An Experiment In Focus Adjustment

 --> My high school drama teacher had a sign on his bulletin board for years,* which read:

Theatre is Life;

Film is Art;

Television is Furniture.

To the half-dozen cranberry-haired teenagers fully immersed in the optimistically-named Drama Department of our predominantly Republican, sports-focused rural-suburban learning institution, this helped solidify our self-congratulatory youthful angst and firm commitment to getting beat up weekly by the gym teachers. These days (nearly a decade after having spent nearly a decade in Theatre-with-an-re) I might amend that sign somewhat, to read:

Theatre is full of actors;

Film is fine but I like movies;

Television is comforting;

Facebook ruined society.

Also I hardly ever wear Smiths t-shirts any more.

Nevertheless, although I’ve escaped Theatre for Wiseass Striptease I remain committed to live performance as my artistic medium of choice - for the simple fact that I am still fascinated by the variations from one performance to the next, and inspired by the constantly-changing interaction between performer and spectator. ** The liminal space in which live performance exists is one of quite literally infinite possibilities: it is where theatre, dance and ritual all find roots. ***

What you don’t so much find in that impermanent transitional space is digital cameras.

I’m a firm believer in the inherent social contract between performer and spectator: We’re here for and because of each other; this experience wouldn’t exist if either of us weren’t present. And “present” doesn’t mean “taking photos of the whole thing so you can status-update about what you did tonight.” If you leave with your own emotional response to my performance and feel moved to convey your impressions to others through your own words, it becomes our experience; if you take crappy cell-phone photos of my entire act, you have crappy photos of me on your phone and not much more.

Now, amidst all of my you-damn-kids-get-off-of-my-lawnery, I will readily acknowledge several things:

1. The average audience at any given titty show isn’t there to experience the ritualistic transformative possibilities of a shared liminal space. They’re there to get drunk and see some tits.

2. At any given titty show we are there primarily to entertain, and not necessarily to change the world. If we can sneak that in too, so much the better.

3. Get a grip, grandma, the world’s gone digital and everyone has phones and Photos or it didn’t happen! and that’s just the way the world works and if you’ll excuse me I have to go text my status location to Facesquare so I can be the mayor of my life.

4. Sometimes people want to take pictures because they think you’re awesome. Also it’s nice to have videos of your acts and stuff.

So I try to find a balance between kicking tourists in the f-stop and just giving up and mugging for the sea of screens and lenses. I’ll always prefer the live experience (years ago I stopped taking a camera with me on vacations, after I realized that I was getting so anxious about missing shots that I wasn’t actually noticing where I was or what I was seeing) and I will never put up with rude, inappropriate or disrespectful photographers at any show, be they professional or casual … but for the sake of my ulcers I realize I do have to chill a little and let people experience the performance in their own way.

Thinking about all this (and, occasionally, being driven to tears of rage by it) led to a variety of ideas about how to do something productive with the frustration. This January I had the chance to begin a hopefully-ongoing project through which I will a: make art out of anger and b: amuse the fuck out of myself. Transformative qualities of live performance aside, I’m pretty okay with that; so, then, here’s part one:

1.13.13 from Nasty Canasta on Vimeo.

* Specifically, several years that started with a “1” and a “9.”

** And not at all because I have the drawing skills of a concussed bee.

*** I just recently paid off my massive student-loan debts. Just as a matter of interest.

Striptease on Film: BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S (1961)

--> To think of Breakfast At Tiffany's brings many things to mind, from the problematic (Mickey Rooney’s infamous yellowface performance*) to the sublime (that ridiculously perfect Oscar-worthy Cat**). But even if you’ve seen the movie a couple dozen times because it’s your home-alone, laundry-folding, fuzzy-slippers-glass-of-wine-and-ovaries treat (just for instance), you might still forget this scene every time until it’s suddenly upon you: 

The dancer is one Beverly Powers, also known by the stage name Miss Beverly Hills, and she was a for-real, honest-to-goodness burlesque stripper. From Tom Lisanti’s Glamour Girls Of Sixties Hollywood (2008):

Beverly Jean Powers was born in Southern California [in 1937 or ‘39] and graduated from Van Nuys High School … She wed a Los Angeles tree surgeon at a young age. The brunette beauty with the tantalizing 37-24-34 figure then became a striptease artist using the name Miss Beverly Hills. Working mainly in Las Vegas, her act entailed dancing glamorously, dressed in showgirl-type gowns, and gradually removing her clothes until she is clad in a two-piece bikini; during the final minutes on stage, she doffs her top (she always had pasties on underneath). Becoming well-known, Powers was provocatively photographed for a number of men's magazines of the time including The Dude and Knights before giving acting a try.

Elsewhere it’s reported that Miss Beverly Hills had a stormy affair with mobster Mickey Cohen; that her husband Bill Powers was actually a hairdresser rather than a tree surgeon (a completely understandable mixup, really); and that, in December of 1959, “discovered by Chuck Landis, she takes the place of stripper Candy Barr as featured performer in Los Angeles’s Club Largo when Candy goes to prison.” There’s more out there on the interweb about her film and TV performances than her burlesque career - though she does seem to have been cast as a showgirl, burlesquer or stripper fairly often (Viva Las Vegas, Kisses For My President, Angel In My Pocket and an episode of Fantasy Island, to name a few). Apparently she retired from both stripping and acting in the early 1980’s and is now a minister in Maui.

I love this scene for a few reasons, beyond getting to see even a Hollywood-approved slice of this classic performance.

• First: That cape; that dress. (Though Audrey Hepburn was dressed by Hubert de Givenchy, Edith Head was the costume supervisor for the movie … unless that was one of Beverly’s own burlesque costumes?)

• Second: By 1961 the First Golden Age of Burlesque was beginning its transition into the modern strip club; and although who ever knows how accurate the Hollywood Version is of anything? I like to think this is at least something like how it was at the time. I’d like to think that if I were having a bad day (say, tearfully sending my Texas daddy-husband home on a Greyhound bus) I could grab my gay-in-the-novel best friend, slap on some devastatingly glamorous sunglasses, have Nellie Manley pile up my coif as if it were accidentally that fabulous, and head off to a wood-paneled Manhattan lounge to watch a burlesque queen strip to a live band while I get wittily drunk at four o’clock in the afternoon.

• Third: The dialogue in this scene (which doesn’t appear in the novel) (which you should read if you haven’t, it’s heartbreaking and beautiful in a different way to the film) did make me prickly at first. ***  How dare these characters even imply that there’s anything remotely superficial about what I do? It is deep - it is important!

Well, yes. And yet … this is a thing to write about at greater length at some other time (or if you catch me drunk enough backstage on the right night, I’ll slur your ear off about it whether you like it or not and just see if I don’t) but I have been reminding myself a lot of late that being serious about your art and your job doesn’t mean taking yourself too seriously; or, Those Who Work As Giant Stripping Sandwiches Shouldn’t Throw Stones. What I do is, on balance, amusing and superficial - and that’s okay (see: the four-hundred-squillion-dollar, all-pervasive industry that is Pop Music), it’s what makes the transcendent moments of deep importance when they do occur (and they do) all the more resonant for me.

Anyway. Next time you have a laundry-folding, fuzzy-slipper-wearing night off, open up a bottle of wine and dial up Breakfast At Tiffany’s on the interweb – and be sure, when you do, to drink a toast to Miss Beverly Hills.

* Blake Edwards, on the film’s 45^th anniversary: “Looking back, I wish I had never done it...and I would give anything to be able to recast it, but it's there, and onward and upward.”

** Whose real name, it appears, was “Orangey .”

*** In case my video-of-the-TV-screen clip is somewhat inaudible, here it is:

Holly: Do you think she’s talented? Deeply and importantly talented?

Paul: No. Amusingly and superficially talented, yes. But deeply and importantly, no.

Holly: Gracious! … Do you think she’s handsomely paid?

Striptease on Film: THE SILENCERS (1966)

--> Take four and a half minutes out of your life to watch this (actually, you should take 102 minutes and watch the whole movie sometime because it's delightful, but in the meantime just the opening credits will do):

This is The Silencers, Columbia Pictures’ 1966 spy spoof featuring sexy secret agent Matt Helm (Dean Martin) and a whole lot of jet-set-fabulousness. I’ll leave the film trivia to Wikipedia and IMDb (although I will say, as a point of interest: Cyd Charisse’s singing was almost always dubbed on film, in this case by a young Vikki Carr*). A strange series of happy accidents fueled by out-of-date tech led me to this film, and needless to say I was pretty much hooked on the basis of the credits alone.

What I want to know is the story of this title sequence: Who were these women? Were they actors, dancers, or actual burlesque strippers? (I don't recognize any of them; and I'm pretty certain that any legend who appeared in a Dean Martin movie - even if it wasn't technically with Dino - would have mentioned it pretty significantly. I met Joel Grey at a party once and I haven't stopped talking about it for a decade. He was wearing a tie with bunnies on it, you know.) Also and of course, I will be eternally frustrated that we never get to see the end of any of these numbers, 1960's Hollywood being what it was, but I like to think they filmed it all. (It is a cherished dream that footage exists somewhere and someday the interweb will acquire it. Now you know what to get me for my birthday.)

I don't tend to draw a lot of direct and specific inspiration from classic performances - my aesthetic is very different, I don't really dance so much as try not to trip while in heels, and glamour as far as I'm concerned is a thing that happens to other people ... but something about this particular moment in striptease time (and Hollywood and fashion and advertising and all that) delights the hell out of me. There's a wonderful mix of high-glam and sex-kitten looseness: Sure, I'll spend two hours getting my hair done to go to the supper club, but if a few curls happen to tumble out when I take my shoes off and run through the fountain outside, well then rowr.

... also like the then-relatively-new Bond films, the Matt Helm series features its own bunch of fantastic character names: Lovey Kravezit, Coco Duquette, Yu-Rang ( *shudder*) and a crew of henchwomen known as the Slaygirls (wait, I've changed my mind: that's what I want for my birthday).

There is fortunately a lot of great classic striptease on film, from Teaserama to Christopher Walken's brilliant number in Pennies From Heaven (Go. Watch. NOW. It's manlesque circa 1981); as one of my own favorites, I'd like to add The Silencers to the list. **

* Who was born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martinez Cardona. Which is a fabulous name. That’s all.

** By the way, the second movie in the Matt Helm series, Murderer's Row (also 1966) co-stars a ridiculously sexy young Ann-Margret. Also Karl Malden, for whom I have a permanent soft spot.