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.

But even the Muppets thought was a good idea.

However, they were a family show and we are not!

I am thrilled to be working once again with Nelson Lugo  (seen here to the right with my co-producer Joe The Shark to the left and me as Cherry Pitz in the cozy middle)

Nelson who is known for many things including Epic Win Burlesque: By Nerds, For Nerds….featuring burlesque tributes on topics from Star Wars Vs Star Trek to Ghost Busters.

The fun with Hotsy Totsy is that I get to do two of my favorite things: comedy & burlesque. In this video which was part of a show where we worked with Nelson and Schaffer the Darklord to spoof The Odd Couple.

Tuesday’s show also features an all-star cast including: Evelyn Vnyl, Francinee, Gin Minsky, Jenny C Quoi, Kita St Cyr, Ruby Solitaire, Bunn YBuxom with Bobbie Chaset behind the bar, Joe The Shark Naftali at the door and drink specials by Sailor Jerry!

And I can not do a post on burlesque without giving you a burlesque act from And I Am Not Lying Live! Here is a clip of me doing a strip as Cherry Pitz

The New York Times gave me a tiny shout-out this evening in a piece about the storytelling scene in New York City. I am referred to as “imposing,” which is confusing, but I’ll take it as a compliment. I strongly encourage that you run right out and read the whole thing. Cyndi Freeman gets a mention in there, too, as well as a bunch of other folks that I am honored to consider peers. The mighty Adam Wade gets some serious ink, too.

Here’s an excerpt that I think is the core of the piece, referring to my friend Ophira Eisenberg:

She explores the taboo, but without the persistent relief provided by consistent punch lines. In doing that, she shows how a story can use humor but not be shackled to it, how it can be emotional without pandering, and how difficult ideas can be articulated entertainingly.
What she demonstrates is that storytelling can give a certain kind of comedy a chance to grow.

Storytelling has grown a lot beyond regular Moth slams. The Moth was the Big Bang that coalesced into the sun for this whole thing, but now a bunch of other planets are cooling and growing their own life forms. The following is a list of storytelling shows that I’d recommend checking out in the city. I’ve been in most of these, and am friends with folks that run all of them.

A lot of these shows don’t have a lot in the way of a Web presence. I hate linking to Facebook pages, but that’s the world we live in — crafting stories and running shows takes a lot of energy, and so does running a website. At this point in my life I’d rather have “writer/performer” etched on my tombstone than “blogger”. Anyway, here they go:

Liar Show
Real Characters
Told!
BTK Band
Nights of Our Lives
The Story Collider
Ask Me
How I Learned
The Soundtrack Series
Adam Wade has a BUNCH:

• Tales of the Cosmos
• Whatever Happened to the Nerds
• Adam Wade From New Hampshire
• Super Stories

I can also see how Moth story slams would be intimidating to people that are new to this. They’re huge, with lines around the block and they sell out pretty much every time. There’s also no guarantee that you’ll even get picked. And if you do get picked, you’re pretty much screwed out of a decent score unless you get picked fifth through tenth. By the fifth storyteller the booze kicks in, scores start to loosen up and judges figure out what the hell they’re even doing.

Frankly, these things should be a little intimidating to first-time performers. Anyone who just thinks “what the hell, I’ll just jump on stage for the first time in front of 400 people and be awesome like I always am, every day of my life” is missing a critical component to their personality and is likely going to embarrass everyone in the room except themselves. I’ve seen this happen. A lot.

You should get on stage and do it anyway, but a little fear is a good thing. It means you’re taking it seriously.

None of the following open mics were around when I started going to the Moth. If they had been, I’d have definitely tried my stories out at these first. I’m not saying that there’s a right or wrong way to do any of this stuff. Any door you find is one you can walk through.

But if you happen to want to workshop a story yourself or test it out in a lower-stakes environment — hell, sometimes the crowd is barely even paying attention — you could do a lot worse than to check these out. In order to win a fight you’ve got to spend a lot of time doing pushups and hitting the bag to get ready for five intense minutes. It’s the same principle here.

The following places are where I go to practice:

Phoning it In – Lukas Kaiser runs this open mic Monday-Thursday in somebody else’s apartment in Tribeca. It’s a warm room, supportive, and sometimes a woman walks straight through with a baby in a stroller and disappears in the back.

Kambri Crews’ “What’s Your Story” held monthly at Luca Lounge. You pretty much have to find this on Facebook or go to Luca Lounge and check it out first.

I Like You, Maude

Oh, Hey Guys at UCB East

Like anything else, there’s an etiquette. If you’re brand new to any of this, I’d recommend showing up and checking a show out first, then introducing yourself afterwards. Get to know folks, connect online. Pretty soon the whole thing will blossom and you’ll be tired of all the emails, updates, and Facebook events. And eventually, your brain will hurt from all of it and you’ll have nightmares abut your own show.

Congratulations: you’ve arrived.

I bought it yesterday, then was disappointed to see that you couldn’tsave the GIFs to your own phone, or keep the pictures private. I was going to delete it today, but then saw that the dev team stayed up all night fixing those things. Not bad!

Here’s one I took on my morning commute:

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.

I will hosting this week’s show & the cast is:  Jenny C’est Quoi, Gal Friday, Calamity Chang, Go Go Harder and more!

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!

Brother, did they ever deliver:

The saxplayer handed me a pretty sweet business card right afterwards, though none of the URLs on it are coming up right now. As near as I can tell, they’re called the Funky Nassau Band, and you can catch them in the subway underneath the Financial District, more or less. They’ve got a ton of stuff on YouTube, too. I especially love this slow jam in a Miami Vice suit.

Brandon and his wife and me and my girlfriend hang out together and do couple stuff together. One of these days, we’re going to get D.Billy and his lady involved and have the biggest, brunchiest, triple-couple bouge-a-thon that Brooklyn has ever seen.

I was having lunch with Brandon and his wife the other day, and he told me what he’d been working on. “It’s pretty fun, man,” he said. “It’s a video piece that we’re going to call ‘Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street.’”

I was a little surprised. He didn’t really strike me as that kind of a dude, to be honest. “Just watch it,” he said. I did, and now I totally get it.

Now, I present to you: “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street,” by Steven Greenstreet and Brandon Bloch:

Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street from Steven Greenstreet on Vimeo.

Not exactly what it sounded like when you read the title, was it? That’s kind of the point. As Brandon told me, “We noticed that all the coverage coming out of the Occupy Wall Street movement was either of freaks or young, unusually good-looking people. So we decided to both be honest about our motivations and make fun of media’s tendency to seek out pretty people, and we ended up with an inspiring, moving story. We just kept the title because we knew it would get some attention and hey, look — the kind of person that searches for and watches a video called ‘Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street’ is probably the kind of person that actually needs to hear this message pretty badly.”

He’s right. If they’d called it “A Sober and Respectful Look at the Underrepresented Womyn’s Voices at Occupy Wall Street”, would anyone have watched it?

Unsurprisingly, the Internet had decided to lose its collective mind over this. The response is both shocking, and not surprising at all. There is a particular type of person that is happiest when they are riled up and offended about something. This sort of person is found both on the right and the left of the political spectrum, and they just LOVE to write a blog post about their manufactured outrage.

From Feministe:

It’s the dipshit fratboy vibe of “Ohhh yeah, let’s go to this protest thing because there are hot chicks there, and then we can make a video where we sound kind of, like, deep, you know? Because we can like talk about community and stuff and how even though these hot chicks got us there, we realized that there’s something, like, important happening, you know dude? I’ll wear my favorite Livestrong bracelet.” It’s the idea that women are at OWS to be oggled by dudes, or to inspire some polo-shirted nitwit to Care About Something More [than titties] (TM). It’s that he’s taking pictures of women without their permission or knowledge and posting them on the internet as masturbatory fodder. The one upside is that the Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street tumblr is like Steven Greenstreet’s very own I’m A Creep bat-signal (he may also be a 9/11 truther? Lots of warning signs here). May he never get laid again.

And Salon:

This video is sexist. It’s an example of women participating in public life — political, professional, social — and having their participation reduced to sexual objectification. That’s what happened here, nothing more, nothing less.

All this outrage is just wonderfully stupid. If you ever catch yourself saying or writing the phrase “I, for one, am OFFENDED” unironically, it’s probably time to just think about the things in life that you consider fun. It probably won’t take long.

On the one hand, the fuss is a good thing. It’s getting people to watch the video, to see the actual stories that come out of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Maybe people will start to understand why it’s happening in the first place.

On the other hand, this is sad and embarrassing for the left. All this humorless infighting is distracting and it’s why we can’t get organized. Steven Greenstreet and Brandon set out to tweak people’s biases with an eye-catching title, and it’s working. They’re getting tons of views, and they’re playing on people’s preconceptions.

It’s just sad to see self-avowed feminists playing themselves in the process. Without that title, the video would be a little on the voyeuristic side, but otherwise safe for broadcast television and not exceptionally remarkable. With the title, all of a sudden the sky is falling.

One of the only publications that really got what the video is and isn’t about summed it up this way:

I would actually argue that Greenstreet has consciously courted controversy, albeit subtly, by not making a leering video that amplifies his subjects’ sexuality, but which uses a title that makes is seem as if he did. Clever boy, and even more clever in that the word “hot,” though I ran it through the sexist wringer earlier, could be reasonably construed to define a woman who is so intellectually engaging that she becomes a hopeless object of desire.

Would there be anything wrong with that?

…

I would further argue that whatever outrage people are feeling about this video is as faked as the supposed exploitation of the women in it. If it is real, then the outrage springs from a deep-seated immaturity about both life and sex! Appreciating someone’s sexual appeal does not automatically dismiss their other fine qualities, but denying their attractiveness literally does. It may be inappropriate to express that appreciation in certain settings, but the idea here seems to be that even recognizing the fact that there are Hot Chicks that Occupy Wall Street is a denigration of them as activists fighting for a cause.

This excerpt comes from a piece on the AVN’s website. AVN is, of course, the largest trade publication that serves the adult film industry. Their site, and the preceding link, are never, ever safe for work. Unless you work in the porn industry.

For what it’s worth, Brandon’s wife is smart, qualified to appear in that video, and has an abundantly healthy self-esteem. She and I both think that maybe it’s a little more important to focus on the issues the protests raise rather than something quite this distracting. Half of our parents’ generation met at protests, and it wasn’t a shared love of bongo drums that got them there in the first place. Nobody that matters cares what gets you down there, as long as you have an open mind.

It seems like copy-editors are getting laid off left, right, and center – as though nobody cares anymore. Sure, typos happen when you’re writing and posting fast. And everyone knows what you meant to say. But it’s like giving a big presentation with your fly all the way down. Sure, people know that you meant to put pants on. And your wang is probably still covered. But it still makes a distinct impression.

It looks like a rogue copyeditor took the red Sharpie to this Uniqlo ad on the C train. They just couldn’t take it anymore.

Good for them. It works better now, doesn’t it?

It’ll make more sense in the video, I swear.

I have told this story in various incarnations over the years, but I happen to feel that this performance at the Moth at Southpaw in Brooklyn on Labor Day this year really nailed it. Hope you enjoy it:

If you’re interested, you can actually hear two tracks that we recorded at practice here:

Royal Quiet Deluxe, April 1998

Exotic Newcastle Disease, by Royal Quiet Deluxe

If you happen to see this today, and want to see more like it live in person, I’m putting on a show with my awesome and talented friends tonight at Union Hall in Brooklyn. There will be stories like this, burlesque striptease and a sword-swallower. For real.

Click here for show info and a cool poster: And I Am Not Lying Live at Union Hall

You can get advance tickets here.

Everyone who can remember September 11th, 2001 has a story. That includes me. I wasn’t in New York or DC or rural Pennsylvania, so mine’s not that dramatic. But if I went around trying to win suffering contests, I’d imagine that my life would look a lot different than it does now.

Both the phone and the electric company caught up to me on the morning of September 11th, 2001. I had a story due to Richmond.com at the time, a freelance project that had been filling a hole in my tattered writing income. I didn’t really need the electricity that morning anyway — I didn’t own a computer in the first place. I’d sneak into campus computer labs or squat at friend’s places when I had to, typing down handwritten notes in order to get the thing written as quickly and efficiently as possible.

So I did what I always did when the deadline was tight. I climbed out my bedroom window onto the row house roof and jimmied open my neighbor’ Kate’s office window with a credit card I didn’t deserve. Then I climbed in, turned on the dialup modem and made my final edits while the connection hissed and fused.

I sent the piece in and then cleaned her cat’s litter box to show both gratitude and penance. Then I called the office. Kate answered – she was a writer there. “Who is this?” she asked, recognizing her own number on her caller ID. “Uh, sorry” I said. “Listen, we’ll talk about this later. Turn the TV on, now,” she said, and hung up the phone.

I turned it on and watched a few minutes, trying to make sense out of it. Then the second plane hit and everyone in the world realized what really happened. A few seconds later, the station feed jumped to a scene from a Frank Zappa film. Cotton smoke boiled through a cheaply made model town, cars crashed into styrofoam gravestones and Zappa’s face hovered over top of it, grinning. Then whoever it was at the TV station fixed the problem and the news came back on.

I’m not sure if any other Richmonders saw that too, or not. I’ve never discussed it with anyone, actually. That was far from the strangest thing that happened that day and pointing it out never seemed that important.


I watched the planes hit, people jumping, the buildings collapsing and the huge wave of smoke and soot moving uptown on television. Then I went outside, shellshocked like every other American. I remember cars parked sideways in the middle of the street, just pulled over and abandoned, taillights blinking.

The rumors were flying around that planes had hit Camp David, that there were nuclear bombs going off, that the subways were burning. We saw the escort jets shoot overhead a few times, and then the sky was silent.

I remember holding strangers’ hands at a coffee shop, telling each other it was going to be okay eventually.

Eventually it got dark. We sat out on the porch, looking up at the sky and seeing nothing. No blinking lights from the airport, no stars, nothing. We talked about how everything was going to be different from now on, and nobody knew what it was going to be like.

The consensus was that it was pretty much going to suck.

I’m fortunate to not have lost anyone I knew or loved that day. I never knew anybody who even went down to help out and got sick. I can’t imagine what that must be like for the victim’s families and friends. But I feel like we all lost each other that day. Ever since then, things have gotten more hostile, more polarized in out public discourse. People are divided over their beliefs like never before. And they’re overlooking the one deepest belief that every human being should hold the dearest:

If we’re going to make it through the world, we’ve got to make patience our default setting.

There are a lot of more poignant 9/11 stories flying around today, but this one is mine.

I’ve seen a lot of whining about the ceaseless cable television coverage of the 9/11 anniversary, and I’ve done a little myself, saying on Facebook:

I actually wasn’t in danger of forgetting about 9/11/01 anytime soon. While I think it’s important to memorialize the victims and make the day a part of our history, I don’t really feel like reliving it on TV and the Internet.

I thought about it a little more, though. And it’s mostly still true. But this happened in America, to Americans. And nobody ever said that we were a culture that understood restraint, respect, and somber dignity. That shit’s for Swedes.

This thing affected everybody. And most people aren’t that good at communicating deep, profound experiences. It’s just not a priority for most normal human beings. But that doesn’t mean that something deep and profound doesn’t happen to them. And when it does, they deserve to share their stories and take part in the great feedback loop that is sharing, listening, and healing.

After all, nobody’s making anybody watch television or click on anything online. I suspect that most of the people who have read this far have done it because they’re my friends and they care about me.

It’s okay to leave the TV off, turn the TV on, do nothing or wave a cheap American flag and listen to Lee Greenwood. Whatever you can think of to get through something traumatic is fine by me.

As long as it doesn’t involve passing the hurt on and making some other strangers grieve just as badly.

I told a story about the experience at The Moth at Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo, NYC back on June 23rd — you can see video of it here:

Willie is one of those rare people who is both a classic archetype and a completely unique individual. I can see how someone might see my story and think I’m reaching for this cartoonish stereotype of an older cracked-out street character, not unlike Chappelle’s Tyrone Biggums or Richard Pryor’s Mudbone. Except I’m white, too, and I worry sometimes that I could be perceived as indulging in a reductive racist stereotype on top of whatever else is going on in that story.

Then I think “fuck that, just because I’m white doesn’t mean I don’t get to have a real, complicated friendship with a black man who is literally too funky to function within mainstream society.” It really happened, you know. You change things around a little to make your memories fit a story arc, but Willie is real as hell.

Possibly too real.

Here is some video that I took of him near dawn on the night that we met, dancing in my living room to “Ghetto Life.” It’s pretty short, because a) I was plastered myself and b) I have always believed that you’re either documenting something or participating in it. Shortly after I took this I chucked the camera and started dancing right along with him.

These are a few photos of Willie and his Lady that I took later on in the summer, getting drunk on my front porch and dancing to, you guessed it: Rick James.

Willie told me, in all seriousness, that although I may be “mostly bitch”, the spirit of true blackness resided in me all the same. “You made that sculpture, man? You made that thing? That thing black as hell, nobody but natural-born nigger-hands could make that thing live like that,” he said, cackling. Then he gave me a fragrant half-hug.

I can’t say that I miss Willie, exactly, as he was really, really hard to be around a lot of the time. But I miss those laughs, and that incredible, loose, free funk that he could hand out like a wizard giving presents.

The last time I saw Willie he was wearing two grass skirts: one in the classic position, and the other under his armpits, encircling his otherwise bare chest like a festive tank top. He had a police whistle in his mouth and was directing traffic in the middle of the road in front of a church on Sunday morning.

I don’t know if his body is still alive or not. But I hope that insane funk like that never dies.