Hotsy Totsy Burlesque is back after a 4 month break! I love this show. It is an ongoing burlesque soap opera with returning characters and plot lines. We’ve been doing it for 4 years.

The basics are that Cherry Pitz and the girls live at The Home For Wayward Girls and Fallen Women, an all girls’ hotel that is always in need of cash so every month they run a show to raise funds. Of course, there are things that always seem to go wrong or weird behind the scenes. Think Muppet Show but instead of puppets you have naked girls…..(Which the Muppet Show kinda wanted to do.)

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Someone pulls up slowly to the crowd on the elevated highway, just to the edge where all the people and abandoned cars make it impossible to drive further. The driver wrenches the wheel to the side at the last second, lurching to a sudden stop and surprising a shriek and a laugh out of the woman in the passenger seat.

They slide out of the windows like the Dukes of Hazzard. The woman strips to a Wonder Woman bikini and puts on some silver boots. The driver throws his shirt into the open window and says “well, I won’t be needing this down there.” “Babe, I don’t think you’ll ever need that again,” the woman says, helping him to tie on a giant furry cape as he plops a Thor helmet over his head.

I have no idea why I’m staring at this couple in particular — thousands of people have done this over and over all afternoon, ditching their cars in place on the highway and jumping out to walk down the interstate towards the glowing orb in the park below. They’ve come with roller skates and hula hoops, picnic baskets and massive cone joints that you have to hold with two hands. “It’s a horn of plenty, brother, and the more you share it, the more you get from it,” says the guy that hands it down to me from tall mirrored stilts. You’d think it would be tough marching down the road, slick as it is in spots with smeared fruit dropped from the vines bursting from the median and snaking their way down the guardrails.

The first couple of pilgrims had to stop their cars in the middle of the highway because the undergrowth got too thick to drive anymore. I’ve heard that the giant white orb sticking out of the National Mall up ahead is the source of all these sticky fruit-bearing vines that are caressing the highway system all around Washington with tendrils that plop giant mango-shaped things that taste like honeysuckle and persimmon and breadfruit all rolled into one all over the roads. In some places they burst up through the pavement and then split, creating shady canopies along the road.

We walk faster, laughing and passing a fruit around, the juice dribbling from our chins. Someone bats a beach ball towards me and I smack it on up ahead into the crowd. A couple guys with guitars and bongos are covering the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers”. People are in bathing suits and furry chaps, riding unicycles and laughing but we’re all moving forward together as the crowd thickens and the sun drops down near the horizon, a giant red orb hovering over the bluish white one on the mall.

The other side of the road is deserted, blank except for one guy who has fashioned his blue dress shirt into a sort of head wrap. He motions for someone to help him over the concrete divider. Once he makes it over, he pulls his Blackberry out of the holster on his hip and whips it over the divider and down the empty road, skipping it like a stone on the empty pavement. When it explodes into shiny shards the guy that helped him over the divider whoops and gives him a high five.
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Two visitors leave the office along with me tonight. They’d had a meeting that went pretty well, apparently, well enough to break the silent force field that most people turn on in large New York elevators.

I’m also wearing shorts and carrying a bike helmet, so maybe they think I’m a bike messenger.

“Well that went well,” the man says, his voice lingering on the “well”, with a pause meant to cue his female partner. “Oh I KNOW,” she says, her hands fluttering, “you were just awesome in there! Especially how you stood up and gestured and threw all those comps to the side and everything — you’re such a ROCK STAR!!”

Whenever someone says “Rock Star” in an office setting, Keith Moon’s spirit buys a pair of pleated khakis at TJ Maxx.

My soul groans a deep and lowing tone, the sound of a majestic redwood that’s about to just give up completely. When I worked as a business banking researcher, my manager would refer to (other) members of our little team as “Excel Rock Stars,” or “research Rock Stars.” She would also leave photocopied prayers for strength and forgiveness on the office copier. Later in our relationship, when she was letting me go, she told me while shaking her head that I “just didn’t have a passion for banking research.”

“I think she’s buttering me up a little, don’t you,” he says, “trying to get some free drinks out of me before the train leaves for Connecticut.” She giggles a little more, and looks at me, saying “no, he was a Rock Star in there, he really had it together! It was incredible!”

“What do you think, man, is she putting it on a little here or what,” he says, totally milking her for more elevator-appropriate adoration.

What I think is:

Nothing says “you will spend the rest of your life in a beige and climate controlled purgatory” like being called “Rock Star” for showing up on time with a succinct PowerPoint presentation.

But I don’t say that. What I say is, “well, you have to be careful when you hear that phrase at work. It usually means something’s coming. I always brace for it whenever I hear that term.”

“Oh, stop,” she says, looking at her partner and laughing still. He’s looking at her, but asking me, “what is it, then?”

“In my experience in office settings, ‘Rock Star’ is the steam wafting off of a pile of corporate bullshit,” I say, before I can stop myself.

But look, people. We’ve got to think about our language a little here, go a little deeper into the subtext. Real Rock Stars show up at least an hour late and blow the hearts and minds of thousands of screaming people. They writhe and sweat, they put their hearts on the line night after night and leave the stage in a hail of cheers and underpants and then shower women way better looking than themselves with champagne at dawn. It’s the reward for years and years of having heart and eating beans, of nurturing the flames in their souls long after it’s time to compromise, shave and get a day job.

Every time someone calls me a ‘Rock Star’ it reminds me how far I am from that. And man, it just burns.