Burlesque Debut

Boots LaMae made her debut on Friday night. It was amazing! I had so much fun and being in front of a (drunk, rowdy) audience was surprisingly a lot easier than practicing for Doug and my cat. I think the shot of tequila I took before I went on also helped.

Highlights from the evening included:

• The attendance of my 85 year old boss. The first couple times she asked about coming I was too confused to answer and awkwardly dodged the question. In her defense, my boss is awesome. When I am old I want to be just like her. In fact, I kind of want to be like her now. I just wasn't sure if having her there would be totally great or totally weird. After consulting my friends they assured me it would be great so I sucked it up and told her she could come. My teacher reserved a table for her and after I'd performed she asked her if I still had a job and my boss said "She's getting a raise!" and everyone cheered. My boss is not in the office today, but I plan to follow up on this raise business tomorrow.

• After I'd performed a guy asked to take a picture with me. Given how I was dressed he probably thought I was a Dollywood employee who'd somehow become confused and wandered into a burlesque show. Whatever. It made my night.

• How great all the other performances were and how many of my friends showed up.

IMPORTANT UPDATE

Some of you may have noticed that I have changed the name on my profile from Sophie to Sarah. That is because Sarah is my real name, and after using an alias for two years now I have decided I don't write anything here that's salacious enough to require me to be totally anonymous. I also decided that it's weird and a potentially scary window into my future to have an alter ego with the same name as my cat. Now the two of you who read this and don't know who I am can go ahead and google stalk me. Just type in the words "Sarah" and "publishing" and see what comes up. Good luck!

* Note: That is not a picture of my cat. It is a stock image I found that looks very much like her. Some day I will grace you all with a real picture of Sophers, but until then you will just have to use your imagination and picture a cat that looks similar to the one above only ten times cuter.

Empty Carbohydrates Make Everything Better

As some of you might have heard via me, tonight is the night of my show. I am scared. Excited, but also scared. I am sitting at my desk right now feeling like there is a small furry animal doing laps in my stomach and fighting the urge to stress eat one of the bagels that my boss brought into the office yesterday. Normally I would just give into the urge, but being that I'm going to be prancing around without any clothes on in a few hours that might not be a good idea. Oh who am I kidding? That bagel doesn't stand a chance.

Remember Me When I'm Gone

Last night we had a dress rehearsal for our show on Friday. It went well. I fucked up, but so did everyone and nothing too terrible went wrong. Which basically means that all the things that were supposed to come of came off, all the things that were supposed to stay on did, and I didn't have some kind of embarrassing meltdown ala Jujubee from this season of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Everyone in the class got to perform on stage and when we were all done we went down to a secret alcove in the basement of the Slipper Room so our teacher could give us each a few minutes of feedback. My little workshop session started out with the teacher telling me she wanted to murder me. After noticing the look of horror/confusion on my face she explained that I repeated one choreographed movement so many times during my routine that it made her want to kill me. Then she added with a smile that I looked so adorable doing it that it didn't matter.

She must have said this in a very charming way because at the time it registered as a compliment. It took until I got home to start freaking out about it. I want to be great tomorrow! Not incredibly annoying but attractive enough to avoid being slaughtered by a roomful of drunks because of it. I'm just going to have to practice a lot tonight and put extra sparkles on my costume in the hopes that the audience will be too dazzled to notice how many times I bop my hips back and forth in time to the music . . .

Beadazzling

One of the many reasons I have fallen off the earth lately is that I have managed to follow through with one of my New Year's resolutions and get back into doing burlesque. For the past month I have been taking a class in character development that culminates in BUM BUM BUM . . . a performance! Yes, that's right, instead of twirling my tassels with a handful of giggly hipsters in an empty studio/bar on the Lower East Side, I will actually be shaking my stuff in front of my boyfriend, friends, and a bunch of drunk strangers at The Slipper Room this Friday. I would say you're all invited, but if anyone is still reading this thing at this point I'm sure they're already coming. In the course of taking this class I have learned many things:

1) I am the only woman my age in New York who does not know how to sew. Before this class I assumed that no one under the age of 60 knew how to sew. As a skill, I thought it had gone the way of butter churning and um, fife making. Oh was I wrong. On the first day of class our teacher told us that doing burlesque is like going back to kindergarten; you get to play dress up and put sparkles on everything. Fun right? Of course! The only problem is finding a way to adhere the sparkly things to the other things without using a needle and thread.

This is where a product called Magnatac comes in. It is a fabric glue that our teacher told us about then warned us to be careful with because if it gets on your skin it will "Take your fingertips off a little bit." I have chosen only to concentrate on its awesome adhesive powers and ignore the warnings. Last night at my insistence my boyfriend glued a band of sequins around a thong while I was wearing it because I couldn't think of any other way to make sure it fit. If my life were a reality show the underwear would have stuck to my ass and Doug and I would have had to come up with creative and hilarious ways to get it off. Luckily my life is boring and it was fine.

2) No one knows what burlesque is. Three people have asked me if it involves a stripper pole, four asked if I'll be on stage alone, and one woman asked me how I'll feel about this ten years from now when my career has taken off and pictures of me in pasties start circulating. That last point is ridiculous mostly because my career is never going to take off to the extent that anyone would try to sabotage it, and also because if I cared about people seeing me in pasties I wouldn't dance around in public wearing pasties.

3) Spending a little money on a lot of little things quickly adds up to a lot of money. I have spent more than I care to admit on a costume that essentially looks like the result of a drunk hillbilly armed with a beadazzler getting in a fight with the contents of her hamper.

4) Not even the prospect of shaking my naked ass in front of a roomful of people will inspire me to workout.

So many lessons! The whole thing has been a ton of fun, but it's also been way more work than I'd imagined. Mostly because when I get excited about something I am incapable of doing it half-way and end up spending every lunch hour for a month running around Manhattan searching for the perfect rhinestones to stick on a martini shaker or some other prop that no one but me will notice.