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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 17, 2007)
4« ; iu StOUt AUGUST 1 1, ¿007 fur 2 ÚPr« A amum HOLLYWOOD VINTAGE Jill of All Trades X a T emme 1Y\ agm Î f t^E WAfFd B/P t^APCELCE XU hundreds to choose from Drag performer can't slow down vintage eyewear for your Rx :■■ '■■■■■’ '■7 ■ Jfÿ*-/ • • • .- ® \ ScprcMBER 2, 2007 'P a 6 faa » t O regc > m 8:OOpM CoMvrMfîcM C enter 777 X)¿ ÏYUrî- ¿ UfWIB KT»»« 0 ivö $35.00 (503) 222-5338 (T cket « ^RCEuexueoM alternative greeting cards men's vintage clothing rhinestone jewelry M B ook a show, write the music later.” Thar might not he the safest approach to performing, hut if any one can hack it, it’s Mickey Pollizatto. The 35-year-oid juggles a ton of responsibilities: He works as a barista at Pix Patisserie, where he also orchestrated its 2007 employee calendar; he dabbles as a part-time photo assistant and baby sitter; he screens Saturday morning cartoons for adults; and he shines in the spotlight as one-half of the electro pop duo Caught in Candy. Pollizatto’s alter ego is Cabiria “CJ” Jones, who was bom in the summer of 2004—the same month that saw the arrival of popular performance troupes Sissyboy and Fleshtone, incidentally. “She’s from Europe. If you ask her she’ll say, ‘Everywhere.’ She’s got a hokey little accent because she’s picked up a lot of quirks along the way,” Pollizatto explains. "She kind of has a tragic background. Her mother is an Italian Jew, her father was a German soldier. In her mind she’s thriving in the ’80s...no matter what year it is.” Last fall Caught in Candy staged the musical Fatal Flaws at the Time-Based Art Festival, where fans finally learned how CJ came across her cohort, Maximdlian Hertzalot (Daniel Bidwell). 28,H <s< S andy (503)233 1890 Mickey Pollizatto channels Cabiria Jones. " >:w ’ * <>- .' u'- I ■ :"i' ■ML - ® PDXSEX fact: lots of guys have an STD & don't even know it. VtfMtto keep things hot without getting burned? VSvf^ hot th<|g^|^,one. Maybe it's time to talk. “Max and Cabiria meet in the States, and Max leeches onto Cabiria to become famous,” Pollizatto says. "He winds up screwing her over—he cheats on her, there’s some implication that he was abusive to Cabiria—and she kills him. That’s how the musical ends. She shoots him down. Then there’s a little news broadcast at the end that says she’s been arrested.” CJ will soon make her solo debut—complete with dancers and a slave boy/roadie—but this will be a prequel of sorts to that sordid story. “She’s just a pop diva, and she just wants to make people happy and dance. I guess she’s grown up a little bit,” Pollizatto says. “Now she sings a lot about love—I guess it’s hard for me to say as the creator. It’s kind of like piecing my own head apart, you know? Because she is me.” So who is this guy? And what drives him toward superstardom? Like many queer men before him, it’s all about Madge. “I want to be exactly what Madonna is, but as me,” Pollizatto says. “1 always think of Madonna as Jim's Closet i BY JIM RADOSTA j someone that just did I collaborate a lot...and 1 wind up -'oming against people that have to plan. I’m like, ‘No, let’s just do it now and figure out the details la.er.’ Madonna knew that if she just took the right steps, everything else would fall into place. That’s how things usually work best for me.” In keeping with that pace, Pollizatto is still feverishly working on songs for his upcoming gig. “1 feel like I had to come up with something really quickly because I wanted it to be a creative summer,” he says. “As soon as something goes blank, I need to create a project.” Pollizatto traces his feisty feminist spirit to his childhood in Long Island, N.Y., where he grew up in a household full of women. At 16 he came out to his single mother, who worked as a cop. “My mom freaked out. I had to tell her again a year later. All of her Catholic shit started coming out,” he says. “Now my mom goes to Pride parades without me. 1 don’t even go to Pride parades!” After high school, Pollizatto “spent 10 years looking for myself,” traveling in Europe and studying at State University of New York at Albany, first as a social work major and later switching *o Italian and business. In 2000 he randomly picked the Rose City as his next destination; besides seeing the Mm My Own Private Idaho, he admio he knew little about the West Coast. “1 had a good feeling about Portland.... 1 hear it from a lot of people that come out here—they just get a call in their head and they go,” Pollizatto says. “1 quit my job, 1 gave them four weeks’ notice, and 1 bought a plane ticket to Portland. This is a good example of Mickey: Buy the ticket, work out the details later.” © perform their first full set in Portland during Kink—a new night presented by Queer Fetish featuring bondage demos and DJs Blackeye, Mel and ChaotiQueer—from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sept. 1 at Rotture, 315 S.E. Third Ave. Clover is $5 freaky or $7 vanilla. Mickey Pollizatto and Asher Loverdi present odd and obscure S aturday M orning C artoons noon Aug. 18 at The Waypost, 3120 N. Williams Ave. This week's theme is music and singing. CJ AND THE DOLLS Arts and Culture Editor J im R aixtsta needs your feedback. Write to jim@justout.com.
