The first time I met Rufus Wainwright, he was naked.
Well, he started out dressed, but it was only a matter of minutes before he was dancing naked in front of our table at a grungy nightclub in LA called The Garage.
Let me back up a little.
I was out on the town with my girlfriend, Pleasant. She knew Rufus, and I’m not sure how he got it into his head to take off his clothes for us, but he did. He started to strip for us and we encouraged him with cheers and catcalls. I didn’t think he’d really do the full monty as we were in a public place with loads of people around, but I was wrong.
He did!
And he was wild, flinging his moppish hair around, dancing. He was talking to us later (with his clothes on now) and telling Pleasant how he had done a gig the night before at the Universal Amphitheatre and had gotten kicked out of his hotel room. I naturally assumed he must have been working as a professional stripper. Later, Pleasant told me our stripper’s name was Rufus Wainwright, Loudon’s son, and one of the first acts signed by Dreamworks and he’d been doing a concert at the Universal Amphitheatre the night before. Oh.
We went to see him play piano and sing at a tiny little place on Fairfax the following week. He was entrancing. The rawness of his talent, his heartrending voice…he knocked my socks off.
The following week, I was having a glass of wine with Pleasant and Kina at La Pubelle when we ran into Rufus again. Pleasant and Kina were the other dancers on the Go-Go’s Tour as well as dear friends. He invited us on a walk down Franklin to this incredible old historic building. I’d always wanted to enter this building as the architecture is so beautiful. We knocked on one of the doors and it was answered by a man with yellow hair and a matching yellow marching band coat with coattails. His house was a shrine to music. It was wallpapered with classical sheet music. Every nook and cranny was decoupaged with pictures of classical composers. In the middle of the living room was a grand piano complete with lit candelabra. The yellow-haired man, a sort of mad-scientist version of Liberace– flicked out his tails and sat down and played a haunting classical piece for us. Rufus was up next, and he sat down and played for at least an hour, all kinds of incredibly beautiful music. He would occasionally shout out the composer he was playing “Shubert! Debussy! Bach!” but he didn’t stop. He hunched over the piano, his wild hair flying in all directions, his shoulders rocking back and forth. We were swept away by this unexpected ending to our evening out. Kina said, “I want a Rufus! I want to take him out whenever I get bored.”
And I wouldn’t mind having a Rufus myself.
