We were friends in the East Village back then. I remember I bumped into Candis Cayne (as a boy, as Brendan) outside the audition afterwards. I saw Madonna for a moment at the end of the giant room, sitting at a table, behind a sea of handlers.
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I was like that girl at the beginning of the movie Fame who bombs the audition. They put numbers on our shirts and the choreographer took us in groups and was screaming stuff like, "Do a pirouette!" Everyone knew what a pirouette was but me.
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Instead, it was a mob scene of professional dancers. I thought since she'd talked to me, it was going to be this meeting of the minds where she'd consider featuring me in a sequence in the tour and turn me into a huge star. How did she know who I was? Years later, I was working the door at Sound Factory Bar for Frankie Knuckles and Rob Fernandez, and I told the story. She said, "Are you Mark Allen?" I was shocked. She came up to me and asked me to come to the audition for the Girlie Show tour for the Erotica album. She was at the Roxy to deliver her 12-inch single, "Deeper and Deeper," to DJ Frankie Knuckles. But then he died and Madonna became the abstract Andy Warhol in a way. The goal was to come to New York and meet Andy Warhol. It seemed if you wanted to be successful, you went to New York and became part of a downtown scene and then you could take it to the next level.
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In the late '80s, there was Dianne Brill, John Sex, Ann Magnuson, you, Lydia Lunch. As a child, I learned about all these things-I was always studying New York, always paying attention to the key figures.
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I read that Edie book about Edie Sedgwick. I checked out art books and stuff about the Soho art scene. I was into weird things-art, music, sci-fi, Mad magazine, Blondie. I grew up in a Southern Baptist home in Texas. While he edits, I pressed him for some details of his dancing days and the one entrepreneurial possibility he regrets not chasing. These days, Mark is directing and acting in a film called Sock Job ("a screwball comedy about masturbation"). One of the hottest (and most interesting) go-go boys of the 1990s was Mark Allen, the Dallas-born guy who eventually hung up his skivvies and became a writer and commentator.