Down to the Fringes
Nerd Culture Goes Burlesque at Crown Heights Comic Book Store
By Matthew Taub
Peter Calderon wasn’t on the bill, he just felt like breaking out his Deadpool costume.
The 38-year-old Crown Heights resident and employee of the Strand Bookstore was at Anyone Comics on to attend his first ever “nerdlesque” performance, wherein characters from Star Trek, The Addams Family, and Rick and Morty would reveal their little-known dancing skills, among other things.
“It’s like peanut butter and puffy cheese doodles,” said Calderon, tightly decked out in the Marvel hero’s red and black getup. “They work really well together, but it’s something that you wouldn’t expect to be put together.”
In fact, nerdlesque has been around for years and is “bigger than you’d think, unless you’re part of the scene,” said Moe Cheezmo, the show’s co-producer. Though Cheezmo, 42, acknowledges that many outsiders might view nerd culture and burlesque as strange bedfellows, he believes them to be “a perfect match” as “nerds like to have fun and are sexy people.”
Roughly two-dozen audience members had packed Anyone Comics’ basement by the time Cheezmo took the stage as emcee, his loose white lab coat and scruffy beard mocking the pomp of the Star Wars theme. He delighted the crowd by referencing Rick and Morty. He invited “wolf whistles” and “cat calls,” while imploring that they remain “endangered species” outside the theater. He got personal by disavowing Star Trek’s various reboots.
And then he brought out act one, Star Trek’s Zelma Zelma, who had abandoned her red Starfleet dress and beamed up through a hula-hoop before collapsing dead at the end of her number. The audience — including Calderon, whose facial hair flowed far below the edge of his Deadpool mask — met each successive sartorial sacrifice with applause, hollers, and smiles.
This may well have been the most rapt basement in Brooklyn for the duration of the ensuing hour, which saw Cousin Itt of The Addams Family shedding Itt’s prodigious hair (and then some), as well as Rick and Morty’s Ma-Sha losing her extra limbs and her only layer to the tune of Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls).”
The air was celebratory, with the crowd expressing pride in being in on its communal secrets. As Cheezmo touted one of the auction items, a tote bag labeled “Bag of Holding,” he extolled its utility in revealing one’s “big fucking nerd” status to onlookers in the grocery store (this would-be onlooker had to consult Google in order to identify the bag as a magical accessory in the game Dungeons & Dragons).
“I define a nerd as somebody who is passionate about a genre or a subgenre to the point where they can talk about it for hours whether or not the other person has interest or not,” said John Jennison, a comic creator who was instrumental in bringing Metropolis Burlesque — the show’s production company — to Anyone Comics. Jennison wonders if the recent Hollywood glamorization of superheroes has rendered nerd-dom more “socially acceptable,” citing “more media coverage of it that embodies the idea of the typical, like, what you wound consider like a ‘cover girl sexy.’”
Regardless of whether the nerd community finds that problematic or threatening, the basement seemed safely fortified against any encroaching mainstream sensibilities. The audience merely reflected Cheezmo’s assessment of nerds as people who “are eager to celebrate their fandoms a lot of different ways.” After all, Cesar Mendez — who once left a Star Trek convention asking himself, “‘really, do I have to dress up to be a fan of something?’” — sat only feet away from the costumed Calderon.
Don’t mistake Mendez’s skepticism for apathy. At 59, the Museum of Natural History employee trekked out to Crown Heights all the way from the Bronx for the show — choosing it over another show in Manhattan. He gave up movies for “a long time” because he would attend burlesque shows instead, and would frequent the New York School of Burlesque’s monthly showcase in order to recommend acts to producers. He was drawn in particular to nerdlesque for its innovations, recalling an old act featuring the Thing from the Fantastic Four. “The Thing stripping?” he asks admiringly. “Okay, that’s something new.”
Mendez may not have wanted to dress up like the other Trekkies, and says “I could never consider myself a nerd, unless you mean an extreme fan.” On this night he was not ambivalent: “If I am a nerd for burlesque, I am a nerd for burlesque.”
Follow Matthew Taub on Twitter at @mjtaub1.
