“My favorite farm animal is a pig because they are such intelligent and emotional animals,” said ’80s legend and 1998 lesbian crush object (High Art) Ally Sheedy the other day via email, apropos of the Farm Sanctuary “Winter Wonderland for the Animals” event she’s attending tonight at the Art Directors Club with other famous lettuce chompers, like fellow neon-decade heartthrob Corey Feldman, Legally Blonde acting genius Jennifer Coolidge, hip addict and girl-about-town Tatum O’Neal, and a blond DJ-for-our-time who calls herself Princess Superstar. “I became a vegetarian because of love for animals and then committed to being vegan because of all the education on factory farming I received from Farm Sanctuary,” continued Ms. Sheedy, perhaps unaware that her comely mid-’80s visage is still seared in our noggin’ from watching St. Elmo’s Fire every weekend during our zitty stage while praying to God we’d someday make out in the shower wearing nothing but a pearl necklace (no luck yet, depressingly). But we digress! Ms. Sheedy said her diet was “reinforced, of course, by Skinny Bitch”—the omnipresent vegetarian weight-loss tome favored by Posh Spice—“and of course I was reared on Charlotte’s Web!!!” Speaking of favorite farm animals, composer David Del Tredici presents his orchestral performance piece My Favorite Penis Poems, which he explained “is a program of my more sexually explicit music … ending with a graphic description of a blow-by-blow progression of an S&M scene from an Allen Ginsberg poem called ‘Please Master.’ The theme of all six poems is the penis, from several points of view: a woman, a gay man…” Turn on the bubble machine! (Hey, Mr. Del Tredici has a Pulitzer!) He developed his repertoire because “in American music, there’s no out gay music that’s set to classical music, and I thought that was a shame,” he said. “I wanted to create a body of literature that was explicitly gay and set to music. I was really recharged by the idea of discovering erotic verse in my music. I had been doing Lewis Carroll for 20 years, and I kind of thought I was going to be doing that forever, but then this came along and said, ‘No, you’re not!’” Come to think of it, we probably went through something similar…
[Farm Sanctuary Winter Wonderland for the Animals, the Art Director’s Club, 106 West 29th Street, 6 p.m., 607-583-2225, ext. 221; My Favorite Penis Poems, Symphony Space, Broadway and 95th Street, 7:30 p.m., 212-864-5400]
mbryan@observer.com
