Multiple Os

Hyper-femme superhero alter ego with artist Lois Weaver

May 27, 2021 Oriana Fox with guest Lois Weaver Season 1 Episode 7
Multiple Os
Hyper-femme superhero alter ego with artist Lois Weaver
Show Notes Transcript

Mentioned spontaneously by two prior guests in this very podcast series, the influential and pioneering performance artist and professor Lois Weaver needs no introduction. Yet Oriana provides a very lengthy one at the start of this interview with Weaver in which they discuss her alter ego, Tammy Whynot, who decided to stop being a country and western singer in order to start being a lesbian performance artist. In Weaver’s own words, Tammy’s “sense of wonder and her ability to fail gloriously and without shame were her superpowers. Tammy’s wisdom of ‘why not?’ gave the definition she had been searching for: resistant femme = a highly competent woman who just looks like she needs help.” Having performed the role of resistant femme (among others) for decades now, Weaver shares her thoughts on femininity; falling in love (with your work); the challenges of autobiographical performance; Split Britches’ most recent piece Last Gasp; public engagement; orgasms into later life; and finally retiring on the topic of retirement.

Dr
Oriana Fox is a London-based, New York-born artist with a PhD in self-disclosure. She puts her expertise to work as the host of the talk show performance piece The O Show.

Dr
Lois Weaver is the director and co-founder (with long-time collaborator Peggy Shaw) of the company Split Britches, which among many accolades, won the Innovative Theatre Awards (USA) Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award in 2017. So many awards! In 2014 she was a Guggenheim fellow in 2014 and shortly thereafter a Wellcome Trust Engaging Science Fellow. She got the WOW Women in Creative Industries ‘Fighting the Good Fight’ award in 2018. And, the honours keep rolling in... Most recently in 2021 Split Britches’ theatre-piece-cum-zoom-film Last Gasp has been nominated for the Drama League award for Outstanding Digital Production. Not even a pandemic can stop this woman from being creative. Weaver is also a professor of contemporary performance at Queen Mary University of London. She also pioneered a form of public engagement called the long table

Credits:

  • Hosted, edited and produced by Oriana Fox
  • Post-production mixing by Stacey Harvey
  • Themesong written and performed by Paulette Humanbeing
  • Special thanks to Charlotte Troy, Katie Beeson, Janak Patel, Sven Olivier Van Damme and the Foxes and Hayeses.

Would you like to see your name in the above credits list? In a couple of short steps, you can make that happen by supporting this podcast via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/orianafox

Visit www.theoshow.live for regular updates or follow us on Instagram.

 “Hyper-femme superhero alter ego with Lois Weaver”

Oriana Fox’s Multiple Os - Podcast Transcript

[Theme music]

Oriana Fox: 

Hello, this is Oriana Fox. Thank you for tuning in to Multiple Os, the spin-off podcast for my talk show The O Show. The O Show is a live performance piece that mines the conventions of daytime TV talk shows for all that they’re worth. It features artists and other experts who have little to no difficulty ’spilling the beans’ about their lives and opinions especially when they define norms and conventions. So if you’re interested in candid confessions non-conformity creativity and mental health you come to the right place!



[Theme music]



Lois Weaver (LW)

Go. You go for it.



Oriana Fox (OF)

Okay. All right. So how can I do justice to the inimitable Lois Weaver? She’s an artist, activist and an educator, an icon of feminist avant garde performance who’s been making work since before I was born. 



LW

Oh, no. It’s one thing if I’m as old as your parent, but to say before you were born, that’s bad.



OF

It’s not that bad, it’s good.



LW

I had the opportunity to respond. So I did.



OF

That’s good. So okay, so she’s lived the American dream, of sorts, born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia into a working class family, and went on to forge an award winning career in New York City’s experimental theatre scene. Touring works abroad and eventually reaching a top rank of academia, the top rank of academia in London. She is the director...



LW

My sister said I pulled the wool over their eyes. So there you go.



OF

Oh, what a mean sister.



LW

Go ahead.



OF

She is the director and co-founder with longtime collaborator Peggy Shaw of the company Split Britches, which among many accolades won the innovative Theatre Awards lifetime Artistic Achievement Award in 2017. So many awards. In 2014, Lois was a Guggenheim fellow, and shortly thereafter, a Wellcome Trust engaging science fellow. She got the Wow women in Creative Industries fighting the good fight award in 2018. And the honours keep rolling in. Most recently this year, that’s 2021 Split Britches theatre piece-cum-zoom film, Last Gasp has been nominated for the Drama League Award for Outstanding digital production. So not even a pandemic can stop this woman from being creative. She has been and continues to be very prolific, if that isn’t already clear. Making work in theatre spaces, community halls, and on YouTube. In terms of content, now let’s get to the good stuff already. Her oeuvre has entailed working with as she herself puts it, “disrupting performance and audience relationships, disrupting gender, celebrating sexuality, exploring sensuality and eroticism, concentrating on relationships, women’s relationships to the intimacy of their lives, women’s relationships to the enormity of their relationships”. After many years of staging shows about the Butch and Femme dynamic, being in it and subverting it at the same time, and her partnership with Peggy Shaw as Split Britches, around about the mid 90s, Lois longed to investigate the visibility of a femme on her own. And she had to move all the way to London to do that.



LW

I had to get out of town.



OF

Lois is a Professor, so not just a regular lecturer, FYI, here in the UK, that title Professor signifies reaching the pinnacle of academic excellence, the top rung of the ladder. So she’s a Professor of contemporary performance at Queen Mary University of London. But seriously, she knows how to teach and she’s very influential. In fact, on this very podcast, on the two episodes that have already been released, both artists I interviewed mentioned, you spontaneously of their own accord for two different reasons. So Hamja Ahsan, who’s an introvert pride person brought Lois up for your pioneering method of public engagement called the long table. He advocated that it should be applied in all arenas of public life, from the cafe to the parliament. And he was adamant that this would be revolutionary….



LW

Wow. 



OF

And then when Joshua Sofaer and I were discussing artists who make autobiographical or what I would call self-disclosing performance, not just as a rite of passage, or as a foray into less personal work, but all the way through into later life, which by the way, he said he loves, loves, loves - that’s three loves. He loves watching that work and it was your name, Lois, that he used to exemplify this. So yes, Lois Weaver, she needs no introduction. So I better hurry up and shut up and get on with speaking with her. So I want to talk to you today about everything, about art, pleasure politics, about alter egos, and orgasms into later life. So let’s get started.



LW

Oh, yeah, let’s do that. Okay, great. Thank you very much. That was wonderful. I feel much better today. I should, you should have called me up a long time ago. Really cheered me up.



OF

That’s good. That’s what I’m here for. Yeah, so yeah, where to begin? I guess. Oh, yeah, I want to say how we met.



We first met, I was a participant in your workshop at Artsadmin, about directing and collaboration. And one of the most memorable moments for me was like, completely anecdotal like nothing to do with your teaching methods, which obviously also impacted on me, not to negate that, but just was about you, you were sort of speaking about your relationship with Peggy and, and yeah, being the feminine one. And like, being sort of in, I don’t know, I guess it was, you know, wanting to wanting to break free of that kind of that dynamic, or it was the first time that I as a straight person, like, had an insight into the fact that like, as a straight person, as a straight woman, I’ve always just looked to the queer world is like, they they know, you know, like, they’ve kind of worked it out, like they, you know, it’s, it must be so much better, like the that dynamic between, you know, masculine people and feminine and people must be, you know, completely liberated from its, you know, the trap of heteronormativity. And this is like, oh, it isn’t like, so that, it just gave me this kind of sense of like, Oh, so the things that happen with this dynamic are then placed on to, within those relationships too.



LW

Well, we all watch the same movies, you know, we all were given the same kind of role models. Those of us who are queer had the benefit of twisting those models a little bit, but we all have the same sort of external influences about what it, you know, what it means to be the things that we end up being anyway. Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt. Go ahead.



OF

No, that’s all. That was, that was my kind of like. Well, I think what it is like I, like, all through art school, I wanted to make images of like, female desire, whatever that is. And the only like, the best things, I could find that I felt like were expressing my desire. We’re all like, you know, like, were all lesbian and queer representations. Like, I just could not find the straight representations that I could identify with. So I don’t know. Yeah, that was my kind of confessions of, yeah...



LW

I mean, I think being queer. I mean, being queer for me, gave me the freedom, I think, to embrace the stereotype where I think sometimes being heterosexual you have to you have to seriously reject the stereotype, because it’s placed so you’re in imprinted, so definitely, on who you are, and who your relationships are. And I think being queer, we just had the freedom to like, go ahead and go right into that stereotype, and then embrace it. And then like I said, twist it, or perverted or subvert it, and so on. So yeah, but I mean, you know, when you said the word relationship, I think, you know, I think relations are just difficult, no matter what you’re able to bring to them, you know, when you put two different people in the room, or you put two different people in a cottage, or they you put them in a house where they’ve been living together in a pandemic, you’ve got to encounter all the same things. I mean, I look at international relations. And I think that’s just like my relationship with Peggy, that kind of, you know, inability to really understand what that person is saying, and therefore make a decision based on that is really difficult. You know, and I think the more you know, someone, sometimes the harder that is, although some of the decisions as you get older, they make themselves in a way, but I still think it’s really hard to really know, you know, how another person functions to the extent that you can, you know, collaborate with that and make it work.



OF

Yeah, well, speaking of collaboration, that’s another thing that I kind of envy though about your, your career is like, I think it’s maybe a difference of like, I come from a fine art background. And so everything’s been about like me as the individual artists making things on my own. And whereas, that workshop that you did was all about, you know, collaboration and, you know, directing yourself, directing other people and that kind of, you know, working through that dynamic and I still to this day, I don’t think, like I’ve had a really successful collaboration with anyone. So, I really, like admire that aspect of your, of your work.



LW

Well, I think, to be honest, I might envy you a little bit in the sense that I have always had this fantasy of what it must be like to be a solo artist in the sense that you go into your own studio and you come up with your own ideas and follow through on those, be it a painting or performance or whatever. I have a real, probably romanticised notion of what that is and, and I always thought that if I were to start over, I’d want to be, you know, an independent fine artist. That would be the road I would take. But I think, for me the idea of collaborating started really early on, because I didn’t feel like I had enough of my own ideas. And I’ve always felt dependent on the ideas of others. And dependency is not a great word. I always been greedy for the ideas of others. And always, you know, wanted to make things in that context of, of community. Maybe that’s because I was a, I was the baby of the family by 10 years. And so I had a very solitary existence. And I grew up in very isolated environment. And I always say that I grew up knowing that I would have to move to a place where people would still be awake when I went to sleep, because I couldn’t bear the solitude of that darkness. And I think probably some of my instincts to collaborate might have come out of out of that as well, you know. But, having said that, I think it’s more true what I said at the beginning, which is, I don’t feel like I have enough of my own ideas. I really feel that I feel fuller, when I have other people around me contributing.



OF

Yeah, I can relate to that too, because I definitely, well, I definitely like grabbing other people’s [work as a starting point]. I reenact, or I parody, or I never feel like I’m just yeah, it’s always been like a process of like, how do I get to my own, find my own voice? But anyway, yeah, I just, I want to ask more, though, about the, like, Butch and Femme roles and your relationship to femininity. And like, I know in recent works, Peggy’s been talking about her relationship with kind of hegemonic masculinity, and that as being exemplified by Trump or whatever. And I’m just wondering, like, about you and your femininity? Are there any, like, aspects of femininity that you find to be problematic or that you don’t identify with? I mean, you kind of, you parody femininity. And well, yeah, I really liked your your, something you said, I don’t know if you want to say something first, but I was gonna quote you.



LW

I was probably gonna quote myself, but you go first.



OF

You said, your alter ego, Tammy Whynot, you said “her sense of wonder and her ability to fail gloriously and without shame were her superpowers and she became, she became your hyper femme superhero. And her wisdom of why not gave you a definition you’ve been searching for of resistant femme, a highly competent woman who just looks like she needs help.



LW

Absolutely, that that’d be, that was what I was going to say that last little quote, that last little phrase is the thing I’ve lived by, I think, I mean, in the sense that I’ve embraced the same aspects of femininity, that I also reject, which would be learned helplessness, I think that’s the thing that I’ve rejected over the years. And to be honest, I feel lucky that I didn’t, I wasn’t encouraged in me as a kid, you know, that I was encouraged to, to be independent, to make my choices to make my own things, and not to depend in that sense on other people and to learn to be helpless. I didn’t have that. But I’ve enjoyed performing that. So that idea of the performing the learned helplessness or looking like I need little help when, when everyone can see that under the blonde wig, there’s a brain that can take something apart and put it back together again, has been the greatest pleasure of my performing femme actually. So, yeah, so that has always been my model of femininity. And when I’ve been asked over the years mostly by butches, I’ll point out, when am I going to make a performance that explicates the whole nature of femme-ness or femininity? And I have tried, I tried a lot to, I tried various ways. One of the ways Peggy and I both tried was we did a performance based on Paris Music Hall stars, who were sort of the early Madonna’s, you know, of our culture, because they wrote, directed, performed in, designed the costumes for, were the stars of their own show. And so, you know, we started to make some work to think about what does that mean, when a femme was on her own on stage, but even then, I don’t know it just wouldn’t quite get to the essences of what it was that appealed to me that we’re not in relation to the butch dynamic, which, which is something that Peggy and I kind of latched on to really early on, because we knew it was good theatre. We knew that, so playing, you know, Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond was, that was good theatrical fodder for us, you know, to play and lip sync to those characters, or to play with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May, these, these theatrical couplings were really, felt like good performance material for us. And so we latched on to butch and femme as almost as much of that as we did out of any kind of personal desire. But then I also think, early on, in my coming out, which was when I was in my 30s, we would talk about the old lesbian bars, you know, the old, particularly, both of us, Peggy and I, coming from working class environment, the old lesbians that we knew and had become aware of as young youngsters were Butch and Femme. That’s how they survived. That’s how they identified. And we had a great love and respect for that history. And I think part of us wanted to embrace that as well, to know. So yeah, so I think that was, those two things were the bedrock of our having started to play with those things. And then as we began to play with them, they really began to compete with how we managed to keep space for each other and, and independently with that.



OF

What do you mean by that keep space?



LW

Well, I think again, because... As I was saying, again… We keep space. What do I mean by that? I guess, when we did choose role models that we were playing with, let’s say Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca or various comedy teams, we always chose the ones that that had equal footing on stage, and that they all share the same amount of space. I think that’s what I mean, that we...



OF

I definitely noticed that in your productions, it’s very much like your collaborations are such that, they’re very much like, yeah, there’s definitely not like the sense of the masculine overtaking or being too prominent or, more prominent or anything like that.



LW

Yeah, I mean, because, you know, certainly comedy, certainly, again, growing up in the ‘50s as Peggy and I did, you know, it was very easy for the housewife to be the butt of the joke, you know, or the woman right to be the butt of a joke. And so and then, you know, and that was one of the things, feminists, you know, as we started out as, or certainly I did, I started out as a feminist performer, feminists were not supposed to be funny, you know, because the joke was always on us.



OF

Absolutely. I wanted to get to that, so I’m glad you got there.



LW

And, and so it was with my work with Spiderwoman, the first show that I did with a company, I worked with Spiderwoman, which is probably...



OF

Yeah, I didn’t mention them because it was just gonna get longer.



LW

That’s alright, i was a long time ago. But you know, they’re Native American, predominantly Native American, African American and white working class women who came together to make this company and our first piece was called Women in violence. And our director, Muriel Miguel, my mentor, insisted that we work with the dirty joke, because our the, or even the joke was that was a male prerogative. And, and often it inflicted violence on women, didn’t it? So we wanted to grab hold of that, use it and turn it around. And that was the first time I actually thought about that and realised that, you know, one, we weren’t meant to be funny, and two, that we weren’t meant to be funny because we were often the butt of the joke. So that, but that was, again, that was the beginning of wanting to work with humour that way.



OF

Yeah, ‘cause I was gonna bring it up in relation actually, to your performance as Tammy Whynot. And I think it’s fantastic that you did your inaugural lecture as a Professor as as Tammy Whynot because I think, yeah, my, I often talk about like, I don’t, or at least that thing now is changing more, but I had this feeling for many years that a woman wouldn’t do like that kind of playing dumb persona that like someone like Andy Warhol does. Like, I just feel like women artists always have to be, you know, the experts on their work, and they have to speak about it in this very articulate kind of academic way, and they can’t be like this silly or obtuse person who’s just like, Oh, what do you think? Or, I don’t know, just because I guess they would worry about it not being seen as a persona, they would think that people just believe they were idiots. 



LW

Absolutely. 



OF

I feel like, yeah, so that’s why I think it’s so wonderful about you’re using, you know, you’re using this this moment of recognition for your academic career and playing the role of Tammy who is maybe more like a silly woman, or...



LW

I didn’t follow through on your, when you brought Tammy up before, when I was talking about having made all these attempts to describe or unpick femininity, or the performance of femininity. It wasn’t until I just didn’t land on Tammy, Tammy has been with me a long time in different forms, but suddenly realised it was Tammy that allowed me to sort of both embody thatkind of femininity, but wouldn’t be broken by it. I mean, you know, Dolly Parton is the perfect example of that. I mean, you know, Peggy used to always say, you know, Dolly can talk about her tits, all she wants, but if you, if you thought someone was going to get a close enough to touch them without her permission, they’d be dead. And you know that they’d be dead. So that, you can sense that, one is that she’s smart, two, is that she’s completely in control. And I think that when I realised, Tammy wasn’t that for me, necessarily, but that she was in control enough, even in her sense of fear, even in her embracing a failure, and in some ways, that is her control. So, so yeah, so my response to the institution, you know, as a working class femm from the south of the United States, suddenly becoming a professor in an English academy. My way of dealing with that was, you know, sort of drawing the potential for failure within that, you know, and then celebrating the success of it at the same time, and Tammy allows me to do that. 



OF

[Laughs]



LW

But yeah, you’re right, I mean, nobody had ever seen an inaugural address like that. And, but Peggy was sitting next to the principal of the university, you know, because they were all lined up on the front row, and they all had processed in and their robes and everything. And I do this thing where I throw cupcakes because I count out my age. That was the other part of it was to celebrate the years of my 50-something years, up to that point, and I was throwing cupcakes, and one nearly hit him in the head. And he just looked over to Peggy and he said, this doesn’t usually happen at an inaugural address. This isn’t how they usually are. 



OF

As if she didn’t know, hilarious. And the other thing, I love it when she [Tammy] goes to protests too, because I don’t know, I think of protests as this very serious and a full of anger. And you know, I don’t know to say, it brought it completely different aspect to the act of protesting, you know, just made it really playful and fun.



LW

I think that well, that’s the humour thing is the playfulness, and the fun and not taking yourself too seriously. But I also think she serves the purpose. I mean, it took me ages to become a feminist, because I would go to these feminist coffee houses or, or feminist meetings and I would be afraid that I didn’t know enough. I didn’t have the right language. I didn’t have the right platform. I didn’t know all of the key words. And I think some of us even now go to protest with a similar kind of, I’m not sure I have, you know, I have this desire, I have this passion, I have this anger, but I don’t have the, I’m not sure I have all the knowledge. And I think that keeps us, it keeps us from being engaged fully, I think. And that for me is one of, that’s one of her superpowers that she does not have to know everything. And she can be naive for other people. Like I when I’ve used her as an emcee at particularly live art events. She’s a perfect emcee, because you know, there might be some live art event that is on the first viewing incomprehensible to some people in the audience, she says, generously. 



OF

[Laughs]



LW

[Laughs] She can come out afterwards and said, wow, you know, I’m not sure what that was. But didn’t you like the colour of her dress? Do you know what I mean?



OF

[Laughs] Yeah. No, actually I realised we should, for our listeners who may be not are not familiar with Tammy Whynot, let’s assume there might be some listeners who are not familiar. I feel like we should just give some of the backstory. So she decided to stop being a Country and Western singer to start being a lesbian performance artist, right so, so the character’s about your relationship to Country music stars, to that type of, or reckoning with your kind of, your childhood in the south and with hegemonic femininity and this kind of naivete, but and also, yeah, you use, you parody all those things, but you harness them to research very serious stuff. But I just, yeah, I love like, I love how you’re like, I’m figuring out about all this performance stuff. And they make these things called ‘installations’, and they have to have ‘projects’. Yeah, so it just really brings it down to...



LW

Yeah, she kind of deconstructs the vocabulary, and the jargons that often in closed communities, like institutions and live art communities take for granted that everybody else knows what these things mean. And so she can, she can play with that and that’s very, very ...What, what is it? It frees you up a little bit to not worry about making a mistake. 



OF

Yeah.



LW

Tammy, I don’t know if you know this, but when I first did Tammy Whynot in 1976 when I was with Spiderwoman [theatre company] and we were making a show, we decided we were going to do the Lysistrata, Sophocles’ Lysistrata. And we were going to do this whole thing because it was, I think there was, you know, war in the environment, as there always is, usually. And we were going to talk about withholding sex. And we were all heterosexual at that point. And anyway, somebody had to be the Spartan woman, which in the Greek play is the countrywoman. So because that came from the south, I got cast as the dumb countrywoman. And I decided at that point to play her as country-western singer, which I would have run like hell from, you know, as because it would mark me as a southerner, it would mark me as a working-class, dumb southerner. And we’re in, and I didn’t want to be identified with that at that point. But we are able, again, Muriel Miguel sort of encouraged me to embrace that and play inside that, to see where it would take me and she never left me after that, Tammy never left me.



OF

That’s a long relationship. Another really long relationship, longer than your relationship with Peggy?



LW

It must be genetic, that longevity must be a genetic because my parents were married almost 60 years, my brother is almost 60 years with his wife, my sister, and 50 years with her husband. So I, sometimes what I, you know, Peggy and I would almost break up, or we just get sick of each other. And I couldn’t let go, I often thought, oh, it just, it must just be in my genes or my chromosomes somewhere they, I do this, this is what I do this kind of hanging on or holding on or staying with whatever, however you want to call it?



OF

So yeah, I mean, you’re, so a lot of your work with [Split] Britches has been sort of staging things from your life and your relationship and that has, like, obviously, impacted your actual relationship has it? Could you talk a little bit about that, like the impact of your work on your life? I know that your life goes into your work, but I’m wondering when it goes back the other way? What happened?



LW

I think it probably goes back the other way, much more than it seems, and probably even much more than we acknowledge it. I mean, we often say now that we’ve used performance as a methodology for confronting the challenges of our life, you know, when we get to a certain point, like what Peggy is a good example with when she went into menopause. How do you express menopause as a butch woman? So she made a piece Menopausal Gentlemen. And I think the working through of that piece helped her work through that period of menopause for her and that sense of identity within menopause. So I think it’s, you know, I think we’ve, we literally have used it. But, I mean, one of the things we also have talked about is because in the early days We did, we worked a lot on lesbian eroticism and, and felt it was important to portray lesbian eroticism on stage. I mean, we’ve never been a company that made work about being lesbians we always made being lesbians the given, and whatever other kinds of considerations we were making in the work. But we always wanted to be physically erotic. I wanted to be a couple. And we wanted to express that physical attraction and attention and affection. And I think one of the things, the more erotic we were on stage, the less sex we had. You know, and these things happen in relationships. But at one point, I noticed that we hadn’t been having sex, and we hadn’t really felt like having sex. And that’s all right. And then I thought, you know, why, it’s because we’re doing it on stage. It’s really, and that really, that impacted us. I think the other thing that impacted us was trying to work out this expression of gender identity around Butch/Femme, and work out a change in that, you know, Peggy was changing.



OF

Do you ever play the butch? Like, do you ever...



LW

That’s exactly what I was getting to, I never actually played the butch, but there are quite a few of our pieces where I would get in a suit, and Peggy would get into the dress. And, and a lot of that would be done on stage. And we flip in and out of it on stage where I’d be in a suit, but Peggy would rip the suit off me and I’d be in a dress, and Peggy would be in a dress. And we did that a lot. And again, that was sort of, not the very early, but earliest work that we did. And then as Peggy became more masculine-identified and, and sort of not identifying with the trans community, not wanting to be trans herself, but identifying with that, that particular kind of masculinity, and not wanting to be seen as a drag queen, which is, she says that’s what people see her as when she puts on a dress, is a drag queen.



OF

Right. 



LW

And as I was trying to take up more space on the stage as the femme and try to understand also what femme was, I wanted there always to be a representation of femininity on stage. But at the same time, sometimes I wanted to play the butch. So if I played the butch that would necessitate Peggy playing the femme if we wanted to make sure that wasn’t erased on stage. And we had massive fights about that, we started to have massive fights around that. So that, trying to do that on stage really started to affect our kind of our relationship in a way where Peggy thought I was trying to make her wear a dress, and I thought she was trying to, just it’s true, ‘cause I was.



OF

Right, I see what you’re saying, though, I hadn’t thought about it in that way of like, in order to then not eliminate the feminine, you’ve got to have Peggy in a dress.



LW

And I, I mean, I know this at this point, this is, you know, is the edge of what could be a contentious conversation. But at that point, when we’re talking 1994 to 1999, or maybe even 2000 when we’re having these conversations and these conflicts and you know, in the trans community within our lesbian community was building I and I was struggling with some visibility. Those two things were, didn’t go well together. For me, they were there was a discomfort in that as I felt like, I didn’t want my I wanted my femme visibility to be invisible, I wasn’t sure that it was as visible as it could be yet when we were moving in that direction. And at the same time, what was happening is more or more visible was that the trans aspect of our communities, this was very early, and that was really difficult for me and very disturbing, you know, and it became really contentious for Peggy and I in our in our working relationship. And it always centred around who’s wearing the dress in a way, but I mean obviously that conversation has now infiltrated our community in a very destructive way and I wouldn’t particularly hold the same position. Although I probably deep down still hold a similar fear that I just don’t want woman or feminine, femme or the feminine to disappear. And I define woman by whoever defines themself as a woman. I’m not, I don’t feel trans exclusionary, but I do feel ever so protective of what happens to representations of the feminine in this world. You know, and I celebrate that, and I protect it, and I’ll fight for it for everybody, and whoever wants to do that, but it’s a bit more difficult conversation to have than it was, you know, however many, 20 years ago that was, we were starting to deal with it just between us, me and Peggy.



OF

Yeah. Well, like, on one of your bios it said something like, you tried female impersonation, or something like, you distinguish between like female alter ego versus female impersonation? What do you, how do you, I mean, it sounds like just semantics almost. But I know, what is the difference between?



LW

That is kind of semantics, I mean, when we did Belle Reprieve, which was our reinterpretation of Streetcar Named Desire. And Peggy and I created that with Paul Shaw and Bette Bourne of The Bloolips, which if you don’t know them, are an amazing, well, a drag group, but they wouldn’t necessarily call them drag queens, they call themselves "men who like to wear frocks". And their drag work, their performance work was so inventive, you know, so I mean, they made whole house, whole dresses that were meant to be aspects of architecture, you know, and whole, you know, so once they came out, there was a number where they were all dressed up as cheeses, but in these like, beautiful, sort of abstract drag, really. And anyway, we got together to make this piece and what we saw Bette Bourne who was one of the male members of the blue lips, wanted to play Blanche. So his partner played Mitch, Peggy was Stanly and I was Stella. So when we defined this, on the programme, so who the characters were, that Bette was impersonating a woman, Peggy was impersonating a man, I was a woman impersonating a woman using the form of that, and Paul was impersonating a fairy. So you know, so we were actually using this idea of impersonation, which I think is different from who Tammy is to me, which is absolutely an alter ego, who is rooted in a different kind of place for me, so she could show up as butch or femme and she’d still be Tammy.



OF

Ah, I see. Okay.



LW

I guess, I mean, I haven’t thought about that. So it’s a really good question. I hadn’t actually thought about that distinction, but maybe I should do the butch Tammy?



OF

I’m sure lots of people would like to see that butch Tammy. So, but also, I thought maybe you were gonna say because it’s an alter ego, it’s more of you in Tammy, as opposed to playing a role that’s very separate from yourself, or...



LW

I think that’s right. I mean, you know, and when I was Stella, as a woman, impersonating a woman, I was definitely a different character. But I was still me in that character. But I yeah, I think that’s probably right. I like the distinction.



OF

So I want to ask also, like, with the, obviously, Tammy wears this bleached blonde wig and it’s obviously a wig. Do people believe, do you think people believe Tammy as a person? Like, do you ever, does someone ever come up to you saying, where’s Tammy? After, like, or do they know? Has that ever happened? 



LW

That’s a really good question.



OF

It’s just because it happens to me all the time as The O Show host, like when people, it’s happened to me where I present, I put the wig on and I present something and then like, later on, I’m hanging out without the wig and people are like, where’s Oriana? Like, they don’t know that I’m Oriana. I just wonder, but with Tammy she’s more of an obviously, I don’t know, I feel like she’s, the wig is more obviously a wig, or there’s something about her that’s like just, she’s clearly like a costume that’s been thrown on.



LW

Yeah. ‘Throne on’ is the right word. And I think that’s an interesting way of thinking about how I approach femme as well. I mean, I think Sue-Ellen Case, wrote this essay “Toward a butch-femme aesthetic”, and one of the things she talked about in relation to me is that, you know, yes, you might see me on the street in a dress and high heels, but the legs aren’t shaved, and the lipstick is a bit askew. So there’s always a kind of not quite rightness about the picture. And, you know, we might call it slippage. So there’s always and there’s always a crack so that I’m not trying to complete the image of the country-western singer, there’s always you could always see me through that costume. And, and I talked to my students about that, that’s my distinction between theatre and performance, is that in theatre, people try to create characters, this goes back to what we were just saying that you create characters that are opaque, you know, actors don’t want their personality to be seen in a character. Whereas in performance, that’s the whole point, we want to be able to see the bleed of the artist in the persona that they’re building. So I think that’s probably... I don’t think people necessarily see me in the bar afterwards and know that I’m the Tammy. But I don’t think they think Tammy is real. However, the thing about Tammy is that people will talk to Tammy and I mean, they’ll tell me loads of stuff about themselves. You know, that’s why I call her my facilitator of public engagement because she can ask them about their sex life in public. And they’ll tell you, they’ll tell her, there’s, so there’s something about, I often think it’s something about her not being quite real that makes that possible, you know. Whereas if I was in the audience asking them questions, I’m not sure that I would get any response or that response anyway.



OF

Have you ever tested it? [Laughs] Gone around asking personal questions as Lois?



LW

But, you know, I have noticed recently, I haven’t been, you know, dressed up as Tammy for a long time, mainly because of the pandemic, a couple of times during the pandemic. And I have noticed, though, that I’m much more Tammy than I used to be even when I’m Lois. So that thing that she used to do for me, which is to help me get over a kind of social fear, or an intellectual fear of inferiority, or any of those things that inhibit us, or even fear of failure as an artist, she really taught me how to manage that. I feel Lois can do this now. I feel like that we’re a little bit closer together now. That’s good. So...



OF

Why hasn’t she come out much during the pandemic?



LW

It’s a good question. I think that the pandemic allowed me to go into a quiet or less public space, or it necessitated that in some ways, but even though we still communicating online, or you know, doing podcasts, or there are many ways that she could have stayed active, I just didn’t have that. I was more introverted. I didn’t have that desire for display that I think I need sometimes in order to get into Tammy and I was doing other, more quieter things. You know, still going online, still doing things, I was doing them as myself. I don’t know, I think it might be age too. Because when we first started talking, I was thinking about butch-femme and where I am now with that femininity. I think that was one of the questions you posed, and we didn’t get to it. You know, Joan Nestle says that femmes become butch as they age. And one of the reasons for that is that being femme is high maintenance. And it’s high maintenance, because it’s a construct, and it takes a lot of energy to construct that construct. And when you get older, you just don’t have the energy to put it all on in the same way. And I think that might have been part of why Tammy stayed in her bag all during the pandemic. I don’t, I don’t miss her; I feel like she’s still there. But I haven’t had the urge to get her out and show her off. Maybe it’s just wanting to be quiet or conserve some energy, that sort of thing. Watch it, as soon as I say something like that, then that’s it, she comes. That’s all you’ll see, for the next two years. It’s like, once, you know, because Peggy and I have had open relationships for a long, long time. And when that first started, I remember having a conversation with an old friend of mine because Peggy was having an affair. And we were walking through the park, and I said, no, I’m absolutely not interested. I’m not looking for another relationship, I’m so content. And it was pretty much the next day that something like that walked into my life and lasted for nine years.



OF

[Laughs] That’s so funny, that, this reminds me of my partner when we first met, and we spoke on the phone. He was like, oh, love, I never think about love. And it was like we met and it was like, I love you. And I said, when we were talking on the phone you said you never think about love. 



LW

I always think that when I hear somebody saying, oh, I’m not gonna ever do that again. I go, oh, yes you are. 



OF

[Laughs] You’re about to.



LW

You’re just opening the door for that possibility.



OF

That’s my ploy of getting him to listen to the podcast. If I mentioned him, he has to listen. 



LW

Yeah, he’s definitely in this.



OF

But yeah, like do you do? How does your kind of butch-femme relationship like, does it, like, how do you deal with housework? I know it’s a really stupid question, but like housework? And like, do you divide? Like, who cleans the toilet? Like, do you have? Like, does the stereotype of masculinity and femininity impact on like, the division of labour in the home?



LW

No, I mean, Peggy looks after the car, because I don’t particularly like cars. And I look after the business side of things, you know, in terms of paying attention to what needs to be done, because she doesn’t have an organised brain like that. She cooks a lot and cleans up. She does a lot of the dishes, thankfully. I think we pretty much have to goad each other into doing actual house cleaning because we don’t particularly like it that much. I think there’s a kind, if you looked at us, you know, if we were over there and you looked at us, you’d say oh, that’s gendered in the sense that Peggy’s driving, I’m doing the shopping. But it’s really affinity, isn’t it? It’s what I like doing. 



OF

I feel like that’s usually what it is, isn’t it.



LW

Yeah, but you know, I just thought of this, when you mentioned, brought it up again, butch femme, and I thought of this when we were talking about Tammy, it’s, you know, things that have changed drastically. And, for instance, Tammy, sometimes I find it hard to celebrate the white blonde country-western singer in the context of racial conversations right now, in our conversations about race and racism, because of the ways in which, you know, that representation has been part of the white supremacist environment. That’s not to say, I would abandon her or that I wouldn’t use her to try to explore that. But it’s not as easy to take on that stereotype, you know. I have to think twice about it, I have to be thoughtful about it. Particularly in certain environments. And I think the same is true of the butch-femme at the moment, you know, because so much about gender and the binary and the sort of interrogation of the binary and the nonbinary and acceptance of the nonbinary and that, you know, butch femme has very much gone out of fashion. And it’s very much in some circles looked down on. It’s really old-fashioned. And while I don’t really mind being old-fashioned because I’m old, it’s another thing that we’re, you know, we’re looking at it. I don’t think that when we made, like, when we made Last Gasp, for instance, we looked at the dynamics of relationship, and we, I was in a dress and Peggy was in a suit. But I don’t think we really went in into the say, and we yeah, we did, actually because we reenacted the marriage story, towards the end of the film, but I think we had a different idea about how to use butch-femme. And I think that’s, you know, that’s changed because the cultural conversation has changed.



OF

That was a big part of that show, I think, especially with Peggy’s monologue.



LW

Yeah. Peggy’s trying to pick it apart and think about how to manage it. Yeah.



OF

Well, it sounds like reacting to a specific. There’s a point where, I can’t remember what she’s talking about, but she, it sounded like she, I think it was an anecdote of like being specifically told, like... Oh, it was about not wanting, like being glad that you made work back in the day when you could make mistakes, you had that freedom, whereas now everything so... Yeah, and then this kind of attack of, I don’t know.



LW

No, she was she was reliving a trauma. It was a very traumatic experience, you know, literally, that literally happened to her where she came to the table to say things that she often does, you know, just about what it was like when in the ‘70s. And she was pretty bitterly attacked for being trans, exclusionary, I guess, but, or being unconscious. But I think what it was is that we were in a situation where it was a long table, and the long table had been introduced by an academic, which I add, I hadn’t organised this long table. I, we just happened to show up at this long table. But I would never encourage anyone to introduce a long table because it introduces a kind of language, or a kind of expectation that goes against the whole ethos of the long table. So she introduced it with a lot of theoretical notions around performance and queerness, and gender, a lot of language and Peggy was responding to that. 



OF

I see.



LW

And she was responding to how, you know, all this sort of theoretical ‘theory-speak’, Peggy calls it, could inhibit, would have inhibited her creativity, and that she felt lucky that she didn’t have to, she could make it up, she could make the whole thing up. Whereas now it feels a bit prescribed. And so, you know, that was a contentious thing to say, and she got really bitterly attacked for it and felt, well, she silenced herself for a long time after that. So this performance is a kind of trying to deal with that trauma and come out of it a little bit and talk about it.



OF

Have you ever experienced anything that made you want to silence yourself in a similar kind of way?



LW

No, because I think maybe I don’t take the same kind of risks that Peggy does. In that sense, or I. I mean, we used to have this thing where people said, I whispered and Peggy shouted, you know. That’s part of our sort of dynamic, or I’ll set up a structure so that other people can talk, and I’ll contribute, and I’ll have an opinion, but I don’t, I don’t sort of put my opinions out there as much. I’m more interested in drawing other people’s opinions and finding the balance. And those for better or worse, I don’t, I’m not celebrating that, because sometimes it’s aggravating. But I would say that this goes back to our conversation about collaboration, there’s one time when I wanted to quit, and that was the result of a bad collaboration. And that, you know, we didn’t really set ourselves up properly to start the collaboration so that it came down, after a while, it came down to issues of ownership. 



OF

With Peggy or with someone else? 



LW

With someone else. 



OF

Yes, I remember that was a key thing in the workshop [at Artsadmin], it was about, like, coming up with some kind of contract at the beginning, some kind of agreement about, yeah. That was like, that was really good advice.



LW

It was a friend of mine who was in business who gave me that advice, you know, and said, it doesn’t even matter what the contract says because it gives you something to change if you want. Yeah. But that’s we didn’t have a contract and, or even a clear understanding. And it, it ripped us apart at a time when we were doing, when the show was going really well. So it just felt like and I thought I’d never, I thought I’d leave performance and never go back. But I did and we’re still and we’re friends now. So it’s not like it was... And that’s another thing that I’ve learned, you know, is that even in these riffs because I had a riff with Spiderwoman, I had a riff with this person. You know, time is a great healer and after a certain amount of time, we live in a small community, we need each other. You know, we have, we depend on our mutual aid for each other. We’re friends now you get over it, you move on. That’s good.



OF

Well, that’s good.



LW

It is good.



OF

Yeah. That’s very hopeful.



LW

That’s my, that’s my little vision of the future. Just be patient and let time do its work.



OF

That’s great. That’s really good.



LW

That’s what, I’m going to say, no, actually, I’m going to talk about time for a minute, because I was just in a conversation about conversations. And one of the things that came up was time, and someone on, it was a panel, and someone said that time was a marker of care. I thought they said time was a maker of care. But either way, I think that one of the things that gets in our way, when we disagree about, you know, gender identity, or racial politics or vaccines, that we don’t really give each other enough time, you know, to sort of talk it through or think it out loud. And we don’t allow for awkwardness and silence in our conversations so that we can wait and see how how we think we think or how we think other people think. 



OF

Yeah, and I think it also if you’re going to communicate with people who feel differently, or who have different views like you need to have a lot of empathy or like patience, or I don’t know, yeah, something that a lot of, yeah. That often when you have, yeah, really strong views, you don’t have.



LW

You just get up and walk off the porch, because you know, you don’t want to even engage in the difficulty. It takes time to do that.



OF

Yeah. So okay, so I want to ask, there are many things I want to ask. Oh, yeah, but I do, I just want to kind of agree with you about the whole academic starting, I don’t know, for me, it’s like, anything could set me off on not being able to participate in the long table. But I like when Hamja [Ahsan] brought up the long table as being this wonderful thing that allows conversation, I was like, you know, I’ve been in a long table and I went up to the table, I wanted to contribute, but I just was still too shy to say anything. I didn’t even write anything down. And I had to go home because I had a little baby at home and I couldn’t stay. And it was like, I don’t think it always does open up. And he was like, you just negated my whole point. Like, I don’t mean to because I’ve also like, you know, done my own long tables and found it was really good, like with students and stuff. So I’m not knocking the whole thing, but I think it, I think it had to do with like certain academics being at that table and having already, yeah, and just, I don’t know, when anything’s at the Live Art Development Agency, I just feel very, like, anxious. And like, it’s like, this is the space that’s supposed to be supporting me, I better not fuck it up here. Like, they’re the ones that might support me, let me not mess it up. So yeah.



LW

No, absolutely, I get it. I mean, here’s the thing, the reason I, I sort of, say that it’s as open and democratic as I do say it is, is that usually there’s at least one or two people who come to the table and talk and share an experience that wouldn’t have if it had been a panel discussion, or if it had been something that was more formal. And at least there is that option to do that. But I don’t deny that it still takes a lot of courage to get yourself to come to the table. And, and I also don’t deny that the framing of it makes all the difference in the world. You know, and I agree with you about something like, anything that you’re invested in, like the Live Art Development Agency, or I mean, I’m not all that invested in my institution, I feel like my job is to actually confront my institution. But at the same time, I can be intimidated if there you know, some highly competent academics in the room that I value, and I wouldn’t want to sound like an idiot in front of them. I’m shy as well. But I often say to people who said that to me, just get, well you did that, but just get yourself to the table. Well, you don’t have to talk at the table, you can just be there. You need listeners at the table. Yeah, it’s okay, you know, it’s okay to be shy.



OF

I know. I know. That’s what, I mean, that’s what Hamja has like drilled into me already. Anyway, I know it’s okay to be shy. It’s okay to be shy. But yeah, what you were talking about, like all the things you’re talking about, around Tammy just like it’s spot on with the with this thing that I’ve been exploring, shame attacking, which is a therapeutic technique, within Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, I go on and on about this. So it’s really probably boring for my listeners to hear it one more time. But yeah, just it’s about acting against yourself inhibiting irrational beliefs and doing the thing you fear doing and getting the response you feared getting, but you unconditionally accept yourself anyway. Which is, so you permit yourself to fail and to fuck up and whatever, just so exactly what you’re saying with Tammy. But interestingly, when I met like the UK is leading expert in this form of therapy, he said that if you do it as a persona, it’s not as effective therapeutically because you can compartmentalise it. So I was like, Oh, my God, I’ve been doing it the wrong way. And but yeah, exactly what you’re saying, though, it’s like, I don’t need the wig. I could still go on and be Oriana, the host without the wig. So I could, but yeah, and I think it is that the, you know, the two personalities just like you and Tammy are getting closer. But yeah, I don’t know what I’m getting at, my question is I’m just kind of...



LW

I don’t know if I agree with that person, or not. I don’t know what, I look, I don’t know a lot about the therapy you’re talking about, but I do know something about shame. And I do know that when I’m working with personas for people, or when I’m even doing creative hosting workshops, or just something I’ve done particularly within the academic environment. I mean, that’s the place I go to, what is the place where you feel you could feel the most ashamed? What would make you feel the most ashamed in this particular social situation? Or, you know, that kind of, build the persona on that, you know, and then let that persona act you out of that. You’re not going to act out of that on your own, feels like you need the right outfit for that. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know, I think that’s where, I don’t know, I think that’s where performance can really help us because we can practice it without taking that full, terrifying ride on our own.



OF

I agree with you. I can also yeah, you just need something, you just need a little bit of protection, like, it’s some things are so, feel so risky that you just, you want that little extra protection.



LW

I mean, the thing I feel right now about failure and performance, or failure in a conversation or panel, whatever, you know, when you have to show up and be somebody, it’s absolutely down to Tammy. And I, if it hadn’t been for Tammy, I would never have been able to go there where I can remember, as Tammy standing backstage thinking, oh, well, you know, this could go terribly wrong. I have no idea how this is going to work out. But I kinda know that as Tammy, I can get myself out of it, whatever it is, I mean, and that little conversation that I’d have with myself as Tammy, I am now able to have with myself as Lois, and I kind of almost enjoy not knowing what’s going to happen. And, you know, if it fails, figuring it out in the moment. I don’t think I’d never would have gotten there without the persona, I don’t think.



OF

I know, I mean, I feel the same way. Yeah. So that kind of leads on to my next question, which is, obviously you’ve you spent a long time doing this autobiographical performance. So I’m wondering like, what has felt the most risky? Like what, you know, thing have you revealed or thing have you done that has felt like the most challenging?



LW

I think I, what, I try to work with the first thing that comes into my mind and not censor that. But the, what I came up with was this piece that we made, Peggy and I called Lust and Comfort. And it was a piece that interrogated our long-term lesbian relationship. And it was at a point, it was at the point where we were seeing other people trying to redefine our relationship or even dissolve it. Who knew at that point? But we were trying to bring some of that reality and that conflict and that change onto the stage. And, you know, how like I was starting to like, understand my, a different, I had a different sexuality than the sexuality I had with Peggy. I was interested in other sexual practices than the sex that we had. And I was trying to articulate that on stage. You know, as a part of this whole big, crazy performance about long-term relationships, and the whole premise of the piece was what are you willing to risk for lust or sacrifice for comfort? That’s why we called it Lust and Comfort. And not knowing really, on the other side of that performance, whether we’d be together or apart, because it was a lot going on. And that felt exhilarating, but it felt like the scariest and Iidid, I do think I revealed more things about myself in that pace than I have in some of my other pieces.



OF

And then that, obviously, it probably it affected your relationship with Peggy but what about for you personally? Do you think that taking that risk had an impact on you, like, on how you kind of are in the world or, or as anything that you’ve done? I mean, obviously, you talked about Tammy, and you becoming closer, and that, obviously, has an impact on your everyday way of being but just yeah, there are other, anything else?



LW

Well, it, I guess, I guess the massive impact of that is that it was after that, that I situated myself much more in London, and less in New York. So we had a physical separation, much more of a physical separation, which that was already, in effect, because I was already co-artistic director of Gay Sweatshop at that point and Gay Sweatshop produced that show. But I hadn’t quite dug in to also being a resident in London, and living that least half, or if not more than half the year in separation. So yeah, we did separate, but I think we separated better than we might have if we hadn’t done some of that work. And did I manage to fulfill my sexual desires? Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, as a result of playing with that on stage. And I was just thinking about it. I do think that was also a really early beginning point of me and Peggy rethinking our gender identities on stage. Because we both, we did, we worked off of three shows, one was The Servant, you know, this film, Joseph Losey’s The Servant, where we both played male characters. 


OF

Ok. 



LW

And then we played off [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. We did three different films, basically and they are, we played with that, and I really played the ultra femme and we’ve dealt with that relationship. So yeah, I think we were starting to pick a lot of things apart in that piece.



OF

So yeah, speaking of like, you know, getting what you want sexually. So all your research, all your research, as Tammy into sexuality, getting older and sexuality like, tell me some of your findings?



LW

Well, I mean, again, that came about because I didn’t feel the desire for sex as much as I had, as I was getting older. Which could have had, you know, there’s loads of reasons for that. But I didn’t want to necessarily think that was just it, that that was, you know, once you go through menopause that’s it. I didn’t believe that. And I also knew that people weren’t talking about it. So I thought that at least I want to talk about it, at least I want to find out what other people feel. And it was not conclusive. I mean, people feel loads of different things. Like I met, you know, women in their 70s, late 70s, who are on dating apps, and going out with a different man, you know, every night. And then I’ve met women who absolutely had no interest whatsoever in sex, to start with or, or to end with, or whatever. And then we, I’ve met women who might have had interest in sex, but because they were in an older heterosexual world, knew that having a sexual relationship meant having a relationship in which they would become carers for the man, again, and refuse to get, to even entertain the idea of having sex because they didn’t want to get themselves into that position. I don’t think I recovered my libido as a result of that research. I felt, like, I felt happy to be in good company with other women who maybe would have sex, but not necessarily wasn’t the biggest thing in their life anymore. And I began to, if certain, I don’t know if it was that pace or not, but I began to let fall in love with my work. And I felt like, I felt sexy in my work. And, and so I basically just fell into that acceptance as a result of that research. But there’s loads of loads and loads of women who are really very sexually active in their 70s and 80s, which was, that was encouraging. 



OF

[Laughs]



LW

But didn’t change my feelings, I don’t think necessarily. But you never know, there’s so many things that impact our, our desires for sex, sometimes it’s health, sometimes it’s circumstance, you know, sometimes it’s... I just started to really love being solo, being singular and enjoying my own time. And, and then I realised what I wouldn’t mind having sex, but I don’t necessarily want to spend the night with anyone. I don’t necessarily want to wake up with a new person, and have to get to know another person, you know, then you think, oh, maybe it’s not sex, but it’s intimacy that I’m having, you know, so you. But I did carry on having sex for a while, and I probably will again, but I’m in a kind of quiet space at the moment.



OF

So yeah, so speaking of, thank you for sharing that. [Laughs]



LW

I don’t know if its of interest to anybody, but you’re welcome to it.



OF

So yeah, speaking of like getting older and like, are you going to retire? Or do you have a pension? I just want to like really stupid practical things like do you have a pension?



LW

Well, I do now, I have a little one because I’ve been teaching at Queen Mary for 20 years. And I, I have this phrase that I’ve always said that I am going to have to live, I’m gonna have to work until I die because I retired in my 20s and 30s. So because I didn’t work, I mean, I worked but I didn’t, I worked lots of different jobs. And so, I didn’t have a pension then. And I didn’t get a pension till I started working at Queen Mary in my late 40s and 50s. So, you know, loads of people said, I got a job at the university right out of college because I want you to know, I wanted to establish my pension.



OF

I know, I feel very worried about it for myself. And so, yeah, hence my asking you.



LW

Yes, and I'm becoming nervous about myself too because I, what happens? I’ve said this to someone recently, come Sunday, I want every day to be Sunday. You know, when I think about okay, Sunday is over now, the workweek starts on Monday, I would just assume it to be Sunday for the rest of the week. And I think, is that mean that I’m ready to retire? You know? I don’t think so. I mean, I love my teaching, I love my, the work that I do. I get more tired. And I also feel like, you know, there are things I’m not as quick at or as good at as I was, you know, 20 years ago. But I think I could manage for another five or so years, maybe longer. So I don’t have any plans to retire. And also as artists we never retire, do we? I mean, that’s not something you retire from. But if you’re talking about retirement as an economic thing, I’m lucky also because I have a really cheap apartment in New York. And so I could potentially live on a little bit of money, you know, if everything went well, and I didn’t get ill, I could. But having worked for a while, I got used to going out to dinner, you know, and having a nice bottle of red wine occasionally. I don't know if I could give that up, I’m gonna have to work to support my habits.



OF

So I think that might be all my questions.



LW

Shall we retire on retirement?



OF

Shall we retire on retirement, that’s good. Yeah, I’m just glancing at my questions and seeing and there’s nothing. Yeah, that’s it. That’s great.



LW

I’m aware that it has started to rain in the last few minutes. And so when you get your, this recording, there might be some raindrops falling on our heads.



OF

Ok, that’s fine. [Laughs] 



LW

That might be what you hear.



OF

Alright, I’m sure it will be totally fine. 



LW

Great. Oh, good. I’ve enjoyed this. Thank you. 



OF

Me too, thank you.



[ding sound]



OF

Well, that concludes my interview with Lois Weaver. I hardly edited it at all because it just seemed to flow so well and touched upon so many topics that interest me and that she brings such a fascinating perspective to bear on. I hope you got as much out of it as I did. 

[Song: “Next time on Multiple Os”]

OF

Next we’ll be departing from the usual guests on “Multiple Os”, which so far in the series has featured mainly artists. So we’re going to take a little bit of a turn talking to a sociologist and coach Jo Van Every who wrote a book called Refusing to be a wife: heterosexual women changing the family. So that’s something to look forward to next time on “Multiple Os”.

[Theme song]

OF

Thank you so much for listening. If you’re enjoying the series, please do tell all your friends about it. Until next time I’m going to keep unconditionally accepting myself, my life and other people and I hope you’ll do the same because we’re all just fallible human beings. 

[Theme song]