evangina - the love band
juli crockett and lisa dee are best friends, late bloomers, and totally goofy. they have made an artform out of humility via humiliation and take great joy in showing people that it's okay to be completely retarded in public. they are best friends, not lesbian lovers. they are very romantic girls, love the d, and like to play their guitars and sing. they are in the band the evangenitals.
official bios:
lisa is a classically trained opera singer and studied with Mike Stevens at Pasadena City College at the The Colburn School for Performing Arts. She completed a two year music program at PCC and won the Lynn Reineke Award for voice and the Charles Pyne Memorial Award for music studies, singing with the college's Opera Workshop, Chamber Singers and the Jazz Choir. Lisa has performed scenes from various operas such as La Boheme, Carmen, Don Giovanni, Le Nozze de Figaro, Die Fledermaus, La Sonnambula, Der Freischutz, and the role of Helene in Paul Hindemith's German expressionist opera Hin und Zuruck, as well as the Valet in the premiere of Gary Bachlund's Four Fables, a series of four one act operas based on Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales directed by Anne Ketchum. lisa has attended vocal master classes with Chloe Owen, Dr. Kay Lipton, and Victoria Kirsch; has performed for LA Opera's LAUSD teacher's training program and has worked as a soprano section leader with the Verdi Opera Chorus in Santa Monica, Angelica Lutheran Church in downtown LA at Burlington and Pico, and the West Hollywood Chorale. While at the college, lisa was also the mc and performed for the African Drumming ensemble led by Francis Awe. In a previous lifetime, lisa was also a member of the Laney College Gospel choir in east Oakland, and took one semester of beginning guitar. That was how she was able to teach juli the only 5 chords she knew at the time, which is really all anyone needs.
Beyond her classical studies, lisa also spent several years performing with east LA's experimental revolution Killsonic, as well as donned a suit and tie to sing spanish a capella improvised harmonies with Las Panchas, and is the premiere voice on the Persian movie title soundtrack for San Francisco Film Festival winner "The Tune of Nostalgia". lisa also can be heard singing on her brother Jeff (Fifteen, Crimpshrine) Ott's punk rock album "Survivor". In addition to her varied and sundry musical talents, lisa has also performed the role of Dulcinea in "The Dawn of Quixote" a play written and directed by Juli Crockett for 24th street theater, which was chosen for the "best of Edgefest's last 5 years" Los Angeles cutting edge theater festival award. She is currently beginning work on the next adventure in theater by watching every copy and version of Orpheus she can get her hands on, and looks forward to getting started on juli's experimetal new vision of the story. lisa also sang a song called "bones" while performing the role of a skeleton in the 4th grade halloween play at pleasant hill elementary school, if you ask her she can probably still remember how the chorus goes and isn't too cool to sing it for you..
lisa dee is cute, funny and painfully sensitive. most of the time she channels God, except for when she is sad and seeking new levels of self inflicted pain and suffering, then she is channeling Jesus.
juli's life and career of provides certain proof that, in creative matters, the shortest distance between two points isn't necessarily a straight line, but that the crooked one is fascinating.
Alabama-born with a Canadian mother, raised through her teenage years in Central Florida, juli attended the Pinellas County Center for the Arts. She transplanted briefly for her junior year in Bermuda and was featured in performances at the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society. juli moved to New York to continue her studies where she earned a BFA in theater at NYU's Tisch School.
While in New York, juli directed several plays, including Brecht's Jungle of Cities at the Red Room and adaptations of the radio drama The Shadow and Dylan Thomas' Doctor in the Devils at Tisch. After a short stop in Guatemala where juli did voluntary theater workshops at a rural public school, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue an MFA in Directing at California Institute of the Arts. At CalArts, her production of Strindberg's Easter was called "transportational" by Butoh master Dawn Saito, and her thesis project [or, the whale], an adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick, written and directed by juli, was a landmark production at the school.
The text of [or, the whale] was later presented in the Moby Dick 2001 conference at Hofstra University, and was also used as the foundation for the inaugural production of the TENT performance group in Portland, Maine.
Simultaneous with her entry into Graduate school, juli began competing as an amateur boxer, winning the Los Angeles District title two years in a row, followed by the Blue & Gold National title. After graduation, she turned pro, enjoying a short but impressive undefeated boxing career of 3-0, two KOs in the 135 lb. lightweight division.
In 2003, after an injury during training, she reluctantly retired from boxing and started a county-funk-folk band, The Evangenitals, for which she is lead vocalist and principal songwriter. In early 2005 due to some scheduling conflicts, Evangenital juli and lisa performed in Long Beach without the gentlemen genitals. They called their female duet act EVANGINA and another legend was born.
Today juli’s exhaustive performing schedule is interwoven with her equally passionate attention to ongoing vocations as playwright and stage director; she continues her education pursuing an advanced degree in philosophy; and at the same time she earns her living performing as the "June Carter Cash" in the world's premier Johnny Cash tribute band Cash'd Out.
juli’s writing is the central theme of her varied interests. The band keeps her creating continuously, many of the lyrics derived from her poetry and stories. Currently, juli is working on a collection of short stories, a screenplay based on the Book of Job, the outline of a novel, and theatrical adaptations of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, the Fausts, the Orpheus myth, and the life and sufferings of Saint Simone Weil which has been commissioned for the Center for New Theater at CalArts.