Activist and porn icon Annie Sprinkle renewed her vows to her longtime partner, artist and UC-Santa Cruz professor Elizabeth Stephens, at a packed outdoor Art Happening in Altadena this weekend.
The couple also opened things up to a particular celestial body, which played coy most of the night.
The 3-hour event featured burlesque performances, music, dramatic readings, comedy, and a choir at the Farnsworth Park high above Pasadena. Among the 300 attendees were Nina Hartley, directors Cass Paley and Carlos Batts, educator Carol Queen, performers Jiz Lee and April Flores, and Veronica Hart, who performed “Good Night, Moon.”
Sprinkle and Stephens co-founded the Love Art Lab, “committed to doing projects that explore, generate, and celebrate love,” and Saturday’s performance was the couple’s sixth wedding-as-installation; the purple, third eye phase of performance artist Linda M. Montano’s chakra-based “7 Years of Living Art” series.
Believe me, Readers, that your narrator was confused and frightened when he thought himself transported through time and space to a 1968 hippie freakout even as the familiar smells of adjacent Porn Valley wafted through the night.
But, even as the event sometimes shared the tenuous wow factor of a poetry slam heavy on earnestness but light on entertainment value, there were also some heavy duty, joyous performances by the likes of the Life After Shopping Choir, Miss Candye Kane, a Shakespeare recitation by Lian Amaris, and exuberant dance performances by Lady Monster and Femme 6.
Sprinkle and Stephens sat onstage, beaming, throughout the performance, surrounded by several dozen performers.
But the best act of the night was the couple’s EcoSexual exchange of vows, where each praised the other to the Moon. I’ve been to some weddings where the couple can’t stand each other and no one has a good time. But this wedding—a threesome, no less—was glorious.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Madison Young turns your guilty masturbation into art; John Holmes—Comeback of the Year;
See also: Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens: Love Art Lab
Three things, G:
1) Altadena – one word 🙂
2) Farnsworth Park?!?!? I haven’t been there in 25-30 years.
2a) Still Altadena, and a good couple of miles north of Pasadena.
3) I seriously wish I was there! I haven’t been to Altadena (my home town) in almost 20 years.
Thank you, Christopher, for the correction. I think I was thinking about the drive-thru dairy chain called Alta Dena. Or maybe that’s called Altadena, too.
But I stand by the “high above Pasadena” part, because that was a long drive back downhill to the 134.
You might be interested to hear that the cops surrounding the park gave us all the once over as if we were going to burst into flame at any moment.
No, the dairy chain is, indeed, “Alta Dena,”, and yeah – that *IS* a long drive down to the 134, down Lake Ave, no doubt.
Well, I think, just from the pictures, that just about ANYONE not involve in the shindig would give you all the once-over, if not the good, old fashioned “evil eye.”