Lessons from Alice Cooper

By Kim Wilmath

Times Staff Writer

TAMPA

My mom gardens, teaches Spinning and lectures me about wearing sunscreen. She won't watch movies "with all that shoot-'em-up stuff." She updates her Facebook status with messages like, "Be friendly to mankind."

How nice. How very not heavy-metal groupie of her.

Imagine my surprise when her best friend, Kim Burns Cummings, an aesthetician who sculpts pottery, offhandedly mentions "that one time your mom and I partied with Alice Cooper."

Pardon?

My mom, Yvette Wilmath, was unfazed. "Oh, I never told you about that?" she said before breaking into School's Out.

It was the summer of 1971. Mom and my namesake were 14 — on the cusp of typical teenage rebelliousness. They got sent home from school for wearing black Vietnam protest armbands and clogs. They hemmed their skirts short, wore their pants slung low and let their hair grow long. They didn't exactly do drugs, but they experimented.

The worst defiance came when Kim fell in love and ran away with Doug, also 14. When she was returned home two weeks later, Kim was grounded for a year.

But there was one problem. Alice Cooper was coming to town.

Alice Cooper, as in the shock rocker who got his stage name from a Ouija board (he was born Vincent Furnier). The guy with more eyeliner than my mom has ever worn and performances that included re-created executions and boa constrictors.

Kim told her mother she wanted to attend a speech by a nice older woman about the dangers of drugs. Oh, the woman's name? Alice. Alice Cooper. The girls thought they were in the clear.

Then on the day of the concert, Kim got a note from the principal during math class at Woodrow Wilson Middle School, telling her to go straight home. Terrified that something bad was about to happen, Kim brought my mom and a few other friends with her.

There in her shag-carpeted living room, with Kim's smug mother standing by, sat Alice Cooper.

Red shirt, white jacket, stringy black hair, pout. Omigod. It's. Him.

"It took me a few seconds to say, 'Hi. Nice to meet you,' " Kim said.

"I was afraid to say anything," Yvette said. "We were just transfixed. Like, pinch me, is it real?"

Turns out Kim's mother, who managed a talent agency, tracked Cooper down and promised to introduce him to her fashion model clients if he'd visit her house and talk sense into her daughter and her friends.

After quickly changing out of their dorky school clothes and into their bell-bottoms, the girls talked to then-22-year-old Cooper and the band about life on the road. They listened to veiled references of crazy parties and loose women.

Kim's mother kept nudging her, as if to say, "Don't let this be you. Don't you ever lie to me again."

Kim and Yvette didn't get to go to the concert; Kim was still grounded.

And the visit was more of a lesson, Kim said. "After that I said, 'Mom, listen. You're right. I'm wrong. We're going to have to trust each other.' "

Still, the girls say, it was pretty awesome.

"We were sort of surprised about how much beer he drank," Yvette said, cracking up.

Cooper is back in town Friday, this time at Ruth Eckerd Hall, with his Theatre of Death Tour '09. But with grownup schedules and stuff already planned, the friends probably won't make it to the show.

Maybe it's better that way. Maybe it'll always be cooler to remember Cooper through the star-struck eyes of 14. Maybe now, older and wiser, it'd be different.

Kim grabs my face. "You better be wearing sunscreen."

"Oh, I tell her all the time," Yvette said. "Listen to your mother."

Kim Wilmath can be reached at kwilmath@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3386.