Burlesque and you

If you are like me--and there is a 25% chance that you are me, because only about four people read this blog--then you are aware of the renaissance in burlesque that has left New York dizzy with visions of tassle-whirling pasties and--like me--you have neglected for far too long to see what all the excitement is about. Anyway, tonight I caught the This Is Burlesque show at Corio.

Upstairs at Corio is a lot like a comfortable living room, the furniture being a mix of quaint, old-fashioned mid-century modern and quaint old-fashioned post modernism. It is a safe place, and I felt comfortable.

I should say that burlesque is not stripping for fat chicks, as a friend of mine has characterized it; for one thing, the women are in pretty good shape. At the risk of giving away what goes on at a burlesque show, let me say right here that I am not going to say whether any of these gorgeous women end up in less that their G-strings and pasties or confirm or deny that a Ping-Pong ball hit me in the forehead.

I will say that in looking over the menu I wondered whether the food at a burlesque show is “food.” The answer is that the scallops I had were great. Take away Angie Pontani and her sisters and you would still have a restaurant that served a delicious meal with large portions, as a friend of mine has already mentioned.

But eating great scallops in winter would be so much less of an experience without Murray Hill presiding. My friend, a theatre major, said to me “If they break down the fourth wall, I’m out of here.” I told her I thought the fourth wall had already dissolved, that the domestic arrangement of couches and chairs formed a continuum with the stage. . . . Murray Hill, who has a kind of Benny Hill-like cherubic face and began with a song containing the line “I like chicks!,” describes himself as the “hardest working middle-aged man in show business.” Never before has the smarminess and the seamy side of show business been so adorable. As he worked the room, commenting on members of the audience with the kind of laser-accurate insights that we would hope our therapists would have, I told my friend that I thought part of what burlesque does is push the envelope rather like the way fire departments out west set controlled brushfires. “You overintellectualizing,” my friend said.

I just wish that someday I could learn to underintellectualize. I probably should not have turned down the free vodka shot.

In due course Murray Hill set his sites on us: “What? Have you been going out for five years or something?” Yes, I laughed. Having been in a five-year-plus relationship that went thud I knew only too well that that is what I certainly must have looked like with my 26-year-old female friend (platonic, for real).

It has been a long time since I had seen such a parade of stockings and straps and bustiers. I suddenly found myself with a memory from when I was very young, probably too young for nursery school and watching my mother get dressed--I am old enough to know a time when girdles and stockings held up with snaps and straps were the normal innerwear of most women.

The highlight of the show for me was Melody Sweets, who approached the stage from the back of the room. She leaned down to me and said “Where are your drinks?” (they hadn’t arrived yet). She then went into an endearing version of Tom Waits’ “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” And so there is that glamour, the dizzy lyrics she sung sweetly (she did another nice song at the end of the show), and I am left reminding myself that “Melody Sweets actually spoke to me! I will never wash my ear again!”