Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert)

Joanna was always an actress.In Swooning Beauty she portrays herself as the Sugar Plum Fairy-eleven years old and still going: ''So I liked pink underwear, wore a pink tutu, and became the Sugar Plum Fairy. . . .Dad loved the Sugar Plum Fairy and asked her to perform. . . .I pranced around and executed absurdly clumsy leaps and sloppy pirouettes. . . .Like Dad, Russell knew and loved the Sugar Plum Fairy'' (SB, 109, 110).In the pink, Joanna starred in elementary and high school plays.A space traveler, the stepmother in Snow White, the actress.She was learning about presence-how to project it, live it, be it.She inherited one of her nicknames, Cleo (after Cleopatra) due to her dramatic Egyptian-style hairdo-straight bangs, shoulder-length brunette hair.Now this do is one of her trademarks.The others are pink fairy beings and chocolate, interests also cultivated as a child: ''Chocolate, art, sex and beauty: my calling was pleasure.I did not become a hedonist, a sybarite, a slave to pleasure, but rather its faith-hound and philosopher'' (SB, 109).Joanna is a singer.When in high school, she formed a folk group with her three best friends.They were the Sugarhill Four.It later became a rock group.She was the lead singer.When they were juniors or seniors, they cut a single with Mercury, a big label in Chicago: ''The A side stunk, though it became successful in Atlanta. . ..The B side . . .should have been the A side.I wrote it, lyrics and melody.'My Lonely Life' was a perfect teenage ballad of misery'' (SB, 70).The Sugarhill Four performed on Chicago's public television station when Joanna was sweet sixteen.