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.