House sitting. Literally. Making butt-grooves in the quilt covered couch on Pearl Crescent Court. Strange dogs sleeping on either side of me and I'm oddly at home. And, oddly, home this will be for the next week. I'll be able to do some auto-exploring through the back-wood-roads of North Raleigh via my father's Toyota Camry. Carpenter Pond and Creedmoor, Mt. Vernon, Noorwod, and Leesville, take me past the horse pastures, the painted fences and brick houses to the sunset between cities, the Piedmont turning toward night.
Yesterday the sky was lavender at 6:30 pm. Loose cotton-ball-clouds in the east: fluff-puffs in the sky and colored cotton candy. And to the west the sky was cut with knives. Sliced stratus in front of the setting sun, back lit with neon gold. Reefs of cumulus above, emblazoned against the pale purple background, and each wrinkle winked in that rare silver time. A painted sky hanging over 540, and I was speeding west along the curve of the earth. Four lanes on either side of the median, commuters heading down the concrete pathway toward brick houses in the country side of North Raleigh or South Durham. And above their heads: pure electricity. Artwork in the sky above the freeway.
Yes, I will be able to do a little auto-exploring, but most of my time will be spent in a stranger's house with strange dogs. So it goes...
But none of this can possibly be as strange as last night. For last night brought the burlesque. An experience I am not likely to soon forget. After downing several silver bullets with Tate and Hannah Baron in their Peace College dorm room, we piled into Tate's Subi and headed down town. Legends, Legends, the hot-spot, the enormous dance club frequented by Raleigh's chic homosexual population.
Five dollars at the door, but it is empty inside. Room after room. Through the dance-chambers, empty, our footsteps echoing off of the walls, off of the high ceilings, off of the columns that rise at intervals: a phallic forest: the ghosts of gays grinding in the shadows. Empty until we buy beers at the bar and head to the back room where the show has already started...
I was expecting gay guys and girls, drag queens galore, and the transgendered masses. I was expecting outlandish costumes, platform thigh-highs,themed make-up, and bee-hived hair-dos. I was expecting chaos. But apparently this is not burlesque.
Instead, the stage was graced by beautiful young women, each in turn. Their skin soft under the stage lighting. Dancing out onto the stage in their racy costumes. Pin-up girls, dancing out onto the stage from behind the velvet curtains, from behind the long procession of decades that has hidden them away. They dance: out from the '20s, from the '30s and '40s to an audience firmly rooted in 2010. They are soft under the stage lighting, and we are there to welcome them. The lost girls. Back after all these years.
Each one takes her turn. And each turn looks like this: She dances onto the stage, the music playing just for her, and she proceeds to undress in front of the crowd. It is a scarf whipped off of the head and tossed, unfurling in the air as she dances, a sequined top unbuttoned--button by button--and flung to the side, a skirt unzipped and now a hula-hoop around her waist as she does the slow sway down to the stage, get low, get low, until the skirt is a puddle of fabric at her feet. The crowd encourages the shedding of each article with cat-calls and whistles. A sly smile from the girl on the stage. And then it is the heels, un-clipped, she steps down, the stockings, peeled away one by one from vanilla legs. She is a pale flame under the stage lights, and the crowd cheers. And then she turns her back to the crowd, her butt-cheeks like ripe fruits poised atop her legs, and she slowly...slowly...unclasps her bra...and she takes it off and holds it out to the side and drops it...cat-calls and whistles from the audience...and then she peeks over her shoulder, and she smiles at the crowd, the crowd working itself into a veritable frenzy...and then she turns around, her arms crossed over her breasts to cover herself...and she walks out to the front of the stage...and then...as a finale to her little piece of the show...and then...cue the Cuban percussion music, please...and then...she flings her arms wide open as if to embrace us all, as if to embrace the world beyond, and behold:
NIPPLE TASSELS
NIPPLE TASSELS...spinning fire...NIPPLE TASSELS...man's desire...NIPPLE TASSELS...spinning free and Holy Shit! a sight to see.
Shake it. Shake, Shake it. Shake it. Shake, Shake it. Shake it. Shake, Shake it. Shake.
The crowd erupts. All that flesh on stage, pale and perfect in the soft light, and she exits stage right, still shaking, still shaking, leaving the clothes strewn across the stage for some lucky man to come and sweep up before the next girl dances down from the decades to strip off her costume and set us on fire.
Burn baby Burn.
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