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One guest in his 20s admits to me that he lives in a one-room apartment by the beach, is rarely home and has no discretionary income to speak of. "But," he says, sharing a Tupperware moment, as we all do at some point during the day, "I still eat my oatmeal out of a Tupperware bowl that I've had forever."

After the show, Phranc breaks out order forms and a calculator in a back room and the guests line up into the hallway, checkbooks and ATM cards in hand. The Tupperware Lady rings up $900 in sales, bringing her grand total to $5,000 in just three weeks on the job.

"This is the best gig I've ever had," she says. "Tupperware rocks!"

It's certainly proving to be more lucrative thus far than the music business, which the 42-year-old Phranc has been a part of for nearly 20 years. In the late-'70s and early-'80s she was a fixture of the L.A. punk scene, playing in bands like Nervous Gender and Catholic Discipline alongside such punk notables as the Circle Jerks and X. But she also wanted to distance herself from a certain nihilism she saw in the genre, and with her first acoustic single, "Take Off Your Swastikas," she officially became a solo artist who could give free rein to folk inclinations.

Things went relatively swimmingly for years; she put out albums on Rhino Records and her own label, and opened for Morissey during his world tour in 1991. But everything stopped abruptly that same year when, during the tour, she got a phone call in Boston informing her that her brother had been murdered.

"My momentum stopped for a long time," says Phranc. "I was so sad. I needed to slow down and reevaluate what I wanted to do." She began devoting much more time to artwork, something she had always done in the margins of her music career. The mostly three-dimensional pieces fashioned from cardboard, dubbed Cardboard Cobbler, are now a crucial part of her growing enterprises.

When she returned to music full-time in '93, she was relieved to find that she hadn't been entirely forgotten. "The business moves very quickly," she says, "and it's very easy to become invisible and stay invisible."

Her new act includes a bit called Hot August Phranc, in which she does signature Neil Diamond tunes. If her Tupperware mien is any indication, Hot August is more of a salute than a sendup, a nod to the kind of passion that, in this age of irony, is almost entirely passé. Phranc doesn't believe that the two -- passion and irony, she and Neil -- are mutually exclusive.

"Folk and punk, for example, have a lot more in common than people think," she says easily. "Musically, they're very similar -- there's two, or three, or even one chord. The difference is in volume and speed. They're both music of the people that carry a message. Woody Guthrie and Nine Inch Nails aren't that far apart."

Neither, it turns out, are me and Tupperware. Far apart, that is. In the afterglow of the party's success, as Phranc efficiently packs up her display, one late-arriving guest in a Hawaiian shirt sits and muses, pretty unironically, on the whole Tupperware weltanschauung.

The stuff is as American as we wish we were, he says, the essence of uncomplicated equipoise: square and definitive but clear and flexible, airtight, supremely adaptable, consummately useful and, however much it is abused, virtually indestructible.

"It's the perfect synthesis of rationalism and art -- what Jefferson called enlightened rationalization," he waxes on. "What could be more rational than Tupperware?" And, he adds, "It's timeless -- past, present, future. It's Jeffersonian andJetsonian."

Phranc smiles brightly in agreement. Her personal heroes -- and heroines -- in this business are Brownie Weiss, the first Tupperware lady from the '50s, and a drag queen named Pam Teflon, who is currently L.A.'s hottest seller.

"He's one of my greatest inspirations," says Phranc, with a bit of awe. "I mean, before, he had nothing. Now he's doing $5,000 a week with Tupperware and he has a show on Comedy Central. He's so busy, he might have to give up selling."

Not only does Tupperware inspire philosophizing, it makes Hollywood take notice. Talk about synthesis. Utterly woozy with a sense of possibility, I sit and fill out an order form for a pitcher, a commuter coffee mug and a set of modular containers called Packables. I have no idea how I'll use them.

Phranc cheerily makes out my receipt and then, in a spasm of sororal feeling, invites me to a Tupperware rally next week. "Everybody is great, the training is free," she says. "At the rally I went to, there were about 200 housewives, a drag queen, and me. I was so excited, I couldn't sleep. Tupperware is really all about family."

And, she says, it'll pay for her next record.
salon.com | Nov. 5, 1999

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