Madonna Cacciatore
EVENT: She's in Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Unfair Arguments with Existence and Routines at A Theatre Under the Influence.
First things first: Is your name for real? "Yes it is. Catholic Italian parents. Madonna Louise Cacciatore."
How old are you? If that isn't too personal a question. "I'm younger than Mick Jagger, but not by much."
Were you born when the Beat movement was flourishing? "Yes, I was probably 10. Still fairly young, but I can remember when the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan for the first time--JFK, Vietnam, things like that. I wanted to go to Woodstock, but being 11, my parents wouldn't let me."
What does "Beat" mean to you? "Well, it's a lot of poetry, a lot of pot, really wonderful people questioning authority in a big way. Community, intelligence, it's something that we're lacking--we don't question things as much as we did then. We've gotten a little more complacent."
You don't think of berets and bongos? "Oh, yeah, those were happening too, definitely. Those big flower-power things on Volkswagens. I had a red Volkswagen with white pinstripes and flower-power decals on the inside. I was really glad to outgrow those flowers--they were on everything in my early teens."
Did the Beat movement just flow into the hippie movement in your experience? I always thought of them as separate cultures. "More prevalent for me was the hippie movement--there might have been a space between them. I guess if I had to classify it, the beatniks were inside and hippies were outside--the hippies were in the streets protesting and making free love."
Did you make any free love? "Oh, I'm sure I did my share."
