London Fundon

The weekend before last, The Bear and I skedaddled off to London for a lovely long weekend. Arising at stupid o'clock on the Friday morning (the Bear kept waking up through the night as he was too excited to sleep properly - aw!) we made our way Londonwards, the first stop on the agenda being the Harry Potter Studio Tour at Leavesden Studios. (Hence all the excitement.)

YOU GUYS. Every Harry Potter fan needs to go here. The tour took us around three and a half hours and you get to wander through at your own pace, which is totally perfect. The only problem was all the fucking PEOPLE, as you accidentally bump into them and get bumped into approximately four million times as you make your way around. But it's a really great setup and even though, as Nicola informed me on Twitter, they don't let you fondle Snape's robes, we had an absolute blast. I'd suggest that anyone who plans on going should try to avoid looking at too many photos of the tour, as the less you know, the more amazing surprises you'll get and the more often you'll exclaim: "Holy crap! It's THIS THING THAT I LOVE! LOOK AT IT!" As such, I'm only putting a handful of pictures up here and they don't really give anything major away, so it's safe to look.


There's a deadly gift shop at the studio too, where you can buy all manner of overpriced Hogwarts paraphernalia, but they don't quite seem to have gotten the hang of sufficiently stocking the shop just yet. I wanted to pick up a few fridge magnets as small presents, but there were none left. So I figured a little keyring might do, but they were completely sold out of Gryffindor keyrings, or indeed anything small and affordable that was Gryffindor related. And I was hardly going to give someone a present of a Hufflepuff keyring, sure I might as well just slap them in the face and be done with it at that rate.

Our lovely friend Brenda was kind enough to put us up for the weekend, although on the first night I woke up at one point to find her cat, the bauld but very cute Ógie standing next to my head and eyeballing me. I may have told him to fuck off. Sorry Ógie.

This was the view from the back of Brenda's place. AMAZO.

Saturday's entertainment came in the form of the British Female Crown performances for the World Burlesque Games, which just HAPPENED to be on while we were over. It was a total coincidence, I SWEAR. There was also much entertainment derived from the fact that the show was taking place in Bush Hall. Heh. Bush.


The show was fantastic fun and each performer did a truly amazing job. My highlights were Chi Chi Revolver, a goofy, tattooed, hula-hooping dynamo that looks not unlike Lady Gaga and definitely deserved a place in the top three. Robbed, she was! Here's a video that shows just over a minute of her act (I don't know why the person filming didn't record it all, because they bloody well should have) :



Billie Rae, a red haired, fire breathing ballerina doll was another of my favourites, you can see her Forgotten Ballerina routine here:



The winner of the competition was Eliza Delite, a dead ringer for Lynda Carter who blew everyone away with a beautiful Virgin Mary routine.



While it sounds deliciously sacrelicious to combine Holy Mary and burlesque, it was actually just gorgeous and the crowd went fucking nuts for it. The glittery sacred heart was a nice touch too.


On our last morning, I plotted our route back to the airport via Holborn. For I had previously found a Krispy Kreme donut shop along High Holborn a few years ago and you may recall how obsessed I am with these particular roundy Original Glazed hoops of happiness. After traipsing up the busy street with our suitcases in tow, I was getting worried. There was no sign nor smell of a doughnut to be found. It turned out we were at the wrong end of street, for as soon as we ventured to the other end, LO! There it was! The Bear had walked straight past it, but my doughnut senses were on the ball and I spotted it in time.


We bought twenty four doughnuts that morning and after a quick spot of suitcase Tetris at the airport, we managed to make enough room to stuff the two boxes into the Bear's suitcase. It was a GOOD DAY.

Also, I noticed that the lifts in the airport were made by a company called Schindler.


SCHINDLER'S LIFT!

I'm here all week. Try the veal.

Draw Baby Draw

At the end of April, the Bear and I finally got around to attending a Dr. Sketchy's Anti Art School session, in this case Disco Inferno, which was spurred on by the news that founder and art superhero Molly Crabapple was going to be in town at the time and giving a talk the next day. The Bear kept pronouncing her name as Molly Krabappel all weekend because he just loves winding me up.

The mirrorball-strewn sketching session itself was tremendous fun, upstairs in 4 Dame Lane is a gorgeous venue and with €5 whiskey sours on the go, what more could you want? (Seeing as neither one of us had done life drawing since the Leaving Cert all those years ago, we practiced drawing each other while drawing each other a few days beforehand because we're SO GODDAMN META.) Once I settled into it and stopped panicking because the poses were only lasting a minute to begin with, I really enjoyed it and the three hour striptease (as host Scarlett Nymph referred to it) totally flew by. I used to be reasonably good at life drawing and this has made me want to scrape all the rust off and get much better at it.

Sade O'Sapphic and Sophia Disgrace were the disco diva models.

Some delightful drag king action from Phil T. Gorgeous. Note the dude in the red scarf, because that's Alan Cumming, who was there to film a documentary. ALAN CUMMING! Sebastian from The High Life and/or Nightcrawler! So brilliant.

The idea of Dr. Sketchy's is a brilliant and empowering one and it was fascinating listening to Molly herself explain at her talk the next day how the idea was formed. As a model herself, she was annoyed with how drawing class subjects were faceless and unnamed, with Female Nude Model #1 being the height of the credit they got. Dr. Sketchy's revolves around the models, they're the stars of the show, being whooped and cheered for every saucy pose they strike and deeming which sketches are to be rewarded with cupcakes or tequila shots.

As the poses got longer, my drawing got less frantic and I slowly got somewhat into the swing of things. The last two 20 minute pose sketches are the ones I'm happiest with, so they're the only ones of mine you get to see.


I was always going to love it though, something that can be described as a mix of art, burlesque and whiskey is like pulling my favourite things out of a sparkly top hat at random and having them all work spectacularly well together. The next Dr. Sketchy's session is Miss Havisham themed, which sounds utterly fantastic. It looks like I'm not going to make it to that particular one unfortunately, but you can bet your sexy ass I'll be at the one after that.

All session photos are from the Dr. Sketchy's site and were taken by Cherry Sedition.

Downstairs Cabaret

On a lazy Sunday a few weeks ago, I re-watched Coraline as it was being shown on telly. My favourite characters in this film have got to be the two batty old ladies living downstairs from the blue-haired heroine, former showgirls April Spink and Miriam Forcible. The pair are delightfully dotty, voiced by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders and own a scatter of little Scottie dogs.


When Coraline goes through the door to the Other World, she meets the Other versions of Spink and Forcible, who put on a spectacular show for her and transform into their former younger and rather sexy selves.


But going back to the old lady versions of them, when they lead Coraline through their apartment, you can see posters on the walls of the saucy shows they performed back in their vaudevillian heyday, posters which I instantly demanded to get a proper look at at. BECAUSE THEY'RE GORGEOUS. And beautifully illustrated. And pun-tastic. And here they are!


Hot stuff, comin' through.

Also, I'm now writing for the very lovely Beaut.ie and the nostalgia-laden Where's Grandad? which goes some way to explain the frankly SHAMEFUL neglect of this blog for the last while. I'm sorry! Don't leave me!

Wild Things

There was a time before celebrities had to give their babies mental-sounding names to show us how much better they are than us regular folk. A time before pesky possession of exotic animals laws were brought in. Which means a time when famous people could look cool as fuck parading their fancy wild animal pets around the place.

SUCH AS

Audrey Hepburn and her pet deer, out doing the weekly shop.
  Beatrix Potter with her pet rabbit (well OBVIOUSLY), named Benjamin Bouncer.

Legendary dancer/singer/actress/badass Josephine Baker with her pet cheetah Chiquita.

John Barrymore (Drew's grandad) looking awfully dapper with his pet monkey.

Another pet cheetah here, with American actress Phyllis Gordon doing a spot of window shopping.

Frida Kahlo chilling out with her per deer, Granizo. Which, according to totally reliable online translators, means "hailstones". Cute!

Salvador Dali with his pet anteater. Of course. He'd hardly have a pet Jack Russell now, would he?

And finally, what has to be my absolute favourite of these photos...

Burlesque superstar Zorita, OUT WALKING her pet snake. That's right, she's taking a SNAKE for a WALK. Because Zorita doesn't give a FUCK.

Lots more brilliant ones over at Retronaut. I would now like a pet ocelot, please.

Storm In A Cupcake

Girls bursting out of huge cakes is such a common trope in films and TV at this stage that I reckon if you wheeled a giant cake into a room full of people and it turned out to be an actual cake the whole way through, the disappointment would be palpable regardless of demographic. I'm certain of it. In fact, if anyone wants to bake a giant cake for me to prove my point, please go ahead and I definitely won't eat it all instead of doing what I said I would. Definitely.

Ladies in varying states of undress (or gender, in the case of South Park) have popped out of cakes in everything from Singin' In The Rain, Boardwalk Empire, Cheers and even Xena: Warrior Princess.


What immediately comes to mind for me though is Erika Eleniak and if the name doesn't ring a bell then simply saying "that scene in Under Siege" certainly should. There must be VHS tapes of Steven Seagal's finest work strewn across homes in which Erika's interrupted cake dance has been reduced to fuzzy static due to excessive pausing and rewinding.

There she is now, with nobody to look at her bottom only Casey Ryback and he's got a battleship to save so put some damn clothes on, woman!

Anyway, in case you've ever wondered where this propensity for oversized cakes with a sexy girl filling came from, allow me to inform you. Towards the end of the 19th century, Gilded Age New York was rife with ridiculously wealthy gadabouts and grande dames, all trying to outdo each other with hugely elaborate dinner parties and soirees for the city's elite. Mamie Fish, a legendary hostess with a flair for divilment once held a dinner in honour of a mysterious prince, only for her guests to arrive and discover that the prince in question was a monkey dressed in white tie and tails. Equestrian enthusiast CKG Billings celebrated the opening of his stables in 1903 with a dinner on horseback in the exclusive Sherry's restaurant. For real. A room in the restaurant was decorated to look like the countryside, complete with grass on the floor, waiters dressed for a fox hunt, sterling silver menus shaped like horseshoes and specially designed saddles that incorporated trays fitted to twelve live horses.

Look at these mad bastards! Steps up to the horses and everything.

However, the most notorious stunt by New York's wealthy ne'er-do-wells was what transpired the night of a stag party organised by Stanford White, a well known architect. The dinner was attended by a host of American impressionist painters, Wall Street brokers, photographers, illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (creator of the Gibson Girl) and badass inventor Nikola Tesla. Apparently the dinner was a twelve course affair, with four banjo players and four singers providing entertainment and two girls to pour the wine, a brunette for red and a blonde for white. Classy. When dessert rolled around, the singers began to chant "Sing a Song of Sixpence" as a huge pie was carried into the room. At the line "Was that not a dainty dish to set before the king?" sixteen year old Susie Johnson burst out of the giant pie, accompanied by four and twenty actual birds and danced up and down the table with a stuffed blackbird on her head, feathered toe rings on her bare feet and while some accounts claim she was dressed in sheer black gauze, other stories say she was "covered only by the ceiling".

An illustration that appeared in a newspaper afterwards. I see they went with the non-nudey version of the story.

Although the guests and staff were sworn to secrecy, the story eventually made its way to a newspaper office and what became known as the Pie Girl Dinner exploded, lifting the lid on the shenanigans of the city's VIPs, scandalising the rest of the town and setting a precedent for dramatic desserts that has endured and adapted all the way to now.

Hectic Picnic

I think it's pretty safe to say that Electric Picnic is essentially a weekend of guaranteed merriment, regardless of how demented the weather has decided to be at that given point in September. Of this I am convinced, having had spectacular fun at the the wet, muddy, cold version in 2009 and the earlier ones around 2005 and 2006 where there was actual honest to God SUNSHINE for most of the weekend and I have the photos and rather hazy memories to prove it. Anyway, that's enough preamble. For this was yet another shenanigan-filled three days, which involved the following...


> Santigold taking the roof off the Electric Arena on Friday night, such was the ferociousness of her electro/superfunk set, sending the crowd into a frenzy. Her show was made all the more amazing thanks to her two backing dancers that would out-fierce Tyra herself, bopping along in perfect time with matching golden pom-poms which were soon exchanged for giant hammers, which then gave way to lassos for the part when the pantomime horse came onstage and danced to the music. Yes. A DANCING PANTOMIME HORSE. I want to live inside Santigold's head.

> The Salty Dog shipwreck stage being its usual decadent, dreamy and brilliant self, where we caught Jerry Fish and The Mudbug Club, a Cajun band I can't quite remember the name of and most importantly, the three delightful cancan dancers that frequent The Burlesque and Cabaret Social Club. Jackpot.


> Getting our disco on at the glittery, sparkly wonderfulness of Bitches With Wolves. I seriously can't get enough of this band, not to mention frontman James O'Neill's AMAZING Eighties Madonna dance moves. Eighties Madonna but miles better, in fact.

> Ambling past someone in the full bespectacled, stripey jumpered Wally outfit passed out asleep under a tree.


> The sheer joy of getting to see the very lovely and tremendously talented EleventyFour play both the Peace Pagoda and the Love Letter Stage in Body & Soul. Both of her sets seemed to attract the most random, bizarre and brilliant of happenings, what with the man dressed as a tiger raving to her sweet, funny, folksy stylings, a zombie bridal party stopping by for a listen, a conga line of people disguised as a deck of cards scampering through the audience, and that's actually only the half of it. She handled all the distractions marvellously with her witty banter and the audience most firmly on her side for the Eleventy vs Loud Drumming Bastards debacle. She's recounted the whole thing on her own site and it makes for most surreal and entertaining reading. Also, I completely missed the fact that I had been sitting near Pop Culture Monster at her gig, who I would've loved to have met properly. Next time, purple monster!


> Mr. Billy Flag distracting the drunk-ass headwrecker that kept asking us all what our favourite Bruce Springsteen song was by pointing to the middle distance and shouting "What's that over there!?" whereupon we all legged it in the opposite direction. It was the only way, there was just no getting rid of this fucker.


> Tieranniesaur stomping some amazing funk pop into the main stage of Body & Soul, with bass lines so big and delicious I wanted to eat them. The bass lines, not the band. There was also a brief appearance by frontwoman Annie Tierney's brother Mick Pyro, which was rather class.

> Discovering the genius that is Abandoman in the Comedy Tent. An improv hip-hop duo that stormed through a series of amazing on the spot songs, earning themselves three standing ovations from the delirious crowd. After that astounding performance, MCs Andrew Stanley and Damien Clarke led the audience through the first verse of Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, with the entire tent taking over when they forgot the rest of the words because we all knew it by heart, obviously. David O'Doherty's meandering lo-fi whimsy followed, which was hilarious as ever and topped off what was possibly my favourite ever stint in the Picnic's Comedy Tent.


> Lords of Lightning BLOWING MY MIND entirely with their genuinely awesome lightning bolt performance as they duelled atop a giant Tesla coil each alongside the fire-breathing Arcadia stage. Yowza.

What the Jaysus fuck? Amazing, is what!

> Dancing my socks off in general, but particularly to Gordon Gano finishing out his set with Blister In The Sun, Public Enemy lashing out Don't Believe The Hype, Pulp treating us to Disco 2000 and pretty much all of Beirut, as I do love a bit of brass.

> The Brownbread Mixtape knocking it out of the park in Mindfield with their inspired comedy sketches (in particular the reconstruction of Amanda Brunker's already laughable appearance at Oxegen, punctuated with the YouTube comments from her video. There's really nothing like seeing the unnecessary rage of the YouTube commenter brought to life) the gorgeous poetry and music and the most rousing end to a performance that I've ever seen, in the shape of their alternative Irish anthem My Blood Is Boiling For Ireland. It mostly involves the crowd shouting "Ireland! Ireland! Ireland, FUCKIN' IRELAND" and a fantastic call and response bit as Gaeilge. Go h-ana funky ar fad.

All told, it was a typically fantastic Electric Picnic weekend...'till next year, Stradbally!

Hero In A Half Shell

In American burlesque of the forties and fifties, competition was fierce among dancers constantly trying to outdo each other. It became the age of the prop, with sights like Rosita Royce and her bikini of trained doves that would fly away on her command, Linda "Cupid Doll" Brigitte who would swirl about in a giant champagne glass and Lili St. Cyr who playfully splashed around in a transparent bathtub all performing to packed houses. My favourite story from this age of extravagant props and imaginative dancers concerns Kitty West, who performed an act as Evangeline The Oyster Girl in New Orleans.

Kitty West aka Evangeline The Oyster Girl

In 1949, Evangeline was the headliner of the Casino Royale burlesque house on Bourbon Street, with a routine that involved her rising up out of a giant oyster shell, stripping to a jazz soundtrack and dancing with a giant pearl. She even dyed her hair green for a while, to evoke the idea of seaweed. However, a rival water-themed act soon came swishing into town in the shape of Divena and her 300 gallon water tank in which she performed an underwater striptease.

Divena "The Aqua Tease"

OH NO THEY DI'INT.

Evangeline mid-performance. (Note Divena's tank on the right. Not only was she trying to muscle in on The Oyster Girl's claim to aquatic fame, she was encroaching on her stage space! The WAGON!)

The management at the Casino Royale immediately gave Divena top billing, a move which Evangeline was having absolutely none of. One night, while Divena was doing her nautical thing, Evangeline had decided "balls to this" (possibly not in those exact words, however) and marched onstage wielding an axe.

"I just wanted to break the tank into a million pieces, and I did. I went out there and I just started pounding away at the bottom. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I was just in such a rage that I didn’t want her to take all the spotlight."

The furious stripper smashed the tank open, sending water crashing over the edge of the stage, drenching the audience and leaving a bewildered Divena spluttering at the bottom of it. Apparently, before the startled performer even had a chance to crawl out of the destroyed tank, Evangeline reached in and pulled her hair, as if she hadn't already gotten the message loud and clear.

Take that, you soggy bitch!

Yeah. You better recognise.

Conveniently, a photographer from Life magazine was in the attending crowd and managed to capture the entire incident, making it headline news the next day. Evangeline has always denied that it was a publicity stunt and insists that she had no idea that there was a photographer in the audience. Saying that though, cameras in 1949 weren't exactly the most discreet of apparatus, so he can't exactly have been Mr. Inconspicuous.

A look that seems to suggest that one should not fuck with The Oyster Girl unless one wants their head caved in from a sudden change in water pressure.

Evangeline was promptly hauled off to prison where she was photographed again and fined $10, which, considering the nationwide publicity and cover of Life she got out of it, was a total bargain.

***

Incidentally, I've been rambling on about the sexy publicity stunts pulled by the brazen ladies of the 30s, 40s and 50s over on Boob.ie, most of which involved their boobs. So that particular post contains pictures of boobs, just so's you're warned. Boobs.