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At the table with Flash Rosenberg:
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 24, 2003
YBOR CITY -- In so many ways, her name is apt.
Flash Rosenberg, photographer.
Flash Rosenberg, quick-take artist.
Flash Rosenberg, flasher.
During lunch at the venerable Columbia Restaurant this week with a scrawny Don Quixote peering from the wall, Rosenberg swears the story she tells about her name during her one-woman show Camping in the Bewilderness is true.
Rosenberg was hired years ago to photograph a costume party in Philadelphia. Slight woman that she is, she covered two essential spots on her chest with strips of duct tape. That was her costume. Someone asked if she was the "real" photographer and if so, what was her name?
"Her name is Flash," came a voice from the crowd.
Who wouldn't want to be called Flash rather than Susan, the name given by her parents in Newark, Del., in the 1950s? Susan is everyday; Flash is every once in awhile.
Rosenberg is a photographer (hire her for your wedding!), comedian, teacher, writer, cartoonist, clown and filmmaker. She has three North American diamondback turtles in her 900-square-foot apartment in New York's garment district. She sews her own clothes and sometimes the underside of the fabric looks better to her.
"I am not a leopard person," Rosenberg says, flipping her patchwork, unconstructed jacket inside out. Next to her skin are leopard spots lounging on velour. What shows on the outside is a shiny, gun-metal moire pattern. "So much better don't you think?"
Dining with Rosenberg is the enlightening companion piece to Bewilderness, which sometimes suffers from its own format, part slide show, part stand-up with nostalgia, preciousness and pith mixed in. Rosenberg doesn't seem so much bewildered as bewitched by a mind in constant motion. The show flits like a butterfly, stopping for just a moment before winging on. It might not be until a few days later that the viewer appreciates the stops along the way.
Like the bit about perfume. Why, she wonders during the show, do woman dab perfume behind their ears? Why not put it under their nose so they can smell it but others don't have to? That garners a few laughs but may only have full effect the next time the elevator stinks of Youth Dew. She takes the topic no further but moves on to the periodic table of the elements, then to the strangeness of layered food, back to the elements, on to a goofy photo of her brother as a boy. She zigzags to a tentative but somehow necessary comment about 9/11. It's exhausting at times, processing it all.
She doesn't mind that the jokes take time to percolate. That, she says, is what makes her humor female. She is steady and deliberate, rather than "ejaculatory" like most male stand-up acts. Rosenberg has been told by comedy clubs that her material is funny but her delivery doesn't work.
"It doesn't work for comedy clubs because I don't do set-up, punch line, set-up, punch line, the way most guys do," she says.
At lunch, and one-on-one, Rosenberg slows down but remains intense. She listens. She pulls off her French necklace to offer a closer look. She picks at her black bean cakes. When the waiter wheels over the fixings to make the restaurant's legendary 1905 salad, conversation stops.
"I think when they make something at the table, they want us to watch," she says. We sit still while the waiter adds the Worcestershire sauce and a squeeze of lemon. The mound of salad, minus the ham strips because Rosenberg's a vegetarian, looms before her.
"Now I know why it's called 1905 salad," she says. "It's because the first guy who ate it still working on it."
Rosenberg is fascinated about memories and the visual clues that conjure them. She talks quickly and before you know it you're nodding yes, but not quite sure why. It's easy to get lost in what she's saying though it sounds like fun to take a writing class from her. She teaches in New York, taking students and their notebooks on subway rides to chronicle what they see. They play games like "look at the face and guess the shoes." In photography classes, she challenges students to make timeless photos, pictures in which no one will be able to pinpoint their time in history.
She talks about her autobiography of ideas and how she loves the feedback of laughter because she's part of the "me generation, not the woe-is-me generation."
Flash, the conversation goes this way. Flash, it goes another.
Rosenberg is a noun, verb and adjective with a couple of expletives tossed in. Woman as sentence, picture that.
Camping in the Bewilderness runs tonight through Sunday in the Shimberg Playhouse of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Show times are 8 p.m. tonight, Friday and Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $15.50. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045 or www.tbpac.org.