WORD ON THE STREET
by Holiday Dmitri
The Booster - Wicker Park
May 1, 2002

Is This the End of Misty Martinez? By Holiday Dmitri

The jig is up. Misty Martinez doesn't want to play anymore. Not now, anyway.

Chicago's petite super shock-hero and sex kitten is taking a hiatus. But is it for good?

Known as the fantasy doll in the electro-world of tacky taste and booty-shaking burlesque performances, Martinez, garbed as the blonde goddess in super sexy attire, is an anomalous babe of substance. She writes, records and produces her own cheesy synth beats and electronic effects that, coupled with her outlandish props and equally outrageous performance, never ceases to cause a stir with the audience.

The "personal effects" girl (re: stripper) for noise band To Live and Shave in L.A. 2, back-up singer for the whimsical pop group Strawberry and starlet in indie films by directors Gym Jones and Jim Fotopolous, Martinez might be considered a self-absorbed dumb blonde to some, a shrieking, slutty sideshow exhibitionist to others, but -- like it or not -- she's no diva.

She is sweet, unassuming and ... well, not really even herself.

Martinez is not always Martinez. She, like many a superheroes, goes by a different identity and a different name during the day. Misty Martinez is in fact a 24-year-old journalist for a major Chicago paper.

We are sitting at Jinx on Division Street. Reporter interviewing reporter, and my subject is speaking of her other half in the third person. There is the daytime Inquisitor, and the show-time Provocateur. And the Inquisitor-one, she is not trying to be pretentious; as a matter of fact, she is merely being herself -- and not Misty.

"I want to try to keep her very separate, because she doesn't have much to do with my real life," she explains to me. "Misty is like a dream. She's just something that pops up and then she's gone. I don't really make too many appearances off the stage as Misty or go out in public as her. I think there are different roles everyone plays, and mine just happens to be polar opposites.

"It's really nice because I get to pile all these negative self-indulgent things onto another character and get it all out of my system. And I don't have to take responsibility for it," she says, laughing, "which I know is another way of being irresponsible. But, whatever, I'm not hurting anyone."

Things are picking up for Martinez. Just back from a European tour (two shows in France, four in the U.K.), she is quick to talk about her experiences abroad, which included neo-Nazis in ski masks gnashing their teeth, pumping their fist, and trying to bite her; and a ghetto-fabulous private party thrown by Dazed and Confused magazine where she performed to "a bunch of retards acting glamorous." ("It was awesome," Martinez remarked about the latter incident).

She is not unfamiliar with semi-stardom. Martinez's "15 minutes" in music's hall of fame, as she will tell you, was performing with the group Cock ESP in 2000, where she got to open up for Sonic Youth and Stereolab.

Still she has complaints about having to travel. "It's just too much," she concedes, "lugging all this shit around everywhere by myself. I have bruises on my shoulders from carrying these bags. Here you pay this sexy person to be there, and then you have to be there by yourself. There are people who scare me. I really feel like I need a body guard."

"And I feel like such a jerk for saying this, but when I have to play somewhere else by myself, it's not fun." says Martinez, who decided to raise rates in order to bring a friend-protector along. "It's why I'm trying to change things and not be so over-the-top with having a stripper personality."

The "Misty Martinez" nom de plume originated from a backwoods biker's bonfire party in the suburbs seven years ago, where a bunch of rough riders mistakenly referred to her as Misty.

The name stuck, and she used it during her four years stripping in Missouri. Soon Martinez became a persona she would adapt when she was in certain situations where stupid men were hitting on her and where she felt uncomfortable.

"I adapted to this total idiot," she explains. "I thought that if I acted like the exact woman that these guys think they like right now, would they really like it? That's why I started becoming stupid and slutty. Then the blonde wig and costume just came into place."

From her seasonal shows around Chicago (at the Empty Bottle, the Hide-Out, Fireside, Office Space and Congress Theater), to her gigs in New York City, Baltimore, Miami, Cleveland and San Francisco, there is no question that Martinez is a showbiz shell-shocker.

Take, for example, a show where she cracked open a pink horse piñata full of raw chicken gizzards. Or one of her early performance at the Empty Bottle, where she pretended to give birth on stage, and when the bloody baby came out, sprayed it with Lysol and threw it at the audience.

While Martinez has only done the solo thing for a year and a half, she already has a fare share of beer bottles, cigarette butts, cash, death threats and illicit provocations thrown into her face.

"One woman was saying she was going to convince the men in the audience to rape me," Martinez remembers. "It's starting to get really hard playing dumb. Everyone thinks I'm just like that. Everyone talks to me like that and treats me like a second-rate person. It was really interesting at first, but now I'm starting to realize things. I don't know if I feel like doing it anymore. I don't know if I even feel like being Misty at all."

"My only goal in life is to have fun, and if I'm not having fun, I don't want to do it," she explains. "So right now I'm in a transitory stage, and I'm trying to rethink where I'm going with all this, and whether I want to keep doing it for that much longer. Maybe my next show will be in 2005. Maybe I will change my mind tomorrow. I have no clue."

Martinez's last show was on April 19 at the Empty Bottle. In the performance, she pretended she was in school, got educated and then taught herself the lessons she had learned. There was a kiddie pool on the side of stage that she waded in. For her, it symbolized a baptism.

"I try to have these little messages in my show, but no one gets them. They are to others really random, but to me really well thought out and make perfect sense. That show was about me becoming a whole new Misty. There was a whole scene where I died and came back as an angel -- but an angel in Hell -- and I was trying to make it seem like I was an angel in Hell this whole time. I was seriously considering it to be a 'Misty Dies/That's the End' show at the Bottle."

Suffice to say, it was her favorite show.

Side Note: Want more of Misty Martinez? Check her out at http://pages.ripco.net/~nailhead/misty/. She can also be contacted at: Misty Martinez, PO Box 101061, Chicago, IL 60610.

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