Out on the Town: Liz and Sydney in Outweek: 1990 and 1991
This section of Dead Jackie Susann Quarterly online and Stardust Lanes is dedicated to the pre-Dead Jackie days of Liz Tracey and Sydney Pokorny--writing a monthly (and later bi-monthly) column for Outweek magazine called "Out on the Town." It started out as sort of a news report with the two authors presenting a different news item with their name and while the early pieces are a pretty solid piece of history, as it goes along it gets really, really fun. Before long, the pieces were open conversations about the weekly clubgoings and other experiences of Liz and Sydney and when their voices come to the surface, it results in peels of laughter on behalf of the reader. The result is a vivid picture of somewhere I've never been: the New York club scene of the early 90s.Sydney would speak of these columns with a certain amount of pride. When she passed away in September 2008, her friend and collaborator on the last two Dead Jackies, Amy D, had suggested scanning all of these articles and posting them online: not as text but as they appeared in Outweek. I sent out feelers to anyone I knew who might have copies in their bookshelves, attics, garages... to no avail. But Liz herself had pointed out that Gabriel Rotello himself had scanned all the issues on his own Outweek web site. I asked him if I could edit the PDFs on his extensive and amazing site down to just the "Out on the Town" columns and he gladly gave me permission. Like many other things in my life, it took me way too long to make good on what I'd intended to do. It's November 1 and Sydney has left us behind now for one year and two months and I'm finally posting these. I hadn't read them while Sydney was alive. In the last fourteen months, they've made me very happy when I've managed to run through them. The voice of Sydney the commentator is very much the voice of Sydney the person. When she refers to things she still loved to refer to over a decade later... like the fruitcup scene in High Anxiety... I laugh my head off.
This page is essentially a marker. Like a lot of the Dead Jackie site, I want it to look prettier. And I don't know that I shouldn't be the person writing this intro rather than Liz herself. But for now, have a good time, and if possible, feel free to enjoy a cocktail as you browse...
Anthony K 11/1/2009
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