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THEATER
The Tamarie Show
Houston’s own Lucille Ball? Mary Poppins on drugs?
It’s hard to describe Tamarie and the zany musicals
she creates out of her warped creative psyche...but we
know we love her
by Blase DiStefano
Tamarie (rhymes with mammary) Cooper walks into the OutSmartoffices
wearing a wonderful, floppy sun hat and a relatively outrageous
outfit (outrageous for someone who is not a drag queen),
is seated in front of a tape recorder, and proceeds to
talk nonstop for one hour. In fact, the recorder stops
at 45 minutes, and since we are in the middle of an interesting
conversation, we go ahead and talk for another 15 minutes.
We could have talked for hours: This actress/singer/dancer/and-everything-else-you-can-think-of
has lived an extraordinary life for someone only 29 years
old.
Her recent years have been spent conceiving, choreographing,
directing—and cooking for—her Tamalaliaseries
of musicals, all produced by Infernal Bridegroom Productions.
She’s now on her fifth installment, Tamalalia
2000,which is currently being perkily performed
at Stages. Tamarie concocted her first revue in 1996,
at the Orange Show; crowds enjoyed a lively show, then
were treated to a pasta dinner...cooked by Tamarie.
Tamalalia 2!made its way around Houston via a
moving school bus, the audience/passengers feasting
on sack lunches and keg beer. With Tamalalia 3: the
Cocktail Party,Tamarie moved her troupe to Stages’
upscale setting, actually making eggplant dip in the
course of every performance for the after-show cocktail
party. Also premiering at Stages was Tamalalia 4:
the Camp-Out,which was capped with a cookout, of
course, complete with beer and Kool-Aid.
Tamarie’s descriptions of her creations are just
about as surreal and stream-of conscious as the musicals
themselves. Tamalalia 2000 (T2000)opens with
a video showing her married life. “I’m with
the park ranger [the one she ran off with in Camp-Out],
living in the Woodlands,” Tamarie says. “I
look awful. I’m in this total Sally Field hairdo,
the denim jumper dress, and since I work at Whole Foods
[in real life], I actually filmed myself shopping in
there, but very Stepford Wives-like.” She soon
stumbles upon a method of time travel to escape from
her dreary life. “We go to the past,” she
says, “where there are dinosaurs and all kinds
of things.” And she ventures into the ’80s
when she was a “bad-ass 12-year-old” to have
an adventure with Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran. She’s
got dead Jewish uncles running around in it, and she
even dies and goes to heaven, which, she says, “is
my own version of heaven and hell.”
She’s ourversion of heaven: an actress
who can act and a comedienne who is willing to look
ridiculous for a laugh, á la Lucille Ball or
Carol Burnett. Tamarie is a show-woman or, better yet,
a Mary Poppins on drugs. It helps that Lucille Ball
was an influence on her and that when she was four years
old, she expected her mother to call her Mary Poppins;
she even had a little red umbrella to enhance the fantasy.
That might explain her attraction to drag, which has
always been included in her shows. T2000is no
exception. “There always somehow ends up being
some man in drag,” Tamarie says. “It just
happens. This year, you may remember Greg Stanley, he
writes the lyrics and he’s the larger actor, he’s
gay...”
How could I forget the rollerskating fairy godmother?
“...He’s playing me now,” Tamarie states
matter-of-factly, then adds, “...in the future.
So you know, I gotta get someone in drag at some point,
right? It’s not like when I sit down to write the
show I think, OK, time for the gay jokes. It’s
just a flavor for me.”
Her gay-friendly attitude extends to her private life.
“When I grew up, my mom’s best friend was
a lesbian,” Tamarie says. “There are pictures
of me when I was eight years old at a lesbian picnic,
throwing water balloons with 50 hairy ladies in their
70s.” It helped that her mom was open with sexuality
and that she has an artistic background. “It sounds
silly,” she continues, “but there is this
thing about me—so many of my best friends are gay
men. And they’re always like, If I could be
a woman, I’d be you,and I am always like, I’m
a gay man trapped in a woman’s body.And all
those silly stereotypes that you can fit me in as far
as the things that I enjoy: We love the same show tunes,
we all like ice-dancing together on the phone during
the Olympics, yelling and screaming, I can’t
believe that they were robbed of the gold!,silly
stuff like that. So I guess it’s just sort of always
been a part of me. And it’s very important to me;
I feel very activist about it.”
Because her parents were very liberal in their politics
and social beliefs, this child of the ’70s was
shocked when she entered the real world. “When
I was 18 and I suddenly opened my eyes and saw how the
way of the world really is,” she recalls, “I
remember calling my mother and I was hysterical, in
tears, and I was like, Mom, there’s horribleness
and there’s bigotry and racism and the environment
and the sea turtles.I was like going crazy, and
she’s like, Ha!, you sound like me when I was
your age.It’s like how do you deal with it,
how do you deal with the madness? She said, ‘Well,
you just be as good as you can be, and you try to do
as much as you can personally in your own life.’”
Lucky for us, Tamarie has taken her mother’s wisdom
to heart.
Though she was born in Chicago, Tamarie wasn’t
there for long before her family moved to Austin...then
back to Chicago...then back to Austin. “By the
time I was 12, I’d lived in 40-something houses,”
she says. “It wasn’t an army family; it was
just these crazy hippie parents. We moved every four
months. I sort of grew up thinking you moved every four
months and painted.” She ended up in Houston when
she was 14 and studied at HSPVA, where she met many
of the cast members who are in T2000.“We
all did a musical touring show in Taiwan in 1987. I
think you went through experiences that other people
maybe have when they go off to college. It was really
an intense time you spent. I mean we were 16 and we
were there till midnight working on shows. Sex, drugs,
rock ‘n’ roll...it all started real early.”
Tamarie graduated when she was 16—“I had
been scholastic at one time in my life and had skipped
fifth grade,” she quips. “When I graduated,
I was like, OK, mom, I’m ready to go off to
NYU. I think instead of dance, I’ll study theater
now.” Mom’s reply: “I don’t
have $20,000.”
Tamarie tried out a college in Portland, but returned
to Houston after only a year. “Most of my friends
have gone somewhere else for a while and come back here
or ended up here somehow,” Tamarie says. “And
it’s true, I have other friends that live in other
parts of the country and they just don’t have the
same sort of established large social network. And that’s
really what keeps me here. I mean that’s what defines
Houston for me. It’s my other family.”
Which brings us back to the present. T2000
is her biggest show yet, and she’s thrilled that
Stages is doing the tech support. “I just talked
to my costume designer and she said they were up to
120 costumes at this point. It’s great because
it allows my imagination to go wild. I can say to her,
like I did last year, I need 15 dancing-tree costumes,and she’ll do it. And like this year, I’m
like, tap-dancing whiskey bottles,and she’s
fine with that.”
So are we, because she now has more time for the creative
part of her work. “But it’s been hard to relinquish
some of the daily in-and-out production aspects,”
the multi-talented Tamarie admits. “I was really
pissing off my good friends who are production assistants.
At first I was like, Did you do this? Did you check
it? Did you double-check it?I was doubting everything
they were doing. They were like, You have to stop
this! You’re driving us crazy!So, OK. It’s
going to be OK,” she intones.
“So, you were becoming a diva,” I suggest.
“Whitney Houston all over again.”
She laughs. “No, God forbid, let’s hope not.”
Tamalalia 2000 plays through Saturday, Aug. 26.
Performances are held Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
at 8 p.m. at Stages Repertory Theatre, 3201 Allen Parkway
@ Waugh. Tickets are $10 for Thursday performances,
$15 for Fridays and Saturdays. For more information,
call Infernal Bridegroom Productions at 713/522-8443.
For reservations, call the Stages box office at 713/52-STAGE.
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