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Bonnie Quinn’s dressing room looked like the Manson family had taken a studio apartment for a weekend and decided to stay. It was two small rooms of delinquent destruction and serial vandalism.
The walls hollered. Every surface was a full body tattoo of obscenity, poetry, song lyrics, jokes, limericks, names, political slogans and crude homilies. An assault of graffiti shot out in all colors, all sizes, and all media: spray paint, markers, ballpoint, pencil, even lipstick. The writing came from one hand, albeit reflecting various stages of sobriety or sanity or both. Instead of the sharp spikes and balloon figures of urban taggers, these were the legible rounds of The Palmer Method, which only served to make it more disturbing, as if Sister Mary Margaret had been slipped a tab of acid instead of the communion wafer.
Where words failed, illustrations wove between the slogans and slanders. Her drawings showed impressive craft and imagination not to mention a sense of angry depravity generally reserved for avant-garde radical presses and X-rated comic books. Above the sofa, anatomically correct Looney Tunes characters performed all manner of sex with world figures from Gandhi to Nixon. Adorning the space above the bedroom door, a study of Thomas Jefferson with his breeches down around his ankles made a Feifferesque morph over six panels to George Jefferson with his pants down around his ankles. Her caption read, “Six Degrees of Fornication.”
Monte perched on a barstool studying me for reaction. “This is so weird,” I said. “I have a room done exactly like this.”
“Hey. This is what I have to deal with on a daily basis. You get to go away after you find her.”
Veins of fractured glass splayed out across the entire surface of the makeup mirror from an upper corner where something had been thrown. The dark stain above it on the wall could have been from recent coffee or old wine. The etching across the top of the mirror instructed: “Do not make me glamorous,” and concluded on the bottom with: “I am the American Single Mom.”
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