This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #97 (December 2001/January 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Christine Lavin Lucky Star by Pamela Murray Winters "Cool" is hard to define, for "coolness" is ever-changing; one minute you're au courant, while the next minute the club kids are laughing at you. But it's a safe bet that the opposite of cool is a 49-and-a-half-year-old, moon-faced folksinger twirling a pair of Day-Glo batons. "Look at me," she laughed, mid-dance-step. "I'm like Britney Spears' grandmother."

That's part of what's special about Christine Lavin — she's been earning money as a musician since 1984 and shows no signs of stopping, but she's never cut her musical consciousness to fit this year's fashions. By being herself — only more so — she's attracted a wide range of fans. And, with her summer stint in a one-woman show on the New Jersey shore, even more people have discovered her unusual blend of music, theater, rhythmic gymnastics, astronomy lessons, beauty pageantry, and even cosmetology.
Even before the batons came out, at one of the last shows in New Jersey Repertory Company's Getting in Touch With My Inner Bitch, one audience member, who'd grabbed a last-minute seat for the sold-out performance and knew nothing about Lavin, kept asking his neighbor, "Is this considered normal for folk music?"
"It's been a real leap of faith," said Lavin about her move to the stage. But it hasn't been a leap she's made without checking her parachute. In 2000 she signed with a new agent, Ann Patrice Carrigan of Poetry in Motion. This agency, owned by actors Anthony Zerbe and Roscoe Lee Browne, is "more theatrical in nature" than her previous representatives, some of whom were unhappy that she was doing much more onstage than merely singing. Poetry in Motion recognizes Lavin's unique gifts, describing her as a "full-service entertainer."
Seated comfortably in the living room of her producers, Gabe and SuzAnne Barabas of New Jersey Rep, in a post-show wind-down, Lavin was nevertheless adamant about making certain statements, though her delivery was, as always, gentle and demure.
"I've felt for a very, very long time, and this is one of the things I'm determined, there are so many people in folk music whose work would be so at home on the legitimate stage. And there's such a need for good songs and good songwriters for theater. There's just not enough. And there's always room for people who are good.
"One of the people who's come to this run here at New Jersey Rep is Jim Nicola. He runs New York Theatre Workshop, which has been interested in me since 1994. I did a four-day workshop in '94 with actors singing my stuff." Not much came of this experiment; while Lavin worked in one room, "in the next room over was Rent." But in the wake of the success of Bitch, Lavin planned to talk with Nicola about getting "a series of singer/songwriters from all over the country and putting them in front of the theatre world.
"When you're a solo performer, what you've been doing, without thinking about it, [is] building a one-person show that's very theatrical in nature. It's just you and your instrument and your voice, and you're telling stories. We're all storytellers." Being a singer/songwriter is "just the simplest form, it's just stripped down — it's entertaining, and it works."
Theater seems like a natural setting for the music Lavin enjoys, as well as the music she makes. Getting folksingers onto theater stages will "open that up for larger audiences who turn their nose up at folk music 'cause it's in a church basement or something. And also, as we get older, we like cushier chairs!" she giggled.
Over the course of Bitch, which ran from August 9 to September 2, Lavin added new dimensions to the one-woman, one-guitar setup. She judiciously used a foot-pedal-activated device called a Boomerang to multiply her voice, creating, in effect, her own girl group. With the audience's help, she opened out a few of her songs as if she were a Hollywood screenwriter pitching scripts: "Shopping Cart of Love: The Play" was a natural for this treatment, as Lavin wove out, with gusto, the tale of a woman's breakdown in the supermarket express lane. And sometimes she brought her audience members onto the stage. Never before has Lavin drawn such enthusiastic male choruses for "Sensitive New Age Guys." "I know a lot of guys come because they want to be 'Sensitive New Age Guys'!" she laughed.

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #97 (Dec. '01/Jan. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.