Next week, Laurie Anderson will be presented by Seattle Theater Group at the Moore Theater (Nov. 8 & 9) and in conjunction with this event, I will be interviewing Laurie on Nov. 9th at 2 p.m. at the Center of Contemporary Art (COCA). While I'm certain that she will not recall meeting me, our paths have crossed many times. In fact, and this might seem a little grand, but in the same way Harold Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of his take on the Western canon, my life watching performance has been defined through a strange series of watching, meeting and being in close proximity to Laurie.

I first saw her in 1989 when a young coed at the University of Kansas offered me an extra ticket to see "Strange Angels." I had little idea what a performance artist was at the time, but after seeing Laurie, I began telling people that I wanted to be one.

A couple of years after college, I began working as an arts admistrator and since that time, I have never worked for an organization that has not presented Laurie Anderson.

In 1996, I helped co-produce the "Nova Convention: Revisited, " a performance tribute to Lawrence, KS resident William S. Burroughs that featured Laurie, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Philip Glass, Debbie Harry, John Giorno and Ed Sanders. This ended up being the last public appearance by Burroughs, some one I've found strangely influential in my own life, and some one Laurie apparently considered to be her artistic mentor.

I moved to New York in 1999 and began working at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is one of the main institutions to have championed Laurie's work. This fact was evidenced by BAM's commissioning of her "Songs and Stories from Moby Dick," probably her largest undertaking ever, and one that is inspired by a novel that was something of a centerpiece for me during my english major in college.

And now, I find myself working at On the Boards, which was one of the first organizations in the US outside of NYC to present Laurie. I believe the first year she performed in Seattle was 1981. Touring experimental performance art is still a relatively young phenonmenon--one could argue that contemporary art didn't really start to move around the US until the late 1970's. If that's the case, it's certainly easy to see how influential of a figure Laurie's been in bringing attention to a certain kind of performative raison d'être that is at the heart of our mission. While she'll have no idea who I am next Tuesday even though we've met several times, she continues to loom large in what I do.