Abby Heller-Burnham's birthday: September 18, 1980. A Virgo and a Monkey. Now, Abby's mid-Aughts musical heritage has been well-documented. Those who need to know, know: Abby played keyboards and sang for the all-girls rock band The Bad News Bats, led by Liz McDermott. The Bats were quite popular on the East Coast for a while, and Abs managed to move in rarified company. The scandal about Abby and music is this: though a dab hand at playing rock, Abs own peccadillo was that what she actually felt most musically attached to was show tunes. Les Mis, for example. I could embed something from Les Mis, but I have my reasons for refusing to do so. I did play Big Star endlessly for Abs in the early Aughts, but her response was never that enthusiastic. What Abs would have enthusiasm for is the very marked hinge from Big Star to painting, photography, and visual art in general. The legendary Mrs. Chilton might've shown Abby very much, as one suspects some of her professors at PAFA were shown by Mrs. Chilton. Alex stands there with his guitar and serenades Ms. Heller-Burnham. And makes no mockery at all, because the seamlessness in Big Star between music and images is something that distinguishes them in a positive light. The glossy, musical theater version of Manhattan being the musical world she was most attached to, I'm glad that Abs got drawn into the rock matrix willy-nilly to strut her stuff as a rock and roll animal. It takes all the masterpieces she produced in the mid-Aughts and transcendentalizes the idea that here's an artist who went the whole nine yards to cover all bases.
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