Barely Protesting
February 29, 2008
Where are we going?
Pot-addled and with low expectations, we sped out into the setting, purple night of our puritan stronghold. Four colleagues. Strangers. Co-workers. Not one of whom had a clue what to expect at the show that night.
It had all started easily enough; I could remember that much. A few months earlier, my friend Mike had separated his need to critique from his social-agoraphobia for long enough to join a student publication. At semester’s turn he had risen up the ranks to take charge of the Arts section. “We’ll set the world ablaze,” he hollered.
I have to admit, his promotion had cheered me up some. In recent months my mood had taken a turn for the worse.The primaries had hit full swing and all of us watched with focused disappointment as the same issues went dodged, the same fundamental questions were spun until we ourselves could no longer remember who had asked them. Was it us or them? The lines in the dust, hardly ever defined, were no longer recognizable.
Certainly someone must still care! Bodies had come back in coffins, draped in red, white, and blue. Sure no one here had known any of the dead, but that didn’t mean they no longer existed. Or did it? A grieving mother must be out there somewhere, wringing her hair like Mother Keller waiting for her boy to return.
For nearly seven years, plans and promises had slammed head-long into resolve — coming together to give birth to hideously defective legislative children. We could not see the horrible things our own government was doing, our vision obscured by the ash and amber and smoke of the at-the-time still smoldering rubble of Ground Zero. Nothing changed. Our own government has turned on us. All of our prophets are dead.
One day, a few weeks ago, something miraculous occurred. A message arrived for us in the mail. We had been sent for.
“Truth serum Presents: Sex Workers Cabaret — One Night Only!” the flyer screamed.
Mike and I sat wide-eyed on the bed looking down at the orange slip of paper. “What do you think it is?” I asked in sheer buffoonery.
“Well,” Mike thoughtfully balanced the bong between us. “In my opinion it’s clearly an invitation to some pagan ritual.”
“Naturally we’ll have to go.”
“Of course, I’ll arrange tickets immediately.”
Sex. Workers. Cabaret. The words sang out to me with a mystical rhythm like the marching song of a long-forgotten laborers union. What would happen there? I didn’t have the foggiest clue. The only safe bet was that there would be nudity and popcorn, a lethal combination for any self-respecting college man.
With bated breath the day finally arrived, Saturday, February 15, 2008. I came back from the first triumphant night of the play I was performing in to find a house full of warm apathy.
“It’s sold out.” The plainness of the message sent me into spirals.
“B-b-but,” I stammered. “The tickets. Jesus Christ! What happened to the tickets?”
“No tickets,” Mike’s voice reached out through the thick smoke that separated our faces.
“We have to go. We have — it’s what we’ve been waiting for.” I could see the futility. The mood in the room was shifting dangerously out of my favor. It wasn’t Mike’s fault, or mine for that matter. We were just products of our time, products easily shifted towards complacency. Why leave? The house was warm, we had no tickets, and the air crackled and enticed with the smell of cannabis. This is what we always do. We’ll smoke. We’ll drink. We’ll listen to metal. Change is a fallacy anyway.
Mike stood up casually. “Yeah, alright.”
“Alright what?” I snapped.
“You’re right. We should probably go.”
“Oh.”
And like so many other miscast soldiers from lost generations past, we slunk off to go see The Sex Workers’ Art Show, the modern day freak show.
Where are we?
The inside of the theater was moving with the type of impatient energy typically reserved for middle school assemblies. The insiders had arrived alright, and they wanted a show. Maybe some blood too.
Did anyone really know what we were all in for? Looking back, it’s hard to say. Getting in had been a struggle. The outside crowd had been a cross section of confusion: Art school researchers mixed gracefully with tranny insiders, and all worked together to keep an eye out for the sparkly eyed deviants who floated among us.
Of course none of these people had anything to do with our getting into the show, of this I was sure. As the bastard children of the Gonzo press, we knew there was not a door in existence that couldn’t be overcome by drug-heightened confidence and a plausible magazine name.
“We’re with The Observer,” I told the ticket taker.
“I’m sorry, but there’re no tickets reserved for you,” she shot back.
“Well of course there aren’t, but just see what you can do for us.”
The angry rotarian stalked off and my eyes fell to dancing around the lobby. To my left, a book selling booth was being manned by a blown-out looking blonde.
A gruff voice shocked me back. “How many are you with?” The woman now standing before me was replete with leather jacket and short hair. Of the many gays I am friends with, I have never felt totally at ease with the masculine members of the lesbian tribe. I have no charm to offer, and as a result I tend to panic and freeze. Sensing my cowardice, Mike stepped in:
“Four.”
“Four?” The woman’s face soured with disbelief.
“Yes, four. A writer, an editor, an illustrator, and a photographer,” he explained. “I’m the editor.”
“Well, editor, you need to reserve tickets.” The woman paused. I could see we were through, before we had even begun too. The injustice of it all filled me with contempt. This could not stand. Thankfully, it wouldn’t have to.
“Well, I can sell you three,” our savior began, “and comp you one. But just so you know the Dig is here, and they only sent one writer.”
“Oh that’s fine.” My editor replied. “We’re far more important than the Dig.”
What possible good could come of this?
Annie Oakley silently stood at the forefront of the stage like the head female priestess of a Dionysian carnival. She was the show’s host. Above her, the Coolidge Corner Theater was lined with carvings of Roman gods, and the crowd played its part in the ancient recreation. All of us in the audience were part of the teeming masses, stiff with excitement for the freak show to start and our realities to drift away.
This was our bread and circus, our Roman coliseum. We wanted to see the modern American freak show. Porn stars are, after all, the only group political correctness has passed over. Who better then to provide some stoned laughs?
“We want a show goddamnit!” A hulking barbarian in a baseball cap bellowed out from behind me. Others threw popcorn. I remained relatively silent. “Give us a show,” I muttered between sips of beer.
The lights dimmed. The show began.
First up was The World Famous Bob — a six-foot-tall woman wearing a high-slit blue dress and ankle-inverting heels. No real identity could be found for The World Famous Bob, Annie Oakley had informed us, and as far anyone knew The World Famous Bob was her real name.
As Bob launched into her opening monologue, I pictured this gargantuan woman at the DMV. “Ma’am I must have your real name,” the bespectacled man behind the license registration window would insist.
“But can’t you see,” Bob would exclaim in her high falsetto, as she extended her arms “I have already given it to you!”
For the most part I listened to Bob’s speech. She had run away with a transient gay best friend. Feeling unappreciated by their stymied small town, the pair had hopped into a fire red chariot and blew out to sunny California, free to start life anew. Soon after Bob was stripping at the Skin Flamingo.
Her story was another flame out of the distinctly American type, and to be totally honest, I couldn’t have cared less. I threw back my beer. If the performers weren’t going to medicate me, I’d just keep doing it myself.
My impatience must not have been lost on Bob. The minute the story was over, she took her clothes off. Dropping her dress to the theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bob shook her massive breasts all over the stage. The burlesque was good enough to send the mob back into its pre-show frenzy. I sat back into my chair with a short breath of relief. The nudity had relaxed me some, but I still remained suspicious. Something about the rules of this game seemed unfamiliar, and I was beginning to sober up.
No sooner had this inkling of suspicion arisen in me, then Ms. Dirty Martini walked briskly to center stage. She was a stout woman of perhaps thirty-five, wearing a red, white and blue sequined flag dress. Ms. Dirty Martini stood center stage and waited for the attention to come back to her. Unlike The World Famous Bob, it seemed Ms. Dirty Martini had not come to talk.
Before I could even begin to wrap my brain around what this fireplug of a woman might be doing wrapped up in our nation’s flag, the dance began. “God Bless America” rang out from the theater’s speakers, and Ms. Dirty Martini began to whirl around in circles. Moving along the stage, she swooped and dipped as articles of clothing whipped through the air. I was transfixed by her movements. She was like an elephantess ballerina, stomping her way towards a not entirely ungraceful pirouette.
As the music reached its crescendo, Ms. Dirty Martini reached between her curvaceous thighs and began to throw money all over the stage. Hundreds of fake dollar bills poured out of Ms. Dirty Martini’s ass as if it were a malfunctioning ATM.
“Jesus man alive!” Mike and I shared disbelieved looks from across the aisle. Our photographer darted up from her seat and rushed to the front of the stage to snap away at the visionary and the streaming money.
I looked at Mike. His eyes were recessed back into his head, glossed over with equal parts of intrigue, shock, and horror. God forgive him; the poor man went to a Catholic school.
Ms. Dirty Martini continued to pull the ribbon of money from her rear, holding it above her head and twirling it. Pardon me for not knowing what to make of a full-figured woman dancing in a spiral of ribbons origination from her own butt.
What were we seeing? This wasn’t what we had paid for. We had wanted escapism, “Come on in and see Dojo the Dog Faced Boy and his Mother,the Lobster Woman, Blow One Another — Tonight Only” We wanted to forget, damnit, to forget the whirlwind of garbage that swirls around most educated Americans. But this — watching Ms. Dirty Martini pull wads of cash from her butt — this was something different entirely. It was shocking. It was violent. It was protest.
Like Spartans leading the front lines, more performers came springing from the wings. Bridgette, a Helen Bonham Carter look alike smothered in loosely applied Cruella Deville makeup, confessed that after being rejected from Chuck-E-Cheese she had stolen her sister’s Catholic confirmation name and began stripping. She belted out her own, original, musical theater composition. I sat in impressed silence as a stripper pole appeared on stage. Bridgette twisted and contorted her naked body up to the top of the pole, and never for a moment stopped singing. It occurred to me the freak show was morphing into the first effective and moving performance art show I’d ever seen
And then, it got weird.
Coming back from intermission, I was certain I was beginning to have a hold on the night. Yes, we were seeing something new. It was radical and cool, but, damnit, so were we. We were artists. We were journalists and artists. For God’s sake, we showed up to the show packing an illustrator. We were prepared. We could easily be on board with the jist of the show, no problem. We had just needed a little time to adjust. Now we were good.
We believed that we understood, and were cool with, the spectacle of alternative culture we had just witnessed. They weren’t that different; it wasn’t too much to stomach. Now we were good.
But we forgot about Dave. In retrospect, it was an easy enough slip to have made. Caught between the crossfire of what we were seeing, and actively working our way towards being down with it, none of us had remembered the Asian guy from the crowd who had quietly volunteered to be part of an upcoming act.
Dave was led on his hands and knees by a towering, ten-foot-tall Vietnamese dominatrix wielding a leather chain.
“Take the microphone,” the dominatrix commanded Dave. Collectively, the entire crowd shifted to the front of our seats to hear him speak.
“Yes,” Dave timidly sniffled.
“Yes what?”
Dave looked up at the Dominatrix questioningly. Dressed in a combination of fishnets and leather, she lorded over him in a terrifying manner. The whole thing looked like the cover art for some sideways graphic novel.
“WHAT’S MY NAME, DOG?” The Dominatrix screeched, yanking on the chain and pulling Dave’s head up to her.
I flinched. I knew I was back out of my league. Still, Dave just sat there, incapable of preventing the mixture of stage fright and pleasure from spreading stupidly across his face. The Dominatrix readied her arm for another yank. It was too much for me to take.
“Jesus Christ man, do something! She’ll rip your head off.” People looked at me.
“Mistress Keva.” Dave whispered. It was hardly audible, even with the microphone, but there was our answer.
“That’s right, Mistress Keva,” she scolded back at him. For the next 20 minutes Mistress Keva had the entire audience in stunned rapture. I’d be lying if I said I remembered everything she said, or even everything she did to Dave. The whole performance occurred in a blacked-out nether region, which only exists behind doors most of us will never see, let alone open.
One thing was for certain, though: Dave loved it. Every command Mistress Keva gave Dave followed unquestioningly and with fervent concentration. He never spoke above a whisper, but that must have been because there was no need to. When Mistress Keva jumped on his back and rode him like a Ferrari, he made vrooming sounds. When she called him a dog, he whimpered. He even sat by patiently and listened as she discoursed on Orientalism in modern sadomasochistic society. And when she drove home her point on this topic by having Dave moan an orgasm in Cantonese, he did that too.
Staring at Dave on his back, moaning in a foreign language, I flashed back to an experience I had had a few months earlier. Travelling in Spain, a few friends and I had decided to hike up a mountain. Once there, I had taken up the quest to balance myself atop a small antenna pole that jutted out to within a few feet of the plateau’s overhang. Balancing on that tenuous pole I had looked out towards the Mediterranean Sea, which lay, uninterrupted save the pole, 13,000 feet below me. What I learned doing this was that you can find out about yourself by pushing yourself to extremes.
Coming back to Dave, I was certain that he had stood on the top of his antenna pole for long enough. Yet, it seemed Mistress Keva disagreed. Laughing, she reached back into a bag and took out a ten-inch, strap on dildo and attached it to herself. “Wherever this is going,” I thought, ” it’s probably going to be intense.”
“Come here, Dave.” She cooed, extending one finger out to him. I then proceeded to watch Dave, a grown man presumably engaging in his first sadomasochistic behavior, fellate Mistress Keva in front of a theater full of people he most assuredly did not know.
I looked at Mike. He winced in his chair, gnashing his teeth and pleading with Dave not to do it. But he couldn’t look away. At this point, the aura and shock had worn off for him. He was forced to confront the sober reality of watching a timid, tiny Asian boy go down on dominatrix’s dildo while she moaned in Cantonese.
Watching Dave and Mistress Keva, there was simply no way for me to know that the night’s strangest act lay ahead. And yet, looking back into that night’s strange mist, I should have sensed that something important was still milling inside the recesses of the Coolidge Theater. I should have known there would bet at least one last real voice screaming in protest at the atrocities of the age.
Annie Oakley returned to the stage. “We only have one more act tonight, and it’s a good one,” she said, her enthusiasm rising above the tiredness in my body. “He is one of the most famous burlesque performers in the world. He’s been a featured performer in Berlin, Paris, and all across this great country of ours. Please welcome Krylon Superstar.”
Silence. A scream. “Oh my God you guys!” What sounded like a 12-year-old girl’s voice didn’t match up with the pounding, running sound I heard slamming down the aisle behind me. Then I saw him. “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “they’ve engineered some type of giant, mongoloid mutant with which to destroy pedophiles.”
Before I could go further with it, though, Krylon had bounded onto the stage. He was an athletically built black man. Standing, at least, 10-feet-tall, he deftly crawled about the stage in nine inch stiletto heels and a neon purple wig. I must admit, at this point I still felt I had seen weirder.
Krylon spent his first few minutes on stage jabbering with the energy and emotional depth his voice had originally suggested. The jokes fell flat, and I could feel the disappointment beginning to set in on me. I had run away with the night’s previous energy, my standards for the finale had become too high. “Oh well,” I thought, “At least I still saw Dave.”
And then, as has often happened in this article, something strange happened. Krylon began to sing:
“This is a shakedown/No fucking around” He crooned, the stage light’s dimming around him. “Rodeo bully man leaves destruction in the desert sand/This is a shakedown/No fucking around.”
A shakedown. The words were unmistakable, the sadness in Krylon’s voice un-missable. I knew what this was. I had heard it on the history shows, read it in the cultural manuscripts, seen it the money coming out of Ms. Dirty Martini. It was protest. True protest, captured in the tortured falsetto of a transvestite man’s singing voice.
The mood was back. Krylon shot his head back into the stage lights. The music went up. Strains of “America the Beautiful” filled the auditorium. In one fell swoop, Krylon threw his microphone to the floor and tore off his dress. “Fuck Bush” was scrawled across his chest in lipstick.
Lip-synching along to Katharine Lee Bates’ words, Krylon removed his clothing until he stood naked in the spotlight. He extended his arms high above his head and marched in step to one of our nation’s most cherished rhythms. His message was clear, and I may never see more inspired looking faces than I did at that moment.
Somewhere during all of this, an inflatable baby pool full of glitter had made its way onto the stage. Not missing a beat, Krylon leapt into the pool and tossed glitter high into the air. Illuminated under the lights, with his purple hair and black skin covered in glitter, Krylon Superstar looked like the play doll America would never think to make for her daughters.
The music turned a corner and began building to its peak, rushing forth from the speakers like a subway burrowing its way out of the tunnel and towards the platform. Krylon crouched down in the pool in a bent-over position, his back placed upwards towards stage right. Out of the wings, a stage hand carried a sparkler. Krylon and the stage hand caught one another’s eye. Then the stage hand stuck and lit the sparkler in Krylon’s butt. With the music fading and the stage light’s bouncing around him, Krylon looked out at the audience.
“There she is,” I thought, “Mother Keller, still waiting for her boy to come home.”
The Art Workers’ Sex Show is a travelling troupe of performance artists drawn exclusively from the sex industry. The group is an amalgam of former prostitutes, dancers, and pornography stars. The show reminds us that art is not always beautiful, but is no less artistic from its lack of beauty It also reminds us of two of he principles which our country was founded on; free expression and liberty.