Lesley’s Turn To Fly

Now and then: Wanna buy a used crybaby?

Lesley’s Turn To Fly

By

Carola Dibbell

Mercifully, Barry Manilow and Peter Allen are on the audience side of the tiny checkerboard stage. The place is Reno Sweeney New York, and the reason is Lesley Gore, who scalded her name into rock and roll history (retroactively) with its first feminist anthem, “You Don’t Own Me.” Eleven years later, graphically bra-less and hard as a fist in a slinky rose gown and functional frosted permanent, Ms. Gore’s skill at ball busting shows no sign of aging graciously. Where the pudgy teenager’s version of the hit (described on her Golden Hits liner notes as “saucy”) was chilly enough, the current one is outraged, amazed, and bristling with contempt.

. Clearly, the new venom is one more proof of Gore’s instinct for dramatics — she sings co-writer Ellen Weston’s lyrics, “I’d like to be Bazooka bubblegum / Good enough to chew / I’d keep my wrapper on for everyone / Everyone but you,” like some Stanislavski exercise starring the gum. But the outraged stance is a little different. When Gore patters, breathily deadpan, “People always ask me, where has Lesley Gore been? I don’t really know what ,to say; as far as I’m concerned, I’ve been here all along,” the lines may be Little Miss Homebody 6f 1964 but the delivery is more little green mamba snake: notoriously fast and deadly. The fiercely proud person with the long list of grievances in Gore’s act seems to be herself.

Now, as a stance, touchy pride (a.k.a. macho) can be a useful goad to stage energy but it can also, in the absence of humor or justification, get boring fast. If Lesley Gore has her dry, hard-headed little jokes, they tend to be at her enemies’ expense. But as for justification — well, this is more than a touchy alleged has-been, this is a woman with an ego and feminism, albeit of the school exemplified by Gore’s unsisterly boast she got there before Helen Reddy. Gore’s punchy readings of her old hits — even on a self-pity number like “Judy’s Turn To Cry” — are consistent with the original Gore-Weston material that follows. Their leading subjects are ambition (“Immortality”) and anti-romanticism / (“Golden Couple” — that gum stuff was just sex). Interestingly enough “Child,” a lu llaby (and a real tear jerker), fits the former category. Like work, parenthood is a selfless means to that magnificently selfish goal: Immortality.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 59

It’s significant that, while adult-identified in repertory and looks, the woman can and does rock, rhoving easily into a high-strung, direct-hit sexuality that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with Earth Mother. (In spite of obvious differences, I kept flashing on Suzi Quatro). In other words — especially with the gay following likely in view of Gore’s immaculate professionalism, larger-than-life authority and distinctive sexual persona — Lesley Gore could draw not Only on Doty Previn’s audience, but one as diverse as Bette’s. She deserves it. lf