From Phoebe Legere's Insta & Facebook:
Nov. 7 - 6:30 PM - "Mr. Melvin" - new edit - Museum of the Moving Image, NY
Tonight I sat in a movie theater hearing my own voice — song after song — rolling through those massive movie-house speakers. The film looked like a million bucks. It was prescient, funny, glamorous - environmental art - full of politics and hope! The whole theater was laughing and cheering. If I’d known how great it would look, I might have dressed up — but no one cared. They wanted my autograph anyway, even though I was wearing a T-shirt and sneakers.
It was one of those rare, surreal moments that make you stop and say: Well, that was a life worth living.
There is beauty in riding through the Rockies on a Dugati clinging to Hunter Thompson.
There is beauty in singing with a Tibetan shaman at 18,000 feet among wolves, yaks, and snow leopards.
And there is the quiet, aching beauty of reading the letters people wrote to me while I lay, with no insurance, dying in Beth Israel Hospital one hot New York summer.
But tonight was a different kind of beauty — sharp, cinematic, and strangely holy.
There I was at Kaufman Astoria Studios — the same place where my best friend, Dennis Daugherty, once worked as a maintenance man. Dennis died at 33. And now, all these years later, I found myself back in that same building, watching myself on the big screen as Claire — the girlfriend of Melvin, a maintenance man transformed into the Toxic Avenger, a hideously deformed superhero born from a vat of toxic waste.
Art reflecting life, life echoing loss — and out of both, somehow, #transformation.
On screen, there’s a line where Lloyd cites Greed as the reason they split one movie into two. And yes — Greed is probably why they didn’t use me for the voice of the Saturday-morning cartoon, even though they lifted my look, my costume, my voice, and my accordion — wholesale. It was a time when everyone wanted to exploit me, but no one wanted to develop me as an artist.
And yet, there it is — that moment when my Amazing Grace kicks in - just accordion and organ - and later my song Turn to Me, under the end credits. It sounds like a total banger — produced by Chris Lord-Alge, by the way, as poetic payback for screwing me out of a decent mix when I was on Epic Records.
So, to my "friends" who not only didn’t come, but who somehow feel superior to the Toxic Avenger:
You missed it. This new edit proves that Lloyd Kaufman is a shaman and genius.
Fortunately, I had my fans there.
Fans - God Bless them - they show up.
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