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Jennifer Blowdryer Bio:
Should I use the pronoun “she”, as if I am not writing it myself? Not for me, the well paid publicist, the agent, the cultural interpreter. No, I’m afraid I must present you with this brief sketch of a fascinating individual, myself, using my own peasant length digits to hammer it out.
In 1978, at 17, JB began to sing with her very own punk band, The Blowdryers. This was before the days of documentation and ambition, so only one tape of a live gig at The Deaf Club exists on record, soon to be transferred to that state of the art vessel, the CD. She was pretty obnoxious, but fortunately that was in.
In 1983 – 84, she (well I) put together her first book, Modern English: A Photo Illustrated Trendy Slang Dictionary. This was a little project she’d started working on in her friend Ginger’s zine, Punk Globe, and Last Gasp kindly agreed to make it an entire book. Her ex-boyfriend had put out a book called Hardcore California and, because she dumped him, he made her a postage stamp size photo and had her singing the wrong song in the wrong decade. She was sick and tired of people who weren’t there documenting shit, and, fueled by snarky rage, she put Modern English together and it’s actually still pretty funny.
In 1984, she was singing in a party band her and Ginger had put together, White Trash Debutante and had a possessive alcoholic boyfriend with whom she’d written two good songs. She got a fellowship to the Writing Division of Columbia U and decided to jump ship, rather than spending the next 10 years fighting with her band and/or boyfriend, getting an ulcer for the perceived glory of a rock’n’roll cover band.
At Columbia, she lived in an 8 by 10 room and put together White Trash Debutante, a photo illustrated lower middle class autobiography, and The Laziest Secretary In The World, an adventure novel about an overweight temp, a character her Columbia classmates found to be absolutely unlovable and inconceivable, never having stapled together stacks of paper at Blue Shield Insurance themselves.
In the late 80s, Blowdryer began to run shows called Smut Fests with the initial help of Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera. These shows featured strippers performing their own poetry, a little bit before the term sex worker was coined, and they became the darlings of the avant guard. Some early acts were Lily Burana, Tracy Quan, Kembra Pfahler (The Karen Black Band), and Danielle Willis. The first were in a lap dancing parlor in NYC, and they expanded to Hamburg, Baltimore, San Francisco, and London. HBO produced a half hour special on them, for which she was paid a total sum of $3500.
The music and spoken word gigs are really too many to chronicle.
In 2002 the first major production (well, perhaps major is a relative term) of her plays was produced at Theater Rhino in San Francisco: White Trash Debutante and Behind the Candelabra. A new production of WTD is running at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC, and plans for The Laziest Secretary In The World, her other play, and Gutter Boys, her best friend Alvin’s play, are in the works for the Bay Area in the fall of 2005.
Works in Progress:
Blowdryer writes a food column for New York Press, and the occasional book review
The 86’d Project is underway, currently she’s compiling interviews and texts by people who are consistently thrown out of places and banned, for varying lengths of time, from venues as various as Rite Aid and pretty much anywhere in San Francisco. This will eventually become a found text play.
Persiflage is the zine she publishes with Alvin Orloff, it’s the house organ of their literary movement, Spectacularist Internationale, and has featured pieces by Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Stephen Beachy, and Chelsea Starr.
Truly Blue: An Anthology of writing by sex workers and even a trick (I’m Not in The Habit of Paying People To Leave, But In Your Case I’ll Make an Exception), including pieces by Lily Burana, Tracy Quan, Matt Bernstein Sycamore, David Sterry (author of Chicken), Jonathan Ames, Rev Jen, and Nick Zedd. Photo illustrated by Annie Sprinkle.
