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"When I was a Brownie, I ate all of the cookies. From the start I was a very bad girl. I already knew that people were never going to think of me as a nice girl when I was in the fifth grade. I tried to wear go-go boots with my parochial-school uniform.
"I wanted to do everything everybody told me I couldn't do. 'I didn't fit in because I don't belong here,' I thought. 'I belong in some special world. Madonna is a strange name.' I felt like there was a reason. I felt like I had to live up to my name."
Growing up with an icon for a name, Madonna has developed a distinctly democratic attitude toward sacred symbols: they belong to the common man and woman. She hangs multiple crucifixes around her neck, has draped herself undraped in the American flag and made freewheeling use of the hallowed peace symbol.
"My idea is to take these iconographic symbols that are held away from everybody in glass cases and say, Here is another way of looking at it. I can hang this around my neck. I can have this coming out of my crotch if I want. The idea is to somehow bring it down to a level that everyone can relate to.
"I had to cancel two of my shows in Italy because of the Vatican. Rome and Florence. It was propaganda. Even though there were all of these profane gestures and masturbatory demonstrations, I think that my show was very religious and spiritual. I feel fairly in touch with my Italian roots, so when I got to Italy, I expected to be embraced because my show has so much Catholicism in it. Fellini -- whatever! And they slammed the door in my face. They were basically saying that I was a whore and no one should go to my shows and that I was taunting the youth and making them have bad thoughts and blah- blah-blah."
In Italy, under direct attack from the Vatican, Madonna appeared under kliegs in shades and her flaxen halo to defy the prelates with her artistic manifesto:
"My show is not a conventional rock show but a theatrical presentation of my music. And like theater, it asks questions, provokes thoughts and takes you on an emotional journey portraying good and bad, light and dark, joy and sorrow, redemption and salvation. I do not endorse a way of life but describe one, and the audience is left to make its own decisions and judgments."
To use a technical psychiatric term, Madonna is a complicated nut. A darker shadow of her libido has been peeking forth in her recent work. She appeared bound in chains and wearing a black leather dog collar in her video epic Express Yourself. In Hanky Panky she pleaded for corporal punishment, asking for "a good spanking." She frolicked as a stern, let-them-eat-cake fop queen in a send-up of Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the MTV Video Awards ceremony. In her controversial medium-core mini-film, Justify My Love, she played an O-like character drifting through a hypnagogic sexscape worthy of Leopold von Sacher- Masoch. Truth or Dare takes her into murkier erotic territory still: Circe with a wink and a whip. A common theme of these artistic explorations by this former cheerleader is masochism.