Come one, Come all! Presenting all the UPCOMING EVENTS at GRAVESIDE VARIETY…. (Patreon)

Hello loves!!!

Greetings from a plane. I AM UBER-EXHAUSTED FROM THE NEW ORLEANS DRESDEN DOLLS SHOWS and holy shit - every one of them was OFF THE GODDAMN HOOK....

AND we had a great (historic, dare I say) patron meet-up in Jackson Square yesterday…photos coming. You’re gonna like it.

I hope many of you were able the dolls stream - funded by Y’ALL - from New Orleans on Saturday night.

The consensus from my post yesterday seems to be to just leave it up for the time being as an unlisted link…so that’s what we’ll do. HERE IT IS AGAIN if you missed it! It’s had almost 20k views! I kvell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pwDQeq3-W8

It’s been so heart-warming to get all the feedback from people all over the world who got to access the show. The band is just blown away by the love. We are SHATTERED, energy-wise, but we are so, so happy and feeling so, so lucky.

………

AND NOW....

DRUM ROLL...

GRAVESIDE VARIETY

IS

OFFICIALLY OPEN

FOR THE SUMMER SEASON!!

SHOWS! EVENTS! COMMUNITY COFFEE HANG HOURS!

If you missed my big-ass post about ALL THINGS GRAVESIDE VARIETY, and how our "soft" opening weekend for patrons and the neighbors went, it’s HERE: https://www.patreon.com/posts/84767103

AND NOW….COME COME COME!!!!

COME TO MORE EVENTS!!!

In AMAZING news, our own Liz Grammaticas, long-time patron, brigade member and dolls helper, is gonna take her chances helming the space during the community coffee hours. HIGH FIVE HER! SHE IS ONE OF US. You can pretty guarantee that if the space if open during community hours, and there’s someone working there, it’s gonna be be Liz. Liz is literally helping me put this here post together. Liz is MAGIC. This is Liz.

We still don’t have a liquor license, so don’t expect to come and get wasted, and we have an open bring-your-own non-alcoholic beverage (and food!) policy. Everything’s potluck. Share with your neighbors.

Every show has a table where people can bring food and drink and plonk it down, and we will always provide flatware, plates, napkins, and at most events, coffee and tea.

Here is a list of events coming up!! SHARE THE EVENT PAGE FAR AND WIDE, IT’S LEGIT NOW!!!

AND.....

If you’re coming to ANYTHING this month, comment here below!

Post to the FB patron page to find fellow patrons to meet up with!

You can also make threads on the shadowbox to find rides, friends, potluck plans….USE THE TOOLS!!!!

Here's the basic list, scroll down for more juicy info about the acts and shows!

I'm super excited for ALL of this but especially looking forward to seeing John Coons do his WHOLE SHOW!! And I'm excited, of course, for Lance and our party around a piano. You SAW WHAT WAS POSSIBLE :)

Here we go:

june 29 @ 5pm – live music with amadou diallo + m’bollo

july 1 9:30-1   open community coffeehouse hours 

july 9 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

july 9 @ 7pm – party around a piano with lance horne

july 10 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

july 10 @ 6pm – ‘super second rate’ with cellist leah coloff

july 14  @ 6pm – golly presents : kyp malone + holly miranda

july 15 @ 10am - drag story hour with annie christ

july 15 @ 2pm – book event with the golden notebook TBA

july 15  @ 6pm – golly presents : kyp malone + holly miranda

july 16 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

july 16 @ 6pm - embodied ecology and storytelling with sophie strand

july 17 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

july 22 @ 2pm – book event with the golden notebook TBA

July 23 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

july 23 @ 7pm – party around a piano with lance horne

july 24 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

july 24  @ 6pm – john coons presents BLEAK!

july 25  @ 6pm – john coons presents BLEAK!

july 30 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

july 31 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

august 4 @ 6pm - golly presents : joan as police woman + lisa g

august 5 @ 6pm - golly presents : joan as police woman + lisa g

august 6 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

august 6 @ 7pm – party around a piano with lance horne

august 7 9:30-1     open community coffeehouse hours

august 13 @ 6pm - golly presents : zach djanikian + chris maxwell + amb. parsley

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I’ll be at most of these, wandering around!!! And in good time, I’m going to schedule my own little series of talks and performances. Right now, I’m mostly just gonna be there flouncing around in a bathrobe, pouring people coffee, playing a tune here and there, and enjoying myself as I recover from this insane tour.

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We also will be starting OPEN COMMUNITY COFFEEHOUSE HOURS.   We are starting this Saturday, July 1st,  9:30am-1pm.  After that, we will be doing this regularly starting July 9th on Sundays & Mondays 9:30am-1pm, unless otherwise noted.  These will be a super low-key and donation based.   We will have serve yourself coffee, tea  and sometimes baked goods. We welcome baked goods!  Feel free to work in the space, chat with friends, make new friends, or just enjoy the vibes with a hot beverage.   We just kindly ask that you use the space you make a donation. (Cash or venmo is great!!)

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june 29 @ 5pm – live music with amadou diallo + m’bollo

An evening of music from Amadou Diallo + M'Bollo and enjoy the rhythms of Senegal, Mali and Guinea.

MBollo combines west african roots with American musical elements such as upright bass and acoustic guitar. MBollo consists of Theo Schikowitz on upright bass, Benjy Bruno and Matthew Albeck on guitar, and Amadou Diallo on Djembe and Gongoma drums. Amadou has been living in America since 2001 and began by teaching African roots drums in the Hudson Valley, collaborating with a great many different groups playing a wide variety of music. MBollos songs are written by Amadou; some are Sufi songs, others are love songs or songs about peace. MBollo has had the pleasure of playing at a variety of local venues including Opus 40, the Falcon, the Colony Woodstock Cafe, the Rosendale Street Festival, Woodstock Farmers Market, and Bywater Bistro, among others

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july 9 @ 7pm – party around a piano with lance horne

Join us for a night of piano-side sing-a-longs with Lance Horne and a rotating cast of fabulous performers!!!

Lance Horne is an Emmy award-winning composer, pianist, singer, and music director who has arranged for/performed with Alan Cumming, Jake Shears/Scissor Sisters, Ricki Lake, Rufus Wainwright, Pink Martini, Liza Minnelli, Kylie Minogue, the von Trapps, Ben Folds, Neil Gaiman, Kristin Chenoweth, Justin Bond, Sandra Bernhard, Amanda Palmer/Dresden Dolls, Cheyenne Jackson, Kelli O'Hara, Meow Meow, Taylor Mac, the Gatlin Brothers, Boston Pops, Seoul Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony, London/SF/LA/NY Gay Men's Chorus, Sydney Dance Company, Michael Feinstein, Carol Channing, and Sesame Street; performed for President Obama, the First Lady, and Queen Elizabeth; multiple appearances at Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, Lincoln Center, and London's West End.

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july 10 @ 6pm – ‘super second rate’ with cellist leah coloff

'Super Second Rate' is a work-in-progress performance written and performed by cellist and singer/songwriter Leah Coloff.

Leah's father was a music teacher. Years after his death, while cleaning out his office, Leah comes across the draft of a letter he wrote to the head of her university music program He has some real shitty opinions about Leah's talent and the prospects for her future. The letter hurts but also sets some long held suspicions to rest. Funny, upsetting, humane, 'Super Second Rate'--a solo show with original songs--is about difficult truths that might also set us free. Developed with support from The Secret City and SilverSun Foundation.

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Leah Coloff is a cellist, singer described by The New York Times as a combination of artful angularity and a rock-inflected assertiveness. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, her classical roots collide with 70s rock and a pioneer spirit creating her self-identified style, CLUNK (Classical + Punk) with songs and works that are honest, sensual, funny, brutal, pissed-off, beautiful and chilly sweet.

In the classical realm, Leah's focus is on working with contemporary living composers including Philip Glass, Ted Hearne, Joel Thome, Sean Friar and Michael Gordon. She was the cellist for  Ted Hearnes The Source, produced by Beth Morrison Productions for Brooklyn Academy of Music and REDCAT in Los Angeles and she can be heard on The Source (New Amsterdam), selected as one of the best classical recordings of  2015 by The New York Times and The New Yorker.

She has performed and recorded with numerous musical artists including  Trey Anastasio, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Michael Cerveris, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed, Damon Albarn,  Ziggy Marley, Linda Thompson, Dean & Britta, Angelique Kidjo, Nancy Sinatra and Mark Mulcahy among others.

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july 14  & 15 @ 6pm – golly presents : kyp malone + holly miranda

Come join us for an intimate evening of music from Kyp Malone & Holly Miranda

Kyp Malone is a musician and artist based in Brooklyn NYC. He wrote and performed with the musical groups TV on the Radio and Iran.

Malone currently plays with the musical groups Ice Balloons, Bent Arcana and primarily performs solo employing elements of improvisation, folk and electronic music.
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Holly Miranda grew up between Detroit and Nashville, two music towns that would influence her own journey in a very profound way. She began playing piano at the age of six, taught herself guitar at fourteen and moved to New York at sixteen to start her professional career. For over twenty years, Holly has been performing, writing and producing with some of the best talent in the business. She has performed with the likes of Karen O, Lou Reed, The XX, and Lesley Gore. She released two records with her band The Jealous Girlfriends and has co- written and produced a mass of other projects.

In 2021, Miranda and her long time collaborator, Ambrosia Parsley (Shivaree), started a co- operative record label called Eye Knee Records. The phonetical spelling of Ayni; a way of living by reciprocity. For every ten releases they donate 100% of the proceeds to a charity that benefits the communities of Earth. They have released twenty-one singles and a collection of sound installations Holly wrote for a sculpture garden in Pamplona, Spain (Un Bosque). Each single is accompanied by a music video and a story, the reader's digest of record labels if you will. Catch Holly on tour and visit EyeKneeRecords.Com and sign up for the mailing list to stay in the know about what they have coming next.

https://www.hollymiranda.com

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july 15 @ 2pm –  Book Event with the Golden Notebook- TBA

We are teaming up with our friends at our beloved local bookstore The Golden Notebook. Details to come!  In the meantime, check out other events with the Golden Notebook

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july 16 @ 6pm - embodied ecology and storytelling with sophie strand

Join us for an evening with Sophie Strand
Weaving the web: Embodied Ecology and Storytelling

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and shell write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood shes ever lived in she has been known as the walker. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially  between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.

Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone's Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, The Madonna Secret, that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels.  She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.

Follow her on Instagram

Subscribe to her substack

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july 22 @ 2pm – Book Event with the Golden Notebook- TBA

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july 23 @ 7pm – party around a piano with lance horne

we are doing this again!!

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july 24 & 25 @ 6pm – john coons presents BLEAK!

BLEAK! Cabaret duo John Coons & Matta Aument

TWO NIGHTS ONLY!

Cabaret duo John Coons & Matta Aument invite you to escape the barren hellscape of your life and join them on their journey through a jazzier, more-glitter-filled apocalyptic wasteland! A wickedly sharp and satirical song cycle, BLEAK! gleefully skewers the plethora of ways that we're all trying (and failing) to meet the present moment. Come find out just how much fun giving up all hope can be! (And wear something fun. It's the end of the world, after all.)

JOHN COONS (he/they) is a singer-actor based in New York City. He has performed with the Seattle Opera, Seattle Symphony, Boston Symphony POPS, Pittsburgh Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and has sung the National Anthem for the Boston Red Sox. They've shared the stage with popular acts Ben Folds, Foreigner, and Joshua Bell and made their Broadway stage debut singing in the memorial of Jerry Herman. Other highlights include singing in a Salmon Opera, playing Mrs. Pentstemmon in the musical adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle, and Shane Stant (the guy who took out Nancy Kerrigan's knee) in Tonya and Nancy: The Rock Opera at A.R.T.s Club Oberon. Quickly becoming a fixture on the NYC cabaret scene, he's performed at Joe's Pub, The Green Room 42, The Duplex, Club Cumming, and Don't Tell Mama, though many young New Yorkers would recognize him as Dr. Theremin on WNET's Let's Learn. This season: Sweeney Todd at The 5th Avenue Theatre, their cabaret show Nocturnal Omissions in venues across the country and Mexico, and BLEAK! at The Green Room 42 and Seattle Town Hall.

Matta Aument (he/him) is a music director and orchestrator. In cabaret settings, he frequently performs with Molly Pope (... a Gay Man & a Piano, Polly Mope) and Seth Sikes. Theatrically, Matt's credits include music directing the Barrow Street production of Sweeney Todd, orchestrations for We Are The Tigers off-Broadway, and new arrangements for the Broadway revival of Gigi.

watch a clip here: BLEAK

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august 4th & 5th @ 6pm - golly presents : joan as police woman + lisa g

Join us for an evening of music from Joan as Police Woman and Lisa G

Brooklyn-based, world renowned recording artist, live performer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, mentor and producer, Joan As Police Woman, born Joan Wasser, started her musical career studying classical violin. She began playing with alt-rock bands, expanding the terrain of the violin.
In 2002, Wasser created Joan As Police Woman to explore song-writing. Her debut album Real Life was released in 2006 to wild acclaim. Originally self-described by Wasser as punk rock R&B, her sound has naturally evolved through 10+ acclaimed studio albums, thousands of live shows internationally and hundreds of collaborations including John Cale, Lou Reed, Gorillaz, Meshell Ndegeocello, Anohni, David Sylvian, Rufus Wainwright, and Damon Albarn (the last five also all feature on her own records).

In January 2021 Joan was hired by NYUs Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music as a mentor. Her most recent album The Solution Is Restless (released November 2021) is a collaboration with the late great Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (Fela Kuti) and Dave Okumu. Presently writing her new album and a hymn to commemorate the upcoming eclipse, Joanstays inspired by collaborating with and contributing to as many musical projects she can fit into the 25 hour day.

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Lisa Gee is a singer-songwriter from New Jersey, currently based in the Pacific Northwest. A lifelong creative She has spent the last ten years slowly exploring her musical voice in a mixed bag of covers, and writing songs with her ukulele that she never imagined playing outside her own bedroom. These sincere, intimate reflections on love and life comprise her debut EP for Eye Knee Records, coming out in Fall 2023.

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august 6 @ 7pm – party around a piano with lance horne

AND AGAIN!!!

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august 13 @ 6pm - golly presents : zach djanikian + chris maxwell + amb. parsley

Join us for an evening of music from Zach Djanikian + Chris Maxwell + Amb. Parsley....

Amb. Parsley
The artist formerly known as Ambrosia Parsley, is best known for her work as the principal songwriter and front woman for pop noir adventurers Shivaree, much loved abroad, little seen at home. She's worked with Laurie Anderson, Joe Henry, Sex Mob, Dave Sitek, and Hal Wilner, while her songs have been featured in the films of Quentin Tarantino and David O Russell, licensed, as well, for television and advertising in more than a dozen countries around the globe.

Chris Maxwell

Chris Maxwell musically channels the heart of Americana-pop  Big Star, Freedy Johnston, Wilco and the like  in crafting a song-cycle as personal as home movies with X-rays included. A beautifully poised grown-up album in an age that still coughs one up from time to time."- Jonathan Lethem.   Chris made his name playing perhaps the furthest thing from wistful Americana  in the 90s, he made catchy, jagged junkyard rock with the legendary New York band Skeleton Key. Before that, he was the principal songwriter and clever guitarist of Little Rock, Arkansas first band to be signed to a major label, the Gunbunnies, whose Southern Gothic jangle the L.A. Times characterized ...as if the Beatles met Faulkner on E Street." These days, Maxwell works out of his new Goat House Studio in Woodstock, where he composes and records music for hit TV shows like Bob's Burgers and Inside Amy Schumer, as well as having produced and written music for other artists (They Might Be Giants, Iggy Pop, Yoko Ono, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) as part of the celebrated production team The Elegant Too.

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AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST…..GET ON THE GRAVESIDE MAILING LIST - even if you’re not local!!! - to get up-to-the-minute cancellation info, new event info, and last-minute shenanigans!!! SHENANIGANS!!! I SAID IT, SHENANIGANS!!!!

Mailing list is HERE:

gravesidevariety.com

SEE YOU THERE, MY LOVES

xxx

A

PS MY FUCKING FLIGHT JUST GOT DIVERTED TO PHILLY so i am sitting in the Philly airport waiting to hopefully get back on my plane and I ran into Teresa Toro, one of my fave patrons, who was at the Dolls shows!!! Small fecking world.