The Act of Burlesque: Field Notes from a Stage Kitten
BY IAN WOODE
Editor’s Note: The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Dec. 22, 2019: Just past midnight, before last call. Charleston, WV.
Sweat pools in my pits as I watch Red Scare in a sequined mask and a shiny jacket hold a staple gun before the crowd. I’d shed my jacket at intermission when the gals upstairs in the bar arcade area, since cordoned off with plastic Dollar General tablecloth, changed into their second act costume. The mass of Charlestonians — peppered with some Huntington hipsters — queue up with their dollar bills in hand.
A woman mashes a dollar bill against the man’s chest. She grips the gun and squeezes the handle, sending a staple into his skin.
“Holy fuck, man!” a drunken reveler screams behind me.
He jostles me to the side as another patron plugs a buck into the performer’s chest. Red Scare — wearing shorts and a top hat — doesn’t even look as the spectator lays a dollar bill on his shoulder and shouts some incoherence about “earning your money tonight.”
A buddy of mine from Lexington had come up with his home-schooled, holy-rolling girlfriend. It saddened me to see him leave at intermission — after all, they’d driven 3 hours to see the show. But considering this was only the third time she’d ever been in a bar, watching a burlesque show was a bit much for her. With a delegation of Pagan bikers drinking in the back by the lottery machines and a man having small bills stapled to his chest and bleeding like a stuck pig, I started to think it was the right move.
When the music, an instrumental piece featured in the 1996 Robert Rodriguez masterpiece From Dusk Till Dawn, dwindles down and Red Scare sways his way through the crowd and up the stairs to the importuned dressing room, I am wide-eyed and seized up.
I’d seen all the acts in rehearsal, except this one. When Jack the Sound Guy, the boyfriend of a performer who flashed a big black used Drilldo the size of a donkey dick (don’t worry y’all, I was assured it had been cleaned and thoroughly sterilized when I was fucking around with it earlier that day, though that assurance didn’t shake off the same unclean feeling I always used to develop whenever I woke up in a hot trailer after a night of heroin and beer), moves to pick up all the dollar bills that the crowd tossed, I remember I have a job to do.
Tonight, I am a stage kitten.
Dec. 15, 2019: I-64, early afternoon, somewhere between Huntington and Charleston
I watch the temperature as I drive down the road — the old Mustang, a 20-year-old car with a semi-stale motor, has been leaking slowly over the past year. What started as a trickle, an occasional fill-up after a month or two of tooling around, has developed into a steady stream; by the time I change the water pump next weekend, I’m pouring two gallons of anti-freeze into my reservoir every two days.
I have the tape recorder rolling as I interview my girlfriend, Misery Macabre. She sits in the passenger seat, slightly annoyed I’m interrupting her prep time for my questions. Normally she likes to listen to the music of her sets, getting herself in the mood for her striptease. Once my interrogation is over, she’ll listen to “Son of a Preacher Man” — planning out her moves for a Pulp Fiction-themed act.
The Appalachian Traveling Tassholes founded their troupe in the summer of 2019, at the birthday party of a member who goes by the moniker Lolita Haze, or as she puts it, a combination of “Nabokov and stoner trash.” Starting with ballet when she was three-years old, Ms. Haze couldn’t afford to pay for a studio when she moved to Charleston to study for an English degree. Back in 2017, she was approached to take part in another troupe, The Jewel City Vaudeville Collective. After a couple of shows, some members moved away, while others got busy with their professional lives. The current group came together after the success of some Halloween shows in Fayetteville and Huntington.
The tape I recorded from the car is trash — I had placed the recorder too close to the gear shifter, so all I could pick up from our conversation is road noise. As I recall it, I tried to goad her into philosophizing about the impact of burlesque on Appalachian culture. I’m not sure what exactly I was looking for; perhaps a profound quote about sexual liberation in the Bible Belt? Maybe how the act of stripping before an audience is fundamentally subversive to the rather conservative culture of mountain folk?
Then again, when you’re living somewhere where a man can wake up Sunday morning in a strip bar, walk out the door, and cross the parking lot to church just in time for the altar call, it’s hard to say just how revolutionary stripping off one’s clothes is. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, burlesque shows are a bit more conservative than what you see at a typical strip club. Without giving away too much of the Traveling Tassholes’ act, I can assure you they’re not picking up crisply folded dollar bills with their labias.
It can be argued that the difference between stripping and burlesque is like the difference between a direct-to-video Joe Estevez buddy cop jaunt and a Martin Scorsese film. Mass produced mindless entertainment (and arousal) vs. thought-provoking high art. McDonald’s to the 5-star Zagat restaurants.
Maybe it’s cliché for a publication such as this, but when placed under a Marxist analysis the difference between the two becomes even more apparent, at least in this case.
See, when I was younger, I went to a few strip clubs. When I wasn’t old enough to drink legally, I would pass time talking to the strippers during my lap dances. When I became of age, I did the same because paying $7 for a bottle of Bud Light is fucking highway robbery. Occasionally, drunken curiosity would lead me to ask them if they got to keep all their tips.
The answer was a resounding, “Hell no.”
In a typical gentleman’s establishment, the strippers either work directly for the house or are considered independent contractors. A certain amount of the tips accrued from a set end up in the house’s pocket — sometimes up to 50 percent. Lap dances and the champagne room — I never could afford it, so I don’t know if one really gets their dick sucked there like all the bullshitters say — only land a few dollars into the dancers’ g-strings. With the money left over from their night, the dancers still have to tip out the bartenders, security, and the DJ. While the take home can be better than an evening shift at Bob Evans, the dancers ain’t exactly profiting either.
Exploitation of labor, as Karl Marx would put it.
With The Appalachian Traveling Tassholes, the troupe democratically votes on major decisions — how to split up tips, which shows to play, etc. Cover charges at the door are still taxed by the venue, but ultimately the tips earned by the acts themselves are earned wholly by the troupe. The product of their labor — entertaining a crowd of beer-swilling hillbillies — is owned completely by the performers. The determination of who gets what is based on how many acts are performed, fulfilling the Leninist maxim: “He who works shall eat.”
Burlesque Performers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose except your bras!
Dec. 21: Early Evening, on the West side of Charleston
Lolita Haze’s living room is as sexually charged as her act.
While sitting on a red-and-gold-striped sofa, I notice the bondage pictures on the wall, a woman’s chest bound in a rope girdle. On the coffee table sits a bong, an ashtray, and a collection of Playboy magazines. I want to pull one out and flip through it, but I’m more interested in the large African man standing in the living room, with a camera around his neck.
His name is Oxygen_Garden, and he is from Nigeria. How the hell he ended up in Charleston, West-By-God is a segue to a joke he’s had prepared for the decade he’s roughly spent in the Mountain State.
“Where I come from, we don’t wear shoes. When I heard they don’t wear shoes in West Virginia, I figured I’d move there because I wanted to go home.”
A photographer and an artist, Oxygen is tagging along to document the first show of the Winter Tour, at the Boulevard Tavern in downtown Charleston. Just a mile or two away from the picturesque riverside food and drink strip, we’re in the West side, where I think it’s smarter to smoke a cigarette in the backyard than to walk the 10 feet to the front porch and risk having a gun stuck in my face.
Oxygen explains that he came to Charleston to study jazz music. He dropped out after a spell due to money concerns and went to work in construction, living briefly up the holler where my girlfriend grew up. Hell, he even worked with her dad — some would say a small world, but frankly it’s just a small state. Eventually ole Oxygen started traveling around the country, crashing on couches and taking pictures of various people and places. Today, he has a literal studio apartment in Huntington, filled to the gills with flea market finds he uses for props in music videos and photo shoots.
As we chit chat and compare frugal fashion finds, the ladies are applying make-up in the bathroom. Dulcy Delicious wanders between the living room and the kitchen, softly singing lines to “Santa Baby” — the first number of the show. Throughout the practices, she’d been a bit flustered by the song — forgetting a line here and there, dogging her perfectly fine singing voice. With precious few hours left before the show, she’s got the tune down pat, though she’s still nervous about it.
When she describes her ultra-religious household as “a cult,” I blurt out, “Which one?” a bit too eagerly — my fascination outweighing my tact. She elaborates about her stepfather being emotionally abusive, calling her a whore when she was 8 years old. If my Lexington friend’s girlfriend was sheltered in home school, Delicious practically grew up in a bunker; she didn’t know when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina.
Upon “leaving the farm” — a turn of phrase I had to battle my morbid curiosity from pursuing further — Delicious watched the 2010 film Burlesque. Years later, she saw a burlesque performance at Huntington’s V-Club while on a date. From there, she wanted on the stage.
So when she ran into Lolita Haze and was asked to perform for her birthday show, Delicious hopped at the opportunity. After growing up in such a repressive household, celebrating her body and making art with it is a source of empowerment, a revolt against the bullshit she was fed.
Watching her effortlessly gyrate her hind end on the dance floor, it’s a surprise to find out she’s never studied in her life. An erotic auto didactic, Dulcy Delicious watches floor work videos and studies each move, working for hours to get them down.
While talking to any one of the performers, terms like body positivity and expression come up. The act of burlesque is liberating for them all, but you can tell it’s on a whole different level for Dulcy.
Dec. 15: Mid-afternoon, before opening at the tavern.
Freedom ain’t free, though.
Twirling tassels on one’s tits, even in the 21st Century, still has its stigmas.
As I’ve said before, West Virginia — especially Southern Dub-Vee, is definitely in the Bible Belt. Social attitudes and mores, even among the hell-raising heathens, skew conservative; go into a country bar and ask the drunkest old man you find what he thinks about abortion, Muslims, or gay marriage. Sure, you might find some exceptions — I remember back in 2012 getting lit with an elderly Hatfield who proudly stated he was voting for Obama because he didn’t trust that Romney bastard — but in my experience, if you ask those questions in a bar, be prepared to hear some hateful shit.
Charleston and Huntington — the top two largest cities in WV (a whole whopping 50K a piece) — are progressive oases. Don’t envision Portlandia — there’s still Paw Paws every morning at the Tudor’s Biscuit World, spouting off the latest Fox News talking points like anywhere else in the state. But the cities are just big enough to support the spaces where artists and writers and dreamers and rejects and ne’er-do-wells and hangers-on can call their own.
Places like the V-Club in Huntington, like Taylor’s Books in Charleston. A place to call their own.
So far, the Traveling Tassholes haven’t run into any problems — you get the occasional drunk shouting for the ladies to show off their tits. At a house show, another drunk thought it would be funny to don a dress for the intermission — it wasn’t a drag act, but an insult to drag, as Ms. Haze explained it to me.
However, being in the environment they’re in — taking home a couple hundred apiece tops for a show — each performer has a day job to report to.
They have to stay anonymous. They can show off their asses, but they can’t attach their Christian names to it. They can show off their tits in a picture, but their face has to be cut off. Promotional materials are purely graphic, no pictures. Their coworkers might moonlight as comedians, dirt track drivers, MMA fighters, but the burlesque performers aren’t taking any chances letting their extracurricular activities be known.
After all, some work with kids. If the right mother wearing a denim skirt were to bump into a performer at Hobby Lobby talking to their partner about making pasties, there might be talk with their supervisor come Monday morning.
At the tavern on a Sunday afternoon before the show, I pull Cherry Nova to the side.
It’s her first-time performing burlesque.
Throughout her adolescence, Ms. Nova said she had a profound hatred for herself, her body. Then she found David Bowie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Lady Gaga and found herself in costume. It was a confidence boost. When she caught wind of the burlesque troupe, she decided to join.
Her debut show at the Tavern proved creative and intricate — raw sex, purple corduroy, and Prince.
But even for her, anonymity is a concern — if a certain “live, laugh, love” element in her family found out, she could face some financial consequences. Hell, just modeling in the nude for a college art course sparked some shit at the dinner table, though that same kin doesn’t bat an eye gobbling the latest horseshit from the Kardashians.
“She was like, ‘How could you do this?’” Nova said.
Dec. 21: Showtime
Less than a week before showtime, I agree to be a “stage kitten,” a cutesy manner of saying the cleanup crew. Bucks and buckles don’t spring legs and scamper off the stage — there’s gotta be at least one set of hands making sure the dames get their dough and their clothes.
For the Dec. 21 show, yours truly and a towering young lady I’ll call Geraldine West volunteered for the task. It seemed simple in practice; a performer would strip off their shit, we’d pick it up. I even wrote their names on blue contractor’s tape, so all one had to do was throw their clothes in the corresponding bag, then at the end of the show it was all right there. No hassle, no mix-ups.
Easy peasy Don Lemonparty.org squeezy.
We’d run through it a few times during rehearsal — once with me picking up the clothes, the other time with Miss West. Before the show, I dipped out for a while to attend to personal matters. When I came back, I found out I would be the tip courier. We hadn’t practiced that. Maybe Miss West had done it before, but I sure as hell was green.
Behind the bar we kept a cardboard box. Seventy-five people (at least) were crammed in there — the establishment couldn’t have been more than 25 feet wide, from wall to wall. Factor in the bar shaving off at least 10 feet of space, you’re talking tight fucking quarters. Loud music plus inebriation on the part of the patrons meant you shout “pardon me” about three or four times before a motherfucker steps aside to make way for the drop. And there’s always the lingering concern in the back of your head that the most tore down of the crowd might sock you in the face in a misguided attempt to get a refund.
After the second act, I had to make multiple runs to keep myself from looking like a dithering dufus by dropping the bills on the floor because I had too many in my hands. I knew full well I could stuff them in my pockets, but I didn’t want it to look like I was trying to fleece anybody — those bouncers were some big dudes, and I am currently running a 0–7 record for fist fights in my adult life. At the end of Lolita Haze’s Gothic shtick, one poor lady picked up dollar bills three or four times; every time she’d stick one in the wad I had in my hand, another jumped out.
So whenever a dancer would start doing crowd work, I’d run up onto the stage, snatch as many bills as I could, and run behind the bar.
Keep in mind, that many people crammed together makes it hotter than a ghost pepper grilling on a radiator in the middle of July. Charleston’s downtown buildings are like any old-ass buildings — they leak hot air and trap in the cold. Despite aged architecture and the outside being 40 degrees with a slight breeze, that many people made for a sauna. And my dumb ass, looking to be at least half-fashionable, decided against shedding my faux leather jacket during the first act.
The sweat oozed from my pores — by the end of the night, I smelled like a foot.
It was worth every minute.
Jan. 4, 2020: The Dining Room Table
The finish is flaked and cracked on the table, pockmarked with rings from coffee mugs. It’s stained, but it’s sturdy. We haven’t had the table long; we inherited it from a friend who finally lost his battle with cancer. The table doesn’t wobble like the old one — when we moved, I lost the screws to secure the top to the legs.
At this table, we eat. We fuss with the kid, who rejects anything we put on her plate.
At this table, we play board games. We squabble over property trades in Monopoly, weighing the ethics of trading a railroad and $500 to a 7-year-old in exchange for a set of properties.
At this table, we wake up. We stare into each other’s eyes as we idly chat about life together while sipping coffee on a rainy Saturday morning.
At this table, we create.
In the evenings leading up to a show, Misery sits at the table with cloth and fringe and card-stock. Needle and thread, a hot glue gun, and scissors lay by her hands, ready for that seam, for that rhinestone. Not a dime goes into the Tassholes’ pockets — it goes here, into the costume.
Kinda like a dirt track driver.
I’ll be on the couch reading Lenin, and she’ll call for me.
“Does this look good?”
“What about this color?”
“Think this song will work for the act?”
The stage, where I’ve been attempting to affix a certain line of ideological gobbledygook this whole essay, is the final product. The practices are merely the gestational period. For Misery Macabre, the conception and the creation starts here, at our dining room table.
It’s here that I write all this horseshit, at the conception table.
Burlesque is creation, it’s art. It’s the juxtaposition of visual and performance. Prior to the December show, I’d never seen my girlfriend perform — the shows are a bit past my bedtime. But I’d seen the front end, the birth of the act. It seemed interesting; I’ve always been happy for Misery, because the whole thing looked fun.
After the show, both of us smelling of sweat and our eyes sagging for sleep, we stopped at a Speedway for coffee and drink. Misery was concerned she looked insane — I assured her all rules about public presentation are out the window past midnight. On the stage, however, she wasn’t concerned. She just wanted to deliver a good show.
And as the dollar bills rained from the crowd, as the money box filled and filled and filled until it almost overflowed, she and the other ladies did just that. For that moment, unrestrained, the loss of inhibition and “shame” — a nasty word we’ve all struggled with in the Bible Belt — delighted the crowd. During 3-to-7-minute sets, four ladies and a man were transformed into goddesses.
Speaking of the man — Red Scare — what’s his secret to taking a staple to the chest anyways?
“Getting drunk,” he said.
