from The Morning Call
April 16, 2000
by Geoff Gehman
America's on sale, and Alix Olson's selling without buying.
The 24-year-old performance poet is at Moravian College, in her native Bethlehem, slamming the national epidemic of moral bankruptcy.
The Statue of Liberty, she announces, can be bought -- in pieces.
National health care -- it's 100 percent off.
American dreams -- well, they're on "permanent layaway."
Olson's internal-rhyming, cash-register-chiming spiel could shame a legion of late-late-show hucksters. She begins with her back to about 200 spectators, projecting the disembodied voice of an attention-Kmart-shoppers manager.
She punctuates machine-gun chants with breathless pauses and bayonet punchlines. She plays coy sarcasm against sly sympathy, smarmy smiles against disarming squeals. She's a hiphop comic, a bebop motivator, a blue-light televangelist.
Olson wrote "america's on sale" to purge herself after gorging on commercials promising a better life from running shoes and toilet paper. She performed the poem to win the 1998 National Poetry Slam, enabling the New York team to beat Dallas by percentage points.
It contains her creed: Reject greed and discrimination; accept all races and sexual orientations. She has spread these beliefs for the National Organization for Women, the National Lesbian Summit and high-school prisoners. They've made her a hero, which has made her warier of marketing hooey.
"Society is so much about productivity," insists Olson, who lives in that advertising mecca, New York City. "It's saturated with people working too hard, producing too much but not what's emotionally valuable. People are so over-stimulated by the media, over-stimulated by representations of things as opposed to the actual things.
"I'm always grappling with the question of who is crazy. Is crazy someone who deals with this irrational system really well? Or is crazy someone who's driven crazy by the irrationality of this system?"
Sitting in a Moravian College lounge, Olson describes the sanity of growing up in Bethlehem. She considers her hometown a sort of social laboratory. It was here she witnessed ethnic groups divided by the Lehigh River, and united at Bethlehem Steel Corp. It was here she empathized with unemployed steelworkers and protested a presidential visit with the placard: "I am a product of a Bush education."
Olson's affinity for labor was encouraged by her father, Gary, who teaches political science at Moravian and chairs the Lehigh Valley chapter of the Labor Party.
Her feminism was nurtured by her mother, Laura Katz Olson, who has trained a generation of legislators at Lehigh University, where she teaches women's studies.
"There was always a kind of implicit message in our house," says Gary Olson, "that if you were privileged, and understood how the world worked, you had an obligation to do something about it."
Alix agrees. "I think it was never really an option not to do something for people," says the women's-studies graduate of Wesleyan University.
Alix's mother agrees, too. Before her daughter's April 5 performance, Laura turned to state Rep. Bob Freeman, a family friend, and exclaimed: "Wasn't she always vivacious? I just can't remember when she didn't love people."
At Moravian, Olson's parents, long married to other partners, heard her lobby for a coalition of tribes. In one poem Alix literally sang a litany of beliefs: that the dollar bill feature Harriet Tubman, the Moses of the underground railroad; that "mutual masturbation makes a lot of sense."
Singing another work, in a gentle, looping, Suzanne Vega second soprano, she attacked the increasingly incestuous media. In "my daughter," she promised a child will be unisexual without guilt, will be "a cross-Medusa, a wild, healthy fiend."
It was fiendishly entertaining material, interpreted with feral savvy. Dressed in Halloween colors, Olson ranted, whispered, pinwheeled. She bounced on flat feet, flipped wrists like a hiphop preacher, flashed a smile that could make a jack-o'-lantern seem to frown.
She was a generous partner for Regie Cabico, who staged his homosexuality and conservative Filipino heritage as a zany revue ("If you watch "Dynasty," he said, quoting his mother, "you'll die nasty"). Olson tripled as a whip-smart, laid-back emcee, informing students of the national crime of spending more on pet food than health care.
Olson's fearless inventories -- celebrating her female anatomy; defending post-menopausal lesbians as "crones in their prime" -- have earned her excellent gigs.
She helped represent the United States in the first Spoken Word Event in Portugal and performed during the national conference of the National Organization for Women.
Excellent blurbs make her Web site (www.alixolson.com) sing. N. O.W. President Patricia Ireland has called her "a feminist who bridges the gaps between generations."
Some listeners, admits Olson, are discomforted by her comfort with uncomfortable topics. She's had to tell interviewers that, no, she's doesn't always rage and, no, men generally don't consider her a witch. Some males, in fact, have bought their sisters her chapbook, "Only the Starving Favor Peace."
Olson confesses a few regrets, a few taboos. She dislikes misogynistic rap. Sometimes she wishes she were less scatological, that she performed more of the eloquent words she learned at Liberty High. And the author of "Vagina Poem" admits "squirming" while listening to playwright Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues," tweak the title word for a good 10 minutes.
Olson has discovered that comfort can be uncomfortable, too. She's happy her passionate poetry has prompted young people to not only declare they're gay, but also to rejoice they're gay. Yet she's concerned her no-holds-barred approach has turned fans into fanatics.
"I had one guy screaming at me, `Where are you going?' after I had performed for two hours," recalls Olson. "He just wanted to engage. It took me a while before a little rationality clicked in and I realized I could leave.
"People expect a perfect performance, both onstage and offstage," she continues. "They expect that you're there to talk to them for four hours. They don't realize when they e-mail you, you have 25 other e-mails to answer.
"I guess I've realized how effective art can be. And that an artist has the responsibility to not only cross boundaries, but to maintain boundaries." Olson smiles and adds: "Now I know I can perform anything anywhere, because I can always leave."
Olson teaches this lesson in New York City elementary schools. Every Friday she brings her calling to a slam-poetry class in a Brooklyn high school.
Last Christmas Eve she joined an ideal project, where prisoners are told that caring for pets can be a better alternative to violence than lifting weights.
Olson and three other poets visited a women's high school on Rikers Island, site of New York City's main correctional facilities. They met nearly 60 young women incarcerated for everything from holding stolen drugs to killing the rapist of a friend in the act. The sense of robbed adolescence, of stolen holiday, was terribly depressing.
"They're gobbling turkey with this awful Christmas music piped in, and they're all bawling and missing their families," recalls Olson. "A lot of them are religious, so the music is making them feel even worse. They looked so young and so fragile. They looked like my friends."
Olson performed "my daughter," which advocates "self-empowerment in the face of unconquerable odds.' She substituted for a poet debilitated by the pain of a jailed brother. She praised the prisoners' renditions of poems and gospel songs. She relished the praise of administrators who postponed family celebrations.
"The experience taught me that good people land in jail, for reasons I don't see as criminal," explains Olson. "I know a lot of people who don't use drugs who end up in jail; actually, I think my friends have done more drugs than those women. And also a lot of them are bored. They're lacking the stimulation that other kids have, and they get themselves into trouble.
"They're so bursting with raw emotions, and they're also so appreciative," adds Olson, who taught a Rikers woman after the high schooler left jail.
"I think people forget what they have, and people in prison don't have much, so they're so excited to have people come in. Seeing people maintain their individualism, their enthusiasm, in that type of circumstance -- it taught me about survival, especially the survival of optimism."
Expanding audiences has coaxed Olson to expand her concerns. The Rikers women, for example, inspired a poem in which a suspected criminal insists the real "boogeymen" are Disney, Monsanto and other conglomerates.
She finds herself writing about friends as well as enemies; a destitute subway rider in addition to female sweatshops.
Then again, Olson may slam slam poetry's growing attraction to corporations. She sees warnings posted like construction signs for suburban sprawl. MTV plans a slam-poetry pilot; Nike invited a slam poet to appear in an ad; last year's finals at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe was sponsored by a liquor company.
Olson has no intention of endorsing The Gap, of becoming the one-stop-shopping Martha Stewart of slam. But she worries that slam's main attraction, its democratic, "you-go-girl!" attitude, will become "you-go- (your corporation here )!"
Olson claims she's getting better at linking her "headstrong" and "weepy" personalities. She feels more holistic living with "three of the most vivacious people I know."
She shares a Brooklyn apartment with her best friend from Liberty High; her best friend from Wesleyan, and her partner, Amy Neevel, who works for the YWCA of the City of New York and who introduced Olson to the Rikers program. She also serves as Alix's booking agent and grant writer.
"It's a commune of sorts," claims Olson. "It keeps you afloat in New York, which is a place where you could drown."
Olson has other islands in sight. She hopes to join other poets in a project Neevel has designed for four New York City venues. The group would teach nine months at Rikers Island; a family academy in Harlem; a Chinatown school attended largely by recent immigrants, and the city's only high school for gays and trans-genders.
Olson is preparing her first CD, which will feature musicians for very sound reasons. One, her poetry is basically music without notes. Two, instruments warm the recorded voice, which can sound chilly in the studio. Three, Olson can honor her favorite activist musicians: Bob Dylan, the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco. And, four, matching feminist lyrics with Caribbean rhythms suits her patchwork, why-the-hell-not philosophy.
"I just think there's a really great need for human interaction and face-to-face contact," suggests Olson. "We're distracted by materialism, by other people's fantasies, by cars claiming to make you sexy, and clothes claiming to make you beautiful and Nike claiming to make you a perfect athlete. That's why slam poetry is so popular: it gives the average person a voice, a little pedestal."