tania_katanPHXated is talking with local performance artist Tania Katan, whose one-woman show, Saving Tania’s Privates, open at the Littel Theater at Phoenix Theater tomorrow night.

You can get tickets here.

Katan’s website is here.

And you can see the entirety of the PHXated team’s strange infatuation with Katan here.

Yesterday, in part 1,Katan discussed her writing technique and her intimate involvement with Mormons.

Today she discusses growing up gay and coming back to Arizona, and makes an obscure reference to hair-care products.


PHXated: What brought you back to Arizona?

Tania Katan: Jan Brewer, running into people I went to high school with at Trader Joe’s, hot car-door handles, housing market. What was the question? Oh, um, because my partner got a really great job.

[Katan’s significant other, artist Angela Ellsworth, teaches at ASU.]

PHXated: What was it like growing up gay here?

Tania Katan: Who said I was gay? Who said I’m grown up? What kind of scandal are you looking for, Bill? Why are you so PHXated on my sexuality? Is it because you have a not-so-secret crush on me? Look, I’ll share hair product information with you, but that’s where it stops, buddy!

PHXated: What’s your favorite album of all time? What was your first concert?

Tania Katan: I do have a picture disc of Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers, which would have to be my favorite album of the early 80’s—I mean, “Church of the Poison Mind,” with Helen Terry belting out her deep vocal moans and then “Karma Chameleon,” “Miss Me Blind”… come on, this album is genius!!! But my FIRST favorite album, without a doubt, Harry Chapin’s Verities & Balderdash, I was 3 years old when it came out and listened to it over and over again and loved ALL the songs, not just “Cat’s [in the Cradle].” I also loved Don McClean’s American Pie! I remember both of the album covers sitting on stacks of albums in the small living room of my parent’s more-than-modest New York apartment. Thinking about both of these albums now, these storytellers set to music, and remembering the covers of the albums; both men are looking at you/me/their audience and holding up a finger, with Harry it’s his index finger, like he’s implicating you, like he’s asking you to be an active listener or participant in the stories he’s telling and with Don, it’s his thumb with the American flag painted on it, like maybe everything in the country will be alright or maybe it’s the irony that if the flag of America is painted on a relaxed hippie’s thumb, well, we might be in more trouble than we thought or probably some combination of the two and some other innovative ideas too.

First concert, like very first, Harry Chapin at Gammage. After the show, my mother knew how much I loved him, so we waited around to say hello, he was sitting on a stool casually signing autographs, I was about 9 years old and when we finally got to say hello to him, my mother told him how much I loved him, so he leaned down from his stool and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which I promptly and dramatically wiped off, letting out an audible, “Yuk!” He and my mother laughed. Shortly there after he died. When I was an adult, my mom used to joke with me, saying that maybe it was because I wiped off his kiss that he died.

Katan’s show run through Oct. 10.

Part 1 of the interview is here.