Comedian Joan Rivers took the stage of Caf? Istanbul in the New Orleans Healing Center on Tuesday night wearing a silver-sequined wrap that glinted in the spotlights like a Cuisinart blade. The 78-year-old entertainment icon spent the next 60 minutes shredding political correctness, propriety and good taste into coleslaw. In terms of inappropriateness, Rivers seemingly knows no boundaries. Sex, religion, race, death, you name it: Rivers stamped all over it with her shiny black pumps.
With a community grocery store, coffee shop, yoga studio, botanica, street university, book store, fitness center, art gallery, hand-made craft booths and other socially and spiritually expansive amenities, the Healing Center on St. Claude Avenue is a sort of a bohemian shopping mall.
From the Crayola-colored walls to the wafting incense, it wouldn?t seem to be the natural habitat of a platinum-blonde avowed material girl like Joan Rivers. She said as much at the beginning of the show, when she promised the audience ?I?m gonna do the act like (this is) a real place.?
Rivers is the reigning high priestess of irreverence. How she came to be on the Healing Center stage has to do with a priestess of another kind.
In an interview earlier this month, Healing Center co-founder and voodoo priestess Sallie Ann Glassman said that the story began more than 15 years ago when she was asked to come to Manhattan to conduct a spiritual ?cleaning? of Rivers? apartment building.
Read the May 2010 story about Glassman's voodoo mentor: "Haitian voodoo priest finds refuge in New Orleans" here.
As Glassman explained, Rivers had moved to New York from Los Angeles, bought an apartment and began renovating. But things didn?t go well. There were the usual contractor ?disasters? to deal with, but there were also eerie occurrences that kept Rivers on edge: howling wind behind a door that covered a sealed corridor in the basement; a disconcerting liquid oozing up through the basement floor.
The abandoned taxidermy trophies didn?t improve the atmosphere any either, Glassman said.
?I do have to say,? Glassman said, ?it was one of the scariest places I?ve ever been. ? It was like the Amityville horror.?
Before Glassman came on the scene, Rivers had called in a paranormal investigator, who scanned the place with a demon meter. The demon meter was "ringing off the hook," Glassman said. The investigator not only diagnosed the problem, he also proposed a solution, suggesting that Rivers call Glassman.
Glassman said she was apprehensive about meeting Rivers, and vice versa, but they instantly hit it off.
"We took one look at each other and both of us cracked up," Glassman said. "We were at eye level, (we were) both these little Jewish ladies. We have very similar senses of humor. She was just a great person. We were hand-in-hand fighting back the winds and the bubbling stuff."
With Rivers, her dog Spike and a few of Rivers' friends on hand, Glassman went to work. Donning a black robe, she stood in the building's ballroom, holding a silver sword over her head, shouting incantations at the top of her lungs. When some of the other building tenants demanded an explanation, Glassman said that Rivers invited them to help defeat the poltergeists.
Celebrity ridicule is at the surface of most of Rivers? ribald musings, and her New Orleans show was no exception. Betty White, Al Roker, Sean Penn, Sally Field, the Kardashians, Goldie Hawn, Anderson Cooper, Rosie O?Donnell, Cher, Chaz Bono, Justin Bieber, Woody Allen, Olivia Newton-John, Oprah, Princess Diana, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, Kirk Douglas, Dick Clark, June Allyson, even the recently departed Phyllis Diller were evoked during Rivers? ricocheting monologue.
But there may be a touch more to Rivers? comedy than star tarnishing. Rivers tapped into the audiences? fear of decline, decrepitude, disease and death. And she did it with such brutal aplomb that even the Grim Reaper would giggle.
On the subject of elderly dating, Rivers said that one guy took her to meet his family ? in a cemetery.
On the subject of Twitter, Rivers imagined Joan of Arc?s last tweet: ?Is it me, or does anybody else smell smoke??
On the subject of celebrities coming to New Orleans during the 2005 flood, Rivers joked that she came, but was unable to save people because her rescue boat was already crowded with her publicist and hair dresser.
On stage, Rivers couldn?t have been more cynical about charity. Yet her performance was a benefit for the center, one that she had promised Glassman as a wedding gift when she married real estate developer Pres Kabacoff in a ceremony Rivers attended.
When tickets to the first show in the 250-seat theater swiftly sold out, Glassman was further delighted that Rivers volunteered to put on a second the same night.
Read the Jan. 2011 story: "Pres Kabacoff and Sallie Ann Glassman create an exotic home in Bywater" here.?We owe all this to Sally,? Rivers shouted from the stage during the standing ovation at the end of the show.
Reach Doug MacCash at dmaccash@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3481. Read more art news at nola.com/arts. Follow him at twitter.com/DougMacCashTP.
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Source: http://www.nola.com/arts/index.ssf/2012/08/joan_rivers_a_devilish_delight.html
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