The second episode of An American Family, which focused on her first encounters with the underground, provided fodder for water cooler conversations around the country. “We’re going to the La MaMa theater tonight,” Lance told his mother, Pat Loud. “Vain Victory with Jackie Curtis. It’s the ultimate of the underground, honey. You’ll just think it’s so neat.” Several minutes of campy performance footage from Curtis’s show were included in that episode, as well as an awkward moment in which Holly Woodlawn met Pat Loud in a Chelsea hallway. Later that evening, in a diner after the play, the cameras made it clear that Pat was not impressed by what she saw at La MaMa. Pat Loud explained her reaction to Vain Victory decades later, which mostly had to do with the fact that it was a hot summer night, and La MaMa had no air conditioning. Along with the outré dialogue and uncomfortable bench seating, it was all a bit too much for her. “I was just a housewife from Santa Barbara, California,” she said, “which was a small town at that time, and I had no idea there were people like this in the world. And it was pretty crazy. I remember there was a toilet in one of the major scenes, and it just did not appeal to me. It did not have my name on it.”

From Chapter 23 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore