The Night we saw a
Lunar Eclipse By George Buckleton & Mike Atkins
There were two events that Renegade House attended the other night. I was prepared to write about the ironic similarities between them, one involving strippers, and the other being a burlesque night at a lesbian bar. I intended taking the position that burlesque and stripping are the same thing, but that the different words enforce an arbitrary moral judgment. But sometimes these ideas work better in theory than in fact, and one wishes that reality wasn’t intruding on a perfectly good idea.Â
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It seems self-evident that there'd be similarities between two events that involved girls taking off their clothes for the entertainment of others. But here's the fly in the ointment: one of those events seemed populated by people who didn't seem too enamored of the idea of girls taking off their clothes for entertainment for some reason. I don't have any personal knowledge that this was the case, but I was told that the crowd at that event thinned out considerably at the time that the strippers took the stage. You see, it was an event put on by the clothing company superette, there were plenty of girls there, and the purpose of the strippers was only for the sake of prurience at a distant second. I guess the world isn't ready for ironic strippers.Â
Although that was the event that I spent less amount of time at, I could tell that it was the more interesting one (form a writers perspective, i.e. there was more to say about it. I think the other would've been the more enjoyable for anyone who actually was after a good time). Most of the mingling that I did was in the pursuit of finding a men's room; and in my searching; I found several small rooms whose purpose was just a little too obvious (they weren't bathrooms). Maybe an exclusive party that was taking place in a (reluctantly) disused brothel blurred the line between ironic voyeurism, and actual voyeurism a little too much. Â
Take the above implication with a pinch of salt though. Like I say, I didn't see this supposed exodus, and it looked comfortably full at the time that I got there. And the crowd didn't look all that out of sorts, in fact they looked rather... well, comfortable. -Not physically comfortable, the boys climbing up the stripper poles, like they were out of control 4-year-olds visiting the fire station can't have been too physically comfortable, but that takes a certain amount of existential comfort. Existential comfort was rather prevalent there; at the point that I gave up looking for a men's room (It wasn't exactly hidden, but all those little rooms made infuriatingly good decoys) I went to ask one of the bar people, and a girl next to me turned to me, and cracked a joke about how long it was taking to get served. Strangers speaking to each other, in coherent, non-slurred sentences at bars is hen's-teeth rare. And that shows how comfortable the people there actually were.Â
Although, I suppose the ultimate anecdote about how comfortable the people (who were there when I was there) seemed, was that it was a place where TV personalities felt comfortable making the smokey-smokey gesture to each other to signal that they were going outside for a cigarette, thus admitting publicly that they partake of the dirty habit. There may be a lot to say about the other event, but I'm not going to be the one to say it. When I was told by our artistic director that I would be covering a “lesbian party”, I feared lipstick lesbians of the Katie Perry variety; who else would call their event a ‘lesbian party’? But no, thank god, those turned out to be his words; they were real lesbians. Except it's pretty hard (and not to mention patronizing) to talk about lesbian culture as if it's the sort of thing that needs an outsider's perspective. So I won't. I suppose I could rate the performers, but all I saw was a belly dancer. She put on a good show, but it was over quite quickly. Suffice it to say, it was a good atmosphere, and the place where it was held looked like a neat hang-out, and I met some cool people; end of story. Oh, and I watched the lunar eclipse.