MOCA, take note: You want to convey a sense of dangerously standing on the edge of what's next by marking three decades as champions of modern art with an epic assemblage of superstars celebrated for walking on the wild side. So you enlist Lady Gaga, the Top 40 chanteuse du jour, to tickle a pink piano by celebrity artist Damien Hirst, while that name brand band of ballet, the Bolshoi, bobs around and It artist Francesco Vezzoli stitches away.

Pop provocateurs?
Try pop as in popular. As in most favored, most marketable, most everywhere. As in bubbly without the punch of hooch.

Wednesday night, just days following that grand gala, the real thing burst onto a tiny stage just a few yards down, literally and, yes, culturally, from MOCA, with the west coast premiere at REDCAT of "Arias with a Twist," the landmark collaboration between drag performance icon Joey Arias and marionette master Basil Twist. This risque mindbender, which runs through December 13, stars freakishly fabulous puppets and a Billie Holiday-sounding drag artist. It's also the most avant-garde moment seen in this neighborhood in recent memory, last weekend's anniversary gala nearby, included.
Even the after party boasted the original gal to walk on the wild side, Holly Woodlawn (look her up, kids, if you don't know who this is). Joey's rare appearance in L.A. was enough to lure all those dirty downtown NYC expats now living on yoga and herbal tea here (well, sort of), including multi-threat Ann Magnuson, Party Monster James St. James, designer Michael Schmidt, Constance (a favorite of Robert Mapplethorpe), Annie Flanders (founder of NYC counter culture chronicler, the original Details) and Howie Pyro (who worked for Joey at Fiorucci back in 1979, and worked the turntables with his diabolical garage mixes Wednesday night).
Ann was among the friends who came out to host the evening, along with Lisa Edelstein, Rosanna Arquette, Katy Rodriguez, Anne Crawford and Dudley DeZonia, my Andy Griffith, Bryan Rabin and yours truly (poor Debi Mazar was missed, marooned at home with a temperature). Bryan and I spent the last month, in fact, madly pulling off a reception worthy of this talented gang of superhumans and the puppets who support them. Last fall, he got me to a way-off-the-track theater in New York to see the performance in its inaugural run, and I was gobsmacked. Here were devil puppets with monstrous schlongs doing the Watusi with a flesh and bones character cinched within a gasp of his life in a corseted body suit by renegade Thierry Manfred Mugler.

The oft-cited New York Times declaration--"Eat your heart out, Madonna… Goes the distance, all the way over the rainbow."--got it right. We clearly weren't the only ones who prodded Joey post show to come to REDCAT. Less than a year later, here was the wonderful, Technicolor image of Joey in the many purple satin arms of an octopus on the cover of the season catalog. And it didn't take much arm wrestling on Bryan's part to wrangle me into lending my whatever-it-takes either.

You can tell folks only so much about this show before it all sounds too good to be true. But this show really is that way. It's imaginative and insane, jolting and joyful. It's an eyeful and an earful and it will make your head explode. It sparkles in a way that all those wildly more famous and richer johnny-come-latelies who headlined up the hill five days before can only hope to echo.

THIS JUST IN: So far, so loving it...
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All Photos by Rose Apodaca (except where noted) and can NOT be "borrowed" without permission.