John Waters and Bob Shaye
by Eric Gladstone

Q: One of my favorite Sundance stories is once when I was walking up Main Street, a guy was posing over a pile of dog shit, and his girlfriend was taking a picture. Do you have any memories of Sundance years past?

JW: I think the most bizarre was, the last time I was at the festival they gave me a car and somebody to take me to screenings. At the same time there was a mass murder about an hour from here, a Mormon stand off, and the press had been waiting for two months to get the shot of the police raid. And I went to that instead. It was in the middle of a blizzard, and the press said “You’re here?!” That was the year Hairspray played here. Accidentally, I made a family movie.

Q: Have you seen any films here this year that impressed you?

JW: I saw Gregg Araki’s movie [Nowhere], which I liked very much. He’s a filmmaker that has the quality of … it’s definitely a “Gregg Araki” movie when you see it. David Lynch’s movie I saw [Lost Highway]. Those are the kind of directors I like. They take you into their world, even if you don’t want to go!

Q: Have you been to any murder trials recently?

JW: Not any more, OJ ruined it. I made Serial Mom and once I make a movie about one of my obsessions it’s used up, I’m over it. I tried to go to a murder trial in Baltimore, and they all recognized me and thought I was making a movie about it, so it wasn’t fun any more.

Q; What’s your current obsession?

JW: Hmm, I’ll have to think about that…I’ve always been interested in behavior I can’t understand. That’s the one thing that interests me more than anything. As soon as I can understand it, I lose my obsession. Certainly, my current obsession is always whatever I’m writing about, and in a way, the art world was a new obsession.

Bob: As you possibly know, John has evolved his creativity into being a fine artist.

JW: What I do is take pictures off the TV screen of other directors’ work and redirect them in storyboards the way I think they should be.

Bob: What was interesting to me was that I saw many people [at the screening] last night turning to each other and asking who Tex Watson was.

JW: Oh, God. I made this movie two months after attending the Manson trial, and you can certainly see the influence in this very much. I can. And since then, I sort of cringe when I see that, because I’ve taught in prison since then. It was something that was very radical at the time. And nobody else did Manson imagery then — until 20 years later, when Guns ‘N Roses got in trouble for it! It was something that was very much in the news at the time. The whole murder scene that was cut out [and now featured in the newly restored outtakes] was a subplot where they get revenge.

Continued at Pt. 3

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Copyright 1997, ECG

John Waters and Bob Shaye
by Eric Gladstone

Q: Why did you cut it out?

JW: I thought it was a little too weird, made them too violent. Also it was too long. That’s one thing I learned with ‘Pink Flamingos’, the first cut of it was an hour too long. Not shortening things, whole subplots! [What's restored now] isn’t even all the outtakes, there’s a lot more. That’s going to be the 50s anniversary!

Q: Any plans for a sequel?

JW: Well, I wrote a sequel called Flamingos Forever, it’s published in a book of mine called Trash Trio. I worked for a while to get it going, it never happened, and I doubt very seriously it will now. Though I think Anthony Hopkins should play the Divine part in drag. Eddie Fischer as the Egg Man. I cast the whole film in the new introduction to Trash Trio, who I’d want to play in it now.

Q: What are you doing for your next movie?

JW: I wrote a new one, that I just finished, called Pecker about a small bird — no, about a 17-year-old kid that works in a sandwich shop in East Baltimore and takes pictures of his loving and peculiar family. Nobody thinks much of it until he’s accidentally discovered by an art dealer and turned into an art star in New York, much against his will. He picked at his food when he was a child, that’s how he got the name Pecker. It’s in development, a development deal with Fine Line. They just got the budget yesterday and they haven’t even seen it yet!

Q: You were talking about things you don’t remember shooting. What are your strongest memories about the shoot?

JW: How cold it was. You can see people’s breath throughout it. After every scene we’d wrap Edie in blankets and she’d say [in whiny Edith Massey voice] “somebody rub my feet.”

Q: With the discovery of the new footage, did you find you could put a whole new movie together?

JW: Well, I didn’t want to do a “director’s cut,” I think those scenes should’ve been cut out. But if you know the movie and the characters, it’s nice to see some new Divine and Edie scenes, and some Mink Stole scenes. I didn’t want to put them back in.

Q: I’ve heard there’s a documentary about ‘Pink Flamingos’ being completed?

JW: Yeah, a friend of mine in Baltimore named Steve Jaeger, who plays one of the new men in the trial scene at the end, shot us making this movie. He never did anything with the footage — I’ve never seen it until recently — He has ten hours of documentary footage of us making Pink Flamingos, of me showing Divine how to eat dog shit. It really took my breath away when I saw that! He’s still working on it and it’s about halfway done. It’s called Divine Trash.

Q: Was Divine as eccentric off screen as he was on?

JW: No, Divine was a very gentle man in real life. He never went in drag except when he was making a movie or getting paid to do it for his recording career. I met Divine when he lived up the street from my parents, and I always joke that he was “the girl next door.” And I knew him in high school. And in films, for me, he was a great mouth to speak through. He had a lot of anger because he was hassled in high school.

You have to remember then, drag queens were really square. They all wanted to be Miss America wearing a mink coat. Then Divine came along with fake scars on his face and carrying an ax. They hated him! So it was a great release for Divine. The day he showed up for his role in Hairspray, he said, “No drag queen would ever look like this.” He told me later in life that he’d be doing appearances and the people who used to beat him up in high school would ask for his autograph. You know, it really could still cause him great pain. I think he used that pain for the anger in the Divine character and it made him a star. He was a character actor, that’s what Divine was.

Continued at Pt. 3

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Copyright 1997, ECG

John Waters and Bob Shaye
by Eric Gladstone

Q: Do you take credit for launching Rikki Lake’s career?

JW: Well, the day I cast her in ‘Hairspray’, she’d been turned down for a job at The Gap a week earlier! So I’ll take a little credit, yeah.

Q: How did you meet Cookie Mueller?

JW; Cookie, it was very sad to see her last night. Her book is coming out this year… I met Cookie when she won the door prize at the world premiere of Mondo Trasho, and she had just been released from a mental institution. It’s true! And the door prize was dinner for two at The Little Tavern, which was then the worst hamburger joint in town. We picked her up in a limousine, took her there and filmed it, and that’s how I met her. I think she was a good writer, I wish she’d started that earlier. She was later the art critic for Details magazine. And she did a lot of movies. And unfortunately, she died of AIDS. And that’s her baby in the pit that they sell. He’s 25, works in an art gallery, and his name is Max. She originally wanted to name him Noodles, but the nurse wouldn’t let her do it.

Q: What about Baltimore, how has it changed since then?

JW: It never changed that much to me. It’s a nice place for me to live because people think, “Oh, he couldn’t be famous, he still lives here.” Nobody bothers me and everybody’s very nice to me. It’s changed because of Homicide. Everybody I knew that I started with–Pat Moran who cast all my movies got an Emmy nomination this year for Homicide; The person who built the trailer for me now does all the sets for Homicide–All the people who worked with me and are still in Baltimore are now very successfully working with Homicide.

Q: With the way New Line has grown in 25 years, do you think they could buy and market a film like this now?

Bob: I’d like to think so. The only thing that distresses me a little bit about how the company has grown is that need to bring in talented and creative associates because there is so much to do, and there is a kind of pristine efficiency in just six or eight people. Everything that comes across the receptionist’s desk, I got to see.

JW: Bob forgets, he did call me after he saw the movie and said, “We’re really interested in the movie. Come to New York, but please don’t bring your friends!”

Continued at Pt. 5

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Copyright 1997, ECG

John Waters and Bob Shaye
by Eric Gladstone

Q: You sort of broke into the mainstream with Serial Mom? Has that affected your creativity since then?

JW: Well, I definitely think the independents and the studio system are not as far apart as they used to be, you know what I mean? The executives are younger, a little hipper than they used to be. I remember in the old days when I used to go to Hollywood to pitch, the worst thing I could say is that I’d made Pink Flamingos, because they had heard of it but hadn’t seen it. And their wife would go rent it and they’d watch it in a Beverly Hills screening room and have a heart attack! Now, the people that run the studios, a lot of them saw it in college. So it’s easier for me there.

Bob: Also, it is a very salutary dichotomy for American culture to have an independent sector so viable. Because so-called major companies –I won’t say old-timers–first of all are unable physically to make a film that is inexpensive because of the union rules. And the other thing is the subject matter, and to some extent economic viability, which is one of the reasons we created New Line. Very few people know this, but just after we formed the company, we were about to lose our bank line [of credit] because of the title. The film was originally released by “Saliva Films.”

JW: I thought you were hiding.

Bob: Even then I was trying to protect New Line, which had already been reprimanded, wasn’t pristine itself. There is kind of a hubris factor, a political factor. We were just laughing about the fact that the MPAA is reviewing this movie Tuesday…

JW: I’d love to be a fly on the wall at that screening!

Bob: It may create a new rating altogether! NC-absolutely no children. I think they’re going to regret that New Line ever joined the MPAA.

JW: I go tonight to the screening in Salt Lake City. I told Bob, I’m nervous because it’s Friday night. On Friday, you don’t get out of jail till Monday–on a weekday you get out the next day.

Q: How do you feel personally about Pink Flamingos in comparison to your other films?

JW: Well, I certainly have made technically better movies. I was still learning what to do then. I never went to film school. It was filmed with magnetic sound that came right into the camera, what they used before video, so that you could never cut. Every cut, the sound had to overlap 24 frames over the beginning of the next shot. So it was basically like filming a play, no MTV cutting here! I’m proud of it, though. It was like having a juvenile delinquent child who keeps committing crimes, but you still love it.

Q: How about how you’ve grown as a director?

JW; Well, I know now I guess I wouldn’t have asked Kathleen Turner to eat dog shit! But then, I asked Divine right in the beginning of the movie innocently, “Would you eat dog shit?” And he said “Sure.” I didn’t really talk about it that much, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. The day came and we just did it. There were problems–the dog wasn’t cooperative–but don’t make me tell that story again. After he did it, Divine’s first words were, “Now I know I’m insane.” Everybody was laughing, and I think a lot of the guys were smoking pot, and he said, “Really, I think you could get sick from that.” So he called the hospital and said, “My son just ate a dog turd.” And the nurse said, “Well, you might get the white worm.” But nothing ever happened. He was a strong man.

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Copyright 1997, ECG

“Have you seen the fucking pictures I’ve done? They’re all about my breasts. That’s just not who I am, and it makes me feel kind of…dirty.”

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
By Eric Gladstone

Michelle Williams does not want to talk about sex. Despite the fact that she is most identified for playing the highly sexualized Jen Lindley on “Dawson’s Creek,” that she disrobed night after night on a New York stage last year, and that she features in a steamy love scene in HBO’s lesbian-themed “If These Walls Could Talk 2,” the teen actress thinks being a sex symbol is not much of an aspiration. “Sex symbol, sex pot,” she spits out. “That’s worthless to me, that’s gutter filth.”

Instead, like another misunderstood blonde before her—Marilyn Monroe—Michelle is more interested in books. Browsing the hushed hallways of Los Angeles’ Heritage Bookshop, a dealer of rare volumes she visits frequently, Williams takes stock of some of her favorite authors. She looks at a Thomas Pynchon, considers Phillip Roth, Upton Sinclair and J.D. Salinger, and asks about Dostoyevsky. And, as if to prove she isn’t just a literary tourist, notes in passing that she “can’t get through Faulkner” and doesn’t like Hemingway. You wouldn’t have an easy time finding a 19 year old so well read, especially one who’s had practically no formal schooling since the ninth grade. Finally, she settles on a first edition Tennessee Williams collection (containing a favorite play, “This Property Is Condemned”). It sets her back nearly $300.

Michelle has been collecting such editions since she “all of a sudden had the money,” thanks to the success of “Dawson’s Creek” three years ago. Her prized possessions are a rare copy of Ibsen’s “The Doll’s House” and an antique set of Shakespeare in its raw state. “Some are so old, like the Shakespeare, that you can’t really read them,” she explains dreamily. “But I touch them. And I smell them. And I run my hands over them. And I have an affair with them,” she chuckles. “It’s about as interesting as my sex life gets.”

That seems hard to believe, not so much because of her steady relationship with indie director Morgan J. Freeman (Hurricane Streets, Desert Blue), but for the free-spirited sensuality the actress exudes as “Linda” in the “1972” segment of “If These Walls Could Talk 2.” In the most erotically-charged of the three lesbian-themed tales, Michelle’s feminist bra-burning character falls for a politically incorrect butch dyke played by Chloe Sevigny, who seduces her in a revealing nude scene.

“It’s a really vulnerable place to be” Michelle says, of shooting the explicit scene. “But I’m also really glad that my first love scene was with a woman. It was a really natural process.”

How natural was it? Well, ask the actress what kissing Sevigny felt like and she exclaims, “Have you seen her? She’s fucking hot!” But Michelle backtracks when asked if that lifestyle interests her.

“I think that everybody is probably curious by nature,” she responds coyly, realizing that we are, yes, talking about sex–something she doesn’t want to do, “without a cigarette,” at least.

Later, lighting an American Spirit outside a nearby hotel, she continues: “It just seems completely irrelevant to me, because it doesn’t make me any more or less qualified to play a lesbian.” And, she emphasizes, the tele-film “isn’t about a love scene, it’s about love.”

“It was a brave scene for them,” says Martha Coolidge, director of the segment. “[Michelle had] a tremendous commitment to what the movie was about. She really believed in the sort of humanist anti-discrimination idea behind the whole project.”

Continued at Pt. 2

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Copyright 2000, 2009 ECG

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
By Eric Gladstone

Still, Williams admits that she probably didn’t weigh the scene as heavily as she should have. “Having just done nudity on stage [in the off-Broadway play “Killer Joe”], I was sort of fearless about it and felt brazen and you know, liberated. Which may have been a dangerous way to feel, because the beauty of theatre is that you create and recreate each night. There’s no rewind button.”

Michelle is a bit fed up with the contradictions in how the media portray teen sexuality. On the one hand, she figures “kids are always going to have sex, and that’s not a bad thing. I wish that there wasn’t such a stigma attached that made girls feel like sluts and whores, because it’s [part of] growing up.”

On the other hand, she has misgivings about many of the revealing photo shoots she’s participated in. “Have you seen the fucking pictures I’ve done?” she rants. “They’re all about my breasts. That’s just not who I am, and it makes me feel kind of…dirty.” It also made her feel like giving her then-publicist the boot. “I didn’t want teen girls or my little sister thinking that that’s a woman’s power, that’s how girls should look.

Williams is confident that her little sister Page, 16, will support her latest performance, as will her mom. Boyfriend Freeman, 30, approves, but Michelle confides, “the thought of somebody else touching your lover’s body or knowing things only you should know, is a really tricky thing.” And Dad?
“I’m not sure what my dad’s going to think.”

By her own account, Michelle’s relationship with both parents has been tumultuous. Larry and Carla Williams raised Michelle and Page (she also has a half-brother and two half-sisters, all older, from Larry’s previous marriage) in tiny Kalispell, Montana. Michelle describes it as “a really small, beautiful, but at the same time industrial dirty town.” As a kid, she was an outdoorsy tomboy, skiing with her uncle at the age of six, riding jet skis on a nearby lake with neighbors, and bonding with Dad over boxing matches on TV.

“He was pretty much my best friend growing up,” says Michelle of Larry, a commodities trader and ‘round-the-world “treasure hunter” who also ran two unsuccessful campaigns for the US Senate as a Republican. “He taught me to read and love books and to love travel, and be independent.” Michelle’s relationship with Carla was not so great, especially after the family relocated to San Diego when she was nine. “I was rebellious and rude, and disrespectful of her.” Perhaps ironically, Michelle says her relationship with mom has improved greatly over the past year, while she glosses over her current status with dad; Mr. and Mrs. Williams are currently going through a divorce.

“I can’t really remember not wanting to act,” she recalls. “The opportunity to do plays was given to me at a really early age, and I never really wanted to be without it.” Thus, after her freshman year of high school, Michelle opted to finish via correspondence classes, completing three years’ requirements in the space of one. And at 15, against objections, she moved to L.A. with an eye on the silver screen. Soon after, she also legally emancipated from her parents because it made getting roles easier, “and because I was rebellious.”

Continued at Pt.3

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Copyright 2000, 2009 ECG

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
By Eric Gladstone

“Moving to L.A., I don’t know if I would’ve had the guts to do it now as opposed to when I was 15, and was fearless. In a lot of senses I wasn’t [ready for it].” Nor, even after spots on “Baywatch” and “Home Improvement,” and film roles in Timemaster, Species, and a remake of Lassie (all of which she is neither ashamed, nor particularly proud), was she ready for the instant notoriety that came with hit TV show, “Dawson’s Creek.”

“It was just really overwhelming,” says Michelle of the first flush of success. “There were so many things I didn’t expect or understand.”

She visibly brightens at the thought of describing her short life in literary examples. But her answers are also telling: after “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,’ for her childhood and Judy Blume books for her pre-teen years, she chooses Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground” Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” and Herman Hesse for the last several years—not exactly light reading. For recent months, she picks the poetic erotica of Anais Nin.

Right now, though, sitting in a booth at the historic and newly-hip Hollywood haunt Musso and Frank’s Grill, Michelle seems like she jumped right out of the pages of Salinger. Far away from both her teen fans and detractors (like the creators of the “I Hate Jen” website), she tucks her knees up against her in the leatherette and wood booth, taking nibbles of a grilled cheese sandwich and sips of tomato soup between thoughts. She laughs at the thought of any special diet or work out regime (“I smoke a lot and I hear that keeps the weight down,” she cracks), but also admits sullenly that she isn’t a bit comfortable with her body. “Not at all,” she whispers

“I keep having dreams about having a disability. I had a dream the other night that my arm was just a stump from here, and my leg ended just below my knee. I keep having dreams about it, that I’m missing something.”

Williams is loathe to criticize “Dawson’s,” now in its third season, but admits her steady job is “like punching in a time card.” She is also feeling the constraints of being under a six-year contract. “I can’t really imagine doing another TV show after this.

“What if I decide that I want to be a school teacher [one of her half-sisters’ profession] what if I said I wanted to move to Paris and study art, or if I’d want to become a truck driver? Maybe I will want to go to college.”

Still she paints an enviable picture of her home life in the tiny island village of Wrightsville, ten minutes from Wilmington, North Carolina where “Dawson’s” shoots.

“I went to a psychic yesterday, somebody who came highly, highly recommended. And she said, ‘you live in a warm place, it’s so full of light.’” While Michelle doesn’t know how many of the psychic’s predictions to take seriously (including getting a dog and “one or more” children), she speaks devotedly of her small beach house.

Continued at Pt. 4

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Copyright 2000, 2009 ECG

MICHELLE WILLIAMS
By Eric Gladstone

“I worked hard to make it mine,” she says, having painted walls, hung lighting, replaced doorknobs and handles and filling it with secondhand furniture, an oil can collection, an etching of a saint she found by the roadside, and of course, those books. Michelle fills her downtime with more than reading, though—she hosts a weekly poker game, typically attended by cast members Kerr Smith (“Jack”) and Josh Jackson (“Pacey”) as well as Morgan. Then there’s jet skiing, the occasional karaoke performance, and believe it or not, watching presidential debates.

“This is my first year being able to vote and I’m just fucking thrilled. I’ve been paying taxes since I was fifteen and always been really upset about the fact that I couldn’t vote.

“I have a really hard time relaxing,” Michelle confides. “And I just kind of feel unsettled, or in limbo. I always had a real need to just be older than I was, and to grow up quickly. I was really intent about those things, and I would get them soon. I love children,” she says, musing on the psychic’s prediction “I love the way their perception is still their own.

“But now I’m just happy to be nineteen. Just figuring out what I’m going to do, with the rest of my life, to an extent.” For now, there is hiatus work. Following parts in Halloween H2O, Dick, “Killer Joe” and “Walls,” she’s looking forward to joining the revolving New York cast of the stage production “The Vagina Monologues” this spring, and making Don’t Blink, a film about three girls who meet in a Nevada brothel, which she and fellow actresses Meghan Perry and Amy Danles wrote for themselves. It’s hard not to see a pattern of roles increasingly defined by, umm…sexuality.

“My therapist know that sex defines a lot of my roles,” says Michelle with a confessional smile. “We’re very, very aware of this. I know all about why, where it stems from. I know.”

Not that she wants to talk about it.

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Copyright 2000, 2009 ECG

“I belong somewhere trapped in a castle in the 14th century, in the rain, churning butter…”

Olivia Wilde
By E.C. Gladstone

Where are the paparazzi when you need them?

It’s a crisp winter day in LA, and Olivia Wilde, who’s just flown in from New York, is dying for some sushi. So when the actress calls from the lobby of the W hotel as I’m pulling up, I tell her to skip formalities and just meet me at the curb.

Would it be too much to ask that at least one photographer be there to capture the former O.C. co-star getting into my car? Just a grainy shot to get people wondering about her “mystery man?” I mean, this is the kind of publicity a guy can’t buy.

But nobody’s on the sidewalk. Not even a college kid stringing for TMZ with a cell phone camera.

Wilde, dressed in denim with a cloth cap over her long brown hair, is apologetic—not for that, but her sleep-deprived and makeup-free looks, which, truth be told, make her only stop-you-on-the-street beautiful instead of the usual coronary-inducing gorgeousness when she’s actually trying.

She also smells fantastic.

When we park on the street and she leaps out and feeds the meter without even mentioning it, I’m already won over. That small act is almost the equivalent in a Hollywood actor to an ordinary person stopping traffic for an old woman. Very classy.

But if looks and manners were all Olivia had to offer, I could stop here and save space for more photos. Five minutes later, though, after she’s told me about her hilarious plane flight next to effusive fitness guru Richard Simmons, and touched on the joys of ensemble acting, the best Mexican restaurant in New York, the cultural renaissance of Ireland, and political author Chinua Achebe, it’s clear that Olivia is the type of person whose intellectual curiosity and engagement with the world goes far beyond the apparatus of entertainment.

And she’s all of 21 years old.

“In order to get enthusiastic about a role, I have to feel like it means something, that it will have some sort of relevance to the world,” says Wilde, who’s in the middle of being everywhere, with this season’s ‘Turistas’ (a cautionary tale about organ harvesting) and Alpha Dogs (drug dealers in over their heads) in theatres, ‘The Black Donnellys’ (a family of Irish mobsters) on NBC in a few weeks, and Death and Life of Bobby Z coming up. “But you find it in any role that’s well written,” she says, raving particularly about ‘Donnellys.’ “Even if they don’t seem they’re in any way politically relevant.”

For prime example, Wilde points to her breakout performance in the second season of The O.C., as Mischa Barton’s lesbian girlfriend. “That was extremely important, because of the influence it had on all these women around the world. I got letters from countless girls saying that I made them feel comfortable with their sexuality, that they thought they had to be ugly to be a lesbian…”

Continued at Pt. 2

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Copyright 2006 ECG

‘Here’s my picture, what’s your MySpace address?’

“Exactly! ‘Want a house guest?’” She laughs.

Alright, so Wilde, who has a world-class smile, and peppers her speech with outbursts like “un-bee-lee-vable” and “cul-chah.” isn’t too self-serious, thank God. Because her background is the kind you’d expect for someone walking the halls of the Capitol or debating public policy on Sunday TV (neither of which would we rule out down the line) rather than staking a claim in Young Hollywood.

Born in New York City to globe-trotting journalists Leslie and Andrew Cockburn (pronounced Coh-burn), Olivia Jane grew up as an alternately rebellious or over-achieving middle child in the “musty brownstones” of Washington DC’s Georgetown. ‘Everything was about this old intellectual history,” she says, with family friends who were seemingly all controversial fellow scribes like Christopher Hitchens, Seymour Hersh and Gloria Emerson.

“It was pretty obvious from when I was very little that acting was my calling,” she says. “I was always very outgoing [and] existed in several different fantasy lands. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep at night because I would be creating little movies and plays and characters in my head.” Her mother (who had attended Yale Drama School with Sigourney Weaver and Meryl Streep) was happy to encourage her. “She said many people would tell me it was going to be impossible, and that I never ever could believe them. That came in handy a few…dozen times!”

While Olivia’s parents frequently took dangerous assignments around the globe (particularly Leslie, who was even five months pregnant with Olivia’s younger brother while covering the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu), the tweener concerned herself with ballet recitals and competitive swimming –which would later help her perform most of her own underwater stunts in ‘Turistas’–at Georgetown Day School. She also attended cooking school during summers in Ireland, where the Cockburns maintain a home on the southeastern coast of County Waterford. “I belong somewhere trapped in a castle in the 14th century, in the rain, churning butter,” she jokes, “I’m very comfortable in that environment.” The skills learned there come in handy when she throws large dinner parties, but her love of food (she is a somewhat flexible vegetarian) has become politicized as well: “I’m really interested in how nutrition affects education and crime, especially in this country.”

Her family’s tradition for outspokenness, which also includes uncle Alexander Cockburn and other more distant relatives, goes back to her grandfather Claud Cockburn (who wrote as James Helvick), known in his home UK as an unrepentant socialist reporter and novelist. “There’s an amazing community of intellectuals in Ireland, and being a part of his family let me into that circle,” she says. “He was blacklisted, and I seem to have trouble keeping my mouth shut as well.”

Continued at Pt. 3

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Copyright 2006 ECG