Public Eye

The great performance artist and actor John Fleck -- as opposed to the great former Star-News City Hall reporter John Fleck -- just performed his "Side Effects May Include ..." at the Boston Court across the alley from the paper's world headquarters here in the Playhouse District.

It was part of Sasha Anawalt's 2009 NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater, the USC Annenberg Program that brings arts journalists from around the country to Southern California each spring.

If you know Fleck's name, it's likely from his fame 19 years ago as one of the NEA 4, the group of performance artists who took their case all the way to the Supreme Court -- and won -- when the National Endowment for the Arts funded them and then turned against them for being too dirty and in receipt of public funds. It was fantastic political theater in itself.

And Fleck is still fantastic. I had never seen him live. But the show is a kick. He's a natural actor as well as an artist. The conceit in the one-person show is his memories of going on a 10-day fast and having to thus wean himself from the wonderful products of what he calls "the church of Los Angeles" -- Trader Joe's. No more $5.99 Bordeaux. He passes around the audience a container of TJ's dark-chocolate covered edamame. He gave me, sitting in the front row, a shot of Wild Turkey in a paper cup -- nice work, if you can get it. Hadn't had a 4 o'clock whiskey in years, or maybe ever. And he gloriously describes the fear of doing without (much) food and drink for a week and a half while still trying to go on TV auditions while his fellow actors are popping cans of Coke -- "Unfair! Like performance-enhancing drugs in the Olympics!"

Sasha, the Pasadenan who directs the arts journalism master's program at USC, asked Fleck after the performance if he had been funded since 1990 by the NEA. "Nope." "Well, you are being funded by them today!"

More on the show tomorrow. I have to get me to Trader Joe's.