Speak performance: Author Beth Lisick wields wit while bringing personal stories to life

By Kristen Peterson

Thursday, July 21, 2005 | 8:33 a.m.

After devouring Beth Lisick's 240-page collection of outlandish personal stories, it's difficult to imagine that the Bay Area writer ever looked skeptically at artists, that as a child, she thought, "Why do you think anybody would care about what you wanted to say?"

"I was a very practical, utilitarian kind of person," Lisick said from her home in Berkeley, Calif. "I thought I wanted to be a doctor, maybe. It seemed like a stable, good thing to be."

But the doctor thing never happened. In fact, Lisick has dabbled in just about everything, save for a career in medicine.

She made a teenage attempt at a career of "extreme tanning," a quick 50 bucks working as a one-time hair model, led the spoken word/music group the Beth Lisick Ordeal, starred in check-cashing commercials and toured as the only heterosexual woman in a lesbian poetry group.

More recently, when she's not dressing as a banana for a fruit delivery company, Lisick is settling deeper into the role of writer.

Her third book, "Everybody Into the Pool" (2005, Regan Books an imprint of Harper Collins), which she will read from Friday at the Clark County Library on Flamingo Road, is getting a lot of attention.

Mainstream publications Entertainment Weekly, which gave the book an A, and People Magazine, which called it a "zippy beach read," have endorsed the book. More serious critics are placing her in the same class as Dave Eggers and David Sedaris. The response has Lisick considering what literary task she might tackle next. For readers, it's a good thing Lisick succumbed to the notion that people might want to hear what one has to say. Her stories are told lavishly and sincerely.

She writes of her early years growing up in a conservative Catholic family with Midwestern values in Saratoga, Calif. She takes us to her illegal warehouse apartment at Mission and 16th streets in San Francisco where she was rained on by sewer water (literally) upon returning from a vacation in Tokyo.

"With this book I just wanted to tell stories," Lisick said. "My funny stories."

It was these stories, told onstage, that got Lisick noticed by Manic D Press, which published her first two books, "Monkey Girl" and "This Too Can Be Yours." Her conversations around the office at the San Francisco Chronicle led to a job as a columnist for the paper's Web site, www.SFGate.com.

Recently she was featured on National Public Radio's "This American Life."

Regarding Lisick's work, local writer and NPR commentator Dayvid Figler said, "As good as it is on the page, it's 10 times better when she reads it."

"I was once in a bar with her in Albuquerque, N.M," Figler said. "We were there for some poetry festival. We were all in this bar and someone had a bright idea that they would read poetry. So they started reading poetry. Nobody paid attention to them.

"All of the sudden Beth got up onstage and started telling one of her stories. All eyes turned to her and the place got really silent. She's just a great storyteller. You want to hear every word. She's always positive, always uplifting. But at the same token, she's cynical and humorous.

"It's not like she's a writer. She's your friend."

Workin' for a livin'

What happens to Lisick throughout her life isn't always so unusual. It's more her perspective that has you dropping your jaw.

There are her endearing introspective views on chasing down girl-on-girl liaisons after mistakenly believing that she -- that everybody -- was bisexual, and her falling in love with a singer in a band after seeing him perform the song "Whack-ass Caucasian Two-Step Chicken."

Referring to a fight between former acquaintances, she writes, "If you've ever seen underweight men on opiates fighting or trying to break up a fight of other underweight men on opiates, you'll understand how upset I was not to have had a video camera.

"But as the brawl continued and I started looking around at all these messed-up people I was with, I lost it."

Her "mind-blowing tan" that became her "calling card" in high school and helped lead to her being named homecoming queen was seen retrospectively as a Zenlike experience: "My favorite part of the job was not how my skin took on the burnished burl hue of the truly precancerous, but the path of discovery. It amazed me to realize that my mind could be so blank day after day for the better parts of June, July and August."

On being the only white woman living in an all-black neighborhood as an adult, she conveys that her "strategy at first was to be really friendly.

"If my neighbors could see that I was a nice lady and not an evil agent of gentrification, they might accept me. Then we could move on to that next important level of race relations -- ignoring one another."

Homeward

Lisick's stories are treated with equal amount of tenderness, humor and cynicism. She plays no favorites.

"At open-mike bars, everyone was denying their past like it wasn't cool," Lisick said. "They're acting like they were raised in the Chelsea Hotel. I loved growing up in the suburbs."

Though Lisick toured with lesbian spoken-word group Sister Spit and dabbled in slam poetry, she always felt more comfortable with telling stories, which grew from two-to-three-minute presentations to half-hour conversation-style monologues.

"I think everybody can tell these stories. You just have to have a way of looking at them," Lisick said. "I didn't have a unique life. I had a regular suburban childhood, then a bohemian artist lifestyle, which a lot of people have had."

Her Porchlight Storytelling series is a monthly event that has professionals -- lawyers, bus drivers, strippers-- from the community telling their personal stories in a 10-minute conversational-style effort.

"The worst people we have are stand-up comedians, poets and performances artists," Lisick said. "People love to hear stories. I've learned a lot from watching six people a month get up and tell personal stories about their lives."

The stories revealed in "Everybody Into the Pool" came as a big surprise to Lisick's parents, including one about working a fundraiser for Catholic Charities to pay for an abortion when she was 20.

"The stuff that was hard was the abortion thing," Lisick said. "It happened so long ago, you know. I hadn't told them. The bisexuality, they said, 'We can't believe you told the entire world about your sex life.' "

But, she said, "I wanted to have fun with it, but tell the truth of what happens to me. I didn't reveal anything I didn't want to."

While Lisick didn't want to take a deep literary dive into her tales about her son Gus for fear of being pegged an "alterna-mom," she does talk about adapting to motherhood as a thirtysomething living in a drug-infested gang neighborhood she refers to as "Brokeley."

She still lives in the same neighborhood with 3-year-old Gus and husband Eli Crews.

But, she said, "If I sell some copies of this book we're going to move out of this neighborhood. My house has doubled in price since I bought it, but it's still a crazy neighborhood."

Regarding whether much has changed since writing the book, Lisick said humorously, "Gosh, has anything changed? I don't think so. I'm still in the same (crummy) neighborhood. I'm just older."