By JERRY TALLMER
Klop! Klop! Klop!
Her red leather boots go klop klop klop as she paces briskly ahead of me down the corridor to her cubicle in an NYU building on Lower Broadway. “Karen,” I say, “when I think of you, I think of boots.” I do not say: a naked lady in boots. She smiles. “That’s very funny,” she says. “‘Those boots are made for walking.’” We both know the line that follows, here unspoken: “Walk all over me.”
Karen Finley, who was born March 7, 1956. in Evanston, Illinois, is 51 now, going on 52, and to this moment is what used to be called, before my time or hers, “a fine figger of a woman,” whether or not coated in chocolate, in honey, or just plain street clothes.
“Forget 50,” she says, “life doesn’t begin till you’re 40.” That, for her, would have been in the mid-1990s, about halfway between the triumphant obliteration of Jesse (Senator Prude) Helms by the NEA 4 (Tim Miller, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley) and the 1998 U.S. Supreme Court ruling undoing that triumph.
There have been so many Karens — playwright, essayist, book writer, artist, shock-effect performance person, stage actress, movie actress (Tom Hanks’s doctor in Philadelphia), wife, mother, monologist, political agitator, feminist, satirist, diarist, teacher, lecturer, sexual dragon fly …
As we’re talking (early October) she’s preparing to open, solo, in Wake Up!, a double-bill that’s to run through November at the Green Room, 45 Bleecker Street.
First half: The Dreams of Laura Bush, part words, part drawings by Karen which will be projected behind or around her. Second half: The Passion of Terri Schiavo, an “oppositional narrative,” she calls it, on a woman’s right to die.
Karen, at this stage of the game, may we sum up, take stock?
“Sure.”
Taking a look at your life and work so far, what in it are you happy about, and what in it makes you less happy?
“I think what I’m happy about is the transformation from the NEA thing and the Supreme Court thing to the continuing work. It took a lot of work and personal growth to get through that, and to get through being attacked. It was only with the help of people like Ron Lasko [a quiet, non-establishment publicity man] … So I’m happy about my contributions to art, and I think they’ve been recognized as such.
“What I’m unhappy about is I feel I was just too young during the NEA and the Supreme Court case. I wasn’t that young, but I was still young. I was still an idealist.”
And you’re not now?
Very earnestly: “No, I don’t think so.”
Do you feel it is true or not true that your work — much of your work — has been laced with anger?
“Well, yes … Protest, I would say.”
And that the anger may have been triggered — been driven — by the death of your father?
“Uh-huh.” Pause. “Yes.” Pause. “I think I had that drive before his suicide. You know, a man can be looked at as driven by passion, but when we look at a woman who is very decisive, it immediately gets tagged as anger … A bitch... A man who’s decisive doesn’t have to explain.”
(A couple of years ago Karen had told me, and I had written, that when she was 21 she’d come home to Illinois from the San Francisco Art Institute, only to be informed by the police that her father — jazz drummer George Finley — had killed himself. “He played with Anita O’Day and Eddie Harris and Dave Brubeck,” she says now, “so I grew up with music around me. But his depression sort of curtailed his career.” That’s all she chooses to say, and lets the subject drop. But does fill in a few details about her mother, who’d met George Finley in a Chicago jazz club. “Her name was Mary Steinert, and she was of mixed race: German Jewish, Eastern European, Native American. Was very involved in the arts, civil rights, was politically engaged. Was very supportive of my work. I think she said to me that I would really understand human sexuality once I went through menopause. She died of lung cancer some years ago.” Karen, the eldest, has four brothers and one sister. One of those brothers, William Finley, has a book of poetry coming out next year.)
Speaking of women who have to explain their drives, what do you think of Hillary?
“She’s strong. I write about her in the Terri Schiavo piece. People think Hillary’s in control and therefore she’s a bitch — the stereotype of the controlling mother … ”
You know what I mainly think of Hillary, said I.
“No, what?”
I think she’s fucking boring.
Karen Finley burst into gales of laughter. “And she did vote for the war,” she said.
Any thoughts about Giuliani? (Two years ago she’d told me he was a joke. Now, her head resting in her hand):
“I like the fact that he’s for gay marriage. I like the fact that he’s against guns. But he just isn’t in my consciousness right now.”
Where were you, Karen, on 9/11?
“I was going to work at a publishing house at William and John Streets. Never made it. Saw a building fall, and just kept running uptown.”
Are you angry about that?
“Yeah. I’m angry.” After a minute: “In the show I talk about the male body in war. Man is raised to die, in all cultures. Man is expected to be allowed to die” [unlike Terri Schiavo].
She pulls out a book from a pile on her desk. Images of War, Boston Publishing, 1986. Photographs of bodies, corpses, Vietnam. “We don’t get these images now,” she says. “Casualties. Bodies. Body bags. Every night on TV you saw the body count.” Pulls out more books of similar photos.
What are you going to do with those things?
“It’s research toward my next work. It’ll deal with seeing and not seeing, the same as with images of a woman clothed and unclothed.”
How can you do that without referring to your own track record in that role?
“I’m sure I will,” she replies calmly.
One part of Karen Finley’s life counterbalances all the rest of it, and that is her daughter Violet, now 14, whose father is attorney Michael Overn. He and Karen are divorced, and
Karen, when pressed, says she’s now … “uhhh … dating.”
Violet is doing well in school — “she’s into soccer, and everything’s fine.”
Karen! Don’t tell me you’re a soccer mom.
“Yes, I am.”
You literally go and watch the games?
“Yes, I do.”
In those red leather boots. Klop, klop, klop.
