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AWESOME Burlesque Experience

Book Guy

I write it like I mean it, but mostly they just want my money.

I saw an old-style Burlesque show this weekend. It's a stage-performance that takes place in a theater that, for most of the month, is a rock-concert venue with "normal" bar out front. A rather bohemian little institution in this my rather counter-cultural town. For the "burlesque" night, they charge $15 to $20 for a ticket, and you watch several five- or eight-minute acts in which one, two, or even six very hot dancers perform. Generally the girls are disrobing SOME, though for a few of the acts they actually didn't fully bare their tits except when their backs were turned away from the audience. Some acts were called "aerialists," in which the girls did trapeze tricks, mostly what we'd now call choreographed gymnastics. One gal was a world-champion hula-hoop performer (I'm serious!) and she disrobed during hula-hooping. There's a cheezy MC who talks to the audience between acts, mostly to keep the whoop-up level high and to introduce the next set, and also to provide enough time for set change backscene while he's talking. A humorous magician also did a five-minute thing with a gal from Minnesota who never did get the concept.

Well, I frickin' LOVED it. I had heard about these things and had wanted to get down there and see it, but they perform so seldom, and on such fucked up nights (Sunday at 10 pm, WTF??!!) that it's difficult to fit into my schedule. Finally managed to get there just before it was starting. I stood at a bar, drank, and watched. We yelled. I whistled. The choreography and dancing skill were top-notch, fully professional level. The girls were (well, all but one) zuper-duper hot hot hot. The costumes and props were excellent. The first number, for example, was themed on a "librarian," in which the girl wore her hair up in a bun, and thick glasses, and slowly became more and more sexy, with very creative use of opening and closing a book right in front of her tits or pussy just exactly in the way that made you think you were going to see more but then you didn't.

I had expected that I'd be annoyed or bored by some of it. Like, I thought, hell, if there's a super-hot girl on stage and she's a stripper, why would I want her to distract from her hotness with all that Broadway-style stupid-choreography? That WOULD have been my attitude, if I had been at a normal strip club where the girls were, other than the one on stage, available for lappers and where I was driving myself into the drunk oblivion of needing to get a gal on to sit on my willy. In fact, I've written about exactly that concept, here on the boards, stating that the girls who over-choreograph their strip-club routines seem to me to be avoiding their sexuality, trying to think up a distraction. Instead, I wasn't annoyed by the choreography at all, and found it enhanced the thrill rather than just getting annoying. Maybe the burlesque performers were better at it -- they were "serious" dancers, you could tell; probably could get real parts in real stage chorus lines (or leads!); whereas many strip-club dancers who get all Broadway about it are probably just wanna-be's. But also, the burlesque had all the trappings of a legitimate performance -- plot, tension and release, surprise, EYE CONTACT, careful lighting (oh, the lighting is SO important, strip-club managers!), backstage helping hands, big red curtain, MC. It FELT right. Schwing!

Dudes, if you're in New Orleans when this performance happens to be on, you MUST see it. Make sure you get tickets the afternoon of the performance, don't wait 'til the last moment, because it's very popular. There are lots of girls and acts, and they recycle some or present some new ones, each time. The burlesque night, as a whole, gives such a clear indication of what's MISSING from the currently typical strip club scene. The whole thing was about 1 hour 30 minutes, I think. And there was drinking and hanging out with the other people at the bar for the whole time. Afterwards, it just turned back into a normal bar (except some of the performers mingled with the audience ... heh heh ...) and it was the cool bohemian joint it's always been.

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