happy 73rd birthday Jane Dornacker

 

It would be nice to be able to say happy birthday Jane Dornacker, born 1 October 1947, 73 years young but Jane Dornacker let's get it out of the way died on the 22 October 1986 at a mere 39 years. She certainly packed a lot into those years and we should marvel over that. I am the author of much of her wikipedia entry which I spent a few hours labouring over a few weeks ago, after stumbling over her somehow, I forget how, but via The Tubes, who I was/am nominally interested in. Dornacker cowrote an early semi-hit of The Tubes', "Don't Touch Me There"; she wasn't really a member of the group (she was a backing singer/dancer, and mainly worked with them live from what I can gather). 

You can absolutely imagine, looking at Jane Dornacker's career, that at a certain point she was going to transform from 'god what a troublesome person, uncategorisable and way too finicky' into 'we have to get the right vehicle for this person', just as was required for (for instance) Fran Drescher or Whoopi Goldberg. If you can't beat them, co-opt them. However, she died in a helicopter accident while doing a traffic reporting job which in a fair universe would have just been interim to some kind of global fame (or not, we'll never know). Thus when you look her up on youtube, you get about seven or eight iterations of videos replaying the recording of her death:

When I came to Jane Dornacker's wikipedia page, I found it to be mainly a series of descriptions of the same helicopter accident, including a description which dominated the introduction to the entry. The amount of space given over to the minutiae of the accident and its aftermath was definitely more than half the entry, serving to minimise her life and achievements in a number of ways (and there wasn't even any heft to this section - as I said - it just repeated the same information over and over). Who would ever want to be defined by their death, for god's sake? She was clearly a remarkable performer, long before she won a campaign to be San Francisco State University's 'Homecoming Queen' via the tactics illustrated above (that, and telling people she was 'magic' and an 'Earth mother'; she would later joke that she moved to San Francisco in 1965 from Albuquerque to 'start the hippie movement'). To my mind, the absolutely most telling aspect of the way that incident was reported, from the San Francisco Examiner 6 November 1965 p. 6, was its headline: 'College Queen Contest Back to Normal'. 

She spent the 70s and early 80s as a comedian, musician, actor and all-points-inbetween. No-one says it in the press reportage (don't know why they were so coy) but being over 6 feet tall and a 'buxom red head' no doubt meant she felt she had to take life by/on the front foot but she was, apparently, a natural performer from a very young age, making up operas in nonsense languages and writing a book about stinky skunks when she was a young child. 

So we all know this joke: 

I know it's not my job* to fix all the shit that's going on online or even in wikipedia (btw during my Jane Dornacker editing fury I got a congratulation from wikipedia - I hit my thousandth edit!!! I edit a lot because I keep making screw ups, typos and formatting errors while I do it... lol) and why the hell am I at all surprised that there are stupid sexist assumptions made all over the place online, and wikipedia, which is clearly 90% incel nerd paradise? But still, it really grinds my gears to see how quick the nation of fools who contribute to/edit wikipedia mindlessly replicate the fucked up inclinations of our racist/mysoginist society. For instance, Prairie Prince, the drummer in The Tubes, has a section on his personal life in his wikipedia entry: guess what it comprised (until I removed it)? It was completely about his wife (whether she is still his wife, I can't tell)** who by the way was also a member of The Tubes, and about whom there was virtually nothing in the actual entry on The Tubes. I mean it's bad enough I can't write in my entry (yes, it's mine now) on Jane Dornacker what her mother's actual name was (she's just in the papers in the 50s as half of 'Mr and Mrs John L. Dornacker') but in 2020, you'd think that even fans of the Tubes, who were a 70s alternative rock act after all and who did have at least two women extensively involved with them not just Jerry Hall-Bryan Ferry style, might think that one member of the Tubes was more than another member of the Tubes' 'personal life'. FUCK THESE FUCKERS. And happy birthday Jane Dornacker, I wish you were around to enjoy it. 

*Maybe it is my job. It feels like a calling

** pretty sure he married someone else about 20 years ago so probably not

what do you want from life?

In 1979, we had a student teacher whose name I don't recall, who was obviously this amazing idealist who wanted to unlock the kidz from their rigidity conformist vibe. He was short and intense, with (now I'm painting a picture of his vibe rather than recalling what he really looked like, because I can't remember) big teeth and a squarish jaw and short, almost frizzy curly hair. He wore striped t-shirts and jackets and denim jeans rolled up a bit, in a way that probably makes sense if (I know what this is like) you are generally a little too short for your pants, though it was also something of a fashion.

For one lesson, an English lesson, he had a tape of a song by the Tubes called 'What do you want from life'. He had typed the lyrics out and roneod them and gave us each a copy, then played us the song on one of those tape recorders, you know, 1979 style tape recorders. I knew nothing about rock music at the time but I knew this was shit (listening to a bit of it now, I realise neither he nor I nor any of us knew a thing, it is much more i-ron-ic than it seemed in that Hawthorn classroom in 1979). I remember one suck student pretending to be interested in The Tubes as if ingratiating oneself to a student teacher had any validity.

A week or so later the student teacher lost it in class because he wanted us to write an essay on 'plastic conformity and barbed wire of the mind', and someone said they didn't want to because it was shit and he yelled, 'OK so it's shit right, you still have to do it'. Whoever our normal teacher was at the time confided in us (!!!) that he wasn't going to get a very good mark, primarily because of that. This was from a time when teachers tended not to say 'shit'. (Not the same thing, I know, but still to do with mention of taboo bodily function; I was amazed when I was included in a conversation with the librarian at high school who mentioned that the name of the organisation 'Mensa' reminded her of the word 'menses'.)

Anyway, I have to concede now, thirty years later, that 'what do you want from life' is not a ridiculous question. I suppose most of all I want sufficient material wealth to be able to pay someone to extract a grass seed from my dog's nose (the Tubes did not include this possibility) and in fact I would like this as often as necessary, though I might have to get her a facemask if this happens that often; or pay someone to take a branch down that has half-fallen on the house, as happened a few days ago (eventually we called the SES as it was dangerously playing the electric wires).