This is one of the few food related items that John Lloyd Young didn’t jewel at my place last Sunday when The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch & APLA hosted “Food for Thought”, the first ever exhibition of his brilliant Pop Kitsch art interpretations of iconically kitschy komfort foods. Had I remembered where I put it I may have used my Velveeta camera to take some fabulous photos that day.  Lucky for us I didn’t as you can actually see the work and the beautiful Pop Kitsch guests like RuPaul who came to view it much clearer then my little Shells & Cheese Dinner baby is capable of popping out.

John Lloyd’s eye-popping work costs somewhat more than the three Kraft box tops and dollar shipping and handling one had to send in to get this Velveeta Camera when it was made in the 1980’s. The 110 Kodak film cartridge is still inside…

…just as fresh as John Lloyd’s ever-glowing can of Spam.

Of course, my preference would be to dump the Kraft Shells & Cheese Dinner cam and go for John Lloyd’s Kraft Mac & Cheese “Dominoes”. It’s hard to a tell from this photo but he jeweled 100 boxes of it and toppled them out on a 16 foot serpentine table.

In 2006, the musical I co-wrote, The Color Purple, lost the Tony to Jersey Boys of which John Lloyd Young was the star and for which he won the Best Actor Tony.

We hadn’t seen each other since the round of award parties back then but a few months ago he e-mailed me out of the blue and asked if I was interested in writing some music with him. When he came over to talk about it he brought me a gift that he had just made, a jeweled box of Triscuits.

I went completely nuts for the box and encouraged him to keep on jeweling. What I saw over the next couple of months I considered brilliant works of Pop Kitsch art and I decided that presenting John Lloyd’s work would make an excellent exhibition as the first artist officially sanctioned by The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch.  My Tony loss to him already made a perfect set up for Kitsch. I also thought that his Pop Kitsch sensibility would inspire mine and make for some excellent party props like this sign I painted interpreting the junk food John Lloyd chose to honor in his work.

We both were hard at work up until the last minute before the guests arrived.

And arrive thank God they did as all proceeds benefited AIDS Project Los Angeles. Those who dug deep included Stu James (Harpo in The Color Purple), Lesley Donald (Buster in The Color Purple) and Jai Rodiguez,

as well as Mito Aviles, Chadmichael Morrisette and Tiffany Daniels (Squeak in The Color Purple) posing with John Lloyd’s very first jeweled piece, “Virtue” (not edible!)…

…and a couple hundred more folks who you can see you right here.

When it came to food there was delicious Moms BBQ House soul food versions of John Lloyd’s delicious jeweled food.

Here’s Charles Phoenix modeling the chicken, peas and mac & cheese with me, Sonny Ruscha Bjornson and Mark Blackwell:

“Food for Thought” was also an unbelievably great excuse to order the world’s largest home delivered pizza…

… and to float individual servings of cotton candy in the pool for guests to snack on.

Here’s a lovely display of Spam that accompanied John Lloyd’s bejeweled Spam…

… and the artist vouching for its edibility:

I must say that despite my lifelong dedication to junk food I never tasted Spam until I spiked a cube here. Not surprising to anyone who knows me I found it very tasty. But I digress.

All in all, it was a wonderful day both as a party host and as a conceptual artist. John Lloyd’s and my work melded into one big kitschified fondue and despite the fact that rain was threatened all week the heavens held up so our eyes and stomachs were able to ingest beautiful works of art that my Velveeta camera only dreams of capturing in their full glory.

For full documentation of the bejeweled food fest go here.

To see how the Los Angeles Times enjoyed it go here.

Photos: Melissa Manning for the Look Partnership LLC

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Categories: Furniture and Housewares, Gadgets, Kitchen, Kitsch, Music, Party, People, Press, The Color Purple


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This vintage cleaning product can may be a little worse for wear but so am I as I hobble around my house shining it back up to its usual state after a couple hundred people trounced through here yesterday in celebration of John Lloyd Young’s debut exhibition featuring his very first works of Kitsch Pop art. I love that cleaning products in aerosol cans were so new when this came out in the 1950s that it was made of silicones (more than 1!) and was referred to as the “push-button cleaner”.

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Categories: Art, Celebrity, Crafts, Creativity, Fashion, Food, Hollywood, Kitsch, Kitsch O' The Day, Music, Party, People, Photograph, Self expression, The Color Purple


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I’m supposed to be traveling today but won’t know if I’m going until a couple hours before the flight due to complications on my collaborator’s side. I’m not the world’s most eager traveler to begin with but having a suitcase that makes me smile every time I look at it sure helps if one is of the nature that their traveling psyche can be affected by aesthetics.

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Categories: Accessories, Disco, Kitsch, Kitsch O' The Day, Music, Musical Instruments, Pomplamoose, Self expression, September, Songwriting, The Color Purple, Travel


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I am so absolutely not a cook so the fact this 1950’s kitchen tool de-veins and peels a shrimp in one fell swoop isn’t what I cherish most about it but, rather, the gorgeous aesthetics that grace the box. From the pre-psychedelic background pattern on the lid…

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Categories: Food, Kitsch, Kitsch O' The Day, People, Place, Political, Self expression, Street, The Color Purple


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These little hard plastic record coasters were all the rage in the 1950’s and 60’s when 45’s and 33-1/3’s were blasting from hifi’s all over the world and Tom Collins, Manhattans and Hi Balls were resting on them as everyone did The Jitterbug and Stroll, topping it off with The Twist.   Some of the coasters were just cheesy versions of records featuring hit drinks:

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Last night was the closing of The First National Tour of my musical, The Color Purple.  I had never written a musical before, hardly ever went to see them.  I’m an all-the-way Pop Culture gal and for me this was a medium from ancient times with way too histrionic sounding songs and singers frozen in time.  I was the least likely person in the world to write a musical but write one I did, with Brenda Russell, Stephen Bray and Marsha Norman. We were nominated for 11 Tony’s.  How we even won one, the brilliant LaChanze for Best Actress, was a miracle in the climate on Broadway. (Don’t get me started on that one…). Beyond being eternally proud of the work, especially the uplifting and joyous effect it had on audiences night after night, the most stunning part of the journey was the family of friends I made through the Broadway run and the ensuing national tour.  Right from the beginning when we started writing Purple in 2001 I always heard that  there’s constant bickering among everyone but we were all really friends.  And I mean everyone, from Alice Walker, the Pulitzer prize winning author of the novel, down through us authors, the cast, director, producers, hair, makeup, wigs, production managers, everyone.  I was always being told by other friends who had written for Broadway that by the end no one would ever talk to each other and that so many writers of so many shows, because the experience takes years and is so intense, never end up  speaking unless they write another show and then it’s just about work. Our case always was and remains different. This is a family that will be together forever, bound by an experience where the piece itself was bigger than any one part. Everyone felt chosen and blessed to be a part of The Color Purple. Fantasia WAS Celie.  Watching that journey of her finding herself through this character was a joy and a privilege. Every cast member, starting with the staggering Felicia P. Fields, Tony nominated for Sofia and the first actor we ever cast in 2003, was not only a triple threat – brilliant singers, actors AND dancers, a rare enough find in one person let alone an entire cast – they were a gift for any artist to have interpret their work.

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Categories: Afro, Art, Awards, Book, Celebrity, Creative process, Creativity, Kitsch, Kitsch O' The Day, Music, People, Self expression, Songwriting, The Color Purple, empowerment


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I’ll be waving one of these  all day and night today as these are the final two performances of the First National Tour of my musical, The Color Purple. The  whole 4-1/2 years I was writing this with Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray we waved these church fans and others from my collection of 60 from the 1950’s and ’60’s daily. I’ve been stuck on songs before but being stuck on a song for a musical when one has to consider way more then the singer or the content of the song like the plot, which we were writing at the same time as the songs, the dialogue, whether something should be musicalized or spoken, is there dancing to it or not, does the wig guy have enough time to make the wig changes, on and ever-increasingly on…, let me tell you the sweat pours down and these church fans, totally organic to what we were writing other than a couple decades too late, came in mighty handy.

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I’m still incredibly bleary-eyed from my month’s buildup to my Sound Of Soul extravaganza Monday night, the recuperation after from which  I still feel numb not to mention running back and forth to The Pantages to see the final ever performances of my musical, The Color Purple, as originally conceived before it closes on Sunday and jumps to another tier of performance when the second national tour begins in a couple weeks. Honestly, I’d rather be lying in bed watching TV, my favorite sport, then running myself ragged like I was 16. But I’ve never been the type to do the former and I seem to eternally be the type to act the latter so at least it makes me smile when my drinkware matches my state of mind.

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Categories: Bar accessory, Drink, Furniture and Housewares, Kitsch, Kitsch O' The Day, Party, The Color Purple


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.                               Me and RuPaul

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Can’t even move I’m so stiff and a little pissed as well as me who usually travels around with four cameras, different resolutions for different occasions, only had one on me last night at the opening of my musical, The Color Purple, back in LA for the third time, and after many years of faithful service this camera just handed in its resignation and quit. I suppose that could be considered Kitsch, the co-author of the show’s camera rebelling at the opening no less, leaving a master archivist, me, with little other than words to describe the UNBELIEVABLE NIGHT it was.

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Categories: Kitsch, Kitsch O' The Day, Party, People, Photograph, The Color Purple


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