Hello World

I was backstage at a show the other night, completely naked, glittering up my body in the midst of a crowd of jazz musicians and Mardi Gras Indians waiting to go onstage.

This is my favorite part of a show where I’m the only burlesque performer: traipsing about naked in front of strangers, giving them a nudity sneak-attack.

The first few minutes are always the hardest. Everyone is freakishly cordial, asking me nothing but the necessary questions about lighting and prop placement while looking at the floor or the space between my eyes.

But I see the dropped-jaw exchange in my mirror when I turn my back to powder my nose.

Then I ask one of them about the bead work on his costume and make a joke about my pasty tape and slowly the formality breaks into giddy interaction, like a giant “Phew! She knows we know she’s naked!”

By the time I start taping a package of tissues to my crotch, my new friend Honey, a Mardi Gras Indian, feels it's appropriate and acceptable to offer up some saucy jokes about what people do with Kleenex.

And to me it feels like a victory, undoing, even if in a small way, every time someone hides sex away in porno mags stuffed under his mattress, has strictly lights-off intercourse, or slouches incognito into a boarded-up fortresses of a strip club.

Because how can sex ever be good when we don’t sit down and get to know it, shoot the shit, look it full in the tit.

That’s what this blog is about.