.

In case you haven’t read it, the title of this post is in reference to the if-I-do-say-so-myself-despite-a-few-tiny-inaccuracies-great-and-rather-large-piece-on-me in last Sunday’s Washington Post.

In current news, I will be taking to the stage in LA again for the first time in over a year, actually the first two times, as there are two impending opportunities for me to regale you with my most humiliating show business stories and watch the audience remember my lyrics better than I do as we sing-along to some of my greatest hits!

First, I will be performing my infamous poolside with Sammy Davis Jr., Elizabeth Taylor slab o’ ribs story as well as a retelling of the single most ego-numbing, dignity-deprivation moment of my career, the Phoebe Snow/Paul Simon “I’m so f%#king hungry and yes, you’re Still Crazy after all these hours” story at Beth Lapides’ I’m With The Band (sorry, Pamela DesBarres who HAS been with the band!) evening at the Skirball Center, Friday night, June 5. It’s rock & roll comedy told by very funny people like John Riggie (30 Rock, The Comeback), Greg Behrendt He’s Just Not That Into You), the lovely Moon Zappa (Curb Your Enthusiasm, America the Beautiful) and, of course, ME, featuring stories about some of music’s biggest legends and presented lounge-style with cocktails and snacks available for purchase. Tickets here.

Then on Sunday night, July 12, it’s big ol’ party time when the illustrious Andrae and I + band hit the stage for a wild, so-affordable-it’s-crazy fundraiser for my Detroit-inspired record, video and feature length film about human spirit, “The D”/ Allee Willis Loves Detroit”!! Featuring a sneak peek world premiere of the record and video with more people in history than have ever been the original artist on a record, joined by some of the biggest stars to ever emerge from the Motor City.  Also sing-alongs to some of some of my fattys like “September,” “Boogie Wonderland,” “Neutron Dance,” and the Friends theme, as well as auctions from the legendary Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch collection! Many more surprises at this outrageous multimedia live feast for the eyes, ears and soul!!  Tickets, thankfully going fast, are here.

And last but far from least, we are making fairly stunning progress on “The D” record and video, both of which are in the area of 85/90% finished. We are constantly diverted from the filmmaking mission having to prepare things like a marketing deck and a movie trailer so we can all stop eating up to the green edges of our food and raise some real money to get this car on the road. But I must admit, despite the financial deprivation – PLEASE COME TO THE BENEFIT ON JULY 12 – we are all having the time of our lives working on something this creative and worthwhile. All we do is laugh, and all we do is feel better and better about what we’re doing every time we look at the joy pouring out of Detroiters eyes, mouths and hearts as we pull everything together.

Exciting news on “The D” song front is that Detroit’s own Maejor, an artist with hundreds of millions of YouTube views and the smoothest voice this Motor City side of Marvin Gaye, is the latest superstar to add his voice to the record.

Plus recent interviews for Allee Willis Loves Detroit, the film, include the multi-seriesed Michael Patrick King, the shy and retiring Jenifer Lewis, the demure Sandra Bernhard, and Earth, Wind & Fire’s stupendous Philip Bailey, among illustrious others.

That’s about it for now. Here’s the link to my story in the Washington Post again:  “Most interesting woman you’ve never heard of” (so please get your ass to my show and help rectify the situation!)

Onward, Detroit! And remember to gimme some gas money on July 12 or pop it down here if you’re in generous spirit and unable to attend.

 

I know, I know… It’s been pathetically long since my last update. That might be because of the 20-hour-days-minimum-six-days-a-week schedule those of us working on the Detroit record, video, and filmhave been adhering to, handstitching everything together as if we were Betsy Ross making that flag. There have been great, jubilant days…

…as well as days that make you want to roll onto the freeway and pray an 18 wheeler puts you out of your misery….

But that’s the life of an independent 99%-self funded artist and I wouldn’t change anything for the world. Well, I WOULD love someone to dunk me into a big ol’ vat of Lincolns…

Old photo I know… If you can’t tell by the lack of wrinkles on my face you can certainly tell by it being the last time I ever wore a dress. But aside from that I leave each day totally uplifted by the spirit pouring out of the footage and sounds leaping off the record. Wish I could leak a teeeeeny tiny sample but let’s just say that no other city has had a song that sounded so insanely jubilant and looked quite so unique.

I don’t wanna let too much cat outta the bag until we premiere the record and video in Detroit this SEPTEMBER. Now that the year-long jotting down of logs has ended the video’s about 60% finished. In the meantime we’ve also begun interviewing some of my esteemed friends and colleagues for Allee Willis Loves Detroit, the film. The bounty includes this young Detroiter:

…and this young man who gave me my big break by having me write for his group, Earth, Wind & Fire:

The celeb list in the film is long because people have a lot to say about Detroit (and apparently me). This includes many Color Purple people and a stunning array of Grammy, Emmy, Tony, Academy Award, and Pulitzer Prize winners, a smattering of whom we’ve filmed so far including RuPaul, Ricki Lake, Bruce Vilanch, Lesley Ann Warren, Marsha Norman, and Luenell with a whole slew yet to come.

Not to say that the finish line of the feature film is in sight but we are crawling towards it with skinned knees, blisters on our fingers and faith in our hearts!

As for “The D”, the record is about 95% done. Just in need of us moving out of my home studio – not to berate my little studio which back in the day James Brown called one of the best and funkiest sounding in LA – but so we have a shot at mixing in more opportune acoustic conditions so the 40 basses, 35 guitars and over 5000 singers don’t make everything too wobbly sounding as they bounce off the heads of Sammy Davis Jr., Groove On Brother, and other soulful onlookers here at Willis Wonderland.

We’ve also been putting together a marketing deck so we can raise real money to get “The D”/ Allee Willis Loves Detroit finally on the road. As all of us normally peer through artists’ eyes we had no idea what we were doing here and this took some months of concentration not to mention putting any further record, video or documentary editing on hold.

If you know of any deep pocket persons or company/institutions that should see our lovely and provocative marketing deck please let me know. And to drop a few coins of your own in the tank you can always go here.

In the meantime, go on wit yo bad self, Detroit!

Hard to believe that after working on “The D” a solid year and a half, my ever-growing crew of 15 and I are descending upon Detroit in less than a week to record the song, video and feature length documentary. We’ll be recording and filming groups of 50 to 1000 people at each of 40+ locations where people will be singing “The D”, dancing, and showing their Motor City spirit however they can. Nothing like this has ever seen attempted- not just the largest number of people ever on a record, but the largest number of people as the original artist on a record. A partial list of locations participating is at the end of this email.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been recording incredible Detroit born singers, songwriters, musicians, comedians, and actors here at my studio in LA – groundbreaking Motown songwriters and producers like Lamont Dozier, Paul Riser and Mickey Stevenson, former Supremes Mary Wilson and Scherrie Payne, singers Freda Payne, Marcella Detroit, Pam and Joyce Vincent, Diane Steinberg, daughter of legendary Detroit DJ Martha Jean The Queen, comedians Lily Tomlin and Angela Shelton, and musicians like Greg Phillinganes, Ray Parker Jr., Reggie McBride and Bruce Miller – with a lot more to come. Here’s some of the action in my studio over the past week:

Mary Wilson:

Lamont Dozier:

Lily Tomlin:

Massive thanks again to all of you who donated moolah to make this truly historic song, video, documentary and collaboration with the people of Detroit possible. As the scale of this project involves tens of thousands of people and a 20 day/ 40+ location shoot, not to mention postproduction and all else involved in finishing the project we are still actively seeking funding. I haven’t made a big deal about this one. It’s just there for generous souls who want to be part of something truly inspirational. We are also seeking larger donor sponsors and/or angels. You can email me back with any inquiries about that.

Thanks to the following locations where we’ll be filming and recording “The D”. One of the sing-alongs at The Heidelberg Project, Saturday, September 21st at 3pm is open to the public.  A schedule will soon be published at https://www.alleewillis.com/WeSingTheD/.

The Detroit Historical Society and Museum
The Dossin Maritime Museum on Belle isle
Detroit Yacht Club
D-Hive
Mumford High School
Pasteur Elementary School
Martin Luther King High School and marching band
Wayne State University
College For Creative Studies
Eastern Market
Temple Israel
Academy of Rock
Rock Ventures/ Opportunity Detroit
Radio One
The Heidelberg Project
Mosaic Youth Theatre
The Whitney
The Fisher Building
Greg’s Soul In The Wall restaurant
Consumer Auto Parts
American Jewelry & Loan (Hard Core Pawn)
U Detroit/ Harmonie Park
Henry The Hatter
Lafayette Laundry
African Bead Museum
Lululemon at Eastern Market – largest yoga class ever in Detroit – 500 people
Michigan Opera Theatre
The Ford Piquette Ave. Plant
Campus Martius Park
The Alley project (TAP)
Detroit Synergy – biking event
Historic St. James Baptist Church
The Greening Of Detroit
Detroit Dog Rescue/ HUSH
Church of the Messiah
Deep River Y Choir/ Comerica Park
Russell Industrial Center
Ebenezer Baptist Church
Michigan State University Community Music School
Woodbridge Housing Complex

Now just about all that’s left is to board the plane to Detroit!!

Onward!

Allee

Zsa Zsa Voom!

When Sid Krofft – let’s stop and take a breath right here – Sid Krofft! of H.R. Pufinstuf and Land of the Lost and wayyyy more fame – when Sid called me two months ago and made me put Sunday, June 30, 2012 in my calendar he told me that it was a nonnegotiable-under-penalty-of-death-do-not-cancel-under-any-circumstance type of event. I trust this man enough to know that that means I should write it in my calendar in cement. Then he told me where we were going: to ZSA ZSA GABOR’S house for her husband, Prince Frederic’s birthday party!! Had I actually been writing in cement there’d be a big fat Allee Willis face print in it right now because THAT’S HOW FAST my head bobbed to my chest in ecstasy and disbelief upon hearing WHERE we were going. Besides that, Sid is one of those people who I clicked with the second we met and we always have the greatest and most comfortable time together.

Sid lives very close to another good friend of mine, Beverly D’Angelo. The plan was we would meet at her house exactly 45 minutes after she arrived home from a Lego extravaganza in Minneapolis. Beverly and I go back to the 1980s together. She’s hysterical, a great friend, great actress, and dresses with flair, a quality I can relate to. She looked especially great on Zsa Zsa D-day, which was amazing as her plane was late and she got this together in 15 minutes:

So me and Beverly in my car…

… follow Sid and Donnie and Teri Moll, who live smack dab in between Sid and Beverly, winding around Mulholland Drive into the immaculate bowels of Bel Air to Zsa Zsa’s house. The first person we met was the Prince himself. You see this guy on the news and they always portray him as a nut but I have to tell you, nut or not, he’s an excellent party host. And trust me, I know a lot about being an excellent party host.

The kind of party host who takes care of every detail:

Price Frederic also hand-carried out out every morsel of food and set the table himself.

It was deli-gone-insane. Every kind of sliced meat on the planet…

… including these impressive linoleum looking slabs:

A big topic of discussion was what the white stuff was in the middle of this pork chop. Was it a Porturkey?

Zsa Zsa and the Prince’s house is THE Hollywood house that anyone who loves Hollywood, old Hollywood, dreams about. Built by Liberace (and where the HBO biopic was shot), Lee sold it to Elvis, who then sold it to Zsa Zsa – three of the most extreme personalities in show business history, all of whom floated their nuttiness around in Liberace’s famous piano-shaped pool!

Everyone  at the party, regardless if they had been there 100 times before, was snapping photos so fast it was like their index fingers were on automatic pilot. But it’s SO not my place to plaster Zsa Zsa’s kitsch-on-the-elegant-tip domicile all over the Internet. So I shall have to leave it at this one shot of Beverly waiting for her drink next to the Oscar replica/ gold champagne bar as an example of the supreme 70’sness of this most hollowed mansion.

And though Zsa Zsa was ensconced in her bedroom there was lots of Zsa Zsa around.

Here’s Sid with Zsa Zsa:

This wall was not only gold but whatever the finish is had little chunks of raised goldness in it:

BTW, though the dog resting so comfortably on the pillow wasn’t real, many people pet him.

It took all my strength not to straighten this copper relief of Zsa Zsa:

As I’m posting these photos I realize… How completely crazy am I that I didn’t go to the bathroom there?! OMG, if textured gold walls are in the house what must the bathrooms look like?! How could the undisputed Queen of Kitsch miss an opportunity like that??!! Especially as this is the decoration on the outside of the bathroom door:

I know the obvious question is, “But did you meet Zsa Zsa?”.  The answer is no because at 96 she was too frail to attend. But there was a live video feed going into her bedroom so she didn’t miss a thing. The camera followed Prince Frederick everywhere, including when he danced with Madame.

Wayland Flowers may be long gone but Madame is still very much alive!

As is Pee Wee Herman:

All in all, it was a Zsa Zsa Voom Sunday! As we alighted down the red astro-turf carpet to get our cars…

… we all agreed it was one of the best looking Sundays we’d had in years.

Va Va Zsa Zsa Voom!

Anyone who knows me knows that I invite change in my career like most people do with hairstyles. Perhaps because I haven’t changed the latter since 1983 I’m now tweaking the former like crazy since I finally took to the stage last year to do my sold-out-standing-room-only series of live shows, a brief snippet of which you can see here.

The day before my haircut in 1983:

I’m now expanding the repertoire and this Friday night only, February 15th, will be performing live in a charity production of Eve Ensler’s critically-acclaimed “The Vagina Monologues” at the Atwater Village Theatre in LA (3269 Casitas Ave., 90039) as part of Ensemble Studio Theatre LA’s, “Winterfest”.

The shows will be performed on February 14th, 15th & 16th at 8pm. Each night will feature a different cast of twenty actresses from TV, film, and theatre (list below), and will be directed by LA Talk Radio’s Sheena Metal (“The Sheena Metal Experience”). Proceeds go to the anti-abuse charities V-DAY (http://www.vday.org) and PROTECT (http://www.protect.org). For more info on the shows, the charities and to get your tickets visit: http://www.vdayla.com .

Also, on March 9th I’ll be hitting the stand up trail again at Eve Brandstein’s Poetry in Motion/The Road Not Taken (tickets: www.EveBrandsteinPoetryInMotion.com) as well as performing an all-new pulsating St. Patty’s Day routine at Beth Lapides’ UnCabaret on March 17th (tickets: www.uncabaret.com).

So be it for vagina, poetry and/or shamrocks, I hope you come play with me!

THE 2013 V-DAY “Vagina Monologues” LA CAST:

Rosemary Alexander (“Sordid Lives, “Cold Case”)

Zuri Alexander (“Fierce: Relations”, “Supernatural: The Play”)

Alison Arngrim (“Little House On The Prairie”, “Confessions Of A Prairie Bitch”)

Jill Bennett (“In Her Line Of Fire”, “Dante’s Cove”)

Lisa Bishop (“Ensemble Studio Theatre LA”)

Kim Chueh (“Without A Trace”, “Strong Medicine”)

Patty Cornell (“Faux Baby”, “Bob Funk”)

Kathleen Coyne (“Who’s the Boss?”, “Locked Up: A Mother’s Rage”)

Kristen Dalton (“The Dead Zone”, “The Departed”)

Anne DeSalvo (“Arthur”, “My Favorite Year”)

Tamika Katon-Donegal (“Boston Public”, “Something Like A Business”)

Bobbie Eakes (“The Bold And The Beautiful”, “All My Children”)

Kim Fitzgerald (“Leap Year”, “Janeane From Des Moines”)

Caitlin Gallogly (“The Turn Of The Screw”, “Snow White”)

Ilene Graff (“Mr. Belvedere”, “Grease”)

Jessica Graham (“2 Minutes Later”, “And Then Came Lola”)

Elizabeth Greer (“The Shield”, “Cold Case”)

Geri Jewell (“Deadwood”, “The Facts Of Life”)

Mary Kennedy (“ER”, “Oh Mary Radio Show”)

Jacqueline King (“Deal Or No Deal”, “From Grace”)

Emily Kosloski (“Helen Of Troy”, “The New Normal”)

Tracey A. Leigh (“Grey’s Anatomy”, “Criminal Minds”)

Carol Locatell (“Mad Men”, “The Family Stone”)

Elizabeth Logun (“Birds Of Paradise”, “Butter”)

Meredith Scott Lynn (“Legally Blonde”, “CSI”)

Sandy Martin (“Napoleon Dynamite”, “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”)

Gates McFadden (“StarTrek: The Next Generation”, “Franklin & Bash)

Sheena Metal (“LA Talk Radio”, “97.1 The FM Talk Station”)

Minae Noji (“General Hospital”, “Memoirs of a Geisha”)

Susan Olsen (“The Brady Bunch”, “97.1 The FM Talk Station”)

Amy Paffrath (“Jersey Shore”, “E! News”)

Angel Parker (“Lab Rats”, “The Soul Man”)

Lizzie Peet (“Cold Case”, “ER”)

Tracy Poust (“Ugly Betty”, “Will & Grace”)

Kim Rhodes (“The Suite Life of Zack and Cody”, “Supernatural”)

Jamie Rose (“Falcon Crest”, “St. Elsewhere”)

Heather Robinson (“Slice”, “Doesn’t Anyone Know What A Pancreas Is?”)

Ingrid Rogers (“All My Children”, “Cosby”)

Jamie Sara (“September”, “Bitesized”)

Eve Sigall (“End Of Days”, “iCarly”)

Ilana Spector (“Ensemble Studio Theatre LA”)

Charlotte Stewart (“Little House On The Prairie”, “Twin Peaks”)

Ashleigh Sumner (“The Event:, “And Then Came Lola”)

Susie Tanner (“TheatreWorkers Project”, “Lady Beth: The Steelworkers Play”)

Barbara Tarbuck (“American Horror Story: Asylum”, “General Hospital”)

Ann Walker (“Sordid Lives”, “Southern Baptist Sissies”)

Dee Wallace (“E.T.”, “Cujo”)

Keliher Walsh (“Year Of The Rabbit”,”Let It Go Already”)

Allee Willis (“Boogie Wonderland”, “The Color Purple”)

Debra Wilson (“MADtv”, “Avatar”)

Jacqueline Wright (“North Country”, “Gilmore Girls”)

Kim Yarbrough (“The Voice”, “Conan”)

 

 

After almost four decades the torturous vice grip on my psyche has been chiseled open so that my little stage personality, the one that once cowered in a dark corner  but whose pleas to give it a chance never stopped rattling through my brain, has finally put on some clothes and come out to play!  FINALLY all the noise can stop!!

Of course, like I do most things, I remain scared of them for a hundred years, then I finnallly get my toe wet and then proceed to become obsessed and jump into things in such a big way it’s all I wanna do and costs me every dime I have pursuing it as I’m a self-funded artist and I live for my art. As such, in the space of seven shows over the last year I went from a piano and a clusterfuck  of technical mistakes to an if-I-do-say-so-myself-and-if-the-standing-room-only-sell-out-crowds-are-any-indication magnificent one-woman-extravaganza-with-25 musicians-dancers-masseuses-chefs-and-me-in-it show, well oiled to the point of being a rig, hit-filled, and more fun than 27 barrels of monkeys.

But my Ringling Brothers scale troupe is too expensive for mommy to mount monthly, which is what she’d/ I’d be doing if left to her/my own devices. So to keep my performer chops simmering lest they run back into the cave they’ve been atrophying in all these years, I’m getting up and doing my very first stand up ever this coming Sunday night, January 20, at UnCabaret.  My lovely and gracious friend, the ever-talented Beth Lapedis, whose creation this legendary comedy series is, asked me to alight the stage joining my other good friends Tim Bagley and Michael McDonald (he of Mad TV fame and not the singer who I’m also friends with and would be happy to take the stage with anytime!). Karen Kilgariff and Faith Tucker are also on the bill.

Here are me, Tim, Michael, and our good friend Jimmy McGill at my place a couple of years ago.

 

You can see that I was comfortable enough with these guys that I didn’t worry about putting on makeup or serving them  on paper plates (though please notice the exceptional plastic fish paper plate holders the spaghetti-smeared dinnerware sit in).  I hope that comfortable feeling carries over to joining them on stage. That comfortable feeling certainly worked for Tim, who bagged the free foot massage after  winning “The First Three People to Win Five Chunks of Soul Get a Free Foot Massage During The Next Song” game at my BaDeYa, Baby! live show this last November.

That show being what gave me the guts to get up and try this standup thing to begin with. So it’s all come full circle and I hope Tim remembers my generous gift of a foot massage and musters up a laugh for my routine even if some of it flops around like a landlocked fish. Which I pray it doesn’t.  Why don’t you buy some tickets and find out for yourself?

 

 

 

PHOTOS FINALLY UP from my sold out ’21st night of September’ Ba-de-ya, Baby! first show! https://www.alleewillis.com/photos/ba-de-ya-baby/index.php. Photos from the second show coming as soon as I go thru the remaining 3000 pics.

Ba-de-ya indeed as the shows were so successful I’m doing them again Nov. 8 & 9! TICKETS HERE: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/258274


On May 8 and 9, 2012, I took a giant leap in my evolution and broke through an almost 4 decades-long bout of stage fright, performing two sold-out performances of my Super Ball Bounce Back Review, a combo concert/sing-along/party extravaganza at King King in Hollywood.

Lack of performing has always been a raw, gaping hole in a long career that’s stretched across various fields of the arts, despite the fact that I’ve always had the balls to throw myself off cliffs as I periodically dive-bomb into pursuits I know nothing about. I’ve hosted multimedia theme parties where I’m perenially on mic so that even the conversations I have with everyone are blasted throughout my house or wherever else I host these beasts. And God knows I walk around in hair and clothes that makes peoples’ necks snap if they’ve never gotten a gander of me before. Throw in that I’ve sold 50,000,000 records despite the fact that to this day I have no idea how to read, notate or play music, and I sold hundreds of paintings before I realized that you mix colors to get different colors. So backing away from displaying myself publicly made absolutely no sense.

But then I realized that this theme of living fearlessly was at the heart of everything I ever created. View life as a creative process. You are the canvas. If you’re stuck with a weakness, for God sakes turn it into a hook. Nine times out of ten, you’re the bogey monster scaring yourself shitless so just get out the way! So I finally did.

So here then are four videos from my Super Ball Bounce Back Review.  If you like them and are going to be in LA on September 21 and/or 22, I’m rising again at NoHoPAC in a salute to “September”, the first line of which mentions the date of the opening night.

“September”:

“Boogie Wonderland”:

“Neutron Dance”:

And the whole enchilada:

Badeya!

 

May 28, 2012 marked the end of a stupendous three-month run of the musical I co-wrote, The Color Purple, at The Celebration Theatre in LA.

Originally performed on Broadway in a 2000 seat theatre with a cast of 31, and later on tour with a slightly smaller cast but remaining in 2000+ seat venues, the Celebration performance featured 19 actors in a 99 seat theater.

Totally reconceived, this performance was wrapped with the kind of intimacy we wrote it with. I loved the original and this production rose to the same heights. To show my gratitude, I threw a party to thank the cast, crew, director and producers for pulling off the nearly impossible, stuffing a huge musical into a tiny yet fantastic theatre.


Way, way, wayyyy, more Purple party pleasure here.

 

Photos: Barry Weiss, Mark Blackwell, and Dina Duarte.