About Serenity Hawkfire

Why I Decided to Create a Parody of Myself
By Suzanne Falter-Barns

I am a self help author and workshop leader who, as my media materials put it, “has appeared on more than one hundred radio and TV shows!” I’ve written earnest self help books that have actually gotten fan letters (albeit dozens not hundreds) and I have been quoted in big glossy magazines. So I could have just walked away and called it a day, vocationally speaking.

But here I am, basically making a mockery of my entire career with a parody character who is ever so slightly like me. (No I don’t wear write robes; yes, I do lead workshops.) Understandably, friends and loved ones have asked me why. Why must I now go around being a parody of a New Age guru, and a really corrupt, narcissistic one at that? MUST I give New Age pandering such a bad name?

Well, I guess I created Dr. Serenity Hawkfire because I needed a break. I was tired of being serious and helpful all the time. I wanted to laugh again. Oh yeah, and I wanted to perform again, too. So about 5 years ago Serenity was launched for that very reason.

But why Serenity? OK, the purpose of my life (here I go sounding earnest again) is to move people to express themselves. So ‘Dr. Serenity Hawkfire’s Beyond Being Workshop’ kind of does that, too, albeit through humor instead of ‘deep’ workshop exercises. I really see it as a total party that parades itself around as a workshop. People who come say it’s fun.

I know I’m having a grand old time.

Why the Guitar is One of Serenity Hawkfire’s Primary Tools

A lot of what Serenity does on stage involves her guitar. Back in my impressionable teen years I taught myself to play my friend Heather’s cracked acoustic guitar. I bent over that baby for 3 and 4 hours at a time and I got as good as you can get when you have no idea what you’re doing. I adored it.

When I grew up, at age 22, I bought a real guitar and took some lessons. And I spent a few years accompanying myself in the lonely silence of my studio apartment each night after work, while I nursed a therapeutic beer. That good habit also disappeared over time.

But now, incredibly, the guitar is back in my life. It has lurked in the corners of my various homes for the last twenty-five years (the last time I’d seriously played it.) My husband has taken lessons. My daughter, a singer, plays it for a while. But I avoided it - that would just be opening up an old can of worms, I thought. One that was just part of my past.

Then it became clear that Serenity Hawkfire needed musical accompaniment. Furthermore, to do the fringe festival circuit in 2008, I was going to have to provide my own and make it easy to travel with. And that … hey … a somewhat corny, folky guitar strum might be fun in the background of the show. And that … HEY - this is actually a character who always has her guitar in easy reach. She NEEDS that corny, folky guitar! Her guitar manifests the power of WaWa!

Derrick, my director, pointed out that Serenity’s guitar is her primary weapon in the attack on squashed self-expression. Like the Lobal Connector Tool and the Silencer, she pulls it out at the drop of a hat to drive home her point that we ALL need to self-express.

Recently I started taking guitar lessons again — after 25 years. I somehow seem to be playing better than ever. Maybe because I grew up?

Why Serenity Hawkfire is a Defrocked WASP

That would be basically because I am, too. The old dictum: write what you know. I grew up in the tree-lined sanctuary of Chestnut Hill, a stodgy suburb of Philadelphia where my artist family tried like hell to fit in. I am not fondly remembered in this grand old town because I wrote and published a rather rude novel about the place in 1990. (It was my delayed coming of age novel.) I still feel bad about that.

My dad was a successful artist, a minor celebrity. And my mother was a columnist for House & Garden magazine, an even more minor celebrity. We were an ‘artsy’ family who favored The 21 Club in New York, expensive prep schools, and caviar on our omelets.

We never had quite enough money to really pull off the lifestyle effortlessly. (All kinds of things, including school tuitions got bartered for paintings.) And we didn’t have the old school connections that you needed to belong to the in crowd. (It was my mother who wanted those.) BUT …we were interesting.

Serenity Hawkfire, like me, never fit in either — even in her own family. Her mother, a divorcee, was a desperate social climber trying to snag a rich man. Her sister is a ‘perfect’ single woman who is a competitive Angora cat breeder, an evangelical Catholic, a proofreader. Both consider Serenity strange, not one of them.

When she sings ‘The Land of LaCoste’, she really mourns the fact that all these beautiful LL Bean people around her were so quick to reject her. She wanted to be loved, respected, invited places, but alas … she was just too strange. (As she puts it, “I was tall, loud, a trisexual”)

My friend Libby MacDonald suggested I create this background for Serenity - our guru was originally the daughter of a stripper from Bayonne - and I’m thrilled she did. Now my character is much realer to my audience, and to me.

This works.

My Performing Experience

In the 1980’s I performed extensively throughout the cabarets of Manhattan as singer and lyricist in an original act titled Carey & Falter. In addition to singing in such landmark cabarets as Don’t Tell Mama’s and Palsson’s, Carey & Falter provided back up vocals for a Brazilian pop recording artist Tanya Maria. In 2004 I wrote and debuted ‘Cole Porter Uncensored’ , a two character Porter review, at The Depot Theater, Westport NY. I’ve also played many roles over the last ten years including leads in regional and local musical theaters, and performed at numerous cabarets and benefits.