Kris was one of the scenesters at La Mere, which was the first Chicago punk club. She used to go by the name of TigerLady.

Q.) How did you get into punk rock? What were you into before?

A.) I was never big into music, but I went from listening to Carol King and Joni Mitchell to buying a Patti Smith album because of a review in Rolling Stone. The first listen, I didn’t get it, but by the third I was hooked!

At about the same time someone was posting Personals ads in the Reader which were kind of arty and witty and abstract—not ‘boy seeks girl’ stuff at all—and signing them ZaZa Lipsoidic. The Reader did an article on him with a picture, and in the interview the subject, Alex Hirka, mentioned he was into Patti Smith and punk rock. This was the first other person I ever heard of who was into punk, so the weekend of the Patti Smith concert I posted an ad saying something like, ‘ZaZa, was that you at Patti’s show? If so, it was love at first sight,’ etc etc, and signed it ‘TigerLady.’ After going back and forth a bunch of times he finally proposed that we meet, and we did, and we wound up seeing each other until he moved to NYC. He was the one who turned me onto LaMere.

Q.) Can you describe the era, paint me a picture of what it looked like, what it felt like at LaMere’s?

A.) Back then I was hanging out at a place on Devon (in Chicago) called Cunneen’s, where they played Emmilou Harris and Ry Cooder. If I told someone I was into punk they either looked at me horrified, or would ask me what I was so angry about. I brought the Horses album in with me once and asked the bartender to play it (they had a turntable behind the bar) and he let it go for about 10 seconds and then pulled it off. I was furious!

I wound up at LaMere probably only because Alex had attended the initial Punk Night, after seeing the ad in the Reader. (LaMere had been a gay disco and was in decline, but bartenders Sparkle and Taco worked at a record store and talked the owner, Noah, into doing punk one night. It was so successful he practically went punk overnight.) I was in Key West hanging out for about a month, and when I got back I started going with Alex and quickly became a punk widow. I was very shy, but used the punk ‘attitude’ to mask my extreme discomfort with trying to get along with a crowd of people. But everyone was such an oddball and nobody really paid attention to what you were doing— it was completely laissez faire.

Q.) Was it a female friendly environment? Did you ever feel as free as men to engage in activities of your choice?

A.) I was never very feminine, and never really woman-identified— probably more half and half. I bought my first motorcycle that first summer that LaMere was open, and eventually wound up working at a bike shop doing mechanical stuff and riding cross country.

But, no, I don’t remember feeling like I wasn’t accepted or suffered at all in any way because I was female. I remember trying to use the john at LM and finding men in the stalls, and men and women doing coke on the counter. I was propositioned by a woman with red hair and heart shaped eyeglass lenses, who wanted me to engage in a threesome with her husband. I remember she gave me her business card which I seem to recall indicated she worked for the electric company in Indiana. Once some guy started yakking at me, telling me that he could tell by looking at me that I was into S&M and that he would be the right person to guide me into that, blah blah blah, but I don’t recall feeling threatened or intimidated. I just walked away.

However, there were women there that obviously felt very free to explore their fantasies in this public arena. There was a woman named Mary, I seem to recall, who wore tap pants and camisole tops— underwear, basically, with high heels, all made up, and walked around the place like that all night, night after night. She seemed very comfortable and appeared to be having fun— and didn’t have guys pawing at her, or bothering her, that I saw. Then there were the ‘Tutu Ladies,’ who wore tutus and did pirouettes and other balletic movements on the dance floor. They were bizarre, and seemed to be in a world of their own. They returned time and time again, even won the Halloween contest with their joint costume— white tutus with big blue, red and green spots on them— called “Dot.” I ran into a guy at the recent reunion night who remembered them, and he mentioned one night they came in chained to each other.

There was another woman named Claire, tall and very thin, red hair, used to wear spike heeled boots and was rumored to have a stiletto blade knife in her boot leg that she would pull out if someone was messing with her. She was always there with her boyfriend who I don’t remember anything about.

Q.) Did you ever aspire to be in a band? How did you feel about the other women in bands?

A.) I think I had a fantasy about that, but I sound like a frog when I sing and I have no sense of musical timing. I think maybe that’s why Patti (Smith) appealed to me so much. I’m not sure that I felt one way or another about women in bands— I loved Debbie Harry, and Annabelle in Bow Wow Wow. I used to wish that Tina in Talking Heads was more assertive, but then she went and did Tom Tom Club with her girl relatives. One person who bugged me was Exene in X, that girl did not MOVE when she performed— no swaying, no toe tapping, nothing, kind of like Sade.

Q.) What about all the people who went there? I’ve heard stories of a person who walked around on all fours like a dog and even tried to hump someone’s leg. Who were all these people? Can you describe some of the notable characters and where are they now?

A.) The only people I knew from LaMere that I still know today are Alex Hirka, and Denise Turner. I don’t remember any other people specifically, other than those I mentioned above. In general, there was a gay crowd, everyone dressed like bikers (though I was the only one I recall who had a motorcycle parked out front), it was very high energy. I remember some of the dancers deliberately slamming into people on the dance floor and I remember the bartenders were a bunch of nuts. There was one guy called Luna who was always having some little drama going on and having very feminine meltdowns. I remember a very heavy nurse who called herself Sheena setting up a piercing booth on the 2nd floor. I remember Beluga doing his performances, some of which were pretty outrageous. Once he pulled some guy out of the crowd and shaved his head on the dance floor. I mentioned it at a party once years later and some guy that was present said he was with that guy the night that happened, that it was totally impromptu and his buddy just went along with it.

I also remember that the police started busting the place for not carding and letting minors in and Sparkle and Taco (the bartenders who worked at Sounds Good) were very angry with Noah for letting anybody in, cuz they felt he was being greedy and irresponsible. One night Beluga came in dressed like a cop and ‘raided’ the place as his performance that night, and afterward all the bartenders wanted to throttle him because he had scared the bejeezis out of them, they all thought they were going to jail again.

Oh yeah, there was the guy Todd who hung out with the Tutu Ladies. I remember he always looked waif-like, and one night he wore trap door PJs, with the trap door down and his naked butt exposed. He had pierced his butt cheek with a giant safety pin and did not look very comfortable all night. There was a gal named Punky who wore Catholic school uniforms and had her hair dyed red with shading that made it look like an animal skin. She supposedly committed suicide, I think I recall hearing.

Of course there was Mary Alice, who was small, but loud and brassy, always carrying on about something and enjoying her status as a self-styled punk journalist and— dare I say?— groupie of Joey Ramone. In a lot of ways it was very high-schoolish, and people in general seemed really really young— barely out of their teens. There was a huge exodus of people moving to New York and you’d hear folks talking about it and sometimes Mary Alice would make fun of someone for going. I remember she talked about so-and-so once and said that she thought she had gotten a job doing laundry for a certain band.

People were doing poppers on the dance floor, smoking doobies under the south wall along the dance floor and of course, there were drugs galore in the bathrooms. It was rather annoying if you had to actually pee.

Speaking of which, Alex and I used to get into the band parties that occurred after record-signings at Sounds Good. We climbed the alley wall once and then when we were discovered they invited us to everything. I was at one for the Ramones and another time I got to meet Robert Gordon and have a dollar bill signed by all the guys in his group. I have a bunch of T-Shirts and posters and buttons and pins from the time, and a red scarf with ‘The Stranglers’ printed on it.

As an aside, I used to take the train in from Evanston and play racquetball with a girlfriend at the Y on Sunday mornings, after which I would go to the Luxor bath house on North Ave for hours and hours on end. I would bring a bunch of punk and new wave albums to play for her. One morning her roommate, a very exotic-looking Mexican girl that we knew from high school (Lake View), came downstairs and saw the Elvis Costello album cover and shouted, “Sally, that’s him, that’s the guy I met last night at Yahtzee’s!!!” Elvis was apparently out with his manager after a gig at the Aragon that I had attended and was trying to pick up this gal, but she was having none of it— had never heard of him before! My jaw dropped to the floor!

Q.) And how about you Kris, what did you do after LaMere burned? Where did you go after that? As I understand it, most LaMere people did not like going to O’Banion’s.

A.) I hated O’Banion’s. It was too big and lacked that coziness that LM had. I never found another place like LaMere. I lived in a house in Evanston near the Northwestern campus and at one time all my roommates were gay women on the NU women’s tennis team, so we started going out dancing nightly to the women’s bars— CK’s, Augies, the LadyBug, etc.

I had worked for Windy City/Jam Productions ‘frisking’ (a brief patting) women at the door of the Aragon Ballroom— to pull bottles, cans, knives and other weapons off them— and got into the punk and new wave shows for free whenever I wanted. That’s how I saw Patti Smith her first time in Chicago and the place was half full only. I went to Neo’s a bunch of times just to dance, but the atmosphere was totally different, it was trying to be a Euro disco and people were too self-conscious and posing. At LaMere it was more of a spontaneous acting out, although there were some folks who were trying so hard to be seen.

I wound up tending bar at a place called Maxtavern, working side by side with Gavin Morrison and got to listen to all the punk and new wave I wanted to there. Gavin is the guy whose pics were shown at the LM reunion. I don’t recall seeing him there, but I stopped going to LM late in 1977— I had been seeing another guy after Alex left Chicago who I brought to LM, and he got so into it that I became a LM widow again, and he became a doorman there. We broke up and I just didn’t feel comfortable going there anymore. Plus, it had gotten too touristy and was being raided by frat boys looking for a freak show and they were the type that would get in your face and bug you.

Q.) How do you feel about the renewed interest in the LaMere generation? Do you think we’ll be seeing more of you folks coming out to shows now?

A.) I think LaMere was a fascinating phenomenon, but it’s long gone. We all grew up, got married, got jobs, got pregnant, etc etc etc.

Now that there’s no smoking in public places I have been getting out more, but I’m not sure I’m going to do punk and heavy rock. It took me almost a week to recover from pogo dancing at the LM reunion at Club Foot! Thanks for opportunity to reminisce— it was fun!

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