Lori Guarisco: Dancing Poet and Former Bearded Lady

Jewel-toned sequins form abstract mosaics on her shorts, as fringe dangles from her tank top. A blue cape hangs stiffly from her neck. Despite the colorful ensemble, her most prominent accessory is a dull silver: three braids that extend from her chin and fall close to her midriff.

Lori Guarisco lives off Memorial Drive, down a heavily shaded side street. Her gravel driveway runs alongside Shoal Creek, past a school bus parked to the left and a chicken coop to the right. It forms a straight path to her two houses: a one-story cottage, where she lives with her dog China, and a narrow three-story house, where she rents out rooms to aspiring musicians and artists.

I rented out one of Lori’s rooms in fall 2009, as an intern for music and film magazine Paste. As a tenant, the one thing at Creeky Shoal that fascinated me most was a painting of Lori as a bearded lady – a character she created years ago.

Lori, who once ran her own dance company, Group Delirium, (has since) gone on to perform at Bonnaroo and Burning Man – and even with Cirque de Soleil. She describes herself as a “dancing poet,” and as a spoken word artist, street performer and writer. In some of her more recent pieces, she’s transformed herself into a firefighter, a superhero and a crow. She is writing her first novel, and she wants Johnny Depp to star in its film adaptation.

I moved to Atlanta for the second time in August 2010, and I visited Lori at her home studio a few weeks later. Although she had just renovated the space, the bearded lady painting hung precisely where I remembered seeing it last – in a corner next to her stereo system.

The painting now hangs in Eyedrum, for the 10-year retrospective of Charlie Smith’s circus and cabaret-inspired art collective, the Art of Such n Such. Though she has performed as a bearded lady around the United States, Lori has yet to resurrect her character in Atlanta. She may do this for the Art of Such n Such’s closing ceremony on Nov. 12 – though then again, she may not. “She’s often requested,” Lori confesses. “I’m not always feeling her.”

In many ways though, Lori remains a confident storyteller. She speaks steadily even as she rambles, and she laughs loudly. Her favorite word, seemingly, is ‘fabulous.’ This is why, a year after I met her, I asked Lori to tell me the story behind that painting, behind that bearded lady. Her words are below.
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A friend of mine, she was at Georgia State and she was going to go abroad, to spend a semester in Ghana. So she needed to raise some money, and she was in Group Delirium. Charlie [Graham] thought she would throw a carnival to raise some money, and she was like, “Will you perform?” There was no circus performance happening in Atlanta at all, and we did it in an art space that’s no longer here. If you’re going to Cabbagetown and when you almost get to the Krog [Street] Tunnel, there’s a whole bunch of new condos on the left. A minute ago that was rock, warehouse, car lots. It was rusty, it was rugged, and there was a fabulous warehouse space back there. That was where the carnival was going to be.

So I was like, “What am I going to do for the carnival? Okay, I’ll do a freak show.” I was deep with Group Delirium then, and there was like, four or five girls at the time. I was like, “What do you think about being bearded ladies, all of us?” They were like, [gasps, chokes], “Okay, let’s do it.”

The idea is, everybody creates your own character. I don’t care what your beard looks like, I don’t care what your persona is. Make it totally your own thing. What we’re going to do is wear veils over our faces, and we’re not going to let anyone know we’re bearded ladies – but we’re going to dress super sexy. We’re going to build a tent, and we’ll just do our Group Delirium thing. And then when we get the audience, we’ll remove our veils.

I had no idea what response we were going to get – no idea. Nobody knew we were bearded – okay, Charlie [Graham] maybe knew. It totally and completely freaked out the men. They were uncomfortable, but they were attracted to someone with a beard. And then they were like, “Oh, are you lesbians?” It freaked them out. The men wouldn’t speak to us; they would not look at us in the eye.

All the women were saying, “You guys rock, this is awesome. Next time you do this, we want to do it.” And that’s because they saw how much power it gave us. We were feeling fabulous. So, I learned something about gender role that night.

Then more people in Atlanta learned about Burning Man, and a small handful of people had been going to the desert. They said, “Let’s do a Burning Man-esque festival here,” and they called it Ripe Atlanta, like a ripe peach.

The next year I got involved in the production side of it. I had just done “Bearded Lady” so I said, “Look, y’all, I’m doing the bearded ladies. That’s going to be our installation.” So a friend of mine had this fabulous, small circus tent, and I asked him if the bearded ladies could use it. So we set it up, and the festival was at the Metropolitan Artists Studios. A lot of artists live there; my friend Charlie [Graham] lives there. This particular show was going to be different. We had established who we were. We’re freaks, we’re throwing a big party, and we’re going to invite all our freak friends to come. Our bearded ladies are very sensuous and they’re very sexy, so we made this tent so lush and so gorgeous. We passed out thousands of cream puffs and we gave foot massages and we danced. My chandeliers were there, and one of the girl’s husbands played violin the whole night. It was a lounge, and we were serving chilly little cocktails. We didn’t stop until the sun came up. We brought with us beard material – all different colors of hair and glue so that any woman who came to the party that wanted a beard, we would turn them into a bearded lady. By the end of the festival, there were about 50 bearded ladies running around.

I felt sexier wearing a beard than I ever had in my life. I had my entire body painted as if I had hair on my chest and on my back, and I was wearing a super tight dress with little spaghetti straps and a big full skirt. I would make eye contact with somebody, and then we would dance. And then I would turn my back to them and drop my shirt. And you’d see that my back was hairy; it was painted really beautifully. Then you’d think I’m going to turn around and show my boobs, but I’m not. I take my dress – and I did this to thousands of people, oh my god. I had no pants on. [stands up] And so I’m dancing for you [sways hips] and I turn around and I drop my shirt, and then I take my skirt and twirl and lift my skirt up and cover my breasts. I had pubic hair, but I had also painted a little bit more. So it’s like, Oh my god, definitely a girl, and incredibly sexy – but a beard, wow. And I just gotta tell you, I got kissed by so many men. I got many marriage proposals and I got so many, “Oh my god, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Oh my god.”
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Photo Credit: Tim Song