| |
Baby Jane
Baby Jane fell into a down ward slump. The music tastes were changing and producers didn't like her taste of music anymore. Without music as the focus of her life, Baby Jane's life continued unraveling. She fell in love and was caught in a long tumultuous relationship. She lost belief in herself. Instead of applause, she faced severe depression. She was hospitalized and finally helped with medication.
In 1991, she was back in business at Eighty-Eights. She shaped together a show and an album called, I Got Thunder, powerfully reflecting her experiences, the depression, her counseling of teens, her doomed long-term romances, and the sadness and self-hatred that can damage a life. She included two songs Vito had indicated in his will that she sing at his memorial. Baby Jane, with accompanist Ross Patterson, was starting a whole new career with almost all new material.
She continued the story in a second show and a second album, Big, Bad, and Blue -- Live, now stressing healing and new self-confidence. Every song is part of the story, some new, like "Big Body Woman", and others are old, like "Blues in the Night". Some are fun, like the Depression-era song, "One Meatball", which has become an audience sing-along. Through everything that she went through, Baby Jane never lost her wit and her humor. Her third show, The Real Thing - an Intimate Opera, ran at Eighty-Eights from November through June, and returned in the fall. This show brought in all the New York City and surrounding area press, and she received universally rave notices.
|
|
| |
Artist Biography - Baby Jane
|
 Jane "Baby Jane" Dexter grew up in Garden City, Long Island, New York. She is the daughter of a dermatologist and a college physical education teacher. He mother's name was also Jane Dexter. Thus, when little Jane needed a stage name, she became "Baby Jane". From her earliest days, Baby Jane was a performer, an imaginative little five-year-old who hiked her crinoline up under her arms and, inspired by The Jolson Story, sang "April Showers" into her hairbrush.
It was her desire to be a singer that motivated Baby Jane to begin working at age 14 in a local theater group. After school, she learned her way around sets and lighting and selling tickets. She wanted to perform and at this point became "Baby Jane Dexter". Still a student, she auditioned for, and got a job in the Broadway cast of Hair, which didn't last too long when she asked the director to hold her job while she went to Spain to get her teeth capped.
Adolescent Jane came home, went back to school, got a job driving a taxi on Long Island, and at night she traveled into Manhattan to a comedy club, The Improvisation, to be discovered. Her music included rock, blues, and rhythm-and-blues. She performed between comedy acts of Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman. When she heard that a new club in Greenwich Village was opening and needed female singers, Baby Jane went to the owner and asked to audition. She became his first opening act in the Paradise Room of the famed Reno Sweeney, the club that was to feature such up-and-coming young performers.
But while Baby Jane Dexter's career was blossoming, inside she held a secret. In the early 70's, she met a handsome guy who paid her a lot of attention, and although she had been warned to stay away from him, he made her feel desirable, pretty, and sexy. This was before the term "date rape" was even coined, but that was what happened to Baby Jane Dexter who, like many other young women, tried to push the ordeal from her mind. It wasn't until 1979 that she told songwriter Drey Shepperd what had happened to her, and he convinced her to write the music to, "Fifteen Ugly Minutes", a haunting song about the ordeal.
|
| |
|
For more information , enjoy the official homepage of Baby Jane
|
|
|
