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Tuesday, July 5, 2005

Dina Hits P-Town

Posted by on July 5 at 14:47 PM

Seattle’s beloved post-postmodern chanteuse/raconteur/freak Dina Martina is spending the next few months entertaining the gay troops summering in Provincetown.

I’ve been mildly obsessed with watching Dina land on unsuspecting audiences for years, travelling to her first shows in Portland, and rejoicing at the sight of the stricken look of horror that overcame Dan Savage’s mother-in-law during Dina’s performance at Dan and Terry’s faux-wedding reception. Today I searched the web to see how the virgin market of Provincetown was responding to Ms. Martina’s magic, and found this review from the gay paper EDGE.

To the EDGE reviewerDavid Foucher’s his nameeven more off-putting than Dina’s lack of talent and surplus of labia is her alleged homophobia, which spins Foucher off into heady territory that puts even my own Dina theorizing to shame.

"[S]lowly...you realize that Martina has been developed as perhaps the most scathing statement of misguided American values that you'll find hiding behind false eyelashes. Her sarcasm is acidulous, her total incrimination of the liberal lifestyle co-existing in stark contrast to her committed disregard for her own personal appearance. She boards the locomotive to blithe intolerance with an American anthem at the top of her show, and then gleefully sends the engine careening over the cliff, punctuated by a hysterical re-imagining of Charlie Daniels' "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" where she rocks out with a guitar instead of a fiddletake note, her choice of props is deliberate, a send up of Americaís toned-down, lowest common denominator submission to the capitalization of truth."

I'm not sure what all that means either, but I love that such brain-twisting was inspired by Dina. Plus, Foucher ends his review firmly on Dina's side:

"You'll find gleeful chuckles at conservative America in pockets up and down [Provincetown's] Commercial Streetit's one method for sustaining humor in the face of adversity. But nobody else thrashes that sentiment into an ironically religious state with this level of premeditated condemnation, and for some, it may go too far. We must consider this, however, as a minority steeped in a battle for rights: to reach a point of acceptance, we might just need to prove the intolerance. Dina Martina may be unusual, even uncomfortable, and she may also just be out to make a quick buck with the strangest show on earth; but she also may be throwing herself into No-Manís-Land as one of the bravest, most heroic soldiers we have."

As the kids say, word.