PASTY-HAPPY: A TAKE ON THE NEW BURLESQUE
I go back with burlesque, myself.
Back to the 60's, when I was in junior high, when one of the voyeuristic treasures around our house was my old man's "Pictorial History of Burlesque" in the living room library. Girlie mags like Gent, Nugget and early Playboy notwithstanding (all pubic-hairless and pulse-pounding), the images of Tempest Storm and her 41DD" bust tipped with pasties --of Lilly Christine, her glam legs gleaming --these images of enticement (is that the word?) sent a tremor through me, which honestly I can still feel to this day. The word "pasty" still rings my inner bell.
Personally, I wasn't much interested in the photos of burlesque comics and clowns. Just gimme the good parts.
I never did see a live burlesque show or strip show as such, even when I got old enough. Burlesque was well bygone by then. It was now Topless Time. Both high-school sweethearts of me and my twin brother, in Denver, Colorado, became topless dancers (at the same bar, please) a few years after graduation.
It is a funny feeling to see sit in beery jukebox dimness with jerky male strangers, all of you staring at the naked tits and g-stringed booty of your ex-girlfriend, smoky blonde Laurie Kozlowski (aka "Miss Vicky Victoria!")--whose breasts and pussy were the first you ever stroked and sucked and climbed the stairway to heaven with. Yeah, a funny feeling. (Not as funny as the feeling my brother got, the time the bouncer punched him when he tried to go backstage. But that's another story.)
Fast forward to New York, the early 80's. The art scene was exploding downtown in Soho, the East Village. Porn was exploding all over. The Big Apple was wide open, as they say. Me and my crazy Scottish painter friend, Steven, used to hang out at the Baby Doll Lounge in Tribeca (it's still there). Sometimes, alone, I'd buy a topless dancer a drink when she came off stage, if the mood hit (I tried to hit on a few of them, boozy-coolly; they teased, but didn't show up outside). One of the girls said she was a Julliard student; another, older, was a full-timer, working the circuit here and Jersey. She was one stupendously athletic, strong-breasted woman who stretched around on a trapeze above the stage in her g-string and high heels. Whew. But other girls were pale, skin-and-bones druggies. They'd be the type to wear tacky gowns and long gloves and try a pathetic striptease--an embarrassment, a creepy turn off. Naked flesh was what we wanted, right away, quit fooling around.
Atmospherically the Baby Doll was pretty dingy, you always felt the threat of being scammed, hustled. But occasionally, someone custom-made by Venus would climb up five feet from us (I remember a young coffee-toned Amazon) and lift away her teensy over-matched bikini top, with the tiniest of grins, and the whole bar would stop breathing.
But the jukebox always seemed to play BB King's "The Thrill Is Gone" when the girls danced. Not a happy vibe, you know?
I'd go occasionally to another famous skin joint of the time, Billy's Topless in Chelsea, though the scene there was full of working Joe's and I didn't feel up to drinking with those girls.
And one time crazy Scottish Steven and I survived a live sex show on Times Square's old porn row. We just paid our money, went into the sleaziest theater reeking of cleaning fluid that you ever saw or smelled, and with a crowd of old jerks in raincoats (seriously: raincoats), we watched what we could take of the "entertainment" onstage. Namely: a naked bulky middle-aged woman on a mattress sucking away at a bulky guy's dick (or from my seat way in back, his dick area). And then straddling him and fitting "it" inside the hairy area between her thighs. And after grinding away some, climbing off, and leaving the stage holding a towel in front of her. The watching woeful jerks, who had risen and shuffled closer to stage, en masse, when the woman first appeared, they all applauded softly as she went past down the aisle. Those were the days, I tell you. Memorable, but dingy, dingy. Not much on your joys-of-sex atmosphere.
Things seem to have gotten dingier, more blatant and joyless and slicker. The last time I went into a topless place was five years ago (after a decade off), in West Hollywood. By then silicone was rampant. Onstage, not a natural pair in the house.
"You're a big girl, aren't you, love? You always that way?" said the English movie director I was with, all "innocence," as he handed up a dollar to a hyper-titted blondie. She had just straightened from folding herself back on her knees and massaging oh-so-near around her shaved g-stringed love hatch, two feet from our noses. This L.A. "sexy" hard girl with her hard monstrous artificial rack, her hard work-out bod, her hard bored eyes--she wasn't amused.
Neither was I. What had happened to the pleasure of looking at live, good-looking, practically naked female humans?
Which brings me at last to New Burlesque, a phenom I see has been bubbling up the last five years around the country.
In LA at the semi-annual Velvet Hammer and the monthly Moulin Rouge at Jumbo's Clown room (where Courtney Love once stripped); in New York at The Blue La La at the Slipper Room and Le Scandal and the Va Va Voom Room --and at copycat scenes in Atlanta, Montreal, Denver --young folks (pardon the expression) in their 20's and 30's are supposedly bringing back the good times of burlesque: the pasties, the music, the (hmmm) comedians. It's retro-fun, as with the whole Swingers' thing, and the whole sideshow-freak thing (when nails got hammered up sinuses at Johnny Depp's Viper Room).
All with an artsy performance-art vibe. A sort of do-it-yourself spirit---much like SuicideGirls, come to think of it! It's Girls-in-Charge-of-Their-Sexuality now. (Spooky's paying me a fortune for this piece, so I aim to please)
Old burlesque's been dusted off. There's Tease-o-Rama, a new annual national convention of the strippers art, featuring some of the old heroines of the genre. Webster Hall (the club where I made a fool of myself over a young Irish amazon) is staging amateur striptease contests on Fridays.
From Time magazine, ABC News and the LA Times to Hustler, the Village Voice and The New Yorker --people are taking notice.
On the one hand, New Burlesque seems to be a response to hardcore porn's mainstreaming (even Ice Cube, Mr. "Xmas in the Hood," is planning a porn video series, I read somewhere). (Not that you can believe everything you read somewhere). (And not that hard porn is totally alien to me).
In New York, on the other hand, it's a response to Rudy Giuliani's late 90's smackdown on porn and toplessness. The Big Apple has gotten cored. Live sex shows of course are long long long gone. Pasties are now the law, except for in cement bunkers out by the airports.
Pasties are okay by me, I'm a fan. But would New Burlesque ring the Inner Bell? I was wary. The New Yorker warned of "the tawdriness of topless dancing (combined) with the tedium of performance art." Tawdriness isn't fun; but performance-art tedium... that kills.
However, Michelle Carr, one of the creators of The Velvet Hammer, which maybe kicked the movement off five years ago, says that her Rule #2 for new recruits is "No fake breasts." (Rule # 1: "No professionals").
No fakes? Sounds great. So this weekend I went to check out the Va Va Voom Room, one of main shows in town, at Fez in Noho. Fez is a club I know well, having performed my spoken-word act many times there.
I'll say this: the Va Va Voom Room is not like any topless show I've ever been too. That is for sure.
"No, not like topless at all," chuckled Kate Valentine, the Velvet Hammer veteran (mid-thirties?) who MC's the nite's fare as "Miss Astrid," her big-girl hefty frame cinched into a black bustier and a long Lycra skirt. Sort of ala Eric Stanton's big dames with bad attitudes. She books the acts too. (And yes, she'd heard of SuicideGirls.com)
For starters, the crowd was young (I was clearly the "dad" in the joint) --with a lot of couples, even a booth or two full of just women! Not a raincoat jerk in the house.
Miss Astrid, with her black eye-patch and a short black wig, launched things with some haughty patter in a vague Weimar/German accent. The night would be accent-heavy in fact, with a several acts in accents (or rather, "accents").
"We're Francophile tonight," drawled Miss Astrid. Francophile. Believe me, I never heard that word from onstage back at the Baby Doll.
What we had here, I realized by the end, was a cheery artsy cabaret show, with some tits and ass. Did my Inner Bell ever ring?
Yes, it did. Particularly (speaking personally) at Julie Atlas Muz whose full-blown slow strip featured a blow job on a red rose, and an ice cube being slowly rubbed down her pastied torso, down into the warm privacy under her g-string. She cracked up laughing a couple of times in the process. The audience roared.
Never never have I seen a topless dancer laughing at herself and having a fine time with the crowd. Never a "wildly friendly" audience. "Women's sexuality as emoowering, not demeaning," philosophizes one of the owners (the head house clown) of The Slipper Room.
Miss Muz, who's done a one-woman show at Performance Space 122, was built like a dancer, strong-assed, small chested. The World Famous Bob, the ex-performance artist who preceded her, looks more like an un-airbrushed (and un-drugged) Anna Nicole Smith. She can twirl her huge draping real boobs so the tassels on her red white and blue pasties spin. (More audience roaring; this audience came to roar.)
There were comedians, alas, between the pasty parts. But I have to say, the three guys in bathrobes and clown noses (Miss Astrid: "What could be sexier than three naked clowns?") were actually pretty hilarious, bringing up on stage a girl having her bachelorette party (for crying out loud!) and cheerfully exposed themselves to her (after blindfolding). And a guy named "Serge," who told art-scene non-jokes in a French accent (please), turned out to be a pretty good dancer. He teamed up for a tango with a henna-haired dame who first actually sang "La Vie En Rose" (please!) --loudly--in a phony French accent (what is it with all this "French nightlife" stuff?).
But when a short Jewish-looking gay guy with phony knockers under his striped shirt bounced onto stage as "Lilly le Tigresse"--and started up with yet more phony French, I thought: Merde, we've hit PERFORMANCE-ART TEDIUM. But then he launched into one hard-rockin' strip act, down to his sock-wrapped weenie, as Plastique Bertrand thundered away (forget "The Thrill is Gone"). And you know what: it was entertainment, and then some.
When a young woman, "Miss Saturn," gussied up in the worst clich of 50's mom-dom, stripped while spinning half a dozen hula hoops, we were deep in performance-art country, no kidding. You know what? It was entertaining anyway.
The vibe of the night is kind of "Let's-dress-up-as-burlesque!". And as various commentators have pointed out, the irony and camp piles up so much on itself (irony about being ironic about being campy), you get cross-eyed. But in the end, it's a straightahead good time, a cabaret show with some real sex that's user-friendly. Miss Astrid even has a good singing voice. She sat down on the stage and sang Peggy Lee's "Is that All There Is?" to close the show.
I definitely want to see more New Burlesque. Definitely. Maybe I'll check out some of the edgier stuff at the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, where a guy sucks on a flaming dildo that a woman's got strapped on.
Deconstructing traditional sexual role-playing, anybody?
I go back with burlesque, myself.
Back to the 60's, when I was in junior high, when one of the voyeuristic treasures around our house was my old man's "Pictorial History of Burlesque" in the living room library. Girlie mags like Gent, Nugget and early Playboy notwithstanding (all pubic-hairless and pulse-pounding), the images of Tempest Storm and her 41DD" bust tipped with pasties --of Lilly Christine, her glam legs gleaming --these images of enticement (is that the word?) sent a tremor through me, which honestly I can still feel to this day. The word "pasty" still rings my inner bell.
Personally, I wasn't much interested in the photos of burlesque comics and clowns. Just gimme the good parts.
I never did see a live burlesque show or strip show as such, even when I got old enough. Burlesque was well bygone by then. It was now Topless Time. Both high-school sweethearts of me and my twin brother, in Denver, Colorado, became topless dancers (at the same bar, please) a few years after graduation.
It is a funny feeling to see sit in beery jukebox dimness with jerky male strangers, all of you staring at the naked tits and g-stringed booty of your ex-girlfriend, smoky blonde Laurie Kozlowski (aka "Miss Vicky Victoria!")--whose breasts and pussy were the first you ever stroked and sucked and climbed the stairway to heaven with. Yeah, a funny feeling. (Not as funny as the feeling my brother got, the time the bouncer punched him when he tried to go backstage. But that's another story.)
Fast forward to New York, the early 80's. The art scene was exploding downtown in Soho, the East Village. Porn was exploding all over. The Big Apple was wide open, as they say. Me and my crazy Scottish painter friend, Steven, used to hang out at the Baby Doll Lounge in Tribeca (it's still there). Sometimes, alone, I'd buy a topless dancer a drink when she came off stage, if the mood hit (I tried to hit on a few of them, boozy-coolly; they teased, but didn't show up outside). One of the girls said she was a Julliard student; another, older, was a full-timer, working the circuit here and Jersey. She was one stupendously athletic, strong-breasted woman who stretched around on a trapeze above the stage in her g-string and high heels. Whew. But other girls were pale, skin-and-bones druggies. They'd be the type to wear tacky gowns and long gloves and try a pathetic striptease--an embarrassment, a creepy turn off. Naked flesh was what we wanted, right away, quit fooling around.
Atmospherically the Baby Doll was pretty dingy, you always felt the threat of being scammed, hustled. But occasionally, someone custom-made by Venus would climb up five feet from us (I remember a young coffee-toned Amazon) and lift away her teensy over-matched bikini top, with the tiniest of grins, and the whole bar would stop breathing.
But the jukebox always seemed to play BB King's "The Thrill Is Gone" when the girls danced. Not a happy vibe, you know?
I'd go occasionally to another famous skin joint of the time, Billy's Topless in Chelsea, though the scene there was full of working Joe's and I didn't feel up to drinking with those girls.
And one time crazy Scottish Steven and I survived a live sex show on Times Square's old porn row. We just paid our money, went into the sleaziest theater reeking of cleaning fluid that you ever saw or smelled, and with a crowd of old jerks in raincoats (seriously: raincoats), we watched what we could take of the "entertainment" onstage. Namely: a naked bulky middle-aged woman on a mattress sucking away at a bulky guy's dick (or from my seat way in back, his dick area). And then straddling him and fitting "it" inside the hairy area between her thighs. And after grinding away some, climbing off, and leaving the stage holding a towel in front of her. The watching woeful jerks, who had risen and shuffled closer to stage, en masse, when the woman first appeared, they all applauded softly as she went past down the aisle. Those were the days, I tell you. Memorable, but dingy, dingy. Not much on your joys-of-sex atmosphere.
Things seem to have gotten dingier, more blatant and joyless and slicker. The last time I went into a topless place was five years ago (after a decade off), in West Hollywood. By then silicone was rampant. Onstage, not a natural pair in the house.
"You're a big girl, aren't you, love? You always that way?" said the English movie director I was with, all "innocence," as he handed up a dollar to a hyper-titted blondie. She had just straightened from folding herself back on her knees and massaging oh-so-near around her shaved g-stringed love hatch, two feet from our noses. This L.A. "sexy" hard girl with her hard monstrous artificial rack, her hard work-out bod, her hard bored eyes--she wasn't amused.
Neither was I. What had happened to the pleasure of looking at live, good-looking, practically naked female humans?
Which brings me at last to New Burlesque, a phenom I see has been bubbling up the last five years around the country.
In LA at the semi-annual Velvet Hammer and the monthly Moulin Rouge at Jumbo's Clown room (where Courtney Love once stripped); in New York at The Blue La La at the Slipper Room and Le Scandal and the Va Va Voom Room --and at copycat scenes in Atlanta, Montreal, Denver --young folks (pardon the expression) in their 20's and 30's are supposedly bringing back the good times of burlesque: the pasties, the music, the (hmmm) comedians. It's retro-fun, as with the whole Swingers' thing, and the whole sideshow-freak thing (when nails got hammered up sinuses at Johnny Depp's Viper Room).
All with an artsy performance-art vibe. A sort of do-it-yourself spirit---much like SuicideGirls, come to think of it! It's Girls-in-Charge-of-Their-Sexuality now. (Spooky's paying me a fortune for this piece, so I aim to please)
Old burlesque's been dusted off. There's Tease-o-Rama, a new annual national convention of the strippers art, featuring some of the old heroines of the genre. Webster Hall (the club where I made a fool of myself over a young Irish amazon) is staging amateur striptease contests on Fridays.
From Time magazine, ABC News and the LA Times to Hustler, the Village Voice and The New Yorker --people are taking notice.
On the one hand, New Burlesque seems to be a response to hardcore porn's mainstreaming (even Ice Cube, Mr. "Xmas in the Hood," is planning a porn video series, I read somewhere). (Not that you can believe everything you read somewhere). (And not that hard porn is totally alien to me).
In New York, on the other hand, it's a response to Rudy Giuliani's late 90's smackdown on porn and toplessness. The Big Apple has gotten cored. Live sex shows of course are long long long gone. Pasties are now the law, except for in cement bunkers out by the airports.
Pasties are okay by me, I'm a fan. But would New Burlesque ring the Inner Bell? I was wary. The New Yorker warned of "the tawdriness of topless dancing (combined) with the tedium of performance art." Tawdriness isn't fun; but performance-art tedium... that kills.
However, Michelle Carr, one of the creators of The Velvet Hammer, which maybe kicked the movement off five years ago, says that her Rule #2 for new recruits is "No fake breasts." (Rule # 1: "No professionals").
No fakes? Sounds great. So this weekend I went to check out the Va Va Voom Room, one of main shows in town, at Fez in Noho. Fez is a club I know well, having performed my spoken-word act many times there.
I'll say this: the Va Va Voom Room is not like any topless show I've ever been too. That is for sure.
"No, not like topless at all," chuckled Kate Valentine, the Velvet Hammer veteran (mid-thirties?) who MC's the nite's fare as "Miss Astrid," her big-girl hefty frame cinched into a black bustier and a long Lycra skirt. Sort of ala Eric Stanton's big dames with bad attitudes. She books the acts too. (And yes, she'd heard of SuicideGirls.com)
For starters, the crowd was young (I was clearly the "dad" in the joint) --with a lot of couples, even a booth or two full of just women! Not a raincoat jerk in the house.
Miss Astrid, with her black eye-patch and a short black wig, launched things with some haughty patter in a vague Weimar/German accent. The night would be accent-heavy in fact, with a several acts in accents (or rather, "accents").
"We're Francophile tonight," drawled Miss Astrid. Francophile. Believe me, I never heard that word from onstage back at the Baby Doll.
What we had here, I realized by the end, was a cheery artsy cabaret show, with some tits and ass. Did my Inner Bell ever ring?
Yes, it did. Particularly (speaking personally) at Julie Atlas Muz whose full-blown slow strip featured a blow job on a red rose, and an ice cube being slowly rubbed down her pastied torso, down into the warm privacy under her g-string. She cracked up laughing a couple of times in the process. The audience roared.
Never never have I seen a topless dancer laughing at herself and having a fine time with the crowd. Never a "wildly friendly" audience. "Women's sexuality as emoowering, not demeaning," philosophizes one of the owners (the head house clown) of The Slipper Room.
Miss Muz, who's done a one-woman show at Performance Space 122, was built like a dancer, strong-assed, small chested. The World Famous Bob, the ex-performance artist who preceded her, looks more like an un-airbrushed (and un-drugged) Anna Nicole Smith. She can twirl her huge draping real boobs so the tassels on her red white and blue pasties spin. (More audience roaring; this audience came to roar.)
There were comedians, alas, between the pasty parts. But I have to say, the three guys in bathrobes and clown noses (Miss Astrid: "What could be sexier than three naked clowns?") were actually pretty hilarious, bringing up on stage a girl having her bachelorette party (for crying out loud!) and cheerfully exposed themselves to her (after blindfolding). And a guy named "Serge," who told art-scene non-jokes in a French accent (please), turned out to be a pretty good dancer. He teamed up for a tango with a henna-haired dame who first actually sang "La Vie En Rose" (please!) --loudly--in a phony French accent (what is it with all this "French nightlife" stuff?).
But when a short Jewish-looking gay guy with phony knockers under his striped shirt bounced onto stage as "Lilly le Tigresse"--and started up with yet more phony French, I thought: Merde, we've hit PERFORMANCE-ART TEDIUM. But then he launched into one hard-rockin' strip act, down to his sock-wrapped weenie, as Plastique Bertrand thundered away (forget "The Thrill is Gone"). And you know what: it was entertainment, and then some.
When a young woman, "Miss Saturn," gussied up in the worst clich of 50's mom-dom, stripped while spinning half a dozen hula hoops, we were deep in performance-art country, no kidding. You know what? It was entertaining anyway.
The vibe of the night is kind of "Let's-dress-up-as-burlesque!". And as various commentators have pointed out, the irony and camp piles up so much on itself (irony about being ironic about being campy), you get cross-eyed. But in the end, it's a straightahead good time, a cabaret show with some real sex that's user-friendly. Miss Astrid even has a good singing voice. She sat down on the stage and sang Peggy Lee's "Is that All There Is?" to close the show.
I definitely want to see more New Burlesque. Definitely. Maybe I'll check out some of the edgier stuff at the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, where a guy sucks on a flaming dildo that a woman's got strapped on.
Deconstructing traditional sexual role-playing, anybody?
VIEW 18 of 18 COMMENTS
I'm probably one of the few guys in the country (my age), that has studied the burlesque, vaudeville, and english music hall stages extensively. I've taken the time to meet some of the last living legends of these days and learn from them. I've gathered hard to find and out of print works, and have even amassed a collection of original burlesque show material.
I sprinkle it into the work I currently do now, but would love to help put together a true burlesque show.
EDIT: GO see the Bindlestiffs! I have a buddy there, doing one of the best cigar box routines, you'll ever see!
[Edited on Dec 07, 2004 by Hapworth]