In Australia, Jackie made great strides with her singing and performing through her wonderful friend and mentor, Paulene Terry-Beitz. An incredible actor, director and writer, she took Jackie under her wing, and together they devised Jackie’s first one-woman show, “Black Pearls and Strange Fruit.”
Jackie reinvented the dinner show.
“I decided if people wanted a ‘dinner show,’ I would give them one. And the critical difference between my show, and the dinner shows and dinner theater I’d been to in the past was the food. It was not going to be the churned out, mediocre slop masquerading as food that you get more often than not at this type of show.”
Yes, for a time that was a rule in the Gordon household, but it never stuck. All the Gordons displayed some form of musicality (singing, guitar, piano, drumming, the spoons, etc.) and chose to share it at whim.
Jackie did her bit to dispel the bad rap that American food gets globally.
“Australia is inundated with American fast-food chains. Their concept of American food is totally corrupted. But they love great food, so I decided to do what I could to teach them about our cuisine.”
Flourishing in the land of Oz, Jackie worked singing in bands, but she couldn’t keep her hands out of the kitchen. She opened the first café, book and music store in Melbourne and turned the locals on to bagels and wonderful American desserts.
Arriving in Australia, Jackie decided she’d come to a quasi-paradise.
“I was frightened a bit in the early days. I originally arrived in Far North Queensland. Rain forests. The Great Barrier Reef. Visually stunning, but the ‘sticks’ food-wise.”
Pre-Guliani New York was rough and Jackie used singing as an anti-mugging strategy… “Family, friends, they were not allowed to hear me sing, but the scum of New York I could perform for.
Jackie did her “time” on the floor of some of New York’s better dining establishments. She’d never call it her finest hour, but it paid the bills.
Jackie always loved parties, but only if there was delicious food. So in addition to her mega-holiday dinners, she needed little excuse to throw one.
Jackie made her first forays into New York’s food and dining scene during the “radicchio age.”