BRIDGET EVERETT JOES PUB FULL

My pants fell off, and I just stepped out of them and kept going. “A little bit after that, I was doing a show at Ars Nova. “He once came out on stage wearing just a sweater, singing this sweet little song,” she explains. Medlyn, with whom Everett and Mellman would go on to create the monthly variety show Our Hit Parade, provided the spark that allowed her to become the unstoppably wild performer her followers recognize. Everett found inspiration in Kiki and Herb, the cabaret drag duo made up of Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman, as well as Murray Hill and Neil Medlyn.

Living in New York, of course, brings more opportunities for creative pursuits, and it also provides the chance to see other performers express their own creativity. She landed a gig in a children’s theatre tour and earned her equity card, but soon realized that this wasn’t the type of performance she found fulfilling. After a few years of living in Phoenix, “singing the National Anthem at spring training grounds and going ape-shit at karaoke bars,” Everett packed up and came to New York. I didn’t want that to happen to me.” Instead, Everett headed to Arizona State University and got a degree in vocal performance. “She always wanted to be on Broadway, but instead she had six kids and lives in Kansas.

BRIDGET EVERETT JOES PUB FULL

“My mom made a house full of music.” That’s also where she discovered a love for performing, but she didn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps necessarily. “We grew up around the piano,” she reminisces. Raised in Manhattan, Kansas, Everett got her voice and love of singing from her mother. And the raw, fearless sexuality she unabashedly displays is directly descended from those two singers, as well.īut before she was pushing the limits of cabaret performance, Everett had a pretty standard life as a singing actress. Part rock and roll, part musical theatre, Everett channels a variety of vocal inspirations, most obviously Janis Joplin and Bette Midler. It’s the voice that, like her on- and offstage personalities, seems to be full of contradictions.

That voice is what stands out beyond the dirty jokes and the dismembered dolls and the nip-slips: it’s as buttery and smooth as the Chardonnay Everett swills while she’s commanding an audience. I just go on stage and become this terrifying, fucking amped-up party girl with the voice of an angel.” “I used to be this crazy party girl - getting on top of the bar and all that shit - but now I’m much more reserved in my private life. “The wilder I become on stage, the quieter I become in real life,” she tells me. Out of the spotlight, Everett is much more timid and soft-spoken - the exact opposite of her onstage persona. One of the things you can’t help but notice about Everett is her ample bosom in fact, that seems like a deceptively tame way to describe two of her major assets, which Everett gleefully puts to work as she roams through the crowd, casually climbing over audience members and shoving her breasts in their faces. Instead, she was wearing a familiarly low-cut tank top and, somewhat surprisingly, a bra. She was instantly recognizable - she’s quite a commanding presence, even in daylight - despite not wearing one of her signature stage outfits: flowy, revealing numbers crafted by House of Larréon (Everett’s friend, costumer and performer Larry Crone). The onstage Bridget Everett is drastically different from the one I met a week before for an afternoon glass of rosé at a quiet lunch spot in Soho. That’s why when she threw a decapitated doll’s head (that would be her daughter, “Precious”) with a maraca shoved inside it at me from the stage and instructed me to stand up and dance in the aisle, I complied. What else could they have done? When Bridget Everett identifies you as one of her prey, you accept it. In the span of an hour and a half, Everett spit Chardonnay at a couple of gay men sitting at the tables in front of the stage, dripped milk on her chest (and, later, hot wax from a candle she grabbed off a table in the back of the room), and found at least three audience members to bring up on stage to fondle and caress as they blushed and laughed uncomfortably. On the night I saw her for the first time, Everett and her band, The Tender Moments, were celebrating the release of her first album, Pound It, at their regular monthly Joe’s Pub appearance. There’s probably no performer as exciting - or, frankly, terrifying - as Bridget Everett, a woman who could be described with a number of the familiar adjectives we toss at performers who display a certain fierce unpredictability once they hit the stage.

Bridget everett joes pub