I remember, through the foggy haze of my wanderlusty youth (my Brigadoon boyhood, if you please) the first time I saw sex for sale.
"Glossy"
that was the first comprehensible verbiage that i could muster after my poor, pre-pubescent brain had been shattered by my bosom-buddy's 'you have to promise not to tell' personal safari into his father's walk-in closet shoebox-cache of a spank bank investment portfolio.
Playboy was the next beacon in the fog.
Of course i remember the name Pamela Anderson, but that's as much a luck of timing: if i had been a seven year old in the early 50's, the name's would be different, but the EFFECT of the magazine would have been the same.
I was lost, for just a moment, in a private (except for some kid, who's name i really can't remember, so i'm not just omitting it for privacy's sake) show room with a technicolour gallery of exquisitely air brushed caricatures of female humanity's pop-sexuality.
Remember, i was a kid, so whatever physiological responses that are supposed to occur in the wake of this kind of momentous exposure, i didn't get em (that i can remember; maybe the blood loss to my brain from...nevermind). Or maybe i did, or maybe it was all in my head.
Maybe, that was, for me, the moment that began my transition out of larval human into full blown philogynist.
We all know that advertising and presentation is what makes a product succeed and the success of a product is as much in how memorable it is as it is functionality...ummm...
anyway
it was my initial exposure to human sexuality through this venue of softcore pornography that would serve as a rough outline of my understanding of what 'beauty' means, what 'sexy' means, and even (sorry mom) what 'woman' means.
or meant
or means.
and so it went;
follow the bouncing ball(s) and sing along, won't you?
American boy experiences glossy print porn
American boy immediately seeks out more
American boy sucks at this poon hound shtick
American boy maybe asks his dad for help
That was a lesson learned the hard way
Refrain:
Some lessons are too easy to let go;
These lessons are got at work and play.
But there are just some lessons that you never forget
And these are the lessons we learn the hard way
Etc...
Don't fret about faulty parenting folks; my parents raised a well educated, sex-positive hippy dude, no doubt. i just maybe would recommend against enlisting them in your search for porn.
Anyway, folks, the sad sack attempt at lyricism above only serves to highlight my next point:
sometimes, we learn to be ashamed of our libido.
We learn that the objectification of women is unequivocally wrong, and genitals (DO WE NOT HAVE A BETTER WORD FOR THEM YET?!) were made to be respected in the abstract, and any and all sex trade is a perpetuation of institutionalized sexism and misogyny, and to participate in such things is a diminishing of who the woman is, of what womanhood is, and eyes above the neckline mister, etc.
We learn a harsh black and white perspective on yet another subject that, it seems, does much better with sequins and bright colors than it does with shades of grey.
I saw my first burlesque show, is what i've been getting at.
And it was amazing.
It was loud, and rowdy, and intelligent, and fun, and fleshy and a little randy...and it wasn't smut.
I was not watching, for all the historic context of the practice and purpose of burlesque, a powdered nose peep show.
Let me explain.
St. Patrick's day is a big fucking deal, apparently, especially in this city.
These people certainly think so.
It's Sunday, March 18th, 745pm, and i'm EXHAUSTED.
I've got the chest funk from hell and a pint or two's worth of St. Saturday's reveling under my waistcoat, making a fermented phlegm swamp out of my upper and lower respiratory system.
All of this compounded with aught but a two hour nap to bridge the time between Saturday's adventuring into Sunday's work-a-day monotony has got me loopy.
But i promised, i Promised my dear friend Adrienne that i would go with my favorite ginger {Her} to a red-head-centric burlesque show.
She's been yammering at me about this whole scene for about as long as we've been friends, and it's about time i see what all the damn fuss is about.
Stoner-cold and more than my share of grumpy, we stomp up to the box office and the attendee tells her that she ain't paying for shit cause she's a ginger and that'll be twenty dollars, sir.
Glare at her.
Glare at friend.
Back to her.
Sulk to ATM.
Finally, we pass the threshold into the room itself to see...a dude onstage, with a mic, bedecked in a Mal Reynolds brown coat and a facial hair configuration that would make a confederate cannon commander blush.
Our MC, it would seem, has a touch of the dandies.
He's leading the crowd in a pledge.
A call and response pledge to not be a douche.
No touchy
No camera
No phone
No touchy
No douchy
Seriously no Touchy
No problem.
I like this guy.
And, like that, with a quick introduction of the shtick {every act is named after the brand of the performer's bottle-red hair} the evening is off.
***
I want to offer a punch by punch review of the Experience of these performances, but i don't know if i have the vocabulary for it.
I'll discuss some highlights of what most stands out, and maybe i'll review a show in a later post.
***
What i remember most is each performer's costume choice served as our first impression of the tone of what we were in for, followed immediately by the music.
Sight and sound set a scene where a set would have taken twice the time.
Succinct and to the point, the tone of each performance lived in every sequin, every feather; every nuanced, curve-accentuating fold and pleat.
I remember: a strip tease conducted to an aria, with the soaring high notes paralleled by the exquisitely handled 'pull' of a glove; a young lady conducting her entire affair as if she were a cross between Enya, Titania, queen of the faeries, and Pippy Longstockings; an 'elbow to the ribs' jab at the whole Irish event set to a drinking song; a boy-lesque magician act where a musclebound, bald all over {save some rather impressive, o'natural ginger red mutton chops} fellow held the business end of a taser-type 'wand' and, using the sizable static charge coursing through EVERY INCH of his body, used the sparks generate to light a torch...every inch...insert the inevitable 'fire crotch' joke; a beautifully handled old-school burlesque act performed by a woman of exquisitely Rubenesque proportions; a sendup of the entire conceit of burlesque {and jazzercise} wherein the performer came out and just did a jazzercise routine with SLIGHTLY more gyrations than originally choreographed, and all to the original voice over.
I was laughing far too loud, and clapping and cheering and having the jolliest of times i've had in quite a while
The MC even complimented my suit.
All the while i was sitting, late comer that i was, not in the front row center stage, but off to the far stage left, next to the bullpen: i had a de facto backstage pass to watch these people just be with each other and hang out in between performances...in their performance outfits... 0_0
Enough of that.
What i mean to say in any of these recollections, ladies, gentlemen, boys, girls, men, woman, hims hers and any shade of ambiguity you prefer for your pronoun-cing: these scantily clad, conventionally beautiful to the {wo}man performers were within lawsuit distance and all i could do was revel in the sheer audacity of the thing. i was Free of the hyper-commercialized crutch of layering shame and eye-averting apologies over a perfectly natural impulse to See, to Observe, nay even to Ogle!
"Ogle away, ye respectful patrons of the anachronistic arts!"
It was written in every movement, every pasty, every tassel. Every second spent in that room was one spent in giddy hearted worship of the female body and it's excellence.
who the hell is going to tell these women, any of them, that they are victims? I just saw a woman with half her head shaved and the other half in a power pixie cut do a work of such heartbreaking elegance that i was between chest clenching epiphany and riotous laughter the whole time.
and...and, well , the best part is that i never felt any of that sweaty soul'd smutty feeling i've known since that first feathering through the oily(ew), leafy folds of some kid's...some father's nudy mags he probably left findable ENOUGH so that his son could find out one, short sighted way to look at a woman without ever stepping up to the plate and having a conversation about it.
Burlesque is a conversation with it's audience, a bawdy diatribe on who and what we accept as sexy and how it falls to the viewer, the audience, the Partner to decide if 'sexy' means naked, or if 'sexy' can mean funny, intelligent, expressive, articulate, sarcastic, genuine...and also naked.
Thanks for reading.
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