ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS WITH DONNA SUMMER

CRAZY DAYS OF SUMMER The disco diva -- and new author -- chats about faith, motherhood and her favorite German curse words By John Sullivan (from Watermark Magazine Website, November, 2003)

For nearly everyone between 30 and 50, Donna Summer is much more than just a voice on the radio, She is the voice that sang the soundtrack of our youth, our first loves and, inevitably, our last dances.  And though the voice that ignited the fires of a disco generation has been flickering almost subliminally throughout most of the last decade, dance music's grand dame is weaving her way back into the spotlight with two projects that take a look on her life and her music.  The Journey: The Very Best of Donna Summer celebrates her extraordinary career in which she produced 14 Top 10 hits, two platinum and six gold singles, five Grammys in four different categories and an Oscar for Last Dance, the song that crystallized the disco phenomenon.  At the same time, Summer has released an autobiography, Ordinary Girl: The Journey, in which the legend recounts her life from the childhood days when she sang in a Boston church to her European coming of age in the 60s to her unexpected reign as the queen of disco.  Summer chatted with Watermark over the phone, talking about her book, the roles of diva and mother and a few of her favorite things. SUMMER: Hey Sully! (Laughs) With a name like that, you have to be Irish. SULLIVAN: You got it! Want to guess what city I was born in? SUMMER: Boston! Right again. But enough about me. It's always about me but this time it's about you! What made you decide to finally write your life story and share it with the masses?  SUMMER: I had offers to do an autobiography for many, many years and from different people but I always turned them down. But it came to a place where it was really time for me to go in another direction and to just do something else creatively. I didn't intend for it to be an autobiography. It was actually going to be a fictional story with excerpts of my life framed around fictitious people.  Do you think anything you share in the book will surprise your fans? SUMMER: I'm sure there are things that people will be surprised at. One of my theories while writing the book was that I couldn't talk badly about people or be critical of anyone but myself. It wasn't meant to be that kind of a book. It's not really a tell-all.  You truly are a survivor and in so many ways. Where do you get your strength to carry on? SUMMER: Well, I think that's pretty clear too. (laughs) I have always had really deep faith. You're a Sullivan so I am sure your family was probably Catholic or something so you can understand. When you are growing up in that kind of environment, you definitely get a certain amount of, you know, faith. Over time you realize that there are things that you can't change in life. But there are a lot of people who don't have that and they don't know how to hold on.  So, you are saying that when life dealt Donna Summer some unexpected blows, she was ready for it? SUMMER: Yes. If you are going to have a trauma, the time to fortify yourself is before you have it. A lot of people wait until they are in the trauma and they end up physically debilitated and they cannot function. Then they want to have faith and obviously their faith is sometimes weakened because of their circumstances. So I think it is better to have faith all the time.  That's so true. I mean, you want to put up the storm shutters before the storm. SUMMER: (Laughs) Right, you don't want to wait and put them up the day after.  As a child, what was it that inspired you to go down the path towards being a singer? SUMMER: Originally, I would say it was watching those old movies with Judy Garland and she was doing (sings) “Somewhere over the rainbow.” So you got a lot of that impact and that feed from those early movies that you'd see on TV and you would emulate it and sing it 50 times. My mother would say “Do that song again.” So in keeping with the theme of our annual awards issue, I thought I would ask you about some of your favorite things. Do you have a favorite theme park? SUMMER: (Laughs) A favorite theme park? Probably Disney World.  Well that is the best answer considering I am talking to you from Orlando.  SUMMER: Are you serious? Are you calling me from Disney World? You stinker you! Are you there on vacation?  No, no. The paper is based here in Florida and this is where I live.  SUMMER: That's great. I love Orlando! It's so cute and we had a really great time there. I went there for three weeks and did six shows for this company and they put us up in a really nice hotel. It was like one long paid vacation for three straight weeks and we had a ball! Do you have a favorite theatrical production? SUMMER: I honestly gotta tell you that I am a major Lion King fan. The production that Julie Taymor did I think it was a turn of the turn-of-the-century in terms of musicals. I think she did some extraordinary things there.  OK, now let's play with some song titles. Who is your favorite Bad Girl (uh-huh).  SUMMER: Cher! She absolutely is another survivor and I admire her greatly.  So how about your favorite celebrity survivor? SUMMER: Tina! Tina Turner is definitely the celebrity survivor.  Who is your favorite person to “have by you, to guide you, to hold you and to scold you” cause “when you're bad, you're oh, so bad”? SUMMER: Definitely my husband Bruce.  You're a mom to three beautiful daughters. How do you go from being mom to being a super-diva? SUMMER: (laughs) Super-diva? Well, at home I am never super-diva because I can't be. They won't let me be that or let me go there. They're like “Ok, Mom, we are not doing that. I'm sorry, You are acting like a diva.” And what can I say to that except “OK?” I would say that I have an exceptionally good relationship with my daughters because we are very real with one another.  One of your daughters is now a regular on My Wife and Kids. How does having one of your kids going into show biz make you feel? SUMMER: She was in the New York Post this weekend, a full-page ad! I am really happy because I think she knows the pitfalls. She has been on the road with me and backstage and I made her work as part of the crew so that she has regard for other people and what they bring to her. I hope that I've trained her well enough so that when she becomes successful she recognizes that it's not just based on herself, that it's based on a lot of things and that she doesn't get, you know, puffy and stuffy with it (laughs).  So home base for you these days in Nashville. What made you decide to move there?  SUMMER: Why not? It's a great place to be and the kids had a great time going to school there and it's a nice community. When we moved here, the kids wanted and needed to be in a certain neighborhood so they could be close to school. It was kind of a stretch for me but we did it and now it's over and the kids are out of school and it is time for Mama to have the house that she wants. Our new place is a mini-estate on 25 acres and it is beautiful.  Wow. So aside from real estate, what are some of your other hobbies? SUMMER: (laughing) Well, decorating! I love to decorate and I practically live at the Design Center. I am also a total fabric junkie and I am always doing something.  You spent a lot of time living in Germany so I'm dying to know if you have a favorite German curse word? SUMMER: Scheisser (fucker). You know, there aren't that many. Really there are a couple of other ones but they are not that common. As someone who has been all around the world, do you have a pace that is your favorite as a getaway or vacation destination? SUMMER: Italy! Let's face it, Tuscany …Can we talk here? Hello? Italy as a country and the food, you can't beat it. I like the Italian people a lot too because they are so warm and inviting.  Do you have a favorite drag impersonation of you?  SUMMER: Oh, God! (laughs) I don't think there can be just one because there have been so many of them. We did a concert about four years ago and it wasn't even in one of the big cities, but it was a pretty large concert and the whole first two rows were entirely in drag as me. You have always had a large and strong fan base in the GLBT community. Where does that come from, our attraction to you? SUMMER: In spite of what anyone may think, whatever that means, I just think that I'm down to earth and I'm real. I think that I've suffered some things and that there is a commonality in pain and also a commonality in understanding. I just think that I get it.  Well, you are no super-diva. I feel as if I'm talking with a friend.  SUMMER: You are! I tell everybody to remember that I am a mother. And that may sound strange coming from a diva but I think that the mother thing overrides everything. Once you become a mother, you look at everyone as someone else's child and I think that really makes a difference in me as a person. One last question: What's your favorite song that you've recorded? SUMMER: Of all the songs that were hits that people would know I would have to say Last Dance is my favorite. The fact that it won an Oscar and that it was written for me by Paul Jabara makes it definitely one of my favorites.  Originally printed on Watermark Online website