Lisa Faith Philips: One Woman Show

A thousand watts of moonbeam hit the stage. A dinner-theater venue downtown. Lisa’s brilliant floodlit face, her impossibly red, sequined dress is broadcast across the room. Almost Doris Day meets Amy Poehler meets Joan Rivers, but she cannot be contained. Lisa Faith Philips is incomparable, inimitable and the best part is that you don’t know who she is, and I do.

She is a hidden gem. A speakeasy, tucked away in the annals of the East Village. A New York story so good, so juicy, so on-brand, that as I put it on the page it feels like fiction. So of course, Lisa made it into a show, a cabaret. Scrappy and campy and raunchy as all hell.

Every great origin story begins in the Midwest followed by a subsequent departure. Lisa Faith Philips left Findlay, Ohio, to attend Wellesley where she paid her way through school stripping at a Boston club. She feels she was born to be on the stage. Her song was “Candy” by The Manhattan Transfer. Her gimmick? A giant plastic candy cane she bought on clearance following the holiday season. She licks it while she strips. “That candy cane paid for graduate school," she tells me. She earned her master's at the London School of Economics and then moved to Barcelona. In 1979 she arrived in New York and swiftly got a job at a big Wall Street firm.

She hated the hours but saved up, finally quitting to take a job at Punch Line, a comedy club in Midtown. She goes in for an audition at the Comic Strip on the Upper East Side. A young comedian named Chris Rock is auditioning before her. She doesn’t get a slot, told by the talent manager, “you know, you’re too attractive, you’re going to come out on stage, and the women are going to be jealous, and the men are going to think of you sexually.” Lisa takes a deep breath. “Here’s the guy who passes talent at major clubs and he says to me, ‘women aren’t funny. All of us, who run the talent in New York, we don’t think women are funny. But I liked that you did, not typical women’s stuff about dating, you were more political. So, I think you could come back and work on your material.’ I was like, this is great! But he kept me there. And then gradually, the bartender was closing up and locking up. And then he tells me about how his wife didn’t understand him. And he was suffering from blue balls. And I–I enjoy sex and enjoy blow jobs, but I remember thinking I could not, you know, service, a guy who didn’t think women were funny.” Even now she cracks up telling the story.

But Lisa pushed on. She worked as maître d’ at the Russian Tea Room for ten years. Spent time as a marketing director at Random House. Moonlighting as a performer the whole time.

She had an affair with her boss to keep things interesting. “I was bored at work, so, naturally it happened. I thought it’d be just a sort of a little thing, but it lasted longer. And we really cared about each other. And then when I ended it, it was fascinating because I had been sort of secretive about it. And then I started to tell friends about it. And it was interesting how many women would say, ‘Oh, I had an affair, too!’” So, she wrote a show.

“Do you remember the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? I wrote Seven and a Half Habits of Highly Successful Mistresses.” It was a musical romp, equipped with whips to punish audience members who didn’t sing along. Turns out the author of Seven Habits  is Mormon. When Lisa took the show to Fringe Festival in Washington DC, she was sued. “It was when Obama won his first election, and we were so happy. I was dancing and the doorbell rang and I was served.” Fortunately, she has a thing for lawyers. “Their advice was I could win the case, but it would be expensive. So, I settled. But I have a permanent injunction against me in Utah. I’m willing to make that sacrifice.”

This wasn’t Lisa’s only run-in with the law. While putting up flyers for her show around the East Village, two undercover cops confront her. She can’t post flyers without permission. They ask for ID. She doesn’t have any, but points out that it is her face on the poster. They take her to the station at East Tenth. She has work in the morning at Random House. Such has been the constant contrast of her life.

 Lisa has occupied the same East Village apartment since the eighties. It features a tiny kitchen, and a living room filled with Easter eggs. A chalkboard clock has been labeled with a heart symbol, the number 4, 7, and then an infinity symbol. There is a framed Art Spiegelman comic signed “for Lisa! From Art.” A giant Ticonderoga pencil. And what appear to be original Basquiats, though I never got the opportunity to ask. I listened to her stories for two hours before she kicked me out. She had to run to Juilliard for “a class.” Though before I left, she invited me to her cabaret show at the Pangea dinner theater, “Songs of Love and Adultery.” “I’m trying to help save Pangea, they were hit hard after COVID and the East Village has already lost so many of these little theaters.”

The saying goes that you only live once. But I think that, if you really do it right, if you do it like Lisa, you get to live a million lives. You work on Wall Street. You take many lovers. You strip. You get your master’s degree. You rub elbows with The Ramones. You perform standup. You wait tables.

“I love going to Paris,” Lisa tells me, “But they’re put in this historical setting. It’s almost like the city doesn't morph that much. It’s almost like a museum. Whereas here, we can put on a show. Things open, things close. And that’s wonderful.”

At her Pangea show, Lisa is dressed as Marylin Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” She is in her mid-sixties but moves with the limberness of a twenty-two-year-old who is not me. I watch with complete reverence as she captivates a full house. Performing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered,” and lacing biting monologues in between each number.

Findlay, Ohio, was a test site for cable television, so Lisa grew up watching and worshipping a lot of “old stuff,” especially Mickey Rooney. “Mickey played Andy Hardy, and he was always trying to fight the evil businessman and he’d put on a show to save the town. I always liked that–save the town by putting on a show.”

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