BY KAREN BOSSICK
Jodeen Revere grew up the daughter of Paul Revere, dubbed “the Madman of Rock & Roll” for the red Revolutionary War outfit he wore and the madcap antics he performed on stage with his Raiders.
And her tale of living with father—and without father, when he was off touring—will be one of the stories she will tell when she returns to The Spot in Ketchum on Saturday, May 4, to present a new original work called “There Was this One Time…”
Revere, an actor and writer who attended Wood River High School while living in Sun Valley for six years, will read six or seven personal essays. The firsts show starts at 3 p.m. and the second at 7 p.m. General audience tickets are $15; they’re $10 for those under 30, available at https://www.spotsunvalley.com/events.
“This is not a performance, not a play, but a series of short personal essays I’ve been working on for a while,” said Revere, who performed her one-woman show “The Persistent Guest” about her cancer diagnosis at The Spot last year.
“One piece reflects on growing up the child of a ‘60s rock star. Another reflects on my time in Jehovah’s Witness. One piece revolves around my daughter when I overzealously fell into New Age pseudoscience with psychics and tarot cards and all those things. There’s also a story about my grandmother passing, so it’s kind of all over the place.”
Her general voice, Revere added, is one of dark humor so the hour-plus show is not going to be heavy.
Revere’s father formed Paul Revere & the Raiders in Boise in 1958 and propelled to stardom with such songs as “Just Like Me,” “Kicks,” “Hungry,” “Let Me” and “Indian Reservation” on Dick Clark’s “Where the Action Is.” Known for the wacky props he used on stage, he found his lead singer Mark Lindsay when he went to pick up buns from a bakery for restaurants he owned in the Treasure Valley.
“He was very funny, one of funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. And I learned a tremendous amount from him about being a performer—I have his gross 12-year-old boy’s sense of humor,” Revere reflected. “We had a very fun and exciting circus-like life, being able to travel and go places and meet interesting people, given his line of work.”
The man who came home was the same man TV watchers saw on “Where the Action Is”—"a total wacky clown,” Revere said.
“Everything was always a circus—my mother and brother and I formed a family unit and periodically this other child would infiltrate our world and set everything upside down, exciting and crazy, telling us, ‘Let’s have a pool party. Let’s go to Disneyland. Let’s go to Hawaii.’
“Everything was a tornado while he was home and then he’d be gone again and we were left figuring out how the world works. It was a whiplash effect of missing someone, then having an exhaustive ’Wow! He doesn’t know how stuff works. He doesn’t know what’s been happening in our lives,’ when he returned.”
Paul Revere toured so much that his daughter often found herself longing for a father figure.
“Fathers don’t know how to what to do with their children. They like having them but don’t actually know how to relate to them. So, I feel most women in general have this weird pining, looking for validation, from men in their lives. That colors a whole bunch of things and it’s difficult to dig yourself out of that,” she said.
Revere took her one-woman show on breast cancer to the United Solo Fest in New York in October. And she has taken it to numerous other fringe festivals, including Treefort in Boise, Story Story Night and Campfire Stories
She is presenting Saturday’s reading to get a feel for which short essay might become the next one-woman play. She thinks it will be the one about her Dad.
“I assume that everything I write I will read out loud,” she said. “Being able to workshop some of these writings in front of an audience is the only way to learn what works and what doesn’t. Every time I present it to an audience I go back and tweak it. I learn from the readings what words can be leaned on more to change everything.”