Who?

Facebook memories had me thinking this morning about my various name changes and nicknames over the years (Jack Cheslik, S.J. Cheslik, Steven Cheslik, SteChe, Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, etc.), there have been a LOT, but I’d completely forgotten about one of them.

In 1994, when HERE revived LIZZIE (née Lizzie Borden: An American Musical) and we lengthened it with a handful of new songs, I was deep in the thick of Y’all. I was touring a lot then, so I wasn't in the LIZZIE rehearsal room much, if at all. I wrote the songs wherever I was, recorded them on cassette, bare-bones, just me and a guitar with a fuzz pedal and I think maybe a little Casio keyboard, and I sent them to Tim and the band. There was no written music or M.D., everything was much more DIY indie then than now.

By 1994, Jay and I were starting to tour with Y’all a lot and build a non-New York fan base, most of whom seemed to believe our fictional stage identities were real, or they wanted them to be real. (The psychology of the Y'all fandom is still a mystery to me.) So we decided, a la Pee Wee Herman, that we would let them believe it and never admit otherwise. All our press materials had the fake bios, and, even with the most surreal elements of Y'all, we never let a crack show. (I used to get very confused about how old I was because Y’all Steven was much younger.)

So, when LIZZIE returned, I didn’t want to blow the whole thing up by having it credited to Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, so I made up a pseudonym, and the 1994 version of LIZZIE -- which contained the new songs, House of Borden, Sweet Little Sister, Will You Stay?, Why Are All These Heads Off?, Mercury Rising, and Watchmen for the Morning -- was credited to Stephen Streuber. That seems insane to me now, but at the time I thought it was absolutely necessary.

Thirty years ago we weren’t very good about documenting and archiving, and I’ve never been able to find anything online showing that name, but I know it happened!