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from table edge to floor providing a retreat or place of privacy for the performer beneath the table. A video camera rests on the table as two televisions sets, one black-and-white, one color, confront the audience at each down-stage corner; brown paper grocery bags lie on the floor behind the spread of a blanket sized sheet of plastic; sound equipment visible on the stage's perimeter adds to the tangel of appliances and cords populating the set. Everything on the stage is powered by electrical current or preserved by chemicals except, to a certain degree, the sound manipulator John Bender and his assistant and the performer, who is herself wired for sound with a set of earphones. Bender operated his machines to provide aural stimulation; Gallion operates her machines to provide visual stimulation. The audience participates by receiving the aural and visual images, but Bender and Gallion are intrigued with their "toys" and simply allow the audience in. 
At one point, Gallion disappears beneath the table only to be revealed in her privacy by the closed-circuit television sets. She removes stockings and a red polka-dotted brassiere, bandages five or six toes and then smiles genially as she attaches still more cords to her bared chest. Clearly she has no privacy and is unconcerned. Tearing a hole in the wall of crepe paper, she inserts the eye of the camera and slowly surveys the audience. No one has privacy. 

Ascending from, this crawlspace, Gallion wears a white housedress with a twig corsage lined with tiny lights. She appears at once to be an angel beneath a halo of headphones or, just as appropriately, a woman in prison-garb. Possibly she is both a Gallion comments on the woman's total immersion in and subjection to a religion of commercialism. The woman's shape is obscured by the mon-descript dress yet warped by an odd protrusion beneath it whose strangeness is of the same tone as her environment. 

Bender's hypnotic rhythmics and Gallion's constant flitting from toy to toy express a mundanely ordered existence; Gallion fills her time with activities that stimulate her senses. The video camera delights her as she playfully peeks at her audience and trains it upon herself and her toys. Turning two radios on the news coverage, she sets them in the audience on either side. She prepares an hors d'oeuvre for the audience by heating packaged baloney on a curling iron and drying it with a hair dryer. 

Topped with Wonder Bread toast and a sprinkling of Smurf Berry Crunch cereal, the delicacy is offered to each audience member: most are disgusted.

Eerie carousel-like music accompanies Gallion's spreading of grocery articles on the floor near the upstage edge of the plastic sheeting; laundry products, housecleaning aids and cereals make up the barricade. In her silly, coy manner, she shows the audience several advertisements ripped from journals - one - appears to be an ad for handguns - and then proceeds to align the ads on the perimeter of the sheeting. Toothpaste tube in hand, Gallion proceeds to squirt the outline of the United States on her palette-sheeting, switching to processed cheese food squirming from the nozzle of a can to complete the shape. Black shampoo floods Ohio, as Gallion cascades corn flakes on the midwest area. Tide becomes the shorelines, borders and sprinkling of snow on a mountain ridge of cereal.

So pleased is she with her work that she skitters to her camera to record the scene. Toes wiggling in time to Bender's waltz, she appears to be enjoying herself thoroughly, as tiny red dots of light wander over her dress. Placing the bust of JFK in Washington, D.C., she takes up a flashlight and trains it upon her creation, becoming the ruler of the sun in a galaxy of her own making. In the gleeful finale, she makes a "midwest meatloaf" of liverwurst and cereal and shampoo. The delicacy spraddles Ohio as Gallion, resembling the Statute of Liberty, holds high a flyswatter and a can of Cincinnati beer, then inbeds the two "sceptres" in the meatloaf as monuments to the city. 

Suddenly Gallion begins to move sensuously as the lights flicker red and blue. Taken with an idea, she rushes to pass out souvenirs to the audience: "Kate's Chip 'n Cheese" - pressed and packaged in plastic is a blue circle with the words "Cincinnati - The Blue Chip City" floating in a squirt of cheese. The chip is "50% edible" and "each mouthful is a heavenly treat."

[[image]] Kate Gallion. The photo shows her in the process of making her art.