Madam Barker is an aging singer who was never a star, with a love for a live paying audience, a passion for dirty glamor, and a thirst for the apocalypse. She is half dragon and half Irish. She has enjoyed the spotlight throughout her life, and finally settled on the stage, which has an arrangement that makes it harder for people to leave when she’s talking to them.
In 1693, she was born to a Colonial teenager named Elizabeth Emerson, who tried to murder both Barker and her sister. Elizabeth only got it half right, but they hanged her anyway.
According to historical records, in 1874 she began her life in Wyoming as a prostitute and a frontierswoman and an alcoholic. That was over in 1893, when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as a trick shooter and a horse rider and an alcoholic.
It has been suggested she also may have been born in 1901 in Pasadena, and flew airplanes until her death in 1975. Everybody forgot about her, though, because she wasn’t hot like Amelia Earhart, and she was a good enough pilot to die of a heart attack in her own home rather than from a plane crash in the middle of the ocean.
This information conflicts directly with accounts of her death in 1970 of a heroin overdose at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Los Angeles and was discovered when she didn’t show up to hear her newest recordings.
It seems she is still alive, by most accounts. Though it can be hard to tell.
Professional credits include:
Causing the Roman Empire to fall
Knocking down the Berlin Wall
Following you into the Bathroom Stall
Chasing the Nazis out of France
Teaching Nijinsky how to dance
Helping you out of those tight, tight pants
Moonlighting as Sinatra’s Lady Luck
Fleecing her third Husband for a million bucks
Lifting your spirits when your life kind of sucks.
John Fournier is the Piano Player
