moon zappa

Moon Zappa is Frank & Gail Zappa's first child, born September 28, 1967, in New York. A singer, actress, writer, director.

As a 14 year old, she contributed vocals to "Valley Girl" (she was credited for her improvised monologue) from "Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch" - the title was Moon's description of the image on the cover.

In the film "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" (1999) the character Dr Evil says: "The moon unit will be divided into two divisions: Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa."

Moon Zappa contributed to "Blindsided by a Diaper", a book that got released in 2007 by Three Rivers Press and that talks about the effects of having a baby. Moon's piece is entitled: "Having a Baby can Waylay Getting You Way Laid".

34	frank zappa: you are what you is (1981, 2lp, usa, barking pumpkin)
35	frank zappa: ship arriving too late too save a drowning witch (1982, lp, usa, barking pumpkin)
	dweezil zappa: havin' a bad day (1) (1986, lp, usa, barking pumpkin records st 74204) - feat. thunes, wackerman, moon & ahmet, produced by fz
40	frank zappa: them or us (1984, 2lp, usa, barking pumpkin)
	1985 frank zappa- meets the mothers of prevention
	1987 brown, julie- trapped in the body of a white girl
	1989 gumby- gumby
	dweezil zappa: confessions (3) (1991, cd, fr, food for thought cdgrub-19) - feat.mike keneally, scott thunes, ahmet zappa, al malkin
	1991 peace choir- give peace a chance (w/ dweezil and ahmet)
	1991 vandals- fear of a punk planet
63	frank zappa: civilization phaze III (1994, 2cd, usa, barking pumpkin)
67	frank zappa: have i offended someone? (1997, cd, usa, ryko)
	peter stuart: propeller (2002, cd, usa, vanguard records) - feat.moon zappa
	gene simmons: ***hole (2004, cd, eu, sanctuary sancd145) - feat.ahmet, dweezil, frank, gail & moon zappa - track co-written by fz
	various artists: the frank zappa aaafnraa birthday bundle (2006, itunes, -) - feat. frank, moon, dweezil, ahmet & diva zappa
	kip winger: songs from the ocean floor (2006, cd, usa, sidewinder 60018-2) - feat. moon zappa
	documentary: frank zappa - summer '82 - when zappa came to sicily (2017, blu-ray, usa, mvd visual) - featuring massimo bassoli, frank, gail, dweezil, moon and diva zappa, thomas nordegg and steve vai
	various artists: dr demento covered in punk (2018, 2cd, usa, demented punk records dpcd001) - incl. the meatmen: 'my guitar wants to kill your mama' (frank zappa), and missing persons: 'disco boy' (frank zappa), feat. moon zappa

From: unknown
I've seen Moon as a VJ on VH1. She's probably one of the most amusing VJs I've seen. She sings and kids around a lot. Of course she is forced to play a lot of bad music but that's TV...

plaedo sez:
Moon has also been on a recent episode of Roseanne. She can Be heard on brother Dweezil's "Confessions" album, as well as his first album "Havin A Bad Day". If you call the 1-800-anal retentive hotline number on the inside cover of the Z album "Music for Pets" you can talk to either gail zappa or moon unit, the passcode is 12345.

Dancin Bear said:
The 80`s were too cool, and moon zappa is one of my all time faves! I loved her in "Spirit of 76". She should have been cast in the movie "Valley Girl". Good Luck! Moon Zappa where ever you may be. Just gag me with a spoon!

armen Rodriguez said:
Moon is in a play right now. I went to see it last weekend. It was great. It's in L.A. at the Hudson Theater. She has a huge part and she sings in it too The play was great I've gone to see it 2 times now. The play was written by her friend Laura Milligan If you can go see it I suggest you do it's called "Waiting for Studio 54" and theres going to be an article about it in this coming issure of Details magazine.

From: the New York Post
Moon Unit Zappa, the daughter of rocker Frank Zappa, has just sold her first novel, America the Beautiful, to the Dell Publishing division of Random House Inc. for a six-figure advance.
The book is a literary comic romance set in present-day Los Angeles. Its plot centers around a 30ish woman named America Throne who is dumped by her painter boyfriend, Jasper Hush, and pushes on to make new discoveries about her inner self.

It's not too surprising that the author, who made the mid-80s hit record Valley Girl with her famous dad is both embracing and spoofing Left Coast culture.

The story is about radiant self-acceptance, Zappa says. She ^America Throne_ thinks she has happiness, loses it and then has to find it again.

I think it will have a happy ending, but I really don't know, says the author, who does an every- other-monthly column for the cutting-edge West Coast magazine Ray Gun. I didn't do chapters - I did fragments of chapters.

I'm like a ship in the middle of the ocean, adds Zappa, meaning her book, like the proverbial ship at sea, could land anywhere.

Other similarities to book writing and deep-sea sailing? When I scream, nobody can hear me. She hopes, of course, that will change once she is published.

I'm really hoping the book will be funny, Zappa says. I'm just going to explore some aspects of crazy California living.

It will probably be out in spring 2000, says Dell editor-in-chief Leslie Schnur. The novel will be published by Dell's hardcover Delacorte imprint.

Dell had to beat out three other publishers, including an in-house rival, the Crown Publishing unit of Random House, Penguin Putnam's Viking imprint and HarperCollins - a unit of News Corp., which also owns The Post.

We spoke on the phone, and she and I bonded, says Dell's Schnur. She's fun and warm.

Schnur said this is the first incomplete manuscript she has bought from a first-time writer.

Zappa says she hopes to complete it by the spring. Jimmy Vines at the Vines Agency Inc. handled the deal.

We had two rules growing up in my house: 1. If you're going to take a shower, do it with whomever you're dating so you don't waste water; and 2. If you buy one for yourself, buy six, because chances are everybody's going to want one. The first rule traumatized me because I used the bathroom right next to my parents' room, so I didn't date much, and the second one, well, I was the only one who followed it, so it wasn't exactly a two-way street. Needless to say, it occurred to me when I was old enough to make rules of my own that they should be fair and simple. Mine was, If the Bon Jovi video with Jon walking down the street singing "She don't even know my name" came on, I was to be notified at once. Since it was the only rule I had, I wanted strictest attention paid to its enforcement.

You see, I knew Jon Bon Jovi was mine. How did I know? He wore a little crescent moon around his neck, which could be seen quite clearly in the video. So it was only a matter of time.

Up until seeing Jon on the tube, I had spent most of my life locked in my bedroom, miserable about my raging acne and "friend" label with the guys at school. In those days if you didn't have a concave stomach while lying flat on your back at the beach (so you could see your pubic hair in your bathing-suit bottoms), you just weren't noticed. My dad's music had made me shy, almost repressed about my own anatomy, with his lyrics about ramming things up poop chutes and shooting too quick-this, from my dad! He was so open creatively that I was off in search of black turtleneck bathing suits with long sleeves. "Valley Girl," the song my father and I did together in 1982, made me feel like a sad zoo specimen. Going through puberty in front of the world on shows like Solid Gold and Merv Griffin only added to my self-consciousness. But Jon lifted me out of all this. I felt uninhibited, unbridled lust for him. My attention became focused on the love I felt coursing through my veins. Who cared if my legs touched at the top? That's when I started perusing magazines like Kerrang! and Circus for clues to meeting my dream man. I was studying photos of him backstage at Ratt shows and Motley Crue gigs when it dawned on me. Start going to rock concerts! Hang out backstage!

My brother Dweezil was already into metal and had been trying to get me interested in Van Halen, Def Leppard and Ozzy for years. He is two years younger than I am, so that was reason enough to reject his worldview. But now I had a purpose! By day I dreamed up ways to make Jon mine by using some elementary witchcraft: writing my name in cursive with "Bon Jovi" as my new last name, dripping candle wax on the curling j's and n's, and burning the edges of the page to make it look like something out of medieval times while reciting made-up virginal incantations. By night, Dweezil and I would go as far as Irvine to see shows: Aerosmith, Motley Crue, Ratt...no sign of Jon anywhere...Dokken, Rough Cutt...hey, that guitar player is kind of cute....No, stay focused! I would think. Stay close to the Implants; they must know something because they keep getting asked into the inner chambers backstage.

I wasn't lucky enough to be born with a body that responded well to acid-washed jeans and Lycra, so I had to rely on my last name to get past the bodyguards. Dweezil sensed my lack of interest in the guitar solos and ditched me when I started spending nights at metal clubs on Sunset Strip like the Rainbow and the Cathouse, hoping for a glimpse. At one point I was so desperate that I was prepared to try Gazzari's, the lowest dive on the head-banging totem pole, when Dweezil took pity on me and tossed me a golden bone: a pass to the NAMM convention, a trade show devoted entirely to the latest amps, guitars, drum kits-a musician's dream. Endorsement city! Surely Jon would be there.

He wasn't, but Dweezil and I did get invited to the rock & roll charity bowlathon that Jon was expected to attend. We were hot on his trail! I could feel my future as his bride gathering momentum. On the magical night, we arrived to see the likes of Tom Petty, Gene Simmons and Rob Halford trying on bowling shoes and throwing gutter balls like normal folk. I spotted some of the guys from Poison and Faster Pussycat and all of Whitesnake when, sweet Jesus, there he was! The spell worked! As if in a dream, I approached him (very anti-The Rules), introduced myself and stood there staring at his moon necklace, waiting for him to kiss me. Destiny! But he didn't get it. He looked around the room at the other girls, the ones whose legs didn't touch at the top. The spell didn't seem to be taking. Oh, why wasn't I lucky enough to be a video vixen crawling out of a manhole on a steamy, wet street at night? Or standing in front of a wind machine, dressed like a cross between a waitress and a hooker in red vinyl with a cherry in my mouth? Why wasn't I lucky enough to be a stripper (sorry, "dancer") standing on the hood of an expensive sports car in stilettos and a leopard-print bikini? Why wasn't I Tawny Kitaen? He'd want me then. I tried to get his attention back. "What sign are you?" I asked, trying to help him realize that what he was looking for was right under his perfect little nose. "Pisces," he said politely while beginning to move on. The room was spinning now. Pisces? It can't be! Not at all good for a Libra. I was devastated, ruined. That's when I spied the guitar player from Rough Cutt....

After all the shows I had seen and after all the music I had ingested, I realized I'd become as fickle as the next metal head. I bowled the night away, all the while singing Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive" to myself: "It's all the same, only the names have changed."

In the end, I guess what I'm saying is that all that wishing energy must go somewhere, so be careful. Sometimes you chase a dream, and another one catches you instead. In my case I chased Jon but landed in the lap, literally, of a certain other rock god (okay, demigod), with whom I had my singlemost formative and traumatizing sexual experience to date. At his show I could see clearly that although thousands of screaming fans adored him, he was playing for me. Finally, someone who didn't like me for my mind! I won't disclose the horrifying details of the event, but I will say that later that night he was generous enough to let me sleep on the wet spot.

A year after, I bumped into him at another NAMM show, and he told me he was sorry about everything that had happened, that it had caused him suffering, too, and that the only person he felt he could talk to about the whole thing was his close friend-say it with me now-Jon Bon Jovi.

I may have lost Jon, but the good news is that I can sing along, by heart, to any albums by the following: Ratt, Winger, Scorpions, Metallica, Queensryche, Nelson, Cinderella, Extreme, Pantera, Priest and Van Halen, even the Van Hagar stuff (don't get me started on that subject). I know many others, but these are the ones I am most proud of. I have begun to appreciate the more easy-listening stuff too: Tool, Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails. I've got my eye on you Trent the Taurus...

P.S. A few years ago, I heard Jon married someone who kind of looks like me. Go figure.

Moon Unit Zappa has spent years coping with a crazy name and the eccentricities of her rock-star father. Her brilliant first novel echoes the experiences that shaped her life.

When I rang Moon Unit Zappa to arrange an interview I was told, "I can't do it today. I have a tree man coming to trim the jacaranda in my front garden". And she can't miss the tree man, who, in a typically Los Angeles touch, only deals with jacarandas. If you have problems with, say, a live oak or palm, get someone else. It's the sort of absurd but telling detail that peppers Zappa's skewed worldview so perceptively recreated in her debut novel, America the Beautiful.

When I arrive at her cottage on a quiet street in the Hollywood Hills, the jacaranda has been pruned. Dressed in green army fatigues, a T-shirt, black boots and sporting silver hoop earrings, Zappa hands me a mug of Earl Grey then leads me into a small backyard. She has olive skin and a strong, intelligent face, framed by shortish dark hair.

As we sip our tea, she lets slip how she stopped a British magazine running a story about her that featured lurid and apparently untrue details about her father, Frank Zappa; the subversive, avant-garde musician who became an anti-establishment icon before he died in 1993. Listening to her story I think of the parallels it is so easy to draw between Zappa and her fictional heroine, Mer (short for America). Mer's dad is the genius artist, Boris Throne, also dead, and both girls labour with the pitfalls of being a C-level celebrity.

For starters, there's Zappa's name. Besides the famous surname, her parents saddled their first-born with a moniker that is quite probably unique on the planet. Zappa is used to the dread phrase, 'You're not...?' 'I have to pay for things with cash because they read my name on a credit card,' she sighs. It's hard to know why the Zappas chose Moon Unit, although the names of their other children, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva, indicate more than a penchant for the unusual. Judging by The Real Frank Zappa Book, Moon may have been a spur-of-the-moment choice, uttered by Zappa on the eve of a 1967 tour with his band, the Mothers of Invention: 'As I walked out the door... I told Gail, "If it's a girl, call it Moon, and if it's a boy, call it Motorhead.'"

Fortunately, Moon has grown into her name. 'I can't imagine changing it. I don't want to lose my name because that's how I know myself. There is a legacy here.' And besides, it has definite market recognition. All of which will be tested by America the Beautiful, a semi-autobiographical book which fires gentle barbs at such LA obsessions as clothes, cults, celebrity and chocolate. 'I think I have a dark view of the world,' she ventures. 'I have to make everything funny, otherwise it all seems so sad.'

Her book had its genesis in a short, first-person magazine article that Moon wrote about growing up in the Zappa household. "I got phone calls from all these agents saying, "Oh, we love your voice. Do you wanna write a book?",' she laughs. 'I thought that was just ridiculous. I thought it was a fluke. Every job I've ever gotten has been an accident. No, really. All the jobs I actually go after, I don't get. My acting life is a catastrophe.'

Indeed, before switching to writing, Zappa spent years as a struggling actress, mixing off-beat film roles - has anyone actually seen Anarchy TV, Pterodactyl Women from Beverly Hills or The Dark Side of Genius'? - and television appearances in Roseanne and Murder One, with voice-over gigs and stand-up comedy. 'I should just drive around this city,' she says, 'and take photos of all the buildings I've been humiliated in.'

It took Zappa two years to decide which agent to choose. Ten days later she had a publishing deal. 'First, I was so excited that I would never have to go to another audition,' she recalls, over the moon, so to speak. 'Then I panicked.' Part of the problem was that America the Beautiful was conceived when Zappa, like Mer, had been torpedoed by a break-up. Writing it down served as therapy. But by the time she signed her deal she had met her fiance. 'So, I've got a new relationship and I'm trapped in this old life.'

Actually, her old life was pretty extraordinary. Although she was born in New York ('I like to think of myself as a New Yorker, which is pathetic'), Zappa has lived most of her life in Los Angeles. More specifically the Hollywood Hills in and around Laurel Canyon. She thrives on the city's addictive energy. 'People come here to make their dreams come true. You can feel that. You just feel that you can express yourself.'

She spent her childhood in a log cabin, once owned by silent cowboy star Tom Mix and later destroyed in a fire. Today it looks like a swimming pool,' says Zappa. 'It was actually a bowling alley that was underneath the house. Apparently, Tom Mix's horse is buried there. Later we found out there were caves behind the house where the Manson clan was holed up.'

While the cabin doesn't make it into America the Beautiful, there are some fleeting references to the counterculture era. 'Yeah, my mother did literally hitch-hike barefoot to the country store,' Zappa smiles. Nurtured by her parents' non-conformist world, young Moon didn't understand that existence outside the Zappa household was different. At school she felt like an outcast, wise beyond her years. 'I didn't have any concept of age or authority. I remember realising, "Oh, the world has rules and we don't." '

In America the Beautiful, Mer worries that at 29, with no career or boyfriend, she's a failure. Zappa, now 32, spent her 20s feeling blue. 'Before writing the book,' she says, 'I would have called myself a melancholy person. I was always depressed.'

Often typecast as 'zany' and 'wacky', Zappa says she's 'quite shy'. She reads books, listens to music and goes for nature walks. She likes friends who make the world a more harmonious place. 'My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated.'

Her free-wheeling childhood triggered a craving for boundaries that echoes the girls in Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky. 'I grew up with too much freedom,' says Zappa, who sees herself as a late developer. 'You can't define yourself opposite space.' It probably didn't help that her parents withdrew her from school at 15.

In 1982, aged 14, Zappa recorded Valley Girl with her dad, mocking the status-obsessed rich teens who hung out in San Femando Valley shopping malls. Suddenly she had a hit record. 'I made enough money to buy a house.

That's crazy.' But fame proved ephemeral. 'I peaked early,' she says ruefully. 'I was told I'd missed my boat.' If there's anything more mortifying than being famous at 14, it's being washed up right after.

Taught to be kind, Zappa spent her 20s, the depressed years, struggling to survive in the Hollywood snake-pit, where life is seen in simple Darwinian terms of winners and losers. Swamped by what she felt was a chaotic life - 'I feel like I'm in a batting cage and they just keep sending balls at me faster and faster' - Zappa savoured mundane, repetitive tasks. 'The idea of licking stamps seemed great fun for me.' Writing saved her. Sitting at her computer, marshalling her ideas - 'like wrangling a bunch of crazy kids' - has been quite a godsend. 'I learnt that characters always have to do something. Mer's given me the gift of taking action when I'm depressed.'

Amazingly, she still lives on the same street as her mother, Gail, and her siblings. 'I see them all the time. We're close. There's a bond that's strong.' This ghost road simultaneously combines living in the past and the present, a heady mixture. 'It wasn't until I travelled to Crete that America the Beautiful came together for me. I think it's because, when I'm at home, I'm inundated with my environment and my past. So many horrible things, so many great things, have happened on this street.'

When she made Valley Girl many fans, immune to satire, thought she was a 'val girl'. So did the media. Zappa says she wrote a novel, rather than a memoir, because fiction 'gets closer to the truth'. Yet, while America the Beautiful has parallels with her own life, Zappa (whose gimlet eye for LA weirdness evokes Carrie Fisher's work) mirrors a wider reality.

Still, comparisons will inevitably be made between Frank Zappa and Boris Throne. But while Boris is a hedonist, Zappa says her father was 'very, very shy about his body'. She recalls an occasion when she was told to take a coffee to her father, who was reclining in his bath. 'I was probably eight or nine. It was an awkward moment. "Ohmigod! I'm seeing my father naked." And he was definitely not comfortable.' Still, he did like sex. 'Not many people know what their parents sound like having sex,' snorts Zappa, who had the next room. 'It was noisy.'

But, like Boris, Frank was a workaholic. During her childhood, Zappa's father was often on tour. She remembers being mad at his fans because they took him away from her. Later, she says he spent much of his time in the studio, working nights and sleeping through the days. 'I had to be quiet in the house so he could sleep,' says Zappa. She was mortified that her friends, who often stayed over, might catch Frank wandering naked around his house at night. Then there were his explicitly sexual lyrics. 'When you're a kid, it's "Why is he talking about those body parts?"'

When Valley Girl hit, Zappa considered a music career. Her dad, who had to fight for artistic freedom, advised otherwise. 'He begged me not to go into showbiz,' says Zappa, who admits she isn't 'real familiar' with her father's music. 'He didn't want me to suffer the humiliation of someone else getting to decide my fate. He thought I was going to be an artist.'

She still dabbles with song lyrics. 'I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song,' says Zappa, who shares her father's irreverence. She also pens film scripts (later, I meet her writing partner, an actress from Xena, Warrior Princess) and has a sharp ear for slang. If Valley Girl gave us 'ohmigod' and 'fershur', her novel scores with 'this is so my life' and 'yunno'.

Meanwhile, despite her penchant for the dark side, she remains sweetly and quirkily idealistic. 'That's why I have that quote by Issa (an 18th-century Japanese haiku poet) at the very beginning of my novel. "The man pulling radishes pointed the way with a radish." I think that's perfect. That your own experience keeps taking you towards something. My book adds the hope that it's a better something.'

'America the Beautiful' (Review) is available for &9.99 post free in the UK from Telegraph Books Direct, 24 Seward Street, London EC1 V 3GB or by calling 0870-1557222. Please quote NB908 when ordering

A bizarre childhood gave Moon Unit Zappa a taste for the humdrum things in life, she tells Christopher Goodwin

For Moon Unit Zappa, growing up with that name was the least of her problems. Moon Unit might have seemed a bizarre name in Guildford, Surrey, but it wasn't really all that strange in a town where every other child is called something like Beauty, Treasure or Luna.

Moon, now 32, had parentage that explains her name. She is the eldest child of the late cult musical genius Frank Zappa and his wife, Gail. Moon's siblings have equally unlikely monickers: Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva, Zappa was one of the most recognisable and influential counterculture figures of the late 1960s arid 1970s with his lank hair, droopy moustache and irreverent attitude. But unlike many of the musicians of that era who burnt out on drugs, Zappa remained a prolific and respected musician and composer, producing some 50 albums.

His range was extraordinary: his complex orchestral work was performed by many of the world's leading orchestras, yet he also delighted in undercutting pretensions with songs such as Don't Eat the Yellow Snow, about urinating in the Arctic. While Zappa thought of himself as a patriot, he loathed corporate America and described love songs "as one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States".

Later in his life Zappa became a severed icon, especially in the eastern bloc, beloved of people such as Czechoslovakia's post-communist president Vaclav Havel for his music and his commitment to freedom of expression. Zappa died in 1993 of prostate cancer; he was 52.

A little over three years ago Moon wrote an article for Details magazine about what it was like "growing up a Zappa". The article sparked interest from publishers who wanted her to expand on it for a book. "But that just seemed cheesy to me," she says.

Instead, she has written America the Beautiful, a work of "fiction" that is a thinly veiled account of her life over the past few years. Her alter ego in the book is America Throne, whose father, a famous and bizarre cult painter named Boris Throne, dies in early middle age. Like the Zappas, the Thrones live a bohemian Los Angeles life.

Moon says she wanted to tell a story "about somebody who is given, by society's standards, everything, and how unlikable that is. I had a famous name but not a body of work that any body could recognise. I had the perks of growing up the daughter of somebody famous, but none of the confidence of having those things, because they weren't earned by me".

We are sitting in the small dining room of her modest Los Angeles home. Although Moon's boyfriend, a drummer with a rock band, is slumped in the next room watching the afternoon soaps, there's no other hint that we're in a Zappa home. It's very neat, clean and quiet. And we're having what appears to be a normal conversation about the usual kind of stuff. And I we've got our clothes on. Weird.

Moon is pretty, funny and articulate. She's quick to laugh and to sense what makes other people laugh, honed from needing to get attention in a mad house hold and, more recently, from performing a monthly stand-up comedy routine at a local club. Her large, frame-less glasses highlight her clear, light brown eyes.

Moon first became famous in her early teens for highlighting the Valley Girl phenomenon. Her song Valley Girl became a cult hit for her father in the early 1980s, poking fun at the vacuous teens who lived in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles and spent their time m shopping malls saying things such as "gag me with a spoon".

It still irks Moon that people don't realise that the whole thing was satire; it wasn't the kind of life she was leading or aspired to. In fact, she wrote it to gether father's attention.

When I ask her what kind of relationship she had with her father she says, quickly: Telepathic." What she means is that she hardly ever saw him, so she felt she had to communicate with him on some non-physical level. When he was at home he worked all night and slept all day. He was also often away for months, touring.

Moon was fairly young when she realised that what went on in her house wasn't the same as what went on in the rest of the world. Outside the home there were completely different rules,' well, there were rules. Inside the Zappa home there were none.

It wasn't so much a loose, hippie kind of thing - Frank and Gail weren't hippies - but domestic life as a deliberately anarchistic happening.

It meant that Moon never felt safe at home. Partly because it wasn't. Her parents were always terrified that she and her siblings might be kidnapped. And there were always bizarre people hanging round the house.

"I remember letting someone in the house who had a gun," she recalls. "And when I was about 10, letting someone else in who was just out of the insane asylum.

"My parents were extremely generous," Moon adds. "The people they would get to work for them might not have a regular bathing habits, for instance, but maybe they'd be really good at making Claymation dolls. Or maybe someone would be a fairly reliable baby-sitter, but they would wear masking tape on their nipples as a regular outfit. "There were always lots of those kind of people around. I remember one guy who drilled a hole in his nose so he could whistle out of it."

She loved spending time in some of I her friends' homes, because they were so normal. "I remember I had a friend whose family had dinner together," she says, "and the mother would tuck you in at night and make breakfast in the morning. They even had a spare bike for a friend. It just seemed so amazing to me.

"And GQ magazine was just the most exotic thing in the world. Oh, the guys have clothes that match, how strange. When your father's wearing women's clothes and platform shoes, a pair of loafers looks incredible."

Moon grew much closer to her father in the months leading up to his death, and was there when he died. She now respects him and her mother because "they did not try to change who they were just to try to make me happy. They said, 'I'm me, this is it. And you're going to be you.' "

Moon seems to be surprised that I still sense some anger towards her father in the book. She says she doesn't want it to be taken that way.

'I was trying to show the difficulty of being an artist and still having a family, and to show people that it can be done," she says. "But if that's the worst that's going to happen, that your kids are pissed off with you, big deal. They're going to be pissed off with you no matter what you do.''

the official valley girl coloring book by moon and frank zappa (1982, book, usa, price / stern / sloan)
america the beautiful by moon unit zappa (2000, book, uk, headline book publishing)
papa, les mecs et moi by moon unit zappa (2004, book, france, éditions j'ai lu) = french translation of "america the beautiful"
blindsided by a diaper (2007, book, usa, three rivers press) includes a chapter that was written by Moon Unit Zappa

Moon Zappa's proposal for Frank Zappa's "Dance Me This" album. It got rejected by Gail.