and a standup set by The Daily Show’s Jena Friedman). When I tell them how proud my UCB friends are of them, they visibly swoon. “That is so awesome,” Jacobson responds. “That’s the best thing that we can hear, because we’re very conscious of that.”

“The timeline trips me out,” Glazer says of their rise to fame. “When I think about myself 10 years ago, 18-year-old me, and even two years ago, I think—was that real? It’s crazy to get older, period. It’s weird. Your foresight grows.”

Jacobson grins. “I thought you were gonna say….”“FORESKIN!” we all exclaim in unison. For what seems

like the billionth time in our one-hour hangout, the ladies of Broad City have made me laugh so hard I snort. We’ve covered a lot of ground today, and I feel like I’ve really got-ten to know Jacobson and Glazer. But there’s one more thing I need to find out, and that is which Muppets they would have sex with.

“Gonzo is the one with the nose?” Jacobson asks, noting apologetically that she is “not a Muppet lady.”

“His nose is a dildo,” Glazer says frankly, before reveal-ing that she would “be Janice and fuck Animal.”

“Kermit’s a Muppet, right?” Jacobson asks.“Kermit is dope,” Glazer responds, nodding. “Kermit is

husband material.”“I think I’d have a degrading three-way with Statler and

Waldorf,” I offer.“That would be degrading,” Glazer says, laughing.I ask Glazer how she feels about Sam the Eagle and she

takes a moment to think it over. “He’s, like, mean-hot,” she observes, “which I’m not usually into. But if it’s a pup-pet, it’s fine.”

45

“We’re lucky that we have each other.It’s kind of like having a sibling.”

GREAT DAMES II - Bust Magazine

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