Phranc: One O’ The Girls — Translucent Matter

Phranc and I modeling our paper jabot collars made in honor of Prince. Phranc taught this workshop during LACMA’s college night, spring of 2016. Photo by Amber Smith.

About 10 years ago, Phranc and I stood in front of Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Pool Balls in the modern galleries at LACMA. I had hired her to lead a family workshop during the community opening event of a new building, the Resnick Pavilion. We walked around campus past the palm trees and got to know each other. (Fun fact: The palms on campus are an artwork by Robert Irwin, Primal Palm Garden.) We talked about the family program I coordinate, being born and raised in Los Angeles, friends in common, and art. Phranc asked me if the pool balls were on view.

Gallery view of Oldenburg’s Giant Pool Balls in the old Ahmanson Building.

As we walked over to the Ahmanson building, she told me that she saw this artwork by Oldenburg as a child when she took art classes at LACMA and that it was a transformational moment. An art epiphany. Oldenburg’s playfulness and celebration of ordinary objects widened, no, broke apart her definition of art. In the gallery, Phranc approached the Oldenburg like seeing an old friend. Sixteen balls, each two feet tall, arranged into a triangle like on a pool table. Fifteen in colors of maroon, yellow, orange, and sky blue. A solitary white ball sat next to the formation as if waiting to be hit by a cue stick and scatter the others all over the gallery. She crouched down to view at child height, perhaps recreating what it was like the first time she saw it. Phranc always wears Levi’s cuffed over worn combat boots, button down shirts or t-shirts, her medium brown hair in a flattop kept perfect by Venice barber Albert Cornejo. As I watched her, I saw the child she was, delighted and curious. What I didn’t tell Phranc at the time because I didn’t want to fan girl and make the moment about me, was that her music and her embodiment as a butch lesbian had changed me just as much as Oldenburg’s pool balls had her.

In 1985, when I was twenty years old, my sister gave me a cassette tape of Phranc’s album Folksinger. She had been at an event at 18th Street Arts Center and saw Phranc perform. For those of you who don’t know Phranc, she describes her musical self as The All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger. I played that tape over and over again while I drove alone in my green 1969 VW bug all over the San Fernando Valley, especially to school at Pierce Community College and my job at The Broadway department store in the Topanga Mall. I was obsessed. I still know all the lyrics by heart. I want to be strong strong/ like an Amazon. Or from One O’ The Girls They’re trying to get me to shave my legs./ No way.

I particularly loved Ballad of the Dumb Hairdresser. My mother was a hairdresser and throughout my childhood I heard stories and witnessed what it takes to work so intimately with people on their appearance, the many racial and class micro-aggressions mami, who immigrated from Ecuador, had to endure, and how she was always learning new techniques. “That woman wanted a Dorothy Hammil cut. I told her that her hair was too fine and flat. ¡Ni puede patinar! (She can’t even skate!)” In the song, Phranc smashes stereotypes about hair stylists and celebrates their skill, confidence, and artistry. She must have nerves of steel.

At the time, I didn’t have the words for why I was so drawn to not just the music, but to Phranc herself. I was particularly into music by artists who bent traditional gender roles, especially Bowie, Prince and Annie Lennox. My best friends were a posse of intellectual gay men. We talked for hours about politics, books, and desire. We danced like fiends. It was the mid 80s and the Reagan administration was ignoring the AIDS pandemic, involved in covert wars in Central America and Asia, and had cut social services so much that people on the edge, especially those with mental illness, ended up on the street.

And I thought I was straight.

It took me years to figure out, Phranc cracked a hairline fissure in my sexual orientation. I didn’t want to be her (but I did secretly want to kiss someone who looked like her). I longed to be myself and so comfortable in my skin that it simply would be impossible to conform. Our culture has shifted and opened so much since the ‘80s, it’s hard to remember how different it was. I have an added layer; I went to high school in Quito, Ecuador (class of 1983). Living in Ecuador was an extraordinary experience that shaped me. Certainly gave me deep insights into my Ecuadorian heritage and my mother’s culture. I fell in love with Latin American literature, especially poetry.

However, I did not see my sexual identity, or my desire reflected in Ecuadorian society, nor did I meet any out queers. I experienced Ecuadorian culture as deeply gendered and classist. As a people pleaser, I wanted to learn the rules and tried to follow them, often awkwardly. When I moved back home at eighteen, I felt between cultures, or in as Gloria Andalzua writes, nepantla. Nepantla means “land in-between” in Nahuatl. An uncomfortable place of in-betweenness, a liminal and intersectional space where transformation is possible. I felt so disoriented, I even didn’t fit in my family. In Los Angeles, I was too Ecuadorian, and in Ecuador, too American. Never mind adding my Jewish Eastern European heritage from my father, who was born in the Bohemian region of what is now the Czech Republic. And I had no words for my desire. Being of mixed heritage can be just as lonely and perplexing as queerness when you don’t have community or see yourself reflected.

Lisa (Phranc’s partner) drew this sketch of us at dinner after an opening of one of Phranc’s exhibitions. It lives taped to the wall I face while writing at my desk.

Phranc expanded my definition of gender, and how women (cis and trans) can be and love. There’s a line in One O’ The Girls that particularly showed me a path- I think it’s pretty keen, being on the swim team, I can stick out yet still fit in, feeling of belonging from deep within. I feel lucky to have these friends, and they feel lucky to know a real-life lesbian.

Phranc is unapologetically herself and she contains multitudes. She’s mostly known as a musician and performer, Phranc is also a visual artist and calls herself The Cardboard Cobbler. Just like in her music her “paper cobbling” uses humor and pop culture to stimulate memories, provoke discussion, challenge gender norms, and delight the eye. I love this description from Friesen Gallery: Using found cardboard, paper bags, Kraft paper, and paint, the artist’s three-dimensional, life size sculptures literally sew together issues of personal identity, American popular culture and politics with the thread of Phranc’s grandmother’s sewing machine. I saw a paper replica of her combat boots at the Craft Contemporary (now in Ed Ruscha’s collection) and nautical objects like orange life vests at Craig Krull Gallery. When looking at her work, I can see how Oldenburg was influential.

Vest, France, 1789-1794,Costumes; principal attire (upper body),Linen canvas with silk needlepoint, linen plain weave with silk supplementary-warp cut-pile trim and silk embroidery, Image: LACMA

I reached out to Phranc to work with me because I am intrigued by her artmaking with paper and because I saw that she was teaching kid workshops through the City of Santa Monica. I was super nervous and rewrote my email ten times. She wrote back quickly, and we set up a phone meeting. I think my voice croaked when I said hello that first time on the phone. Phranc set me at ease immediately, my trepidation slipped away. We became fast friends as we worked together.

The first workshop she taught at LACMA was inspired by a man’s vest made during the French Revolution. This vest has political slogans woven in the fabric. In Phranc’s workshop, kids made paper vests decorated with their own meaningful words and drawings. When she teaches community art workshops, besides being organized and fun, she connects with the kids. Young people gravitate towards people with big hearts. Phranc listens deeply, takes time to help them problem solve, and tells corny jokes.

It took me a long time to come out. Mainly because I don’t feel like I fit neatly in any category, similar to how I feel about my ethnic and racial identity. (I call myself an ecuaczech.) It’s been complicated to own my truth. I tried on different labels and finally settled on queer, which feels right in my mouth and body. Queer is an open and flexible word that allows me to follow my meandering romantic path.

LACMA holiday party, 2018 or 2019. R to L- George Evans, Beatriz Jaramillo, Pattie Esquivel, moi, Marianne Sadowski, Phranc. Photo by Christian Balagtas

Phranc is a mensch; kind and, phrancly, as genuine as her name. You know where you stand with her. Our friendship is easy-peasy. During the pandemic (we’re still not out of it), we talk periodically on the phone like BFF teenagers. I adore her partner YA novelist, Lisa Freeman. (Read her novel Honey Girl) I try to catch Phranc’s music gigs and art openings, and she does the same for my readings. We invite each other to gatherings. We also hang out at LACMA’s holiday party for employees, eat mashed potatoes (there’s always a mashed potato bar) and dance to whatever is playing. I feel lucky to have Phranc as a friend.

I wonder what it would have meant to me to have met someone like Phranc as a child. Would I have been braver? Would I have seen myself sooner?

PS I did find out twenty-five years after I graduated from high school that my favorite teacher, Mike DeCarbo, was gay. That is a story of kismet for another blog.