DIVAS
Anne
Kerry Ford
I started to write comedy sketches for myself and do them in my shows. It was terrifically liberating because there are no rules. Anybody who thinks that there are, doesn't understand the medium…Then, I performed for President Reagan at The White House. At that time, I was doing “Annie” , so I was there with the company of Annie. Later on, I went to Israel where I sang for Yizhak Shamir for the 40th birthday of Israel? We did Jewish and Hebrew folk songs. That was beautiful. On and about “Days of Our Lives”, Anne stated to the media:” When I got hired for Days of Our Lives, they thought the character wouldn't say anything. That she would wear black and smoke cigarettes. So I wore black and smoked cigarettes for maybe ten episodes. Then I got tired of that; there's only so much smoking you can do! So they started giving me stuff to say. And it was all downhill from there. My love interest left the show, because he got a movie, so then they tied me into the comedy plot. I think they ended up zapping me with a ray gun to kill me and I disintegrated into space. And that's how I left the show! It wasn't their best season. And I can't even remember my character's name! If anybody reading remembers, please e-mail me! Asked by a reporter about performing with her husband, Anne replied: “My husband is a renowned blues/jazz guitarist. He played with all the luminaries in the past 25 years. Everybody from George Harrison to Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell to LA Express to Michael MacDonald, Bonny Raitt ... all these people.
And now he has his own group. He just put out his sixth solo CD and has been nominated for four Grammy's, and he's a major deal. And the people who know him just love him. And people who don't know him, who don't know that genre of music, they go Who? Now, we're just starting to perform together. What we did last night at The Cinegrill (in Los Angeles), for instance, is what I call a hybrid of what he does influenced by what I do. I am much more lyric oriented, and I think that it is influencing his writing to become more lyric oriented. He did a few things from his new CD, which I think could be sung in cabaret.
It's a real departure for
him. And the stuff that I did was jazz treatments of songs. Although it
wasn't strictly jazz. We did things like a strange version of "Walking After
Midnight" or a bizarre poem that led into a Scottish folksong. It was such a
hybrid of styles that people had no idea where we were going to go. There
was a lot of spoken word, a lot of poetry.
On Bill Maher, she said:”
He had the
nerve one night on one of his shows to say something like "The arts are
completely disposable. We don't need them." Boy, did he hear from me! In my
e-mail I said "That has to be the stupidest thing I have ever heard anybody
say! Can you imagine your life without music or literature or poetry or
dance? How can you be such a moron!" There's a friend of mine who went to
the Ballet Academy with me, and he's now the artistic director of a ballet
company in the Pacific Northwest. He's also a fabulous dancer. And he said
to me that 85-90% of his time is spent looking for money. The rest is spent
on creating art. That is completely backwards! I also can't understand why
the arts are cut out of the schools. There have been countless tests done
that show that children do better academically when they are allowed to draw
and paint and sing and do square dancing and all that sort of things. And it
keeps getting cut out, while they are doubling funding for athletic
programs. I have a lot of political activist in me, I'm afraid!”