I took a year off from producing my monthly Burlesque show and I missed it! Storytelling is certainly one of my favorite things but I also really love performing naked (or in g-string and tassels)
If You were at the last And I Am Not Lying Live, my story was about that and also about the difference between exploitation and fun in sexy art-forms. This month my Hosty Totsy show makes fun of that same struggle.
Hotsy Totsy is an ongoing burlesque soap opera. Each epsisode takes place during the “monthly fundraiser at The Home For Wayward Girls and Fallen Women” and in each show there is some back stage drama that plays out between the burlesque acts. This month gangster Nickles Lugo (Played by Nelson Lugo) attempts to take over the Home and to turn it into a money making venture (AKA a strip-club and brothel.) The girls fight back wanting to keep things playful and sweet the way we like it!
When asked to describe my burlesque show HOTSY TOTSY BURLESQUE, I tell people it is like the Muppet show if you substituted puppets with naked girls. Read the rest of this entry »
The last few weeks have been a blur of shows for me, Brad and Cyndi. All this performing is like training for a fight: you hit that bag hard for a month so you can bring it HARD when the bell rings for real.
All this is to say that it’s time once again to leave a pair of smoking rubber tracks on stage at Union Hall with the And I Am Not Lying LIVE show, cock-rocking the NPR crowd with the best comedy, storytelling and burlesque in NYC.
If that tiny bit of promo copy that I half-assed during a conference call was enough to make you want to get tickets already, you can do that here: And I Am Not Lying LIVE at Union Hall on May 1.
Here’s a poster, more on the performers after the jump:
If you’re reading this as a long-time follower of this blog, none of this material is going to be new to you. I’m re-flogging some older stuff, so maybe this is a good time to push away from the computer and go enjoy a nice spring day outside.
I want to shamelessly take full advantage of the mention to show off what the And I Am Not Lying show is all about here. Because frankly, not only am I proud of the work that we do and thrilled to see the storytelling world getting a little credit … I want to put asses in seats on the first Tuesday of every month at Union Hall.
Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman and I put on a monthly show featuring storytelling, comedy, burlesque and sideshow — and I want to share some of the stories that we’ve done there. We’ve only had a residency there since February, so we’re still building up some steam. But all of us do a TON of other shows around town, too.
Consider this a primer, dive deeper if you want. Today is functionally a Friday anyway, so go ahead and watch all of these at work.
Sometimes Cyndi ties her burlesque acts to her stories, and the end result is bigger than either piece seperately. So here’s a story by Cyndi Freeman, with a pretty direct tie into the burlesque act immediately following:
Here’s the aforementioned burlesque act from our show, featuring Cyndi Freeman, Brad Lawrence and Apathy Angel:
It’s time once again to cock-rock the NPR crowd with New York’s first, only, and best comedy storytelling burlesque sideshow at Union Hall on Tuesday, April 3rd.
We’re a “Critic’s Pick” in Time Out NY this week, which is pretty exciting! I don’t know if that’s an endorsement or just a button somebody clicked, but we’ll take it.
The act of telling personal stories about one’s own life takes a certain amount of a certain type of nerve — mostly the “who the hell do you think you are” variety. Seriously: why should anyone give a whoop about my feelings about my feelings?
That feeling gets even weirder when I’m using the Internet as a megaphone to get people to my shows. “Who the fuck do you think you are telling everyone to come see whoever the hell it is you think you are” is pretty much the refrain that runs through my head every time I bathe my face in the cool glow of one rectangle or another.
But screw all that, we’ve been busting our asses to pull together a HELL of a week of shows this week in Brooklyn and Austin, TX for SXSW and I want to pull ‘em all together in one place, then crop-dust the whole Internet with ‘em all damn week.
First: We’re cock-rocking the NPR crowd with And I Am Not Lying – Live, NYC’s only comedy storytelling burlesque sideshow on Tuesday, March 6th at Union Hall in Brooklyn. You’ll see stories by me, Brad Lawrence, and Cyndi Freeman as well as magic by Albert Cadabra, burlesque by Cherry Pitz and Little Brooklyn and comedy by Wil Sylvince.
Cyndi Freeman is a storyteller and burlesque performer here in New York, and she’s the person that got me into seeing burlesque shows. I didn’t really get it at first (beyond the obvious) but when I saw her side of it, I was sold.
Our friends Ben Lillie and Erin Barker run a spectacular science-themed storytelling show. podcast and online magazine called The Story Collider. A few weeks ago, they ran a version of Cyndi’s transformation into brassy burlesque performer after a breast cancer scare on their site.
The thing is, not only can you hear the story from the podcast, you can also see a great comic inspired by Cyndi’s story, drawn by Tammy Stellanova.
The Union Hall show is on Tuesday, March 6th, 2012, 8PM. Tickets are ten dollars. We strongly recommend buying advance tickets, which you can get here:
We’ve been real sometimes-y about these And I Am Not Lying live shows over the past year – a show here and a show there, spattered around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan and DC and Philadelphia in a series of one-offs that are always exciting, but hardly consistent. Considering that the show’s based on a blog that is updated really infrequently, that kinda made sense.
Thanks to a lot of awesome help from Creaghead and Co., that’s about to change.
Starting February 7th, we’ll be cock-rocking the NPR crowd with the And I Am Not Lying live show at Union Hall on the first Tuesday of every month. Doors are at 8, show’s at 8:30 and tickets ain’t but ten tiny dollars for the finest comedy, storytelling, burlesque sideshow you’re going to get anywhere.
Be honest with yourself: stuff like this is part of the reason you moved here. It’s worth a headache at work on Wednesday.
We pulled together this cool trailer about it, too. It may be NSFW, depending on your job:
I wanted to start this show for a very, very good reason. I’m doing this thing so that I don’t go completely numb, and I’m trying to bring as many people back to life as I can right along with us.
I spend a lot of time hunched over a glowing rectangle starting and mediating petty squabbles about nothing, breathing shallowly through my mouth and reading tweets about television. I’ve been doing it for years. When I’m not getting paid to do it I sit around my apartment in my underpants and do it for free, apparently.
Everyone does.
Sometimes I think we’re all using computers to row this numbing boat towards a black wall of depressing distraction. I want to do my part to get as many people into one room and feeling something great together for a little while. And maybe if we get together often enough and pool our collective energies into something funny and weird, we can live a little outside of our bottomless pockets filled with lotus petals.
The entire purpose of life is to get as excited as possible. I’m so, so excited to have a reason to hose the town down with excitement once a month. So it’s like a Mobius strip of recursive excitement for me.
Sometimes storytelling shows can get a little sweater-vesty, comedy shows can be too bitter and detached, and burlesque too much, all in a go. This way we can cross-pollinate the best of the best and no matter what, if you’re not into what you’re seeing you can see something else really soon.
I want this thing to be a rock show without instruments, to just cram an entire aircraft carrier’s worth of fun into the basement of Union Hall. So far, we’ve been doing pretty okay on that front, I think.
D.Billy and I collaborated on this cool poster (I think it’s cool, anyway) to announce the residency:
My show HOTSY TOTSY BURLESQUE is finally back and I could not be happier. I have been running around doing all sorts of things this year, like my solo show and loads of story telling. But what I missed most was dancing naked on stage (or at least semi-nude, there are laws about such things). I also missed the world that Hotsy Totsy is part of. If you could imagine the Muppet show, but instead of puppets you have funny hot naked girls, you are almost there…Hotsy Totsy takes place at “The Home For Wayward Girls and Fallen Women”
It’s an all-girls hotel that has gone through many owners. It was originally incorporated by a religious order called “The Righteous Order Of Frustrated Spinsters With Too Many Cats” and envisioned as a reformatory residence for girls gone bad.
See, the spinsters believed that if you took a girl away from her nefarious environment and surrounded her with cats, she would no longer crave illicit temptation as there would be so many warm friendly pussies to snuggle up with.
Hotsy Totsy is is part of the Burlesque Blitz: A week of burlesque at the Horse Trade Theater Company in NYC. We will be performing at The Kraine Theater, 85 East 4th Ave (Between 2nd & 3rd Ave) NYC – Dec. 28th – 8pm – for tickets and info go to - http://horsetrade.info
And we have a new sponsor: Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum, who will be supplying awesome swag and drink specials!
Man. I can’t believe it’s showtime again already. But me, Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman are bringing our live show back to Union Hall in Brooklyn on December 10th at 8PM. And it don’t cost but ten bucks, people.
People keep asking me, “so, what’s this show about? What’s your hook?” And man, I have no idea. I used to think it was a live version of this blog. But now this blog is turning to a blog version of the live show. All I can say is that it reflects a huge lesson I learned sometime in college:
Never let your IQ get in the way of a good time.
Basically, we’re cock-rocking the NPR crowd with burlesque, storytelling, comedy and sideshow acts. Sound fun? It better. If that’s not high-quality Saturday night entertainment for you, I don’t want to know what is.
If you’re really into the Facebook thing, you can click here to see the invite and RSVP. That doesn’t actually help anything, but it massages my starving ego.
Here’s a poster, lineup published for Google SEO trickery after the jump:
The show features …
Storytelling from
Jeff Simmermon (storyteller featured on The Moth Podcast and This American Life)
Cyndi Freeman (Wonder Woman: A How-To Guide for Little Jewish Girls)
Brad Lawrence (The Moth GrandSLAM champ)
Comedy by
Michael Che
Burlesque by
Fem Appeal,
RunAround Sue & Cyndi Freeman
and a VERY special appearance by
Mat Fraser & Julie Atlas Muz
