(with apologies, respect, and affection to David Foster Wallace. RIP.)
Jane knows someone who's involved in a performance troupe, and she was invited to come to a pre-Halloween show at the White Horse Inn, our local gay bar. From what Jane knew, this would be a drag king show.
Now, we are the sort of ladies who are plenty educated about feminist theory and queer and gender issues—on paper. It's pretty much all book learnin', not from extensive field studies.
But we decided to be adventurous and take our vanilla selves down to this show, despite its being Sunday and a school night. I considered wearing the black lace top that only comes out for trips to nightclubs, and rejected it as trying too hard, in favor of sporty casual. I shouldn't have. Lacy and frilly would have been right in the spirit of the thing, and likely would have gotten me more attention from the strippers.
Yep, this was not a drag show, but a queer burlesque night known as Debauchery. It's homegrown and organic, with proceeds benefiting local queer organizations like Femina Potens.
Jane did tell me that if I bought her a lap dance, she would kill me—and she made me sit on the aisle.
We did get into the spirit of the thing: laughing, whooping, and tipping along with the rest of the crowd. Before the show started Jane and I were chatting about not really knowing how to air-kiss gracefully. Gracefully tucking currency into a stripper's, erm, garments is also a life-skill I have not mastered. Thankfully, it was OK to just throw money. (I know, weird, huh?)
When I was, um, flirted with by one of the dancers I ended up with one of his little fake horns stuck to my sweater, which I didn't realize for several minutes. A girl nearby thought it was uproarious that I had "a horn stuck to my titty." I returned it.
Before the show we felt like we'd entered a time warp, since the music was the same as we heard in gay bars 25 years ago: Vanity 6, Prince, the Eurythmics. I bet the DJ played "Meeting in the Ladies Room" at intermission, after we left.
When we left, we found our car had been broken into--the contents of the glove box were on the seat. Since we've never had a car break-in in all the years we've lived in San Francisco or Berkeley, we felt we were overdue and weren't too upset. There was nothing of real value in the car, but they took Jane's stack of CDs. We have no idea whether insurance reimburses for stolen Dixie Chicks albums. We were rather surprised at what neat and considerate burglars they were—they broke only a little side window, and they didn't dump our maps and registration on the street or in a trash can.
All in all, it was a pretty big adventure.
