For weeks, the hottest ticket on the Lower East Side has been a très private, VIP-only invitation to a lavish "White Trash Party" hosted in the wilds of the South Bronx by underground maven/alternative interior designer/part-time bartender Lex Talionis, whose wildly successful "Gay Martian Party" and "Bondagefest 2004" were the talk of the town among a who's who of everyone who's anyone.
The event, funded by the Calvin Klein Foundation to Assuage Upper-Class Guilt and with proceeds to be donated to the Terry Sweeney Project to Make Life Easier for HIV-Positive Gay Men Who Own French Bulldogs, was guaranteed not to disappoint. Our spy/witness—who isn't just whistlin' "Dixie"!—snagged one of the invites, which promised "WALL-TO-WALL WHITETRASH FABULOUSNESS! A banjo-pickin', corn-cob-pipe-smokin' détournement of all things white and trashy! Let's get tacky and go hog-wild, darlings! EAT our roadkill pie, possum-shaped SPAM molds, and banana pudding with Nilla wafers! DRINK our Jack Daniels and cheap beer! SNORT our mountains of blow and pretend it's crystal meth! THRILL to reruns of Cops and Jerry Springer on giant TV screens! BOOGIE to DJ Gay Elvis as he spins the best white-trash country and heavy-metal songs! COMPETE for awards given to ‘Most Inbred' and ‘Best Re-creation of the Ass-Rape Scene From Deliverance'! SPECIAL GUEST STARS: Michael Musto as Junior Samples and Annie Sprinkle as Lulu in a postmodern recreation of Hee-Haw!"
"The look I'm gunning for with my party costume is ‘Randy Johnson crossbred with Porter Wagoner,'" Talionis told this reporter recently, referring to the mullet-headed baseball pitcher and the flashy country singer.
"Lex and I plan to compete for ‘Mr. & Mrs. White Trash East Village 2004," beamed rehabbed supermodel and full-time scene diva Tortilla Clamato. "People in trailer parks are just so funny and weird," says Clamato, a performance artist whose work is obsessed with and informed by sexually transmitted diseases (her most recent play, Crotchbumps, a festive but cautionary musical about genital warts, opens at the Knitting Factory in December). "Dressing up like a trailer slut is just, for me, a very earthy, sexual feeling. On many levels, it empowers me to masquerade as a disempowered white woman."
"We embrace all these things as a distancing measure," says Esther Shpritzmann, a professor of Whiteness Studies at the New School of Social Research and author of Deconstructing Whiteness, Reconstructing Whiteness, Indict the White, and the best-selling 100 Things Wrong With Being White. "Holding a white-trash party is a way for enlightened whites to say, ‘Look, with a different background and ignorant parents, we might have turned out as racist and disgusting as these people are, so you always have to stay on your toes, you know?'"
The event was staged in a "Total White-Trash Environment" Talionis created in an abandoned lot near Hunts Point Market. For hours, partygoers enjoyed the let's-pretend feeling of being in Arkansas without actually being in Arkansas. Their revelry was abruptly terminated, though, when a bunch of negro youths from nearby project buildings showed up and killed everyone.
JIM GOAD
