Suzanne Lacy (San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego 1976)

Lacy drove onto the Dominguez Hills State College campus in a dragster, dressed in a helmet and yellow jumpsuit. Outside by the library, the audience listened as she delivered, rapid-fire, an autobiographical monologue on time and movement across space. Beginning with a childhood in Wasco, where she calculated the number of blocks she traversed weekly, growing exponentially as she aged until now, when she moved up and down the length of the state each week, teaching one day in San Francisco, one in Los Angeles, and one in San Diego.

She talked about how being an artist was like Cinderella, building castles in the air and making coaches out of pumpkins, and how survival as an artist needed an ability to build, then destroy, your own art in a search for the next metaphor. She calculated the time she spent each year in travel and the time spent shaving her legs, among other things. As she talked she casually put her foot up on the car door, revealing a glass slipper. At the end of the monologue, she tossed the slipper out of the dragster and drove off. (Full Text reprinted in Criss Cross Double Cross, edited by Paul McCarthy)